30th March 2020
I have this idea that, if you tell the story of someone who isn't still living, they get to come alive again, at least for a while. I guess that's why I was always fascinated by genealogy, but not as some "it's all about me" thing, but to make those ancestors of mine come back to life. (Click on "Stirring The Bones" down there to the left if you haven't already - so many stories of people that once lived and loved and fought and worked and raised kids).
But every now and then I get taken in by the story of someone who wasn't "one of mine", but a complete stranger. This is such a story, of two kids who didn't get to have even a half decent shot at this life, and also of their family.
The girls' father Edwin was born in Norwood in 1892, grew up in Adelaide, and as a young man enlisted for WWI in the 9th Light Horse, and saw action in the Middle East. On return he went farming for a while, over at Denial Bay on the Eyre Peninsula, which didn't seem to work out for him, as he sold up and moved away, then somehow bumped into a girl from Tantanoola in the South-East.
Ruth was a local Tantanoola girl, and they married there in 1922, but eventually went to live up in Adelaide, at Novar Gardens just off the Anzac Highway (or "The Bay Road" as it was then), not far from where the Sturt River ran through to the sea, and settled into family life with their four daughters - Patricia born 1923, Margaret in 1924, Betty 1925, and Nancy 1928.
Patricia was a bright and healthy girl, as was Betty, but both Margaret and Nancy were born with heart problems, which meant Margaret missed a lot of school, and it left Nancy always small for her age. But more bad luck dogged the family, as Betty, when age 7, was standing in front of the kitchen stove one day when the wood fire blew back and set her clothes alight, badly burning her neck, chest, hands, and arms, which put her in hospital for nine months, pending later skin grafts.
You would have to think that this family had already had more than their fair share of bad luck, but sadly Fate wasn't finished with them. Fate has a lot to answer for.
The Sturt River in 1934 was still a natural waterway across the Adelaide Plains, with rocks and trees and frogs and twists and bends and with real running water, although most of the year it was more of a creek than a river. But it was prone to extensive flooding every now and then (which is why it was turned into the hugely ugly concrete Flood Mitigation Drain in 1969). But back then it was a real waterway, but like all real waterways, it had its own dangers.
One morning the three youngest girls wanted to go out to some nearby sandhills along the creek, to collect dandelions to make daisy chains, and while they weren't in the habit of going near the creek itself, their mother still reminded them to be sure to say away from it.
Seeing her sister floundering in the water, the second eldest, Margaret, herself only 10, went to the ledge and reached out for her little sister's hand, but overbalanced and fell in as well, and seeing both of her sisters now in trouble in the water, Betty, aged 9, ran screaming in a fit of hysteria for help, and hearing the frantic yelling, a man playing golf at the nearby links came running over and jumped straight into the water and managed to pull Nancy out, but she'd been in there some time by then.
He laid her on the bank and set about resuscitation, not realising there was another girl still in the river. Another man arrived to help, but it was only when Betty came back that they were told about her other sister, and by this time many others had arrived, including the girls' father, and each dived in to find the girl's body, but it was some hours before Margaret was recovered.
Broken hearted, Ruth was to say of her children - "I can't believe that my two babies are gone. Nancy was a favourite of everybody. She was always happy. Margaret who used to stay at home with me, was a great little companion. Unable to attend school because of her weak heart, she spent much of her time playing with dolls and drawing. She had a gift for art."
I have no idea how Edwin and Ruth came back from this tragedy, but they seemed to go on living at Novar Gardens for some years at least, Edwin dying in 1969 - he's in the Derrick Gardens war graves section of Centennial Park - and Ruth in 1982, but I couldn't quickly find what happened to Patricia and Betty, although the plaque on the park bench doesn't look all that old, and is just a stone's throw from where this terrible event happened. I'd like to think that one of the surviving girl's own children put up this memorial to their forever young aunts.
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