MY COUNTRY CHILDHOOD
LEADING PHILANTHROPIST AND AUTHOR ASHLEY DAWSON-DAMER SHARES MEMORIES OF HER EXTENDED FAMILY AND A LOVE OF THE ARTS.
Author and philanthropist Ashley Dawson-damer recalls precious childhood memories and explains how her family’s passion for history led her to the arts.
EARLY ONE CHRISTMAS morning, when Ashley Dawson-damer (then Mann) was six years old, her father, Bill, asked her to look out the window of their home in Bathurst, NSW. Outside was a child-size house with a red roof that he had built and her mother, Judith, had papered with roses and a matching curtain.
“My feet didn’t touch the ground! That was where I spent time with my dolls and reading Enid Blyton books while the rain came down on the tin roof, tucked away in my own little house,” Ashley, now 75, recalls. She is recreating a similar miniature dwelling, also named Cuddle Cottage, for youngest granddaughter, Isabeau, at her 27-hectare property near Robertson in the NSW Southern Highlands.
Ashley’s early days in Bathurst, where she lived for five years with younger brother Richard, her parents and grandmother, Alice Drake-brockman, as well as her aunt and great-uncle, made a lasting impression. Ashley and her family moved to the town when she was five years old, after her grandmother bought a steam laundry business.
“I miss the extended family and simplicity of it. It was always about family and growing your own produce. Jack, my great-uncle, taught us how to push a finger into the soil, put a seed in and watch it grow,” says Ashley.
The family later moved to Wollongong, then Brisbane before returning to Sydney. After school, Ashley studied economics and lived in numerous countries with her first husband. Her memoir, A Particular Woman, published by Ventura Press, documents her life adventures, joys and challenges – including multiple miscarriages and the breakdown of her first marriage, her switch to modelling and life as a single parent before marrying the Honourable John Dawsondamer. Her children, Piers, now 46, and Andelicia, 41, grew up spending weekends and holidays at Oran Park, John and Ashley’s former property near Narellan. After John was killed in a motor racing accident in 2000, Ashley immersed herself in the arts and served as a director of many organisations, including the Opera Australia Capital Fund, the National Gallery of Australia Council and Foundation, Festival of Sydney and NIDA (the National Institute of Dramatic Arts).
“My grandmother’s and my mother’s love of history was the basis for the arts in my life. After my second husband died, I took out a subscription for 12 first nights a year at Opera Australia, because it gave me something to look forward to. I eventually went into fundraising with the Opera. The arts feed the soul,” says Ashley, who was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 2014 for service to the visual and performing arts, as a supporter and benefactor, and to medical research.
Based in Sydney, Ashley maintains a connection to regional Australia and offers a scholarship for country girl boarders. Through her role as trustee with the Art Gallery of NSW, she is involved in assisting Indigenous remote and regional learning, and hopes to also extend learning opportunities to all country students through her recent appointment with the UTS Foundation board. >
“My grandmother’s and my mother’s love of history was the basis for the arts in my life. The arts feed the soul.”
I WAS BORN in Chatswood, NSW, before the end of the World War II and my father didn’t see me for six months. He was a commanding officer with No.31 Squadron and my mother, Judith Drake-brockman, was a swimming champion from WA. They met in the west during the war and married when my mother was 19 and my father three years older. When he returned from the war, my grandmother came over from WA to live in Sydney. Quite the businesswoman, she looked for a business in Bathurst, where my engineering-oriented father could establish himself, and bought a laundry in the centre of town. She had a separate section of our house and rented out the duplex next door to the Howards, whose daughter, Barbara, became my best friend.
“Our family loved motoring and having picnics. We’d boil the billy and my father would make damper in the coals while grandmother sat on a rug and knitted. I was a tomboy, but always very neat, and I liked clothes. I rode a bicycle everywhere and, when I was older, I’d ride it into town, lean it up against the weighing machine at the post office and catch the bus out to Marsden School. My mother watched me going off until the fog swallowed me up.
“History was important to us and storytelling was another family pursuit. I remember being read to as a small child, visiting my grandmother in her bed in the early morning. She would be finishing her cup of tea and knitting, but was always ready for a story. My great-uncle, Jack, saw Queen Victoria in her jubilee year and told stories of growing up with 17 brothers and sisters. He recounted tales of ghosts and witches, and cooked large white flour cakes. Our mother frowned at this, because he used white sugar, which she saw as poisonous. Her cakes were made with raw or black sugar and wholemeal flour. My grandmother cooked casseroles and, in winter, soups with garden vegetables, bones from the Sunday roast, sago, lentils and spices. My blonde aunt, just as talented, cooked and sewed with flair. They both attended hat-making classes and made straw bonnets for me and my dolls.
“My mother was dedicated to her role, providing good nutrition for her children, a task she took seriously, yet with fun. School lunchboxes held a brown-bread sandwich, a salad and a hard-boiled egg with a face drawn on it.
“We were not unusual at a time when women listened to the radio and wrote down recipes, but we were unusual in our emphasis on wholegrains and steaming, not boiling, vegetables.
“Father, an enthusiastic cook, was discouraged by Mother, who preferred he carve the Sunday roast. Having built our holiday house, his most practical asset was his hands. We were willing helpers, hammering a nail or holding a plumb-line. If we were curious about what he was making, we were told, ‘a wigwam for a goose’s bridle’. We knew then it was a birthday present. “My grandmother had travelled widely, many times to England via the great duty-free ports of Singapore and Aden, meeting her first husband on board ship on the eve of the World War I. She also travelled to India, where her second husband was born to an English civil servant family. From her, I developed a strong sense of family and traditions, and continued her love of history by giving my two children medieval names. My mother saw us children as embodiments of her own happy childhood, weaving our exploits into hers to create a tapestry of shared memory. And everyone wanted to hear my brother’s exploits and mine.”
“My mother was dedicated to her role, providing good nutrition for her children, a task she took seriously.”