MY COUNTRY CHILDHOOD
TO CELEBRATE MOTHER’S DAY, WE’RE SHINING A SPOTLIGHT ON THE MUMS OF SOME WELL-KNOWN AUSTRALIANS INCLUDING AUTHORS, TELEVISION PRESENTERS, ENTREPRENEURS, A COOK AND A COMEDIAN.
A collection of famous Australians reveal what they remember most vividly about their mums when they were growing up in the country.
MARION GRASBY
Marion’s mother, Noi, taught her to cook and fostered a love of food. Marion Grasby of Masterchef fame, credits her mother, Noi, a professionally trained chef, with teaching her how to cook. Her deep love for food reaches back to early childhood experiences in Darwin, where Marion was born and where, as a young girl, she would help Noi prepare food to sell at the popular Parap Village Markets.
Today, the mother and daughter still work together, with Noi the resident ‘quality assurance chef’ for Marion’s meal kit company Marion’s Kitchen. “Nothing gets past her tastebuds!” says Marion with a laugh. A few years after Marion relocated to Bangkok, Noi and Marion’s father, Charlie, also moved there. “They’re living about 500 metres down the road now, to my husband’s delight!” Marion says.
“My parents met in Thailand — my day has worked in construction and project management for most of his life, and he was sent to Bangkok in the 1970s to work on the German embassy there. He’d been living in Darwin so, when the project ended, that’s where they moved. Mum had never been to Australia and had no idea where Darwin was. They arrived, and then I arrived!
“In Darwin, my mum was very involved in the Thai and Asian community and a large part of that was helping her friends with stalls at the Parap Village Markets and Rapid Creek Markets, both of which are still going strong today. I always wanted to come back and connect to Mum’s side and her culture. Running a business here has really been a dream come true.”
JANE EDMANSON
Jane’s mother, Barbara, helped give her a lifelong gardening bug.
In her early childhood, Gardening Australia presenter Jane Edmanson lived on her grandfather’s fruit farm outside Mildura in Victoria with her parents, Peter and Barbara, and brothers, John and Tony.
Jane completed an arts degree and Diploma of Education and was posted to Dimboola Memorial Secondary College. By this time, her father had decided to become a farmer and the family moved to a fruit block in Mourquong on the NSW side of the Murray River. Peter grew citrus and avocados while Jane’s mother Barbara was a dedicated gardener, nurturing shade-giving trees and flowering plants around the house in the hot environment. On weekends and holidays, Jane often travelled from Dimboola to Mourquong to help.
“Mum and Dad taught me all the reasons soil is important and because my father was a horticulturalist, he taught me the value of having good soil and being a guardian of it, and my mum was a great gardener. All of their knowledge within the horticultural arena came onto me,” she says.
“Mum had a simply wonderful garden. There’s beautiful soil up there but it’s like a desert as it’s very hot. She had a real skill growing roses with lots of David Austins and lovely perennial plants. Everyone who visited would say ‘I love that, and I love that’ and she would give them bits and pieces, dig up great clumps of plants, and she started many people’s gardens that way.”
NICOLE ALEXANDER
Nicole’s mother, Marita, helped to foster her love of reading.
One of four children, author Nicole Alexander still remembers her sense of wonder at Murki’s wide open spaces and vast, star-filled skies. “I know the phrase ‘big sky country’ is used over and over, but to be out in the bush when there’s a full moon… it’s an all-encompassing feeling of being surrounded by something greater than what you are,” she says.
When Nicole was young, the property employed jackaroos, which kept her mum, Marita, busy cooking while she homeschooled the children at the kitchen table. A love of reading was passed down from her parents, as was the spark of an idea for each of Nicole’s novels. “The number of times I’ve been out driving with my father or sitting at smoko time with a coffee, and he shares a story from the past and it’s like, ‘Wow, I can use that.”
After 123 years of family ownership, her parents sold some of their rural holdings and relocated to Moree.
“I was born in Sydney — Mum was shopping in David Jones and suddenly I was on the way! We spent about five weeks in the city before my parents brought me home to Murki, in Boomi in north-west NSW, to the middle of a roaring drought. Outdoor activities were a relief from being inside. We’d get our lessons from correspondence school in Sydney and Mum would teach us. There’s something about doing your schoolwork quickly so you can get back outside where the action is.
“I think about all the elements people can be subjected to over their lifetime in rural Australia and that helps me formulate their character. Most of my characters are strong, resilient people because it’s just the way life is, I suppose. Mum says a woman can be too capable in the bush. I guess her words came to bear when I hurt my back and shoulder while working — but we choose to live this lifestyle and do this kind of work. I’ve learnt a lot and I wouldn’t change it for anything.”
RACHAEL FINCH
“Mum... would always say things like, ‘Don’t give up, you can do it! Try your hardest...”
Rachael Finch, television presenter
Rachael credits her mother with her sense of determination. Growing up in Townsville, Queensland, television presenter Rachael Finch started early when it came to sport and the great outdoors. Her mother recalls the future Miss Universe Australia as an infant, hurtling down an athletics track clad in just a nappy.
“I try and balance everything with being a mum — shooting, flying and reporting,” Rachael says. “I also do some work on radio station Nova, which is really fun. I’m happy that I have so much variety and these beautiful opportunities — and I thank my mum and dad for their help and support, and for the belief in myself that I could do anything I want.
“Mum was at every sporting event and everything that I did; she was at the end of the racetrack, on the side of every football field and at every competition. Her support was phenomenal and she would always say things like ‘Don’t give up, you can do it! Try your hardest; it doesn’t matter where you come.’ I got a sense of determination and never giving up from Mum that was fantastic.
“When I was 15, my mum said: ‘There’s a modelling competition maybe you should enter.’ I said, ‘Mum, you’re kidding me, look at my legs!’ But I decided to enter, and was lucky enough to win the competition, and the modelling started from there.” >
HOLLY RINGLAND
Holly’s mother, Colleen, instilled a love of learning and reading. Author Holly Ringland discovered the power of plants as a small child, barefoot amid her family’s subtropical garden at Gladstone in Queensland. Her grandmother, Joan Corfield, lived in an old Queenslander with a fairy garden of roses and bell flowers alongside, protected from the scorching summer sun.
“Whenever there was something wrong in the world, I would be directed to the fairy garden and Granny would hold my hand and have me look into the faces of flowers and plants,” Holly recalls. “I think she was bringing my awareness to the fact that nature is bigger than we are and what goes on with our feelings and in our head.”
She says that both her mother, Colleen Ringland, and grandmother instilled a love of reading and learning that saw Holly aspiring to be a writer from the age of three. “They both taught me that you cannot give up on home and with hard work something will give,” she says. “Some days I would show up and write for the people that believed in me, like my partner Sam, Granny and Mum who taught me not to squander it, to seize it and not give up.
“I grew up between mum’s and Granny’s gardens in Gladstone until I was four in the early 1980s. Everyone lived on quote big plots — the classic Australian backyard — but Granny’s garden was another world altogether. She has an ancient mango tree as well as staghorn and bird’s nest ferns and grevillea.
“My memories of that time oscillate between being in Granny’s garden and in Mum’s, where kookaburras and possums would come on the verandah and she would give them scraps. Mum often tells the story of the time she found me on the verandah wrestling a possum for scraps, with a kookaburra watching on!
“Mum and Granny both read to me and Granny was constantly storytelling. Mum taught me to read by the time I was three.”
STEVE BAXTER
Steve was inspired by his mum Sandra gaining a degree while raising kids. “Growing up in Emerald in Queensland was a lot of fun and we were always riding our bikes around town,” says tech entrepreneur and judge on
Shark Tank Steve Baxter.
“My recollections are of lots of fun times at the pool and Mum and Dad had this bribe that if we swam half the length of the pool we would get $5, which you can imagine back then was quite a princely amount. I’ve now realised that was so they could send us to the pool and not worry about us drowning.
“We really enjoyed the community and Mum and Dad were in the local Lions club and involved in all sorts of community activities. There was an extraordinary amount of Lions social events — barbecues and fundraisers and fetes, which were always a lot of fun.
“Our family values were honesty and hard work; Dad was a clerk in Queensland Rail and Mum was a homemaker. Mum did her senior studies while raising us and, in our early days back in Rockhampton she graduated, got her senior certificate and applied to university. She went on and got a degree in social work, then got a job — that definitely gives you an understanding of what hard work is.”
TURIA PITT
Turia’s mother, author Celestine Vaite, gave her a small-town upbringing
“I was eight years old when we moved from Sydney to Ulladulla on the NSW South Coast,” says athlete Turia Pitt. “We’d spent a few holidays down there. Dad had fallen in love with the surf there, so we moved out of the city and down the coast.
“I think Mum, who came from Tahiti, felt instantly more at home with the pace of South Coast life. It was small-town living — not even the physical isolation from anything you would otherwise call civilisation could take away from the sensation of staring out across the glassy waters of the Pacific Ocean on a clear day.”
TOM GLEESON
Tom’s thankful his mum, Annette, and dad, Phil, gave him a country childhood. “I learnt to drive the Land Rover when I was six, and I must have been seven or eight when I got a motorbike,” says comedian Tom Gleeson who grew up in Tambar Springs in NSW. “The muffler had snapped off, so it was really loud, but Mum liked that because she could still hear me even a couple of kilometres away. I liked difficult terrain, winding around various gullies. It made me feel like an adult, out on my own.
“I’ve got two sisters and two brothers. Once, my mum and dad went into town to do some shopping, telling us not to get up to anything dangerous… So we build a flying fox from a windmill down to a tree. We found an old pulley and a rope that wasn’t quite long enough, so we had to attach another bit to reach the tree.
“The incline from the windmill to the tree was really quite steep, bordering on a free fall, and I went so fast that the pulley hit the knot and I flew off into the long grass. Even at that age, I knew that if it wasn’t for that knot, I’d have gone smack into the tree. Of course, I stood up and declared it a success.
“We were taking turns and having one of the best days of our lives, but then that wasn’t good enough. So I got one of our pushbikes and tried to rig it up with two pulleys — one on the seat and one on the handlebars, because how good would it be to ride a bike off the windmill, and have it land on the ground like a flying bike? I’d just got my leg over the bike at the top of the windmill when our parents came home… I’ll never know if it would have worked. Mum says she feels like there were two lives on the farm: the one she thought we were having, and the one we were actually having.
“These days, everyone thinks boarding school is like Harry Potter and Hogwarts, so it’s cool again, but back then it had a bad name. However, I was the second youngest, and the older three were already there, so if anything, I was gravitating towards them. I thought of it more like Scouts or pony camp — and after first term, my parents came to visit and I proudly announced to my mum that I hadn’t missed her once.
“My memories of the farm are very fond, and I think some of that is because my parents sold up when I was 16 — they moved to Sydney to be closer to us at school — so I never had to face a lot of the harsh realities of rural life.”
IAN ‘MOLLY’ MELDRUM
The music media personality’s mother taught him about music.
“I absolutely adored my Grandma Geer. I was with her until she died when I was about 11 years old. My grandma said: ‘Just remember, son, that no-one is above you, but more important, no-one is below you. Treat everyone, every colour and race, the same.’
“I spent a lot of time with Grandma down in Orbost and Marlo, that beautiful place about 20 kilometres from Orbost. Mum loved opera and Gilbert and Sullivan, as did Grandma. They taught me so much about music. My mother enjoyed musicals, and later at Kyabram, we loved to go to Melbourne to see My Fair Lady and South Pacific and all those shows.”
“My mother enjoyed musicals... we loved to go to Melbourne to see My Fair Lady and South Pacific.”
Ian ‘Molly’ Meldrum, music media personality