Marg and Bob Brace – (Part 1/3)
Marg – “ I was born in Bowral in 1952 and lived on a dairy farm at Burrawang. Along with running the dairy farm my father and my uncle grew cabbages, peas and potatoes which they sold on the Sydney Markets. They had both come back from the war and were quite damaged by the experience so the farm was a good place for them to work it out I guess. The problem was it couldn’t sustain two families and I think factors like depression, rabbits and other problems made it not viable.
I have a brother Geoff who is 4 years older and I had 2 cousins in between, so we were really close. We ran amok on the farm. There was beautiful temperate rainforest and bull paddocks and creeks we could play in. It was a lovely childhood.
Through that experience I ended up very close to my Dad. Mum would say, Marg, you should stay home with me and we’ll cook, but no! I wanted to be out in the paddocks. I couldn’t stand the lady-like things and Mum was very lady-like. She was trying to raise me to be a lady and I was a real tomboy. I would go out with Dad and check people’s crops, anything just to be out in the paddocks.
Dad found it very difficult after the war. He was a Commando and a Sniper in New Guinea and Borneo. He was a gentle man really but he’d seen and done some terrible things that were so not ok for him. He grappled with that for the rest of his life. Throughout his life he would try to reconcile. I remember him inviting a Japanese man for dinner and I remember how incredibly stressed and anxious he was beforehand but he did it. Mum cooked the baked dinner. I still have the lovely thank-you letter filed away that the man sent to Dad.
We moved to Austinmer and then to Cowra. Cowra was quite a German area and those people would have had it tough too coming here after the war. I remember Dad invited his German neighbour to ANZAC day and he took him out for the day. We moved to West Wyalong, onto Griffith where I finished school. I went on to Armidale Teachers College to study Agriculture.
I wanted to do Agriculture in school when I was at West Wyalong and in those days girls weren’t allowed to do Agriculture. We had a very scary Principal called Miss Osborne. Suddenly the rule changed and this other girl and I were allowed to study Agriculture. We were the very first girls to sit the School Certificate including that subject in a public school in NSW. Now I’m retired I’ve had time to poke around and look for people. Miss Osborne was a staunch feminist and a life member of the Teacher’s Federation. She was fighting for women and it was because of her that we were able to study Agriculture. I didn’t know that at the time. I ended up being a life member as well and it blows me away that she was there at the start. Doris Osborne was her name. I started off in the Ag section at College with 31 of us, 29 boys and 2 girls. At the end of that course there were 7 boys and 2 girls so the boys fell away.
Armidale Uni was preparing for the Aquarius Festival at the time. My brother had been up in Kuranda building a boat for this commune called Rosebud. The main people in the commune were American and their fathers were wealthy and high up. They didn’t want their children to be called up to war so they gave them money and sent them to Cairns to set up this commune so it was pretty lush but still hippie. There was a guy called Richie there who grew the crops and travelled the world collecting exotic plants. Geoff was building the boat so they could go out to sea and catch fish for protein as well.
I hitched up to visit Geoff. I was pretty wild at the time. I didn’t see myself as a feminist but I was pushing the edges a bit. I was always a fringe hippy. When I came back from that trip I was appointed to Gulgong Central School during a drought. Suddenly from the edge of hippiedom I was in a little rural community as the new potential Agriculture teacher. The male Principal tried to have the subject dropped as he didn’t want me to teach Agriculture. I had lots of issues with him. He told me not to wear trousers to school. I was 20 and the kids I was teaching were 16. I was teaching them to drive the tractor, shimmying up on tractor in a mini skirt was not a good look. I remember writing on the bottom 6 inches of the blackboard so I didn’t have to lift my arm. He said Gulgong was not having Ag so I went to the P&C meeting and he stated things about the drought and other things which were incorrect. I said in the meeting that if he’s studied Agriculture he would know that he was wrong. He hauled me up to his office to reprimand me for humiliating him but in the end Agriculture was put into the curriculum. In that school of 11 teachers there were 9 men, me in my 20s and Mrs Watt, the cooking teacher who was 60.
I asked one of my senior students if there we any interesting teachers anywhere. She said Yes, there’s Spinky and Bracey who are off in their ute which has cartoons painted all over it. I saw them drive up the road and I thought, you beauty, Salvation! So Bob (Bracey) and I ended up sitting next to each other in the staff room. I was 20 and he was 24. That’s how we met.
It wasn’t that easy being a young woman doing all that fringy stuff. There were incidents that happened which were horrible and so when Bob came along I just latched on to him. Because he was this man who would keep me safe but not put any reins on me. I didn’t know that but intuitively I probably did. By Easter of that year we had decided we would marry. Mum and Dad hadn’t met him and were living in Crescent Head so we decided to hitch there over the Easter 5 days and be back for work.
Mum had given me a Siamese cat to look after and it was very jealous so whenever Bob came over the cat would attack him. We decided to take the cat back with us to my parents so we hitched with a cat for 5 days. We got some pills from the Chemist in Mudgee to knock it out. We put it in a cardboard cat box. Off we went and got picked up by a very slow semi trailer. We were going up Cherry Tree Hill and the cat woke up clawing to get out. We got to Lithgow and went to another Chemist who gave us a sedative for a human that we were told to break into smaller bits. The cat took it and we thought it was going to die. I was thinking here I am taking this man to meet Mum and Dad with their dead cat. That would be a really bad start (laughs). We found the RSPCA which was out of town and got a cab there. On arrival there was this young couple baby sitting and canoodling on the couch and not pleased to see us. They said the people we needed to see were out but shouldn’t be too long so we sat there on the couch with them uncomfortably till 3am when they finally got home. They sorted us and we took a train with the cat in the luggage tram. Dad came to meet us at the station and we go down the end of the train to get the cat. The guard said, you own that bloody cat? He had to unpack everything to get to the cat which had wailed loudly the whole trip all the way from Sydney to Crescent Head.”