Almanac Everyday Obits: ‘An uncle and aunt by choice, not blood, and how precious they have been to me.’

 

 

 

It’s like a pilgrimage, this drive. A little journey into the heart of myself, a revisit to many of the things that created me. Three hours of scenery that gradually morph from the hilly green vineyards of the Barossa, north, to the long, endless plains of the Mallee. It’s dry, and there’s dust being thrown around on the wind. I’ve had to overtake a couple of grain trucks, because it’s that time of year and the colours that flash past the window are the same ones burnt into my soul. Loxton has an ABC tower, a tall red and white aerial high above the river flats that can be seen for miles and as a kid it was a competition to see who could spot if first, this marker of being home. I repeated the tradition when my own kids were little, a marker of the excitement that came every time they visited their grandfather who always took them to the Loxton Bakery and bought them custard tarts.

‘Spotted it’…I say to the empty car.

Endings can sometimes come without notice. Like the last time I carried one of my children to bed. The last time I heard my Mum laugh. The last time my Dad’s voice answered the telephone. They all slipped past without me realising. But I’m marking this trip, because it might be my last. I did this drive only thirteen weeks ago for a funeral, and I’m repeating it again for the same reason. Each one is another step closer to the permanent rupture. The last visit to my childhood home.

I grew up on the family farm 50km out of Loxton where Dad was a farmer and Mum was everything else. I was raised with my feet in the dirt and my face to the sun. My cousins lived on the farms either side of us, we all played sport, and we all held our breath for the timely arrival of rain. Dad loved people, he loved the farm and he loved a party, so he made all of that happen. Often. They were weekends when cars from town rolled up, campfires extended into the wee hours and people slept on the lawn. Some of them were friends, some of them were family, and some of them were friends who became family.

Neville and Dad had been mates for most of their lives, but to us kids he was always Uncle Nev. He had a full-face beard and a head full of dark, thick curly hair. He wore black rimmed glasses and he had a wicked sense of humour. He took my dad to the pub the day I was born and every year after, on my birthday, the two of them insisted on wetting my head all over again. He was a typesetter for the Loxton News and he personally took care of the birth notice Mum wrote for me. She wrote one for my 18th and my 21st too, which he also set, plus the photos he and Dad arranged for the inside pages when my own kids were born.

He was an intelligent and articulate man who loved words and his was always the voice around the campfire with a poem or a joke. And it was always his esky with the squeaky lid that he refused to fix because otherwise how could he hear if someone was stealing his beer? Once he’d had a few it was also always his voice that kicked off the renditions of ‘Blood On The Saddle’, sang in an American country drawl about a cowboy being killed by his horse. It was supposed to be tragic, but Uncle Nev loved the line about ‘Oh, pity the cowboy, all bloody and red…for the bronco fell on him and mashed in his head’. We were convinced he’d made it up, but he insisted otherwise.

Twenty years it took him to track down an old LP in a second hand shop and he waved that thing around like a it was a trophy. He mastered the perfect mimic, right down to the wince-inducing guitar twangs. “The-yer wus (twang)… blo-yod on the saddle…(twang) and blo-yod arll around. And a great big purddle…(twang) of blo-yod on the gro-wned”. There were tears alright – of laughter.

He had a little blue Datsun ute he called ‘the wheelbarrow’ and he and Aunty Doreen and daughter Jody would come down the long driveway, pulling up in a cloud of dust. ‘Neville The Devil at your service’, he would announce, doffing his hat. He loved a dramatic entrance. But he appeared quietly on the day of Mum’s funeral, slipping inside the back door in his best clothes, ready to drive us all to the cemetery. He hadn’t been asked, he just needed to do something helpful.

He was always the first pair of hands to offer assistance, and always the last packing up at the end. He danced with me as a debutante, was MC at my 21st, and as an adult he was still at the centre of family fun. He was one of my favourite humans.

His wife, Doreen, and Mum had been friends since primary school. Mum called her Dorrie, and to us she was Aunty Dorrie. She took my Mum to hospital the day I was born, then drove to the pub some hours later to collect Dad and Uncle Nev. I never really considered the magnitude of that gesture until my own kids were born, because it was only shortly before that Neville and Doreen’s six year old son, Stephen, had drowned in the Murray River. Aunty Dorrie knew all about the depths of grief and sorrow, but she also knew how powerful love could be.

When I was two Mum had studio photos taken of me, and Aunty Dorrie bought the dress I wore. I still have the photo in a frame on my dresser, and Mum had stashed the dress carefully in a suitcase of child keepsakes that is still in my wardrobe. Eighteen years ago I photographed my toddler daughter in the dress and sent Aunty Dorrie a copy. Dad told me that she talked about the photo for years.

She had a laugh that could light up the room, and she used it. Often. As a kid, I didn’t need any help to find her around the house… just follow the happiness. She spread that stuff around like glitter. When I’d left uni and was working in Adelaide, Aunty Dorrie threw a surprise 50th birthday party for Mum and she rang me to help make arrangements. I still have the photos of us in her loungeroom that night, all holding glasses of wine. We are laughing in every one.

Five years later Aunty Dorrie was with Mum when the doctors first mentioned it might be cancer, and when Mum decided to shave her head before chemo, Aunty Dorrie went to that as well. In the months of Mum’s treatment Aunty Dorrie visited every day, pegging up washing and cooking meals and lighting the fire. Looking after Dad as much as she was looking after Mum. As a teenager Aunty Dorrie was always the emergency contact on our home phone – if we needed an adult for anything and we couldn’t get hold of a parent, we knew to ring her. Dad was there, and I was an adult, but she was still the first person I rang in the early dawn when Mum died.

Uncle Nev and Aunty Dorrie’s daughter, Jody, is nine years older than me and when I was seven she took me to the Loxton Drive-in with her boyfriend. We were watching Jaws and she sat me in the front seat next to her in case I got scared. She did my make-up for Year 11 formal, and tissied with my debutante dress. She married that boyfriend, Kenton, and I remember their wedding. Mum took lots of photos that day and carefully stuck them into our family photo album.

Jody rang me in August to tell me her Dad had died, and I cried. I cancelled my plans for a writers festival in Victoria so I could travel to Loxton, even though I knew how much he would hate me doing that. But the idea of missing his funeral was impossible. The words at his service spoke of his legendary Weber roasts, his sense of humour and his devotion to his family. They cried when they spoke of him, and of his kind and loyal heart that had been big enough to hold us all.

Jody rang me again last week, for the second time in four months, to tell me her Mum had died. I cried, again. Even writing this, I still am.

Aunty Doreen’s funeral was in the same community hall as Uncle Nev’s, tucked in behind the hospital where I was born. The same one where I did an all-night vigil six years ago when Dad died.

It’s been a long time since I lived in this community and there were very few faces I recognised. I was sitting behind an entire row of ladies in red hats and I knew how much Aunty Dorrie would have loved that. Her family spoke again with such composure and so many beautiful words, talking of her capacity for dress-ups and fun. How she was always up for a party, and her laughter that was shared with such unrestricted heart. The apron she always wore on Christmas day – I’m dreaming of a white Christmas, but I’ll have red if the white runs out. The lipstick tattoos she left on everyone’s face, and how everything was a celebration, and was enjoyed as such. The joy and love she threw around, every day, to everyone. And how fortunate I had been to be included.

In the cemetery, in the town where I was born, I walked past Stephen’s grave, then Mum and Dad’s. I stood next to Uncle Nev’s headstone with my feet in the dirt and my face to the sun. The female pallbearers carried Aunty Dorrie’s coffin to the graveside and I saw the way Jody’s husband, Kenton reached out a hand to steady a weeping pallbearer. And I saw how he quietly held on until she was ready to let go.

Just as the committal started the wind whipped up and lifted hats off heads. Oh Aunty Dorrie. How perfect.

We all filed past and said our final goodbyes, then Jody and I held hands as she pushed the lever and her Mum was reunited with her Dad. In 60 years Nev and Dorrie had only been apart those short few months. An Uncle and Aunt by choice, not blood, and how precious they had been to me.

***

One of the hardest days of my life was in 2002, three days after Mum’s funeral, when after nearly four weeks off work to help nurse Mum in the palliative stages, then the funeral, I’d had to drive back to Adelaide. My sister had left several hours before, and as I reversed out the driveway, for the first time in my life, it was my Dad as a lone figure standing on the veranda. He’d held on to me like he didn’t want to let me go. Ever. Which was probably true, and I knew as soon as I got out of sight he’d break down. And so would I.

I’d just turned 30, and Mum had only been 56. The closer I get to that age the more I understand the tragedy of it, but it was the first time I’d had to farewell someone who had known me my whole life. Someone who had loved me my whole life. And on that day it was just so huge and so raw and I held it together until I got to the end of the street, feeling like my soul had been torn into pieces and part of it was being left behind never to be reclaimed. A wound that felt like it might just bleed forever.

That day I drove home past the ABC aerial and the dust and the plains with the colours that are burnt into my soul, and I wept for the entire three hours.

This one was no different.

 

Sheralee Menz is a writer and community historian based in the Barossa Libraries. Her book, written and compiled with Marieka Ashmore, Rolling Up Their Sleeves, was published in March 2025. Read more about it HERE.

 

Read Sheralee’s other pieces HERE

 

 

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