Betty Paterson with the surprise gift she received for her long-time fundraising work with the RSL’s women’s auxiliaries Photo: Jen White.
As part of our 12 days of what Christmas means to me series, Betty Paterson shares almost 100 years of Christmas memories.
Betty Paterson will celebrate her 100th Christmas next year, but she still has vivid memories of the year she received a beautiful life-size doll.
As the youngest of 12 children in a Bulli coal-mining family, money was tight. However, Betty says Christmas was a beautiful time.
The new doll came with clothes knitted by the “girls in the paper shop” and sat under the Christmas tree in an old pusher pram with a single handle at the front.
“My sister and I used to walk it up Stokes Lane (at Bulli) and back down. I’d walk it up and she’d walk it back. It was beautiful, absolutely beautiful,” she says.
Betty (nee Brown) has lived in Bulli all her life – born, schooled, married and raised her own three children in the suburb.
Up until about two years ago, Betty was living in a unit in Underwood Street, Corrimal, when she moved a few streets away to the Illawarra Diggers Rest Home.
Ironically, Betty’s tireless fundraising and work with the RSL’s women’s auxiliaries helped to build and later extend Diggers after it moved from Mt Keira to Corrimal, where it is today.
She was later honoured for all her efforts in a surprise presentation at Hyde Park War Memorial in Sydney.
“They said to me, ‘We’re going up there to read the minutes about how much money has been raised for this building, and you’ve been such an asset, so wonderful for us and we’d love you to come’. And they presented me with this framed commemoration – I couldn’t get over it.”
Diggers Rest Home was opened in Mt Keira in 1946 for servicemen returned from World War II. During the war it served as the 63rd Australian General Military Hospital.
An article at the time described it as: “Here a returned soldier, convalescing from recurrent war injuries or illness, may regain his strength in ideal, healthy surrounds. Here, a tortured mind, battle scarred and sick with the bewildering worries of a sudden return to civilian life, may shed its uncertainties and find peace and confidence.”
Betty was all too familiar with the effects of war.
She met her husband-to-be, Lewis, when he was with the Army and billeted in the area from Grafton, in northern NSW.
“What a beautiful man he was, and what a gorgeous singing voice. He was one of the best,” Betty says.
Not long after they were married – in Bulli Methodist Church, where all of her siblings were also married – Lewis and five of his brothers were sent to Papua New Guinea during the war.
Lewis returned safely and he and Betty had two sons and a daughter.
And for 30 years, Betty cooked a baked dinner for Christmas lunch for about 13 family members.
“I had them at my place every Christmas; I did the garage up and put up a tree and it was absolutely beautiful.”
Sadly, Betty’s eldest son, daughter and Lewis have passed away, but she’ll celebrate Christmas this year with her son Ross and his family.
And if she gets a chance, Betty will bash out a few tunes on the piano, something the Diggers’ residents are disappointed they’ll miss out on this year.
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