Olive Justice models her home-made bathers. Christine Grayden celebrates her great aunt - and one of Phillip Island’s great characters - for Women’s History Month.
By Christine Grayden
FOR MY 2022 Women’s History Month essay I compiled a list of online historical resources regarding women in Bass Coast. This year I’d like to share a few stories recorded back in the 1990s by my great aunt Olive Justice (nee Grayden) while she was aged in her 90s and totally blind.
Olive did nothing really spectacular in her life to earn her either fame or notoriety. However, blessed with a positive attitude, an adventurous spirit and an ability to ‘pivot’ long before that word took on its current economic meaning, she withstood more storms than are faced by most people. And, in common with her siblings Marguerite, Doug and Bert, she was a wonderful storyteller.
FOR MY 2022 Women’s History Month essay I compiled a list of online historical resources regarding women in Bass Coast. This year I’d like to share a few stories recorded back in the 1990s by my great aunt Olive Justice (nee Grayden) while she was aged in her 90s and totally blind.
Olive did nothing really spectacular in her life to earn her either fame or notoriety. However, blessed with a positive attitude, an adventurous spirit and an ability to ‘pivot’ long before that word took on its current economic meaning, she withstood more storms than are faced by most people. And, in common with her siblings Marguerite, Doug and Bert, she was a wonderful storyteller.
Living to almost 100 years, Olive outlived all her family: her husband Reg; both of their children, Joyce and Roy; her siblings and most of her cousins. Having lost her daughter at 21, having Roy away fighting in New Guinea for three years must have been torturous for Olive. Also, two house fires took most of her possessions and her businesses.
Olive with her son Roy in the 1940s Soon after she and Reg were settled into their “forever home”, which Reg built with Roy’s help in the early 1950s, Reg died suddenly at the age of 58 from a massive heart attack. Not long after, Olive’s glaucoma escalated until she was completely blind for the last 30 years of her life and cared for by her son Roy until his death, aged 74, by which point he was legally blind himself with glaucoma.
She bravely faced her final years in care, first in Melaleuca Lodge and finally at Warley Annex nursing home, just around the corner from her home at 70 Chapel Street, Cowes. Her land was purchased by the commissioners, and, in accordance with her wishes, that land is now a Bass Coast Shire pocket park in central Cowes – a place for gathering and relaxing away from the hustle and bustle of the main streets and shops.
Between the ages of 93 and 95 years old during the 1990s, Olive decided to record many of her life’s stories on a cassette recorder using audiocassettes. Roy placed tactile aids on the recorder’s buttons, so she knew which to press for play, record and stop. As a result we have about three hours of these tapes which have now been digitised. While the quality is highly variable, much of it is usable as it is, while most of the rest I am able to gradually transcribe.
Prompted by Bass Coast Shire’s Melody Stone, who took on the signage project for Olive Justice Place as part of a program to gain more public recognition for women’s roles in the history of our Shire, I decided to create some YouTube videos using some of Olive’s recordings and photographs. The four short videos I have created so far can be viewed on her YouTube channel Olive Justice – Phillip Island memories.
In those Olive talks about an outing to the Cowes yacht regatta prior to World War I, working on the dairy farm as a teenager and her husband Reg operating the San Remo to Newhaven punt – including during the big race days of the Great Depression era – for which I have done most of the voice-over due to the poor quality of Olive’s recording.
The other is based on her dressmaking classes’ workbook from the late 1940s, and features photos of Olive posing in clothing she made herself and other fashions through the decades, while Ain’t She Sweet plays in the background.
This month a new website called Finding Her, being developed by the ‘Her Place Museum’, will be launched to give more detailed information on women who have been recognised in some public way from throughout Victoria. The information on the website will be accessible via a QR code on whatever infrastructure has been placed in recognition of the individual women – for example a plaque, monument or sign. At this point it is possible that Olive Justice may have a page on that website linked to the signage at Olive Justice Place.
Olive’s stories are not about world-shattering events or a life of public achievements. She is relating stories of her embarrassing moments, her observations of the natural world, and the minutiae of everyday life so different to our frenetic lives these days. Here are a few samples for your enjoyment, just by way of commemorating Women’s History Month in Bass Coast, March, 2023.
She bravely faced her final years in care, first in Melaleuca Lodge and finally at Warley Annex nursing home, just around the corner from her home at 70 Chapel Street, Cowes. Her land was purchased by the commissioners, and, in accordance with her wishes, that land is now a Bass Coast Shire pocket park in central Cowes – a place for gathering and relaxing away from the hustle and bustle of the main streets and shops.
Between the ages of 93 and 95 years old during the 1990s, Olive decided to record many of her life’s stories on a cassette recorder using audiocassettes. Roy placed tactile aids on the recorder’s buttons, so she knew which to press for play, record and stop. As a result we have about three hours of these tapes which have now been digitised. While the quality is highly variable, much of it is usable as it is, while most of the rest I am able to gradually transcribe.
Prompted by Bass Coast Shire’s Melody Stone, who took on the signage project for Olive Justice Place as part of a program to gain more public recognition for women’s roles in the history of our Shire, I decided to create some YouTube videos using some of Olive’s recordings and photographs. The four short videos I have created so far can be viewed on her YouTube channel Olive Justice – Phillip Island memories.
In those Olive talks about an outing to the Cowes yacht regatta prior to World War I, working on the dairy farm as a teenager and her husband Reg operating the San Remo to Newhaven punt – including during the big race days of the Great Depression era – for which I have done most of the voice-over due to the poor quality of Olive’s recording.
The other is based on her dressmaking classes’ workbook from the late 1940s, and features photos of Olive posing in clothing she made herself and other fashions through the decades, while Ain’t She Sweet plays in the background.
This month a new website called Finding Her, being developed by the ‘Her Place Museum’, will be launched to give more detailed information on women who have been recognised in some public way from throughout Victoria. The information on the website will be accessible via a QR code on whatever infrastructure has been placed in recognition of the individual women – for example a plaque, monument or sign. At this point it is possible that Olive Justice may have a page on that website linked to the signage at Olive Justice Place.
Olive’s stories are not about world-shattering events or a life of public achievements. She is relating stories of her embarrassing moments, her observations of the natural world, and the minutiae of everyday life so different to our frenetic lives these days. Here are a few samples for your enjoyment, just by way of commemorating Women’s History Month in Bass Coast, March, 2023.
“When I was a young girl there was a minister who used to go around and visit people who could not get to the church. He would drive around with the pony and trap. One day he visited an old lady who invited him to stay for lunch. He came back to us laughing because when he was eating her soup he had to say: “Oh Madame, this soup is fly blown!” But she just said “Oh dear so it is. Never mind – just put them aside with your spoon.”
| ***** “Before superphosphate was used on the island, the paddocks were full of tussock grass and there were thousands of tiny slipper orchids. We children called the pink ones ‘nanny goats’ and the bronze ones ‘Billie goats’. The paddocks were just covered in them! And all sorts of grasses. Now the pastures have improved there’s plenty of food for the stock. But we loved it as children – we loved it just as it was. There were also a lot of creepers growing wild. There was what we called ‘shivery grass’ and all different sorts of grasses. We would have a bazaar and a show of wildflowers and whoever gathered the most wildflowers and the most wild grasses got a prize.” ***** |  Olive was a stylish dresser and capable dressmaker. Here she models a home-made floral fitted dress with a flared skirt |
“When we arrived back in Newhaven in 1927 [Olive had lived there as a small child before her parents and siblings moved to Ventnor], it was still the quiet little town with a few scattered houses that it had always been. But it had a quiet beauty of its own. The Depression was on so things had not progressed very much at all. I ran the post office there and the commission office, and took some boarders. The late Mr John Cleeland often came down to the post office with a telegram for me to send when a boat, including the Alma Dopel and another boat, came into the Cape to shelter. So I would send the telegrams to the shipping office.”
*****
“There was a school at Newhaven, but when the Education Department took the teacher away, my husband took the children over to San Remo school. My daughter (Joyce) made friends over there and some warm, moonlight nights they would yodel to one another from San Remo Jetty to Newhaven Jetty.”
*****
“One day my young son Roy was crossing the channel in a very small dinghy when a huge shark, twice the length of the dinghy, came alongside and looked up at him with a hungry look in its eye. I believe a shark can’t look out of both eyes at once – it has to turn its head to look out at the other. But Roy crouched down in the bottom of the boat where it couldn’t see him and he couldn’t see it, until he was sure it had swum away. He decided it wasn’t wise to cross the channel in such a small dinghy!”
*****
Olive Justice Place is now officially recognised as part of the 'finding her places' website project of the Women's Museum