Vernon

In 10 minutes I cannot do justice to the full magnificence of my mother’s life. I will include some facts and snippets of history, while missing an encyclopaedia’s-worth that would be equally noteworthy.

My mother was a truly impressive woman; a tower of strength; a shining model of a life worth living in every possible sense; she leaves a legacy that is truly eternal despite the emptiness of loss that we all feel so keenly.

My mother had the intellect, the dignity, the self-discipline and drive to be anything – she would have been equally impressive as a CEO; a supreme court justice; a state premier, or (if not for her indoors complexion) a champion sportswoman. But she wasn’t motivated by power, fame, authority, success in the modern fashion of the word, she had no desire for great monetary wealth. Her life was dedicated to being and creating the best for her family. And this wasn’t a path of plain sailing. She was not defined by easy choices and any cushion of automatic privilege. Her life is a shining testament to being the very best, despite obstacles and circumstances that didn’t always follow the plan.

It started with her arriving months premature and only 1.5 kg – 3lbs on the old scale – in 1934, as the world was still crawling out of the Great Depression. She wasn’t expected to survive. Despite the rocky start, my Mum thrived – she was intelligent, active and disciplined. She (and her lifelong friend Yvonne) attended one of Sydney’s early girls’ selective high schools at St George and excelled in multiple languages, history, dancing, piano and was school tennis champion.

After Year 12, she worked for CSIRO Metrology, and then later as an optical technician at OPSM. She was also an entrant in a few quests and contests including 1953 Miss NSW. At one point, she was “Miss Polaroid” – a more elegant pioneer of today’s Instagram influencer.

A major junction in my mother’s road came at the tender age of 20, when she sailed alone on the SS Oronsay’s 2nd trans-Pacific voyage in May 1954 to attend her brother Kevin’s wedding in Utah. Without the benefit of google, Wikipedia, mobile phone or credit card, she arrived in Vancouver then jumped on a train for the 1800km overland journey to Salt Lake City. The Canadian Mormon missionary who had been visiting the family home in Sydney months earlier mis-timed his attempt to greet her at the docks in Vancouver.

Fast forward 1 year and chapters of stories, and that missionary and she were newly married. The weekly letters we have from my mother to my grandmother are a fascinating diary of the minor and major events of life, and reflect my grandmother’s anguish at maybe losing another child and only daughter to the electrifying lure of mid-fifties North America. We don’t know exactly what my Grandma thought about my mother’s honeymoon drive through Northern Nevada and Utah during snow storms, choking dust storms and mud-rain, with the locals blaming the “atomic bomb” – a reference to the atmospheric nuclear test which happened in Nevada at the time. But my Mum’s numerous assurances to Grandma were fulfilled in 1956 when my mother, father and my freshly minted oldest sister Debbie arrived in Sydney in 1956. My mother and father were devout Mormons and in the finest tradition of the church, there were 5 children by 1964.

A striking feature of my mother was she was an exceptional conversationalist on any topic she or others wanted to cover, whether mundane, topical, controversial or sensitive. However, I never had a full appreciation of how momentous it was for her as a wife and mother to consider the choice: “should I stay or should I go” with 5 children, no job and the entire fabric of her faith, social network and support at stake. I was too young to know whether the option was clear at the time, but I am wise enough to know the choice was terrifying and made under extreme stress. And perhaps that forged another of her multitude of defining strengths – a quiet upholder of the highest standards and principles, while slow to judge those whose shoes she’d never worn.

She knew how to marshal her limited resources in creative ways, whether making all our clothes, or artwork and curtains for our house, or when travelling as a single mother with 5 children visiting family within USA and Canada, 1967. Once, running afoul of petty bureaucracy at the border, she used a few minutes of steadfast inattention to transform 5 young children from angels to ferals. Unsurprisingly, the insurmountable obstacles to our transit quickly vanished.

In 1970 my mother re-married and my youngest brother Richard arrived a year later. Sadly, my step-father was killed in a road accident in 1977, and this story is sounding like some wailing country music tragedy. But that’s the point: my mother dealt with tragedy, grief, enormous responsibility and tough choices between bad and worse - she could easily have stumbled, failed, wallowed in self-pity or given up – yet she prevailed and overcome every time with optimism and love. Regardless of the workload or seismic turmoil in her life, she powered on, and as children we were barely conscious of the burdens she carried. Everything was done in the best interests of her family, and like everything else she put her mind to, she excelled. During the same decades that my mother cooked, cleaned, worked, studied, mothered, cared for, disciplined and managed a large household; she was self-motivated enough to become a respected master of genealogical research, my sisters and she were on TV together singing and playing guitar (which she taught herself); she developed her artistic talent into becoming a successful commercial porcelain artist and porcelain art teacher; she knitted, sewed and crocheted masterpieces, she was exceptional on piano, and when time permitted she read voraciously. And as her children became independent, she then took on the role of caring for her own aging parents. She was a masterclass in disciplined self-improvement. My mother wasted nothing, not even a moment of time.

At this point, I just want to acknowledge step-fathers. It must be a tough gig at the best of times and In Bruce and Bill’s case, they took on a lot of expensive baggage – a large then smaller horde of dependent and assertive children – when my father had returned to Canada to take no further responsibility for our upbringing. But, at the same time, my step-fathers married a saint.

Smart and engaging almost to the very end; her body failed, but her mind and her love never did. She remembered the names of the staff who cared for her at the Palliative Care ward, when told their names only once. She was the Scrabble, crossword and anagram family consultant. She spent a decade prodigiously donating her knitted items for hospital fundraising; 35 years volunteering for the Family History Research centres – motivated partly by her intense curiosity to solve the mystery of her own grandfather who deserted his wife and 6 daughters, then eventually washed up dead on a Newcastle beach.

In particular, it’s the enduring role model of love, strength, positivity and patience that I will miss for me and my children. She didn’t have a nasty or vindictive cell in her body. She never sought pity or victimhood, even on the death of her daughter Debbie in 2011. She taught the value of both soft and tough love. Her family came first above all else, including herself.

My mother is deeply faithful and unsurprisingly thoroughly versed in Biblical study, plus a whole swathe of other records, history and archaeology of the times. She is prayerful and spiritual, but not in a particularly pious or ritual sense. If people spoke to Mum on the topic, she knew exactly what the gospel has to say and the purpose of its words. But more remarkable… if you want to know what Jesus would DO with the myriad challenges of a real life, then you need look no further than my beloved mother Fay Watts Lank McKenzie Edmonds.

Clinton

I haven’t prepared anything to say but I’ve been reflecting on some of my recent experiences, and when someone passes away there’s a lot of paperwork. I’ve got to put a whole bunch of documents into the Supreme Court and these documents ask me: what was Mum’s occupation? And what I’d like to do in that box is insert the tip of the iceberg of what Vernon read out and the other tributes that will ... today, but I only get to put one word there, and that gave me pause for thought - [ long pause for thought ] - and I’ve settled on a word - it’s an unusual word - but I think Mum would like it. She’d know it instantly, some of you won’t, but the word I’m going to put in the affidavit, all that paperwork, is “polymath.”

Now polymath is not a parrot that can count. A polymath is a person who has deep experience in a range of diverse subject matters, and as a consequence of that deep experience in a range of subject matters, they bring unique wisdom and insight into problems, and can look at things, and help, and give guidance, and make suggestions that people without that breadth of experience don’t bring to those sorts of situations. So that’s the word I’m going to use and if the Supreme Court doesn’t like it, I’ll have an argument with a judge.

Every experience that I had with her was empirically a learning experience and that was up to her passing and beyond. Close family spent a lot of time sitting by her bed and unfortunately although she became very frail, even though she said she was feeling fuzzy mentally, she was still very sharp. We continued to enjoy doing the quizzes and crosswords and Mum continued to answer questions. We were no good on the Grammy Award winners and the sports stuff, but general knowledge - encyclopaedic general knowledge - even when it appeared that she was resting or asleep.

One of my profound memories was sitting there and we’re doing a crossword and the clue was “colour” : T-something-something-I-something-N. Now that could be an adjective like green, or it could be a verb like colour something in. Colour. And mum, who had her eyes closed, said “ titian, T-I-T-I-A-N ". And I said, “ I’ve never heard of that, Mum ,” and she said, “ When I was at school, the art teacher brought me up to the front of the class and said, ‘Class, Fay Watt’s hair is titan.’ ” The colour titian is named after the most famous 16th century Venetian artist, Titian. Colours were very hard to come by back then and that colour, that Titian used, became the colour of Mum’s hair - of that colour hair. So literally on Mum’s death-bed, I learnt a new word, I learnt about Venetian history, I learnt about her childhood, and that’s an astonishing type of insight into the kind of intellect that she was and how much wisdom she had.

I learn from her now. I’ve got about a thousand favourite photographs, and thanks Dianne for digitising them all. One of my favourites out of the favourites is a personal one for me, which is a photograph of Mum with a very, shall we say, smiling trepidation on her face because she’s standing next to a little aeroplane, a cliche little aeroplane, a Cessna. Mum was a very, very nervous flier, she did not like flying. She did not like being in big aeroplanes, much less a little aeroplane, but she was just about to jump into an aeroplane and do something that she didn’t want to do. And we survived, but she did that as a show of support for and faith in me, not because she wanted to do it - she did that for me. And so now when I look at that photograph I look at someone who did something completely selfless - completely selfless - and I think it was pretty selfish of me, so when I look at that photo these days, I think: we all need to try harder to do more selfless things and fewer selfish things, like my mum, and that would make the world a better place.

Thanks for that lesson, Mum.