JUNE HEAD - Wycliffe Australia

JUNE HEAD
As I Recall
AS I RECALL
JUNE HEAD
June’s recorded story to page 65,
printed and a CD
November 2013
---------Slight modifications of the
original, both text and
pictures,
and added sections
relating to June’s death finalised
January 2014
Page 2
Contents
The Early Years .................................................................................................................... 5
God Answers Prayer ........................................................................................................... 7
Our Move to The Basin ...................................................................................................... 8
The Thief............................................................................................................................. 12
Eunice’s Birthday ............................................................................................................... 13
High School ........................................................................................................................ 15
My Dream ........................................................................................................................... 15
Starting Work ..................................................................................................................... 17
Dad....................................................................................................................................... 18
Growing in Faith ................................................................................................................ 20
A Calling to Missionary Work .......................................................................................... 22
Papua New Guinea Here we come! ................................................................................ 26
First Furlough ..................................................................................................................... 28
Nola ..................................................................................................................................... 29
Tambul ................................................................................................................................ 31
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome ............................................................................................... 34
The Scotts ........................................................................................................................... 38
Visits from Home .............................................................................................................. 39
Weddings and More Visitors ............................................................................................ 45
Some Fearful Moments ..................................................................................................... 48
The Ten-Year Phenomenon ............................................................................................ 50
Our Health .......................................................................................................................... 51
Leaving Papua New Guinea ............................................................................................. 55
Back in Australia ................................................................................................................ 56
Overseas Trip ..................................................................................................................... 58
Cancer .................................................................................................................................. 62
A Visit from an American ................................................................................................ 63
Closing Biographic Comments and Copyright .............................................................. 65
Postscript Notes By Rob; June's Death and Notices .................................................. 66
Printed Funeral Order Of Service ................................................................................... 67
Eulogies: June's Sister Robyn ........................................................................................... 68
Husband Robert............................................................................................... 71
Fellow-Worker Gwen Gibson ....................................................................... 75
Daughter Nola, Son Peter's Fiancée tribute poem, Peter .......................... 79
Rob's Brother David ....................................................................................... 83
Eulogies/Tributes as Gleaned From Cards and Emails .............................................. 86
AS I RECALL
JUNE HEAD
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AS I RECALL
JUNE HEAD
The Early Years
Well, my name is June Head and I was born
on 19th April, 1936, the second child and first
daughter of Cyril Gerald Whitworth and Thelma
May (Cheasley) Whitworth. I was born in a little
hospital called Kelvin Grove Private Hospital,
3 Tongue Street, Yarraville, Melbourne.
My parents’ home address at that time was in
Chirnside Street, West Footscray, so you can see
I started over the west side of town. The first five
years of my life were lived in Yarraville in Pearce
Street and I have some happy memories of our little
home in Pearce Street.
My father worked with I.C.I. (Imperial Chemical
Industries) in Deer Park and my mother hardly ever
worked away from home. She was typical of her
era, a housewife, homemaker and mother, so we
saw a lot more of Mum than we did of Dad.
Dad was a shift worker and he worked three different shifts. Travelling to his shift
work after we moved to The Basin from the other side of town, took a lot out of Dad.
When he was on day shift he had to leave home at
4.30 a.m. for the long walk to the station to catch the
first train, and even then he was none too early for his
7 a.m. start. Night shift was a similar story, leaving
home about 8 p.m., working 11 p.m.-7 a.m. and not
getting home until around 10 a.m.. No wonder Mum
always made him so welcome!
Afternoon shift was another story. It was just
not possible to get there and back for the 3 p.m.11 p.m. shift by public transport. So Dad had to stay
in Footscray with his parents on those weeks.
Dad wasn’t afraid of hard work in other ways
either. The lot next to the one we were renting was
vacant. Whenever a tree fell on the lot, Dad and Mum
would use the crosscut saw to cut it into lengths, and
then Dad would chop them up with his axe.
We were a happy family. My parents were very much in love and didn’t mind showing
it. They didn’t mind kissing and cuddling in front of us kids when they wanted to, say when
Dad had just come home from work or something like that.
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My very first memory is one day when I was crossing a room at home and I must have
been carrying a very special crystal dish because suddenly my Mother’s voice rang out in
panic,
“Put that down!”
And I said.
“Yes Mummy.”
And just let it go - which is not exactly what she had in
mind.
One of my happy memories of our time in
Yarraville was with Ron Mason the boy who lived next
door. He was the only other child in the street; Ron and I
were the same age and we had some good times together.
One of the times I would really enjoy, though I’m not sure
about Ron, was when I would invite him over for
afternoon tea. I had a little toy table with chairs, a lovely
little tea set and my dollies and teddy and, of course, a
chair for Ron and one for me; there we would sit up in
state and have afternoon tea. Another happy memory.
Mum Thelma, Dad Cyril
June (9 mths) and Don (4 yrs)
Ron and I used to wash my
dollies’ clothes then hang them out on
my little clothes line together. I don’t
know quite why, but I had a special
low clothes line which meant that
I could easily hang up my dollies’
clothes when I washed them.
“Afternoon Tea” at Livingstone
Place, The Basin.
June, 10 years, Patricia, 3-1/2
and Robyn, 2-1/2 years.
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God Answers Prayer
Ron and I started school at Blackwood Street State School at the beginning of 1941.
I was still quite young then; four years and nine months old. The back gate of the school was a
very short distance from my home. In fact, I could be still at home when the first bell went
and five minutes later when the second bell went I was in line ready to march into school.
One of my stories about that time is that I was also going to Sunday school. My parents
didn’t go to church but they used to make sure that my brother and I went to Sunday school,
and one Sunday the teacher told us about how God always answers prayer and I can pray to
Him in any situation and He will answer my prayers.
Well that was good information to have,
because one morning, not too long after that, I was
getting ready for school and I could not find my
slate pencil. Now a lot of my readers will not even
know what a slate pencil is, but it was a very
important piece of equipment like a pencil or a pen.
God always answers
prayer. Well that was
good information to
have.
So the first bell went - I was really getting
down to the wire. I suddenly thought, I will kneel
down here at my little chair, (I had a special little cane chair in my bedroom), I’ll kneel down
here and pray about it, so I knelt down and prayed very quickly,
“Please God help me find my slate pencil.”
As I got up from praying, I knocked the cushion on the chair and there, sure enough,
underneath the cushion was my slate pencil. I picked it up, and my slate, and ran as hard
as I could go and got to school before the second bell.
That made a big impression on me. From that time forth I was sure that there is a God
and that He does answer prayer. As I’ve grown older, I’ve realised that God doesn’t always
answer our prayers exactly as we ask them. Sometimes the answer seems to be “No”.
Sometimes heaven seems to be shut up and God doesn’t seem to be interested at all, but other
times He answers in very wonderful and special ways just like He did for me that day with the
slate pencil.
One of the things that happened early in my life was that I was very ill when I was
about three, I think. I was in Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital for months - very ill and
very near death. The presenting problem was measles which is not a big deal these days but it
was a very big deal to me at that time. I was very, very ill. In fact, I was so ill that one night
the nurses said to each other,
“This child is not going to live through the night – what are we going to do about it?
Her records say that she hasn’t been christened or baptised so we need to do
something.”
Of course, my parents didn’t have a ‘phone so they couldn’t be contacted. So the
nurses took it upon themselves to find a Methodist Minister because my parents’ declared
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affiliation with church was Methodism. The nurses found a Minister and asked him to come
in and baptise me. Well, I believe that man was a real man of God and that he prayed not only
to baptise me but that he also prayed for my healing because the next morning, I was still
there and it is fairly obvious at seventy-seven that I still am.
Nurses are not easily fooled; they know when somebody is dying so I don’t say that
they were wrong, just that God decided it wasn’t my time yet. I still had a long life ahead of
me but it wasn’t a very healthy one, especially in those early years, and especially all those
years later on when I suffered from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I just seemed to go from one
sickness to another and at one stage the doctor said to my parents,
“If you want to raise this child you need to take her out of the city area and out into the
country somewhere. She is just not going to become a robust, healthy child until you
do that.”
Mum and Dad decided they would indeed act on his advice.
Our Move to The Basin
My paternal grandfather (who was a Captain in the British Army in the Great War) felt
sure there would eventually be another World War, so in 1924 he migrated from Britain to
Australia with all his family. He advised his children,
“When you marry, move away from the city areas, then, when the Second World War
comes, you will be safer in the countryside.”
So that’s what they did and my father, mother, my brother and I moved up to The Basin
to start life there. Two of my father’s sisters had already moved to The Basin which helped us
feel at home fairly quickly. That was at the beginning of 1942 just before the school year
started. I began at The Basin in Grade 2. It was only a two-room school back then.
Another formative influence on my
childhood was my extended family grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins not in abundance but enough to make me
feel warmly embraced and cared about. I
was the first granddaughter/niece on my
mother’s side of the family and always felt
I was treated a little special because of that,
especially by my aunts, at least until one of
them managed to have a little girl of her
own when I was six.
We had a good relationship with my
father’s family too, especially his two
sisters who, like us, had moved to live in
The Basin.
Cousins Bob and Ron Irwin
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Dad’s middle sister, Marjorie, married Joe Irwin. Joe was taken prisoner-of-war by the
Japanese and ended up dying on the infamous Burma Railway. Aunty Marj and her two boys,
Ron and Bob, lived next door to us for years and we related closely. When Bob grew up, he
founded the Australia Zoo, and he was the father of Steve Irwin the Crocodile Hunter.
Trips to visit the families in Footscray were quite an adventure. First a walk to the bus
stop in The Basin where we caught the bus to Boronia Station; a long train ride broken at
Flinders Street to change trains; get off at West Footscray where we caught the Williamstown
Road tram. From there we had a fairly short walk to either grandparents’ home.
These were special “Red Letter” days for us
and it was a proud day for me when I was trusted to
make the trip alone to visit the Footscray family.
Sometimes we all travelled together as a
family to Altona where my mother’s brother, Ray,
lived with his family. Sometimes Grandma would
go with us too and we would spend many happy
hours at the beach.
Don and June at
Seaholme 1941
Don, Mum, Grandma, June and Robyn
Going to the beach
Another outing I always enjoyed, though we didn’t
go there all that often, was to the Zoo. We never seemed
to go with just our family, there were also always some
other extended family members along with us to see
all the fascinating birds and animals.
Mum, Auntie Marj and Grandma Whitworth
and Don, Ron and Bob Irwin and June
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Another memory of my childhood was when I had little bantam chicks. I was so excited
when my Aunty Kath gave me four of them; one rooster and three hens and they all grew up to be
just the normal bantam size, laying tiny little eggs. I used to spend hours sitting beside their little
cage and singing as my Aunty Kath had told me to do,
“Say little hen, when, when, when will you lay me an egg for my tea?”
“Say little hen, when, when, when will you try to supply one for me?”
It kept a little girl quiet and amused, but inevitably sooner or later they were taken by
the chicken hawks or the foxes, or something. We were very close to the bush when we were
growing up so that was just too bad.
In The Basin we first lived at the top of a very steep hill called Government Road and it
was a very difficult walk for anybody but I didn’t sort of think about it as a kid. We used to
walk down, down, down, down to get to school in the morning and up, up, up, up forever to
get home from school in the afternoon. It must have been hard on little legs but I don’t
remember ever complaining or fussing about it, though it really was a stretching time.
I do remember that in the winter when we had to wear gumboots because there was so
much water around, we all used to see how close we could get to where the deeper water was
lying without getting water inside our boots. Well, of course, when you play with fire you’ll
be burnt, and inevitably we got water inside our boots. It was wet, horrible and
uncomfortable.
My mother said,
“How did you do that?”
“Oh the water is so deep, Mummy.”
(Yes, little brats.)
Something very special happened when I was
seven and a half years old. My little sister, Robyn,
was born and that meant I was no longer the only
girl in the family. Up until then my brother, Don,
and I had been really good mates actually, but it was
lovely to have a little sister. He eventually got a
brother too but that’s way down the line.
It was good to have Robyn around but I will
say about Don, he was a very good older brother.
He used to take me off with his mates – they’d go
rabbiting or what we used to call bushwacking and
so on, and he would always say,
“I’m going to bring Sis.”
Mum and Baby Robyn – Sept 1943
The boys just accepted it and I really enjoyed
that. As I look back I realise he was a most unusual brother in that he would take his little
three or four years younger sister with him and all his mates on their trips around.
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We had some wonderful times catching rabbits and then eating them, of course.
They are good memories too.
Don had a mate, Kevin, who had a ferret. Kevin and his ferret really made our
rabbiting days a great success. As I recall, the plan of action went like this:
Each of us carried an empty sack. When we reached a place where there was a burrow
- which is a series of holes where the rabbit family lives - Kevin would stand by the main hole
with his ferret while the rest of us took responsibility for a lesser hole and stood by with our
sacks. Next, Kevin would let the ferret go. For a few moments it was pandemonium, then we
would stop and count how many rabbits we had in our sacks.
Don and I used to play backyard cricket, especially after school and one day he came
home really excited. He said,
“Hey Sis, I’ve got this really great new bowl.”
He said,
“No matter what you do with it, how you try to hit it when I bowl it to you, it will go
straight up in the air and come down
and you’ll get caught out.”
I said,
“OK, bring it on.”
So he bowls up this wonderful new
bowl and sure enough I hit it straight up in
the air and it comes straight down onto my
nose - and this was a real cricket ball.
No playing cricket with a tennis ball, that
was just for wimps. From that time on
I became a fully committed wimp.
A sequel to this episode occurred
last year (2012) while I was in hospital.
June, Robyn and Don
(Robyn & Don’s Christening Sept 45)
At one stage, last year when I was really, really sick I’d reached the point where I could
scarcely take in any food and drink. I couldn’t drink much because of the cancer I have and
the type it was and the treatment I’d had, especially the radiation to the oesophagus. It had
just about fried my oesophagus to non-existence so I could not get anything down and they
said they had to do something to get nourishment into me. So they decided to put a tube in my
nose and the nourishment was to go in through there.
There was one of the nurses who was particularly skilled at putting these naso-gastric
tubes in and she came to do it for me and she played around and played around and played
around and it was so painful; when I say played around it’s not the right word to use but she
just seemed to be taking forever and it was hurting so much and finally she said,
“Have you ever had a broken nose?”
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I said,
“Yes I have.”
I told her the story of my brother, Don, and the great bowling action he had and she
responded,
“Well, we’re not going to be able to do this for you because it has changed the
configuration of your nose. We can’t get the tube through.”
My other cricket story is quite different and took place several years later but probably
worth including here anyway. Mum, Dad, Robyn and I all went to the first day of the Test
Match at the M.C.G. and not just any old Test Match but Don Bradman’s final First Class
game. We were all excitedly looking forward to watching him make an impressive score and
enjoyed our day out. That was in December, 1948; I was twelve years old.
The Thief
I’ll tell you the story about when I stole something. My parents had quite strong moral
standards. They were adamantly opposed to lying and stealing. They were the two main
things in children that were totally unacceptable. I was not a very truthful child so I got quite
a few beltings for lying, but one day I did something very out of character. I look back and I
really still can’t make sense of it myself.
Here we were in school and Grace
was my desk mate. Our desks were all in
pairs in those days - she sat on one side of
the desk, I sat on the other side - and I knew
that she had two bob, (2/-, 20 cents) in her
side of the desk. At some point during the day, I managed to get hold of those two shillings
and put them in my pocket. Then on the way home I said to all my friends,
I was not a very
truthful child.
“Hey, come with me, we’re going to the store. We’re going to buy some lollies at the
store on the way home and we’ll share them.”
So we went to the store and we spent two shillings on lollies. Now I tell you back in
1943 or 1944 whenever it was, that was a lot of lollies and I shared them out amongst my
friends. There was no way I was trying to keep anything secret. I fear I must have been crazy
but anyway there it was. When I got home, surprise, surprise, my mother had heard this story
and she was ready to deal with it.
Well her way of dealing with it couldn’t have been calculated to make me feel smaller
if she tried which of course, she was trying to do. She said,
“You are going to go up to Grace’s house,”
(it just so happened that Grace’s house was behind our house)
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“and I’m going to come with you to make sure you do it and you’re going to ask to
speak to Grace. You are going to apologise to Grace and you are going to give her
another 2/-. I’ll lend you the 2/- and that’s your next four weeks pocket money.”
(because I used to get 6d a week pocket money)
“Then you are going to get a belting for stealing.”
I said,
“But Mum I told you the truth when you asked me if I’d done it, I didn’t lie.”
She said,
“Yes, but there are beltings for other things besides lying. There are beltings for
stealing too.”
I still don’t know how I got through it, but I did; I had to. I mean with Mum there
beside me, there was no dodging it. Eventually, this all blew over and Grace and I became
good friends, but it was a pretty terrible time. I think back that in this little girl’s life it was a
black, black day, but I brought it on myself. I can’t blame anybody else.
Eunice’s Birthday
There was a time when we all went to Eunice’s birthday party. Eunice was my friend at
school but then she was just about everybody’s friend at school. Her parents were very
friendly and they liked to have kids in the house, so this was another of those occasions. This
time it was Eunice’s birthday.
As I recall, it was mostly afternoon but then it got into the evening so they didn’t want
us to walk home. Mr. Battersby, who was Eunice’s dad, was one of the few people we knew
who had a vehicle; he had an old ute and he decided to take us all home. He piled all us
young girls into the back of his ute and off he went. I remember he headed for our place first,
planning to deliver everyone else on his way home.
Well, we lived on what was called the Government Road Hill and as I mentioned
earlier, it was very, very steep. How the engineers got away with putting that road in like that
at all I would never know. I guess it was about one hundred yards of a section that was so
incredibly steep; then after that it levelled out a little bit.
Our house was about half way up this particularly steep piece and as far as we all knew
the only person who could stop half way up that hill was the doctor; she had a Studebaker and
her car would stop but nobody else’s would. You either had to stop at the bottom and
everybody walked up or you went up to the top, stopped and everybody walked down.
Well, I guess Mr. Battersby didn’t know that or he thought his ute was better than most,
whatever it was, he went half way up and put his brakes on. He may as well have flown a kite
because we went steadily backwards and as he went backwards each of us bounced off the
back and got run over by his vehicle.
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So that was quite a night. The doctor had to come and she put arms in slings and I just
don’t remember all the details except that it was a horrific night. Some of the youngsters slept
at our house and parents came and took children home. It was absolutely amazing that
nobody was hurt more badly than they were. I think the worst injury was a broken collarbone
but there were some broken arms as well. I had one of those and the doctor put mine in a
sling. I suppose she was giving out painkillers too.
I remember the awful shock when that vehicle started to go backwards and we all
started bouncing off the back. I can’t remember how many of us there were - probably about
eight of us - but it was a pretty serious night.
These days, Mr. Battersby would have been sued by all our parents and he would have
been penniless, the poor man, but nobody thought like that in those days. We were just
neighbours together and you just didn’t dream of doing anything like that.
Another lovely memory for me was the afternoon, I think it was just before one
Christmas, when my sister, Robyn, saved me from getting a belting. Our parents didn’t
chastise us all that much, but if they thought we’d gone over the limit in some way in being
cheeky or telling a lie or stealing, we’d get a belting, usually from Dad, and it would be with a
razor strop.
I can’t remember what I’d done but I’d done something that had really raised my
father’s ire and he was cross with me. But my sister, Robyn, who was a lot younger than I,
nearly eight years younger, she didn’t want Daddy to hit me at Christmas. It wasn’t right on
Christmas but it was very close. She said,
“No, Daddy. No. You can’t hit her on Christmas. Daddy, no! You can’t hit her on
Christmas.”
It really touched his heart and he couldn’t do it. So I didn’t get that belting that I’m
sure I deserved because he didn’t belt us in anger, he only belted us because we deserved it for
one reason or another. I was thankful to my little sister, Robyn, for saving me from that
belting.
Another story about my little sister has really not got all that much to do with me but it
is important to me at the moment because it fits right here. When she was seven she was the
Flower Girl at our oldest cousin’s wedding. Our oldest cousin, Joyce, was in her early
twenties at the time and she was marrying this very tall man, Ted; they are still happily
married. Even though they’ve both been through a lot of illness, they are still going.
Anyway, Joyce and Ted were getting married and my sister, Robyn, was to be the
Flower Girl. She wore a blue dress - she just hates blue - she carried a little basket of flowers
and she looked very sweet. Now that photo which has been sort of resurrected lately because
we have been looking through family photos, is on the front of her Seventieth Birthday
invitation which she’s been sending out. It’s a lovely memory to have.
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High School
The next stage in my life was when I started at Box Hill Girls’ Tech., in 1947; today
that is Box Hill TAFE. It was a Junior Technical School then which went from Grades 7-10
and when I started there I wasn’t quite eleven.
You might remember, I mentioned earlier that when I started school in Prep. I was four
years and nine months, but what I didn’t go on to tell you is that I did Prep. and Grade 1 in the
one year. I learned so quickly and so much in that first six months, even though I hadn’t been
to a Kindergarten or anything like that, they put me up into Grade 1 half way through that first
year. At the end of the first year, they said I was ready to go into Grade 2. So I went into
Grade 2 when I wasn’t quite six when we moved to The Basin, so by the time I started Grade
7 or Form 1 as we called it at Box Hill Girls’ Tech., I was still only ten and three quarter years
old.
I continued to be the youngest in my class throughout my schooling which sometimes
had advantages but I think mostly disadvantages. The disadvantages were a consideration
many years later when we were considering our daughter Nola’s schooling, as her end-ofMarch birth date made her eligible for school, but the youngest, and we held her back. When
you are at that time of your life, you’re just not socially ready. No matter how clever you may
or may not be, if you are not socially ready you don’t really fit in with the other girls in your
class. One firm friendship I did make
was with Margaret Baker, later
Margaret Snowdon.
I did particularly well at the
academic subjects, so I would have
been more suited to a High School. I
was a bit of a disaster with subjects like
art and dressmaking. Anyway, they
were pretty good years and I basically
enjoyed them.
1948 class photo, with my Christian
friend Margaret (left), a friendship
which has lasted our whole lives.
My Dream
Let me tell you about the dream which led to my conversion to Christ.
It was a very impressive dream which I will never forget even though I was only
thirteen at the time. It was near the end of the year of 1949 and at school we had had a
faithful Religious Instruction teacher come every week to teach us about the Bible and the
things in the Bible. This particular teacher had led us in different lessons which I had found
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fascinating. She had led us through the significance of the shedding of blood in the Bible;
not a very tasteful sort of topic, but I found it fascinating.
The teacher started when Adam and Eve sinned by eating the forbidden fruit and when
the Bible says “The Lord made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them,”
she pointed out that the coats could only have been made if the animals had been killed and
that’s the first record we have of anything or anyone being killed in the Bible.
She went on to introduce us to the Old Testament Offerings. When the people were
aware of their sin they were to come and confess their sin to God, an animal had to be killed
and its blood had to be shed in place of their sin. So she went on through the Bible like this
until she got to the New Testament and, of course, the most important Offering of all, the
Offering of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, to pay for our sins permanently. Well, I found all
that quite fascinating and one night around about this time, I had very vivid and gripping
dream.
I was standing there in my dream and could see this enormous book - it was very tall
and I said in my dream,
“What is this book?”
And a voice said,
“Open it.”
So I went over and with great effort opened the first page. The first page was completely
black; no writing on it whatsoever, just totally, totally black and I said,
“What is this?”
And the same voice, which didn’t seem to have a body, just the voice, said,
“This is your heart - black with sin. Turn the page.”
So once again I went over and with considerable effort turned the page of this large
book. This time the page was completely red. Still no writing, nothing to say what it meant,
just a completely red page. So I said,
“What does this mean?”
And the same voice said,
“This is my blood, shed to take away your sin. Turn the page.”
Wow!
So turn the page I did. This time, a beautiful white page, not the tiniest blemish on it, just all
white, no writing, nothing, just a brilliant white, a sort of clean white. Once again I said,
“And what does this mean?”
And the same voice said,
“This is your heart as it can be if you let me wash away your sin with my blood.”
And then I woke up.
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Well, I have never forgotten that dream, as you can imagine, and I have never had
anything like it before or since. It was very, very impressive.
Well, that led me to realise that this series of lessons that this good lady had been giving
us were just not stories from the Bible but something that God really wanted me to know and
appropriate in my heart and in my life. So it wasn’t long after that time that I knelt down
beside my bed and asked Jesus Christ to come in and live in my heart and in my life and take
away my sin with His precious blood.
I still don’t understand how all this happens. It doesn’t make any sense to me and
sounds rather gory in some ways, yet I believe that’s what the Bible teaches and that’s what
happened to me on that day.
Because of that, even though I am now near to death, in September 2013, and I know
I haven’t got long to live, I’m not afraid in the sense that I know that because Jesus Christ has
paid the price on the Cross for my sin, I can go and be with Him and live with Him forever in
Heaven - not because I’m better than anyone else - not because I’ve led a good life though
I do say I have tried to do that because I’m a child of God, but because of what Jesus Christ
has done for me.
So that was a major watershed and important time in my teenage years, in fact in my
whole life. My whole life had turned a pivot right there and I went on from there, as it were.
Starting Work
I started work at the C.S.I.R.O. (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research
Organisation) and did some Chemistry at Night School. Actually, after a couple of years I
didn’t follow that route and soon found my niche in
office work operating a comptometer which was the
forerunner of the calculator and long since superseded. It
was quite different and the rest of my working life from
then on was in office work, though those years of office
work didn’t turn out to be all that many.
It was very special to be earning my own money. I
might say my first pay was about one pound four
shillings and sixpence but at least it was pay and things
didn’t cost so enormously much in those days.
Although I did well at school, I had to leave at
fourteen, legal in those days, because my parents just did
not have the funds to help me go any further. It is
interesting why my parents were in this fix.
My parents at this stage were building their own
Dad Cyril and Mum Thelma
home and they had refused to go into debt because they
Builders and Architects
believed it was morally wrong to do that so they were just
step-by-step building their home. If they had enough money this week to buy a few posts,
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that’s what they would buy: if they had enough money the next week to buy some flooring,
that’s what they’d buy and so on.
They worked on it for several years, just the two of them, along with some help from an
aunt. (I’ve referred to Dad’s sister, Marjorie Irwin, earlier. Dad had helped her build her
home before starting his own). They got it built enough to move into and they finished it off
while we all lived in it. Dad was a qualified builder and called Mum his builder’s labourer.
So, when I finished Form 4 at the Box Hill Girls’ Technical School my mother said,
“Look, I’m sorry, all our money is going into this house as you know and you have had
a growth spurt because you’re fourteen. Now, you are going to have to go out and earn
your own money so that you can buy your own clothes.”
Which was all fair enough in the scheme of things as it was in those days.
I had to wear some of Mum’s clothes to start off with. It was so delightful to be able to
get my own money and start buying my own clothes, not that I was greatly into clothes, but I
was almost bereft of anything decent to wear, so it was nice.
The other reason why I was thrilled to be able to earn my own money was that I was
able each payday to give Mum some small gift. I remember I used to bring her a bunch of
violets, or a block of chocolate or just some little thing just to show her that she was loved and
appreciated and I so much enjoyed doing that because I had not been able to do that before.
I had also needed glasses for some time, but could not get them until I myself could pay
for them. So that was an exciting milestone too.
A rather exciting event for the whole family was when my mother gave birth at thirtynine to her fourth child and second son, Arthur; a brother for my brother, Don, at last. Don
was by that time almost twenty-one. This was in June, 1953, three months after my
seventeenth birthday. Little did we know that just six months later, the saddest event of our
lives was to occur when my father died of a massive heart attack just before Christmas.
Dad
Other than the dream that I had which resulted in my coming to believe in Jesus in a
special way, the most significant event of my teenage years was when my father died. This
was devastating for us all, especially my mother. She and Dad had been so close, so much in
love. I can still remember all that as though it were yesterday as Rob and I have just been
looking through some old photographs and we’ve been going through it all again.
I was seventeen; Dad was forty-three. He had talked to a doctor one day; actually the
doctor was driving past as she had been out on a call and he flagged her car down which you
just don’t do, but he did it. He told her about some of his symptoms and how ill he was feeling
and the pain and so on and she said to him very gently,
“I think it might be your heart. You had better come and see me in my office next
week.”
Which he did and she put him on complete bed rest which, of course, isn’t the done thing
these days but that’s what they did then.
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It didn’t really matter because there was so much damage done already that nothing
could help him and it was not very much later that he had a very, very major heart attack in
the middle of a Friday night. Mum woke me and asked me to go and ring up the doctor,
which meant a walk to the nearest shopping centre where there was a public telephone and I
called the doctor. She came as soon as she could and he died the next day in the Royal
Melbourne Hospital. That was on 19th December, 1953.
That was a great shock to the whole family; a very serious thing to happen. I think the
only little bit of ray of sunlight in it all was the fact that, well, two things really. Firstly,
Arthur had been born six months previously so there was this little fellow around in the home
to brighten our days even though Dad had gone. Actually, I wonder how Mum might have
coped emotionally with losing Dad if it hadn’t been for Arthur. She had to keep going for
him.
The other thing was a more practical thing but still it was very helpful. When Arthur
was born, the local A.M.P. Insurance man, like they all did in those days, came around.
“I’ve heard you’ve had another child - let’s sign him up for the insurance.”
Mum and Dad were only too pleased to do that as they had for all of us but he said,
“I want to suggest you do something different this time.”
He said,
“I suggest you take out this insurance on the life of the father instead of the life of the
child.”
Mum and Dad asked what did that mean and he said,
“If anything happens to you,”
and he was speaking to Dad,
“then they collect the insurance.”
So they did and that money helped Mum through that period when she was waiting to
get a Widow’s Pension and that type of thing. It just helped her over that hump so that she
didn’t have to borrow or go out looking for work when she was feeling so stressed. Mum had
hardly ever worked outside the home as it just wasn’t the acceptable thing to do in those days.
If you had a home and a family, that’s where you belonged.
That was a really traumatic time for all of us. I was, of course, working at this time and
so I guess my little bit that I brought in each week was at least a bit of help with the household
expenses.
A much brighter and more pleasant moment that occurred also during my teenage
years, was when I bought a motor scooter. It was a DKW, made by the German car maker
Audi. Well, I thought I was it and a bit. It was brand new. This motor scooter became my
firm companion and I drove it to work, I drove it all over the place and I was usually kept safe
on it, but I did a couple of silly things. I had a blow out once in the front tyre which threw
myself and my passenger, Lorraine Hill, off - nothing too serious.
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Growing in Faith
One of the things I particularly enjoyed at school was Religious Instruction when
missionaries used to come and tell us stories about their life and work overseas, usually
working amongst the children; I just lapped up those stories. I wasn’t sure why, but I really
enjoyed them and the little songs they would teach us about children overseas listening to the
Gospel, coming to love Jesus and so on; this was even long before my dream.
Little did I know that it was God’s way of preparing me for the time when He wanted
me to become a missionary myself, but that’s another story.
I also always enjoyed Sunday school. I used to listen to the stories and enjoy them.
Sometimes we’d have missionary speakers come to Sunday school. One man I particularly
enjoyed listening to was from the Mission to Lepers, now called the Leprosy Mission.
He would tell us these stories about people with leprosy, how they were treated and
could then go back and live with their people again. If their people wouldn’t have them back,
or if they were so badly maimed that they could no longer work or live independently, they
had to stay in another part of the Leprosarium and make whatever contribution they could to
the life of the Leprosy Mission.
What I loved to hear about most was how when they heard the story of Jesus they came
to love Him too and even though they couldn’t do all the things that normal people do, they
could love Jesus; they could sing about Him and enjoy that. I was so glad for them that they
could hear about Jesus.
Another of the things I particularly enjoyed at Sunday school was that, each week, we
would learn a new memory verse, a verse out of the Bible and all say it off together and we’d
do them according to the letters of the alphabet. I should be able to just close my eyes and
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remember them all now but I can’t remember any of them, not even one right at the moment,
but it was a great way to learn Bible verses.
After I had my experience with the dream and asked Jesus into my heart, I talked to the
Minister one day and asked him if I could be baptised. Now this was a Presbyterian Sunday
school and it is normal for Presbyterian children to be baptised as babies by the parents
making the promise on their behalf that they would teach them about Christianity and that
they would make that choice for themselves when they grew up. My parents hadn’t done that
when I was a baby so I asked him if I could be baptised in the church by saying myself that
I was a Christian and believed in Jesus rather than my parents saying it on my behalf.
So he finally agreed to that. One Sunday morning, it was towards the end of winter
as I recall, perhaps about this time of the year, I remember I was wearing a red velvet dress
(so much for the typical white) that happened to be my best dress at that time. I answered his
questions about my belief in Jesus, then he baptised me, not by pushing me under water as the
Baptist or the Church of Christ people would have done, but by sprinkling water on my head
three different times in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. That was a
very significant time for me too.
You may wonder about this, as I did say that I was baptised as a little girl when I was
supposedly dying in hospital. But, neither I nor my parents were involved in that, and I now
wanted to be baptised by my choice as a Christian.
Soon after that I asked if I could be a Sunday school teacher for the little ones. I can’t
remember who had been or who was teaching them at the time. At first I was told I was too
young, I was only fourteen, and I was very small for my age. People would look at me and
sort of think of a number and halve it because I was so small. Anyway, after a while it was
allowed and I was given the responsibility of teaching the little ones in Sunday school.
Then after a year or two came the opportunity to run what was called the P.G.A.
(Presbyterian Girls’ Association) in my little church at The Basin. This was a Club for girls
and we did all sorts of things. I had a great group, including my sister, and we had really good
times together. I was very grateful to God for the opportunity I had with that.
Some of the girls in the P.G.A. were very good at sport - I was not, but some of them
were - so we used to toddle off to the Annual Sports Day at the Presbyterian Ladies’ College
where my girls would be entered in the races and they did very well. One girl was particularly
good at sack races and she would enter in both divisions, both the younger and the older,
and she’d win both, so she did very well. Her name was Denise.
It was also at this time that, whenever I could get time off work to coincide with school
holidays, it was my pleasure to take groups of girls from my little P.G.A. Club away for
several days to Christian Camps.
Another pursuit some of the girls and I enjoyed was meeting together on Sunday
afternoons in a tent in our back yard, as I recall, to read the Bible and pray together.
I called it our “S.U.” Club because Scripture Union was the name of the outfit that printed
the simple Bible study notes I gave to the girls to read each day.
Those are happy memories of my teenage years, too.
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Another Organisation I joined during that time was the P.F.A. (Presbyterian Fellowship
Association) which was for young people to have fellowship together, sometimes around the
Bible, sometimes playing board games, sometimes rigorous discussion on some current topic,
various things we did together on a Sunday evening and we enjoyed that very much. I went to
that for many years and made some lifelong friends through that time.
A Calling to Missionary Work
As my teenage years drew to
a close, my thoughts were
drawn more and more
towards a missionary career
and Bible College training to
help me prepare for such
work. Throughout my teen
years, I had always enjoyed
attending Belgrave Heights
Convention Meetings around
Easter and Christmas where
there was a lot of solid Bible
teaching and a lot of
challenging messages about
preparing for Missionary
Pat, Marg, Robyn, Mum, Granddad and Mr. Thorne
Service. I had made a lot of
Christian friends from all around Melbourne at these get togethers too.
I don’t remember now how Mr. Thorne, who filled his Daimler with young people to
take them to the Belgrave Heights Christian Convention Meetings at Christmas time, got my
mother, her father, and my sister to attend once, around the end of 1951.
I also enjoyed going to Beach Missions as we called them, where a team of young
people would go and live at the beach, in tents usually, and hold meetings for the little kids on
the beach. There was no pressure for the children to come but many of them enjoyed coming,
to sing the little Bible songs and choruses and if they were really keen, being part of a
little meeting together where they were taught about the Bible and about Jesus. These were
all growing and developing experiences for me.
When I was twenty in 1956, an event occurred in Ecuador, South America, which really
rocked the Christian World. Five missionaries of various organisations were trying to reach
the savage Auca Indians in Ecuador, to tell them about Jesus and His love. These men had
made contact with the Auca people and they were really hopeful of a good contact the next
time. So they all went out together full of enthusiasm; their wives stayed home and prayed,
but the husbands never came home. They were all shot to pieces with arrows by the Auca
people.
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That was a very disturbing thing for the Christian World but the good part about it was
that many young people, including myself, dedicated themselves to Missionary service so as
to in some way try and replace these men who had given their lives to try to reach the Auca
Indians.
At first, my mother did not want me to go to a Bible College as she didn’t want me to
leave home. She wanted me to stay right there with her, which wasn’t particularly selfish
because my older brother, Don, had gone off working on the Snowy River Project and my
young sister, Robyn, was quite a bit younger. Mum sort of leaned on me as the other adult in
the family so she didn’t really want me going off anywhere.
It wasn’t until I was nearly twenty-two at the beginning of 1958 that I enrolled in the
Melbourne Bible Institute for their Two Year Diploma Course. As it turned out they
introduced a Three Year Course later on, so I ended up doing that.
A young man from Tasmania named Robert Head enrolled at the same time as I did
and ended up doing the same Three Year Course, but I was totally unaware of this or of him at
the time.
Those were precious years at the Melbourne Bible Institute studying the Bible, God’s
Word, under godly men who had spent their lives studying the Bible to prepare themselves to
teach others like us.
I made many special friends among the other students. Not only did we study together,
we also cleaned house, prepared vegetables, set tables and washed dishes together. This
helped to keep the fees down.
However, one of the policies of the Institute was no fraternisation between male and
female students, so I didn’t get to meet that fine young man from Tasmania until after we
graduated at the end of 1960. By then, we were both interested in becoming linguists and
Bible translators so we were working on a three month Post Graduate Course in Linguistics
and Bible translation theory run by an outfit called The Summer Institute of Linguistics,
December, 1960 to February, 1961.
Social interaction was very different at this Course. Both teachers and students were all
known by their first names (it was “Mr.” and “Miss” at Bible College). Rob and I met there,
but no lights flashed - for him anyway.
Soon after the course, we ended up living in the same house for a while. This was a
home for missionaries on furlough or on leave and if all the bedrooms were not taken by
missionaries, the House Mother offered the rooms to Christian young people from interstate
who were in Melbourne working or studying for a while. That’s how Rob got a room there,
while I was employed as the Housekeeper. That job also came with a room so both Rob and I
were living in the same house for a while. This was a stately old house in Kew.
Both of us were still fully committed to a career of Missionary Service - it just hadn’t
all come together yet. We had both completed our Bible College course, totally penniless, so
we needed time to earn a bit of cash and regroup.
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Rob felt led towards New Guinea, probably as a Bible translator. I was also very keen
to be a linguist and Bible translator but thought I was to go to South America. I am sure now,
looking back, that this was because of the five missionaries who had given their lives in
Ecuador trying to reach the Auca Indians. Rob had first heard about Wycliffe Bible
Translators at eighteen in his home church. It was quite new in Australia then, but I didn’t
hear of it until in Bible College.
Because Rob did not pass every subject with his Licentiate of Theology (L.Th.) course
that we did at the Melbourne Bible Institute in our second and third year, he chose to restudy
and resit the exams for the two subjects he had missed out on. He was doing this around his
office job at the Naval Dockyards at Williamstown, mostly in the evenings. I tutored him in
the evenings to help him get through those subjects.
Unfortunately, he went ahead and failed them both again anyway, which was a great
disappointment to him because he really worked very hard. As an aside, I let him ride my
scooter from Kew to work over those months.
As a thank you for my help, before he knew he’d failed, he took me out for the day after
the exams. We drove down to Portsea Back Beach and then went out to dinner. Somehow,
as we strolled along the beach together, we found we were holding hands. Quite a revelation,
particularly for Rob. I had already felt an attraction to him, but of course, was intending to
serve God elsewhere. We split at first, to follow our separate goals.
Early in 1962, Rob made application to work with Wycliffe Bible Translators (W.B.T.)
while at the same time I was applying to serve with the South American Missionary Society
(S.A.M.S.), both heading towards the same sort of work if we could, but in different countries,
very different directions and we couldn’t quite understand what was going on.
The S.A.M.S. Council or Board or whatever they called themselves, asked me to come
up to Sydney where they were based to meet with some of the members of the Council there,
so I caught the train up and talked with a man and a woman, separately, who were both on the
Council. The lady amazed me when she told me that in order to join S.A.M.S. I would have
to undertake four more years of training at their College by which time I would be thirty and,
she said,
“We don’t accept candidates that old.”
This revelation both shocked and excited me all at once. Before I got on the train to
head home to Melbourne, I rang Rob and told him what had happened. I went on to say,
“They don’t want me, do you?”
I told him what train I was coming back to Melbourne on.
Always a man of few words, he didn’t actually respond, but he was at the Spencer
Street Station (now called Southern Cross) waiting to meet me when I got off the train when it
came in that evening. I took that to be his response. He always said that I did all the
proposing and that he just said “Yes” so I suppose there is some truth in that.
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By this time it was February, 1962. Rob had been accepted to serve with the W.B.T.
and because S.A.M.S. had turned me down, I took that closed door to be a door opening to
serve with the W.B.T. in Papua New Guinea. So the next time the Wycliffe Council met was
31st March and despite all the ups and downs I had been through, applying to another group
and so on, they went ahead and accepted me for work in Papua New Guinea.
After my personal interview and confirmation of my acceptance, I asked them if Rob
and I could announce our engagement that day. Their response was positive so I headed off
on my trusty little motor scooter to where Rob was serving at Belgrave Heights as camp cook
for a young peoples’ camp. We had already bought the ring so now we could clinch the deal.
It had seemed to us as though our lives had been chugging along in slow motion then
suddenly the pace quickened. As 1962 moved right ahead, on 31st March I was accepted for
work with Wycliffe and we became engaged: in April, I had a bad bout of Glandular Fever:
in May, I went across to Tasmania to meet Rob’s family; Mum and Dad and the five younger
children, and then on 16th June, our Wedding Day followed by two weeks in Tasmania for our
honeymoon.
We were looking forward to staying in a cabin at the Great Lakes in Tasmania that
someone had offered to us, but they said,
“The snow is already so bad so early in the season, we wouldn’t like you to get snowed
in there and not be able to catch your plane to Papua New Guinea.”
Instead they offered us a place down on the coast beyond Hobart called Blue Lagoon.
Our Wedding Day, 16th June, 1962
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Papua New Guinea
Here we come!
So then, on 31st July, 1962 things were still moving ahead. We flew out to Port
Moresby, the Capital of Papua New Guinea1 and then on to Lae, arriving there on 1st August.
There were about a dozen of us new members arriving together including three other newly
married couples like ourselves.
Our first three months was a
time of training known as Jungle
Camp, preparing us for the physical
and cultural side of living in Papua
New Guinea. As well as us new
chums, there were five leaders to
show us the ropes like building our
own mosquito proof house and
building our own mud stove.
We trekked each day carrying our
tools to a spot where we were cutting
the grass on an overgrown airstrip.
June cooking on a mud stove
Rob lost a lot of weight during those weeks (from twelve stone to nine stone), so much
so that his wedding ring slipped off his finger and got lost in the river one day when he was
bathing. His energy levels seemed to be slipping away along with his weight so we all knew
there was something seriously wrong but we did not know just what. At one stage, he
completely ran out of energy halfway through the second day of a six-day endurance hike.
That evening, someone else had to hang his hammock for him, and the rest left us there and
we re-connected two days later.
It was quite some time before he got to see a doctor in the coastal town of Lae after a
second major collapse. Dr. Todd was able to diagnose Addison’s Disease which is when your
body fails to naturally produce cortisone, so Rob has now been taking replacement cortisone
for fifty years and doing very well on it, with very few crises along the way at times of high
stress. We thank God that though his illness was so serious, the treatment was so relatively
simple.
The following two stories are about Rob’s illness and what happened to him.
One of them is probably just before we went to Lae, in 1963, when he was diagnosed with
Addison’s Disease and, the second, was sometime after, when he thought he was feeling
better and doing ok.
1
In 1962 Papua New Guinea was called The Territory of Papua and New Guinea and administered
by Australia
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You will remember our whole purpose in Papua New Guinea was to find a place to live
with a tribe of people, to learn their language, to translate the Bible for them and also to teach
them to read their language, so the first place we visited was the tribal area of Nomane.
We got quite a few things together, things that we thought we would need, and we
contacted the Lutheran Missionary there and he said we could come and we flew out to the
airstrip. He had a little house on the airstrip where we could stay, so that was useful, but for
the first couple of days, we walked around the area a little bit, and each day, Rob got weaker
like he’d been when in Jungle Camp before. Well, the Lutheran Missionary said,
“I’m sorry, I don’t want the responsibility of having you here when you’re not well.
I’ll call my mission plane to come in and take you home to Ukarumpa.”
So that was very disappointing, but we couldn’t really argue with him as it was his area
and he said,
“Besides which, now that I fully understand what you wanted to do, I wouldn’t let you
stay here anyway. This is my territory.”
I’m afraid that was the attitude of a lot of missionaries in the early days. “This is my
territory and you can’t encroach upon it even if your type of work is different.” So that was
all very disappointing from every point of view.
Then, Rob had several months where he had more treatment of cortisone and then at
some later time, I can’t say whether it was still 1963 or perhaps, even 1964, we had an
opportunity to go out to another area called the Gimi area and this time, there wasn’t any
flying, it was all Land Rover and walking. Fortunately, a fellow we knew really well, offered
to go with us because we might have been still there, otherwise. Well, hardly, but you know
what I mean.
We drove for several hours out to the end of the road and we knew that we had to walk
up over a hill and down the other side to where the language group, the Gimi, started. There
was a missionary couple there and they were looking for someone else to come in and take
over the work they’d been doing.
However, when we got out of the car and started this walk up over the hill and down
the other side into where this couple lived, Rob’s legs just wouldn’t work for him.
He just completely collapsed; he just could not do it. So, when the doctor had said,
“Don’t try and do too much at first. Wait until you get your strength back fully.”
he knew what he was talking about, because when we were just around at home and not doing
any particularly stressful work, Rob felt fine, but then when he tried to do these long walks,
or anything, he found he was not up to much at all.
Our friend, Graham, really helped us out. He put Rob on his back and carried him in to
the area. Then the folk welcomed us and they were very good to Rob; they let him take over
their bed. He certainly wasn’t up to anything else because what he didn’t know then that we
do know now, if you are under more stress than usual, you can take more tablets than the
usual. But he didn’t know that then, so he just kept taking exactly the same amount.
It was obvious that that wasn’t God’s place for us either, so it was disappointing.
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After we’d been there for a few days, Rob got enough strength back that he was able to
walk out to where the car was with Graham helping him. So we thanked these kind people for
their help and went on our way back to Ukarumpa. Those people, Cliff and Marty, are still in
Papua New Guinea. They were an absolute inspiration to us.
With the Jungle Camp training behind us and Rob’s illness diagnosed and under
treatment, we felt we were ready again to start looking for a group of people to live with, learn
their language and start translating the Bible for them. However, the doctor advised Rob not
to go too far away so we compromised by going to live with the Usurufa people a couple of
hours drive from our Mission headquarters at Ukarumpa.
Work had already been started amongst this group but right now they were in need of
someone to come and learn some of their language and teach them to read it. We spent two
satisfying years doing just that by which time we were ready to take off on our first leave or
furlough which was every sixth year (i.e. five in the field and one at home).
First Furlough
So in mid-1967 we flew back to Australia. Seeing family in Melbourne and
Ulverstone, Tasmania, was a high priority. We were also responsible to visit every individual
and every church which prayed for us and our work and gave money towards it.
We also finalised the adoption of two children we had been negotiating with Australian
authorities about while in Papua New Guinea. Peter and Nola were almost two years apart.
The time in between their adoptions we mostly spent in New Zealand, setting up a Wycliffe
Bible Translators office there as well as serving on the staff of the first Summer Institute of
Linguistics (S.I.L.) course there. Before we did that, Rob and I undertook the Second Year
S.I.L. course ourselves in Australia (in Brisbane then).
The Social Services Department people gave us no idea when we should expect our
children to be born. Rob and I were in a country town taking meetings, speaking about our
work. One morning I had a definite and unshakeable conviction that our son had been born
that day. And that turned out to be true. An exciting assurance that this baby was truly God’s
choice for us.
After we’d finished speaking at the various meetings in the town in north- east
Tasmania, we had meetings in another town in northwest Tasmania and off we went to take
these meetings. Now, the intriguing part about this was, when we were on our way to these
meetings, we knew that this was the town where Baby Peter was and we were to pick him up
from the hospital there after we’d finished speaking. So, in the boot of our car was a babycarrying basket. You didn’t carry tiny babies in capsules those days, or even harnesses, you
just bundled them into a baby basket. When I think about it now, I guess it wasn’t a terribly
safe thing to do, but it was what everybody did.
Nola’s case was different. We were delayed picking her up because she was not able to
tolerate ordinary baby formulas. It took several weeks to find a formula she could tolerate.
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Back we went to Papua New Guinea in mid-1969 as our now complete little family,
ready to face the challenges of moving in with a Highland people group, learning their
language, teaching them to read it, then translating the Word of God, the Bible, for them to
be able to read for themselves. We knew this task would be neither easy nor short.
Nola
Later in 1969, while we were at Ukarumpa, Rob and I wanted to go out to the area
called Tambul, which is where we ended up going to live. We wanted to make a fairly quick
trip out and back, to check it out, so we didn’t really want to take Nola and Peter and we
asked some friends if they would look after them. Well, because it wasn’t for very long, two
friends (that is, couples) said they would each look after them for a few days and that sounded
very helpful. We were grateful and off we went to Tambul.
We flew to Mt. Hagen and managed to hire a car there and drive out to Tambul. That
had all worked out and that’s where we ended up choosing a place to go, stay and live and
study the language. So that was all good.
However, while we were away, Nola, who was four months old, started vomiting, quite
serious vomiting I gather, and the people who were looking after her didn’t quite know what
to do. We did have a doctor at that stage. When we first came to Papua New Guinea we
didn’t have our own doctor, but by this time we did have a Canadian man who became,
actually, a very close friend of ours. Stan was there and he gave Nola what care he could, but
it just all seemed so strange why she was doing all this vomiting.
When we got back and talked to him about it, saw how bad it was, he saw how bad it
was for himself and saw the blood-filled nappies she was passing, he said,
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“This is something pretty serious; there’s some sort of blockage in there. We need to
get her down to the town of Lae where there’s a hospital.”
To have Nola nearer to me, I put her in her pram to sleep overnight enabling me to have
her right alongside the bed, so that any change in her breathing or any vomiting or anything,
I could monitor very quickly. By now, she wasn’t vomiting but she seemed to be in a lot of
pain, but she wasn’t crying. The doctor said,
“This is strange. She’s moving her head back and forth, back and forth, back and forth
and that in a baby is indicative of quite severe pain, but normally they’d be crying as
well.”
So he couldn’t quite work out what was going on.
Anyway, he asked a visiting doctor, who happened to be there just for the weekend, to
help him to try and put an intravenous line into Nola’s head. As for all little babies, Nola’s
feet were too small to take this line, so they were trying to put it into her head, but they
couldn’t. He said,
“Ok, that leaves us the only other option now - to ask for an emergency flight to Lae.”
That night, as I lay there, I didn’t sleep at all, but I lay there praying for Nola, and I said
to God,
“I know you love this little girl and you gave her to us. I can’t understand why you
seem to be now taking her away from us, but we’re trusting You.”
As soon as I said those words, “we’re trusting You,” I wasn’t praying out loud of
course, a wonderful peace came in my heart. I wasn’t sure of anything, I wasn’t sure she was
going to get better but a wonderful peace came in my heart, and I just knew that it would be
all right.
They decided there was a plane available to take Rob, Nola and I down to Lae late
afternoon and off we went. A couple had been looking after Peter while we had been away in
Tambul and they continued to look after him. Both of those dear friends who looked after
Peter are in heaven now, but they were very kind to us that weekend. They had adopted
children too.
We got to Lae and took Nola around to the hospital. The surgeon who was on duty,
looked at her and said,
“Well, she looks too healthy to me to have any serious problem, but we’ll do an
investigation and let you know.”
He said,
“All the specialists have gone home, the x-ray technician, the anaesthetist and so on,
and so we’ll just have to wait until they can come back if something does need doing.”
Well, we went round to the S.I.L. Guest House, S.I.L. were the outfit we worked for up
there, you might remember, the Summer Institute of Linguistics. It was safe to walk around in
Lae in those days. We walked home and about 10 o’clock we had a call from this doctor
apologising for being so offhand. He said,
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“Your daughter is very, very ill and we’re going to have to do an emergency operation
right away. She’s got a bowel blockage and we’re just not sure how she’ll go.”
At least it was good to know what the problem was, but a bit of a shock too.
He said,
“Come into the hospital about 11.30.”
So we did, walking once again. We later found out where they kept the keys for the
vehicles, but anyway, God kept us safe when we walked around there.
As we walked in the front door of the hospital, we could see two nurses carrying a tiny
bundle, walking in a sort of back door. That little bundle was an almost frozen Nola. The air
conditioning in the operating theatre at the hospital was extremely cold, almost like a freezer
and they couldn’t seem to fix it or adjust it, and the longer the operation, the closer the patient
got to freezing, which isn’t terribly good, but that’s how it was.
Well, over those next few days, it was very touch and go.
I walked in one day and the doctor that had diagnosed Rob’s Addison’s Disease, was
there working on Nola.
He said,
“Is it you people causing a stir again?”
He was referring to the fact that both Rob and Nola’s conditions were fairly rare and quite
serious, and he had been involved in both, and had also been on hand just before we walked in
that day when Nola had had some sort of post-operative complication.
Anyway, I knew the light-hearted way he said that, that although it had been another
crisis, Nola must have been coming through it. So, as the days went by, we saw more and
more of getting our little girl back.
The whole thing was a very frightening experience. We were just so thankful to God
for sparing her life, and for the wonderful young woman and excellent mother she has turned
out to be. We just thank God for her.
Tambul
In 1969, after we had been in Australia on furlough and we had come back to
Ukarumpa, we went to see the Director this time, the Director for Tribal Affairs as we called
him, and asked where could we go to try and live with some people, learn their language and
translate the Bible etc. So he said,
“Well, there’s this place up in the Sepik.”
I said,
“Oh, I’m a bit scared of the Sepik. It’s so hot!”
He said,
“Just go and look.”
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So this was called Nuku and we flew out and then managed to get the local Patrol
Officer (Government Officer) to drive us around the area a bit to get a feel of the sort of
people they were and how they dressed and so on, and I was totally put off. It was too hot for
me and a lot of the people wore absolutely nothing, and I thought I’d never get used to that.
Even though you are supposed to adjust to anything that the local people adjust to, it didn’t
seem to me to be the way to go, so I didn’t see how we could work on that one.
We came back to the Director, and he said,
“Well look, write up a report of what you’ve just found out now and then I want you to
read this letter and come back and see me if you’re interested. It’s from a missionary
who is having to leave where he is and go somewhere else.”
So, we took this letter and it was from a missionary who had lived at Tambul. He was
the only one with his mission who was doing linguistic and Bible translation work and he
wanted somebody from S.I.L. or somebody who could do linguistic work and who would
translate the Bible to go there. He was hoping and praying for someone like that to come.
After we talked and prayed about that for quite a while, we decided, yes, this will be the place.
Using the language learning strategies taught to us in the Linguistic Courses we had
done in Australia, within three months we felt confident enough to use the local language
almost exclusively in our conversation and had made steady inroads in understanding some of
the simpler grammar rules of the language. So we discovered if a verb ended in “mu” it was
saying “he”, “she” or “it” did something, such as “simu” meant “he gave” or “she gave”. If it
ended in “ru” it meant “I” so “nikiru” was “I talk” whereas if that little “ru” came near the
beginning of the verb, it indicated far past tense, so “purumu” with a “ru” as a second syllable
instead of the last one, meant “He went (a long time ago).”
Some of our daily discoveries were simple ones like that, others were more far-reaching
like the time we’d planted a small plot of sweet potato, the local staple, and it came to nothing
much. One young lad commented to us,
“If you had weeded your sweet potato, you would now have sweet potato in your
garden.”
We gradually elicited all the language words he said in this sentence and what each one
meant, and then applied it to similar constructions in the Bible, in a negative sense: “If there
is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised.” (1 Corinthians 15:20,
14-19). If Christ had not risen (from dying), we would not rise after dying either. “But He
truly did……., and so we truly also will…….”
It was an almost perfect match; it is called a “contrary to fact conditional sentence” in
linguistic lingo and it meant there are two things either side of the “if” and neither of them is
true. So, it wasn’t true that we weeded our garden, and it wasn’t true that there was sweet
potato in our garden. By the same token, it is not true that people are not raised from the dead
and certainly not true that Christ had not been raised.
Not an easy way to learn another language but in the absence of trained bilingual
teachers or helpful textbooks, we didn’t have a lot of choice but we did make progress.
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They were a profitable few years. Rob recorded a lot of stories in the local language,
then got help to transcribe them. I sat with the mothers and babies, with Baby Nola, learning
language that way. Two-year old Peter was soon in his element, going off with the local boys
learning the language with ease as he went. In fact, at one stage, he was speaking the local
language better than he was speaking English. So one day he said in English,
“I’m going outside to hear the sun.”
because the language word for “feel” had as its
primary free meaning, “hear”.
Gradually we put together an alphabet for
the language, mastered more and more of the
ground rules of the grammar, drafted some
simple primers which we would use to teach
some of the village leaders to learn to read.
We discovered that The Bible Society of
Papua New Guinea had available Christmas and
Easter booklets with coloured pictures with
space to insert the Bible text in any language,
so Rob made that a goal before we went off on
our next leave in 1974. He also tackled
translating Genesis 1-11 which covers so much
of the beginnings of life.
Peter and Silso early 1970s
Following our 1974 leave, it was back to our village home and more of the same. I focussed
mainly on grammar discovery and description while Rob pushed on with translation whenever
he could get a local man to work with
him.
By this time too, I was
supervising Peter and Nola’s
schooling. I sat between them, with
language work in front of me to do
when they did not need me. Nola
applied herself diligently so she did
well, but Peter was indignant,
“My village friends don’t go
to school and they’re all
right, Mum, so why do I
have to do school work?”
Nola and June early 1970s
Unfortunately, his negative attitude to learning continued throughout his school years.
We are thankful to God that later he finally applied himself to learning Mechanics and became
very proficient at that.
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Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
In December, 1977 when we were all back at Ukarumpa for a while, three things
happened at once. Rob was typesetting our first decent-sized book of Bible portions; we had
several men from the village in at Ukarumpa with us to undertake a course on simple farming
technology to help them at home and thirdly, Rob, Nola and I all went down with Glandular
Fever which, unfortunately, morphed into Chronic Fatigue Syndrome which stayed with us
for varying lengths of time.
I was bed-bound for almost eight years which impacted on our lives and our ministry
in a huge way. Rob was up and down for about two years and Nola finally shook free of it
around the end of 1984.
Because Rob had a background in bookkeeping, and finance people were in very short
supply for a while, he was asked to stay at Ukarumpa, our headquarters, to become the Branch
Treasurer and Bookkeeper Trainer for several years. This occurred when we returned to
Papua New Guinea in early 1981 after another time in Australia and it meant Peter and Nola
could attend the local Mission School there - no way that I could teach them then when I was
so ill.
I was also blessed by many friends and colleagues dropping in with meals or to
undertake some household tasks. One friend came in to change our bed sheets every week for
years. Of course, all this time, nothing was happening about our translation work. Friends
would visit and pray with us about that, but one friend was more forthright. She said,
“Why don’t you just give up and go home?”
A perfectly legitimate question, but I believe God Himself gave me the response for her.
“God called us here to come and do this work and I don’t believe that one adverse
circumstance, my Chronic Fatigue, can negate that call. God would have to call me to
go home just as strongly and clearly as He called us to come here in the first place.”
This interchange also gave me the confidence to believe that God did intend to heal my
body and get me back into the Ministry in due course. During this time, every Sunday
evening for a long time, a group of men would come to the house, gather round my bed and
pray for my healing. They waited a long time, but they persisted.
Of course, this story doesn’t deal as such with people of the Kaugel language group
who helped us in various ways over the years, but it’s fair to say here that Ngaru Puli made
life a lot easier for us during this time, helping with house and yard work when Rob had other
pressures but no time to work on the language with him. A highlight for us before this time of
my having Chronic Fatigue Syndrome was when Ngaru appropriated for himself what he had
learned from helping with Bible translation and became a Christian.
1984 was time to go on leave again. It was a shorter field time, because of Peter’s
schooling needs. As we travelled around the various churches that had been supporting our
work, Rob would carry a folding day bed in the car with us so I could lie on it during the
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church services. One of the smaller churches in southern Tasmania volunteered to underwrite
the cost of some alternative medicines that a doctor wanted me to try.
It turned out that the one to benefit most from this was Nola. She had been just
finishing Grade 3 at the end of 1977 when she succumbed to the Glandular Fever along with
Rob and me. Now, here she was just finishing Grade 10 at the end of 1984 when she finally
threw off the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, with the help of the intravenous Vitamin C.
Some of the medications I tried seemed to help a little but nothing really got me up and
going again. Then came my forty-ninth birthday, the beginning of my fiftieth year, in April
1985. My Bible reading for the day was a rather obscure passage - Leviticus 25 which is all
about what the Israelites were to do in their Year of Jubilee or the fiftieth year. It talked about
their reclaiming their inheritance in that year if perchance they had lost it through going into
debt or slavery.
That evening, a life-long friend from high school days, Margaret Snowdon, rang me
from Sydney to say,
“My gift to you this year, June, as you begin your fiftieth year or your Year of Jubilee,
is that God will restore your inheritance, in this case, your health, just as He did with
the Israelites so long ago. Let us see together what the Lord will do.”
So the months went by and I continued to try various medications, alternative and
regular, some of which seemed to help somewhat but nothing brought about a complete cure.
Then in September, I was reading a book which challenged me to believe from Psalm
103 Verse 3, that just as God had forgiven all my sins, He would heal all my diseases.2
So I applied myself to doing just that, thanking God for forgiving all my sins and believing
that He would also heal all my diseases.
At this point in time, Rob had been away in Sydney for about a week and when Peter
drove to the bus stop in Dandenong to pick his father up, I went along. I hadn’t done anything
like that in a very long time. It was really rather quickly that my strength returned. My first
outing was to go to church, then each day I did a little better and a little better, and coped with
a little more and a little more, and had soon taken over the running of the house again.
Actually, I had kept this “journey of faith” to myself. Rob was very cautious, at first,
about accepting what had happened, and was over-protective of me still. Of course, we let our
friends and relatives know this good news of my restored energy and especially, that friend in
Sydney who had been praying so specifically for me. What a great time of rejoicing it was.
You will recall that we were on leave again and at this time we were living in our own
house in Ferntree Gully for the first time. (Our purchase was quite sudden. As we had left
Australia the previous time, a friend helped us find the house and sign up with a bank.)
2
Psalm 103 Verses 2 and 3 “Praise the Lord, oh my soul and forget not all his benefits. He forgives
all my sins and heals all my diseases.”
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Then we began to get ourselves together to return to Papua New Guinea. Our main task
was to find somewhere for Peter to live so he could continue the Mechanics apprenticeship he
had started earlier that year. Rob took on the responsibility for that task and finally found a
friend of a lady in church who was willing to take him on. We were grateful; he was eighteen
at the time.
We put our house into the hands of an agent again to rent out for us while we were
away in Papua New Guinea. We spent Christmas 1985 with family and then headed back to
Papua New Guinea early in 1986.
Before we returned to Papua New Guinea early in 1986, we assured Peter that we
would be back to see him at the end of 1987 when Nola graduated from high school. Nola
had chosen to study Nursing in Launceston, Tasmania. We really wanted to find board for her
in a Christian home and that’s just what the Lord provided for her. From then on the Lord
supplied the funds for us to fly to Australia every two or three years, rather than every six
years as before, so that we could see Peter and Nola and to see for ourselves how they were
going.
Five things were significantly different about our going back this time. We were
without Peter for the first time since he was born in 1967; we’d moved into the computer era
having each bought a very small laptop which ran off AA batteries, each having a total
capacity of thirty-two thousand bytes, and files were saved onto cassette tapes; I was well for
the first time since 1977; we were returning to our Ministry amongst the Kaugel people after
having been away for such a long time because of my C.F.S. and soon after we got back, the
way opened up for us to buy a brand new Mitsubishi Pajero for the long drives to the village.
A very moving thing happened soon after we got back. All those years when I had
been so ill with C.F.S. I had been unable to attend any of the Sunday services in what we
called our Meeting House at our headquarters, but the word had travelled ahead of us that I
was well again. Our first Sunday morning when we were welcomed back, there was a
spontaneous standing ovation which brought tears to my eyes. I took that standing ovation to
be not aimed at me, but as a spontaneous outburst of praise to God for my healing. It was so
good to be normal and feel normal again.
As the time came around for my fiftieth birthday, my friends decided it was worth a
party because they said I’d lost most of my forties. So we’d have a “Life Begins at Fifty”
party, and what a night it was! We pulled out all the stops; it was so very special. Our friends
were asked to bring just a verse from the Bible about life, and there was such a variety, it was
wonderful to listen to them all. God’s book has a lot to say about life. It really was a great
evening; we had a wonderful time together.
Things had changed in the way the translation work was done now. Instead of the
expatriate bossing the work and calling all the shots, they were choosing local people to work
with them in the various phases of the work.
We brought together two groups of men; one to be responsible for checking the
translated portions seeing they were as accurate as possible; the other group was to have
oversight over the order in which the Bible Books were to be translated and in which dialects.
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We had by this time discovered that what we had thought was just one language of the more
than eight hundred spoken in Papua New Guinea, had at least four significant dialects.
All this was good, but there was one thing we still lacked, a well-educated local person
to work with Rob on first draft translation. Although we prayed about this need over the years,
no one ever materialised which was a disappointment as other peoples’ experience had shown
us that having someone well-educated working alongside the expatriate translator, or even
able to work alone on the first draft, really moved the whole project along much more quickly.
That would have been a real shot in the arm for us after all the time we had lost when
I was so sick, but it was not to be. Anyway, we did still get into a fairly satisfactory routine.
Ngaru Puli was the name of the young man who was working with Rob. He had started with
us as a boy, helping in both language and housekeeping work. We taught him to read his own
language, from that he taught himself to read Tok Pisin or Pidgin English but there was no
way to upgrade him to reading English because he could neither understand nor speak it.
Our way of tackling this large task of translating the New Testament was that Rob and
Ngaru would draft a few verses together. When they had finished a section, Rob would print
it out and give it to me to do two things; I had to check it through to make sure that nothing
had been missed or mis-translated, then translate it back into a free English and compare it
with a regular English translation. Then I would hand it back to Rob and Ngaru to go through
the changes I suggested and then incorporate them or toss them.
Several copies would be printed after this and about weekly or sometimes every two
weeks, Rob and Ngaru would meet with the full Checking Committee to read through
anything that had been translated in the last week or two, try and polish it up to make it as
good as it could be and find anything that still needed to be changed.
Once we had put a full Bible Book like Luke’s Gospel through this whole process, we
would try to find one of our colleagues who might be available to serve as a consultant to
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work through it with us. This process went on over and over for each book until finally the
complete New Testament in two different dialects were ready for printing. These two Books
in the two different dialects were printed and dedicated in an open-air ceremony in November,
1995.
After we had completed the translation and dedication of the first two New Testaments
in 1995, we put together a little team of local men who could check word for word the
changes that Rob had made according to what he knew of a third dialect.
Our living situation in that area varied, from a local grass hut, to housesitting an ironroofed house in Mendi, a town nearby. It was also around this time that we began to assist in
the training of local men and women to teach the local children to read and write in their own
language before switching to English in Grade 3. Rob and I were convinced of the theory
behind this move, so we were happy to help all we could. The Government reforms called for
children to be schooled in their primary language in Prep., Grades 1 and 2.
In mid-1999 the third New Testament was published and dedicated. The weather was
not very kind to us that day; in fact, there was quite a downpour which washed out our book
sales. It was quite a disappointment to us, because it is on the day of the dedication that the
books sell and they don’t really sell much after that.
The Scotts
I want to tell you about our friends, the Scotts. During my days in the Presbyterian
Fellowship of Australia in Boronia when I lived in The Basin, back in my teens, I became
close friends with Lois Thorne and her fiancé, Brian Scott. Then later on, I was third
Bridesmaid at their wedding. Brian had his heart set on starting up his own electronics
business which he eventually managed to do. Brian was a radio technician with A.W.A.
back then, and a feature of my Twenty-first Birthday party was watching a black and white
TV on a unit he had built.
This was the couple who later bought a large home with a granny flat at one end,
which we were to call home on a good many of our furloughs. It was always exciting when
we came on leave to see what little changes they had made since the last visit. This was
always a big help to us in several ways. Because we did not have to pay rent; it meant that
our own Ferntree Gully home could be rented out without interruption and we always felt at
home because we were staying in the same place each leave. So that was all very good and
very helpful.
Of course, it developed our friendship even more strongly staying with them during our
times of leave. There was room there for Peter to stay with us too and that was good. In fact,
as the years went by, after he was married and had boys of his own, his little boys would sleep
over there with us sometimes.
God was very good to us through Lois and Brian in other ways too. Through the little
business they established, they gave money generously and regularly towards our Missionary
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work and, as well as that, if we did not have a car to use for our few months of leave when we
were in Melbourne, they would do their best to spring one of theirs loose for us.
We only discovered their final generous act to us after we came back to Australia in
2008. We were looking around for a vehicle to purchase, when one day out of the blue, the
Scott family told us - they had three sons and two daughters - that before he died, (Lois had
died earlier) their Dad had told them that they were to give us their 1999 Magna, with very
low kilometres. What a blessing! I’m looking forward to getting to Heaven to thank them
for that gift.
Visits from Home
Just as we went back to Australia every so often on leave to report to people what we’d
been doing, so people came to visit us, usually family members, mainly because it seemed
that they missed us and wanted to see how we were getting on.
Our very first visitor was my sister, Robyn, which was quite a surprise to us because
we didn’t think she was very interested in what we were doing. But sure enough, she was the
first one to come around 1965/1966 and she spent that Christmas with us, I think. She was
working in a Bank and had got some time off, so up she came.
We didn’t think she would be venturesome enough to do the trip on her own, but she
did and it was just too bad that she got the stomach upset that so many people get when they
travel anywhere in a Tropical Zone. She was quite sick for a few days but she recovered;
she was young and fit.
Whilst she was still there, my Mother and her sister, Aunty Sylvie, came up for a little
while too. I can’t remember how long any of them stayed. I think Robyn stayed the longest
and the others came in the middle of her stay and didn’t stay as long.
One of the features of Robyn’s visit was that at that time our little plane would fly
anyone anywhere on an already existing trip for threepence a pound to try and fill the plane
up. It was just enough to cover the cost of running the plane when all the seats were filled.
She got to know all sorts of people and went with them flying all around the country to where
they lived and worked and did their translation, so as well as seeing where we did our
translation, she was able to visit all these different people. I can’t remember how many
people she must have visited but there were certainly quite a few.
A significant point in Robyn’s visit was that she was searching for spiritual answers,
and, in Lae, the night before she flew out she finally knelt by the bed and gave her life to
Christ. It completely changed her, and has remained important to her in her life, as she’s just
turned seventy.
Mum and Aunty Sylvie had a little bit of trouble getting out of the country. There was
supposed to be a bus for them to catch down to the coastal town of Lae but somehow or other,
something went wrong with that plan and the bus was not running. They did eventually get
home but it was a bit upsetting for a while, especially for Mum, because she was upset
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anyway about having to leave me and then to have that trouble on top of it, she wasn’t a very
happy camper.
I think the next people who visited us were a Mr. and Mrs. Baker from Geelong. They
had a radio programme there where they would talk about Missionary Work and they would
travel around finding Missionary Work to talk about. They came and stayed with us for a
couple of days and then went back to Geelong and talked about us on their programme. The
upshot of that was, the next time we went on furlough, they asked Rob to talk on the
programme which he did as a sort of a follow-up on their report on him.
The Bakers came when we were living amongst the Usarufa people in 1965-1966 when
Rob was still so sick with the Addison’s Disease. We were just living very quietly amongst
this group of people and teaching them to read and write, so that was good. We travelled
there by using a borrowed jeep.
Back in the 1970s I think, perhaps 1974, Rob’s brother, David, and his wife, Suzanne,
came and visited us for a while. In fact, they came for most of the year. They came and
joined our Organisation as a type of member, “short-term members” they were called. They
worked for nine months,
David in the auto shop as
a mechanic and Suzanne
as a secretary in the store.
It worked out very well for
us to have them around.
As well as having
that time at Ukarumpa
working, they came up to
us in the village for a few
months, at Christmas, and
made it a special time of
family getting together
as well.
Rob and June, Suzanne and David, Peter and Nola
At this time, David made himself useful. He was a mechanic by trade, not a carpenter,
but he was pretty handy with his hands one way or another, so he reconfigured our back porch
area, moved the back door, and reconfigured the bathroom so that it was all quite a bit more
convenient than it had been before. It was very helpful to have these alterations done and we
were pleased.
Suzanne used her typing skills to type up a lot of our Kaugel to English dictionary, by
now quite sizeable.
Years later, in 2004, David and Suzanne came to visit us again. At this time, we were
living in the little camper trailer in the fourth dialect area, the Bo(MBo)-Ung. The Lutheran
Pastor had a small iron-roofed house next door with a small spare bedroom. We asked him if
David and Suzanne could use that room, and he said that was ok.
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We found often, when there were spare rooms in the local people’s houses that they
were infested with fleas, but this one wasn’t and we were very pleased to find that. We
certainly did not want to impose that on our guests.
As always, David and Suzanne were a wonderful addition to our household. They were
always so bright and cheerful. David was always taking lots of photos, smiling, cheerful and
relating with the local people, making them laugh. He is really good to have around.
They had come this time for the dedication of the fourth New Testament and so we
were all pretty excited about that, trying to get everything ready. The boxes came out all
ready for the big day. The weather was reasonable and we had a good time. Quite a few
people came from Ukarumpa. We had warned them that the toilet that they would have to use
was pretty primitive, but it was too primitive for one lady; she couldn’t bring herself to use it
at all, so she just hung on all day. Not to be recommended.
David and Suzanne shared that day with us. David took some really super photos and
video, and then they stayed another week or so, I think, while we moved around the area with
the new Book, trying to encourage the people to buy it and use it. That was another good time
with David and Suzanne.
I think our most “Red Letter” visitor was Rob’s sister, Elizabeth. She came twice, a
young unmarried woman, and stayed with us. Well, she took over the house completely when
she came, when I was so ill with C.F.S. It was just wonderful to have her. When we were out
in the village, she not only took over the schooling of Peter and Nola as well as the running of
the home, she also took over Rob’s dentistry job.
Now, that dentistry job, it still amazes me when I look back. Often the people had
pleaded with us and pleaded with us,
“Could we get a dentist? Would somebody bring them a dentist? They had so much
pain and so much trouble with their teeth. Could somebody somehow bring them a
dentist?”
In fact, the final thing that put the pressure on Rob was an old fellow who came to him
one day and he had a really loose tooth. Rob said,
“I think I can get that out for you.”
So he got a pair of pliers and a hammer, literally I am telling you, and gave a little flick
of the wrist and she was out. It must have hurt, but he was very, very thankful that man. It
must have hurt a lot less than when it was still there.
So Rob decided to go to the American Dentist we had at Ukarumpa. He asked him to
teach him the basics of extractions - fillings are much more difficult but extractions, if you
have some idea of what you are doing, are not too bad.
Rob was given this training by the dentist, including giving the injections, so when
Elizabeth came, Rob passed it on to her. She was a Nurse and as game as Ned Kelly.
She’d try anything, that girl. So Rob said to her,
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“You do this, and you do this. You put the injection here if the tooth is there. If the
tooth is over here, you put the injection here.”
There were three or four different spots for giving the injection, depending on where the
tooth happened to be and she made quite a few friends extracting their teeth. There has got to
be better ways of dentistry but the people were pretty happy.
The only time there was a real drama was the day Elizabeth yelled for the both of us. I
still had the Chronic Fatigue and was lying around, as usual, but I did have a dressing gown
on so I got up and started heading out to where she was, outside actually, doing her dentistry.
Rob moved too; he’d been translating at the desk. Apparently this woman she had just given
an injection to had miles and miles of little tiny beads around her neck and the position her
neck went into for the injection completely cut off the airflow.
Elizabeth could see that if she
couldn’t get her lying flat and those beads
off, that lady would not be much longer
for this life so she had pushed her hard
and forcefully off the chair onto the
ground. Anyway, with Rob helping and
working at it together, she did come round. I don’t know whether she ended up getting her
tooth out or not but she was only a young woman and it seemed a pity to be losing your teeth
when you are so young.
The other time Elizabeth came we were living at Ukarumpa but it was still good to have
her come and look after the house. She certainly didn’t have to worry about giving the
children their schooling because they were able to go to the school there.
While Elizabeth was there the second time, Rob’s brother, Geoffrey, also came up to
celebrate Elizabeth’s thirtieth birthday, Peter’s fifteenth birthday and Rob’s forty-fifth
birthday – Elizabeth’s on 27th, Peter’s on 28th, Rob’s on 31st of May - so we were celebrating
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all these birthdays together. I can’t remember that we did anything specific or significant to
celebrate the birthdays, but at least it was good all being together for that occasion.
Geoffrey’s stay would have been the shortest of any stay, I think. One of the major
blessings to me about Elizabeth’s stay was that we became very close. We came as close as
sisters really and it has remained that way since, even though she is my sister-in-law, we are
as close as sisters.
Then the last family visitors turned out not to be quite visitors at all.
Rob’s brother, Stephen, his wife, Jocelyn, and their first two little boys, Christopher and
Andrew, came up to be part of the family in 1979, but as well as that, they had come to be part
of the Bible translation work. Now they were not going to be doing the actual Bible
translation like we were, but they were doing what we called Support Work; doing things that
support the work of Bible translation. It needs a lot of people in the background like school
teachers for your children, pilots to pilot the planes, mechanics to look after your vehicles,
printers to print your books and finance people to look after your accounts and so on.
That’s the type of work Stephen and Jocelyn came to do. They came for quite a few years
(79-82 and 92-97 mainly), and they are still in the work of Wycliffe Bible Translators but they
are seconded now to another outfit called Heartstream Ministries. They are not in Papua New
Guinea all the time; they are only there one month a year and they travel around to other
places too and minister to missionaries around the world.
Probably the first people to visit us after we went out to live with the Kaugel people,
were my Mother and my little brother, Arthur, who was sixteen at the time. Rob had already
been out there overseeing the building of a house, and waiting for us.
Now, it was our first flight out there as a family and the planes are pretty small so we
couldn’t take everything we needed. Because we had two extra people, we had to leave some
things behind and one of the things we left behind were our folding chairs. What we used to
sit on while we were out there were four-gallon fuel drums as we were still in the early stages
of setting up a house. We had to have fuel for various things so we had the fuel drums to sit
on and Mum always said that she had a permanent ring around her bottom from sitting on
these fuel drums. We always thought that was a good joke, but I am not quite sure she was
always joking.
Once again, this time it was Arthur, who got the stomach upset that you can get when
you go to Tropical countries. It is always in the middle of the night, of course. We woke up
to these noises and couldn’t work out what was going on. Rob got up and wandered around
looking for some medicine for it, but we didn’t have anything which wasn’t very helpful.
Anyway, you do recover from these things; Arthur was sixteen so he recovered ok.
Then not too long after that at all, quite early in our time, Rob told the people that his
“papa” was going to come and visit and they thought he meant that his father was coming to
visit and he said,
“No, my papa is coming to visit.”
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He had just got enough of the language to know that your mother’s sister – that particular aunt
relationship – your mother’s sister in the language is your “papa”, which, of course, seems
rather odd because everybody knows that “papa” is daddy. Finally he convinced them that it
wasn’t his father who was coming, it was his mother’s sister and her youngest boy. He was
still just a lad, eight maybe, a bit older than ours, of course. We did find out afterwards, that
they often say “anum-papa”, where “anum” = mother.
That was another lot of visitors and the interesting thing that happened with them was
that we decided one day that we would go down to visit the town of Mendi. It’s quite a nice
drive down the back road to Mendi. (Actually, you can’t do it now because the road isn’t
even open.) You climb from seven thousand five hundred feet to over nine thousand feet on
the side of a mountain, and then drop to five thousand five hundred feet all in about two
hours.
When we left home in the morning, we were absolutely socked in with fog. The
weather was awful. As we drove along and turned left at the T-junction, the weather cleared
and it became very pleasant right down to Mendi. We went down by the river and had a picnic
there. It was really quite a nice day out.
On the way back, there was suddenly a clatter, clatter, bang, bang, bang. Rob stopped
the vehicle and it soon became obvious that the back end of the back drive shaft had fallen off.
Rob undid the other end, put the shaft in the car, then Rob put it in four-wheel drive and we
drove home on the front wheels. When we got home, we found our village was still socked in
with the fog.
Much later on, my Mother came again along with her third husband. You remember
that my Dad died when he was very young and then some years later, Mum remarried. She
and her second husband, Glen, didn’t come and visit us together, but then Mum married a
third time after Glen also died of a heart attack. Mum and Huburn came to visit us in the
village.
They flew into Mount Hagen and as it was fairly early in the day, we thought we had
plenty of time (famous last words) so we drove them to the Wildlife Sanctuary out towards
Baiyer River. Then Rob wanted to pick up some timber he had ordered, so we had to go the
long way home. We couldn’t go straight up over the mountain one-way; we had to go around
the bottom of the mountain and through.
Well, he got the timber from the timber mill that was down the back road all right, but
as we went further, a river was in flood over the bridge and we had to double back. We finally
got back to the main road, but we still had a long trip ahead of us to get home. It was dark and
the fog was thick. My Mother was sitting in the front seat with Rob and she said to him after
a while,
“I don’t know how you can see where you’re going. I can’t see a thing.”
Rob said,
“I can’t either.”
which was not terribly encouraging.
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We finally got to the last river crossing before our house, I suppose at least half a
kilometre from home. We came to a halt realising that there was no bridge as it had been
washed away by all this excessive rain. There was one large log across the river and we were
going to have to take our chances at being able to get across that river on that log, which had a
sort of a flattish top, as it was one of the logs that the bridge planks had originally been on,
if we were going to get home that night at all. Talk about excitement for our visitors.
Now my stepfather, Huburn, was partially crippled. He did amazingly well, but he
certainly wasn’t as nimble on his feet as he might have been. Anyway, he got onto that log
and started trying to get across. Our young Peter went behind him trying to help him, then
Huburn’s walking stick slipped out of his hand. Peter tried to get down to get it but we yelled
at him not to bother. We could lose the walking stick but we certainly did not want to lose
Peter. That water was running pretty fast.
Well, we did all get across the river safely. I don’t remember the details but we must
have. Then as we got closer to the house, Rob was walking in front. He walked into the
house to find there was a fellow there we knew, helping himself to everything - we were being
burgled. So that wasn’t the end to a perfect day. That was quite a day in our memories.
I think God must have been really looking after us that night. We went through so
many dangerous situations on that trip and did not get home until midnight. At any one of
those places we could have been swept away or in more serious trouble than we were.
The only aftermath of that I can remember, is that the fellow was put in gaol and his
mother wouldn’t speak to us anymore because it was our fault that he got put in gaol, which
I suppose is true. We had tried to handle it with the village elders, but they wanted us to tell
the Government, so that the lad would get his “comeuppance” for the many times he had
stolen from them as well!
Weddings and More Visitors
What we weren’t expecting was that our own children would start visiting us after
they’d gone back to Australia. We had committed ourselves to visit them every two or three
years, but we didn’t expect them to visit us.
Well, it turned out that in the September of 1988, our Peter got married to Lisa. Now
when this wedding was up and coming, Rob and I talked about it and decided that what we
would like to do, because Papua New Guinea was so important to Peter from his growing up
years, that instead of our going down to the wedding that we could volunteer to pay the way
for them to come up to Papua New Guinea and show them around a bit so that Lisa could see
the country where Peter grew up and get some sort of appreciation for it.
So they were agreeable to that and we paid their way and brought them up. We got in
the car and drove all over the country, wherever Lisa wanted to go; places she’d heard of and
places her uncles or aunts had told her were great places to go, we would go. This included
going to the lovely town of Madang, a beautiful place on the north coast.
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Rob and I knew a village on the north coast where there was a little house available for
people to use for a short stay. So we went out there hoping that we could spend a night or two
because there was a beautiful reef very near the shore and the snorkelling was excellent.
We went into this little house, but someone had been there before us; it had been broken
into. All the bedding had been stolen and nothing was the way it should have been. We were
very disappointed, but still we were able to show them around quite a bit. They had a little
ride on a launch that was going between some islands so it was a good time had by all, I think.
When we went out to our village area, Lisa was very nervous about the village people.
She felt they looked fierce and threatening. Of course, she was coming into a very different
cultural setting, cold turkey, whereas Peter was coming back to his friends, the boys he had
grown up with.
Anyway, we did what we could to help her see a little bit of the country that Peter grew
up in, and knew and loved so much.
In that same year of 1988, around Christmas time, Nola suddenly decided to come up
for her Nursing College holidays. As I look back, I’m not quite sure how she got the finance
because I don’t think we paid her way and she wasn’t on a wage at that time though she did
get a student allowance. Anyway, she came and had a lovely couple of weeks with us. She
always enjoyed being with us so I wasn’t terribly surprised that she wanted to come and it was
lovely to have her.
In 1993, Nola and her Michael, Michael Thurlow, a young man from Tasmania, got
married in Launceston and Rob and I were there. In fact, it was the year of our furlough and
so it was easy for us to be part of that. It was a really good time.
It was right after that that Rob and I went off on a trip to North America. Now this was
for two reasons; one was we had asked to be allowed to take Long Service Leave. Now when
you don’t get paid for a job, taking Long Service Leave is a little bit of confusion. Anyway,
we had asked some of the people who gave towards our support and they were all happy for
us to do that.
As well as that, Rob was going anyway because he was a Delegate for the work to the
International Biennial Conference. So we went to the United States for this Conference and
then travelled around visiting as many people as we could whom we knew; people who had
started supporting us over the years and were still praying for us and giving to our support.
It was interesting, we couldn’t go everywhere or see everything because the main
purpose was to see people and people don’t always live where there are special sights to see.
Even as it was, we did manage to see a few things and go to a few special places.
One interesting experience I had was when we were in Canada and some friends took
us to see Niagara Falls. Well, you wouldn’t believe the weather - it was totally fogged in,
you couldn’t see a thing and I was praying quietly inside,
“Lord, you brought us a long way to see this beautiful creation you made.
Why don’t you let us see it?”
This Voice was quiet in my spirit saying,
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“It’s all right, you’ll see it tomorrow.”
To which I was saying,
“That doesn’t make any sense. We won’t even be here tomorrow.”
Well, it turned out that we were and that somebody else took us the next day on our
way to our next stop, and showed us around; the weather was magnificent. So, I was
reminded again, we don’t have to fret about everything, just trust that God will work it out,
even little things like that.
Another special part of the trip was through The Rockies. There are absolutely
beautiful areas there; magnificent views, all just really lovely and we enjoyed it tremendously.
A couple that we’d known for a very long time took us through there and showed us around
and we had a good time together.
Then at the end of 1994, Nola and Michael with their little daughter, Emily, their firstborn child, all came to see us again. Now, when Rob and I had gone overseas on our trip,
we had gained quite a few Frequent Flyer points. Some of those I used to go down to
Wollongong, Australia to spend a little while with Nola and Michael when Emily was born,
but there were still more left, so we gave them to Nola and Michael to help them come up and
visit us at Christmas, 1994 so Rob could meet Emily too.
During my trip to be with Nola and Michael after the birth of Emily, I was also able to
have a weekend down in Melbourne seeing other members of the family and I used more of
the Frequent Flyer points for that.
It is really amazing how good God was to us in giving us opportunities to get together
with family.
In 1995, in the November, when the first two New Testaments were dedicated, Michael
wasn’t able to come this time but Nola and Emily came. It was lovely to have them around
for a few weeks.
Meanwhile, the work went on. The third New Testament was dedicated in June, 1999
and as soon as we possibly could, we set to work on the fourth New Testament.
One major hassle in this was finding somewhere to live in the area where the dialect
was spoken and that wasn’t particularly easy. The people don’t build houses of the sort that
we would normally live in and it
was just very difficult for us to
find a place. God led us to an
old pop-up camper trailer when
we prayed for a house with no
fleas or rats in to live in when
away from our main house.
After a couple of false starts, a
colleague helped Rob haul our
camper trailer up from Lower
Mendi where we had been using
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it a little bit before. It was a tremendous task to move the trailer a couple of hundred
kilometres over really bad roads but with God’s help and being very careful and wise, it did
get done.
We had the use of a local house that was a little bit more up-market than some, but the
rent was somewhat exorbitant by our standards. We did pay it because we had nowhere else
but just before we left that spot, our solar panels were stolen which was very discouraging.
The solar panels were for power to run our computers and to give us a little bit of light in the
evenings. It was not the first time or the last that our solar panels were stolen but it was
discouraging especially as I knew exactly who had taken them but there was no way that we
could pin it on him.
Stealing was not uncommon, even long before armed hold-ups and robberies became
part of Papua New Guinea life, with some frightening personal experiences for us, which I’ll
come back to.
Anyway, at least now we had our camper trailer and the resident Lutheran Pastor had
allowed us to park it in his little area near the church. We had somewhere to live and sleep
and could get on with the work on the fourth
dialect. Can you imagine a camper as a
workplace as well as for living for weeks
at a time? The seat-less pit toilet was quite
a walk away.
The fourth dialect was actually quite
a bit different from the other three and so
it was a lot more work, a lot more effort.
The sounds of the dialect were quite different too and we really struggled to understand the people as they spoke to us. Anyway, little by little, we did make progress.
Some Fearful Moments
One morning in August, 2000, we were on our way into Mt. Hagen, which is not all that
far from where our camper trailer was parked, when four men held us up. They took the car
off us and made us get out and just stand on the side of the road pointing guns at us.
They didn’t allow us to hold anything. I remember, specifically, one of the men came very
threateningly towards me with his machete and he said something like,
“Where’s the money?”
I said, quite truthfully,
“I’m not carrying any money and I belong to Jesus Christ and you can’t hurt me in any
way.”
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And he backed right off. He left me alone and didn’t bother me again so I was thankful for
that. Anyway, they did take the vehicle and left us standing there like a pair of dumb nuts
along with a fellow that we’d been taking with us.
It did turn out well as the Police Highway Patrol were out that day and they found our
vehicle, but I think the men got away. At least they got the vehicle back, which was not too
much the worse for wear. Some things were stolen; our computers and the car radio and
things you would expect to be stolen were stolen, but it could have been a lot worse and we
were thankful to get it back so quickly.
That car hijack reminds me of some other incidents that we’d had. I remember one
night at our Ukarumpa Headquarters, it was just right on dark and the dog that we were
looking after for somebody hadn’t come home. We said,
“Well, if we are going to be protected by this dog, we’d better go and get it.”
So we set off to get the dog then suddenly, two men stepped out from the side of the
road, one with a homemade gun and the other with a vicious looking knife. I sent out one of
those little arrow prayers,
“Well, what do I do now, Lord?”
And, He said,
“Scream!”
So I screamed like you’ve never heard before. Rob said it really put him off. He’d
never heard me scream like that. I screamed and screamed and screamed and about the same
time, the fellow with the gun, shot the gun in our direction. I don’t think he could have had
any bullets in it, just powder, because there was just a puff of smoke, but it was a little
disconcerting.
The other fellow took a swipe at Rob with his grass knife. Rob threw his arm up to
protect his head and it was just as well he did as the grass knife hit the torch he was carrying.
He did get a piece taken out of his arm by it so he ended up in the medical clinic that night,
being sewn up. It was rather ironic that we were going out looking for this dog, which was
supposed to be protecting us, and we get attacked.
Another time, we woke up in the middle of the night, a lady’s voice was saying,
“Help, help, help!”
We thought,
“Where are we? Who is she?”
You know how disoriented you are in the middle of the night. It turned out to be the
people who were renting the house next door; he was a Vietnam Vet with his wife and they
were feeling pretty helpless as they were being attacked by some fellows with knives and guns
who broke through their front door.
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Rob jumped out of bed and went out to see what he could do and got himself into deep,
deep water, because some of the fellows who were attacking turned around and attacked him
instead. He got quite beaten up. That wasn’t a very pleasant night.
I wasn’t really involved except when Rob called me to unlock the door to let him back
in and two fellows came in with him. I was a bit concerned, as I had jumped out of bed in
such a hurry I didn’t have a night coat or anything on; I just had my little lightweight nightie.
One of the fellows lunged for me but Rob got between us, and the fellow backed off so I was
very thankful for that. He did give them money we had in another room.
The Ten-Year Phenomenon
I want to tell you the story of the Ten-Year phenomenon in the Tambul area.
The first of the Ten-Year phenomena that we experienced was in 1973. We woke up one
morning and everybody was crying and wailing. We said,
“Who’s died?”
and tried to think of who we knew who was really sick. When the people started coming to
the door and speaking to us in their local language, we thought,
“What does that mean?”
We couldn’t understand what they were saying until they said the word “Ice, Ice” so we
ran out to the gardens with them and sure enough, their gardens were absolutely ruined. It was
a freezing cold morning and a very heavy frost. It is pretty high up there and pretty cold, and
about once every ten years, they get really bad frosts.
So there we were, people all round us. Tonight’s dinner, tomorrow night’s dinner and
dinner from now until when, where is it coming from? There was not a thing they could eat
and if you leave it in the ground and hoped that once the frost has past, the plants will recover,
it makes good thinking, but it doesn’t work like that, so we said to each other,
“What can we do? We’re not rich. What can we do to help these poor people?”
After a while, the people came to us and said,
“The Government is going to give us food if we work for it.”
This was still the Australian Government: Australians were in charge until 1975 and
this is 1973. It turned out that the Government paid the people to build a large shed in our
backyard and we were to be responsible for it and then they were going to fill it with cartons
of fish and bags of rice, which we were responsible to give out to the people, or Rob was.
I tried not to get involved. With very quick tempered people I try not to get my neck stuck
out too much. So we were able to help them.
Then in 1983, the same thing happened again and it is amazing how it was every
ten years, but now they had their own Government, it wasn’t an Australian Government,
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but by now we were a little bit better off and we were able to help the people with quite a bit
of fish and rice to tide them over the hard times.
In 1993 around it came again.
2003 something different happened. It was frost again, but as well as that and more
obviously, a potato blight came through the area. You see, our people grow sweet potato to
eat but they grow ordinary Irish potatoes to sell so they could get a little bit of income, but this
time they were struck both ways. The sweet potato was affected with the frost; I don’t think it
quite exactly overlapped, but it was fairly much the same year, I think, and then the potato
blight.
Every time these crises came, we would send out word to the people who supported and
encouraged us in our work and also our colleagues from around the country. They would
respond by sending what little gifts they could manage to send so that we could keep giving
the people food to eat. It was not easy, not the best thing we ever did as far as ease of
purpose, but we were glad to be able to help them as much as we could.
Our Health
Sickness in various ways continued to dog our path. We never seemed to be
completely free of it one way or another. I had another bout of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
from about the middle of 1999 into 2000. Anyway, somewhere in the early 2000s we decided
to take out Hospital Insurance.
I had needed to have an operation on my right ear for, well, the whole of my adult life
really. You might remember I talked about having measles very badly when I was a little girl
and how ill I was, well that played havoc with my right ear and I had virtually no hearing in it
and I had almost no drum. There was now a fairly successful operation that could put a new
drum into replace the damaged one and so we decided that we would take out Hospital
Insurance and then get this taken care of. That insurance was started early in the new century,
2000/2001 and we thought that would be the only thing we’d use the Insurance for, but it is
amazing just how much we did use it
I had the ear operation taken care of in 2003 in Launceston, Tasmania, by a very well
qualified surgeon and then while I was still recovering from that, Rob suddenly got a severe
attack of inflammation of the gall bladder and had to be rushed to hospital. Once again our
Hospital Insurance came up trumps. It was our first exposure to key-hole surgery.
Then in the Christmas holidays that year, 2003, we had Christmas with Nola and
Michael and their children who were now living in Western Australia where Michael was
pastoring a church. By this time, they had four little ones.
One day, we were all sitting around the swimming pool and Nola remarked to her
father that he had a lump in his neck, so she sent him off to see the local doctor and he said,
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“Yes, you have some sort of lump there which I think is related to your thyroid, and you
need to have it taken care of.”
So, sure enough, in 2004 we were back in Tasmania again, this time for Rob to have his
thyroid removed. Because it was growing inwards, under the bones, it would have eventually
choked him, so it was good to be clear of it before our return to Papua New Guinea.
During the time all these things had been going on, we returned to Papua New Guinea
to gradually work away at the fourth New Testament, which was eventually completed in
December, 2004. We had a celebration for that and that was a good time with the local people
and some visitors, which we enjoyed. The main visitors for us were Rob’s brother, David,
and his wife, Suzanne, who had visited us way back in 1974. They came up in 2004 to help
us celebrate the dedication of this New Testament.
June 2005 – Getting a lift
from Mt. Hagen to
Ukarumpa when she was
not well enough to travel
the Highlands Highway
with Rob
At some point after that, in 2005, we were back in Australia again, I’m not sure if it was
leave or not, it probably was, and Rob had a really bad back; his back and his legs were giving
him a lot of pain. So he went to see a surgeon he was recommended to and it was amazing
how quickly he got into seeing this surgeon. It was really incredible. He had just sort of
tacked him on the end of his day and gave him a good hearing. He said,
“Well, you’re going to have to have surgery straight away, Mr. Head, and clear that
pinched nerve in your lower spine, or, if you don’t want to do that, you can go back up
to Papua New Guinea and wait until it gets absolutely urgent and I’ll give you the name
and address of the best surgeon in Northern Australia.”
Rob said,
“Well ok, I’d better have it now.”
This was a little bit disconcerting for him but, anyway, he went ahead and had the
surgery. Well, you hear the nightmare stories about things that go wrong, but not this time.
We were so thankful that it really went very well and he recovered marvellously.
I don’t know whether it was quickly or not, it was certainly gradually with minimal pain
and he had a good range of movement and no return of the previous problem. We were
very thankful for that.
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One little note of interest there, because of something my sister had said to me, (she’d
been a nurse) I said to Mr. Wallace the last time we saw him before Rob’s surgery,
“Mr. Wallace, would you do this surgery yourself?”
He said,
“I will if you ask me to.”
So I said,
“I’m asking you to.”
All these big men have assistants and the assistants have to get their experience somewhere,
somehow, so, of course, sometimes it would be the assistant doing the job but Dr. Wallace did
it himself and we were very pleased.
My memories of our last few years in Papua New Guinea are rather spasmodic, while
part of that time is of things that happened in Australia too.
December 24th, 2005 –
June reading some of the
Christmas story from a
New Testament in our
village near-neighbours’
own language at our
neighbours’ sub-clan
Christmas party feast in
our back yard
December, 2005 June interacting with
a neighbour lady in
the village
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The motor bike Rob used to get around the various villages to check on literacy classes
and things like that was, of course, so much cheaper to run than the four-wheel drive and
easier to manoeuvre in some of the more difficult places on the roads. Unfortunately, it was
stolen and we were very disappointed.
Another thing that happened in 2005 a few months earlier than Rob’s back surgery,
actually, and we were still in Australia at that time, was the Centenary of the church which
was Rob’s home church in Ulverstone, Tasmania, the Ulverstone Baptist Church. They
pulled out all the stops and made a great celebration; it was really a wonderful night. Good
food, good fellowship, it was a great time and there were several people who gave testimony
to what the Church had meant to them. There were a lot of past Pastors from years before
who came and they shared too, some of their memories of their time with the church.
When we were back in Papua New Guinea in 2006, two things happened. Rob’s back
was pretty well right as long as he kept walking a fair bit and our work in Papua New Guinea
celebrated its Fiftieth Anniversary. We were known as S.I.L. in Papua New Guinea, and
S.I.L. had been there for fifty years so we had a great celebration. We invited quite a few
people and had a somewhat low key, but good time together.
In April of that same year, we celebrated my seventieth birthday. My sister, Robyn,
came and her son, Simon, my nephew, and we took them out to the village area and then back
to Ukarumpa where we had the party. I didn’t realise how many friends I had until I had that
party. There were lots of tables full of people eating good food. It was a great night and you
don’t need expensive restaurants to have a good time.
I bought a number of spit-roasted chickens, cooked some vegetables and asked other
people to cook some vegetables or bring a dessert; we had plenty of food. I got two or three
young teenage girls who were willing to serve as waitresses, so it was just a really good night.
They did all the washing up as well, the dear kids, but the only thing I didn’t think of
was that they would need to be fed. There was plenty of food around but they didn’t dare
touch it because they hadn’t been told that they could and by the end of the evening they were
starving, poor girls. I felt so badly. I think that was the only failing in the evening, the rest of
it was a good time.
I enjoy parties. I was so glad that Robyn could come and Simon because he can be
good fun. He left his wife and three little ones behind and came and joined us.
As the years ticked by and we took stock of the work we’d done in various ways, the
translation work, the literacy work teaching adults and children to learn to read and to be able
to read in their own language, Rob thought of another way we could help the New Testaments
to be read and used.
He had heard about things called “MegaVoice”. These are little machines a bit like an
MP3 player that you could put recorded messages on, then give them out or sell them, for
people to listen to. They were solar powered so there was no cost in running them and Rob
thought this would be just the thing to encourage the people who can’t read or who won’t
read, to listen to the New Testament in their own language.
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So he started working on that, actually while he was convalescing from his back
surgery. He found it was a good thing for him to do while he just sat there and was unable to
do too much. He was unable to be too active except that he had to be able to walk quite a bit
each day. So part of the book of Luke, which was what he chose to work on first, he recorded
himself and part of it he’d already had people up in the village record it and he edited it.
Well, believe it or not, here it is 2013 and that task still isn’t finished. We decided we
would do it in two dialects, not four, and Rob would be mostly responsible for editing one of
them and I would be mostly responsible for editing the other.
That’s what we’ve done, but a few weeks ago, the day before I had this stent put in my
throat, I was working on the second last chapter of the second last book and I haven’t been
able to get back to it as my strength has just drained away. I have just been unable to work on
it and finish it off and that has been very disappointing to me.
Leaving Papua New Guinea
The other thing we had to decide was, just when we should leave Papua New Guinea,
although we both agreed that we wanted to keep coming back at least once a year. We also
wanted to cut ties and finish up the work as best we could. Well, some good things happened
and some not so good things happened.
The Catholics whose Mission head station was down the road from where we were
living in the village, offered for us to store our household goods and our books. We were very
grateful to them for this. In fact, even as I speak, there is a lot of that stuff still there which
Rob will have to go and do something about some time. As we have gone back each year,
they’ve given us a little flat to stay in and we were able to pull out our household goods that
we had stored and use them, which was a big help to us.
Anyway, we decided that April or May, 2008 would be it. We would get everything as
finished up as possible and leave about then.
We wanted to sell our house at Ukarumpa, but we were unable to do so before we left.
We were thankful that after we left it did sell, and was sold to a Tasmanian couple, a new
young couple that we didn’t know. Because Rob is a Tasmanian, we were both pleased it sold
to a Tasmanian couple and they are still enjoying living in it. Our house was fairly small and it
didn’t suit a lot of people, but it seemed to be just right for Neil and Catherine.
Well, those last days in our village home, which we were renting from a village man,
were very harrowing and very difficult. We had made some wonderful friends there, over the
years, but we had also made some enemies, or close to enemies.
As we made our plans to leave and said we were going to sell this, or we were going to
do this with this, or whatever, the owner of the house would say,
“No, you are not going to sell that stove. You’re going to give it to me.”
And so on.
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Then there were other demands on us. There were three young teenage boys who were
the sons of fairly important men in the village, and they came and made all sorts of demands
on us. They said, if we didn’t meet their demands, they wouldn’t allow us to drive our car
away.
You don’t need this when you are under stress and getting ready to leave a place. We
just felt that we were looked on as a resource to be exploited. We felt rejected, unappreciated,
distressed and sad.
Our calling to the work that had nourished us for those forty-six years was the only
thing that kept us going over these difficult days when the people were treating us so shabbily.
In fact, we feared for ourselves at times when the threats were pretty strong. It all came as a
surprise because we didn’t expect them to treat us like that. We thought we had reasonably
good relationships with the people. That was all very distressing and very hard to cope with.
If it hadn’t been for the way the Catholic people supported us and encouraged us, I
don’t know where we would have been. We eventually got through it all and drove away and
got ourselves back to Ukarumpa.
Our last few weeks in Ukarumpa we were treated entirely differently. Instead of being
treated like a resource to be exploited, we were treated as God’s faithful servants to be
celebrated. We were affirmed, encouraged and appreciated. We had four farewells of
different kinds by different groups of people, and it was a much more pleasant leave taking.
Back in Australia
One of the first things we found out when we got back to Australia was that Peter and
Lisa had separated. We were devastated by this, not that we had ever got on with Lisa
particularly well, but just because we felt concern for the boys, their four sons, and wanted
what was best for our Peter. We put pressure on him to tell us what had happened and why
they had separated, but he wouldn’t talk about it at all so we let it go at that.
What we do know is that he later met and now is living with a lovely young woman
named Michelle, who is as sweet as butter and as kind as could be. We‘ve grown to love her
very much and they’re talking about getting married.
Now we were back in Australia, a high priority was to get our Ferntree Gully house
ready for long term living after having been rented for twenty-eight years or so. We stayed
for that time with my sister, Robyn, and her husband in nearby Montrose and commuted each
day to the house to work on it. Various people came and helped us.
The most significant people who came to help us were what we called “the German
Invasion.” We had a long term German friend named Helmut and Helmut was a man of many
skills who offered to help us in any way in cleaning up the house, painting and so on. He
brought along his sister, Bruny, who was just as talented, and her husband, Siegfried.
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What a team they made; cleaning down walls, repairing cracks, filling in unnecessary
air vents and repairing cornices and just every little thing you could think of, and then the big
paint job itself.
Rob decided that the simplest thing for paint would be to just use the same paint
throughout except that he wanted white ceilings and cream walls. So we bought gallons of
paint, or litres or whatever they are these days, and set to work. The atmosphere was warm
and friendly; I don’t think I heard a cross word once. Robyn came across sometimes too and
helped with cleaning up the walls, and it was really a pleasure to have us all here, working
together so harmoniously.
Then another German lady who knew all these other Germans, turned up one day with
chicken soup for lunch. Her name was Hennie and she sure is a good cook, so we all enjoyed
that too. Her skills were not painting and repairing, but cooking soup.
Helmet’s wife, Renate, and Hennie’s husband, Rainer, were also supportive in this
whole exercise.
At the same time, Rob’s church in Tasmania gave us a very generous gift which paid
for the carpets, the curtains, a new fridge and washing machine which was all a wonderful
boost for us in our resettling. We had some money set aside to get this all going, but their
help was tremendous
We also bought a new lounge suite, coffee table, TV cabinet for the lounge, and a
dressing table for our bedroom which matched the bed Chris and Robyn had given us. All
this furniture came to us at special prices and/or discounts through friends or relatives who
had contacts with people. We were very grateful for all of that.
When we had left Papua New Guinea in April, 2008, we committed ourselves to two
things in regard to the work: to continue editing the audio New Testaments and to going back
to Papua New Guinea for about a couple of months each year.
Our first visit was towards the end of 2008 when we hadn’t been back in Australia for
even a year yet, but we were fairly well settled in the house by now. Rob continued recording
the two New Testaments as this task was not yet finished, while I worked with a couple of
young men clarifying some dictionary entries. We had quite a large dictionary, but some of
the meanings were not really clear and I needed some help with finding out just exactly what
some words or expressions meant.
Back in Australia people expected us to be retiring, but those projects kept calling us.
Rob worked on the audio editing of the New Testaments while I worked on the dictionary
entries. Gradually, as time went by, it became obvious to me that the two tasks, the dictionary
and the New Testament audio-editing, would not get completed if we continued to work at
both tasks, so I decided to leave the dictionary project and switched to working fulltime on
editing one of the audio New Testaments.
2009 came and went with time in Papua New Guinea again as well as working on the
editing at home in Melbourne.
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Overseas Trip
2010 turned out to be a very special year for us both when we went off in the middle of
the year on a long-awaited three months trip. The main purpose, initially, was to visit the
areas where our respective fathers grew up in England, as well as to track down any living
relatives.
When our friends in Europe heard about these plans, they said,
“Of course, you must come and visit us too.”
After which our North American friends echoed much the same.
While we were working at putting all that together, I read about a tour of Egypt and the
Holy Land including a trip to Oberammergau in Southern Germany for the Passion Play.
Well, how could we afford all that?
When Robyn and Chris, my sister and brother-in-law, heard about it, they suggested
they come along too and help us by paying my fare. So we set off together with the
understanding that once the tour finished in Munich, we would each go our separate ways.
Egypt was a wonderful experience: the River Nile, the Pyramids, the Sphinx, the Sight
and Sound Show, taken everywhere by air-conditioned bus. The drive through the desert to
the border was a surprise to me. I expected it to be totally flat, but there are many hills, even
mountains, but it was certainly very dry.
Border crossings were a nightmare, but we did eventually get through to Jordan where
we visited Petra, a city of sandstone: quite fascinating. More hair-raising border crossings got
us into Israel. So much to see there: the Dead Sea, Galilee, Jerusalem, the River Jordan, the
Plain of Armageddon, Caesarea, Nazareth and so much more.
A Christian young man in Nazareth explained to us how difficult it is to be Christian
there, where most people are either Muslim or Jew. Once again, we were ferried around by
air-conditioned bus, our final trip being down to Tel Aviv to catch our plane to Munich in
Southern Germany.
From there, we drove south to Neuschwanstein Castle; which looked like a fairy tale
palace and then on to the Passion Play at Oberammergau. Held only every ten years, the
people of the town act out the suffering and death of Our Lord, Jesus, as an Offering to God
for delivering them from the plague centuries before. Once they performed that, not one more
person died, so they said they would perform it every ten years as a thank you. It is performed
several times each week for several months. Because all the dialogue was in German, it was a
little bit difficult to follow, but it was amazing how quickly we adjusted and were able to
follow the English translation we were given.
That was the end of our organised tour.
Next day, we were picked up from our Munich hotel by a friend whom we had known
in Papua New Guinea and who now lives in Southern Germany. She drove to her place, and
the next day her parents who had been missionaries in Papua New Guinea too, took us all
down to Salzburg in Austria. From then on, we travelled through Southern Germany and
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Austria, The Czech Republic, North Germany, The Netherlands, Switzerland and France,
mostly by train, visiting friends, seeing sights and taking in classical concerts, including the
performance of an alpine horn.
From Paris, we caught a train and then a ferry across the Channel. It was exciting and
surprisingly emotional for me, to have a magnificent view of the white cliffs of Dover as we
came into land. We soon took delivery of our little hire car (we should have ordered a
G.P.S.), and set off to find Rob’s second cousin and husband at Bexhill-on-Sea. We seemed
to get to know one another fairly quickly and easily and they drove us around to many spots in
the area which were significant to the family history.
From there, we travelled on in our little hire car, enjoyed lunch with former Papua New
Guinea friends on our way to Bournemouth, to find more relatives on Rob’s side and then on
to Plymouth, to find a second cousin of mine and his wife. It was interesting to drive through
Devonport nearby, considering our connection with Devonport, Tasmania. Launceston was
on the map, but too far away with our limited time.
Knowing we wouldn’t be seeing any more relatives until Yorkshire, we meandered
around the countryside a bit, including a brief foray into Wales. When we finally reached
mid-Yorkshire, I caught up with quite a few relatives in a reasonably small area.
A Papua New Guinea ex-missionary friend offered us her bed for which we were so
grateful. We used her Tom-Tom a couple of times too, such a help. We toured through the
Yorkshire Dales, which was pretty wet, and then into the beautiful Lake District for a couple
of days. Our B & B there was in Ulverston! We travelled still further north and over the
border to Edinburgh in time for the Royal Military Tattoo. What a spectacular night. It was
here we handed in our hire car then next day, caught the train to London. A friend had
managed to get us a special price on our train tickets.
Once again we were met in London by friends from our Papua New Guinea days, one
of whom was giving us a place to stay. I can’t say we saw all of London in the next four or
five days, but we gave it our best shot, including St. Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Abbey,
Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, and a wonderful classical concert in St. Martin-in-theFields off Trafalgar Square, where we were filmed in a TV show, (James May),
before flying out of Heathrow to Toronto, Canada, leaving my laptop behind and yes,
we did eventually get it back.
Although we had no relatives to visit in North America, we did have many friends from
our Papua New Guinea days and thoroughly enjoyed travelling around to visit them and see
some sights. The highlight for me was about two weeks we stayed in Waxhaw, North Carolina
with my best friend, Pat. During this time, nephew, Mike Head and his family drove up from
Florida to see us.
Another special time was travelling through the Canadian Rockies with our friend,
Stan. We have previously done it many years ago with Stan and his wife, Jean, but Jean had
passed away. And so on to Vancouver, south to Seattle, and time to catch our plane back to
Aus. Not many weeks back home and we were heading north again for our annual two
months trip to Papua New Guinea. And so 2010 came to an end.
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Recognition of our
“Fifty Years of Faithful Service 1962 – 2012”
presented to us by
Wycliffe Bible Translators Australia
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June with our son, Peter, and his youngest son,
Shannon much more
our youngest grandchild, Shannon – August 2005
recently, with a pet rabbit
Us two with our daughter, Nola, husband Michael,
and their children Isabelle, Sarah, Emily, Josiah. July 2013
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Cancer
Time flittered by as it does and in no time we were attending the eightieth birthday
celebration of a dear friend in mid-March, 2011. The next day, as we got together for a family
barbecue, I suffered all day with severe indigestion and reflux. I had never had anything so
severe so far as I can recall.
For the next six months, I was back and forth to the doctor who tried me on various
dosages of Nexium. Finally, he ordered a gastroscopy. As I came out of the anaesthetic,
the Gastroenterologist brought me to with a rush by informing me that I had cancer of the
oesophagus. He called it “a nasty”. I wished that he had called Rob in first. This came as a
terrible shock, as you might well imagine, especially when a surgeon later told us that it was
virtually incurable. A check found that it had already gone to a lymph node in the neck, so
cutting it out was not an option.
Because we were told then by a medical oncologist that it was virtually incurable and as
I felt well at that stage except for the pain of the indigestion, we decided to go ahead with our
annual trip to Papua New Guinea and leave any treatment until we got back. As it turned out,
I had more and more trouble swallowing while we were away, so we cut our visit short and
came home a week earlier than the six weeks planned.
We were home for Christmas. Nola, Michael and the family came and stayed with us
for Christmas en route from Mackay to Launceston where Michael was finishing up his
pastoring work in Mackay and taking up a new position in Launceston. They just had time to
come and spend Christmas with us, which was very special. Then on 3rd January, 2012, I was
admitted to Ringwood Private for a combination of radiation and chemotherapy treatments.
When I first was diagnosed back in August, 2011, I wrote to a friend who was a great
believer in alternative treatments. He encouraged me to eat a diet of fruit and vegetables,
mostly juiced. The only obvious effect this had was to make me lose a lot of weight. Some
tips were very useful like drinking aloe vera juice to help counter the burning effect of the
radiation in the oesophagus and applying aloe vera gel to my back and chest for the same
reason. Although the radiation treated me pretty roughly, I weathered the chemotherapy fairly
well.
Because the radiation burnt my oesophagus so badly and made it very difficult to
swallow food and drink because of the pain, I had a PEG inserted into my stomach and was
fed through that for some time.
I graduated from the hospital to rehab. about March, but somehow I seemed to become
depressed too. Then not too long after I came home, I experienced a manic episode which
was especially unpleasant for Rob, though I hardly knew what was going on. After that,
a recurrence of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome came my way, but eventually by the middle of
June and our Fiftieth Wedding Anniversary came round, I seemed to once again be back to
equilibrium both, mentally and physically.
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After that, for about three months, I was symptom free with no sign of tumour or spots
on any scans. Then one day in September, I had trouble eating my meal; the cancer was back,
with another tumour, this time near the top of the oesophagus. This was a real blow. I had
convinced myself that the cancer had gone for good so this recurrence was pretty difficult to
come to terms with. I had chemotherapy again.
Then in January, 2013 we decided to go back to Papua New Guinea for one last time,
last for me, anyway. It was good to be back but difficult to know what to say to our village
friends about my illness. I was concerned that one mention of the word “cancer” would have
them gathering around to wail in anticipation of my death and that was the last thing I wanted.
When we arrived home two months later, in April, the oncologist was keen that I make
a decision about further treatments. As it turned out, he made the decision for us. He came to
see me in the hospital, Rob was there too, one day after Mr. Kohn had fitted a stent because of
swallowing problems, saying,
“If you have more chemotherapy, it will be stronger and take a lot more out of you than
before. You will lose all your hair and experience other unpleasant side effects. My question
to you is, is it worth it? It might give you a few more weeks or months, but is it worth it at
your age?”
He went on,
“You are a woman of faith and you know where you are going and you have no fear of
death. My recommendation is that you do not have any further treatments and subject
yourself to these unpleasant side effects.”
Meanwhile, the stent had become essential, as I could no longer swallow anything, not
even my own spittle, though I still felt pretty well in myself with daily walks and twice
weekly walking to my exercise classes for older people. Fitting the stent seemed to be a
pretty simple procedure and Mr. Kohn, the surgeon, did not expect it to affect my quality of
life at all, but certainly something did, because ever since the stent was fitted, I have had very
poor quality of life. In fact, it seems to us like a recurrence of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
again, which has dogged my life for so many years, though none of the doctors will accept
that as a major cause for my weakness.
Meanwhile, I have planned my funeral service and all the people who will take part, all
the Bible readings and the hymns, who will speak, who will speak at the graveside service, all
down to every little detail. I planned the theme of the service to be “Seeing the Glory of God”
from the Bible Verse in John Chapter 17 Verse 24.
A Visit from an American
When we were in Papua New Guinea, I built up a lot of friendships. I find it easy to
make friends, but Rob doesn’t find it as easy, so he would just tag his shirt-tail onto my
friendships.
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My two closest friends were both Americans; one a mother of seven children, the other
a single lady. Well, the lady who was the mother of seven children, she got very sick after
returning home to America from Papua New Guinea with her husband, and she passed away,
which was very sad.
The single lady, Pat, had been working in language with an Australian lady; they still
haven’t finished the work. Every so often, my friend, Pat, comes out to stay with her friend,
Joan, in Western Australia to work together on completing the dictionary of the language.
During a trip to Australia in 2009, Pat, Rob and I visited Tasmania together. On her
return to America, Pat began to talk in letters and ’phone calls about wanting to put together
a book of photos covering the trip. Much more recently, she began to talk about coming to
Australia to have more time with Joan (Hainsworth who lives in Perth) to continue the
language work which they had started in Papua New Guinea.
Suddenly, it all seemed to be coming together. She knew that Rob would be in Tassie
for the weekend helping celebrate his youngest brother Geoffrey’s 60th birthday and would
arrive home Tuesday, 1st October this year (2013) and Pat would arrive in Melbourne,
Wednesday, 2nd. By this time, Rob knew this but I didn’t. I did know she was coming by the
time she arrived.
On the Wednesday afternoon, our friends, Gordon and Cecily Tucker picked her up
from the airport after thirty-eight hours of travel and brought her straight in to see us. Much to
our surprise and delight, not only did she come, but she brought along the photographic
journal of our trip to Tassie.
Rob knew nothing about this
and I had forgotten that she had
ever talked about it. It is a
magnificent work of art and so
well put together. A wonderful
memory of our trip together.
Gordon and Cecily live
in our next suburb, Rowville,
and had agreed to look after
Pat and get her around.
The next day, Tuckers took her
to Wycliffe headquarters to see
long-time friends there and at
Eltham.
Friday afternoon she
came back and spent a couple
of hours with me.
Unfortunately, my physical limitations meant that we couldn’t spend long times together.
I thought this would be the last time, but Gordon brought her over for an hour Saturday
morning before taking her to the airport to fly to Perth for her six weeks with Joan.
Her visit meant so very much to me.
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Acknowledgement
I am very grateful to Nanette Bourke, who, as a volunteer biographer with Eastern
Palliative Care in Melbourne, gave many hours over many weeks to make this biography
possible. She committed each Friday morning to help me record my thoughts for that
week, took it home and typed it up, and was gracious in dealing with suggested editing
along the way. She encouraged me on when my thoughts and energy were limited.
Thankyou, Nanette!
Rob’s reflection to Nanette, the Biographer
“I was hoping I could get June to
summarise her life in a final paragraph
at the end of the biography,
but it seems that that isn’t going to happen.”
The content of this story remains the property of the author June Head
Edited and prepared for publication by volunteer biographer
Nanette Bourke
On behalf of
Phone: 1300 130 813
www.eastpallcare.asn.au
November 2013
Rob’s later comment
Having started on the 19th July 2013, the final saving of
this file and printing was on the 12th November, 2013, and
presented to June at home the same day by Nanette. It’s
a wonderful record to have, and so well laid out, with the
photos too. I am very grateful for it, as others will be too.
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Postscript Notes by Rob
June died at home (in a hospital bed that was needed the last few days)
on Saturday 23rd November, 2013, at 3.27 am, with me, son Peter and fiancée
Michelle and Peter’s eldest son Steve present, after a full 3 ½ hours of final
struggle.
Her funeral service was at St. Hilary’s Anglican Church, Kew, which had been
her home and then supporting church from around 1959, at 10.30am (the
planned 1 ½ hour service lasted until around 12.40 pm). Someone guessed that
upwards of 200 people were present.
The burial was at Lilydale Memorial Park (lawn cemetery) at 2.30 pm,
in drizzling rain.
I thank God for giving June to me, and for her absolute commitment, firstly to
God, His Word and His will for her life, and secondly to me.
----------------
Newspaper insertions
In Melbourne, Herald Sun, and in Tasmania,
The Advocate (North-West Coast),
The Examiner (Launceston), and Mercury (Hobart).
--------------------------------
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..................
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------------EULOGIES
June’s early years
(Robyn Daly, nee Whitworth)
I am Robyn, June’s younger sister.
Recently I read June’s memoir, prepared by Eastern Palliative Care. After
reading it, I thought, God’s work has been her priority. My other thought was,
Only one life will soon be past, only what’s done for Christ will last.
I am here to speak about June’s early years.
June was born in Yarraville in 1936, the first daughter of Cyril & Thelma
Whitworth. Our brother Don was born in 1932.
We were all sent to Sunday School, although our parents didn’t go to Church.
June writes about a Sunday School teacher telling them, “God always answers
prayer and you can pray to Him in any situation and He will answer your
prayers.” Not long after that, she lost her slate pencil. The first bell had gone at
school. She thought, I will kneel down at this chair and pray about it, and
promptly found the pencil under the cushion! It made a big impression on June.
From then on she was sure there was a God and that He does answer prayer.
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When June was about 3, she was in Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital with
Measles. They thought she wasn’t going to live through the night and the
Nurses arranged for her to be baptised. They found a Methodist Minister and
June believes he not only baptised her but prayed for healing. The next morning
she was still alive.
A doctor advised they move to the country so she could become a healthy,
robust child.
Our paternal Grandfather (who was a Captain in the British Army in
World War 1) realised in 1924, there would be another World War, so he left
Britain with his family and came to Australia. He told his children that when
you marry, move away from the city where it will be safer.
So our family moved to The Basin in 1942. Two of our father’s sisters were
already living there, which helped our family feel at home.
Don & June attended The Basin Primary School and The Basin Presbyterian
Sunday School.
We had a wonderful extended family. Many trips were made to Footscray to
visit both sets of Grandparents, Aunts, Uncles & Cousins.
June enjoyed rabbiting and playing cricket with our older brother Don and his
mates. Looking back, she realised Don was a most unusual brother to include
his little sister.
She had wonderful memories of that time.
I was born when June was 7 ½.
June attended Box Hill Girls School. She enjoyed school & did well. She was
chosen to be a prefect. I on the other hand was asked, “Can you think of any
reason why you shouldn’t be expelled?!”
The following is an excerpt from June’s memoir (quoted verbatim):
My Dream
“Let me tell you about the dream which led to my conversion to Christ. …..
....... (On pages 15-17 of this biography, so not repeated here.) .......
.... So that was a major watershed and important time in my teenage years, in
fact in my whole life. My whole life had turned a pivot right there and I went on
from there as it were.” END OF QUOTE
June always loved hearing Missionary stories at Religious Instruction in school
and Sunday School.
After the dream, June asked our local Presbyterian Minister if she could be
baptised. She wanted to make a personal choice now that she was a Christian.
Soon after she asked if she could teach Sunday School. After a while she was
allowed and she taught the little ones.
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June left school at the end of Year 10. Our parents were building their own
house and money was scarce. June was delighted to have her own money.
She could buy clothes, pay board and buy little gifts for our mother.
She started work at CSIRO and later worked in an office on a ‘Comptometer’.
It was superseded by an Electronic Calculator.
June had the opportunity together with Ena Hill to run The Presbyterian Girl’s
Association. Lorraine (Ena’s daughter) and I were both members. I personally
enjoyed playing murder the most. We would move all the furniture around and
then hide in the dark. If anyone was caught you called “MURDER”. June and
Ena also took us to the PGA annual sports days at P.L.C.
We also went on Christian camps. I remember one at Point Lonsdale.
June held Bible studies and prayer times in a tent in our back garden. We sang
lots of choruses.
June joined Presbyterian Fellowship Association and enjoyed getting together
to play board games, have rigorous discussions and Bible studies.
In June 1953, our brother Arthur was born. We were all delighted.
Six months later our father died of a Myocardial Infarction, aged 43.
We were all devastated. Our parents had a wonderful, loving relationship.
Having Arthur so dependent on her helped our mother work through her grief.
June bought a motor scooter DKW, made by Audi. She used to give me a ride
to work. Once the front tyre blew and she and Lorraine were thrown off.
Nothing serious.
June always enjoyed attending Belgrave Heights Convention Meetings at Easter
and Christmas; Solid Bible teaching and challenging messages about preparing
for missionary service.
June joined Scripture Union Beach Mission Teams.
In 1956, five missionaries were killed trying to reach out to the Auca Indians in
Ecuador. Many people dedicated themselves to missionary service after this
tragic event.
In 1958, June enrolled at Melbourne Bible Institute and spent three very
precious years there, studying the Bible (God’s Word), under Godly men.
June made many special friends at M.B.I.
On a personal note, after a car accident I (Robyn) went searching for God.
I went to Papua New Guinea and watched all the missionaries like a hawk.
I could tell they had a peace and purpose I didn’t have. June said to her PNG
friends, “She knows it all, don’t say anything. Just pray.” They prayed that
I would surrender my life to Jesus before I left PNG soil. I did.
(Referred to on p39 of this biography.)
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(Brother) Don died in 1978 from a Myocardial Infarction, aged 45.
Our mother died in 1979 from Cancer
(Brother) Arthur died in March 2006 from complications caused by
Parkinson’s disease, aged 52.
In April that year, my elder son, Simon, and I went to PNG for June’s
70th birthday. I realised the people there knew her better than I did.
I was amazed to hear her telling jokes.
I finish with this quote again, which I feel sums up June’s life:
“Only one life will soon be past. Only what’s done for Christ will last”
oOoOoOoOo
Rob’s Eulogy about June
I thank you all for coming from near and far, including neighbours, to share
with us this time of grief but memory. I know that June wants us to honour God
in thinking about her life, but it’s nice to have memories of her as a person too.
Actually I have found it quite emotional to read what many people have written
about her, some of which I read to her in moments when she could concentrate
towards the end.
I sincerely thank David Cummings for leading this service. He’s been a longtime friend, leader, and encourager. And I thank the Rt. Rev. Stephen Hale for
allowing us to use the facilities here. June has fond memories of her association
with St. Hilary’s, and we have been grateful for their prayers and financial
support for our Bible translation work over many years.
June and I were at Melbourne Bible Institute in Armadale for the same
three years, as Robyn has told you, from 1958-60, but there was no fraternising
allowed between sexes, and what’s more I was there to study, and I was
determined to go into missionary work single rather than be distracted by such a
relationship or finish up in a marriage that would stop that happening.
So I really didn’t know her at all. June was committed to missionary work, but
in South America with a different mission, while my interest was New Guinea.
I had heard about Wycliffe Bible Translators first when I was still back home in
Tasmania and an 18-year-old, but June did not hear about it until during Bible
College. But her “calling from God” was to be a Bible translator in South
America, and she chose an organisation that would take her there.
Funnily enough, we finished up together in a missionary boarding house the
next year, in Kew, where June was a housekeeper/assistant cook. A number of
out-of-Melbourne young people boarded there, including our soloist today and
the young lady who became his wife.
Many evenings she helped me with theology studies for two subjects that
I had previously failed in college, and at the end of the year, after I had sat the
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exams but before I knew that I had failed the exams again, I took her out,
down to Portsea I think, as a thankyou. There were absolutely no sparks for me,
and I didn’t even notice until later that she had a completely new outfit on.
But something happened down there, and we found ourselves holding hands as
we walked along the beach.
But then, despite a strong attraction we suddenly felt for one another, God’s
orders to us had to come first, so we backed off and I left the boarding home.
I went ahead with joining Wycliffe Bible Translators early in 1962, for going to
New Guinea, and in March June went to Sydney to finalise her application to go
to South America. “Sorry,” each of the two council members said separately,
“you have to do more study and preparation with us; by then you will be thirty
and we won’t take you that old, so you may as well withdraw your application.”
Rejection? Depression? June said later that she wanted to whoopee in front of
them, but didn’t. She rang me and said that they had turned her down, and that if
I wanted her she would come with me. In my typical inability in those days to
communicate, I didn’t answer her. She then told me when her train would arrive
at Spencer St, and if I was there she would take it we were to move forward
together. I did meet her. The Wycliffe council accepted her on the 31st March,
despite being rejected by the other mission and that same day she got on her
faithful motor scooter and went up to Belgrave Heights where I was cooking at a
youth camp and we quietly put the ring on her finger and moved on from there.
As a little aside, June spent many, many months at the beginning of our
marriage worrying about whether her cooking was up to my standards as a cook,
as I had had several months as cooking assistant here and there, but I finally
convinced her I was not a cook, and everything was okay, as long as she would
cook me some things that my mother had cooked too. It was also not my role as
the man of the house to do the cooking anyway, as my upbringing had shown
me! I had a lot of years later on to be forced into a change of mind and role
about that point.
The 16th June we married, and the 31st July we were completely packed up for
shipping stuff and on a plane for the overnight trip to New Guinea.
By this stage and since, as many of you might know, June was very black and
white in her standards, despite confessing in her recent biography that she lied
well as a little girl. My first real sample of this absoluteness – well, second
actually, if you consider that she would not consider coming with me when she
felt her calling from God was to South America -- was when the minister who
was to marry us pointed out to her that these days you don’t have to promise to
obey your husband, you can get away with some other word. “No,” she said,
“the Bible says to obey your husband, and if I don’t promise to I may not.”
It’s interesting to see how that works out in practice. It was rarely an issue,
even if there may have been a lot of hard talking in decision-making along the
way, but when push came to shove and I put my foot down about something,
she accepted it and lived with it, even if she didn’t agree with it.
You might find that hard to believe, but she always had very high standard
under God and sticking with Bible standards.
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Gwen, who we met very early in our PNG days, is going to talk about our
work, but I will just say that, in hindsight, I don’t know where things would
have finished up for me without June, and these four New Testaments would
probably not exist. I will just say that June was very intelligent, and if it was not
for financial constraints forcing her to leave school at the end of grade 10 she
probably would have gone to university. Who knows, we may then never have
met. She refused to make anything of it, but I was very impressed and proud of
the fact the when we first came down here into retirement, the head of the
linguistics department at Canberra University made a special trip down to
Ferntree Gully, to invite June to enrol as a mature-age student for a PhD
programme, based on what he had seen that she had written as a full grammar
description of the Kaugel language in which we had worked. I wanted her to go
for it, but for several reasons she did not.
I will just briefly touch on relationships. June’s love for me was absolute,
and she took her responsibilities in our relationship very seriously. I am very
grateful.
She wanted six children, but in the end she thanked God for the two children
He did give us to love. And eventually eight grandchildren through their
marriages. She could multi-task, sitting in the village at a long desk schooling
one child on her left and one on her right, while working on language projects in
front of her, and, importantly, keeping me fed three times a day, as well as
relating to village people along the way. One of our children was easy to teach,
but the other was not so easy! That multi-tasking was no big deal for her, and is
part of the frustration for her in recent years, that she couldn’t do it any more.
She continued working too, most of the many years that she lay on her back
with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. One example of her brain working, and also
her pleasure in general interacting, was that she memorised the names of every
nurse that ministered to her in these last years.
June was very disciplined in her devotional and prayer life, praying regularly
for a lot of people and world-wide situations, and daily for a list of people for
whom she had a special burden.
Cancer, like premature death, is for every one else, even after it has changed
the lives of a sister and sister-in-law of mine and their spouses who, thankfully,
are still with us. My 98-year-old Mother really struggled with having three of
her girls with cancers, though never blamed God and prayed daily for all of us to
the end of her days on earth quite recently, before going to her heavenly reward.
June had severe indigestion and reflux for around six months from midMarch 2011, and a gastroscopy then revealed “a nasty”, as the doctor called it. It
was unfortunate for June and me that he told her this just after she came out of
the anaesthetic and before I could be there with her. When it was confirmed and
June found that she might have only months to live, with one of the most
untreatable cancers, she told the oncologist, “I’m ready to die. I have no fear of
death as I trust God for what’s on the other side.” I could almost see her growing
her wings, as I looked on and listened.
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Serious discussion brought her back to earth somewhat, and consideration of
those here who loved her. I did not know what a reasonable prayer to God was,
but my immediate prayer wish was that we could celebrate our 50th wedding
anniversary the next June. As it happened, we not only celebrated our 50th, but
I think even the oncologist was surprised that we celebrated our 51st as well this
last 16th June. Not only that, we thank God that we had two ministry trips back
to Papua New Guinea, even if not with all of the same freedoms as previous
trips. The last two years and a bit have had their lows of course, along with
some ups. June’s faith in God never wavered, and, even as one who believes in
life with God after death for those who believe in Jesus, I was still absolutely
amazed at the absolute certainty which June so frequently expressed and in the
end pleaded for to Father God and His Son Jesus, as life became harder and
harder. You will know that I was alone with June every night when she was not
in hospital, though it was reaching the point of uncertainly as to how much
longer I could physically look after her at home. I was thankful in the end that I
had decided to keep her home. It is unbelievable to me that God in His mercy
allowed that Peter especially, but along with his Michelle and Steve, would be
with me from midnight Friday to 3.27am Saturday when June took her last
breath, to hold and help her to the end. And at 3.40 we were able to ring the
nurse on duty to come and deal with final things.
I must acknowledge here with grateful thanks the wonderful support and
understanding of medical people since we started this final journey with June
over these last two years plus.
And without minimising what others did, I have to say that the Eastern
Palliative Care nurses and system is tops, 24/7.
And at the very end, our GP heard a report from a health nurse, requiring
another prescription, and came out to see us in his lunch hour on the Friday
to confirm what he heard, and pray for us, and then rang me on the Saturday
afternoon to see where things were. He was an encouragement to me too at
times on my journey with June, and talking through it all with me on that
Friday and Saturday.
We were surprised that the Palliative Care group also provided services
beyond medical nursing, one being helping patients write personal biographies.
I snapped that up. They are volunteers, and Nanette was wonderful, efficient and
patient. June made notes for twelve recording sessions on Friday mornings,
which Nanette took away and typed up, until June ran out of physical and
mental energy. But together they did cover quite a lot of ground. They gave us
two hard copies of the Biography, which includes some photos, and a CD.
Thankyou Nanette, and the system that made it possible.
I also must acknowledge a band of hundreds of prayer supporters around
the world, who hung on every email report I sent out, and prayed and wrote.
And Wycliffe folk stood with us, especially Cecily from the Member Care
department. Meals came from many, but especially from my neighbour Tahanee.
Who have I missed? I thank you all.
What have I not said? Lots.
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The cameo of June’s life would not have happened if our two elder granddaughters had not stepped up to the plate at the last minute. I thank them.
I don’t know how I feel. I want June back, but not the person who was
suffering so much at the end, with neither of us having quality of life. But we
had many wonderful years together, for which I thank God, both in our personal
lives and in ministry for God together.
I will be forever thankful that God gave me June before I headed off into the
unknown. It’s hard to believe she’s gone. To Him be the thanks and glory for
our relationship and for anything we accomplished together, and may the day
come even yet when many Kaugel people will accept and be blessed by the
Scriptures that we were able to leave with them, in written and audio form.
oOoOoOoOo
June’s years in WBT and Papua New Guinea
(By fellow member Gwen Gibson)
A friend sent me this just a few days ago:
June was a person who knew how to care – and did care.
a person who knew how to pray – and did pray.
a person who knew how to love – and did love.
much more could be added to this list.
I am to speak of June’s time spent in New Guinea. That is a large portion of her
life as she & Rob spent almost 50 years in PNG. So of necessity I will only
cover certain things but many things will be left out.
I first met June, I think it was in 1962 at their farewell meeting here in
Melbourne as they were going to PNG for the first time. It was also my
welcome home after my first term in PNG. I was thrilled to see this young
enthusiastic couple all set for translation work.
When I returned to PNG in 1963 I hardly recognized Rob as he had lost so much
weight and looked so ill. He had been very ill and was diagnosed with an
incurable disease and people expected them to return home. But NO, as June
said to me over the years “the Lord called us to PNG and as yet He has not
called us to go home.” Rob was able to stabilize himself with medication which
he has to take daily. BUT much to their disappointment the Director and other
leaders decided they could not go to a village and do translation as Rob needed
to always be close to medical attention so they needed to take a role as support
workers and live at Ukarumpa, so they were appointed to the Finance Office
where they worked very well for a number of years.
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By that time it was obvious that both of them were coping very well,
Rob had balanced his medication and regained his weight and was living a
normal life, so they were allowed to go out to a village just two hours driving
distance from Ukarumpa where they were to do Literacy work for some months
and see how they coped with village life. .
Just as a little aside: They were actually just two miles down the road from
where my partner and I worked, though there were two completely different
languages. At that time there were lots of visitors to Ukarumpa, and they were
sent out to our Kanite village for an experience because we were close to
Ukarumpa. There was no one living at the Usarufa village at that time, and we
used to always have to give them a cup of tea when they arrived after being on
that horrible road. But then when June and Rob were there, they came to their
place first, and when they got to our place and we offered them tea they would
say, “Oh no. June’s just served us hot scones and cups of tea.” “Well,” we told
them, “you wouldn’t have got that at our place.” It turned out that June had
prepared a dry mix of scone dough, and whenever she heard a vehicle come over
the mountain behind them and people would call out and say “Here they come,”
she would add water and put it in the oven, and have hot scones ready when the
visitors came.
After they both did so well and coped well with village life they were allowed
to go to a language group and do translation.
So they allocated in the Western/Southern highlands, in a village 8 – 10
hours drive away, depending on the state of the road, as all of this is in steep
mountain terrain. It is a very large language according to PNG standards with a
population of approx 80 thousand speakers. They found there were distinct
dialects in this area and they finished up by printing 4 different New Testaments
and lots of literacy books and materials in all of these.
If you said to June that is a colossal task she would quickly say “Oh! Rob is the
translator!” She didn’t mention the fact that she checked the translation and did
the back to English translation, which is necessary to have the translation
checked by a translation consultant. You can’t do this without knowing the
language well. She was also excellent at grammar, and solved the grammar
pattern for that language, and later became a Grammar consultant helping other
teams. Did you know that every language has its own distinct Grammar pattern
which needs to be solved to do an accurate translation?
Their accommodation varied according to the dialect they were in.
At their second place they had an excellent house with all iron roof and a wood
fire stove so as they could have warmth for the cold mornings and nights, and it
even had an indoor toilet. It was built by another couple that decided to leave
and do further training. Their first house was bigger than village houses with
more rooms, but mostly built of bush materials with an outhouse toilet.
I don’t think any of the other places were like that. I know one place they stayed
at, they lived in something like a small trailer camper that they took out there.
I only saw one picture of the inside of it, there was room for their bed and they
had two large cardboard boxes they had their computers on, and I think they sat
on folding chairs, there was a small 2 burner gas stove and that was about it.
June told me they ate sitting on their bed. They had no heating.
They did put up two solar panels outside so as they had power to run their
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computers and I know the solar panels were stolen at one point. That sort of
place would be OK for a few days if you were young and on holidays, and only
ate and slept there. But they were there for some weeks and were busy working
all the time. It was really close fellowship!
In other places I think it was just a village house they lived in.
But I never heard June complain
They were an amazing team and worked around and with, many difficulties and
health issues. I visited them out in the village twice. The first time I was there,
while we were visiting, a village man came to the door and asked for Rob. Rob
went and then I heard shouting and yelling going on and I said to June “What’s
he so mad about?” She laughed and said “Oh! He’s not mad; that’s just the way
they talk.” I just thought of quietly-spoken Rob having to deal with people like
that. It was all such a contrast to the easy going jovial people I worked with
in the Eastern Highlands. It was also at a higher altitude about 7,000 ft (21/2
thousand meters) and only 9 degrees from the equator.
From their area you can looked across to a mountain that goes higher than the
tree line and is just rocks near the top and is often covered in snow.
This altitude suited June as she found the heat hard. Most people think of
tropics when they think of New Guinea but when a cold wind comes from that
mountain it is anything but tropics. It can be very cold at night and at times they
had severe frosts which caused devastation to the people’s gardens and they
would all be hungry. At one stage the people suffered so much that June & Rob
bought and distributed food to help many of them.
But what made it all so hard was that mostly there was very little spiritual
interest. But June and Rob laboured on. After printing the N.T.s they then
recorded much of the New Testament to go on little portable players, but they
had trouble getting readers to help them and those who they could get were not
expert readers so that has involved long tedious days and months of editing the
recordings which is still being done.
As one of June’s friends wrote, “June & Rob are a couple who persevered over
many difficulties and discouragements. Every one of them would cause teams to
reconsider their call to the work, but quitting was not an option for them.”
A number of times they were attacked by what we call “rascals’ in P.N.G.,
which are often armed gangs that cause havoc to people.
Once at Ukarumpa while they were walking together along the road, they were
held up by a man with a machete as he attacked, Rob held up his arm to protect
his head and his arm was cut but then the fellow ran away.
The road they drove to the village was notoriously bad and once while
returning to Ukarumpa they were held up and left standing on the road as their
vehicle with all their goods including their computers and all the work they had
been doing while in the village was driven away. Wonderfully a car came along
and picked Rob & June up and they were able to get safely to Ukarumpa. Their
response was “Praise the Lord we were not harmed,” as often these criminals
strip the people, take watches and rings etc and rape the women. Wonderfully,
the vehicle was returned unharmed. I think this is correct that as the rascals
drove down a side road, and even though it was not in the Heads’ language area,
the people living in villages along the road recognized the vehicle as being
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Rob & June’s. It was a distinctive green Pajero. The people who obviously
held the Heads in high respect were furious and stopped the vehicle and the
rascals ran away and the village people brought the vehicle back with everything
unharmed. A miracle of the Lord.
The other persistent difficulty was illness which plagued them on & off for
many years. When my co-worker Joy McCarthy had CFS (Chronic Fatigue
Syndrome) June was one of Joy’s visitors and she had the wonderful gift of
encouragement, and instead of being exhausted after a visit, Joy was usually
encouraged. June said to Joy “I am going to have our family pray at our
breakfast table every morning for you.” Nola & Peter had joined the family by
then and so they as a family prayed faithfully for Joy. After some time Joy
recovered but we were so upset when some months later we heard June was ill
with CFS. As many of you know June battled with CFS on and off for the rest
of her life. It seems to be always lurking in the body and appears especially at
the time of a bad cold or ‘flu.
I used to visit June when she was ill, and before I went I’d think of news of
various people we knew to tell her. But always she already knew all about it
and could tell me about their children as well. To begin with I thought she was
just a ‘sticky beak’ and wanted to know everyone’s business, but I soon changed
my idea and realized June was praying for them.
Everyone I have asked for their thoughts of June has mentioned what a great
woman of prayer she was. As one friend said June enjoyed and thrived on
being with people and interacting with them. As she lay for many months and
even years too weak to get up she would spend her time praying for people and
their families and also speaking to many on the phone.
But she was still in control of all that was happening in the house from her bed
or couch. Fortunately Rob was able to get a helper in from the language group,
so was able to continue working on translation and that helper would help in the
house and do the dishes etc. all under June’s Instructions.
When she recovered she would bounce right back to her usual busy self. I saw
her rushing up a hill one day and said “June, where do you get your energy?”
She said, “I have two speeds, run & stop.” How true that was.
She was a highly organized and disciplined person, and was an independent
thinker in many ways. June & Rob both took a very active interest in the affairs
of the Branch and attended all the meetings whenever they were at Ukarumpa.
Back in the days when we were a smaller Branch, at our Conferences it was
open to the people from the floor to discuss issues, often Rob would speak
against a motion and a little later June would speak for it. We often were
amused as when it came to a vote by raising our hands often June would vote
for something and Rob would vote against it. That didn’t seem to worry them
they just accepted each other as they were.
June & Rob loved music. As one friend wrote,
“June always had classical music playing, and I never heard a cross word in all
the many hours I spent with her when she was ill, she continued to keep in touch
by phone with so many so as she could pray for them. When she was well she
celebrated holidays and birthdays royally, and made special food for certain
holidays. Routine was very important to her and she was organized keeping
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track in her record book of every cent spent. There was a time and reason for
everything done, and she always made sure their prayer letters were sent out on
time.”
But I found out she was very disciplined except in one thing. One friend who
she often visited while at Ukarumpa wrote,
“One of our favourite things was to do a jig-saw puzzle. The time would come
when June needed to stop and go home and get the meal, but there was always
just that one more piece of the puzzle to find, and then she would go, but
when she found that piece there was just the next piece to find and so it went on
until Rob would phone to ask when she was coming home and she will say ‘Yes
I’m coming’ but then there was still just one more piece to find. So she was not
perfect, and loved jig saw puzzles.”
In closing I would like to say:
June was faithful to the task in spite of all the obstacles, difficulties and
opposition over the almost 50 years in PNG. In spite of all that has happened to
them, June & Rob have continued faithful to the work God gave them to do.
The Lord sustained and encouraged them along the way, and gave them many
friends who prayed and provided for their needs, not only Wycliffe friends
but also other mission folk and many, many people here at home.
The work June & Rob have done has not been in vain in the Lord.
I love the last verse in 1 Corinthians c.15:
Always give yourself fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that
your labour in the Lord is not in vain.
I know June has received a warm welcome home to the Lord she loved so dearly
with the words, “Well done good and faithful servant.”
May all of us who come behind be found faithful as June was faithful.
oOoOoOoOo
Eulogy by daughter Nola, on behalf of her and Peter
Mum was probably not your typical or average Australian Mum.
For a start she brought her two children up in a third world country,
living amongst a people group whose language, customs and ways were
very different from her own. But in other ways she was just a typical
Mum.
Whether they are praising us or scolding us, mums always seem to have
a quotable one-liner waiting to let us know exactly what they think.
Mum was no exception…she had those one-liners down pat…
Elbows off the table!
Don’t talk with your mouth full!
Will you look at the dirt on the back of your neck…and…
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A little soap and water never killed anybody (both of those
probably more pertinent to Peter).
It’s all fun and games until somebody gets hurt.
If the wind changes your face will stay like that.
I’ll give you something to cry about…
and…yes…that was applicable to me.
If I’ve told you once I’ve told you a thousand times.
Do you think I was born yesterday?
Why…because I said so…that’s why!
And
Money doesn’t grow on trees.
…Even last week in the midst of her struggles to communicate,
as I was helping her into a clean nightie, she managed to say…
“Nighties don’t grow on trees you know…”
As children we may not have appreciated these one-liners,
but certainly as adults we not only appreciated them but also
appreciated her humour which endeared her to everyone she came in
contact with. No one more so than her grandchildren who can sit and
recount for hours the many laughs they have had with her over the
years.
Mum was brought up in the era when all women learned and were
expected to excel in the skills of cooking, sewing and knitting.
She never really thought of herself as a marvellous cook and it wasn’t
until I had a family of my own that I appreciated her skills as a mum in
this area. There aren’t too many women who can cook a loaf of bread
in a roasting pan on a single burner kerosene primus or plan and
purchase enough food to last a family of four for several months.
Sewing was not her favourite pastime but she was a fabulous knitter
and when we were young kids I don’t remember her ever idly sitting;
she always had those knitting needles in her hands creating jumpers
and cardigans for Peter and myself, many which looked like Joseph’s
coat of many colours.
Mum was a vibrant woman who, I think everyone would agree, had a
passion for life. Her commitment to her family was characterized by
strength, courage, faith and determination.
Strength to cope with all the physical demands of bringing up children
in a harsh environment. This meant making a home in an environment
where houses are constructed out of rough bush materials, where there
was no running water and the only electricity was provided by a small,
noisy generator. Where the nearest supermarket was 2 hours’ drive
away over a rough and at times dangerous road.
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Courage to believe that the will of God would not take her family
where the grace of God would not sustain them. Although I am not so
sure that she showed courage when Dad would drive through the
muddy landslides on the terrible roads in Papua New Guinea. She
would make us kids walk to the other side with her where we would
stand and watch while Dad manoeuvred the vehicle slipping and sliding
through the mud. She would stand with her back turned saying that she
would not watch in case Dad slid off over the edge of the cliff and for
us to watch and tell her when he had got through safely.
Faith to trust that God would watch over her children when she was
unable to physically be there with them.
Determination to cope with the pressures of home schooling her
children while Bible translating and maintaining a home. Quite often
this determination was needed more than other times. Peter was a bit
of a mischievous boy and was not particularly interested in schooling
… he was more interested in going off into the bush with his friends.
I was probably a bit more ‘boring’ and just did the work I was assigned.
Mum was determined he would get his work done even if it meant
coping with a young boy who would climb the exposed studs of the
walls of the classroom; swing through the exposed rafters of the roof
singing as he did so “Tarzan climbs, Tarzan swings, Tarzan falls,
Tarzan calls…bring the bandaids...” as he landed on my desk.
Billy Graham once remarked that ‘Only God Himself fully appreciates
the influence of a Christian mother in the moulding of character in her
children’
This may be true… but Peter and I are very thankful and very
appreciative of the role and influence that Mum has had in our lives
and our respective families’ lives over the years.
I want to finish this morning with the verse in John 14:19, where Jesus
said, ‘Because I live, you too shall live also.’ This is what takes the sting
out of death. It is none other than the Lord Jesus Christ who rescues
us from the fear of the grave. He is the one, who in dying, destroyed
death. He has removed death’s sting, and causes us to look at death not
as a disaster, but as a means by which we are ushered into the presence
of God and into eternal glory.
oOoOoOoOo
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Tribute Poem by Michelle Blackmore, Peter’s fiancée
I actually wrote this for Mum June the week before she died, and I
didn’t get a chance to read it to her then, so I’m going to read it now.
I'm sorry that I cried today and that you saw my tears
You stole a big part of my heart, it has been yours for years
I miss your smile and cheeky laugh, not seen it in a while
I close my eyes remembering that laugh and cheeky smile
I'm sorry that I cried today and said my feelings so
And through my tears I blurted out
"I DON'T WANT YOU TO GO!”
You looked me in the eye and said "it won't be too long now"
I know you're tired of fighting, and it's in God's hands from now
Every moment with you, I cherish my Mum June.
You have been an inspiration to me before we even met.
You don't know that I researched you and your missionary work
in Papua New Guinea, weeks before we met in person.
I was amazed then and continue to be amazed now, at your
strength, your faith, and your loyalty... everything about you!
One of the most significant people to bless my life,
AND through the love of my life Peter!
I will always remember vividly the first time we met,
Christmas day in 2008 at our home in McKenzie Lane.
You walked in the door and hugged me!
I have often told people, that I have never seen a mother
embrace her son the way you do,
as if he had been away for months fighting in a war!
You always held him and shut your eyes so tight like it was the first or
last time. That's just the passion you have for your kids!
I Love you Little Lady (my pet name for you). xoxoxoxoxoxo
Peter added:
“I love you Mum, and thanks!”
oOoOoOoOo
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EULOGY FOR MY DEAR SISTER-IN-LAW JUNE
[By David Head; - follows on from Nola, Michelle and Peter’s Eulogies]
I think when you consider the hardships that there were in the early days of
the kids growing up as they did, they turned out to be pretty good adults,
didn’t they? Two lovely, well balanced, capable, adults……
….--- middle-aged adults actually! 
Well I’m David, as David (Cummings) said, and I’m one of the younger
brothers of Rob, and I’ve got a few thoughts from the Head Clan.
I want to thank you on behalf of our family for coming. I know David has
welcomed you but it’s lovely to see so many here and it just shows us as a
family how you appreciate Rob and particularly June, so thank you for coming,
that’s really beaut.
There are some from Ulverstone here, in Tasmania, from the Baptist church
which was Rob’s sending church when he went to college and off to the mission
field, and I think it is so lovely that when (Vicar) Stephen mentioned earlier
about this being June’s home church, (St. Hilary’s, Kew) her sending church to
college and the mission field, and what I think is probably rather extraordinary,
that two churches have supported one couple in a variety of ways over half a
century. I don’t know how many other missionaries would have had that
situation. Supporters come and go, but, I think that’s extraordinary, so, thank
you to St. Hilary’s for being part of that.
I just want to say something briefly to Rob publicly, as one of his siblings,
and I want to say we admire your courage and determination. It’s been many
months, and particularly over these last weeks. I’ve personally seen good men
fall by the wayside when they’ve come under this sort of mental, emotional,
physical, and spiritual pressure. But you’ve stuck it out to the end. Over fifty
one years ago you said “For richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till
death us do part.” And you stuck it out; you fulfilled that vow. But you know,
I believe quite strongly that it was nothing to do with that vow 51 years ago that
you’re here and we’re here together today, it’s because of your wonderful love
for your dearly beloved June, your wife. We are very proud of you, Brother.
These glasses don’t focus as well as they did a moment ago, I’ll have to go and
see the optician again.
[Insert: David is the sibling who was carer, with his wife Suzanne’s support,
for fourteen years for our Dad, who died at 104 just a few years ago,
and then for our Mother, who died just a few months ago at nearly 99.]
A few memories from our family of June.
We were quite small when Rob brought June home to visit the family before
they got married.
I was about ten at the time, and us little kids hid behind the couch. In retrospect
that was probably very insightful...., but we had all been told about this lovely
new sister that we were going to have, so Rob and June came in and Elizabeth
was just astounded, “How can someone so old be my sister?” I mean, June was
25 at the time let’s face it, but Elizabeth has found that over the decades their
ages have closed, and that barrier has ceased to be a barrier long, long ago.
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Stephen has a memory. I’d just say that Stephen and his wife Jocelyn, Stephen
is one of our brothers, is ministering in the States at the moment and could not
make it home, but email is a wonderful thing and Stephen’s memory of the first
time June came home, was that he just happened to be the right person in the
wrong place at the right time, he was in the kitchen with June. June dropped a
sauce bottle - it broke! Dad immediately blamed Stephen for the problem. And
our dear, honorable Stephen, as what?..., about a 14-year-old or something,
didn’t say it was June’s fault, he accepted the blame and I understand that he
and June’s eyes caught, there was a wink and a nod and that bond has never
ceased, through those fifty odd years, which is a lovely thought and we’ve all
grown to Love and Admire our dear Sister June. She’s very special.
Geoffrey, as the youngest, has a life-long scar that June caused. I’m not sure
that she’s aware of this, but he was about seven when we all went to the airport
to see Mother off to the wedding, to Rob and June’s wedding in Melbourne;
poor little “Geoffie”; his mummy was going away and he was never going to see
her again.  He’s never quite recovered from that.
Now our Dad was a great debater. He lived to be 104, and was still prepared
to debate at that age. He was a great debater and some would say he liked to
argue, I think it’s nicer if we think it is debating. He would win at any cost,
even if it meant changing sides during the argument. Most of us were sensible
and shrank away. But then came June --- and I think we saw that Dad had met
his match. Now don’t get me wrong, June was not a women’s libber, but -- she
strongly believed that her opinion was at least equal to anyone else’s. This
caused a bit of a problem between her and Dad initially, but they learnt to
admire and respect each another, they both had very bright brains and so that
was really nice, and June, to keep her brain bright, as Gwen has mentioned, did
crosswords, Sudokus, Scrabble - our Scrabble at 28, got thoroughly worn out
over the years, jigsaws were always on the go, and there was knitting; and
certainly not least, working in four foreign languages in Papua New Guinea.
She was even a poet. You know June took a keen interest in her nephews and
nieces. Everyone has already said that she loved to interact with people and be
helpful, and pray for people, and she loved her nieces and nephews, and when
our brother Stephen and Jocelyn’s little Andy died about thirty years ago,
June wrote a poem for that funeral, which was rather nice, and it sticks
very tightly in Stephen and Jocelyn’s mind as something very special. So June’s
had a big impact on her nieces and nephews, she took them under her wing, and
when they struggled she helped them, she stayed there through thick and thin
with them.
We only saw June for a few weeks about every 5 years, as we grew up, when
they came home on furlough, so most of our getting to know June was through
letters and praying for her, and Rob of course.
Now our dear Mother, who has only left us to go to glory about five months
ago at nearly 99, but she didn’t have any daughter-in-laws, she only gained extra
daughters when us boys got married. And my wife Suzanne and Jocelyn and
June would have acknowledged that Mother treated them just like our sisters
Rosemary and Elizabeth. They were just Daughters, which was rather special.
Mother has prayed for June ever since she discovered her when she came home,
and has prayed over those 52 years for June, every day, along with the rest of
her kids. And as Mother was approaching 99 just recently in the nursing home,
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she would ask us every day, “How’s June? How’s she doing? What can I pray
specifically about today?” and that was very special.
June of course being industrious, whenever she was at 28, at home, she was
always making jam or preserves with Mother, and Mother, knowing just how
much she appreciated the fresh apricots off the tree, would always try and keep
some frozen ones for when June came home and “NO, you mustn’t touch them,
they’re for June.” And June would make sure there weren’t any left before she
left. She loved apricots.
Have any of you had a meal at June’s place? Have you discovered that if you
don’t eat fast enough your dish is gone and washed up before you’ve finished?
She was pretty slick on dishes, she doesn’t like untidiness and so that was one
little thing.
A number of us siblings have actually stayed in Papua New Guinea at
different times with Rob and June. So we’ve experienced firsthand just how
capable she was in that type of environment. And Gwen, it was great what you
said about the various houses, so I won’t repeat that, but just to say that where
the little camper-trailer was, which was very small, and they lived in that for a
long time and we were there with them, Suzanne and I for a little while, and
experienced that, [though not actually sleeping in the camper], and their toilet
was over t-h-e-r-e [quite a distance off], and it was a woven grass shelter about a
metre or so high, so I struggled a bit, and no door, you hung something of your
clothing on a peg so that everyone knew you were in there. When you were in
there and settled, you could see through a big hole in the wall, down the valley,
the buses and people, and you didn’t dare have your mobile phone or anything
else in your pocket when you ....... there was no retrieval I’ll tell you that. So,
you know, they were pretty primitive conditions, and for people, especially
when they got as old as they did towards the end..... That’s a significant
commitment.
Have you ever tried walking with June? Gwen mentioned it. Well there’s
only one person who walks faster than June, and that’s Rob, June was always
just a few paces behind Rob. I haven’t got this written, I’m sorry David, but
when Rob was home having his thyroid done, he couldn’t speak very much and
struggled with breathing. I walked over town with him, and by the time we got
nearly back home I was half the length of this church behind him, and he was
talking all the time, and he called over his shoulder, “Ah, I’m finding it so hard
to talk and walk at the same time.” But June was pretty slick too and I
remember her in her Blunnies, her Blunstone boots, or gumboots, or heavy
walking shoes. She was a pretty solid sort of lady in the way she lived and
behaved. Always practical, but had a skirt and blouse on. Not a feminist, she
was feminine. She was a lovely lady.
A thought that Rosemary had. June loved to communicate in any way she
could – letters, cards, emails, and “Young people, was she ever on Facebook?”
“No”, didn’t quite make Facebook, but I tell you what, she found any way...
[audience comment] she... right... she text the kids and grandkids. She found
any way at all to communicate with everyone. Rosemary, just in recent months
got a text saying, “Check your emails.” [said gruffly], well that’s how Rosemary
read it, so she did, and found that one had come in only an hour before, and June
was wanting an answer. Well, most of us don’t check emails every hour, but
when they talked on the phone the next time, June explained that it wasn’t meant
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to sound gruff, just that June needed an answer, to be able to move on.
So, that was our June.
She had many hard times, but she was an example to us of stamina,
determination, and great faith. June and Rob visited Tasmania and came to our
mid-week home group and I just need to mention, there are a couple of folk here
who have come to support Suzanne and I from our Home Group in Ulverstone
Baptist, and another couple, one of whom went to college, here, at MBI, with
June. Anyway, June and Rob came and shared with the group about their faith
journey, and June at that point had been crook for a long time and the group
were just so impressed with her stamina and her faith, and in fact, in our group
now, whenever we start talking about faith or determination, we don’t talk about
Elijah or Moses or Abraham or Paul, they say, “Ah, June...… .” I feel quite
chuffed about it, and proud, you know.... that’s my sister.
Well June, what can I say?
June’s quest for the whole of her adult life was to share the good news of Jesus
to everybody; it didn’t matter where they were. And I think she would say to us
all, using words from Scripture, she’d say, Love the Lord your God with all your
heart, and mind, and soul, and strength, and love your neighbor, and family, and
friends the way you love yourself. June was a very significant and lovely part of
our family. She was a great example to us all. And we know she’s enjoying life
right now with the Lord, and worshipping, she’s looked forward to this for so
long; --- BUT she is and will be sorely missed!
oOoOoOoOo
Comments/Eulogies/Tributes about June
from sympathy cards and emails at her death
(You may occasionally guess the source of comments,
but I (Rob) have tried to make it hard to. A selection; I may not have them all.
Please forgive me if you wrote something that would fit here that has slipped.)
** An email from a brother and sister in-law, responding to an email from me, on 17 Nov 2013:
We hear what you're saying in the email and I must say that we are very sad for you
both and us. June, we know that you are looking forward to Glory and we're sorry
you are having this struggle on the way, I pray God will give you the strength and
courage to deal with these current issues until He is ready for you. Rob, how could
any of us ever envisage such a struggle and terrible way to end your wonderful,
fulfilling and faithful partnership with such a great woman. Like you, humanly
speaking we thought you-2 would come home to Oz, buy a van and do your
discovery thing and have a well deserved rest after a lifetime on the Mission Field,
but here we all are, with June looking forward to Heaven and the end of suffering,
and you happy for her to go for her sake, but dreading your loss of your beloved.
June, from first meeting you when I hid behind the couch at 28 when Rob brought
you "Home" to meet the family, seeing you in the highlands of PNG through to
now, you have been a sister of great worth and a great example of Faithfulness
to the Family, to Rob, and most of all to our wonderful Lord. You have pushed on
in hard times when most of us would have given up and fallen by the wayside.
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You can also be assured that in being obedient to the Lord through your life, many
have and will go on having the opportunity to become God's children.
June, I'm sure you'll enjoy Heaven and all that goes together with 24/7
Worshipping the Lord with the Angels, Heavenly Host, and those from here on
earth gone before, but in amongst all that splendour I've got to say we will miss
you greatly and want you to know that our lives would be by far the poorer had we
not known and loved you. Thankyou for being a great Sister and a wonderful
support / mate / help meet / friend and lover for my brother.
** (Also pre June’s death:) (“....” was printed on card: )
“Although the words are short and few, This brings the warmest thanks to you.”
Yes, dear June, thanks for your friendship over many years. Thankyou for being a
woman after God’s own heart as David was. Thankyou for sticking with the
Kaugel for many years and giving them the Word of God in their mother tongue.
Thankyou for putting yourself aside to do what the LORD asked you to do.
Thankyou for showing me how to prepare for eternity with Jesus and be prepared
to wake up in Glory and finding that it’s HOME. .... I am so thankful for times
together and lessons learned from your life of devotion, tackling the difficult
and trusting Him totally. …….................
Long-term SIL-PNG lady colleague
** “Poem” to June on a card, back in July 2013, so months before she died: --OUR LORD’S CHERISHED CHILD
Forever a gift from God, / Peaceful in His hands, / A treasure lost forever, /
To all of us and life’s demands! // My Surrogate Mother, / If I may call you that, /
What a dynamic impact, / You have had in fact. //
Your wisdom, and your Grace, / I miss so very much. .........
Neighbour
** Your love radiates to an extent that few people have the pleasure to realise.
It’s a gift you have which I’ve been gifted the pleasure of for these years that we’ve
been neighbours. God knows what a treasure you have been to my family and self.
You both have become our surrogate parents. .......
Also before June’s death -- same neighbour
** The void June left behind is huge. She always encouraged me!
Our 1st Christmas in PNG you hosted us and shared your lives with us.
I remember June telling me how she always loved reading God’s Word from the
time she was a young girl. …………………
SIL-PNG compatriots
** How precious it was to get to know you and work with you and learn from you.
You were a great encouragement, even when I was back in Germany. It has been a
hard time, but in it all June was filled with hope and kept praying for the people
around her. That was incredible. .... I feel the loss. ............
Worked with us in the village for a while
** June…. an extraordinary servant of our Lord. A powerful witness in my life –
her kindness and strength, humility and perseverance, her determination to not be
bound by chronic illness, her cheerfulness in adversity. June was a great role model
for women. Strong and feisty, loyal and committed wife, and an amazing Christian
– her love for her Saviour shone like a beacon. ….........
Lady friend in June’s sending church
** June was such a lovely lady, taken too soon. ..................
Exercise class lady with June in the area where we live;
lost husband to cancer too, in the last year
** June was a soldier / For the Lord. //
Forever faithful / and in accord / With Him the lover / of her soul. //
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She’s with Him now / He’s made her whole. ………………..
Friend and past co-worker; lost her hubbie a few years ago
** Remembering June as a wonderfully dedicated lady. ............
ex PNG members
** Thankyou for the lovely notice in the paper – it really did give a good
understanding of the important things in June’s life and was a witness in itself.
We will always value her friendship, her perceptiveness and encouragement for us
in our difficult times ……......
ex SIL in Asia, and from my (Rob’s) home town
** Twelve months ago (Dec. 2012) you (two) send us a poem “World Christmas”
which I am keeping as it is so true and so relevant. June had written a long email
and was looking outward and upward despite being on chemo and being aware of
the recurrence of the cancer. So much can happen in one year. ...…..
ex PNG
** Many times I've remembered the time when (we two) were "new arrivals" in the
PNG branch back in 1965. We made a trip on the Goroka road to visit Joy and
Gwen and stopped by to visit you and June. I still have the Tomato Soup recipe
that June gave me - what a keeps.
…………..
ex PNG member
(We were in Usarufa then, on the Okapa road before Joy and Gwen’s Kanite village.
Gwen comments in her public eulogy, p75, about that time on that road and June’s scones.)
** We enjoyed hearing your beautiful classical music flowing over to our yard
(at Ukarumpa) as we did Saturday morning chores (next door). Auntie June was an
example to me of her deep joy she had in her Saviour no matter her circumstances
– those many years she was in bed ill, I would come over to play with Nola and she
showed me in her suffering what finding true joy really was. ……………..
A daughter of the next door Ukarumpa family
** We were fortunate to have met June in the twilight years of her life. She was fun
to be with, had a great sense of humour, and always enjoyed a joke. Her company
was always convivial and we were blessed to have known her, even though for just
a short time – a lady we greatly admired. ...........................
A same-street neighbour couple here, who June first met as they and June
did their walks around the neighbourhood streets, and the contact flowered
** We loved June, from the time we met her bedridden at home at Ukarumpa, and
you have both inspired us with your tremendous devotion to translation, even
though we know you went through some very difficult times with it all. ……..
...........................
ex SIL-PNG
** (June’s) persistence and courage, in spite of her health set-backs, has been
remarkable. .... It seems to me that the translation work you two did must have
been very important, or you would not have been attacked and tested as you were.
.................
Friends since 1961 and ex missionaries in another country
** I count it a privilege to have had Auntie June as a friend and role model
for 52 years. ......... A son of very close friends of June’s from before they married in the 50s
** We remember June as a humble, fun, godly woman with a twinkle in her eye.
We are so glad we had the pleasure of meeting you both ---- your lives of love and
sacrificial service are an inspiration to us and many others. ................
Neighbours of and church members in one of son-in-law
Michael’s churches, who became our friends too
** You’ve both been such an encouragement to us over the years and a blessing to
both of us. .........................
Relatives on the Head side
**I remember a time when June had been healed of her chronic fatigue. I would
see her zipping past my window (at Ukarumpa), full of energy and life. One
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afternoon she and (my daughter) came running/skipping down the road laughing
and holding hands. This is the way I want to remember her – full of joy, full of life,
and ready to show her love to a young insecure girl. ………
SIL-PNG colleague
** ..... with great praise to God for your lives and the way you have both served
the LORD is such a way as to show His glory to many people. ........... ex PNG
(“Seeing Glory of God” was the theme June ordered for her funeral service,
so this wording is very impactful to me (Rob).)
** We remember June as a loving, giving, and friendly person who served her Lord
with her whole being. She always accepted us as we were, and in our treasury of
photos we have a nice one of her holding our son when he was quite young. ..........
Head-side relatives
** We have been blessed to travel part of the journey with you and June.
We are thankful for June’s life, ministry, and deep interest in people. ……......
Missionary friends from Bible college days
** I look on June as ‘my friend’, one whose faith in the Lord was strong, who had
a bright smile and good sense of humour and always saw the bright side of life.
Her mind was quick to see problems and often come up with the answers.
I remember the good days we spent together working in the finance office at
Ukarumpa, back in the early days [= 1960s] when she so willingly accepted her
‘group service’ to give us the help we needed --- (My husband) and I really
appreciated her hard work and cheerful ways. …..... Early days ex SIL-PNG member
** June was one of our favourite ladies in PNG. ............
ex SIL-PNG couple
** June was such a special lady – a mentor to me. I have so many good memories
of her – too many to list – but I think I most enjoyed being with her at Highlands
Region prayer meetings. Maybe because prayer was so natural for her – she was
truly herself, and her sense of compassion and humour were at their finest. I really
miss her. ………………….
Wife of an ex PNG translator couple
** June was such a ‘go-getter’. Whenever possible she was a-moving. ....
She touched people’s lives and certainly gave us an example in
contentment/perseverance in life. ....................
ex SIL-PNG couple
** As we think of June’s life, we are reminded of a life of diligence and faithfulness.
One who has put her hand to the plough and not looked back. We thank God for
all her accomplishments for her Lord. She has run a faithful race, always pressing
on towards the goal. ….......
ex PNG missionaries
** It has been my great privilege to know June’s friendship, encouragement and
support these many years, and to share in the fellowship of Bible translation
ministry. I’ve always marvelled at June’s tenacity in prayer, and her faithfulness
despite many obstacles. The loss of her cheery, heartening interest is great. ..........
Friend who works with SIL in Asia
** June always amazed me with her BIG heart and always wanting to know how
things were going for me. Your (for it was always “Rob and June”) work ethic has
been a huge witness to me and your kindness in opening your home. ..........
SIL-PNG school- teacher friend
** We remember June with affection and respect, and her brightness, energy and
tenacity. ……………………………………..
ex SIL-PNG
** We will never forget June, a very special, kind lady to my daughter and to me
and my (ex partner, our neighbour) .... and her prayers for us all. …..
(We’ve met him during his visits from another city to our neighbours. A lonely Christian)
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JUNE HEAD
** So thankful to have known June. She was lovely and welcoming to us. …......
Relatives of an in-law
** Whenever I think of June some words come to mind, like plucky, courageous,
secure faith in her Lord. ………
Boronia friend
** It has been wonderful how much she has done through all her years of ill health.
..... fellow MBI student and missionary elsewhere
** You both held special places in my life and June always knew how to ‘give me a
kick’ when I needed one. I’ll always remember that she prayed for new friends for
me and God answered. ..........
Short-term worker with us in the village
some years ago, and remained a friend since
** ..... so dedicated to all she did, as unto the Lord. I was privileged to share her
with you in the family. ………………..
Head-side relative
** June was always a friend and encourager. …………....
An ex single-lady support-worker in PNG
** I have always thought of you as a special couple, and I look back with great
thankfulness that you were able to visit me three years ago.
[We stayed with her on our 2010 tour.] ........ ex SIL-PNG
** We do admire with thankfulness the ministry and witness you had together –
it was a help and encouragement to us to know you both. ......
Tasmanian supporters couple
** We thank God for her life given to her Lord and her heart for giving God’s
Word to P.N.G. people. .............. Long-term friends, ex New Guinea missionaries
** We have all lost a wonderful friend and soul-mate. June was a kind and faithful
friend to me and I valued her highly. .................
ex SIL-PNG lady
** …... Over these last few months [in fairly frequent visits] I have seen her battle as
the cancer attacked her body, yet her steadfast faith in the Lord was ever present.
Our friendship stretched over more than 60 years, and her steadfast witness,
utmost faith in what she was doing, and her common sense, was wonderful to
share. It was a privilege to have her as my Friend. ………….....
A single-lady close-suburb-Boronia friend since their teens
** She will be greatly missed. I was always amazed at what she was able to do as
she battled all her problems [over many years]. .........
ex SIL-PNG lady colleague.
** June has been an inspiring example of perseverance, courage and commitment
over many years. We join many, many others in giving thanks for her life. ……..
A daughter of supporters, who later became a missionary in another country
** I remember June as a courageous woman who never gave up and pressed on
to reach the goal that the Lord put before her, in spite of physical hardships and
limitations. ………………..….
ex SIL-PNG support worker
** She had a great life, and was a great impact on many many people....
including me. ………………………....
Single-lady ex SIL-PNG
** We have been feeling the loss of our friend June. We have loved her and admired
her (actually both of you), throughout the years and just find it hard to believe that
the world could keep spinning without her. It is hard to let her go even if we all agree
that June is finally free of trials. We praise God our hope is secure. We praise God
for preparing a place for June and for preparing the way for June to get there. But
we grieve for ourselves and especially for you and your family…. SIL-PNG colleagues
** We are saddened to hear the passing on of June on Saturday last week. We stand
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JUNE HEAD
with you and your family and God's people who have stood with you both over
so many, many years of loving ministry to Papua New Guinea. You and June gave
of yourselves unreservedly in providing God's precious Word to the Kaugel people
of Western Highlands and to the rest of PNG. You went out of your way to
encourage, build and develop Papua New Guineans. We have photos of you both
together standing with us in many events and functions. We salute June for her
courage, her passion for the Lord and His ministry to the glory and praise
of Her Lord and Master. .......................
PNG-BTA leader
** A very close relative was overseas and not able to be with us during the grieving/funeral time.
She sometimes fills a page with thoughts with coloured pencils as she meditates and prays.
She says: “When I heard .. My sorrow is deep ... A very special sister and friend.
Here is a photo of some of my prayings and rememberings the day after I heard
the news of her going.” [I, Rob, have to admit that I can see June in the words she uses!]
Your lovely June
JUNE
is written in the middle of the page, and these words radiate from it
Generous / Innocent / Doer-without / Open / Careful / Loyal / Journeyer /
Courageous / Afraid / Laughter / Inviting / Just / Bossy / Joyful / Prayerful /
Persistent / Overcomer /Celebrator / Pioneer / Frugal / Organiser /Hugger /
Faith-filled / Skilled /Fearless / Sharer.
Outside an outer wavy circle:
Known By God / My Sister / !HOME! / Fully Alive / No Suffering / Safe /
No tears / She’s gone / She stays / Crossed over / My friend.
** Dear Heavenly Father, Thankyou ....................... .
Thank you for making this remarkable team who have worked so
diligently and faithfully all of these years in PNG. What a wonderful
testimony to Your grace and love and perseverance.
We pray that their folk there would indeed read Your Word,
and be made truly alive as Your children, so that one day we will all
meet before Your throne. ............
A primary-school teacher at Ukarumpa in
Nola’s time; now in the same role in another country.
oOoOoOoOo
Our son Peter’s current “family”, except for Shannon, at cemetery 28th Nov. 2013:
(Amber &) Jamie, (Chloe &) Steven, Daniel (& Amy), Peter and fiancée Michelle,
and Michelle’s younger son, Cameron (still at home and in grade 11)
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