Ann Staples
Ann Staples lived on Victoria Park Road for 63 years, from 1938-2001, and witnessed many changes in the Kelvin Grove area.
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Transcript
A Donkey's Gallop
So number one here is basically how long you’ve been in Kelvin Grove.
63 years, from 1938 to 2001, just down here on Victoria Park Road.
So you had a few little stories about…
When I was three, the ice man came and left the ice and when I was a stickybeak at three and my mother was very busily shutting up the house because there was a big storm raising, little miss stickybeak pulled the bag down to see what was in it and it fell across my foot and broke two bones in my foot. It was a big block of ice. And the same time a man got electrocuted on the golf course because he went and stood under the tree as the lightning struck. And it struck him.
You used to get up to tricks when you were a kid, didn’t you?
Yeah, well it was mostly my sister because she was very shy, but when in her own yard…we used to stand on the fence and give cheek over the fence...because I got tired of standing on the fence and I jumped down and sliced my heel open on a sardine tin. So that was that story. In 1942 my sister took sick and mum had got her own doctor down and he just said, oh she’s got the flu, give her a couple of aspirin. And mum knew it was more than that, so I got the army doctor over who was visiting the AWL camp and he came and looked and stood at the bedroom door and took one look at my sister and said to mum, oh have you been to see a doctor with this child? And mum said, yeah and he said, well get an ambulance and take her to hospital. That was on a Saturday morning and on Tuesday she died. She had spinal meningitis. At different times the army had pass out parades up on the top, actually Gona Barracks, but it wasn’t called that then—just called the Barracks in those days. I never knew it as Gona Barracks. We used to go up there for pass out parades and then they’d get in the hall and have games and funs and things like that. And we played a game called 'Under and Over', and of course the guys running it used to have a few sherbets under their tails…
And your engagement party was there wasn’t it?
No, it was in a different hall. It was in a hall closer to my back gate. The army wouldn’t lend it out to me, but the guys in the army building, they hired the hall and then lent it to me, but of course some of them came to the party as well. And that was in 1957. And that’s the story of my life. Short and sweet like a donkey’s gallop.
