Born into this World on 3^rd June, 1907: Passed to God on 6^th April, 2007

Anne Segal, mother of Graham and Ian, passed away peacefully in the early evening of 6th April 2007 doing what she enjoyed: having a cup of tea and a natter with her friends at the Three Trees Retirement Home. One of the ladies having tea with Anne told me that at the time of Anne’s passing all appeared well and Anne was her normal cheerful self, contributing to the conversation. Suddenly however, she unexpectedly looked up towards heaven in mid-sentence, stood up and raised her arms as if embracing or welcoming God and then settled peacefully back in her chair. She died in that instant without pain, without suffering, without regret. We, her remaining family, are grateful to God for such a quick passing.

We know she had no regrets because she had told everyone who ever visited her that she did not wish to reach her 100th birthday. She passed away eight weeks prior to it. Anne, for the most part, enjoyed good health right to the end. She had had some serious bouts with illness in earlier times. But she had a strong will to live and a strong constitution, and was always able to pull through the difficult times.

Anne Segal is a complex woman to characterise.

She was opinionated, yet selfless; she was compassionate and helpful in her dealings with others less fortunate; and throughout her life she was dependable and loyal to her ideals, her sense of justice, her friends and her family. She was both knowledgeable and thoughtful about life in general and she tempered her views about life with a broad-minded and worldly wise attitude. She was extremely patriotic.

In December 2001, the Prime Minister, The Hon John Howard MP announced the creation of a Centenary Medal to honour living persons who have made a contribution to Australian society during the last hundred years. Anne was one of a select group given the award. Her citation read that she received the Centenary Medal ‘for services to the community, in particular for service to Lithgow Meals on Wheels’. This well-deserved award was just the tip of an iceberg of community service.

Anne’s long history of active community service is recognised by the fact that at various times she held executive (elective) office in many local community organisations including Meals on Wheels, Red Cross, Mothers for Vietnam, The Quota Club, Lithgow Municipal Baths Fundraising Committee, Lithgow Tennis Centre Fundraising Committee, the Organising Committee for the Inauguration of the Annual Festival of the Valley (a community festival to celebrate the diversity of Lithgow City), various School Committees, and probably a great number of other committees that I don’t even know about.

There are two particular awards that Anne highly prized above all others. The first was her award of Life Membership of the Australian Labor Party in 1996. She joined the Party in 1946, a subject I shall refer to again shortly. The second was her award of Life Membership of the Lithgow Workmen’s Club in 1998. She was very proud of these achievements and felt that they provided a positive recognition of her work on behalf of working Australians.

She was also proud of the fact that she knew and had a kiss on the cheek from every ALP Leader from Gough Whitlam to Kim Beazley.

Anne had a keen, sometimes off-beat, sense of humour and loved a joke. It didn’t matter if the joke was a little risqué; that simply contributed to her enjoyment. I couldn’t go past this point without a brief nostalgia trip, courtesy of Anne:

‘Roses are reddish, violets are bluish,
If it wasn’t for Jesus, you’d all be Jewish!’

She would also often greet old close friends whom she hadn’t seen for some time with the irreverent greeting:

‘Kiss me on my bottom – my top lip’s sore!’

However, by referring to a couple of Anne’s jokes, I don’t want to detract from her remarkable life. But she herself would be the first to say that solemnity was too important to be left to the solemn.

Anne was born in Eden on the south coast of New South Wales. In 1907, Eden was a whaling station. Whales were very plentiful at that time and often swam near the shore. Harpooners would venture to sea in tiny open fishing boats, harpoon a whale and try to pull it ashore. Many times the hunt was unsuccessful. Many times the whalers were killed or seriously injured while on a hunt. The whalers, after all, did not have the powerful harpoons of today; their harpoons were thrown by hand, and the whales were captured by hand. It was an extremely dangerous job.

Anne often told tales of the whale hunts. When the whale hunters were called out to sea, a bell was rung in the town. The school was immediately closed and all the children were able to run along the cliff top and watch the hunt. It was an exciting spectacle for a young child in school.

Anne’s parents owned a general provisions store in Eden. However, it was not ultimately a successful venture and the family eventually moved to Sydney. It was here that the young Anne Segal found her feet and her wings. She would never have described herself as a feminist in modern day terms, but as a young woman in her twenties in the new nation’s twenties, she was one of an unstructured group of women of their day who liberated themselves from the strictures and constraints of the Victorian era and created an independent life for themselves. They were the women who created the ‘Roaring Twenties’ and laid the foundation for the future feminist movement.

Anne wore shorts (tch, tch) went mountain climbing with boys (how audacious!), rode horses but not sidesaddle (gasp!), played golf (what! a traditional man’s sport!), and attended the opera and stage productions regularly. She traveled by herself or with a girlfriend to distant places without a chaperone (how daring!). It was on one of these trips to Brisbane with her girlfriend Olga when they met two young handsome fellows: Arthur Segal and Barney Rosenblum. The boys, as boys will, took advantage of the situation and asked the girls out on a date (a date! unchaperoned! in 1928! is that bold or what?!).

The interesting thing about this first date was that Barney escorted Anne, while Arthur escorted Olga. However, fate in the guise of Cupid quickly intervened to right this wrong pairing and it wasn’t long before the young good-looking Arthur proposed to the lissome and attractive Anne. They were married in 1935. (By the way, Olga married Barney about this same time and the two couples remained good friends and kept in contact for many years thereafter).

Anne’s story from here necessarily includes Arthur as their lives became inextricably entwined as they committed themselves to a high level of community service.

After their marriage, Anne and Arthur opened a small shop in Eden. However, the venture was not a commercial success and at the commencement of the 2nd World War, they returned to Sydney. As was common in those days of high patriotism when men were ready to serve King and Country without question, Arthur enlisted in the Australian Army, expecting to be sent to the Middle Eastern Front. Recruiting numbers at the time were very high, and the Army couldn’t take all the recruits for training. So the Army asked Arthur to wait for a formal call-up. But with a young wife, Arthur had to earn a living. So he and Anne moved to Lithgow, joining Anne’s sister Birdie (Zeporah) who was married to a local Lithgow businessman, Isadore Basser.

Arthur found work at the Government Small Arms Factory. He was quickly trained as a Fitter & Turner/Toolmaker helping to manufacture weapons for the Australian Defence Forces. When Arthur was finally called up to undergo Army combat training in mid-1940, the Army refused to take him as he was now classified as being in a protected war effort job.

In addition to his work at the Small Arms Factory, Arthur became a Civil Defence Anti-aircraft Team Leader, and spent time in the hills around Lithgow on alert to take action in the event of an aircraft bombing attack on the Small Arms Factory, which was an obvious prime war target. This was a threat taken vary seriously at the time, because the Japanese propaganda machine directed radio broadcasts specifically at the people of Lithgow saying that the Japanese Air Force will bomb the city. These broadcasts said that it did not matter whether Lithgow imposed a blackout or not, because Japanese bomber pilots could always find the target from the moonlight shining on the Small Arms Factory’s large lagoon of water used to cool the factory’s forges.

During this period, Arthur worked 8 hours on-shift at the Factory, 8 hours on-shift on civil defence duties at an anti-aircraft gun post in the mountains and 8 hours at home for sleep. This pattern was followed for the duration of the war.

Graham arrived on the scene on the night of 6th December 1941. Graham’s time of birth coincided with an unusual configuration of world events, although Anne did not realise it then. After all, she was a little pre-occupied with other matters at that particular time. Interestingly, historical records show that at the specific time of Graham’s birth, the Japanese High Command through Admiral Yamamoto gave orders to Admiral Nagumo, Commander of the Japanese Pacific Fleet, to initiate the attack on Pearl Harbour and invade the Malay Peninsula. Coincidentally, at that very same time, President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States initiated formal action to put the United States on a war footing. He made that official declaration to his staff officers after receiving intelligence information that war with Japan was now inevitable.

After delivering Graham, Anne awoke to the newspaper headlines that Japan had attacked the United States’ naval base at Pearl Harbour, and had landed troops on the Malay Peninsula. Suddenly, the war took on new and more frightening dimensions. It was suddenly very close to home. Despite the constraints, restrictions and rationing of a wartime economy, life did go on and Graham had a very happy childhood. Graham was a very adventurous child, so Anne had a few ‘experiences’ in bringing him up. Here’s a sidebar anecdote.

Graham was not very tall at 4 years of age, so could just stand up in the underground storm water drains that came into the open at the bottom of Amiens Street, where we lived. Graham decided one day that it was necessary to explore these underground drains to see what was at the other end. When he didn’t return home for lunch that day Anne went searching for him. She quickly learnt of Graham’s exploration adventure. So there was Anne, on hands and knees, wading some half a mile in water in the pitch-black of the underground drain that other kids said Graham had entered, calling ‘Graham, Graham’. (I must have heard her, because I wandered back feeling quite indignant at Mum thinking I was lost and quite peeved at being called back from a big adventure. I never felt that I was lost. After all, as I unsuccessfully tried to convince Mum later when I was sent to my room for the rest of the day, how can you get lost in a tunnel?! The upshot is that to today, I still don’t know where those drains go to).

The uncertainty of the future in the war years worked to prevent any increase to our family. When the end of the war was foreseen, and with the coming of the Peace after the defeat of Japan, family life returned to some semblance of normality, and Ian was born in October 1945.

Arthur’s work at the factory imbued him with some political ideals about the sense of a worker’s worth and the conditions under which workers were expected to work. He was strongly influenced in this by Anne, who was well-read on social issues of the day. Arthur had earlier become a Union Steward in his workplace at the Small Arms Factory. Following the Peace, and as the Small Arms Factory moved into peacetime operations, Arthur was elected as District President of the Australasian Society of Engineers, a position he was to hold for many years. At this same time (viz., 1946), Arthur and Anne joined the Australian Labor Party (ALP). They quickly assumed executive positions in the Littleton Branch.

Lithgow was then in the federal electorate of Macquarie. In 1946, the local Member was Benjamin Chifley MP, Prime Minister of Australia. Unfortunately, Ben Chifley died in office in 1949. In the ensuing preselection ballot, the successful candidate was Tony Luchetti, a local insurance broker. Tony Luchetti asked Arthur to be his campaign manager in the by-election. Arthur then became President of the Macquarie ALP Federal Divisional Executive, a position he was to hold for nearly twenty years. Tony won the election and with Arthur as his campaign manager went on to hold Macquarie at the next 9 federal elections, when he retired.

Arthur repeated this success in the state arena, guiding Jim Robson MLA to a succession of election wins in the State electorate of Hartley. During this period, Arthur remained active in the trade union movement.

While all this was going on, Anne was not acting as a stay-at-home Mum. She became active in the Red Cross and was a foundation member of the Lithgow District Quota Club, a service organisation that provided mentoring, life skills and public speaking skills for young women. She joined Meals on Wheels, an organisation in which she held executive management roles as well as field work roles delivering meals to elder citizens in need for many years. It was this service that was recognised by the Australian Government through the award of the Centenary Medal in 2001.

During the Viet Nam war, Anne joined with a group of Lithgow Mums whose 19 year old sons had been conscripted to fight in Viet Nam. The method of conscription was through an unpopular lottery, where marbles with dates imprinted were drawn out of a barrel. All males, on turning 19 years of age, became eligible for conscription. If your birth date was drawn out, you were conscripted, trained as a soldier and sent to Viet Nam for a year. Ian was in the lottery, but thankfully his birth date was not drawn out. Despite Ian not being conscripted, Anne helped the Mothers for Viet Nam to raise funds to buy some little luxuries for the boys on the front line. The Mothers would then make packs of these goodies which were passed to the Army, which delivered them to the soldiers in the field. This is a clear measure of Anne’s community spirit.

Anne and Arthur served as committee members on groups that raised funds to construct tennis courts in the city’s recreational and sporting precinct, and to construct an Olympic-sized swimming pool for the city. They further served as committee members on a group that created and implemented the Lithgow District ‘Festival of the Valley’, a week long festival of community events for both entertainment and publicity for the region. All these projects were eminently successful.

Despite this active community life, home life was never neglected. Anne was a very good cook. Her dinner parties for friends and political colleagues were a treat to be savoured. Ian and I can well remember going up the mountain behind our house to collect four-gallon drums of wild blackberries that would become homemade pies, tarts, and jams. Her particular specialty however was her homemade blackberry wine. Many Lithgow-ites will attest today to the kick in Anne’s blackberry wine. Alas, such family pursuits are no more. The blackberries began to takeover the bush and the Council had to declare the blackberry as a noxious weed. They were all poisoned.

Anne had a number of culinary signature dishes. One of her most famous was a dish of pressed lambs’ tongues with ginger sauce. She served it once to a young Gough Whitlam, then the ALP Deputy Leader. When Gough Whitlam became the ALP leader and stumped the countryside drumming up the support of the faithful, he regularly came to Lithgow. Each time he came, he would insist on a serving of Anne’s pressed lambs’ tongues with ginger sauce.

In the mid-1940s, Arthur was elected as an Alderman on the Lithgow City Council. He held this position for over twenty years, eventually being awarded the Certificate of Long Service from the Local Government Association of New South Wales. Arthur was Deputy Mayor of the City of Lithgow for many years, but unfortunately never became Mayor because his employer, the Small Arms Factory, would not grant him sufficient time-off to attend to Mayoral duties. He did however serve for many years as the Chairman of the Council’s Budget and Finance Committee overseeing a budget of millions of dollars – not bad for a boy who had to leave school at 12 years of age to help earn money for his parents.

Arthur was also the Lithgow City Council delegate to the Hartley County Council, the electricity distribution authority for the Blue Mountains area. Arthur became Chairman of this Council, again a position he held on a long term basis.

Arthur passed away in 1970. He died in unusual circumstances. He went into hospital for a routine medical procedure he was required to undergo every six months or so. Just after he went into the hospital, he had a mild heart attack. He had never previously exhibited any symptoms of heart trouble. During recovery, Arthur could not urinate. Doctors were at a loss to understand why. Doctors decided to carry out some exploratory surgery. Upon opening him up, doctors discovered that Arthur had advanced cancer of the kidneys which was inoperable and untreatable. Doctors sewed him up and gave him and Anne the awful news that he had only four days left to live. Arthur had obviously carried this cancer for many years, but not once during this period did he suffer any discomfort or pain or show any symptom to indicate that he may have had a problem. That is why his sudden and unexpected death hit his family and friends so hard.

Arthur was always a positive and proactive person. After a short period of sad reflection with his good mate, the local Uniting Church Minister, he personally made all the arrangements for his funeral to save Anne the difficulty of having to attend to this unpleasant task. On the fourth day, in company with his mate, Arthur passed peacefully away.

Following a period of mourning and getting used to living alone again, Anne continued with her community work for many years. At long last however, time caught up with Anne and she had to give up the community work that had given her so much satisfaction and pleasure. During this phase of her life, Ian and his wife Judy looked after Anne, attending to all her needs and requirements as was necessary from day to day. Eventually, Anne moved into the Three Trees Retirement Home where she stayed until the end.

Anne was farewelled by family and friends at a simple but moving non-denominational service at the historical Hoskins Memorial Church in Lithgow. She was cremated and her ashes were scattered on the same rose garden where Arthur’s ashes were scattered many years earlier.

Vale Anne.

Prepared by Graham Segal