Lotus Appel

Following the success of the 25th CWA Art Award
organised by Lotus Appel, Alison Alder asked Lotus
a few questions about her life in Tennant Creek,
especially wondering where she did her
shopping in 1964.

I came to Tennant Creek in 1963. I was travelling around Australia and I came by boat up to Darwin from Broome where I had been for the previous six months and I drove down this far.
I had asked for a job at Darwin Hospital but they sent me here, and I thought, OK, because it was on the way home to Townsville. I wanted to work for a while, have a look around, earn a bit more money.
I actually had never heard of Tennant Creek until I came here - very ignorant of me. When I got here I found that there was more money coming out of Tennant Creek than the rest of the industries in the Northern Territory put together; more than the beef industry, certainly more than tourism as that wasn't such a big thing then. It was quite an important place.
I was offered a job as Matron of the Camooweal Hospital and I went over there for a few months, however I had met my husband in Tennant Creek and he pursued me and brought me back to Tennant. I was the first Sister at Tennant Creek Hospital to be re-employed after she was married. Before that, once you were married you were out.
I got married at the Church of England in 1964. We had the reception at home.
I bought my wedding dress in Mt Isa, I bought a blue dress. I can't remember what I did with the dress, I've often wondered about that. Short dresses were the thing then and I remember my husband took his tie off in the car on the way home and we've never seen it again since.
We bought a house when we married. It was a small timber framed fibro house but it had foundations next to it of a bigger house. When my husband notified his family that we were getting married his father sent him 1,000 German pfund and that was enough for us to build a brick house.
We never ever rented, and be it ever so humble, my husband didn't ever go into debt to build the house. He got the plumbing done when he had the money, and then he got the electricity so by the time I had the twins and Sheridan was born we had been living in the little two room house and then moved into the bigger house.
All my children were born here, except Sheridan. I had her in Alice Springs as I had to have a Caesarean section but she was here up until the last gasp. The twins were born here, though they weren't the first for Tennant Creek. There was a woman who had twins here in the 1930s, which was a bit daring of her.
Twelve months after my first child was born I had twins, so I was busy. There was no creche, there was nowhere you could go too much and I had no family here. I had a big pram which I popped the three of them into and we used to walk from park to park - that was the only thing you could do.
When the boys were about four and the eldest was going to preschool my mother announced that she was coming to live with us because all her grandchildren were growing up and they were strangers to her. So she walked in and announced that I could go back to work. It was only for those three years or so that I wasn't working.
There were a number of little supermarkets in Tennant Creek at that time. Fresh produce came from Adelaide I think. Everyone used Sunshine Powdered Milk, there was no milk delivery and for a while there was a great vegetable garden at Warrabri and they had a piggery too.
There was a Chinese lady growing vegetables but she didn't have a market garden because when I got here the water had only just been reticulated. She was where Enterprise Electrics is now and her garden was grown in petrol tins filled with dirt that she had to hand water.
The old people up on the hill, Mrs Douglas, who recently died, and her brother had a water truck and they used to deliver water into your tank. As water became available and people started to plant things the town got greener and greener and it is now quite an attractive town.
I went back to work for twelve months and then discovered that I was pregnant again. As soon as I told my mother she took off - she didn't mind having toddlers but she wasn't going to look after a baby. I didn't stop work for long after Sheridan was born as the Hospital was short of staff. There was a flu outbreak over Christmas so I was called in, and at the beginning of February I went back to work. A friend of mine had a baby so she looked after the children for me.
We had quite a busy type of hospital in those days. The hospital was down in the Main Street where the North Primary School oval is now. When the Army came they did surgery and all sorts of things here.
The National Trust Building is the hospital the Army built. I know people who had gall stones removed and all sorts of operations here. When Alice Springs started to grow they sent all our surgical instruments down there. Alice was growing because the Railway stopped there. It is a great shame because if the railway had come up here we would have been OK as Alice doesn't have a lot of industry aside from tourism. If we had the railway the advantage of that would have really helped the mining industry.
The following year I worked night duty, my husband did day shifts and we did that for four years. I liked night duty. In those days men didn't take a lot of responsibility for children and it forced him, it was a good thing. He liked cooking and he coped with that alright and my eldest daughter kept him in line, she was the boss the family. There is nothing like a little managing miss and she told him what to do.
They were very busy times but I wasn't house bound. It is very destructive being tied to the house with four small children. When I went back to work the first time I was quite devoid of confidence and that is why I didn't want too stop again because it was quite hard to get back in.
In 1975 we went overseas for a few months and when we came back I didn't work straight away but then I worked in the School office. I thought to myself that I really will have to go back to Nursing because if you stay out of it to long you have to do some retraining and there is nowhere to do it in Tennant Creek. So I decided to go back to work.
I had only been back for one month when I discovered that I had breast cancer and had a radical mastectomy. I was 39 and I thought that I was finished. I didn't bother to restart my superannuation or anything, I was ready to finish up. But I didn't die, and so I went back to work and to nursing.
I really like midwifery and once we got this doctor in who said he was going to specialise in obstetrics and from now on the midwives will do no more pelvic examinations. I thought if you think I am going to deliver a baby that someone else has examined you can think again because I've often had doctors tell me that women are fully dilated when they are not.
A job became vacant in community health so I applied for it and got it. They opened a new community health centre and rural and community health were together, along with the dental clinic. Eventually I was in charge of both rural and community health.
I didn't work full time as a rural nurse but I used to go and relieve at different places. It was very innovative. We tried to provide the same community type health services that people could get anywhere.
While I was there it was the Year of the Handicapped and I applied for funding to open the Fullwood Centre and got funding to buy the land and then bought the house from Warrego and set it all up. It was a great training place for handicapped people, both young and old. We got a bus that you can put a wheel chair in and we organised excursions.
Before that those people had no way of going anywhere, so we camped, went to Katherine, all sorts of things.
But then people came from Canberra and said it was inappropriate to have young people stuck in with old people. They were the greatest mates though, the young and the old, they took an interest in each other. But they said they couldn't continue our funding if we kept having older people there which annoyed me and then there was a takeover of the management and of disability services.
The Health Department had a rearrangement and placed Rural Health under Alice Springs, they change all the time, and we moved up to the hospital and community health more or less lost its personality as a lot of people didn't know it was there. We were seen a lot more in the community before, and they made all the positions specialist positions so the Infant Health Sister only did Infant Health and so on. Before that we had been more of a team.
An amazing number of people have come and gone in Tennant Creek, you couldn't count how many people have been here. When I first came here Peko was the big mine, and people lived in these little huts. People came from all over Europe, migrants, and whenever we went back to Europe my husband and I used to go to Italy, Austria, Switzerland visiting friends from Tennant Creek.
I was lucky that I made friends with some people who stayed here and even people that I had connections with before I moved here. People like Mrs Joswig, she was Matron at the hospital, Nancy Schmidt and I nursed together. My friends seemed to be people who stayed here.
But I have known many women who got distressed by making friendships and then people moving on. I had an advantage though in working, it is very healthy for women to work because otherwise you are dependent on your husband's support and men aren't always that supportive. I was able, through my work to have an outlet.
I joined the CWA in 1964 and at that time there was nothing else for women to do in town. We used to have a meeting and the hall would be full, everyone went there. The only trouble with women's organisations is that they often have petty fights amongst themselves, if they don't have sufficient outlets to be able to brush that off then you run into jealousies and so on.
We held the first Art Award in our old building (current CLC Building). We had huge hessian covered stands that we hung the work on. It was very dark due to no proper lighting.
I admire the foresight of the people that started the Art Award. They were always looking for ways to normalise Tennant Creek, make the place a bit more culturally welcoming. That was one of the things that was suggested. Probably as a fundraiser as well. Everyone that has been involved has really enjoyed it.
I don't know whether Tennant Creek is still in a recession or whether we are going to get a boom but the railway line has been very slow coming and we can certainly do with it. I've been considering whether I should leave or not because my husband died but I have come to the conclusion that I will stay for as long as I can.
Tennant Creek has most of the things that I need and I can walk to the Post Office, and supermarket and I have found that if I need something done it is pretty easy because I know the tradespeople, and they treat me well. I worry about the amount of crime around but I know that is everywhere, not only Tennant Creek.
I don't think that the health services are as good as they were, but that is probably nationwide too. Tennant Creek has treated me very well, both my husband and I thought that. He never wanted to go anywhere else, he was going to stay here for the rest of his life and he did.
I don't know how long I will stay but it certainly suits me at the moment.