What are you most proud of in your life? I think just my family. They’re such a big mixed up mob. Half the nationalities in the world. Very interesting to see what happens with your families. My name is Janet McDonald. Born at Melbourne. That is me in 1923 taken with my mother. She nearly died when I was born. My grandmother went to visit her and me the day after I was born. And the matron at the little hospital in Murrumbeena said, “Oh, you can't go in. She's got measles”. My grandmother said, “I don't like the sound. I'm going in.” Because she had done some nursing and drove ambulances in France during the war. She'd seen septicemia and knew the septicemia rash. Straight away got an ambulance and they took her into "Mount Saint Evin’s, which is St Vincents now." She was there for months. "Couldn't have any more children after that." My father was an accountant. But he was very troubled from his experiences during the war. It’s the 5th Battalion Pipe Band. Oh, I've always loved the pipes. He left in the first ship that left Australia in 1915. They went straight to Egypt, and then they went to Gallipoli, landed on the second day of the Headquarters Company. I think moved around a bit, you know, as the war progressed. He was not well. He came back, he’d go off on benders occasionally... Vanish for a week and lose a job and come back and settle down again. But I think he had very hard time for quite a long time. My mother seemed to be remarkably understanding. He used to go and play for the Blinded Soldiers Association between the two world wars. He frequently played the piano up there on Friday nights. 20, 30, 40 men sometimes. As a teenager, I'd be sent to dance with them occasionally. I was always a flat-footed dancer. Wasn't much help to them I suspect, but they were a nice lot of men. Some even had their voice boxes burnt out from the mustard gas. And I remember one man, Foster McConnell. Lovely bloke. He could just speak like that. Awful to listen to. So sad. That's Betty. "My mother’s mother was a wonderful storyteller" when we were young. I remember one day she had those coloured glass windows in the drawing room, the top of the big bay window, and in the late afternoon you’d get those lights in the air. And she used to always tell me they were the fairies flying across the room. Come to see us. Come to visit us. We were living in Armadale. And one side of the street were quite nice, you know, three, four bedroom houses. The other side were these two bedroom terraces. And there was one house there where there were at least seven children that I can think of. And I was walking past the house one day and I stopped to talk to one of the girls about my age, and the mother came up and gave her a piece of cake. And she said to me, would I like a piece? I said, “Thank you very much”. I had one mouthful of it and it had been made, I showed it to my mother, been made with rancid dripping. I’ve never forgotten. It just sort of sticks in your mind. It was just horrible. 11 Cromwell Road, South Yarra. I sort of grew up there. And I got to know most of the old dears on the street. And there were 2 or 3 dear old souls. Spinsters living in these big old two-storey houses in the street. I suppose, left over from the First World War. Husbands or boyfriends killed. The first school I went to was it a little boarding school. Madam Pignolet and her two daughters. Madam Pignolet was a bit of hard taskmaster. Liked to use her round pencil on your fingers when you were having your piano lesson. That was common in those days. Then I went to Saint Margarets in Malvern. Then I had 2 or 3 years when I was virtually home most of the time. I ended up getting blood poisoning and appendicitis. Then I got rheumatic fever. But I was always happy as long as I had a plentiful supply of books. And I still enjoy reading. Dickens. ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’. I've always loved that. Bronte. Poetry. Jane Austen. And I even still sit down and read a bit of Shakespeare. Once I started to come good, they sent me to Firbank as a boarder. I was so far behind with my work. Especially maths and science was useless. I couldn't catch up. Just end up in strife all the time. Oddly enough, I've got a couple of frocks at the moment that would be exactly what I was wearing, couple of sizes bigger, at 18. Plain shirt frocks. Very comfortable easy fashion. I had done eight months nursing. I can still remember giving my first injection to one of the patients there, having only practiced on an orange up until that stage. And she was a girl about 16 who’d had a leg amputation. TB bones, which we don't see anymore. And I was about 18 months older than she was and terrified. Frightened I was going to hurt her whereas she just thought it was funny. Nice girl. Came from the slums of Melbourne. God, she was brave. Wonder how she got on for the rest of her life. It was awful. I hated it. Hours were too long. You were so isolated out there. I just didn't fit, I think. I hated night duty. You'd be sent from one ward to another in the dark and we were using lanterns which we had to keep shaded. Male patients, especially the TB patients, could be a worry at night. They'd go wandering. The girls all warned each other to be careful. It was blackout days and you had to be very, very careful with your lamps that you didn't have any light shining through the gaps in the canvas. Melbourne was just dark. Can you imagine it without any of that reflected street lighting? Even a country town these days has streetlights in it. I don't like the idea of starting a war but if you have no choice, you do what you can. My father was in the army. Everyone else was in the services by that stage. You had to do something. You couldn't just sit at home any longer. I don’t know, for some reason, they stuck me in medical records and there I stayed for the rest of the war. Fortunately, the office was at 339 Swanston Street so I had the public library over the road. And the gallery. I could go and say hello to Phar Lap. A photo of me with my friend Elizabeth Wallace "outside the Australia in Collins Street, Melbourne." "That was probably the only outfit at the time. " And I was in civvies which I probably shouldn't have been. I probably should been in uniform. So I was committing an offence. I had a cousin who went to the Naval College as a 13 year old and I got to know all the boys in his year which was great fun. Eventually married one. I wasn’t very keen on him when we were younger. "There were people in the year I preferred more." He was too sensible and good and hardworking and.... When I was 13 or 14 I found him boring. I suppose I grew up a little. In the middle of the war some time, we bumped into each other on Princes Bridge. And he said, "“Could you have tea with me this afternoon?”" Very proper. I, for some reason, was going somewhere and said, “Sorry...” Then it wasn’t until the war finished and I was staying in Hobart with an aunt and uncle. The fleet was in for the regatta. And I thought, I'm sure I know someone on board something that’s in. Put the thinking cap on and came up with Hugh. So I rang that ship. He said, “Oh, we've got a ball on tonight. Do you want to come?” I had terrible trouble, though. I'd taken an evening frock away with me "because it was getting to that stage again." And I didn't have any long white gloves. I chased every shop in Hobart. Eventually, I found one pair that went on my arm but I had to leave it rolled up because the fingers were so small. So I did manage to get myself dressed. Just sort of went from there. We got married in 46. Christ Church in South Yarra. He was very tolerant. Put up with me. I got a bit fiery at times. "I don’t think I’d have been easy to put up with at times." Because I don't think you are going to find any partnership of any sort "that's not going to have differences of opinions" somewhere along the line and probably very serious ones at times. Or that appear to be serious to you. The next day when you’ve had an argument about something when you think you might kill each other, you wonder what you were arguing about. That happens quite frequently. Or it has to me. That is the year that my husband was at the Naval College. The rest of his year and there were 12 boys in my husband’s year and two of them were killed. Very attached to all of them. Pencil drawing of me when I was about 14 by one of the young naval cadets, Jack Lester. He was unfortunately lost during the war. Such a nice, kind boy. It was just such an enormous relief to have it over and to know they were now safe. There were crowds in the street, Swanston Street and Collins Street were just packed. Yes. Don't seem to remember anyone doing any work. We moved to Adelaide. "My husband finally managed to get out of the Navy." He'd been trying ever since the war finished. Housing was absolutely impossible. Eventually managed to find a single room. I got pregnant, made the mistake of telling the landlady and she instantly gave us notice. Took us nearly a month before we found another room. And that was in the city actually, out in the outskirts of Adelaide. But she was a bit of an old bag and she didn't like having a baby in the place. And, I was only allowed to use the kitchen for one hour a day, and I asked one night if I could go into the kitchen to get something I needed for the baby, and she said, “No, you've had your hour!” My husband did his block. Told her exactly what he thought of her. And then he settled down. Anyway, in the morning, she didn't come out of her room. We got a bit of a fright then. But by about 10 o’clock in the morning, I said, “I'm going to knock on the door and see if she's all right.” She'd had a stroke. She eventually spent about six weeks in hospital and didn't come back. And we found out that the rent we had been paying her was the whole of the rent that she'd been paying for the house. We moved to Cowell, over on the west coast of South Australia, after my husband graduated. And that was our first practice. Then 16 years in Kerang in northern Victoria. My husband was a GP. Smallish country town with four doctors. Very non-stop for the doctors. Especially if they're extremely conscientious people. We had three children. That's my husband with my daughter and the two boys, Hugh and Hector. Oh, and me. Didn’t notice that. once they were teenagers... I just loved those years. They went to the local school until high school stage. Then they were all sent off to boarding school, which worked well for my daughter and didn't work at all well for the boys. They hated it. They’d made their friends up in the country. They liked the country life. They got old at riding those dreadful old vehicles around dam walls and doing all those terrible things that kids do out on farms. This is my daughter, Georgina, when she was admitted to the bar. Got her degree "the same day as her future husband got his." It was lovely to see. Hector and Hugh, they both became musicians. My oldest son basically worked solo. My youngest son was with a couple of bands that were reasonably well known. The last one was a band called Redgum. He used to write songs. He loved what he did. My daughter... oh, say 12 years ago... Losing Georgina... Breast cancer, Georgina. It's a horrible thing. And then my older son a couple of years after that. Same year as his father, about 6 or 8 weeks between them. And... And my youngest son. No use people telling you it’s going to get better. It doesn’t. My daughter's husband will be 80 this year. Seems terrible, doesn’t it? I can still remember him at university. Probably 9/10 of the young people haven’t the vaguest idea of what’s going on in the world. They don't listen to the news. They don't read the newspapers. I think they’re very easily influenced by someone who comes along and wants to influence them. That’s very worrying. I think Trump is just going to kill so many countries. It’s frightening. I think it’s the most frightening thing that’s happened since the day war broke out in ‘39. Just like the Nazis back again. Even here in Australia. What's wrong with the boys? How can they be so easily influenced by these neo Nazis? Have we spoilt them? Or is it just that our education system is so poor that they don't know what’s happened in the world? They need to be teaching the kids what’s happened in the world over the last 90 years. 80 or 90 years. They need history lessons. Geography lessons. "Enough to give me sleepless nights at times." I went to a naval thing at the Box Hill RSL last week and talking to one of the ex-Vietnam men and he's still in a bad way. I just don't think people really understand now how shocking war can be. You said your favorite food was crayfish. Preferably on sheets of newspaper. Fresh bread and butter and lemon. Nothing fancy. And that was one of the beauties of living in Cowell. We used to go out with a bucket and a spear, which was a broomstick with a six inch nail on the end of it. Come back with a baby bath full of crab. Cook them on a wood stove in the backyard. Do you have any secrets to longevity? Well, not too much exercise and a good brandy and dry before dinner every night. I find that helps... Or two.