The Australian Women's Register

Marion Eddison’s private education in the south of England under a governess, and later in a finishing school in Antwerp, Belgium, ill equipped her for the arduous life of a Canberra farmer’s wife. Married in 1910 to English gentleman farmer and horsebreeder Walter Herbert Eddison, she and their four children emigrated with him to Australia in 1919, following his war service with the Australian Light Horse at Gallipoli and France, where he was gassed. After living first in Cooma, then at the Oaks Estate near Queanbeyan, the Eddisons moved with their now six children in 1926 to Yamba, a soldier settler leasehold in the Woden Valley, ACT. There they farmed sheep, bred thoroughbred horses and operated a small dairy. While her three sons were fighting in the Second World War, the burden of farming fell entirely on Marion and her daughters Diana, Pamela and Dorothy. They nevertheless found time to join other local women in raising money for the Red Cross, making clothes for wounded soldiers and volunteering at the Lady Gowrie Services’ Hut, opened at Manuka in 1941. War brought tragedy to Yamba. Shortly after his marriage, Tom, then in the Royal Airforce in England, was killed over Holland in 1941. Keith, who joined the Royal Australian Air Force, was killed over New Guinea in 1943, the month before his brother Jack, who joined the Australian Imperial Force and was imprisoned in Japan following the fall of Singapore. The family only learnt of Jack’s death after the war ended. After losing stock and property in a bushfire in 1952, the couple moved to suburban Deakin where Walter died in 1966. Eddison Park in Phillip, ACT, is located on what remains of their Yamba property.