Australian in my difference

Women and migration in Australia since 1945

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Sheila Lawless

England

Sheila Lawless is living testimony of the important role women of her generation played in building new communities in postwar Australia.

Sheila Lawless (née Snaith) was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne on 4 July 1929, but now lives in Adelaide, South Australia. Married in 1951 in Britain to Lawrence, she is one of the hundreds of thousands of postwar immigrants from Britain, the so-called 'ten pound poms', who arrived in Australia after the Second World War via a government assisted passage scheme. A mother of four (only one of whom was born in England) and grandmother of ten, Sheila has lived what some would call an 'ordinary' suburban life. She has made no remarkable scientific discoveries, never held public office and has never achieved international sporting success, some of the typical measures of historical significance in Australian culture. Like most Australian women of her age, she stayed at home to look after her children while they were little, returning to part time work when they were at school, work that has been traditionally regarded as unremarkable by historians.

A closer look at some of the details of Sheila's life since her arrival in Australia should force a reassessment of that view. Sheila Lawless is living testimony of the important role women of her generation played in building new communities in postwar Australia. Sheila is one of the many 'ordinary' women across the nation who, through their volunteer labour at schools, churches, and community centres, helped to convert barren subdivisions on the metropolitan fringes into functioning communities of people where children could be brought up in safety and relative prosperity, a highly significant role in a society where the experience of total war was a recent memory. Never a 'whinging pom', Sheila is proud of her heritage and perhaps, but for the economic legacy of war impacting upon her quality of life, she might never have left England. But making the decision to do so, she also made the decision to make the most of her life in her new world. The folk of Windsor Gardens in Adelaide should be grateful that she did.

Sheila Lawless's first application to immigrate to Australia in the early 1950s was rejected because she suffered a bout of tuberculosis when she was a teenager. Despite having ticks in all the other boxes, her medical history disqualified her. Needless to say, this was a major blow, especially as her immediate family had already made the journey from Newcastle-on-Tyne to Adelaide in 1951, paving the way for Sheila and her husband Lawrence. The plan was that Sheila's father, who was a plumber and therefore in much demand in Australia, would settle first and then sponsor the migration of Sheila and her civil servant husband. When this plan went awry, everyone, especially Sheila's parents, was devastated. It wasn't until Sheila, after having the first of her four children in 1954, visited a doctor who scoffed at the suggestion that she was a health risk that Sheila and Lawrence were in a position to join her parents. Noting that he had approved the passages of numerous women who were nowhere near as fit and healthy as Sheila, this doctor gave her the final tick in the box and the Lawless family were on their way. Twenty-eight days after leaving Tilbury Docks, they arrived in Adelaide on 26 July 1955. Sheila was twenty-six years of age.

Upon arrival, one of the first differences she noted, apart from the wider streets and tinned roof houses, was the smell of Australia - the pungency of the eucalypts in particular. While speaking English no doubt offered Sheila some advantages not enjoyed by migrants of non-English speaking background, it did not shield her from the problems of adjustment experienced by most adult migrants to Australia. For ten years after she arrived, Sheila suffered the terrible pain of homesickness, despite the fact that she had family and friends to turn to locally. She missed her friends, she missed her husband's family, she missed the sights and sounds of the English countryside, to which she had been evacuated for four years during the war. She liked Australia; it was everything she thought it would be before she arrived - to quote her 'it was like coming for a nice holiday but you knew you couldn't go home'. Embracing her new home, Sheila, nevertheless, saw no reason to deny the importance to her of her old one. It took a while for her to overcome this ambivalence; arguably it will always remain with her. Both Sheila and Lawrence found work very quickly and, after receiving their first pay check in Australia, they never looked back.

On arrival, Sheila lived with her mother and father in their house in Parkside in central Adelaide. This made it possible for her to go out to work for the first year, even though she had a young child. Once they saved some money, Sheila and Lawrence built their own home in a new housing estate called Windsor Gardens. Whilst the house was fresh and new, the furnishings were sparse and the services in the area were almost non-existent. Lawrence made friends through his workplace, but Sheila, who was now at home full time, found life challenging. There were no shops, phone boxes or schools, and they initially didn't own a car, a major problem considering the lack of regular public transport to the area. There was, however, a Catholic church around the corner and it became the centre of all social life in the area. A woman named Molly McGrath organised social events for the new members of the ever growing community, and as more women and children connected through the agency of Molly's soda bread and cups of tea, the community became closer and more organised. What started as Wednesday coffee mornings for three or four women run through the church grew into a mother's club that lobbied and prepared for the opening of a parish primary school. They provided enormous support for each other, and the nuns who arrived to teach there.

With the passage of time, Windsor Gardens matured as a community as, of course, did the Lawless children. In 1973, with all the children at school and after seventeen years out of the paid workforce, Sheila Lawless returned to work, courtesy of a government scheme that encouraged women to refresh their skills through short courses at business college. Once graduated, she secured an administrative job at Kildare College in Adelaide, where she worked the family friendly hours of 9:30am to 2:50pm, taking on more and more responsibility in the position until she retired in 1987. Lawrence, eleven and a half years her senior, had already retired by this time - the couple had also moved from Windsor Gardens to Green Acres. Despite the move, the Lawless's still keep in close contact with friends they made through the church in Windsor Gardens. The 'Friendship Club' still meets regularly and provides an important social occasion for the women (and their husbands) who helped create the community of Windsor Gardens fifty years ago.

The importance of this club is underlined further by the challenges thrown up to Sheila in 1999, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Thankfully, Sheila recovered, and she made a point of speaking openly about her illness through the club, encouraging all her friends who hadn't done so recently to have mammograms. This simple act led to the early detection of cancer in five friends! Since then, the 'talking table' of the 'Friendship Club' has become an important resource and means of communication for all the members. In an environment where elderly people can feel isolated and consequently cut off from important information, the women of the 'Friendship Club', with their husbands, continue to provide an important, community building function.

One 26 July 2005 Sheila Lawless celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of her arrival in Australia; fifty years of homemaking, community building and contributing to the creation of the 'Australian way of life', as it has come to be called. Not all individual contributions to the common good are recognised publicly, but this does not make them any less remarkable. Like the so-called 'pioneer women' who arrived a century earlier, Sheila Lawless and others like her, who arrived as part of the postwar wave of migration to Australia, turned aggregated plots of land into the living, breathing communities that support the bulk of Australia's population today. Love them or leave them, but a life in the suburbs in the 1950s and 60s provided the childhood backdrop for the ascendant generation of today. Sheila and her generation of women provided the comfort and security that enabled the so-called 'baby boomers' to make the most of their opportunities. That they could do it with the memory of war still current and the pangs of homesickness ever present is truly remarkable.

Source of Image: Sheila Lawless.

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© Australian Women's Archives Project, 2006
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