Pat Strachan has devoted much of her life to teaching children and leading groups of young people. Since coming to Goulburn as a primary and infants school teacher she has maintained links with the Parkesbourne community. Photo: John Thistleton.
Ignoring the adage, never work with children or animals, Pat Strachan has embraced both for much of her life.
It began with her husband Alan’s silky bantam chooks and later, miniature dachshunds, followed by her children and many others in primary and infants schools, her church and social circles.
Pat met Alan when they were students at the Wollongong Teachers College. Among the first cohort of 140 students at the new college, they began teaching in 1963, married in 1965 and came from Riverina schools to Goulburn in 1967.
After renting in Goulburn they moved into a home at ‘Grovedale’ at Parkesbourne, where they were caretakers for 20 years.
“At one stage, when I called enough, this has got to stop, we had 22 miniature dachshunds,” Pat said.
Once out of town with more room, their assortment of animals expanded to budgerigars and old English game bantams, or as Pat says, “those dreadful things with the big claws. One attacked me and I threw the bucket at it.”
Luckily for those chooks Alan looked after them, while Pat fed and cared for the dachshunds, keeping a sharp eye out for snakes and learning how to use a double-barrel shotgun that came with the house. “My 10-year-old grandson thinks it’s wonderful because he has a grandma who had a double-barrel shotgun and could actually use it,” she says with a chuckle.
They lost one dog on the way to the vet, who suggested containers of water on the perimeter of the dogs’ run because that’s what the snakes were after.
Alan later became engrossed in genetics while developing a special breed of show pigeons for nearly 20 years. “Then he got too ill to continue and was absolutely devastated,” Pat said. “He had nearly 200 pigeons.” Sadly, Alan died in February, 2021.
Junior Anglicans group from Goulburn hired a small bus for outings, which Pat Strachan learned to drive and visited places like Warragamba Dam in 1976 when the dam was under construction. Pat is seated on the extreme left. Photo: Strachan family collection.
Legendary rose grower and chief flower steward at the Goulburn Show Max Ryan enlisted Pat as his ‘chief scribbler’, a tedious job writing out prize cards after the judging. When he stepped down from his steward’s role he gave the job to Pat, who still fills that role at age 80.
Fortuitously she inherited a walking frame left behind by a previous volunteer, a handy accessory after she was recovering from a fall. She was able to pile everything she needed onto the walker and wheel it into the pavilion.
As chief flower steward Pat says she is caught between the devil and the deep-blue sea, finding the two days of assembling the flower section a struggle, but well rewarded talking to so many like-minded people. She loves people.
Her father Jim Whittaker, a 10-pound Pom and fitter and turner met her mother Ethel Osbourne at Corowa and the couple raised their children in Sydney.
“I grew up in a church youth group in Sydney, Westmead Methodist Youth Group; it was a big part of my life,” she said. “The youth leader was 21; we were boyfriend and girlfriend and he was convinced he was going to marry me and so were his parents. But I went away to college and met Alan. These things happen when you are only 17.”
At Parkesbourne each Sunday Pat and her daughters Beth and Karina cycled to the Merrilla Uniting Church, while Alan was off in the car attending chook shows.
She would drive Beth to Junior Farmers meetings and sit up the back marking school books which led her into a leader’s position alongside Pat Hunt. She later helped Pat Hunt establish an animal nursery at the show.
She helped other clubs during her daughters’ soccer and hockey playing days, as well as the Uniting Church youth groups and rural youth group which succeeded Junior Farmers. Pat regards her long tenure with the church as a vocation more than a period of volunteering and today is the Uniting Church Parkesbourne secretary and caretaker of the cemetery there and at Merrilla.
A group of junior Anglicans at Bundanoon in the 1970s, when they hired bikes and visited the Glow Worm Glen. Photo: Pat Strachan.
She taught at West Goulburn and East Goulburn public schools in the 1960s and 1970s, and was infants deputy principal at South Goulburn. She was then appointed as infants deputy principal at Bourke Street Public School through the 1980s, earning the nickname ‘Strawny’ from younger pupils, and returned to East Goulburn.
She is clear on the overall highlight of her school career:
“Teaching Kindergarten,”she said. “They are just divine. They sit in a big circle, you can throw an idea at them and they just go with it. There are no inhibitions; it’s just wonderful.”
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