Joyce Gegg with a small Bernina sewing machine she owned before opening her bridal shop 53 years ago. Photo: John Thistleton.
Behind the elegant bridal gowns lined with intricate beading, a determined dressmaker toiled to feed her family and establish herself as a household name in Goulburn for more than half a century.
Born Annie Joyce Griffith in a shearing shed near Grong Grong in the Riverina after the family home had been destroyed by fire, she lost her father to cancer when she was four. She milked cows before and after school.
In the workforce at age 13, she scrubbed a neighbour’s floors and cooked for their shearers and workmen. At age 16, she travelled on a bus for 48 kilometres to attend a dressmaking course at Narrandera Technical College.
On her 21st birthday, she moved with her mother, Emma, and her second husband, Joe Todkill, to Goulburn. Married at age 23, Joyce, as she became known, later took in sewing for her neighbours and ran the North Goulburn Public School canteen while raising her three children, John, Greg and Bronwyn.
When the marriage broke down, she applied to be a cleaner at Goulburn Base Hospital, only to be turned down by a good friend, matron Ros Noakes. Joyce had been sewing for Ros and her mother for many years. They had met at St Nicholas’ Anglican Church and Ros saw a much brighter future for her friend.
“You get yourself down the street and get a shop like I have been telling you to and open a business,” Ros had said to her.
Within 10 days, Joyce had organised a lease and a bank overdraft for a small shop opposite Geissler Motors in Auburn Street. She settled on her new venture’s name, Bronwyn’s Bridal Boutique, hoping one day her daughter Bronwyn, 11 at the time, would take on the business.
Working seven days a week in the early times, sometimes well into the night finishing urgent jobs, Joyce discovered Ros Noakes’ confidence in her was well placed.
“I’ve never employed anyone; it was just myself,” Joyce said. “I made my own patterns and everything. I would measure my customers, and the gowns were made to measure. I’ve had a lot of experience. I used to make all my children’s clothes, my nieces’ clothes, I did all my nieces’ weddings.”
She teamed up with Phyllis Fashions owner and friend Phyllis Rudd to stage the annual bride and debutante of the year parades and hosted fashion parades for charitable fundraisers.
Joyce’s daughter Brownyn in the gown her mother made her, one of 25 that had to be finished on the weekend of her wedding. Photo: Gegg family collection.
A woman from a travelling circus called in one Monday morning, wanting a bridal gown and four bridesmaids’ gowns urgently. The wedding was on the Thursday. Joyce finished them on the morning of the wedding.
More than once she made gowns for gay couples from the Southern Highlands.
After seven years in the shop, she relocated to a double shop upstairs in the Huntley Arcade, further south in Auburn Street, where she became good friends with other tenants, including curtain-maker Bob Jones, accountant Des Storrier and gift retailer Ray Olsen.
Much of the detailed work on her beautiful gowns was done by hand.
“I used to do all the beading at night,” she said. “It was a lot of work; no wonder my eyesight’s going.
“I loved my work. I used to go in at 7 o’clock and came home sometimes at 8 or 9 pm, depending on what was happening.”
She made her daughter Bronwyn’s wedding gown and four gowns for her attendants. On the weekend of that wedding, Joyce had to complete 25 gowns. Bronwyn’s was the last one, finished at 5:30 on the morning of the wedding.
In 1978, she married Austin Gegg and planned to retire a decade later. But when Austin was later diagnosed with a brain tumour, Joyce moved out of the shop, continued sewing at a reduced rate and looked after her husband until his death in 1988.
Tragedy struck again in 2002 when her son Greg was killed in a trucking accident.
“I vowed I wasn’t going to do any more sewing,” Joyce said. “But a girl came to the door one day, crying her eyes out, wanting a dress. She said, ‘You will have to make me a dress’.”
Joyce obliged, and the business began afresh and continued later as she fought and overcame breast cancer in 2011.
She stopped working in 2023, having lost sight in her right eye, and has regular injections to save her left eye.
“I’m still managing,” the 95-year-old said. “It’s just the reading and the close work which is too much.”
