Our Lady of Mercy College high school pupils in 1960. The borders in their jackets are seated, while the day students are standing. Verna Taylor is back row third on the right with a cheeky smile. She says the day students ignored a rule forbidding them to mix with the borders. Instead, they became firm friends. Photo: Taylor family collection.
Heavily pregnant in July 1944, no matter what Joan Canning told nurses at Goulburn Base Hospital, she was unable to convince them she was not an inmate from the jail.
She had been brought to the hospital by a prison officer in uniform, who happened to be her cousin. Both of them were unable to say exactly where overseas Joan’s husband, Dig (Digger) Canning was.
Joan’s daughter Verna, who was delivered safely at the hospital after that misunderstanding, explained her mother’s predicament.
Dig had been posted to Tarakan off the coast of Borneo to help defend the island against the Japanese during World War II. He had come from Cowra, where he had helped oversee a prisoner-of-war camp and was uneasy about the rapidly escalating unrest among more than 1000 Japanese prisoners being held there.
“You need to leave Cowra, it’s unsafe,” he told Joan who was about to give birth to Verna any day. She hurried back to relatives in Goulburn.
That’s how Verna arrived into the world. “There was a big cloud over me being the child of a felon,” she said.
Days later the Japanese prisoners escaped. More than 230 were killed along with three Australians.
The war took its toll on her parents’ marriage which later broke down, leaving Joan to raise her two children single-handedly.
Awarded a scholarship years later at Wagga Teachers College, 18-year-old Verna caught the train, with her mother attending to see her off.
Later at college she met her future husband, Robert Taylor, another Goulburn local who had been visiting with cousins.
Completing her training, she was appointed to Bowral briefly before joining Goulburn’s Bourke Street infants school, where resources were meagre.
“The principal used to lock up the firewood in September, so we had to wear an overcoat in the classroom, it was so cold,” she said. “I had a weed growing up an inside wall that I let grow to four feet, that’s how cold and damp it was.”
After a break from teaching and having her daughter Sherilyn, she resumed teaching at West Goulburn and later had a second baby, Mark.
At home with one of her corgis, Scout, Verna Taylor recounts extraordinary events leading up to her arrival into the world. Photo: John Thistleton.
“When I came back after having Mark, I went to North Goulburn for a term and they had this strange class called the family class,” she said. “They were all ages from third class to sixth class and were either cousins or brothers and sisters.”
Verna’s challenge keeping the peace was akin to presiding over one long extended family squabble.
Returning to West Goulburn she taught a class in a converted weather shed, so tightly packed with 20 children she had to climb over desks to get from one end of the room to the other.
If little children had an accident and needed a change of pants teachers had few options without hot water. “You would be trying to clean up little kids with cold water in the middle of winter,” Verna said.
Carpet arrived for the weather shed floor due to a policy from new prime minister Gough Whitlam in 1972. The school had divided into infants and primary, with the appointment of a head mistress, Heather Durrant.
Free milk in little bottles for the children was a welcome bonus. “The boys loved it; they licked the congealed cream off the top,” Verna said. Without a refrigerator the milk sat outside no matter what the temperature was, even in summer. But everyone made do with what they had. “Nobody died because their packed lunch wasn’t in a freezer box,” Verna said.
Travelling on school excursions teachers tried to include a parent who also was a nurse, in case of any mishaps, a good plan that came undone when they visited Bundanoon. “We found a parent who was a nurse, and she was the only one who got injured,” she said. “She ran into a stick and hurt herself.”
Transferred in 1981 to East Goulburn Primary School, she was unhappy leaving West until she realised her new principal Alan Milne was such a lovely boss.
Verna Taylor with Goulburn East Kindergarten and Years One and Two in 1982. The composite class had 24 children, a handful for a single teacher. Photo: Taylor family collection.
Her career was cut short in 1986 when she was forced to retire due to a voice disorder caused by her laryngeal nerves locking near the base of her throat, preventing sound from coming out.
“I was heartbroken,” Verna said. “I loved teaching, loved the children; they are so little as infants and most of them wanted to learn.”
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