Aileen’s Derby days
• Scottsdale’s Aileen Johnston reflects on 82 years of life.
By Daisy Baker,
November 02, 2022
Aileen Johnston spent much of her childhood in Derby, where her family had a thriving vegetable garden, and trapping rabbits and raising your own chickens was just part of life.
Mining was still the major industry in the town, with the mine hole visible from her classroom window.
“We could sit in grades seven, eight and nine and look out the window, facing the big mine hole and you’d see rockfalls coming down while you were in the classroom and on the rare occasion you’d see an animal go over,” she said.
“I remember a man being killed on the Derby Mine. They had a trolley they used to cart the big bags of tin on, to cart it from point A to point B and he got run over by it and was killed instantly.
“I would’ve only been five and I still remember his name.”
Mrs Johnston said going forward she would like to see more of Derby’s history honoured.
Of a Sunday she said it was commonplace for her and other local children to go to a house and record hymns that would be played on 7SD.
She has fond memories of going to the picture theatre with her siblings, entering for a shilling and spending sixpence on a treat in the break between movies.
When Winnaleah District High School opened in September 1955, Mrs Johnston was 15 and in her final year of school.
“The Government gave the parents permission for the girls to have a grey pleated skirt instead of a tunic so we could wear it when we left,” she said.
“Then I was monitor at the Derby School for 12 months.”
In 1956 she was the Sunday School teacher and used to do housework for the Minister Mr Morris.
On the evening that the doctor’s surgery burnt down, Mrs Johnston was working on the telephone exchange in Derby.
“I had to go and wake up the postmaster to come and help me because I couldn’t manage the two boards – it was the real old-fashioned exchange,” she said.
“That was a horrific thing in Derby at the time.”
When a young Ronnie Grenda and Denzel Casboult came to town to work at the Commercial Bank they were frequent users of the public phonebooth.
“We were naughty and didn’t used to charge them so they’d stand there for hours and talk to us girls on the exchange,” she laughed.
By 1958, Mrs Johnston was still doing a lot of housekeeping, including for Mr Percy Press one of the local butchers, whose passage she used to polish from the front to back doors on her knees.
“I bought my first high-heeled shoes in Derby and all those sort of things,” she smiled.
“Derby was a beautiful place then.”
The Minister’s wife Mrs Morris was a trained nurse and later that year Mrs Johnston decided she wanted to pursue the career herself so she enrolled at St Luke’s Hospital.
She ventured into Launceston on the January long weekend by bus, arriving at 9 o’clock at night.
“I walked up in the pitch-black dark with my case up to the hospital, went in and they took me over to the Nurse’s home in Clarence Street and I stayed there until Christmas 1960,” she said.
In July 1961 she married Max Johnston and they lived in Launceston.
Max had Polio when he was four and was left with severe disabilities.
Together they had four sons Phillip, Andrew, Ian, Graham in less than five years and then Mrs Johnston returned to night duty at St Luke’s, which she did for the next 12 years.
“I slept and they played outside and then I got up, they went to bed and I went to work,” she said.
Max worked for St Giles and together the pair helped found the Disabled Person’s Association, which organised a lot of fundraising.
Mrs Johnston said one of the rarest things she saw in her nursing career was a direct transfusion to save a woman who had a massive haemorrhage.
“They put over the radios [for assistance] and this big policeman came. They took blood straight out to him and straight into her to save her life,” she said.
“They called all the nurses off duty down to see it.”
She always said she would retire from nursing at 40, so in 1980 she did just that and later moved back to the North-East, living in Winnaleah, Derby, Branxholm and Scottsdale.
In her 82 years Mrs Johnston has faced more than her fair share of sickness
and heartbreak.
She said one of the saddest days of her life was when her sister Pauline, who had an intellectual disability, was hit by a car in Hobart, two days before Mother’s Day in May 1979.
“I looked after her for forty years before she got killed. I taught her to walk, taught her to talk, everything for her,” she said.
“She would have been 83 this year.”
In the first ten years of her marriage, she had eight operations, birthed four babies and lost twin girls.
In another incident, she came out of a car in Winnaleah after an accident and went through a barbed wire fence, suffering significant injuries to her head and arm, with around 58 stitches in her head and ear.
At the age of 62, she took on caring for her seven-month-old grandson Jacob
in 2003. He lived with her until he was 15.
Now at 20 years old, he is one of the regular visitors she looks forward to seeing.
Despite the hardships that have come her way, Mrs Johnston remains determined and generous.
“I think you’re born like it, to help and to give. Otherwise you’d just go down in a screaming heap,” she said.
“I never expected to live until I was 82.”
These days she makes a range of stuffed knitted toys and hand puppets, which she donates to Shekinah House, a service providing hope for Launceston’s Homeless.
When she’s not knitting for charity, she can be seen walking around Scottsdale, or enjoying time at the CWA, the local craft group or the hospital auxiliary.