Val’s lifelong Valentine
• Valerie Auton in the garden of her home at Nabowla.
By Daisy Baker,
March 16, 2022
Valentine Farm at Nabowla is a place Valerie Auton holds dear and has been a common backdrop throughout her eventful 90 years.
She was born at the farm and spent the first eight years of her life there before moving to Scottsdale with her family.
“We moved to Scottsdale when I was eight and it was the worst day of my life. I never wanted to go and it’s owned and possessed me forever,” she says.
Her mum bought the 50-acres the farm sits on from the neighbours as somewhere to run the cows she milked during the winter months.
“My brother and I used to walk them from Scottsdale at Ringarooma Road, the first house past the old swimming pool where the caravan park is,” she said.
“We used to walk all the way down here on the side of the road.
“The cows knew the run in the end and were never any problem.”
Mrs Auton said she was never keen on school but eagerly took up the opportunity to become a telephonist at the telephone exchange in Scottsdale upon graduating.
She said being one of five telephonists was a job she loved.
Mrs Auton continued on at the exchange until she married Neil Auton in 1950 and they moved to Branxholm where they raised their four children Gray, Murray-John, Karen and Sali.
During the school holidays, she often took her children to the Nabowla farm, where they would stay in the little old cottage, along with her sister who visited from St Marys.
Before Mrs Auton took on nursing, she gained significant health insight through the struggles of her son Murray-John.
Two of her sisters were nurses but until one of Murray’s doctors suggested she become a nurse, she said she’d never considered the career path.
The matron at the North Eastern Soldiers Memorial hospital turned her away, saying they weren’t taking on any nurses and Mrs Auton thought maybe it just wasn’t meant to be.
But the next week, she received a call from the matron asking her to start as an auxiliary nurse the following Monday.
When they moved into the new hospital, Mrs Auton said she used to assist the surgeon with surgeries.
“It was so exciting because we’d get the patients into the hospital either Monday night for Tuesday surgery or Wednesday night for Thursday surgery and you’d get them ready, the next day you’d be there operating on them and the next day you’d be looking after them again on the ward, so you followed them right through,” she said.
“We had Dr SenGupta and he was a missionary doctor from India and he did absolutely everything. He was doing really high-tech stuff.
“I can remember the first super-selective vagotomy in Australia and he did it at Scottsdale.
“I was there with him. Every finger was taken up with something.
“That’s when I thought ‘I’m not fully qualified enough to do this’ so that’s when I wanted to learn more and do more.”
At 40, Val became the first mature aged student to do her general nursing training in Tasmania.
After completing her training and spending a year working in A&E in Latrobe and Scottsdale, she decided to do further training in midwifery at the Mersey General Hospital.
Mrs Auton said the first baby she delivered sticks in her mind as one of the highlights of her career.
As she progressed in her nursing career, Mrs Auton eventually moved to the Nabowla farm.
In 1983 Mrs Auton went to Western Australia as an outback nurse for six months.
“I must say that was the happiest time of my life. It was just wonderful being there with the Aborigines.”
She spent two months in Wyndham, a month as the matron of a nursing home in Derby and then for the last three months she was stationed as a nurse in the desert, which she says was “just awesome”.
After receiving word that her daughter Karen was expecting twins, and her mother had taken ill, Mrs Auton decided it was time to come home.
Upon her return, she went back to work at the NESM where she stayed until she retired at 65.
In the meantime, she acquired land from forestry adjoining the family farm and cleared it all, giving her a total of 40 acres.
When her mother passed away, Mrs Auton inherited four acres of land and the house, which at that time was a tumbled down little cottage.
Over the years, Mrs Auton has renovated the cottage.
“How I rebuilt this house, I really don’t know but I did most of it myself. I had someone put the roof on and do the plaster but I did everything else,” she said.
“The house next door to Neil at Branxholm was for sale for 15 pounds so I bought that and Neil brought it down on the truck and a friend from Scottsdale joined it up.
“A bit got added on and then another bit got added on.”
The once ramshackle four-room cottage is now plenty big enough to house visiting extended family.
When asked what the place means to her, Mrs Auton’s face lights up. “Everything. Just happiness,” she beamed.
Despite her love of the Nabowla farm, Mrs Auton said she has never been one to settle and has felt the itch to travel and explore, right through her life.
“Every second year I’d go on a holiday somewhere, climbing mountains or exploring,” she said fondly.
“The best one in my life was when I went with Julie Skipper and we had a week with the grizzly bears and black bears in Western Canada and then we went to Churchill to see the polar bears,” she said, turning in her seat to point to a series of framed photos on the wall behind her.
“And that polar bear actually came and talked to me. It was just an amazing experience.”
When she was doing her nursing training, she frequented Cradle Mountain, often visiting for a night with her friends after a bad night on the ward.
“I think it was 50 cents a night to stay in the huts then. They had heaters in there and you always had to take dry sticks to get your fire going. Of course, the wood was always wet.”
The thrill of meeting different people and exploring new places has also taken Mrs Auton caravanning across Australia, and to Peru, Antarctica, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, India, the Himalayas, and Bhutan among many other destinations abroad.
Mrs Auton has collected hundreds of gemstones from all corners of the globe throughout her travels, which are now displayed in her home.
“I’ve picked up stones from all over the world and I just love them,” she said.
“There’s some really expensive ones in there and dirt cheap ones.
“I’ve just had this fascination with stones and I don’t know where it came from.”
These days Mrs Auton lives life at a slower pace and her expansive garden is her pride and joy.
She said she’s grateful for the help of a local man in maintaining the garden beds and keeping on top of the weeds, which alongside contending with the farm’s strong population of quolls and possums, is a constant job.
Mrs Auton celebrated her 90th birthday on the weekend at a small gathering with her immediate family, a cousin from New South Wales and two of her best friends.