ELIZABETH Connors will celebrate her 90th birthday on January 4 with a party thrown by a wide circle of family and friends.
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She is a tall, stately woman, with obvious physical and emotional strength.
Despite her good health, Elizabeth said it is her faith that kept her strong after an often challenging life.
“Yes, because it’s helped me a lot though all that grief,” she said.
Her father Alexander Williams met and married Nellie Munro at Pindaroi, but Elizabeth said he was not an Australian man, but an Indian with a given name like Baba Khan.
Her grandfather Munro was a former sugar slave from the Pacific Islands, imported to work in the Queensland cane fields.
Elizabeth was born on January 4, 1926 at Bassendean, and she understands she was delivered by celebrated Aboriginal midwife Aunt May Yarrowyck.
She was one of 10 children, and the early years were spent at Woodlands near Kingstown where Alexander worked for 21 years.
He died from illness at Tingha hospital when Elizabeth was nine.
Her mother kept the family together and took them first to live with family at Bundarra, then further north to Tingha’s Long Gully Mission, or Ngrumba, run by the Harris family.
“We grew up there, and there was an old school, and we had missionaries for teachers,” Elizabeth said.
The family endured a second tragedy with Nellie’s death from pneumonia when Elizabeth was 12, which put them in the crosshairs of the welfare people.
“What they used to do in a lot of cases, they’d wait for the men to go to work, and that’s when they would come in,” she said.
“They took the Edwards family (her cousins) and the Turnbull family away from there, and we never saw them any more.”
The process was frightening for the children and heartbreaking for parents.
She said she recalled the day the welfare workers arrived to remove her siblings and her cousins, the Gardiners.
“We didn’t want to go, and of course they had police with them as well,” she said.
“When we were all walking out the door, crying, our two eldest brothers, they started a fight.”
The young men scared off the authorities, who retreated a safe distance and threatened to return.
Elizabeth said they never did, but the family remained vigilant.
They took the Edwards family (her cousins) and the Turnbull family away from there, and we never saw them any more.
- Elizabeth Connors
“After this incident with the welfare people, we had to go out and work, and what they did, they found work for us on properties,” she said.
The mission dispatched Elizabeth as a housemaid and her cousin as cook, in a pair.
They worked at Gragin Station, Newstead North, and Shannon Vale at Glen Innes.
It was a seven days a week, all day, with time off at Christmas, when they were dropped at the Tingha town limit and they walked to the old mission.
“In those days, it was pounds, shillings and pence; it wasn’t dollars,” Elizabeth said.
“The cook would get two pounds a week, and the housemaid would get one.”
She later met her future husband, Darcy Edward Connors, a Bigumbul man from Queensland, at Gragin.
The couple had nine children, but lost two prematurely.
Elizabeth lost Darcy on March 30, 1974 in a car accident, which claimed the lives of four more family members.
Elizabeth now has 32 grandchildren, 119 great-grandchildren and 27 great-great grandchildren.
She spread her maternal touch beyond the children she bore, helping a brother with his children when he endured the loss of two wives, and taking in 15 foster children.
Life now finds Elizabeth busy most days around Inverell and Tingha at weekly group get-togethers, events and schools.
She said her life is now guided by her faith.
“The most important thing in my life was when I changed my life in 1978, I gave my life to the Lord, and I’ve been a Christian ever since,” she said.
“Because of all the grief, I was sick of it, the accident, and losing other loved ones, like my daughter, and my son, and I decided to give my life to the Lord.”
