Gwendolyn May Trenerry (née Hartley)

Needles and the Wharf Whistle

Gwendolyn May Hartley was born on 14th March 1946 in a narrow stone cottage on Hart Street in Semaphore, a few streets back from the Port Adelaide waterfront. She was the second of four children born to Albert Edward Hartley, a wharf labourer, and Edna Rose Hartley (née Morgan), who took in mending and alterations from the front room to make up for the weeks when the ships were few and the work went to other men.

Her elder brother, Leonard Albert Hartley, had been born in 1942, while their father was away with the army. Joyce Evelyn Hartley followed Gwen in 1949, and the youngest, Raymond John Hartley, arrived in 1952. The post-war years kept the Port busy, but the work on the wharves was still taken by the day, and Albert came home either flush and short-tempered or idle and worse. Most evenings he was too tired to do much more than eat, read the racing pages and fall asleep in his chair with his boots still on.

It was Edna who shaped Gwen. The front room was always full of other people's clothes, and from the age of six Gwen sat at her mother's feet unpicking hems and sorting buttons into jam jars. By eight she could crochet a passable doily. Edna was not a warm woman in the way of hugs and praise, but she was steady, and she taught her elder daughter that a pair of busy hands was the surest answer to most of life's troubles. Gwen absorbed the lesson so thoroughly that she never quite unlearned it.

She left school at fifteen, in December 1961, as most girls of her street did. Her first job was packing boxes at a confectionery works in Kilkenny, a tram and a walk from home, where the smell of boiled sugar clung to her hair and her clothes. In 1963 she moved to the haberdashery counter of a drapery on Commercial Road in Port Adelaide, and she stayed there four years, measuring ribbon, matching thread and developing the dry, quick tongue that customers either enjoyed or avoided.

A Cornishman from the Copper Coast

Ronald Thomas Trenerry came into her life at a Saturday night dance at the Semaphore Palais in the autumn of 1965. He was twenty-two, a fitter by trade, born on 2nd August 1942 in Kadina, where his Cornish forebears had come out to the copper mines in the previous century. He had moved down to Adelaide for work and boarded with an aunt in Rosewater.

Ron was not much of a dancer. He was, however, a patient listener, and he laughed at her remarks in a way that suggested he understood them, which was more than most of the young men at the Palais managed. They courted for two years, mostly at the pictures and on the Semaphore jetty, and married on 19th March 1967 at the Port Adelaide Methodist Church. Gwen made her own dress. Edna altered it twice before the day because she did not trust anyone else's seams, including her daughter's.

The young couple began in a rented half-house in Rosewater, but in 1968 they took a South Australian Housing Trust double unit in Elizabeth South, the satellite town that had grown out of the paddocks north of the city in little more than a decade. Elizabeth was still young and windswept, its streets full of English migrants who found the heat and the flies as bewildering as the locals found their accents. Ron took a job as a maintenance fitter with General Motors-Holden's, and he stayed with the company for the rest of his working life.

The early years of the marriage carried a sorrow they rarely spoke of. Gwen lost two pregnancies, one in 1968 and another in 1970, both before the twelfth week. There was no ceremony for such things then, only a doctor's few words and a return to the household routine. Their daughter, Denise Joy Trenerry, was born at the Lyell McEwin Hospital on 9th February 1972. No more children came after her, and in time Gwen stopped expecting them.

Two Young Men in White Shirts

In the winter of 1978, two missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints knocked on the door in Elizabeth South. Ron was at work. Gwen, who had drifted away from Methodist services after Denise's birth, let them in mostly because it was raining and they looked about sixteen.

They came back the following week, and the week after that. Something in their certainty appealed to her. The Church offered order, purpose and a community of women who did things with their hands, and by the end of the year she had committed to the Word of Wisdom and given up black tea, consoling herself with an herbal blend she drowned in so much milk and sugar that nobody could have said what it was. She was baptised in the Elizabeth Branch in February 1979.

Ron never followed her into the water. He attended her baptism in a borrowed tie, shook the missionaries' hands, and thereafter treated her faith as he might have treated a passion for lawn bowls: respected, mildly baffling and not his concern. He kept his cigarettes and his Saturday beer in the shed out the back, and Gwen let him, an arrangement that some of the more zealous sisters in the branch found scandalous and that Gwen herself defended with unexpected ferocity.

Denise was baptised at eight, in 1980. Through the 1980s Gwen poured herself into the branch's Relief Society. She cooked for funerals, crocheted baby blankets for every new mother, worked in the tuckshop at Denise's primary school and later took a part-time position at a wool and craft shop in the Elizabeth Town Centre. She was rarely the one leading anything. She was the one who turned up, stayed until the end and took the tablecloths home to wash.

Words That Were Never Taken Back

Denise was a bright, restless girl who grew into a sharp-edged teenager. By fifteen she had stopped attending seminary. By sixteen she had stopped attending Church at all, and she said so to her mother in terms that left no room for gentle persuasion. Ron, caught between the two of them, tended to retreat to the shed, which neither woman forgave him for entirely.

The arguments grew worse through 1989. In March 1990, a month after her eighteenth birthday, Denise announced she was moving to Perth with a young man named Craig Holloway, a mechanic she had met through friends. Gwen said a great many things that evening. The one that lasted was a remark, delivered at the front door, that Denise would come crawling back within the year and that the door would be open when she did. It was meant, at least in part, as an offer. Denise heard only the crawling.

She did not come back. Denise and Craig married at the Perth registry office on 14th April 1995, and Gwen learnt of it by letter a fortnight afterwards. Their son, Bradley James Holloway, was born on 3rd June 1997, and their daughter, Kirsten Leigh Holloway, followed on 22nd November 2000.

The relationship that settled between mother and daughter was not open hostility. It was something more durable than that: a polite, dutiful distance maintained by both sides. There were telephone calls on birthdays and at Christmas, cards with brief notes, and every December a studio portrait of the grandchildren, posed and lit and mounted in a cardboard frame. Gwen put each one on the mantelpiece. Ron flew to Perth several times on his own. Gwen went with him only once, in 2001, and the visit was so stiff and careful on all sides that neither woman suggested repeating it.

Brick, Roses and a Lemon Tree

With Denise gone, the Housing Trust unit felt too large and too full of arguments. In 1991 Gwen and Ron bought a modest red-brick unit in Smithfield, built in the late 1970s, with a small front garden, a single carport and a backyard just large enough for a clothesline and a shed. Gwen brought the curtains with her from Elizabeth South, a dusty rose and avocado floral she had chosen in the 1970s and saw no reason to replace.

Ron planted roses along the front and, in the corner by the back fence, a Eureka lemon tree. It took three years to fruit and then never stopped. Its lemons came out lopsided and thick-skinned, often flushed pink on the side that caught the afternoon sun, and Gwen gave them away by the bagful to anyone who visited, whether they wanted them or not.

The Elizabeth Branch grew and was reorganised more than once over the years, and Gwen's membership eventually settled in the Playford Ward of the Modbury Australia Stake. She knew its chapel the way she knew her own kitchen. She had sat through the funerals of half the original branch members and crocheted shawls for the babies of their grandchildren.

Ron's lungs had not enjoyed forty years of cigarettes, and his heart began to fail in his late fifties. He took early retirement from Holden's in 2001 with a watch he never wore, and spent the time left to him tinkering in the shed, oiling everything except the shed door, and driving Gwen to the shops. The decline was slow, a matter of swollen ankles, breathlessness on the front steps and a growing collection of pill bottles on the kitchen windowsill.

He died at the Lyell McEwin Hospital on 3rd September 2004, aged sixty-two, with Gwen beside him. His funeral was held at the Uniting Church in Elizabeth, the successor to the Methodist congregation of his youth, a choice Gwen made deliberately and against the gentle suggestions of her ward. Denise flew over for four days. Mother and daughter managed the funeral, the wake and the paperwork together with brisk competence, argued once over whether to sell the unit, and parted at the airport with a hug that surprised them both.

The Long Watch at the Window

Gwen stayed. She saw no reason to leave a house that worked, and the years after Ron's death settled into a routine she guarded fiercely. Sacrament meeting on Sundays. Relief Society. The Thursday shopping, walked when her knees allowed and driven by a ward member when they did not. The butcher on Main North Road who knew how she liked her chops wrapped. Evenings spent in her armchair under the lamp, a crochet hook going and the television murmuring, producing afghans, doilies and knee rugs that went to the ward, the hospital and anyone who stood still long enough.

Her body slowed well before her spirit was ready to. Arthritis settled early into her hands and knees, well before she turned seventy, and she began wearing hearing aids in 2014, which whistled at inconvenient moments and which she adjusted with an irritation that never softened into acceptance. She refused, on principle, every offer to repair the front steps, service the heater or replace the screen door. She understood perfectly well that each accepted favour was a small concession of independence. She also understood where such concessions led, having watched older friends in the ward make them one by one on the slow road to aged care.

The ward assigned her visiting teachers, as it did every sister, and over the years a long procession of women came through her lounge room. From around 2013 the assignment fell to Greta Smith and Evelyn Baker, who came once a month. Gwen liked them both, in different ways. Evelyn was easy company, warm and unhurried. Greta was organised to a degree Gwen found faintly comic, but she was reliable, and she noticed things. Gwen made them her too-sweet tea, offered them biscuits from a tin and steered every conversation well clear of her daughter.

In May 2018 she tripped over the brick edging of her rose bed while bringing in the washing and opened a deep gash along her left shin. At seventy-two, with her circulation not what it had been, her skin did not heal the way it once had. The wound became an ulcer that needed dressing twice a week by a community nurse, and it was still raw and slow at the end of July. She mentioned it at Relief Society only because a sister had seen her limping, and she regretted mentioning it at once.

On the morning of 26th July 2018, Greta and Evelyn made their usual visit. Gwen was in a lavender cardigan with sequinned daisies, her hearing aid misbehaving as usual. She served tea and scotch fingers, waved away their concern about the cold and talked about the butcher's recent closure and a possum that had taken up residence near the shed. As they were leaving, she pressed one of Ron's pink-flushed lemons into Greta's hand and told her she would make something lovely with it. It was the kind of small offering she made a dozen times a month. This one happened to land.

It was also, as things turned out, the last time either woman visited. Within weeks, both the Smiths and the Bakers had left the ward without explanation, part of a quiet run of departures that unsettled the Playford congregation through the latter half of 2018. Gwen heard about it from Sister Dalton, who brought the news along with a knitted shawl Gwen had no use for. She did not join the speculation that went around the chapel foyer. She simply noted that Thursday visits had stopped, kept her own counsel, and waited to see who the ward would send instead.

The Steps, at Last

The leg wound finally closed in the summer of 2019. Gwen celebrated by refusing the nurse's offer of a walking stick. A new pair of ministering sisters began visiting later that year, younger women with small children in tow, and Gwen treated them with the same mixture of hospitality and stubbornness she had shown all their predecessors.

The pandemic of 2020 sealed her inside the unit for months. The chapel closed, the sacrament came to her door, and the conference broadcasts reached her through a tablet set up by a ward member's teenage son, which she never quite mastered. Something unexpected came of the isolation. Denise began telephoning every Sunday afternoon, first out of worry and then out of habit. The calls were never long and never touched the old wounds, but they were regular, and Gwen came to plan her Sundays around them.

On 11th March 2022, three days before her seventy-sixth birthday, she fell in the kitchen while reaching for a tin on a high shelf and fractured her right hip. She lay on the linoleum for nearly two hours before a neighbour, noticing the curtains had not moved, came to check. The surgery at the Lyell McEwin Hospital went well, and after five weeks of rehabilitation she was judged fit to go home, on conditions.

Denise flew over and stayed for three weeks. She wanted her mother in a retirement village, or in Perth, and said so more than once. Gwen refused both, and the argument that followed was the closest the two of them had come to the old ones in decades. They settled on a compromise neither enjoyed. Grab rails went into the bathroom, a council home-help worker came twice a week, and a ward member's husband finally rebuilt the front steps, a concession Gwen granted with very poor grace and never mentioned again.

She walked with a stick after that, and resented it. Her hands began to fail on the crochet hook during 2024, which grieved her more than the hip had, though she kept at it in shorter and shorter stretches, producing squares that no longer quite lined up. Her hearing worsened. She never lost the dry turn of phrase, or the habit of seeing visitors coming before they reached the driveway.

Denise flew over each year in March, around her mother's birthday, and still telephoned on Sundays. Bradley visited once, in 2023, with a fiancée Gwen approved of on sight. The words spoken at the front door in Elizabeth South in 1990 were never discussed, by either of them, and by then they no longer needed to be. Gwen remained in the Smithfield unit through 2026, at eighty, with Ron's lemon tree still fruiting by the back fence, giving the lemons away to anyone who called and assuring everyone who asked that she was perfectly fine.