More A Cat Person Than A Dingo Fan

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday April 1, 2006

Alan Ramsey

MARIE GREEN was born in Petersham in December 1915. Her mother was Irish and her father's parents Scottish. Her childhood was a Sydney of hansom cabs working from Central, at the time called simply Sydney Station, with nearby Mortuary Station used for mourners and coffins going to Rookwood Cemetery. Her father, a railwayman for 54 years, would take the family on picnics in a hired horse and sulky.

There were horse trams at Kogarah station and trolley trams from Rockdale to Brighton, where a teenage Marie went swimming. Sydney airport, known as Mascot Aerodrome, was a "corrugated iron hangar in a paddock". Marie would walk there, from Tempe, on Saturday afternoons. At 14 she left school to work for J.N. and A.E. Grace, in china and glassware (imported), at Grace Bros, Broadway. Only "pottery pudding bowls and chamber pots" were made in Australia.

Sixty-four years later Green would record for oral history: "I stayed at Grace Bros until 1937, when I decided to go into nursing, but the sisters were so hard they broke my spirit and I had to give it up. Then I answered an ad in the paper. It was to take care of a Mrs Howard, who was the grandmother of [the man who would become] our Prime Minister. She had very bad arthritis, so I was like a housekeeper for her and her husband [Walter] and their three sons still at home. [Grandfather] Howard had a heart attack and I stayed on there at Dulwich Hill for 12 months.

"There were eight children [including John Howard's father, Lyall] and they were visiting all the time. They were a lovely family - very, very close. Lyall owned the garage on the other corner from the house. He and his wife, Mona, would drop in regularly. The older Howard and I would sit on the veranda and we'd look across at the garage where 'HOWARD' was written up. He had owned the garage himself before he retired. He taught me [how to drive with] the gears on that letter 'H'.

"I continued to see them after I stopped working for them. When I got married [in 1940], Mr Howard [the grandfather] drove me to the church in [his] big Chrysler and he gave me away."

Forty-five years later, in 1985, Marie Green moved into the Weroona nursing home in Leichhardt, where John Howard's mother, Mona, hugely proud of her youngest son, then opposition deputy leader, had been a resident until her death. In 2001, Green's memories of working for Howard's grandparents were included in a book of Weroona residents' life stories, and she later framed a signed letter of thanks from her Prime Minister and hung it on her bedroom wall.

However, you might recall I wrote in this space in February 2004 how Green, with the help of her friend Monica Law, had written to Howard before Christmas to say how "disgusted" she'd been by his "ungentlemanly" behaviour in Parliament towards Mark Latham's election as opposition leader "and how upset his grandfather would have been". So disgusted, in fact, she'd taken Howard's framed letter down and replaced it with "a picture of a cat".

Green turned 90 last December 15. This week Monica Law emailed to say Marie Green had died peacefully in her sleep on March 12. The message added: "She would have wanted you to know. The picture of the cat was still on her wall. So was a copy of your story."