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Norma’s early life was as she described “terrific” growing up in a small South Australian town called Callington.
For the first 10 years of her life although television was introduced in 1956 no-one in the small town purchased a set.
“Every child in Callington had to make their own fun and this is exactly what Norma and her cousins Daryl and Jill did.
Her mother and father owned the local shop and they also operated the local school bus run. Her father would be either setting 14 dozen rabbit traps a day or shearing around the district so it was up to the ‘kids’ to make their own fun and that included setting traps along the Bremer River which Norma recalls was very tricky because not one of them was heavy enough to open the trap so her cousin Jill usually had to jump on Daryl’s back and then Daryl would stand on the trap – very tricky operation all around but recalled as being fantastic fun.
“Every few weeks on a Friday night we would go to the drive-in at Murray Bridge” Norma recalls and we would see movies like Stagecoach, Ben Hur, and Cleopatra leaving all us kids awe struck by the movie and being very inventive and artistic they would convert an old billy cart during Saturday into whatever was seen in the film the night before. Every kid in town would help and they would use simple things like the huge carton that the Kellogg’s Corn Flakes would come in, lots of baling twine, sticky tape and cans of spray paint out of the shop. Two of the boys would be the horses and Norma being the smallest was lucky enough to be the passenger.
Sunday mornings as soon as Methodist Church finished and the congregation were all standing out the front of the church chatting, all of a sudden along the road, very proudly, would go a spray painted gold chariot with Egyptian symbols boldly painted on the front being drawn by two very handsome adolescent steeds and Norma with the old discarded red Town Hall curtains draped over her like Egyptian attire holding onto her father’s buggy whip proudly travelling past
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Norma is positive the numbers attending the Methodist Church congregation increased during those times!
Norma went to Mt. Barker High School but one teacher who disliked her immensely actually did her a huge favour by getting her a job with a well established local business H.B. Chapman’s. She worked with that firm for over three years and the valuable experience has stayed with her all her life.
Norma married at a young age and had a daughter Tarnya and twelve months after the birth of her daughter she went back to work grateful she had a wonderful Mum that was a good babysitter.
Norma worked in several jobs over the years, her marriage had broken up a few years earlier and in 1985 she found herself in the small coastal town of Coffin Bay on the Eyre Peninsula and that is when she first met Bill eventually after six years Bill and Norma were married at Emerald, Queensland.
The adventures that Norma and Bill have had together over the last 32 years is being penned right now as Norma said they are hilarious and hinted it could be something that we may all be reading in the near future.
As Norma has pointed out her early childhood and getting a job at a young age gave her a great head start to life and a life that has turned out to be far more venturesome than most.
She pointed out no television or computers meant as kids we had to find our own fun, make up our own games and you learnt more about life by experiencing it for yourself.
"There is a big group of children that were bought up in Callington at the same time and we are all over Australia but we all keep in touch referring to one another as ‘the Callington kids’ and boy were ‘the Callington kids’ all extremely well behaved kids who never, ever put a foot wrong – mainly because it was likely to get caught in a rabbit trap!"
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