May Mundt a Biography

A Bride at 19

At 18 years of age May met her future husband, James Mundt and a year later, at the age of 19, in 1944, a year before the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the surrender of Hitler’s Germany, May had wed. May Riordan was now May Mundt. The transition had started from girl to woman. May tells me “Romance does not last and the idea of love changes as life does”. We agree that sometimes romantic love deepens and blossoms and grows in substance to a love that is mutual and full of respect and care. Where lovers grow to become friends! But this wasn’t for May. The first year, on their share farm Diary Farm at Conondale where May worked from dawn to dusk, was “fair” and whilst there weren’t outward displays of affection from her husband, he “treated {her} well”. She says, “he wasn’t the loving husband I had expected but he wasn’t abusive either at first”. In May’s words, “it was a great life” and she says; “I had 5 babies in 6 years, and I never missed a milking. I went to hospital for 10 days for each child and was back working full days in the farm”. May’s first child, her first daughter, Joan, was born at the end of their first year of marriage in 1945. Joan is now 78 years of age.

10