May Mundt a Biography

café today! May herself, did some work every Monday, being a nanny for a family friend, and earned the princely sum of 25 Shillings for that work! Memories from those times are vivid for May, especially the very sad ones and the very happy ones. One happy memory that stands out in her mind is that of her father returning from Maleny on his horse, with Ice Cream packed in ice in a Billy Cart. She and her sister would wait with bated breath. It was “heaven”, according to May. There were other captive moments in that teenage part of her life, that brief, almost transient spell between schoolgirl at 14 and wife at 19. It was the precious idyllic lull in May’s life, between carefree childhood and careworn – too early – adulthood at 19, where childbearing was the one yearly constant in a woman’s life. Women had precious little time to move from child to adolescence to womanhood. It was from a little girl to a teenager to a woman with all the myriad responsibilities (minus the accolades), in the brief space of ten years for most women in the 1940’s as it was for May. In that time the family moved from Witta to The Highlands and back to Witta, all farming dairy land, all hard work. That was 1943, where May was 18 years of age and then it was 1944, the year before the end of the Second World War and marriage to James Mundt. May was 19, James 21! Farming, cows, milking, hard work, took over in the years from 14 onward until her marriage at 19. These manual skills took over from Mathematics, Reading and any other intellectual pursuits. There just wasn’t time nor money nor energy for that.

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