May Mundt a Biography

Chapter Four

“We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting (TS Eliot) Perspectives Joan, May’s eldest, left Conondale after year 12 to go out west to Aramac working on a sheep property as a governess. Emotionally, as a 17-year-old child, the circumstances of her life, her mother’s departure and her father’s smouldering anger, meant that Joan was not in a good space. Teenagers are meant to be vibrant and full of optimism but in some, many, cases, this isn’t the norm. Joan had been in late primary school when May had left the farm at Conondale and it was Joan who had to take her place cooking, cleaning, washing, milking cows before and after school and looking after her father, her 3 brothers and her sister, who was eventually ‘claimed’ by May. In a situation like this, everyone suffers, even the perpetrator, in this case James Mundt. Joan’s first two years of high school were at Maleny 1960 and 1961 and that involved travel for an hour morning and afternoon by bus up/down the range. Life, for her, was so very difficult, and May too acknowledges that to me. And to add to that James Mundt, in Joan’s words “was cruel physically and emotionally”. All this time, in Brisbane, May was trying to reconcile to her new life, finding work as a house cleaner and doing the ironing for well-to-do families in Brisbane.

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