Celebrating our History and our People
– 2 July 2014 –
Vasey RSL Care Ltd was formed when Vasey Housing (Victoria) Ltd and RSL Care Victoria Ltd merged in 2004.
As we approach our 1oth anniversary, we would like to acknowledge one of our past board members, Betty Fitzpatrick (nee Goodge). As a long-serving and staunch advocate for war widows, Betty will no doubt be known to many members of the ex-service community and the War Widows’ Guild.
This is Betty’s story…
Betty with former Chairman Dr Jim Breheny on her retirement from the Vasey RSL Care Board
Betty’s husband Bryan Fitzpatrick served with the transport division of the Royal Australian Air Force and died in Vietnam at the age of 37, leaving Betty bereft and alone to look after five children.
But Betty said, “What else do you do, you just pick yourself up and get on with it.” Well Betty certainly got on with it: she joined the Guild soon after her husband died, and quickly became involved in serving the War Widows Guild in Victoria and eventually served on the Boards of both Vasey Housing Limited and Vasey RSL Care Ltd.
Originally from Ararat, Betty was the fourth of eight children, sadly losing the youngest brother at birth. Her father was the farm bailiff at the mental hospital farm in Ararat. Mr Goodger was later transferred to the Kew mental hospital, where there was a wonderful dairy farm, recalls Betty.
The family had moved to Beechworth by the time Betty started school with the nuns. The Goodgers then bought a farm located between Beechworth and Wodonga, where Betty’s mum worked the farm and her father worked in Beechworth.
Betty remembers they had a nursemaid, who looked after the kids while her mum ran the farm with her helpers. The nursemaid’s name was Rosie: “We used to give her a great old time and did terrible things to her. It was a happy life. We had a creek down the way which was our swimming hole and a tennis court nearby.” Betty learned to drive an old ute at an early age.
Then came the war and everything changed. One by one the workers joined the forces and left the farm. Betty’s father was transferred to the medical hospital in Ballarat. Due to the war there was no accommodation to be had, so Betty and her sister Mary had stayed in Beechworth for their schooling. Everyone else had to live in hotels in Ballarat for long periods.
“Then my brother was killed in 1943, he was in the Air Force. This really and truly rocked us.” Betty’s father had been in the First World Wwar and had been gassed and wounded – he was never a well man following the war, and died in 1952 aged 55.
Finishing her schooling after the war at nearly 16, Betty said, “You had to go to a labour place to get work; you couldn’t go where you wanted”. She worked at the Egg Board – eggs were still rationed at this time. As time went by, Betty did her Psych Nurse Training, and she laughed as she exclaimed, “I’ve mixed with mental people all my life. We never had any qualms about mixing with these people: really and truly one lady used to make our clothes and one of them made me shoes when I was a kid.”
“Then I met my gorgeous husband Bryan, at a dance – saw him at least – he really could dance! He was so very quiet and he didn’t chatter. As time went on, I used to do the most outrageous things to see what his reaction would be, but he was still so calm. He was a very nice person, and very, very caring. We finally got married in 1953 and had 16 years of good fun life. We always had a laugh and the kids were my absolute, the pinnacle of my being. I would drag them around, make them go to museums, educate them. I thoroughly enjoyed being a wife, and mother to Denis, Toni, Steven, Martin and Leah.
Bryan had previously been in the Air Force and had been taking a short break when he met Betty.
“He re-joined after we were married only a couple of months. He was posted to Sale to do a course, followed by a wireless operator’s course in Ballarat, and then had a small stint at Amberley. I was expecting bubs then and always wangled that I stayed put, I never wanted to be wandering around; I always wanted stability.
“Then, Bryan got the urge to take off to Vietnam. He volunteered I suppose and was quite excited. He joined No. 2 squadron at Phan Rang and flew with the Americans. He left early in 1969 and was killed on 3 December that same year.”
This rocked Betty’s world. “I’d go to the shops to buy Christmas presents and would go home with nothing, so my 15 and 12 year olds said they had taken money out of their school banks and done the kids’ Christmas shopping.”
Betty and Bryan Fitzpatrick and their five children
The kids then ranged from 3 to 15 years. “We got through Christmas somehow, Bryan was due to come home the first week in January and we had been counting the days. He would write one day and I wrote the next day.
“We had waited for a fortnight before his body came back”, says Betty. Bryan’s body was brought back to Melbourne for the funeral. “It was a huge funeral; police were directing traffic and a lot of his mates got in the car and drove for 2 days and nights to get there.”
A gentleman called Arthur, a very young man on his first tour of duty, was taken under Bryan Fitzpatrick’s wing in the early days, and he still visits Betty to this day, from north of the Gold Coast in Queensland. Bryan had looked after the young chaps very well and was in turn highly respected by them. Arthur told Betty, “Your husband really loved you”, and Betty replied, “He was certainly the light of my life”.
“Down the track, I was just wondering what I was going to do with my life and where was I going to go, when an Air Force guy wanted to know when I was going to get out of the Air Force house where we were living (in Dallas) as they had reallocated it. And then of course I had to move – it had really only been a very short time.”
Betty immediately bought a house in Ballarat, prepared the kids for school and they started on the first day of February.
“My mum and my two sisters were still there. I thought it was a good place to rear kids, it was a good school, and Ballarat has been very kind to me. The kids were great at sports and could ride their bikes everywhere. They have all grown up and I’m proud of them. There has been lots of love in our family. I still miss Bryan so much.”
With her mother, who was already a war widow, Betty attended her first Guild function at the Ballarat Town Hall in 1970. She remembers it was very daunting; all the ladies wore hats with definitely no bare skin on show. The meetings used to be ‘chockers’ with war widows, a lot of them in Ballarat. “I was secretary, and there were at least 100 people at a meeting.”
Betty is to be congratulated on her many years of support and dedication to the plight of War Widows. Now into her 80s, she is the current President of the Ballarat Branch of the War Widows Guild, which recently celebrated its 67th anniversary, making it the longest continuous-serving WWG branch in Victoria. Although Betty has retired from other commitments, she still supports the war widows’ community, visits people in hospital wherever possible and attends many special commemorative services. She took pleasure in laying a wreath at the ANZAC Day commemoration at the Ballarat Cenotaph for the first time in 2014.
Betty is also a cancer survivor, having come through breast cancer, including a mastectomy, in 2004.
Described as a “true Aussie battler” by the Deputy Commissioner for Veterans’ Affairs Victoria, Mr Tony Ashford, Betty was presented with one of 502 Australian flags carried during the belated homecoming march for Vietnam Veterans in Sydney in 1987. An Aussie battler who laughs when she’s nervous and whistles at other times. A person who is always delighted to see you.
Mrs Jean Hutchinson, who is the Treasurer and Secretary of WWG Ballarat, said, “Betty is a very competent person, always busy and always happy to pick up those ladies who can’t otherwise get to meetings.”
Unfortunately the Ballarat Guild’s community is diminishing and there have been six vales this year and the group is getting older. Betty says, “There are Vietnam war widows in Ballarat that won’t join because the group is old! It makes me sad to think they are missing out on our support and I feel very strongly on this point. The Ballarat branch, I love ‘em all, they’re my girls.”
Later in life, some of Betty’s travel dreams came true. With her daughter Toni, she trekked in the Annapurna Mountains in Nepal for her 70th birthday. She rode an elephant, visited the Taj Mahal and Uluru, and even kissed the Blarney Stone. She used to go skiing with some of her grandsons, played golf and tennis, and only this year decided not to renew her golf club membership, after 30 years. These days, there is a very special man in her life, Pierre the poodle, who is her most precious companion.
We applaud Betty for her dedication to the plight of war widows in Victoria and her many achievements, which hangs on the wall at Vasey RSL Care’s central office in Hawthorn. The Guild had a tapestry made representing all the Guild stands for, and Betty chose to include a piece which reads “strong in will to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield“. That certainly captures the characteristics that Betty has shown in her life.