Tribute to Stella Cynthia Nord
I am the son of Pete Thomas who was Stella's partner. I'll talk about Stella filling in some detail on Vera's tribute.
As I read through Stella's archives last weekend, I was amazed by what they contained.
It is almost incredible to learn what challenges she overcame.
From the mid 50s to mid 60s, Stella worked for Swifts Meat Packing Company at Cannon Hill in Brisbane.
There were 30 men and 70 women and they had separate dining rooms separated by a wall, and the men and women could only communicate by yelling through grill holes in the wall.
In the packing room where she worked, thousands of tins of meat were labeled and then stacked in pyramids. The 7lb tins got very heavy after she stacked them for an hour or two. Sometimes a tin would ferment and blow up. Then the stinking meat would blow out in all directions, on her clothes and hair. The temperatures were kept high and the women had to work under fans, so she got pneumonia after 3 weeks.
She was transferred to the cold and damp preserving room, weighing tins before they were capped, putting bits of meat in or out for correct weight.
There was a shute leading down from the cooking vats on the floor above, and the hot meat would pour down the chute to be scooped up into the tins.
The cans were on a conveyor belt, and as she took the cans off to weigh them, the sharp edges would often cut through her gloves, gloves that had become soaked in fat. Within six hours, gloves were usually ripped to shreds. She got many finger and nail infections, once needing three weeks off with a thumb nail infection.
One horrific morning, she discovered at lunchtime that her dental plate was missing. Had the teeth gone into a can of Swift's top quality camp pie meat? They had to stop the production line and run a giant search of the line looking for the teeth. Finally a cleaner discovered them under some machinery and Swift's reputation was not ruined.
The bosses had an arrogant attitude to the women. One night the bosses even told a woman cleaner to clean out all the women's lockers because there was a problem with food and rats. Out went treasured knitting books, comfy old shoes, favorite magazines. The women stopped worked over it and got an apology.
BLF
In the 1970s the NSW BLF opened its books to women and helped them get jobs in the industry - the first union in the building industry to do so. Many women became hoist drivers, first aid and safety officers and job delegates.
At the site shed, there was quite a jolt there when Stella first appeared. One day she came to the site shed and found a resentful man had put half a dozen big nude girlie photos on the wall. She was pretty annoyed and planned a typical Stella counter attack. She went to a newsagent and began riffling through the men's magazines looking for centerfolds of naked men. She bought a bundle of these magazines - to the surprise of thx newsagent. When the builders laborers came to work next day - they found the shed wall had an equal number of male and female pin-ups. Next day someone removed one girlie photo.| So Stella removed one male photo. This process continued till all the photos were gone.
Stella has fictionalised this true incident as a short story.
Stella's Fictional Works
I studied play criticism for a year; part of my education in English lit. But Stella spent her time in uni learning how to actually write plays. I have bee reading her painstaking drafts - always about battlers and migrants trying to overcome the difficulties and prejudices of their environment.
One play's title is "They come in Threes''.
It is about a battler in the supermarket, who finds he can only buy a toothbrush and a mousetrap in packs of three each. The assistant baffles him with science about why he really does need three of each. When the battler puzzles about the maths, the assistant tries to sell him 3 calculators - one calculator checks the maths and the other two calculators check the first calculator.
She could sit down at a big old Remington typewriter and bash away at a speed I could only wonder at, being a pretty fast typist myself.
Stella is famous for her book, "Migrant Women Workers - These are your rights''. As a journalist, I am in awe of her hard work and thorough methods. She describes how in writing this book she gathered and conducted something like 400 interviews, normally without a tape recorder or even taking a lot of notes, which could scare off the migrant women she was talking to. What a memory! She usually went to their homes at night or weekends- which gave her a double insight into their problems with public transport, and their existence with the wolf at the door in terms of low incomes for buying necessities. "As they spoke of all this, they themselves and those listening were often all close to tears."
She said about her book: "Each day, after hearing their stories, I'd come away feeling shocked and ashamed about the things they described and that were happening in Australia. The pregnant, the sick and the injured are discarded like worn-out machinery.''
Stella and our family
Dad and Stella came down for the wedding of myself and Margaret in Melbourne.
They commented wryly that they had a season ticket to all my weddings and the two of them were not going to miss the grand final - my marriage to Margaret.
We took them on our honeymoon, and as we were enjoying a barbecue we counted up the marriages among us four. It was a total of ten, not bad considering that Marg was a cleanskin.
She was a lovely stepmother to Sian and me, to grandmother to our own children.
Sian remembers how Stella learnt karate and one day threw Sian's strapping 14yo boy Michael over her shoulder in the lounge room, much to his surprise.
Stella came to Melbourne for holidays with us now and then, with her mop of auburn-colored hair and an especially wide and cheeky grin.
In turn, we loved seeing her at her rambling shared house in Billong Rd, Neutral Bay, Sydney.
One little triumph I had was to introduce her to foreign language videos. Her hearing was failing but because these had subtitles, she could enjoy them.
Stella and my Father Pete
Stella was a great partner to Pete, and delighted in puncturing his occasional pompousness.
Around 1987-82 Stella lived in a kit house at Monmouth St, Victoria Falls in the Blue Mountains out of Sydney. They had many troubles and expenses in building it and often had to pause the job when their savings ran out. This project was the first and only home they had ever owned. The project was only possible because they were given spare land there owned by Evan and Marlene Phillips , their from the coal miners union.
We can remember how proud Stella was at Mt. Victoria in their own home, despite all the problems with builders and delivery men. It would get pretty cold there in winter and she would rug up in a big red duffle coat.
Summing up
There was something special about Stella's features - a confidence and a look-you- straight-in-the-eye. I think she had seen so much of the under-side of society and toughed it out in places like BLF worksite huts and shearing stations. So nothing fazed her.
Stella has passed many of her best features on to Lindy. Lindy is capable of enormous efforts to look after her family and others in need. Like Stella, she is a born student and able to keep absorbing information to keep her mind sharp. Like Stella, she is capable of a daily workload that would stun any ordinary person. The two of them have combined work to put bread and butter on the table, with countless hours of compassionate activity for others. Best of all has been their enthusiasm and zest for life.
