Mena’s Diary

Jeremy Ward (Annotated by)

In 2014, Jeremy Ward began to research and collate information with the aim of writing his family history. The result was Dressmakers, Preachers and Cockies, a Family History Memoir (Boolarong Press, Brisbane, Australia, 2018). When searching through family records, Jeremy came across a diary kept by his mother, Mena Ward, during the first four years of her marriage to Jeremy’s father, Bryan Ward, an Anglican parish Rector in Ingham, North Queensland, prior to World War II. Reading the entries, Jeremy saw his mother’s personality, humour and caustic turn of phrase leap out at him, but was surprised by how open and emotionally revealing his mother was, as she recorded her struggles to come to terms with her new life. She was far away from metropolitan Sydney, where she had trained to become a nurse, and even further from Urana in rural NSW, where she had spent her childhood. In Dressmakers, Preachers and Cockies, Jeremy quoted extensively from his mother’s diary and, while doing so, came to see the importance of bringing the whole diary to a wider readership. The result is his annotated transcription, Mena’s Diary: An Anglican Rector’s Wife in Ingham, North Queensland 1937–1940. Jeremy doubts that his mother, who died in 1974, would approve of his bringing her personal diary out in the open, but believes the dearth of stories about the life experiences of women like Mena justifies his decision. He is happy to live with the feeling of her sitting on his shoulder and scoffing at why he would think anyone would be interested.