Breaking Bread: Ken and Betty Weatherstone

The couple, who live a few streets away in this Lake Macquarie village, are the subjects of the painting hanging above them.

The portrait won the People’s Choice award in the 2017 Kilgour Prize. The artist is the person running this gallery/cafe, Rebecca Murray. She titled her painting, Some Like It Hot. 

“It was quite exciting for us, nothing like this has ever happened to us before,” enthuses Ken, who is about to turn 92.

“Yes, really wonderful,” adds 89-year-old Betty. “It’s so like us!” 

A few customers walk in and do the same double-take that I did, as their gaze quickly tilts up and down between the couple and the picture.  

Not that every viewer recognises the connection immediately. Ken recounts how when the picture was being exhibited at Newcastle Art Gallery, he was standing before the portrait while a woman was looking at it.

“I asked her what she thought, and she said, ‘Ooh, he’s got wicked eyes, hasn’t he?’. I said, ‘Oh, I have not!’. She looked at me and went, ‘Oh, it is you! I’m sorry!’.”

Actually, Ken has cheeky boy’s eyes, especially as he tells that story.   

Yet long before having their picture painted, Ken and Betty were well-known faces around Teralba. And for almost 70 years, they have been a portrait of a happy marriage.

KEN was born in 1925 and brought up in Boolaroo, just a few kilometres away from where we’re sitting. 

“I can remember the last steam tram going down the main street of Boolaroo, down to Pippy’s corner,” Ken says.  

He left school at 14 and his first job was helping out in a pharmacy at New Lambton for about a year. Ken’s duties were occasionally extended.

“The chemist loved to go across the road to the pub, and I’d put a little white coat on, and I’d be the chemist for a while,” he recalls.

Then Ken worked for a time at the garage in Speers Point, before doing an apprenticeship as a ship’s plumber at the State Dockyard in Newcastle. The Second World War made its way into the dock, as he helped build and repair ships. 

“It was a little bit horrifying at times,” Ken says. “I can remember a [US] Liberty ship coming in with its bow blown off from a torpedo, and the metal was just folded back on itself, and when we came to get rid of it out of the way, here were bits of flesh, the bodies of sailors, meshed up in it.”

Betty is a Teralba girl, born in 1928. She remembers it as a bustling lakeside community of miners and their families: “It was a very special place. We knew everyone.”

Ken met Betty Gray in 1945, at the end of the war, at a dance in Speers Point Park. Betty was there with her family. Ken happened to be in the park when he decided to have a peek through the dance hall window.

“And this girl danced past,” Ken says, “and I thought, ‘Gee, she can dance well. I’d like to have a dance with her’.”

There was just one problem. 

“He wasn’t allowed in at first, but he eventually got in,” smiles Betty.

Ken waited until the doorman became distracted and he walked in and asked the girl for a dance. He told her how he had sneaked into the hall. 

“Mmm, he’s a bit pushy,” Betty thought, but she also noted, “He looks alright”.

“I had a few dances with her,” says Ken, “and I found where she lived at Teralba, and I thought to myself, ‘I can probably walk her home, if I work it right’.” 

And he did. Along with her mother. Mrs Gray walked just a few paces ahead of her 17-year-old daughter and this young man. 

“A beautiful moon was coming up over the lake,” recalls Betty. 

“Oh, a beautiful moonlit night,” adds Ken. “That was the start of a wonderful romance.”

From the moment Ken had looked through the window, he knew this was the girl for him. Betty was more reticent: “It took a little while”. 

In a bid to convince her to marry him, Ken wrote a poem.

Got to get them somehow, mate,” he chuckles. “I didn’t have any good looks, so I had to try something else.”

Ken can still recite that poem in full, and he does, in a gentle voice:  “.. to me she represents all things that are most sweet and dear/an angel sent from heaven, at times it seems/She fills my waking hours with love, my sleeping hours with dreams.”

The poem worked. Betty said “yes”. They married in April 1948 in the Presbyterian church in Teralba. The reception was held in the old community hall and local shopkeepers took care of the catering.

Ken built a home on a block of land given as a wedding present by Betty’s coalminer father. They moved in at Christmas 1950. They still live in that house. For Betty, she can count the footsteps between where she was born and her life now.

“She was born next door to where we live,” explains Ken.

Yet on a level that can’t be measured in distance, this couple have journeyed a long way. They are the parents of five children – two daughters and three sons – born between 1950 and 1958.

“And they’re all good, not a dud among them, thanks to their mother,” beams Ken.

They have 12 grandchildren and 19 great grandchildren. They adore living close to the lake in Teralba. And they love visiting the local cafe. 

Not that they have done everything together, nor are they exactly alike in character.

Ken has loved sailing and canoeing on the lake. Betty likes land beneath her feet. He once took her out in the family canoe on a glass-still day, “but she got seasick”.

Betty describes herself as shy. When she comes to the cafe, she likes to listen. Ken is gregarious, and he engages in conversation with just about everyone who walks in. 

“Betty’s very quiet, and I like to talk to people,” he says. “We’re opposites, and opposites attract!”

In the portrait, both Ken and Betty have cups to their mouths. Betty looks as though she is hiding behind hers, and Ken seems ready to lower his to continue chatting. 

“Yes, I’d rather not have the cup,” he chuckles. “But the cup is probably better looking than I am.”

In the background of the painting is the sheet music for “If You Were The Only Girl In The World”, which Ken once sang in the cafe, serenading his wife and enchanting the other customers and Rebecca Murray. 

So when Rebecca decided to enter the Kilgour Prize, with only two weeks to go, she knew who she wanted to paint. 

“I was hoping to do one face, but that meant having to do two, which put extra pressure on me,” Rebecca recalls. “There’s no way you’d do one without the other.”  

For her painting, Rebecca studied the couple whenever they came into the gallery, and she worked from photos, including one of Betty with the cup before her face: “I could see the little smile behind the cup and I thought, ‘This is great, we’ll work with this’.”

The painting is ebullient and colourful, brimming with joy and life, just like the couple depicted. And that’s what the artist hopes viewers see in the picture.  

“The life really, the life still within,” she says. “At 90 years old, most people think, ‘That’s it’. It sounds awful, but the elderly get forgotten and are thought of as boring or fuddy-duddies.

“These two are so far from that, and that’s what I wanted to capture. There’s still so much joy and life and the respect, and the love that’s still there. Something we all aspire to.”

In April, the Weatherstones celebrate 70 years of married life. As they hold hands, I ask Betty what is her husband’s best quality. 

“He’s very special,” she replies. “He’s always really good with everyone.”

“And the most challenging?,” I ask.

“Trying to stop him from talking.”

I ask the same to Ken. He just thinks his wife is beautiful in every way. He always has. He shows me a photo from their wedding day and says, “You can see what a gorgeous girl she was, and she still is”.

As for the most challenging aspect, Ken finds only good in Betty. They both have a few medical conditions, he says. 

“Everybody knows what I’ve got, because I like to whinge about it. But for all the pain and agony she goes through, she never, ever whinges one little bit.”

Ken caresses his wife’s shoulder and murmurs, “We just love each other.”