Breaking Bread: Vera Deacon, Stockton resident, historian and author

The 91-year-old has been reticent about doing this interview, because she doesn’t like to be “big-noted”.

She chooses a no-fuss restaurant in her home suburb, L&J Dining on Mitchell, at Stockton Bowling Club. Vera even declines a glass of wine with her $8.90 lunch special, a generous serve of chicken and rice.

Yet, despite her protests, people want to make a fuss over Vera. 

As Lawrence Tan, the restaurant owner, says after warmly greeting her, everyone knows Vera in Stockton.

Vera Deacon is known and lauded beyond this peninsula. At the university, a fund for preserving regional history archives is named after her. She is cherished for her work with the Kooragang wetlands rehabilitation project. She is loved for her support of local cultural activities, particularly writing.  And her Novocastrian pride is infectious.

“It is very nice to be praised and all that sort of thing,” Vera says, as we sit in the bowling club restaurant, with its stunning views to the breakwater and along the great curve of Stockton Bight. “But you sort of feel uncomfortable with it.”

Vera must spend a lot of time feeling uncomfortable. So, Vera, for your own comfort, stop reading here. The rest of you, read on to learn a little more about the eminently praiseworthy Vera Deacon.  

SHE may face the sea while we dine, but Vera Deacon is a child of the Hunter River. 

Vera was born in July 1926 in Mayfield. When she was on the way, her father, Norman Pember prophesied, “We’ll have a curly haired girl, and we’ll call her Vera”.

Norman Pember’s prediction was also a lament. When he was just eight, Norman had been made a ward of the state, and he and his sister, Vera, were separated. He never saw her again. But for the rest of his days, Norman kept searching for his sister.

“I’m named for her,” explains Vera.

Norman Pember was working at the BHP steelworks when he met Ellen Meehan. She’d grown up by the Hunter River’s upper reaches, on the enormous Belltrees farming property: “I always say when Mum and Dad married, the Upper Hunter married the Lower Hunter.”

When Vera was two, the Pembers moved to Dempsey Island, one of a clump of islands in the Hunter River estuary. Geographically, it was not far from Mayfield; just across the river. But in atmosphere, it felt like another world, especially to a small child. She could see across to the steelworks, where her Dad had worked until he was injured, which is why they were now living among fishermen and small-scale farmers on Dempsey Island.

“It was very lonely,” Vera recalls. Although she was no longer alone; she had a little brother, Ronnie. He toddled along behind his sister, and they would sit in their dad’s boat.

In 1931, Ronnie died of meningitis.

He was aged three.    

“I remember it so well,” says Vera. “I remember his white coffin.”  

Soon after, the Pembers feared they would lose their oldest child as well. Vera had contracted typhoid fever. When she was released from Royal Newcastle Hospital after two months, the five-year-old returned to a new home on neighbouring Mosquito Island. Norman had demanded the move: “Dad had said, ‘The house is jinxed. We’ve lost Ronnie, we’ve nearly lost Vera. We got to get out of this house.”

As the Great Depression deepened in the early 1930s, the family returned “to the mainland, as we called it”, so Norman Pember could search for work. The family ended up living in unemployed people’s camps, including one in Mayfield West.  

That make-do existence forged Vera Deacon’s sense of social justice. Returning to the camp from school, she and her younger brother, Norman, would sometimes be attacked by other children, who called them “dirty little camp kids”. Vera and her brother would hide from their attackers, “but I felt very ashamed … I had this sense of being a coward”. She told her father, who advised her to fight like a threshing machine. And she did: “I turned and I fought back. And I was never frightened again after that. I asserted myself.”

The family, which would grow to six children, returned to Mosquito Island in 1939. The teenage Vera Pember fell in love with island life: “It was marvellous for us. We were away from the critical eyes of suburbia.”

From her father, she learnt how to grow vegetables. She rowed a small boat to other islands and across to Mayfield and back.

And with each little voyage, she felt more and more connected to the river. Vera came to see the river as her “second mother”, a protector, a food provider, and an educator.

The river, in all its moods, taught her resilience, gave her strength, and invested her with a love for the environment and an appreciation of its fragility. 

One threat to the river lay on the opposite bank. She remembers being with her father one day when he cut open a fish, “and it was full of tar. He looked across and shook his fist at the works and said, ‘They’re killing the river’.”

After the Second World War, the demands of industry reached across the river.

Vera’s beloved islands changed forever, as they were joined and buried by a massive land reclamation project. The Kooragang industrial precinct was created, but Vera Deacon’s past was all but destroyed. 

“I lament it, because I feel what was done to the estuary and the islands was definitely a crime against nature,” she says, recounting the first time she drove with her father over the Tourle Street bridge and onto territory no longer familiar to her. “It was like going along a moonscape, it was dreadful.” 

In recent years, Vera Deacon has done her bit to restore how she remembers the estuary. She has been one of the hundreds of volunteers helping rehabilitate the wetlands on Ash Island.  

“It’s to inspire people that if we do the right thing by nature, we can rehabilitate her, we can restore her. And you just have to go up there and see the bushland, have a picnic; it’s beautiful.”

As a young woman, Vera had left the islands before they were subsumed.

In 1944, she had accompanied her father to a meeting in Mayfield. The 17-year-old was impressed a woman was chairing the meeting. Then a man stood up and “gave this wonderful speech about ending the war and building the peace. It was very inspiring”. 

The meeting was organised by the Communist Party of Australia. Vera was mesmerised. What the teenager heard tallied with what she thought and had experienced in life. She joined the party that night and remained a member until it was dissolved in 1991. What remains undimmed is her belief in socialism as a means of creating a fairer world.  

“I still believe in the historical necessity of it,” she asserts. “I mean, look what’s happening here with the banks.

“No one will ever convince me it’s right to have homeless people, that it’s right for people to pay themselves millions of dollars.You can’t eat all that money. How many houses do you need? How many cars?

“My father always believed in sharing the wealth. You can’t serve two masters. You’re either on the side of the poor or the side of the rich. So I’m on the side of the less privileged. It’s right!”

That night in 1944, Vera not only joined the Communist Party, she met her future husband. The man who spoke was Stanley Deacon, the party’s district secretary.

At first, the relationship was strictly business; Vera went to work in the party’s Newcastle office. But she knew this man, who was 20 years older than Vera, was right for her; admiration grew into love. Stan believed in gender equality, which made him refreshingly different in Vera’s eyes.

“There was that ethos then – ‘Marry a woman and keep her barefoot and pregnant’ – it was a very common thing,” she recalls.

Vera and Stan married in 1946. He left the party office to seek work but had difficulty because of his politics. So they moved to Sydney, where Stan worked on trams then buses and Vera mostly in a post office job, and both were busy raising two daughters, Daria and Deborah.

Interest in the Deacons’ politics had followed them to Sydney. As Vera discovered many years later, ASIO kept files on both of them.  

“It amazed me,” she says. “A lot of useless detail, you think they were wasting taxpayers’ money – ‘Mrs Deacon types at night’. That’s a criminal act?! I was the secretary of the local P&C!”

Vera Deacon was also involved in a realist writers’ group and magazine, and she was on the committee of the Australasian Book Society, publishing works by local authors.

“We felt we had to do what we could to keep Australian literary traditions going,” she explains.

In 1993, Stanley Deacon died – “We had a wonderful marriage. We were married 46 years, five months and 10 days”. After a few years, Vera decided to return home, or as close as she could be to it. She moved to Stockton in 1997.

“It’s on the river and the harbour,” she says. “Also we knew Stockton from the island days. Occasionally we’d row across, tie up and go over and have a swim at the beach.”

Vera immersed herself in the past. She joined the local historical society and, inspired by her mother’s urging years before, pieced together the estuary islands’ history by researching archives and interviewing surviving former residents. She crafted her research into stories, which won writing awards and have been published.

Her love of local history, and her membership of a Newcastle booklovers’ group, led Vera to the university’s cultural collections. She befriended fellow bibliophile and giant of university life, Professor Godfrey Tanner. When Professor Tanner died, Vera honoured him by making a donation towards the university’s archives. The pensioner made another donation, then another.

She has been donating –and she won’t say how much – for about 17 years, helping fund the conservation and digitisation of materials, so more people can learn about the Hunter’s past. Her generosity prompted an initiative the uni called the Vera Deacon Regional History Fund. 

The title makes Vera wince: “I’ve helped, but don’t get it out of proportion! It’s a collective thing.

“My money’s just a bit of oil to help it along. And what would I do with it? I make most of my own clothes, I’m not into flash cars or Paris model dresses.”

Vera Deacon tries to live by her father’s final words to her: “Don’t be greedy, do good and keep an eye on the river.” 

Her eyes and heart remain on the river. 

“I still look at the river every morning when I go outside,” she says.

“I look down the street and I can see it rippling by and I feel contented and happy. Because it’s my river, my lifeblood. It’s the saltwater in my veins. It’s still our mother.”