“It was really tough times. There was no government help in those years (1960s), nothing. 50 cents a week I got for one child and a dollar a week for the other – that’s what child endowment consisted of. If you don’t write it down it gets forgotten. I think it’s very important for the younger generation to read what it was like in an era before their time because they think that what they’re doing at the moment was the norm, and it’s not. When I was trying to raise my two children on my own after coming home from Chile, women were earning only 70% of the male wage. Even though you had children to raise, because you were a woman you got 70% of the male wage. The first approach I made to try and buy this dilapidated old house, was ‘Oh, we don’t sell houses to women’. And they’ve forgotten that that was what it was like.”

– Peggy Stransky, 21 November 2015

Photo of the house she eventually bought (back row of houses), just off Military Road with Hill 60 in the background. Photo provided by Peggy Stransky.