Mona keeps memories alive

At 92, a person might be pleased to sit back and muse on a lifetime of memories. Mona Mynard prefers to do that quietly, away from the public eye. She would rather read about someone else than about herself.
“Don’t concentrate on me,” Mona says, when the Gazette telephones her for a story.
“I’m not one of the well known people here. I’ve never really wanted to be in the limelight.”
On Mona’s bookcase at her Lang Lang home is a collection of memories about the region, newspaper articles about people and places she has known or known about in the 80 years since she moved from Melbourne suburbia to Bayles as a child, and so it is hard to imagine that Mona would be anywhere else but at the centre of her community, albeit quietly as she chooses.
She collects and files the articles for her own interest, stacking them neatly along the shelf. They document the history of the towns she has lived in: Catani, Bayles, Loch Sport, Lang Lang, Trafalgar, and Tooradin, as well as many other towns in the region loosely known as the Kooweerup Swamp.
“Everyone has to keep occupied,” she says.
The collection constitutes more than 20 volumes of carefully dated stories that few people anywhere would bother to compile with such dedication about their own communities.
Such is her interest in heritage that some years ago she bought the Anglican Church’s redundant antique organ to make sure it stayed in Lang Lang.
Mona’s story is the story of every country town person who gets on with the business of living without fuss and without fame in a way that makes small towns healthy and productive places to be.
She is active in the historical society and the senior citizens, and she was a member of the Country Women’s Association from 1937 until the local branch disbanded.
Mona was also a keen bowler, receiving the veteran’s badge in 1987, and a tennis player too.
But dancing is what she would choose as the activity she loved most.
It was sort of inevitable then that she would meet her husband Joe, a Catani farmer, at the monthly town hall dance.
Imagine teenagers piling into the back of a truck, the girls dressed up for a big social event. That is how Mona and her friends travelled to the dance every month in the early days.
“We would all catch a lift in Bill Corbin’s van to the halls at Yannathan, Catani, Longwarry, and other towns,” Mona recalls.
“Mr Corbin would take us all over the place, putting seats in the back of the van and a tarpaulin over the top for us.”
They say dancing is good for the spirit, the body, and the mind. Mona continued until about 1990, when a sore shoulder put an end to her bowling and her dancing.
Mona was born in Western Australia and came to Melbourne as a young child. The family moved to Bayles in 1926, where her dad, Richard Hayward, ran the bakery.
When Bayles Primary School celebrated its 100th anniversary last year, Mona as the oldest former student had the privilege of cutting the cake.
By the time Richard Hayward had sold the Bayles bakery in 1935 and returned to Melbourne to settle in Ringwood, Mona’s destiny with her beau Joe was pretty much on the cards.
The newly weds started out in Melbourne where Joe drove the bus route from Brighton to the museum, then they moved out to Joe’s family farm at Catani, where he did the bus run from Yannathan to Melbourne.
“I loved life on the farm,” says Mona.
Work followed in two more towns, at Trafalgar and Tooradin.
“At Trafalgar during the war Joe did the milk bus run to Rushworth,” Mona says.
The couple settled in Lang Lang in 1961, where they had the shoe and sports store before moving to Loch Sport for a while.
Mona returned to Lang Lang in 1981, after Joe died, and there she stayed.
They had eight children. Jean died as an infant.
There is not much spare time in Mona’s week these days, with three days at the seniors club, monthly historical society meetings, and time tending to her collections of memorabilia, which include displays of spoons and elephants, many acquired on senior citizens bus trips. She also spends her time poring over the local newspaper for cut-outs worthy of her historical records collection.
“I just love to collect things.”
Mona fills the time gaps by knitting toy dolls for the Kids in Crisis organisation at Windermere Child and Family Services. Some go also to Berwick Benevolent Society.
Her son Jim, a local journalist, takes bags of his mum’s knitted toys to Windermere every few months.
“I’m never home,” Mona says.
“I once knew everyone when I walked along the street, but now there are many newcomers to Lang Lang and sometimes I think hardly anyone knows me.
“I’m just an ordinary member of the clubs. I just follow on. All the others do a fair bit.”