Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 497
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[Page 497]
(33)
About the time we occupied the new house, Bill put me on full time, with a proportionately higher salary, as I was becoming too useful for part-time service; the Company was full of work, and I had to spend a few days, periodically, in Canberra and Newcastle.
Happily living in quiet sylvan surroundings in Tutus Street, I spent much of my time in the weekends, first as an amateur bricklayer building a hundred feet of dwarf walling along the frontage and many feet of terrace retaining walls in the garden-to-be, and later making several minor additions inside and ouside the building. When free from her domestic duties, Madge spent many happy healthy hours outside in the sun planning and creating an attractive garden, often with the aid and advice of her devoted weekly gardener McMahon (Old Mac), who had been with us for some years at "San Marino", and still continued to serve us faithfully by coming all the way from Dee Why.
But Fate decreed that we were to enjoy only three short years together in this ideal existence. On the twelfth of May 1959, in the early morning just after a cheerful conversation, Madge suddenly collapsed and died in my arms at the Mater Misericordiae Hospital at North Sydney. Ill health had plagued her during most of her adult life, and she had seldom been strong and vigorous. As a young girl at "Plevna" she was rather chesty and her parents sent her to the Convent of St Mary near Katoomba to finish her primary education, in the hope that she would benefit from the lighter mountain air. At the time it was suspected that she had tuberculosis, but this was later in her life refuted by a Macquarie Street specialist, Cotter Harvey, who diagnosed her trouble as being a congenital fabrous cyst on the top of one of her lungs; harmless enough if it did not suddenly grow larger. Some years later, in 1949, it did become distressfully enlarged, and it was removed by a surgeon specialising in this only recently perfected operation (Doctor M. Susman) in the new Thoracic ward at the Royal North Shore Hospital.
Madge felt much better afterwards and able to exert herself