With the 12-month anniversary approaching for the passing of my mother, Jo Jones, I wanted to share the story of her life, just as she lived it, full of magic and meaning.
Many people remember my mum, Josephine May Jones, as a real character.
And, to honour those memories, I’m going to tell you the story of her life as if it were a fairy tale.
Once upon a time, in a small cottage in Wood Street, Chelmsford, England, there lived a humble farmer and his wife and their nine children.
Harold and Olive Cheverall (nee Twitchett) had struggled to feed their children for the first two years of the Second World War when they discovered they would soon have another hungry mouth to feed.
Josie, their youngest, was born on 18 March 1941, right inside the tiny cottage, and was instantly her dad’s little princess.
The first event she could recall was when, at the tender age of two and a half, she was hit in the head by a brick that was lobbed at one of her elder sisters, who (unlike my mum) had the good sense to duck.
Mum would carry a tiny scar above her right eye for the rest of her life, and she would blame that brick for many of her stranger adventures in years to come.
For many years after the war, times were tough for the community situated just 40 miles northeast of London.
Mum said she’d hunt rabbits with a shotgun, and she became quite a crack shot – so much so that my brother and I would exploit that at the local Shows because she could always win us a prize.
Mum preferred dark chocolate because sugar was strictly rationed; the baker would break off chunks of cooking chocolate to give to the neighbourhood children.
Despite her hardships, Mum always fancied herself a bit of a princess, a dream that was helped along by one of her sister’s boyfriends.
He was a chauffeur, and Mum said she loved taking rides with her siblings in his Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost.
Always the rebel, Mum’s first job was working in a chemical laboratory, where she ruined her favourite shoes because they fell apart after she spilt an acid solution on them.
Ironically, her next job was working in a shoe shop, where her lifelong love affair with shoes would put Imelda Marcos to shame.
During the early ’60s, Mum broke the mould again and went to work for an auto dealer in the spare parts department.
She was working there when she met my father, John Frederick Jones, a recently returned merchant seaman who instantly took a liking to her.
When her friend told her to keep her hands off him, Mum said, “You can have him!”, because she thought he was rude and abrupt.
It seems he was just nervous when he crooked a thumb at the dancefloor and asked, “Do you want to dance or not?”
It also turns out that he was a beautiful dancer, and when he asked her out on a date, caught up in the moment, she agreed.
The morning of the date, she started to get cold feet and had every intention of standing him up, but as the evening rolled around and the weather turned bad, the thought of him standing in the pouring rain while waiting for her in vain made her keep her appointment.
A whirlwind romance ensued, and soon, Jackie and Jo were a couple.
Not long later, Dad was “dragging me past jewellery stores, ” Mum went on to tell us years later.
Frustrated by his lack of communication, she demanded to know why she should marry him when he’d never actually said he loved her, let alone ask her to be his wife.
Although he denied it, Mum said he replied, with a glint in his eye,” Well of course I loves ya! I buys ya fish and chips, don’t I?”
The couple were wed on a Monday, on 22 July 1963, at the Chelmsford Registry Office in Essex, and in September the following year, boarded the TV Fairstar to immigrate to Australia.
Now, in a new country, the newlyweds went to work crafting their happily ever after.
Dad scored a job at the State Electricity Commission in Traralgon in Victoria, but lengthy strikes in the ’60s and ’70s saw him taking up odd jobs on the side to pay off the mortgage.
A modern woman, Mum decided to pitch in as well and cast about for any job she could find to help pay the bills.
She first got a job at Woolworths in the nearby town of Morwell as a cashier.
Coming as she did from England, Mum said there were occasionally a few language barriers.
She recalls a colleague asking for some Durex (sticky tape) and Mum responding quite candidly, “I don’t think we sell them.”
That’s because in the UK Durex is a brand of condoms.
Oh well, it was the swinging ’60s!
The language issue persisted when she got a job with an automotive parts company in Morwell.
With her BBC announcer’s accent, she was the butt of many jokes with the boys in the garage, who took great delight in teasing her for calling trucks lorries and sedans estate cars and the like.
All the while, Mum and Dad were trying for a family, but after several miscarriages, Mum said she and Dad made the decision to adopt a baby.
And wouldn’t you know it, they went through 80 per cent of the process and were just about to meet the agency to sign off on the final meeting when a miracle happened.
Mum fell pregnant and carried the baby to term and then got the best job of all – being my mum.
I was an awesome baby.
But then, 18 months later, my brother Evan spoiled it all when he came along.
Work-wise, Mum started selling clothing via party plan and got so good at it that she won sales awards and hosted fashion parades.
She also got actively involved in her children’s lives, because once we hit secondary school, she joined the Traralgon High School P&C and was even president for a couple of terms, as well as volunteering in the school cafeteria.
A big part of her role was establishing The Gear Box, a shop at the school where she would open up before classes each day to sell stationery items and measure kids up for school uniforms, which she would then make to measure.
Her talent as a seamstress was unmatched and most likely inherited from my Grandmother Olive.
Mum made custom outfits, including her wedding dress and an outfit inspired by it for her 50th wedding anniversary commitment ceremony in 2013.
She made my Deb dress and altered three of my friends’ dresses, and even came to the rescue when Christine Limburg split a chocolate thick shake down the front of hers an hour before we were presented.
Some creative safety pin work on Mum’s part made it so no one even noticed.
She made my formal dress for when I finished Year 12 here in Gympie, and made costumes and did alterations for countless theatre productions and more.
When Dad retired in 1989, he made plans for us to move to Queensland to be closer to his brother Ivor and sister Dolly and their families.
Mum, Dad and I came up to Queensland for three weeks to look for suitable properties, but Evan, having recently scored a permanent part-time job, asked to stay behind, because he didn’t think he could get the time off.
The only time I think I’ve ever seen Mum cry was the night we came home after those three weeks.
Evan had been up to a bit of mischief, and there were burns in the new carpet, marks on the new leather lounge, all the food in the house had been eaten, the rear tail light on Mum’s van was broken, and he’d spent all the money Mum had left him for an emergency on a CB radio.
But the straw that broke the camel’s back was when the doorbell rang that night, and the police said, “Is this the residence of one Evan David Jones?”
Turns out he’d been making nuisance phone calls to some girl’s parents in the middle of the night, so he was issued a warning.
He had to work hard to win their trust back after that, but he did, when he pitched in, along with Mum (who was by now in her 50s) and Dad, to build their dream home in Tamaree.
After the house was built, Mum was casting about for something to do and decided she wanted to go back to work, but, as a woman in her 50s in the ’90s, she had a bit of trouble.
She decided to do a return-to-work course, and part of the confidence-building exercise was to abseil down a 130m cliff.
No problem for my Mum!
She absolutely loved it.
In fact, in 2016, in her 70s, she did the flying fox between the funnels on one of the P&O cruises we took together, much to the astonishment of the crew and the other passengers.
She did eventually find her niche here in Gympie, working for the Weekly Observer newspaper.
Mum met so many wonderful Gympie businesspeople and fantastic colleagues and said she really enjoyed her time in the role.
After she retired, she stepped up her charity work, helping me organise a Shave for a Cure event for the Leukaemia Foundation in 2010 and then hosting and shaving her head the following year, getting her first tattoo, at the age of 70, to commemorate it.
Every year since then, she shaved her head for the Leukaemia Foundation, raising in excess of $30,000 over the 14 years, and giving the tattoo of the logo on the back of her head the chance to be seen in public.
The back of her head was almost as famous as she was, appearing on the cover of the Gympie Today newspaper in recent years.
It was mentioned by Eddie McGuire during her appearance on Millionaire Hot Seat in 2015.
My Dad had gone with her to the taping in Melbourne, and while he sat in the audience, looking on, Eddie asked him,”So, what does she look like when she shaves, Jack?”
My Dad, being the man of few words that he was, replied, “Bald.”
Mum loved her trivia, almost as much as she loved her darts (she was granted life membership in the 2000s with the Gympie and District Darts Association), but on that occasion, she zigged for Yale when she should have zagged for Harvard, so she came home empty-handed.
Mum also loved performing with the Gympie Songbirds and got quite a saucy reputation for pantomiming during Yellow Polka Dot Bikini, and for her madcap costumes at Christmas time.
Dad decided he wanted to sell up the property at Tamaree when it became too difficult to maintain, so they moved to the Southside Family Village in 2018.
Dad’s health was in rapid decline, and in late 2019, he suffered a stroke and had to go into care.
While he was in Blue Care in Bli Bli, Mum went to see him four times a week.
Coming home from there one afternoon, my mother, ever the lead-foot, copped a speeding ticket when she was clocked at more than 120kph on the Bruce Highway.
I’m pretty sure she was 79 at the time.
Thankfully, they moved Dad into Grevillea Gardens a month later, so she could go and see him twice a day, every day, without breaking the sound barrier.
Sadly, in March 2022, Dad died just a couple of months short of their 59th wedding anniversary.
Mum found herself at a bit of a loss, and her own health took a sudden nose-dive, and she was hospitalised in October that year.
In the early hours of 1 January, 2023, she was airlifted by jet-helicopter to the ICU at the Sunshine Coast University Hospital.
She later joked that I was the only one in the family who had never travelled by helicopter.
In June of that year, Mum adopted a gorgeous little puppy called Valentino, and instantly her health improved.
Mum delighted in taking Tino out with her, and he was her constant companion, often spotted with her at the bank or I Can Cafe right up until the day before Australia Day, 2025.
He and I were right by her side when Mum fell asleep on 29 January last year, and, by 3am the following morning, we were still there, but she was gone.
The diagnosis of lung cancer, plus cancer in her blood, bones and everywhere, had only come in mid-November 2024.
She told me she had had a pretty full life, and despite saying her scans had “lit up like a Christmas tree”, she didn’t let that stop her from going out and being with other people, until the very last, possible moment.
My Mum always took the opportunity to try something new, learn and reinvent herself, and while she was both a wife and mother, she was so much more to so many other people.
And I believe she did indeed live her 83 years happily ever after.
The End.
