Mum was born to Violet (1909-1935)and Stanley Fish (1909-1999). (see VIOLET MIRIAM MORRIS  and STANLEY FISH) Named Nellie Fish at birth Mum was born in Inchneuk Private Hospital, formerly at 77 George St, Parramatta (corner of Smith and George Sts).     Built as the residence and consulting rooms of Dr Bowman in 1887, from 1930-1938 it was run as a hospital by two nurses, Watson and McLachlan.      Private hospitals like Inchneuk had been springing up in Sydney since the late 1800s and were presented as a safer option for women than home births.  Inchneuk means ‘Little Nook’ in Scottish Gaelic conjuring up images of safety and cosiness. Unfortunately, at the time, instrument sterilisation and handwashing were not understood to be imperative to ward off infection. One day after Mum was born Violet died of Peurperal Sepsis, commonly known as Childbed Fever at the time.   'Childbed fever, also known as postpartum fever or puerperal fever, refers to  a severe bacterial infection affecting the female reproductive tract after childbirth or miscarriage. It was a major cause of maternal mortality in the past, but is now relatively rare in developed countries due to improved hygiene.'

Mum told me that she was looked after by her mother's sister Aunt Mary, (see THE MORRIS WOMEN).    I have found evidence of Aunt Mary residing at the same premises as Stanley Fish, 110 Victoria Rd, Parramatta  in 1936,  (the address listed on Violet's death Certificate and Mum's birth certificate) and close by in 1937 at 104 Victoria Rd.   Mum remembered watching  her aunt through the bars of her cot as Mary dressed, tying up the stays of her corset..  I'm sure Mum was well loved by her Aunt Mary   (who couldn't have her own children) but when she was two years old , in 1937, her father remarried   and Aunt Mary disappeared from Mum's life.  

Mum always believed that her father hated her for her mother's death.  Mum grew up believing that she had caused her mother's death because her head had been too big.  She told me a story once about this: while in Israel   on holiday in 1994 she wanted to purchase a hat.  She told the salesman that she needed a large size as she had a very big head.  As she tried on the hats he said, 'Your head is only normal size madam. A medium size hat will fit.' Mum said to him, 'You have no idea what you have done for me.'      Sadly  on Violet's death certificate it lists 3 causes of death.  The  third being  'Instrumental delivery, small unyielding parts, large head, persistent occipita posterior, shock.'        When Mum was three, her step brother Ian Stanley was born and that cemented her disconnection from the family.    Mum  and Ian never got along.    Mum expressed scorn of her brother and   his life choices, such as 'shacking up in sin' with a woman who  masqueraded as his wife.  She also  thought he was a loser as at one stage he was   living in a   caravan.   I never met her brother.    There are photos of Mum and her brother growing up.  Mum looks happy in the photos, taken at various locations.  The family seems to have gone on many holidays.  She looked well cared for  and had very fashionable clothes.  Its unusual to have so many photos taken  of  a child during the 1940s so it is very  significant that so many photos were taken.  Unfortunately I don't have access to these photos so can't include them here.   

Mum's name is listed many times in old newspapers as she both won awards and also won many competitions, (puzzles, drawing, writing) ,particularly in the Sun Newspaper.  She frequently made the 'Sunbeams Honor Roll'   due to the standard of her entries.  In high school she attended the Parramatta Central Home Science School,  where in her third year she won the needlework award. (1949).  

The photos and awards  suggest the active support of a parent; probably   Mum's stepmother Irene  who was on home duties   while Stanley worked as an electrician. Regardless Mum  felt abandoned and unloved.    A recurring refrain of Mum's   was, 'I just want to die and be with  my mother.'

Inchneuk Private Hospital

Mary Evelyn Morris c 1940

   Mum left school to do a stenographers course and moved into a share house in Mosman with two other girls.   Mum told me they were so poor they couldn't even afford oranges and lived on eggs.     In 1957  she changed her name from Nellie Fish to Nellie Morris.    Mum had a boyfriend, William, and was all set to have a trip to NZ when she met Dad.    Mum was the stenographer  at the firm where Dad had commenced his apprenticeship.    When she married  my  father on   6/1/1958  she used the surname Fish as her stepmother was very humiliated  about her name change and begged her to use Fish for the wedding.    As a new bride Mum became Nelle Barker (dropping the i and e of Nellie).  The couple moved to Katoomba where Dad finished his apprenticeship.  Mum was already pregnant with my brother Michael McClelland who was born in July 1958.  Another boy (Simon Mum wanted to name him) was  stillborn in 1959 and my brother Nicholas Charles was born in 1960.  

As young parents , at only 25 years old, Ian and Nelle  took the opportunity to  move to Alice Springs and start anew.    Dad had secured a position as a  solicitor.  Mum told me that she was keen to get away from  Dad's parents as they  didn't think she was good enough for their son and   she felt judged by them.       In Alice Springs they moved into a house  on the corner of Strehlow Street and  Gap Road, (long gone now with a row of townhouses standing in its place).      Mum  gave birth to four girls in Alice Springs;  Jill Marie (1962), Louise Anne (1965),  Jane Bridget (1967), and Eleanor Mary (1969).

Mum and Dad seemed happy there.  Certainly my own memories of Alice Springs (although I was hospitalised several times) are  of a sense of safety and security with loving parents.    When I was two Mum contracted hepatitis   A and  became very unwell requiring hospitalisation  in Adelaide.    The boys and baby Bridget were looked after elsewhere but my sister Jill and I were sent to stay with the Everingham family.  I remember the yellow chenille bedspreads in the room we stayed in.   It must have been very hard for both our parents, but particularly for Mum who was  very sick and missing her children. 

In Alice Springs Mum and Dad both converted to Catholicism, after meeting the Little Sisters of Jesus, (an order of nuns who live  a life of simplicity in the community,   working and serving the poor and vulnerable).   Mum became very close  in particular to  Sister Helen  and they maintained their friendship for many years.   After  Cyclone Tracy when we were evacuated to Sydney, we visited Sister Helen in a tiny terrace in Redfern where she was living then.   Years later I recall Sister Helen asked Mum for a reference to work as a house cleaner.  Mum was furious saying, 'She never cleaned for me.  How the hell would i know what her cleaning is like?'  Mum must have written to her refusing to give her a reference as there was a letter back from Sister Helen profusely apologising for the transgression.      To be on the end of Mum's fury was very unpleasant. For Dad Catholicism had been  a flirtation but  Mum took to the religion seriously, becoming ever more zealous years on when their marriage began to unravel. 

  In 1969  Mum and Dad moved to Darwin.  I remember the trip from Alice Springs in a green  holden station wagon.   Mum must have had baby Eleanor and Bridget in the front as recall being squashed up between my three siblings on the back seat.  It was hot and sticky  on the vinyl bench seat.  There were no seatbelts.  In Darwin they bought a house at 36 Wells St, Ludmilla where our family lived until  1980.    The first few years there were relatively calm but  as Dad's legal career flourished and his drinking and womanising escalated, Mum became increasingly isolated and turned to an apocalyptic branch of Catholicism , perhaps in a strange way seeking comfort through the idea of nihilism. (or looking for retribution).       Between    Dad's absence , his public veneration as a lawyer, his alcohol consumption and  his  many affairs and Mum's obsession with  religion   ,  her loneliness, hurt and anger, we children were impacted significantly.   However, more detail is for a different  occasion.

During Cyclone Tracy in 1974 Mum sang hymns through the night as we huddled in the alcove near the bathroom.  It might have worked as we survived and minimal damage occurred to our house. After the cyclone when we were evacuated to Sydney we stayed with Dad's parents in Epping.    Dad and my brother Michael remained in Darwin to help clean up.  While we were at our Grandparent's house, Mum would take long evening walks to have a cigarette and myself (and probably other siblings) would tag along.  I'd complain about the meanness of   Grandad and Grandma and the awful food .  I always had a long list of complaints which Mum would indulge.  She would laugh  at my indignancy, agree with my complaints and offer platitudes.   I remember those walks fondly with me and Mum as Co-conspirators; her with her fags and me with my whinging.

Mum had a habit of taking in children who she felt were neglected.  These often came via her church contacts but she inflicted her rescue attempts on my brother Michael's children and my own.  Among the rescued were Patty, an indigenous girl who's  father couldn't care for her due to his work away, Lisa the young daughter of a severe alcoholic mother, Therese who lived nearby but wanted to escape her big family and Helen who had been chucked out of home.  .   Every one of her rescue attempts unfortunately ended in drama and disaster and caused harm to both the children and their parents.    Her intervention with my own children resulted in a fifteen year estrangement.  When I reconnected with her  I asked why she had  caused so much grief to all of the children and all of the parents.   Mum told me  very frankly, 'I was trying to rescue myself.  I needed to rescue myself but I didn't know how so I tried to rescue others.  I know I hurt people. I didn't mean to.'

Mum was a frustrated creative which she couldn't really fulfill while being a mother.   She came from a line of dressmakers and  embroiderers.  Her grandmother Mary  Corney ) Morris was a dressmaker by trade and  a beautiful embroiderer.    Her mother Violet taught embroidery at Violet Jones.   Family patterns are interesting.  We girls have always loved fashion and clothes and  I have   been  embroidering since I was a teenager.     Mum had a tiny horn sewing cabinet in her bedroom and an Elna sewing machine.   She sewed some of our  special event clothes; my communion dress and my sister's formal dress.    Mum went to many sewing classes and she encouraged all of her daughters to be creative.  Among other things  I recall Mum  enthusing about my drawing and   helping me to enter them into the Darwin Show.  I attended a weaving workshop with her when I was about 10 and   she helped me to make an applique cushion for  competition.  Mum always got involved in school fetes and I loved helping her make things to contribute.   As teenagers Mum taught us to sew our own clothes.    She also supported piano lessons  over many years for my sister Bridget and I.    Mum  was an avid reader and encouraged us to read too.  She would take us frequently to the library to change books and there was always a book at Christmas.  Mum read us night time stories when we were little.  Later on the rosary and religious readings  became the night time ritual.    In later years Mum took up decoupage and then quilting.  She had a market stall for a while at the Orange Lane Markets selling her  decoupage which was often on gourds.    She continued reading ferociously up until she was eighty.  Many of her books had hand written notes and sentences underlined in them.


In 1980 Mum and Dad separated and,  the three youngest daughters (including myself ), moved to Sydney.     We first stayed with my Grandparents in the Blue Mountains before renting a house in High Street  Epping and then buying a house on Eastwood Avenue.     Some happy years followed.  Mum got a new lease of life.   Dad paid her alimony so she was quite financially comfortable.   Mum loved being in Sydney when we first arrived. We went on lots of outings discovering the  big city.    She took us several times to the Domain to listen to the soapbox speakers. She took us to Manly on the ferry.   We went to all of the markets;  Haymarket, Flemington , Birkenhead, Paddington.  We went to Katoomba to scour antique shops and bought old furniture to restore.   Mum took us to the cinema, the theatre, restaurants.  Her favourite was the Commonwheel  , a vegetarian restaurant in the cbd run by a cult.    She bought us new outfits at a small boutique in Beecroft.  We'd visit galleries in Beecroft too.   Mum became interested in health, her bible was the Pritikin Diet.  She   tried all sorts of new foods and encouraged us to try new recipes.  Avocadoes were a revelation. She commenced Social Welfare at Technical college and she made some new friends there, Sue and Tony.   Another friend Pat would come over to visit Mum every Saturday night for many years.  Pat loved a drink but Mum was not much of a drinker due to the liver damage from her bout of Hepatitis and also she had a liver disease  Guillain Barre Syndrome.   Mum began seeing a psychiatrist and getting help to cope with the end of her marriage, although she never got over Dad.   When they divorced in 1982 she changed her name to Lee Morris.  She said that it was because she needed a modern name to get a job.  Nelle was too old fashioned.  She began working as a stenographer, first for the notorious Abe Saffron.  In   the early eighties he was seen as a  charismatic entrepreneur in the entertainment industry  but was later revealed to be a crime boss  with  fingers in lots of illegal pies and  in cohoots with corrupt police.     Mum went onto work for the public service, resigning in 1987.  She liked dressing up and going off in the train to a job and she was  always very proud of her  ability to work.  Mum began dating too.  She had a couple of beaus who were very keen but it was too hard with three surly teenage girls who gave them short shrift.    When I returned to Sydney  from Adelaide in 1986 with my young daughter Lucy Mum and her formed a strong bond.   Now and then Mum would have Lucy for an evening  and  I relished the opportunity to go out and cut loose.  By  21  I had already had a child,  was impacted by a terrible accident  and had married and divorced, now a single mother.   As I had no help anywhere else I valued that bit of support Mum was able to give and she and Lucy had a very special relationship for a year or two.  

Looking back, it is curious that Mum settled in Dad's childhood suburb, Epping.  Mum had grown up in Parramatta and Westmead.  She also immersed herself in Dad's family; his parents, his sister Lynette and her family,   Grandma's sister Ruth and her daughter Tiarna.   Later I found evidence that many  of  Mum's own relatives lived in the vicinity;  her Aunts Mary and Lillian, her cousins  Harold, Dick, Lyle, Frank  and their families.  They all lived within a fairly short drive from our place in Epping.   Mum either didn't know they were there or she wasn't interested in connecting with them.    I think she drew some comfort from  being connected to Dad through his family.  She certainly held a torch for Dad until she died.  

Mum moved to Adelaide for a few years and then back to the Blue Mountains.  During this time her mental health deteriorated and there was some paranoia  /delusion.  She also lived in squalor.  After a fall, Mum went into care, dying less than a year later.  When Mum died she was buried in the same grave as her mother Violet.  Her cousin Lyle, who I connected with through Ancestry, facilitated this for her  as he was the keeper of both family history and the family graves at Macquarie Park.   I felt this was so fitting for her as she had always wanted to be with her mother in death.   On the existing headstone belonging to Violet, we couldn't agree which name to put for Mum  in the inscription which was to be in the large gap  in the middle of Violet's inscription..    There are three  names recorded; Nellie Fish, Nelle Barker and Lee Morris.  RIP Mum.