Ina Patricia (‘Pat’) Harbison (nee Thyer)
by Judy Ferguson
Despite being christened ‘Ina Patricia Thyer’, Pat Harbison has always been known as ‘Pat’. She was born on March 20th 1929 in Kadina, on Yorke Peninsula, to Ina (nee Davies) and Lewis Thyer , the new doctor in the town, who eventually worked there for 60 years.
On her mother’s side Pat is the granddaughter of E. Harold Davies , professor of Music at the Elder Conservatorium in Adelaide, who as a young musician arriving from England in .....taught piano to many young people in Gawler and Kapunda. Her grandmother was Ina Jane Deland , who lived in Cowan Street, Gawler, in the house built by her father Benjamin Deland, which is now the Anglican rectory. Great Grandfather Deland also served as Mayor of Gawler in the years ............and his picture still hangs in the council chamber.
On her father’s side, her grandfather, Ted Thyer had been a Clutterbuck rep for farm machinery in themid north, where his family had grown wheat in the Belalie district since 1871. Her paternal grandparents retired to Walkerville, while the maternal grandparents lived in Hutt Street in the city.
Pat Thyer was one of five siblings – the eldest and the only girl. Her brothers are John, Peter, George, and Walford. Pat grew up in Kadina till the age of nine, when she went to live with her grandparents in Hutt Street, and attended Methodist Ladies College (now called Annesley College), also her mother’s old school. The school was only a bike ride across the parklands from the grandparents home.
At the time, her grandfather was a music critic for the Advertiser, so he attended all the first night performances of concerts, ballet and opera in Adelaide. Her grandmother had arthritis, and didnt like to go out at night, so Pat was lucky enough to accompany her grandfather to most of these performances, which imbued a life long love of classical music.
Pat wanted to be a marine biologist from a very young age – inspired she believes from wonderful explorations of the coast and reefs off Port Noarlunga during long summer holidays at the grandparents beach house. She and her brother had an ancient canoe which they paddled around the reef, diving over the side without the benefit of goggles or snorkel, and peering at the underwater marvels of colourful sponges, fish and other marine life. Winter school holidays were spent at her parents home at Kadina, but the long summer breaks were always spent at Port Noarlunga.
On Sundays Pat, and brother John, who also came to Adelaide to attend secondary school at PAC, attended the Kent Town Methodist Church where her grandfather, E. Harold Davies, had been organist and choirmaster for several years. After church they would often walk to their Thyer grandparents home in Walkerville, where Grandpa Thyer had an orange orchard and a chook yard, just like home at Kadina! In his youth, their father had been a bell ringer at the Thyers’ church – St Andrews in Walkerville.
Her father wanted her to be a doctor, but after a couple of years at university Pat decided Medicine was not for her, and dropped out of Uni. At about this time too, she was doing swimming training every morning at the old Olympic Pool (City Baths) on King William Street (where the Festival Theatre now stands). It was while training there she met a young medical student called John Harbison to whom she became engaged on her 20th birthday.
In 1949, not long after becoming engaged, Pat sailed to England on the ‘S.S. Moloja to visit relatives in England. Her university friends held a farewell supper for her, and a young nurse called Eileen Hastings decided to go too. Next day Eileen purchased her passage on the same ship!
Pat’s father wanted her to study radiography and had asked a colleague in London to give her a job as work experience in a clinic for a month. This was the hottest London summer on record and Pat described lines of civil servants, stripped to the waist queuing for their compulsory chest Xrays with their jackets, umbrellas and bowler hats over their arms. There was no air conditioning and the London heat was stifling! It rather squashed the idea of radiography as a career. Then came an invitation to stay with her grandfather’s widowed sister-in -law Margaret, whose second husband was head of the prep school at Eton College They lived in a 14th century house with sloping floors, very thick walls and low doorways.. Pat’s bedroom window overlooked the wall where the Eton boys played their famous ‘Wall Game’. She will always remember the beautiful Evensong services in the college chapel, with the school choristers.
About this time Eileen, nursing in London, wrote to say she had purchased a second hand bicycle, and “why don’t we go to France?” Aunt Margaret very kindly loaned Pat her bicycle, and soon the two girls were aboard the ferry to Calais.
Eileen and Pat rode their bikes all around Europe, staying in Youth Hostels in France, the Low Countries, Denmark, Germany and Northern Italy. Later she visited Europe again with another Australian girl, hitch hiking in Italy and staying at the Youth Hostel which had been set up in the Castle at Lerici, on the Gulf of Genoa. Madi, the Italian woman who managed the Hostel had been a partisan during the war, and led the annual procession through the village on May Day.
After returning to England, and needing to earn some money, Pat spent several months as a nanny to two small boys – a job she obtained through ‘Mrs Boucher’s Bureau’. The family owned a hop farm in Devon as well as a beautiful house in Herefordshire called ‘Rudd Hall’ and a holiday home in Blackpool, so there were many opportunities to see the English countryside as the travelled between houses.
In August 1950, Pat sailed home on the ‘Empire Star’ a ship bringing many British and some French migrants to Australia. Her parents and John were at Outer Harbour to meet her but due to rough weather the ship was unable to berth. Pat’s mother was so distressed at having come all the way from Kadina to meet her and then not being able to, that she asked the Harbourmaster to send the pilot boat out to the ship to bring her daughter ashore!. He agreed, and Pat recalls climbing down the side of the rolling ship on a rope ladder, swinging over the pilot boat, then the pilot calling out to her, “Hang on and when I say ‘jump!’- you jump!” Fortunately she did as she was told and landed safely in the pilot boat!
She and John were married a month later, on September 15th 1950, in St Peter’s College Chapel.
They lived in the Hutt Street house with Pat’s grandmother while John completed his year as house surgeon at the RAH. The following year John worked as a locum in Nuriootpa and their first child William, was born. At the end of the year a colleague in Fremantle contacted John to say that the hospital there had a vacancy for a surgical registrar, and John got the job. After a rough sea voyage across the Bight on the coastal steamer Westralia with a lively baby boy, they reached Fremantle and rented a flat at Cottesloe, overlooking the beach. They were there for a year, and would liked to have stayed, but the South Australian grandmothers protested at the idea of their first grandson being so far away. So they somewhat reluctantly returned to South Australia where John won the position of Medical Superintendent at Woomera - a job he held for 3 years. Their second son, Michael was born in Woomera in 1953, at the very efficient and friendly local hospital..
This was during the time the Atom bomb and Jindivicks (a controlled target plane) were being tested. There was a large British naval and Air force presence in the town and a very socially stratified society – Officers (top layer), Sergeants (middle layer) and other ranks. The Harbisons were allocated to the officers’ mess, and Pat recalls having to ‘dress’ for dinner at the mess, and, like other wives, owning several long evening gowns while she was in Woomera!
While there she experimented with watercolours, oils and pastels, and painted local landscapes. The town had a thriving Art Society and famous artists such as John Dowie, Stanislav Rapotec and Robert Campbell came up to take classes. Cameras weren’t allowed in the town at that time, so there was a big demand for the landscape paintings produced by members of the Woomera Art Society!
After the three year term in Woomera, they went to England for 9 months, where John did post graduate studies in anaesthesia at East Plumstead Hospital. They lived in a rented bed-sit in Chelsea, and Pat utilised the time doing various art courses at Central School of Art (where she studied stained glass work ), Chelsea Art School (for life drawing), and Kingston Art School ( also stained glass work).
Their third child, a daughter, Jean, was born a couple of months after they returned to South Australia, and they moved to Gawler, where John joined a local medical practice. After two years in Gawler they found, and fell in love with, one of Gawler’s very old houses, an 1860’s mud and rubble cottage on the hillside above the main street, surrounded by a couple of acres of native pines and big old trees. It needed very little renovation, apart from some plumbing and electric light!
Their fourth child, daughter Kate, was born soon after they moved into the old house.
While her children were young, Pat pursued her artistic interests – painting in oils, pastels and making glass mosaics and stained glass in workshops at the Eagle foundry in King Street and in the hayloft of their old house. She would have liked to take up stained glass work as a career, but it was not really practical at the time. However she was able to do some work, and one of her projects is a lovely window in the church at Blinman in the Flinders Ranges.
She also helped with Religious Instruction classes in many of the local schools in the district, including some of the small one-teacher schools that have since been closed.
Her RI experience gave her an incentive to improve her teaching skills, and so she completed a B.Ed. at Salisbury CAE in 1974,, which included a year’s research on the biology of Bream fish in the Onkaparinga Estuary. Her youngest child was about 11 years old at this time.
Her first appointment as a teacher was at Craigmore High School in 1975, where she taught geology, biology and general science for 4 years, taking her Geology students on excursions in the Flinders Ranges. Keenly interested in protecting the natural environment, she left teaching to undertake a Master’s Degree in Environmental Studies at Adelaide University in 1979.This course only accepted 12 students in any one year and so was difficult to get into, but Pat was lucky!
At the same time she also served as a member of Gawler Council for seven years, striving to save some of Gawler’s historic cottages and magnificent old trees, becoming an Alderman and Deputy Mayor,, and drafting a “Tree Policy” for the town of Gawler.
After completing her Master’s degree with a thesis on the factors affecting the distribution of industrial metal discharges in marine sediments, and another three years of postgraduate research on the geochemistry of mangrove muds, she set up her own consultancy, pH environment, specializing in monitoring water quality and marine pollution, in Adelaide in 1985. Some interesting water quality projects included working with the Salisbury City Council on its now internationally recognised wetlands project at Greenfields and writing community information booklets for the EPA(Protecting Gulf St Vincent) and for Transport SA (Doing it Better) in 1997 and 1998. This proved to be a very busy consultancy, and remained so until she retired in 2002.
During this time, she and John also acquired their own sailing boat Adriana, and spent many wonderful weekends sailing the Gulf waters.
In 2003 she set up the ‘Friends of Gulf St Vincent,’ a community group comprising retired marine scientists, coastal residents and others who care for Gulf St Vincent. They meet once a month, and hold community forums in coastal centres around the Gulf, so an informed lobby group can be rallied when threats to the marine environment of the Gulf are recognised.
Recently the group received an Envirofund grant to update the “Protecting Gulf St Vincent” booklet and make it more accessible for the community and students.
Since 2007 Pat has also worked with a group which included more than 30 other authors, to write ‘the Natural History of Gulf St Vincent’. Three of the book’s editors are from the Friends of Gulf St Vincent group and the book was published by the Royal Society of SA Inc. in April 2008.
Pat and John continue to live in their much loved, 140 year old house in Gawler and to contribute generously to the local and wider community. Three of their four children still live in the Gawler area, and they have five grandsons and five granddaughters.
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