Easter Camps at Glenlock, Waikerie over the years

Easter Camps at Glenlock, Waikerie – Our 1963 Episode

Lydia and Joe Mednyanski at Easter camp with the girls Alexa, Gaby, and Brigitte behind the window.

In 1963 Jeff and I went to Waikerie to the Glenlock Easter Camp for the very first time. I think there had only been about three or maybe even two camps before this. Perce Mansfield was the speaker for the early camps and they were held in a big marquee erected on the site. In 1963, my husband, Jeff Berry led the studies and we went took a caravan which we shared with Murray and Heather Franklin.

Heather and I were both pregnant and I had one child already, our daughter Deborah Anne Berry and she was about 18 months old. I will never forget this particular camp because Jeff had written a play for the camp as well, or should I say, he was “writing” a play for the camp. We had hired the caravan and John Martin had loaned his car to drive up to Waikerie. Jeff hadn’t finished the play, so I was sitting in the front seat of the car with a typewriter on my lap and Jeff was dictating the play to me and I was typing it up as we drove along.

Not a good idea!

Well, the inevitable happened, the caravan was very badly balanced and began to sway and before we knew it, the caravan and the car had jack-knifed and the caravan turned over on its side. We were very blessed because there were no other cars coming at the time and so we did not hit anything else.  Jeff rang Colin Hollamby and he and some of the lads came and retrieved the caravan and sorted out the car and someone drove Jeff and me to the camp and then later set the caravan up on-site so we had somewhere to live on the flat.

Well, that was not all that happened. Debbie suffered badly from croup and was not a very well little girl in the first three years of her life. At this camp, she got croup badly, so Jeff was leading the studies and I was trying to cope with a sick baby and living in close quarters in the same caravan as Heather and Murray.

After the first study, Debbie’s croup got really, really bad. We rang the hospital and they advised us not to try to take Debbie to the hospital because it was one of those freezing cold nights and they said it would be more dangerous to try and take her to town than it would be to stay and fill the caravan with steam. So that’s what we did, but in spite of that, Debbie stopped breathing and we thought we had lost her. Jeff gave her mouth to mouth and she came back to us and we both sat up with her all night. She was very distressed and wanted us to sing to her and the only song she wanted was “How many miles to Babyland,” so Jeff and I sang that song over and over and over and over all through the night, on and off, till morning.

Well, that was my first Easter camp. We attended the camp every year for about 20 years after that and my eldest daughter summed up her life as Easter Camp and the Brinkerhoffs. Our kids had so much fun at those camps. In the early years, the whole of the flat was covered with lignum, those funny bushes with the long strands of green that hang down to the ground.

The lignum was riddled with tunnels in their foliage where the animals and wildlife used to move around unseen inside the lignum bushes. These tunnels were soon discovered by our children and they would crawl into the tunnels and make their way hidden, all over the flat. They built cubbies inside, even taking small boxes to sit on when the “passages” opened out into a “chamber” where they could almost stand up.

My daughter Judy was always an adventurous little girl, and I was scared of her drowning. She was only five years old and so to protect her I put water wings on her so that if she fell into the river she would float. Well, what that meant was that Judy figured she would be safe with her water wings, so I found her jumping off the high riverbank into the water and paddling back to shore and she had never yet been taught to swim.

My children grew up going to Easter camp and so I have made a gallery of old photos taken at past Easter camps. You might find people you know amongst them.  So here they are.