Lynette Mornement oral history interview, 24 August 2016

Lynette Mornement

By the late-1980s Lynette Mornement had spent more than 20 years living at The Gap, where she raised her family following a teaching career. At this time, Lynette and the children had begun horse riding, and the prices for adjustment and stabling increasingly weighed upon the family budget.

They decided to start looking for a large property where they could keep their own horses, and one of the first properties they found was at Camp Mountain. They had five horses when they moved to Camp Mountain, which they rotated around several cordoned off paddocks in the property.

to our dismay we eventually found that they could also get out the back end of it as well, which was rather funny… So we closed all those off and we put them in different spots so that we were not devastating everything. We got there in 1988 and by 1990 we were in drought conditions.

The drought conditions were a difficult time for the family - We didn’t have a blade of grass anywhere. We were desperate for water.

Lynette had grown up in Tarragindi, on the south of the Brisbane River. Her father was serving in armed forces during World War II, based in a workshop at North Queensland repairing guns and making ammunition, drawing on his civilian skills from working in a chain factory at Newstead. When her father returned from the war, he began working as a courier for a bakery, before getting a job with RJ Jackson, a freight hauling company.

One fateful day in 1949, a load fell from the truck he was load, throwing him into the gutter and breaking his neck in three places. He died eight days later at the Royal Brisbane Hospital.

He was hurt on the Friday and died on the following Saturday. One week after my birthday. It’s crazy isn’t it. It was so close.

Lynette enjoys the solitude of the mountain - the isolation is fantastic.

But she will often come down into Samford village to meet friends or volunteer at the Samford Museum. She didn’t return to teaching after having her youngest daughter but did spend time nursing at Royal Brisbane North Hospital.

One of her happiest moments was the birth of a foal.

We had been waiting for this horse to have her child… I got up daybreak went out and there she was just looking out over the gate with this beautiful foal beside her, it was just... I ran inside and said “She’s had it! She’s had it” But we had so many minutes, so many moments like that.