By Roberta Shaw

WHEN DOREEN Elizabeth Clarke posed for a photograph of herself standing in a Launceston street she never thought she’d have to wait so long to see her father again. Her mother, Zetta Florence Clarke, posted the card off to her husband, Doreen’s father, on Doreen’s fourth birthday not knowing whether he would receive it or whether, indeed, he would even recognise his little girl. Doreen celebrated her fourth birthday on May 4th 1941, and was, if the blonde rag-curls are anything to go by, quite the Shirley Temple of Tasmania. Doreen’s father, Private Leslie Thomas Clarke, had enlisted as a soldier in the Australian Imperial Force. He embarked for Liverpool in the UK in December 1939 when Doreen was only two-and-ahalf years old. Leslie received the postcard in the north-eastern Egyptian town of El Qantara, a hospital centre during World War II, where he was convalescing from a broken leg. The postcard arrived in good time for his onward journey to serve in other parts of the Middle East.

Leslie was granted recreation leave from the army in June of 1944. He returned home for two weeks and to his wife’s delight, a new baby arrived in April the following year. Elaine was a welcome surprise for all – Zetta being aged 41 at the time. Doreen had kept a copy of the postcard she had sent her father and waited patiently to reunite it with its mate. Leslie returned home with the much-travelled and dog-eared postcard safely in his haversack, to find a grown-up little Doreen, now seven-and-a-half. Doreen greeted her father sceptically. ‘Dad asked where the cute little girl from the photograph had gone,’ said Doreen, ‘but I was still there inside.’ Doreen admits to bewilderment at the prospect of having her father home for good. ‘It took some getting used to.’ Leslie Thomas Clarke was born in Exton in 1905. He married 23 year-old widow, Zetta Florence Clarke, in 1927 and became a stepfather to her two daughters, Gladys and Zetta. The family moved to Melbourne where their son, Colin, was born in 1929. They returned to Exton a couple of years later

In 1948 the family moved to Reedy Marsh to live on the Clarke family farm, Fern Hill, where they ran sheep and dairy cows. Doreen caught the bus from the farm to Deloraine School. ‘The bus stop was a long walk from the house. Tiring for a school girl of 11.’ Doreen lived in Deloraine until age 16 when she left for Melbourne. She married her husband, the late Gordon Arnold Shaw, in 1958 and returned to Tasmania in the mid-1980s. Doreen now lives in Deviot on the banks of the Tamar but fondly remembers making toast by the roadside on an open fire, while chilling ginger-beer in the cool waters of the Meander River. School walks with her sister, Elaine, in the early 1950s, are the highlight of her memories of life in Deloraine. Looking nostalgically at the photograph of her four-yearold self, Doreen concedes that she was never forgotten – not for a minute – during those long years when her father was away. Doreen turns 83 in May.