Audio Slideshow with Nelly O'Meara

Nelly O’Meara: Then I came back home again in the summer, back with Muriel. Mr. and Mrs. Thompson, that were their name, and back to work there again, and then I met Don, and I was walking on the beach, and all those lifesavers were sitting there, and I was young, and I had bikini on, and all that, and they said, hmm, she looks okay, you know.
So that's how it started, the romance. We were engaged for two years. I went back to Melbourne still to work in the wintertime. So I saved up the money then for my wedding, so Don and I got married on the 28th of November in 1959. So we've been married this year, it would be 64 years. Wow. It's a long time isn't it?
So that's what happened there. And then Don and I had this small little house in Apollo Bay, opposite the Presbyterian church at the time. So it was a lovely, Don done it all up, beautifully done up, everything was lovely. That's where we had Carrie. Our oldest daughter's now 63. And we spent about two, three years there. And then the farm came up the Barham River road. So Don went down it was a beautiful big homestead. By that time I worked in town and Don worked at the butter factory, we had, after eight years or something, we had Amber. And that was the biggest surprise. So that's what happened. And then in 1982/3 a lady up the road, she came to see me.
She had a lovely garden, too, and she had tea rooms. And she said to me, uh, Would you like to start tea rooms, Nelly? I said, Oh, my God. She said, Can you cook? Can you cook a scone? I said, Yeah, I can do that. So I started experimenting and things. So we started the tea rooms in 1983. And we've done that, and we run that for about 20 years altogether.
So that was a big experiment. I have never met so many wonderful people in my life because they're often, when they were holidaying in Apollo Bay, they came up and sometimes twice a week, three times a week, just to come up and in the end I knew them all by name because I said the lady with the yellow hat or the man with, you know, that's how I did it all. I had a big list hanging down. Oh, they're coming up. Oh, good, you know. So, we made ourselves very popular.