Ethel ‘Dolly’ Freeman was born on the 6th of June 1881 in Armidale. She was the eldest surviving child of Abraham John and ‘Sarah’ Jane Freeman, who were married two years before her birth.
From about the ages of four to six, Ethel and her younger sister, Lucy (and presumably an infant brother, John) moved frequently with her parents, who were slowly migrating 600 kilometres north to Warwick in Queensland via Moree.
Bertha recalls Ethel telling her that the reason she couldn’t read properly was that she was often kept home from school to help her father chop wood and perform other duties at home.
She also says Ethel’s father used to get drunk on a Saturday night and Ethel and her mother would have to wait for him to arrive home in the horse and sulky so that they could unbridle the horse, but they tried not to wake him because he was a violent drunk.
As a young worker, Ethel saved enough money to buy a property on Stanthorpe Road in Warwick and her parents Abraham and Sarah lived there.
On the 18th of December 1912, aged 31, Ethel married then-44-year-old John Henry Brisbane in Warwick. They had four children: Linda Jane (born 1 March 1916), Lawrence Henry (born 21 April 1918), Bertha Ethel (born 4 November 1920) and Isabel ‘Betty’ (born 8 September 1924). Records show the couple may have had a stillborn girl sometime before Bertha was born. They started their married years on a share farm at Lord John Swamp where they stayed until Linda and Lawrence were both school aged.
In about 1923, Ethel and John bought a farm at Swan Creek, which was then called Leura. They lived, worked and raised their children there for about 16 years. When their children had grown up, Ethel and John sold their farm at Swan Creek in about 1939, they were to move to the Stanthorpe Road home. But on the moving day, John had an accident in the sulky, which rolled onto him and killed him.
A year after the death of her husband, John Henry Brisbane in 1939, Ethel re-married to a neighbour, John Thomas Martin. He died ten years later, making her a widow for the second time.
Ethel survived another 24 years, dying in Warwick in 1974.