Nancy Phelan

Interviewed by [talk at Mosman Library] on 28 June 1990
Subject: Mosman characters

And then there were some people who used to come and spend the day outside our front gate, they were a family and perfectly well behaved there was nothing weird about them, but my mother made up her mind that they were Portuguese – rather romantic but she loved sort of embroidering, and the father was rather small and very dark. So she’d come in and say, ‘those Portuguese are out there’, and they’d come and bring sandwiches and they’d sit all day – you see there was no road down to Chinamen’s Beach it was just a bush track. They’d sit there outside our gate and he would paint, he was painter.

Of course my mother loved that because she loved painters and writers, and she would say, ‘oh, the Portuguese’ that she loved so much. Of course it turned out that they weren’t Portuguese at all, his name was James Jackson, (laughter) and his wife’s name was Dora Tovey. (laughter) She ended up living up the road in a commodious fashion.