IDA Manton

I met Ida Agnes Manton at the Uralba Retirement Village at historic Gundagai, situated along the Murrumbidgee river in the South West Slopes of New South Wales. Here Ida spends her time knitting in between Monday's bingo and Friday's trip into town.

Ida attended school at Maroubra Junction Girls Junior High School before leaving at age fifteen. She married Dallas Bertie Manton at the age of eighteen at Malabar, at what is now Long Bay Correctional Centre. They lived on the farm at Jackalass on the way to Brungle where Dallas was born in 1922, and together they had six children.

Though Ida was rather quiet when I spoke with her, a woman of few words, she shared that it was her father who was her greatest inspiration, and Dallas and her children who provided her fondest memories. Ida has twenty great grandchildren.