Information on Ada Davis compiled and shared with thanks by Pat Davis & Bruce Davis prior to his passing. 

---

Born: 9 November 1902 Upper Orara – Midwife & Witnesses, Mary Ann Hoschke & Rachael Davis

Died:  22 December 1998. Grafton Buried Clarence Lawn Cemetery South Grafton

Ada never married, she lived in Sydney for a number of years in her early years as a companion housekeeper for a well to do family matriarch, returning in 1930 to her family home when Aunt Annie Hoschke needed assistance in operating the Orara Post office upon it being upgraded.

Ada wrote the following herself in 1988 to be printed in the Davis Family Descendants book.

Ada worked at the Orara Post Office from 1930 till 1944; this included the telephone exchange, payment of pensions, savings bank; also the tickets for petrol when it was rationed.  The depression was hard and we had food and tobacco tickets at the Post Office, business was severely affected by the depression and the allowance was reduced from £109 to £102.

A family had to be self-sufficient in the old days; there was no going to the corner shop if you ran out of anything. Often the nearest store would be 10 or 30 miles away.  The only way to travel was to walk or a horse if you had one over rough tracks and then carry everything home.  Sometimes you would get to the store to find out that the boat had failed to arrive, so it would mean that you would go home empty handed.

Material for making clothes was a problem.  They were often made from the bags that flour came in or heavy calico would be dyed with wattle bark etc and then this made into clothes as the families were large and no electric sewing machines existed like today.  This would have been a big task in itself without the cooking and looking after the children.

Often one of the neighbours would be a good bush doctor and get called to set limbs and dress wounds and extract teeth and advise in cases of sickness as we were without doctor, dentist, school, shops, churches, roads and Government help or social services of any kind; just the bush and their children.  When a baby was born one woman helped the other.  For sickness and injuries, they substituted sense and faith for medicines and drugs, and except for very isolated cases the patients pulled through.  The population was small, air and water pure.  Unceasing toil with pick, shovel and axe from daylight to dark bred a stalwart race most of whom lived to a good old age.