Peg Nelson

Peg Nelson was about as close as you could get to a living link with the early white settlement of Central Australia. She was born when white women in the Centre were a rarity. The Alice Springs she knew as a child was “the Stuart Arms pub, a police station, a couple of stores and three or four private homes,”  with supplies arriving twice a year by camel train.

But in her last years, spent at the Old Timers Home she helped to create, she was loved by many simply for what she was: a kind, generous woman with a sparkling sense of humour who, in the words of Old Timers manager Mary Miles, “radiated warmth to everyone”.

For much of her life Peg was the support person for her husband Jock Nelson – the first mayor of Alice Springs (1971-73), an administrator of the Territory 1973) and the Federal Labor member for the Northern Territory (1949-1966), with whom she had two daughters, Pat and Louanne. But, as a member of the pioneering Bloomfield family of Central Australia, Peg had her own remarkable stories.

She shared some of them with me in a chat at her unit at the Old Timer’s just before Christmas last year, going back to her mother’s account of her birth at a nursing home in Oodnadatta 96 years ago, and her return to Love’s Creek station in a buggy. (Recording above)

The funeral service for “Peg” Margaret Caroline  Nelson will be conducted at the Old Timers Museum Complex in Alice Springs at 9am, Monday, 8th February.