Ian Cohn

Husband of 53 years

The video above is an excerpt from the Memorial Service.

Copyright Albury Sound and Lighting 2021.

Susie and I were together for over 54 years. She was a beautiful and wonderful person in all ways. She was a loving and devoted wife to me. She was a devoted mother to our children. She was a devoted daughter to Isabel and to her grandmother Jane Ellis. She loved being a sister to Maggie and brother Jim. She enthusiastically embraced her secondary teaching career and, then in retirement, fully engaged in community life in the Mt Beauty area.

After her father returned from World War 2 Service to the north of Australia, he found it difficult to find suitable continuous employment and throughout Susie’s childhood the family struggled through many changes of places of residence and led a financially precarious existence.

Susie started school at age 4 years at Anglesea where the family briefly ran a Guest house. She was almost a year younger than her fellow students and always felt a little out of it socially because of this. With numerous changes of school she finally was enrolled at Essendon High School where she met her lifelong friend Robyn Sleebs (now Johnson).

She left school after year 11 and commenced the 4 year Interior Design Diploma course at RMIT in 1959 aged 15. At the same time, she wanted to complete her Matriculation (Year 12 now) school year so she enrolled at night school at Taylors Coaching College. She completed her night school Matriculation year with first class honours in Art.

She completed her Interior Design course at the end of 1962 aged nineteen winning the A E Hoad prize for being top student.

She started work with A E Hoad in 1963 working on Interior and Fabric design. She moved to large building (mainly hospitals) architects Stevenson and Turner as an Interior Designer in 1964.

I had been aware of Susie’s existence, and admired her from a distance, since about mid 1964. One warm day in December 1965, after finishing work at Monash University, I went to Dendy St beach with my fellow Mechanical Engineering student, Vic Stewart, came across Susie, who was a friend of Vic’s, and had a pleasant conversation with her. But at that stage she showed absolutely no other interest in me. In fact, I had the impression that she was slightly aloof.

She and I met again about a year later at a Saturday night gathering organised by our mutual friend Vic in November 1966. Her current boyfriend was absent studying for exams. So she looked around. She decided that I was the best of a bad lot, would be a bit of a challenge, and caught my attention by throwing bottle tops at me.

After our meeting at Vic’s party, we started associating frequently. I was scheduled by my employer, Conzinc Riotinto, to move to the Hamersley Iron ore mine port at Dampier Western Australia in January 1967. She resigned her job and moved to Perth, to be close to me, only 1500 km from Dampier. She gained employment as an Interior Designer with a prominent Perth architecture firm Forbes and Fitzhardinge. Things were going so well that, 3 months after we started to go together, I proposed to her at the beginning of February 1967 on the first of my monthly Fly In Fly Out trips to Perth. By then I had the impression that she had “taken it as read” that we should be married.

She returned to Melbourne in November 1967 and I followed in early December 1967. We were married at St Andrews Church Brighton on the 8th of December 1967.

In January 1968 we moved to Dampier but, after 6 months there, we came back to Melbourne when I was reassigned to the Conzinc Riotinto headquarters.

We took over renting the family residence in Middle Brighton because Susie’s mother, Isabel, had moved out after marrying Tom Atkinson.

We raised three lovely children. Susie was a devoted mother and stayed at home until the children were more independent. We struggled financially and Susie took on part time fabric design and market survey jobs to boost our income. In 1980 she completed a Diploma of Education and in 1981 took on Casual Relief Teaching work, shortly afterwards gaining a permanent position at Westall Secondary College where she worked until retirement at the end of 2001. She loved teaching and took on many senior positions of responsibility including managing the School Camp at Balook.

In Mt Beauty she joined quite a few community organisations and did much volunteer work until a couple of years ago when she was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease.

Susie was an enthusiastic skier from well before she and I got together. As a teenager she and her good friend Faith Frankenberg (now Klein) went skiing at Falls Creek before there was a sealed access road. After retirement she enthusiastically continued skiing until about 2016.

Susie was a good tennis player and was the St Andrews Tennis Club Ladies Singles Champion around 1964. Later in 2005 she and Carole Tai were Ladies Doubles Champions at the Mile High tennis tournament at Falls Creek. She was voted the Mt Beauty Tennis Club Seniors group “Player of the Year” in 2017 recognising, I think, her determined fight against the insidious ravages of MND.

So much for briefly skimming over her history. What were her characteristics?

Generosity, enthusiasm, determination, decisiveness, sociability, friendliness, all come to mind.

Amongst many other fine attributes, I would rate one of the most prominent as focus, a determination to complete her life’s projects. Susie took on many projects in her life. I was the biggest of her big projects, and another was acquiring our property in Tawonga South. And once she decided on a course of action there was no turning back. In our marriage, I would say that Susie was the Chief Executive and I was the Chief Finance Officer organising funding for her projects.

She was a devoted and compassionate family member. Early in our married life she did not like the poor conditions at her Grandmother Jane’s nursing home. While her mother, Isabel, was overseas after marrying Tom, and Susie was expecting our first child, she took Jane in and nursed her for around three months until Isabel returned. After Tom died, Isabel lived with us at Brighton for around a year while Isabel’s house was being built in the next street. Later Susie looked after Isabel at Tawonga South for around 5 years until Isabel moved into Kiewa Valley House for the last few months.

I have often described Susie as having an overdeveloped mothering instinct. In relation to our boys however, it became apparent that there is a limit to the extent of an overdeveloped mothering instinct. In their twenties, they found that out by being evicted from the family home. In one case, this was manifested as the “Buy a house and put him in it” eviction method. In the other, it was accomplished by the “One way train ticket to Kalgoorlie” method. In both cases it was totally her decision. Nevertheless I agreed, and all I had to do was raise the required finance.

Susie could be pretty opinionated at times. And with my father being similarly blessed, they occasionally butted heads. Another of my observations was that, on rare occasions, she spelled the word - subtle – “B L U N T”.

Susie liked being sociable, and for many years hosted regular dinner parties both when we lived in Melbourne and in Tawonga South. Up to around 2014, she regularly hosted Gliding Club barbeques for visiting glider pilots on the Australia Day weekend and at Easter time. I think the record for attendance at those was around 80. Until she declined due to MND, she was a regular at the Mt Beauty Bakery morning “solve the world’s problems” group.

She was an enthusiastic Rotary member volunteering as a traffic controller for many of the bike races held in the area and helping out at “Hoppet” ski race barbeques. Another of her favourite projects was the establishment of the Mt Beauty Community Bank which has turned out to be a wonderful asset for the local community. She was on the Steering Committee and did a lot of work raising pledges from UKV citizens to capitalise the Community Bank. She had many other community projects, too numerous to mention in the short time we have today.

We live in the best community in the world, and I want to thank all the many wonderful people around us who helped me to look after her in her final days. Of these, I want to especially thank Luise Mock.

Susie and I had a beautiful, loving, calm and serene marriage. She was the best thing that ever happened to me. She was a wonderful woman.

I loved her all our time together and will do so forever.

Rest in peace Susie. Rest in peace.