Janet Dovey (fomerly Joyner)
We played in the park with all the kids

My name is Janet Dovey. I’m 58 and I’ve been living in Minto for nearly 30 years. We moved from the Eastern Suburbs. The day we moved in we all had the mumps so it wasn’t a very happy day. It was my birthday when we moved in.

The house I moved into was on Bowman Way. I lived there 18 years. We got to know our neighbours. Bowman Way was a very good street. We had 57 children in the street. We used to have lots of fun, we had water fights, we played in the park with all the kids.

Transport was the biggest problem. If you didn’t have a car, you’d have to wait for a bus or a taxi and you had to go to Macquarie Fields or Campbelltown to do your shopping. Fortunately we had a car so I could do the shopping and take the kids to school. But when the kids went to school they had to go to Bensley Road and there was only one bus down and one bus back, and if you didn’t have a car, you had to stay at school all day.

There was a lady who lived in our street. When we used to have water fights, she used to wash her house out with the hose. She’d get in there and scrub it out and you’d see all this water running out of the house.

When I first came to Minto, my eldest son had just started school and my youngest son wasn’t at school yet. Then I had my daughter, she was 11 months old when we moved here.

All I live for is my kids and my grandchildren. Seeing my children grow up and becoming proud adults is important to me. There’s a lot of children that came from this area that didn’t get any acknowledgement. You only hear the bad things, never the good things, like there was a gentleman that used to live in Wangoola Way and he became a doctor. It doesn’t matter whether we live in Department of Housing or not, we’re just as good as everybody else. It’s your values that you instill in your children that can make you or break you.