Vicki Carolyn Cook: A 1956 Red Cliffs Memoir

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VICKI CAROLYN COOK was born at the Red Cliffs Hospital on the 29th of June 1956. She attended Red Cliffs Kindergarten before moving up to Sunnycliffs Primary School, which at the time was a small school of sixty or so children. The majority came from local families whom were all known to the Cooks.
Vicki grew up in a loving family. Her father described her as “an easy child” who only needed to be looked at the wrong way to known she had done the wrong thing. Not only that, but she was a helpful child, “deadest on being a teacher” from a very young age. Her grandparents included Alan’s father, Tom, who she remembered for buying her lollies from the Sunnycliffs shop. There was also Tom’s sisters, Margaret and Mima, who came up from Melbourne …show more content…

Bob, a builder at the time, was the son of local blockies Charles Morris Vale and his wife Dorothy (née Mallock). There was “an instant click” between the two, and in 1979, Bob proposed. The pair were married on the 10th of May 1980, the same date as Vicki’s parents. They moved into a house that Bob built on at Block 660a, on Myall Street in Cardross. Vicki took a break from full-time teaching, working as an emergency teacher only, when she and Bob started a family. Nathan Rob-ert Vale was born in 1981 and Amy Karolina Louise Vale in 1984.
About 1987, the household moved to Twentieth Street, when Bob gave up building and purchased his parents’ fruit block. For Vicki this co-incided with her return to full-time work. About 1988, Vicki returned to teaching – this time at Cardross Primary School. Numbers dropped there, however, and Vicki was the last teacher employed there so she was moved to Red Cliffs Primary School. Alongside the teaching, she spent many hours packing fruit and selling it at a local Sunday …show more content…

One of those is travelling. In 2007 she travelled to the United States, where she stayed with the family that had previously hosted Nathan in Florida. She also visited San Francisco and went on a camping tour. She visited Europe in 2013, spending time in London, Scotland, Penzance in Cornwall, and Belgium, where she met up with backpackers who had pre-viously worked as pickers at the block in Cardross.
Another interest, which takes up much of her time these days, is photography. It might have its roots in memories of her father’s dark room where he would develop his own photos. She undertook a number of short courses, a Certificate IV in Photo Imaging at a local tertiary col-lege, and began uploading images to stock photography websites in

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