By KATH GANNAWAY
MARDI Lambert’s legacy to the Yarra Valley is in the pages of the newspaper she was instrumental in founding in 1979.
Still read every week as the Mountain Views Mail and the Upper Yarra Mail, the Mountain Views Newspaper was her vision, her love and her life for 17 memorable years.
As family, friends and community members gathered to celebrate Mardi’s life on 27 July at Heritage Funeral Home in Woori Yallock, there were tears, laughter and more than a few ‘wow!’ moments as friends and family, myself included, paid tribute to her trailblazing life.
Marjorie Petering was born on Boxing Day 1929 to Tran Petering and Lilian Wyatt Petering and grew up with her younger brother Norman in Box Hill.
She went to Mont Albert Central School and then to Camberwell Girls’ Grammar where she was an enthusiastic and clever student.
Thanks to her life-long habit of never throwing anything out that remotely resembled paper, her story is well documented in everything from a high school project on Russia, sketches and magazine advertisements from her days in advertising, newspaper cuttings reflecting her interest in social justice, politics, world affairs and the quirky side of life in general.
Mardi and Norman were members of the Marcian Players Theatre Group in their younger days and bundles of theatre, film and opera programs shed light on her life-long love of music, theatre, literature and art.
In the late ’50s and early ’60s she worked in Melbourne’s exciting new world of advertising, starting at Myer where she wrote the ‘What’s New at Myer’ column in the Sun, and later with the trend-setting Paton Advertising Agency alongside the likes of Phillip Adams and Fred Schepsi.
She went on to become Copy Chief and Creative Director with Nixon Compton Advertising.
From 1962 to 1964 she travelled the world living and working in London, hitchhiking, railing, scootering and push-biking through Europe and sailing through the Suez Canal and exploring exotic places such as Cairo and Ceylon.
Mardi and Norman bought a bush-block on the edge of Badger Weir and used it as a bush escape for family and friends until Mardi met and married Harrie in 1967.
They built their dream home and in 1970 adopted son Tom and two years later a daughter, Liz.
Most of all in terms of Mardi’s Healesville era, there are the pages of Mountain Views to draw on – including a faded copy of the first edition – 11 July 1979.
It set the tone for the future focusing on local issues, local people, local businesses and local institutions.
Then there are Mardi’s own words as a record of how the paper came about, how it progressed, and the many people who contributed in various roles over the years.
It was a unique model with tremendous community support, including many volunteers, in the early days.
“So many people were barracking for us,” Mardi said in the 10th birthday edition.
“People were hugging me in the street, delighted to have a real community newspaper again.”
In fact, Mardi’s reporting on Healesville matters started in the early ’70s when she took on her first assignment with Maroondah Associated Newspapers as Badger Creek correspondent for the Yarra Valley News.
In a 1991 nomination for Lions Citizen of the Year Award by fellow newspaperman and historian Les Harsant, he said it was her ideal and her energy that powered the founding of the paper and noted that with two young children there was an enormous sacrifice of family and personal life.
“The editorial responsibility for a local newspaper meant working long hours, often seven days a week, with enormous pressure to meet the relentless deadlines and unbelievable demands on physical, emotional and intellectual energies.”
In a letter to the Mail last week, Healesville resident and former Healesville Shire councillor Robyn Johnson summed up what it meant to a generation growing up in the Mardi era of Mountain Views.
“No matter what age there was always something of interest in our local paper.
“Whether it was the sporting pages from my younger years, or during my early to mid-20s seeing photos of friends’ weddings, a few years later the focus would be on the ‘Hello Possums’ section of the paper; where nearly every birth from the Healesville Hospital was announced along with a photo of Mum and babe,” she wrote.
When six young people were killed in one horrible crash in 1984, she said Mardi’s reporting was written with compassion and care.
“That was her trade mark, and it was very much her approach to life.”
She reflected on various roles of Mountain Views from obituaries to verbatim council reports and tracking the progress of the town to local politics and shire amalgamation.
Among all of that, she created the Big Noter Calendar which paid for the family summer holiday and thanks to two local women is still being produced each year for those die-hard fans who just couldn’t live without it.
I worked with Mardi from 1985 to 1992 – the best of times and, in some ways, the worst.
The paper struggled financially and it wasn’t your typical office – it was old school, old equipment, crazy hours, but there was a shared sense of purpose and pride in producing a much-loved newspaper against the odds.
There was also a sense of family. With mainly young mums making up the workforce when I started, it was very much a mix of after-school care and juggling and sharing work and family commitments.
My overwhelming memory of those times is of laughter and friendship with Mardi as a mentor and friend, as well as a boss.
She was an inspiration – generous, intelligent, funny, warm and loving.
She was enormously resilient and exemplified what it means to value substance over style – content was always more important than looks and, paradoxically, actions always spoke louder than words.
Daughter Liz and son Tom paid tribute to their mum with heartfelt recollections on growing up with Mardi in the Mountain Views era and a realisation as adults that their mum was indeed an amazing person.
In an at times humorous tribute, Tom painted a picture that many would be familiar with – a frenetic lifestyle with no hidden agendas.
“What you saw with mum was what you got and there were never any grudges,” he said.
He spoke of holidays at the beach, hiding below window height as mum Mardi dropped them at school – unfurling hair rollers with one hand and sipping tea from the cup on the dash as she waved them off and headed for the office.
On behalf of the Mail Newspaper Group, part owner Hartley Higgins send a tribute from overseas saying Mardi would be remembered for her formative local reporting and passionate advocacy on behalf of the Healesville and Yarra Valley communities.
“She and Harrie put the community first; they maintained the production of Mountain Views at times against the odds while committing personal resources to the paper to their own detriment,” he said.
“Mardi’s role not only chronicled Healesville’s news and opinions, some of which remain controversial; her years as editor have also left a faithful record of the region’s progress and history.”
Perhaps the greatest tribute was the constant line of people looking over the four or five bound copies of Mountain Views, including the first and last editions, at the service.
Mardi succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease and spent her final years in the care of Monda Lodge and Holmwood Aged Care in Healesville where she passed away on 20 July 2016.
She is survived by Tom, Liz and her much loved grandson, Xaine.
