We loved the time we spent with Val. Among other things, she described to us her memory of spending time with her father at the local town fair in the suburbs of Perth during the 1940s, when she was little.
"The town hall wasn't far from us, you know, just around the corner, the Maylands town hall. And they used to have beaut fairs there. And one year you could take an animal and dress it up. So we took our dog. And we had a doll's pram. It was a fox terrier. I don't know if you know foxies, they're only a little dog, it's a zit-dag dog, you can do anything with it. And we dressed it up and had a baby's dress on it and had booties on it. It loved the doll's pram, you know, it used to just lay back like this, you know. And we won first prize! We had a bonnet on him, and everything. And then they found out it was a boy dog, and they took the prize off us, because we had it dressed up as a girl! It's name was Ringer."