Molly Jones

Molly Jones was born Melissa Smithers in Adelaide. Her mother, Caroline, was a dress designer and her father was a successful lawyer. Her parents were divorced. Molly and Brendan met in a Sydney hospital where Molly was being treated for a broken leg. Brendan was the nurse taking care of her. It was Brendan who started calling her Molly and it caught on. Molly may have been a snooty upper-crust young lady from Adelaide but Brendan brought out the softer side of her.

After they married, they decided to move to the country and bought a small hobby farm on the Tallebung Road in Wandin Valley. Molly's mother was not happy about their frugal living conditions and she always brought the most ridiculous luxury items to them whenever she came to visit...a chandelier ended up hanging in the pig pen. Brendan went to work as a nurse in the hospital and Molly looked after everything on the farm, often with terrible results. She always had a plan for making the farm more self-sufficient but things didn't always work out (such as her idea for a yabbie farm when all the yabbies crawled away, leaving her with nothing). When they bought their farm, they inherited Doris, a pig with a slight drinking problem, and ultimately a wide variety of other animals, including chooks (chickens) and a snake called Jewels who slept in their chimney. Molly had a flair for making her own distinctive clothes (usually bright and colorful and a bit on the goofy side but I liked them).

She had an enormous heart and wanted to help everyone and everything -- she often went to bat for environmental and social causes of any kind. She was very passionate about the things she loved. She started up a local paper called "The Valley Voice" but was forced to stop publishing it when it began alienating her friends and taking up too much of her time. Her best friend in the Valley was Vicky (Dean) Bowen while Brendan often hung around with Simon Bowen.

Molly and Brendan had a daughter, Chloe, and, very very briefly, a son they named Christopher...Molly fell off a ladder while decorating the nursery during the later stages of her pregnancy, causing her to go into labour much too early. After a brief fight for life, the baby died and their marriage nearly didn't weather it -- Brendan blamed Molly for the baby's death for a very long time. Molly was diagnosed with leukemia while Vicky was pregnant -- Bob, Brendan, and her friends were preparing to throw her a surprise birthday party when she found out. She died at home in May 1985 while Brendan and Chloe were flying a kite -- she was lying on a couch in the yard watching them when death claimed her and the last thing you saw and heard was Brendan running toward her and yelling before the picture faded to black (click here to see the poem that was read by Bob Hatfield at the end of that episode).

One thing that has always stayed with me is the lullaby Molly used to sing to Chloe -- "Blow the wind southerly, southerly, southerly. Blow the wind south o'er the bonny blue sea."

		The role of Molly Jones was played by Anne Tenney