Jennie Dell has lived a hugely interesting life. From a rebellious youth at England's prestigious private schools to the jungles of Borneo and a lot of cities and towns in Australia, Jennie's passion was journalism and music. Jennie sat down with Denise Alison from Humans of Lismore to tell her life story. 

“My hometown is Brighton in the UK. It’s the most fabulous town, and I was born into a middle-class family, post-war parents who, in England at that time, just wanted the best for their kids, the best they could possibly afford. I was born in 1948, three years after the war, so there were bomb sites still around, and places had been pretty pulverised. 

My parents decided to send me to a very exclusive and expensive girls boarding school. I’d read a lot of Enid Blyton, so I thought boarding school would be great with dorm feasts and all that wonderful girly company, but I hated it. The rules and regulations and the stupid focus on things like….How to lay a banquet table for 20 people. I mean, there is some value in that but not for everyone. How to eat an orange gracefully is another one, and we’d have to give a talk on that and….Are you wearing regulation knickers? We’d have to pull up our skirts and show them. I hated it and I was surrounded by privileged princesses.

My family weren’t wealthy, and they struggled to send me there, thinking it would be a great education academically. It is now but then not so much, because you were going to marry a Stockbroker or a Doctor, which ironically I did.

I became very rebellious and I couldn’t sleep as I was really stressed. I would sit in the stationary cupboard at night after finding the key in the staff room, and I would read all the next year's textbooks. I loved reading. Also, the jars of lollies were in that cupboard (laughs). In there, I found the back door key to the house we were in so in 1960 at the age of 12 I would let myself out and go for really long walks at night.

The school is situated on top of the cliffs just outside Brighton, so it has a view right over the channel but behind it is the Sussex Downs and that’s my home country. One night I walked all the way into Brighton, which is a very vibrant, steamy town that has the best and worst of everything…gang warfare, cartels, crime and everything cultural and beautiful as well.

This particular night I walked right into the centre of town and stood outside the Whisky A GoGo nightclub, just watching people and listening to music, and I realised the sun was coming up, so I went back on the coast road and got a taxi. I asked the taxi to drop me up the road, hoping I wouldn’t get caught, but the taxi driver rang the house mistress, who didn’t like me at all and I got expelled.

I became a bit uncontrollable, and my mother continuously wanted to send me to these private girl's schools with these expensive, extensive uniforms, and I just wanted to go to the Grammar School. I was a clever kid, and I just wanted to learn.

I was expelled from another school, and then Mum took me out of another school. I have a brother 5 years older who was totally conventional and loved boarding school. My mother favoured him, and my father favoured me. I ended up having private tuition for a while, and I left school at 15. I took the basic O level exams, and I was out.

I went to Paris to be an Au Pair. I was too young to do it legally, but my Dad went over with me and signed all the papers. I was there for 2 years and became fluent in French. I always knew I was going to go into Journalism. My Dad was a Journo as was my Grandfather. When I came back to England, I set about getting a job at a Newspaper. There were masses of employment at that time, and there was a job going at The Guardian for an Editorial Assistant filling in for someone’s maternity leave. I applied for it, and I got it.

It was 3 months in the summer of 1964-65. All the best Journalists in the world worked in the London office of The Guardian. My job was to deliver their mail to their desks, make them tea and coffee, run errands and write high tide at London Bridge times every day, moonrise and moonset, and I loved it so much but it was only 3 months. 

I nicked a bit of Guardian letterhead paper and applied for a job in Chelsea in West London. It was the post-Mercury group of newspapers. I started an apprenticeship as a Journo there, and it was great. I was doing everything, human interest stories, women’s stories, fashion, court, and I learnt everything. So I was living in London through the 60s as a young Journo with a car and a dog and the wildest social life. 

I was always a bit of a hippie so that part of me took me away from London eventually. I wanted to go out into the Provinces. I wanted to be a part of a community. I went first to Eastbourne and then up to the West Country and I knew that’s where I wanted my career to be, and I also knew I eventually wanted to have children. Had I not I would have gone for the Foreign Correspondent work. 

I decided to marry my best friend from way back. His name was Alan. He died 7 years ago and he was a very good friend. We got married in West country. I was a Senior Journalist at that stage and I thought I could change the world through newspaper writing, but I couldn’t so how can I? Ok I’ll be a teacher.

There was a teacher training college in the far north of Northumberland, and they had a really progressive training college, and it was in a castle in Alnwick. Alan and I both decided to do the course. I got through the first year but the second year they sent me prac teaching and put me in a classroom full of kids. I couldn’t do it. I was 22, and they had to call me Mrs Martin. I was Jennie, only a student, and I wanted a relationship with the kids, not like that. I could easily be with the kids, but I couldn’t conform to the school.

I decided to have a baby, and Josh was born in 1973. I had Bonnie in November ’74. Alan and I decided to migrate to Australia. We arrived here when I was 5 months pregnant with Bonnie. We got the cheapest ticket to Australia and that involved a plane to Singapore and then boarding an old Greek rust bucket boat to Australia. We could only afford to get as far as Fremantle.

The night before the boat docked all our money was stolen from our cabin while we were at dinner. Being traveller's cheques, it was restored after a while, but we had nothing. We borrowed $10 from a NZ couple which we never repaid because we didn’t have their contact, but I do tell their story and bless them every time. So we had $10 and an orange I’d stolen from the breakfast table on the ship.

We got to customs and the customs guy rolled the orange down the counter into a bin, and I remember thinking that’s the last Vitamin C I may ever see. 

I’m a Quaker, so we called the Quakers in Fremantle, and they found us a place, and we didn’t have to pay until Alan got some work. Alan went to the Sheraton and said he was a Chef. He was a great cook, but they said he could start the next day. They used to pat the workers down after work to make sure they weren’t taking any food, but luckily bell bottom jeans were in, and Alan would stuff Lobster Thermidor and exotic dishes into his socks so we had lovely food once a day for a while. 

We bought an old car and drove to Adelaide where Bonnie was born the Quakers in Adelaide had found us a cottage on 40 acres of plum orchards nestled by a creek. It had no electricity, a pit toilet, kero lanterns and it was just divine.

The train driver would stop the train so Alan could just run down the hill to home. It was lovely. We saved and bought a caravan to put on the back of the car. We had studied the atlas to find the best place to live in Australia geographically and climate wise and it was the Atherton Tablelands. We didn’t account for Jo Bjelke Peterson, so we didn’t go there in the end. We took the caravan to Melbourne, and then we headed north. We were told about Nimbin, and we arrived in 1975, and we stayed for 11 years.

We met Trish Strange, who lived in Tuntable and told her we were looking for somewhere to put our 12-foot caravan. After a while, they offered us the garden house because we said we would make it a community and would offer it as a resource. It had the only bath with a wood chip heater, and it had a roof (laughs). We would open it on Sundays. It was a dreadful old house, but we made it nice.

It was the habit of all the kids to run in a pack, and there was a flood. Bonnie was only 3, and she fell in the creek. Fortunately, she’d been a swimmer since 2 because in Adelaide, in the little creek there was a smooth stone seat, and I could sit her on it, and the water would come over her head. She learnt to breathe with water. She pulled herself up on a rock in the flooded creek. I’ll never forget the sound of Mick Hamilton's gum boots thumping down to the creek to grab her.

Soon after that, she was out with all the kids, and I went to the nearby house with a family of 4 children, looking for Bonnie. They were stoned and said…It’s cool! So I left. My kids had bedtime and story time, and some routine. Alan and I separated while we were in Tuntable. He was a good man. 

Roger Hopkins had bought a house in Sibley St, Nimbin. He built the craft gallery on that land, but he didn’t want the house so he asked if I’d like to live in it for next to nothing. That house became Nimbin music house for people getting ready for gigs, and eventually Roger sold me the house.

In 1985 the culture of Nimbin started to alter. I had done a lot of informal journalism about the experiences we were having in Nimbin. It was all about how idyllic Nimbin was with the music and dance, the colour and charm and homemade houses and simplicity. Those stories then resulted in a lot of disaffected youth from Newcastle going…you can do what you f#@king well like in Nimbin. A lot of original Nimbin hippies had come there to leave their habits in the past but when smack came to town, some of them fell backwards, and a lot of new people came in.

It disrupted Nimbin. There were turf wars in the street at night over speed and heroin, a lot of madness. There was a bit of madness among the original hippies, which was contained so compassionately. There were only half a dozen, but they were cared for gently.  

My children were becoming teenagers, and at that time there was no high school in Nimbin. I was with Harry at this time. We didn’t marry till 1986, but we were together. He was working full-time in Lismore, and I was working with a guy called Gordon Lang who set up this thing called Educational Smorgasbord and my job was to promote it for an hour a week on 2NCR FM. It was good because it brought me out into the community. 

Over a period of time, I worked for NRTV News which I didn’t like. It was too shallow. I also worked for 2LM as a news reader, and then I got a job with ABC as a newsreader and I did some work casually as a Producer. When I started working with The Echo, I was still reading the news at 5.30pm. When I left the Echo and travelled overseas, I gave the job to the perfect person, Matthew Eaton. Matthew is now running an ABC studio in Brisbane. He was lovely.

In 1988, 2 years after I moved to Lismore, a film called Blowpipes and Bulldozers came out, made by Paul Tate and Jenny Kendall in Borneo. It focused on a character called Bruno Manser, who’d been a shepherd in Switzerland and decided to go to a warmer climate in Borneo to do some caving. While caving, he came in contact with some of the tribal people in Sarawak. He lived with them for 7 years drawing attention to the plight of these people whose homes and jungle were being destroyed by loggers. 

Jenny and Paul made this magnificent film about Bruno. 18 months after it was released I couldn’t get it out of my mind so I decided to go over there and lend a hand. Part of that was writing about what was happening for a much wider market. I got things published in the States and the UK. I came back and heard Bruno was getting out of Sarawak. He’s been shot at and had to escape many times because he was Persona non grata.

He was going to Japan to meet with a woman called Beth who wanted to help, and he had a conference booked in Honolulu. I negotiated with Beth that he would come to Australia in between and I would take him on a speaking tour to all the major capital cities, which happened. This is a man that had spent 7 years wearing a lap-lap in the jungle. I was his assistant. 

We met David Suzuki in Sydney, and he wanted to take Bruno to Canada after the conference. He wanted to interview him for a program called The Nature of Things. Suzuki took us to this festival day in Hollywood. It was insane. We saw this helicopter come down and this tiny little man came running onto the stage and onto a rostrum so he could reach the microphone and it’s Tom Cruise welcoming everyone and raving on about the environmental crisis. He said, ‘I’m staying here with you, and we are going to fight this battle, I’m not going anywhere.’ He jumped off the stage, back into the helicopter and flew away (laughs).

Suzuki said, Ok Jennie you need to work the room and introduce Bruno to people. I’d never done anything like that, and then I saw Olivia Newton-John and I could say we’re neighbours. She was so beautiful. The next night we were invited to dinner at her place. It was such a delightful night. 

I came home from that adventure and my friend Graham Askey called and came over with Nicholas Shand and David Lovejoy who were the Editors and Publishers of the Byron Shire Echo. They said, We want to start a sister paper in Lismore, and Graeme reckons you’d be up for being the founding Editor of it. I said…Would I what! So we did it. Without Graham, it wouldn’t have happened.

That was the highlight for me, having the opportunity to do this. We had the best team. I advertised for an advertising sales person and Gwen Trimble called and I said, Why would I give you this job? She said, Because I give great phone. She was sensational.

Trish Strange was our office manager, and Jacqueline Wagner was our Photographer. She’d been a nurse and was doing weddings and calendars and she had a dark room. She’d never done news but from the first week she was a genius. We are still collaborating years later. Alex Clarke with his chest-length dreadlocks at the time was our Graphic Artist. I loved it so much. My kids were older, and it was a wonderful time. 

On a personal level, I went through a bad bout of depression, and I couldn’t go on. I couldn’t go to work. It was really bad, and I had to give it all up. Eventually, I went on the casual list at The Northern Star, where I’d worked before. I loved it there and it was a great newspaper. I ended up getting a bit of casual work back at The Echo for a while too. I retired 12 years ago at 64. I got TB in 2020. When everyone else had Covid, I got TB which I caught in Borneo. 2 years ago, it became active after carrying it for over 30 years. I’m all clear now.

All the way through I’ve always loved music. In fact, one of the best jobs I had in England was at a very famous folk club in Soho called Les Cousins. It was an underground dive which went from Friday nights and all night Saturday. I had the only job in the place serving dreadful instant coffee and tea and sandwiches. I loved it so much. All the best musos played there, Paul Simon, Cat Stevens, John Martyn, loads of people we know well now. I was looked after there. I had a massive armchair, and I had this dog Natasha who would cuddle up to me. That was the beginning of my commitment to music, and we still have house concerts in our home which has run alongside everything else. 

My daughter Bonnie lives next door, which is so lovely and I have my beautiful granddaughter Chloe who is now 25. I love my house, I have my lovely dogs Dolly and Emmylou, and I really love Lismore.”