The following note was written by her daughter Deirdre on a conversation with Nell in her last years. It is interesting for two reasons – it adds to what we know from her own memoir, A Tasmanian Girlhood, and it shows just how little she knew about her own birth and ancestry. After all, Nell left home at the age of 17, just as her father left England at the age of 16. Few young people of that age think of asking about or know anything of their ancestry. The footnotes comment on particular points.

In the Flowery Gully area², near Beaconsfield, in my mother’s parents’ house.

My father went there first to get work (around November 1900). When we arrived, we lived in a two-roomed shack in south Queenstown. Dad moved there to get away from the Mt Lyell mine fumes. He enlarged it to four bedrooms, by the time there were five children, two girls and three boys. When we first arrived, I was about 15 months old, but I can remember there was sacking hanging over the door, flapping in the wind, because there was no door on the house yet. I always felt my father didn’t love me as much as Edie, because he was away when I was tiny. I was only three months old when he left³.

I remember Dad had some good suits, well lined, which he carefully stored in the wardrobe. He used to dress up for the concerts of classical music or Gilbert and Sullivan operas, which were held in the concert hall. He also read a lot and had two shelves of books along the wall. I loved these books and read them over and over again – The Cricket on the Hearth for example. I never liked books written by women because they seemed weak compared with good books by male authors.

She studied drawing at Hobart (Teachers’ College). She took after our father, who used to paint country scenes on postcards to send home to Ludlow.

My fathers’ parents had retired there⁴. Grandpa Lello was bearded, with blue eyes. He was broken hearted because Tom (Nell’s older brother?) didn’t visit them there. Aunt Anne was also there. Her descendants are probably still living. The house, the Gables, was sold.

[Nell said that when she got married, she was sent some beautiful silver jewelry, a necklace and bracelet of 1” wide wrought silver) – these were stolen in a burglary in Sydney.

We loved going to the beach with young people. We would swim in the big surf, but I was nervous of it – there was nothing between you and South America. Mick was never afraid. Sometimes the waves were so huge they thundered down and created big balls of sandy foam, which blew along the beach. [Deirdre's note: They also did cray fishing from the rocks and there is a photo of mum and others riding horses on the beach.]

We had picnics, sometimes for a day or even a weekend. I loved staying with the Andrews in the flat over the bank.as they were better class people. Mr Andrews was the Strahan bank manager, 'Mick' Andrews, his daughter, was my great friend. [Deirdre's note: Nell corresponded with Mick and has photos of her.]

Later on I taught at Gormanston⁵, in the Linda valley north of Queenstown. A branch of the King River flowed nearby and there was an area cleared of trees by the Queentown people and miners. To get home for the weekends, I used to get a free ride on the back of the haulage trucks, hanging on to the sides, as they careered down the slopes [into Queenstown]. I would smile at the workmen. Sometimes I took the horse-drawn coach, cost six pence, which belonged to Mr Coffin. However, I was only earning about a shilling.

1Harry Lello's surviving uncles went back to Britain, although possibly via South Africa. John stayed in Tasmania and died there, leaving a widow and two children, who later went to New Zealand.

2Nell was actually born in Frankford, in the house of friends and former neighbours of the Lello men. The head of house was Alfred Hopper Traill and he acted as informant to the District Registrar on Nell's birth.

3Harry Lello was not with his wife when Eleanora was born. He had already gone to Queenstown to find work in the machine shops and build the house the family were to live in until Harry died.

4It is correct that Harry's parents retired to Ludlow, although Nell also believed that the Lellos came from there whereas they came from Shifnal and before that Bridgnorth, and probably earlier still from Clun on the Welsh border.

5Nell's teaching records show that Gormanston was her first appointment after working as an Assistant in Queenstown, in the months before she went to Hobart to train. After she taught in Strahan, late in her time in Tasmania, she went to teach at South Queenstown.