ROBERT PARER

Prue Clarke OAM, who passed in August 2022, wrote to me two years earlier about her parents, Agnes and Kendall ‘Ken’ Frank, and other interesting family members.

Her mother, Agnes, worked at one time for Sir Jack Keith Murray, the TPNG Administrator, and her father, Kendall ‘Ken’ Thomas Frank (1904–51), a wireless operator and engineer, is mentioned in The Coast Watchers, by Eric Feldt. Ken had a workshop in Port Moresby where he fixed all the coastwatchers’ communication radios.

Kevin Clarke, Prue’s husband, was the District Finance Officer at Samarai. Later, in 1958, he was District Finance Officer at Madang and, in 1960, District Finance Officer of Sepik District. Kevin, who was in the same class as me at Brisbane’s Nudgee Junior, then Senior Schools, told me that he worked in London for Margaret Thatcher for a while but didn’t say when.

Agnes Prudence Alexandra Jeffrey (1907–88), Prue’s mother, was born in Cooktown in 1907. When Agnes married Ken Frank in September 1938, it was a second marriage for both but, unfortunately, that marriage ended in divorce after Prue was born in 1939 in Port Moresby. By 1941, Agnes was remarried and had a son, Jim. Later that year, on 18 December, Prue, with baby brother Jim, Agnes, and her grandmother, Mary Christie, were evacuated to Sydney on the SS Katoomba. The family was looked after in Coolah, in NSW, by a friend of Mary’s.

Prue’s mother, Agnes Frank, with her students

Jim’s surname was Waldby, the name of Agnes’ third husband, but he changed his last name to Jeffrey, the same as Prue’s, largely due to being teased at school and called ‘wallaby’. Jim studied journalism in Gosford and went on to lead an interesting life in the film industry in the UK and Australia.

At one stage, Mary Christie, Prue’s grandmother, had a trade store at the bottom of Lawes Road in Port Moresby. She married a gold miner named Preston Christie, who she soon discovered was having a relationship with a New Guinea woman, so when Mary left on the Katoomba with her daughter and grandchildren, she was estranged from her husband and very angry. While Mary was in Australia, Preston was purportedly murdered at the Old Port Moresby Hotel in Port Moresby. His death was possibly linked to a drinking night resulting in a fall under suspicious circumstances.

Following Preston’s death, Mary moved to Sydney where she received a visit by some men looking for her husband’s mining documents. Supposedly, Preston had found gold in the Owen Stanley Ranges, but Mary had burnt all his belongings after they were sent to her from New Guinea.

Prue’s father, Ken Frank’s family came from Kalgoorlie, in Western Australia. Prue described him as larger than life, as was his father, Joseph Henry Frank. He visited Prue one day in the boarding school she was enrolled at in Charters Towers in Queensland, with his new wife and family, and on their return to Townsville that same day, he was tragically killed.

Kevin and Prue visited a museum in Kalgoorlie in the 1990s to find the museum had part of her grandfather’s mining office on display.

After WWII, Agnes was one of the earliest European women invited back to Port Moresby, arriving in early November 1945, where she became a member of the town council. The TPNG Administration set her up in a special department teaching students typing. She fought to do this work in the early days, utilising departmental typewriters after the staff typists left work. Her initiative was not always supported as the Europeans would often remove the typewriter rollers when they finished for the day.

Prue went up to live with her mother in Port Moresby in 1947, attending school in a temporary building adjacent to the London Missionary Society Church in central Port Moresby, before the new school was built adjacent to Ela Beach.

Her half-brother, Jim, established the first newspaper in Port Moresby after WWII in his bedroom, printed on a duplicating machine. Prue would share his political cartoons with her friends at the Ela Beach Public School before they were published, a sure way of making herself very popular with the other students.

Prue was then sent to boarding school in Charters Towers in Queensland—her subjects including shorthand, bookkeeping and typing—and Agnes organised for her to work in the Administration during her school holidays in Port Morseby. She remained at boarding school until 1958, after which she trained as a school teacher in Brisbane, teaching in Mackay and then in Port Moresby at Hagara Primary T-School until she and Kevin Clarke married in Port Moresby in 1961. 

Resources

Kendall Thomas Frank – http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/frank-kendall-thomas-10236

‘Agnes Frank’ – an interview by Veronica Keratitis for the National Library of Australia located at https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/648437