Each week I post another fascinating true-life excerpt from my friend & mentor’s journals while she was Housekeeper & Cook at The Flamingo, during the period 1968-1999, titled Cookie’s Diaries. Together we’ve changed a few things around & set Cookies story in a fictional Australian country town so as to protect the innocent & the not so innocent! We hope you enjoy Cookies journey from such humble & all but penniless beginnings to owning & running the highly successful country guesthouse, ‘The Flamingo’. To read the last chapter click HERE.
The Laundry – The Spinsters Domain
Now The Spinsters were odd ones and most definitely had their own ideas on how things should be done in The Laundry. I was never to learn a great deal about these two difficult old girls as they never trusted any of us with their story; we can only assume they somehow escaped a China the world knew little about at that time in our history & attached themselves loosely to a group of Chinese market gardeners in the district, although, to be honest none of us knew. Australia was only a little over one & a half centuries old at that time & although we were to grow into a melting pot of nationalities over the next 50 years, back then, at that time in Australia, we tended to stick to our own groups. We were still a new country & highly valued the workload immigrants helped us carry & although we were more than a little curious of what they ate, we stuck to ourselves & so did they.
From what we could make out, even their names only referred to their single status & in no way identified them as individuals & as strange as it sounds in these modern times to be so disrespectful in referring to them as The Spinsters, they in fact demanded it. It was as if they were joined as one by an invisible thread, we assumed they were twins as they were almost impossible to tell apart! Continue Reading 
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