Meeting in the middle of the Indian Ocean: John and Joan’s love story

Resthaven Malvern residents John and Joan Hughes are celebrating 65 years of marriage this June, and it all started in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

John was the Assistant Ship’s Doctor on the P&O ship Arcadia, and Joan was a passenger, making her way to England with her friend Elizabeth to work as a physiotherapist.

‘The steward was giving us a tour of the ship and stopped at John’s cabin to introduce us,’ Joan says. ‘Turns out John was having his after-lunch siesta. He woke up and came to the door in his dressing gown and slippers! My first thought was that he was a bit scruffy – but my opinion improved quickly once we were invited in for a cup of tea.’

A fun activity on the voyage was for passengers to participate in a fancy hat parade. Joan decided to craft a hat and asked John if he had any supplies she could use.

‘He pulled out his old school pencil box,’ Joan laughed. ‘I couldn’t help but be impressed.’

The resulting hat, a house-shaped item to be worn when playing Housie (a game similar to Bingo), won first prize.

Land ahoy

While romance was blossoming at sea, Joan and John were told by others it wouldn’t last once they were on dry land. The boat docked in London and John and Joan went their separate ways. However, a few days later Joan had a phone call from John at the hotel where she and Elizabeth were staying.

‘He had tracked me down,’ Joan laughed.

What followed was a long-distance friendship that blossomed into love and marriage.

John continued in his role on the ship for the rest of that year, then took a job in obstetrics at the Lambeth Hospital in London, near where Joan was working. He was on call most of the time and was only allowed to leave the hospital on Saturday afternoons and every second Sunday.

‘It’s a wonder we ever saw each other at all,’ Joan laughs.

The couple became engaged in 1953, and the following year Joan came back to Adelaide, with John following soon.

‘The cargo ship I was travelling on docked in Melbourne, and Joan met me there,” John says. ‘We caught the Overland (train) back to Adelaide and sat up all night talking in the “cheap seats”.’

The couple were married at the Gartrell Memorial Church at Rose Park, Adelaide in June 1954, and then moved to Crystal Brook, where John worked as the General Practitioner for the area. They then moved to Woomera for a similar role.

‘It was a bit of a shock to suddenly be in the middle of this big, open, stony plain,’ John says of Woomera. ‘There was not much scenery to look at, but it was early in the history of the Woomera Prohibited Area with satellites and rockets being launched, so it was quite an exciting place to be.’

Specialising in anaesthetics

After his stint in the outback, John decided to specialise in anaesthetics. He began this part of his career at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital and travelled to the UK to complete further training before becoming an anaesthetic registrar at the Royal Adelaide Hospital and Adelaide Children’s Hospital. In 1967 he began his own private practice until December 1998 when he retired.

Joan was busy working as a physiotherapist at Somerton Home, where she assisted children with polio and cerebral palsy. The couple had four children: Tim, born in 1961, followed by Chris in 1963, Liz in 1965 and Kate in 1970.

‘I was in and out of work, depending on our own children,’ Joan says. ‘I did a short day, starting at 9.30am and finishing at 3pm, which worked very well with school hours. When Liz was young, I was able to bring her along to work with me, and she would run and play on the equipment at Somerton Home. I think she inspired some of the patients there to want to do the same thing!’

Joan then went on to work at SCOSA, as well as studying at Teacher’s College, though she never went on to work in a classroom.

During these years, the family lived at Eden Hills and then Hyde Park. When John and Joan retired in 1998, they moved to a 10-acre farm at Inman Valley, where they bred alpacas.

‘My vision of an idyllic life on the farm wasn’t quite the reality,’ John says. ‘It was hard work. But, Joan made us a beautiful garden, and it was a lovely place to be.’

The couple moved to Encounter Bay in 2009, where they enjoyed life by the sea for around 12 years before deciding they wanted to be closer to family and the city. They moved into Resthaven Malvern in December 2022. They have separate rooms, located next to each other.

‘The staff here are just lovely, and we find it all very easy,’ Joan says.

Holidays abroad

A shared love of geography led to much overseas travel for John and Joan.

‘I saw a lot of the world while working on the ships,’ John says. ‘The view coming into Venice on the ship was just spectacular.’

There were other working holidays to Papua New Guinea, where John worked as a locum anaesthetist, and then also to Malaysia, Indonesia and Fiji, where he was the anaesthetist on nine occasions with cranio-facial surgical teams from Australia between 1987 and 1998.

‘It was all quite amazing,’ John says.

A family holiday to Europe started with a flight to Perth and then a stopover in South Africa.

‘A friend who I had been in London with was now living in South Africa,’ Joan says. ‘We couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see her again, so we got off the plane in the morning and spent the day with her and her children visiting a game park in Johannesburg. At the end of the day, we had to go back to the airport to hop on another plane to take us to Europe. The children were quite worn out, but it really was one of the loveliest days.’

John and Joan even hopped on board a P&O Arcadia ship (not the original) again in 2014 to celebrate their 55^th wedding anniversary.

‘We only went from Sydney to Adelaide (two days) this time,’ John says. ‘We didn’t go “the long way around” like some of our friends thought we were going to do!’

And that school pencil box with the supplies Joan wanted to borrow? John still has it tucked away in his drawer at Malvern.

‘His only weapon was a pencil box,’ Joan laughs. ‘And look where it got him!’

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