CHENEY–After twice breaking up with her fiancé, 27-year-old Audrey (Quayle) Wagner needed change. She wanted to travel and get a new perspective on life. In 1953, she boarded a steamship in her native Australia, not realizing a new life awaited in Reardan.
Wagner was born in Bellarat, a city of 40,000 people in southern Australia, near Melbourne.
Her father, David Quayle, was awarded The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, one of the British orders of chivalry, for his scientific work with fish. She remembered him spending hours “looking at fish scales through a microscope” in the laboratory he built in their home.
Her childhood was happy, but she recalled the strict rules for dress and behavior at her all-girls domestic art school. The students were expected to be in uniform, even on the tram. If a prefect (teacher’s pet) observed a girl not wearing gloves en route to school, the headmaster would administer corporal punishment to the offender.
Wagner was a talented student but struggled in her housewifery class. The bloomers she made looked like “a navy-blue tent,” and she flunked cooking class because her partner ate “all the raisins and onions” that the pudding and stew recipes called for.
She then fell in and out of love. If not for Ernest “Hap” Wagner, a farm boy from Harrington, Audrey would not have made her way to America after her broken engagement. Ernest Wagner was a medic in the Army whose ship was attacked by the Japanese and sank off the coast of Australia. He was rescued after floating on a life raft for two days.
Audrey Wagner’s mother, who volunteered at the YMCA, met Ernest Wagner while he was recovering from his injuries. She invited him home for dinner, where he met and soon fell in love with Audrey Wagner’s sister Bettine. Ernest and Bettine Wagner eventually married and bought a farm outside of Reardan.
With the money saved from her canceled wedding, Audrey Wagner purchased passage on the SS Moreton Bay and embarked on an eight-week voyage to visit Bettine Wagner in Reardan. She planned to return to her mother in Australia after six-months.
She shared a cabin with “one girl who was quiet and reserved and the other a bit of a harlot.”
On the fifth day of her trip, a ship steward became ill and died. That night he was buried at sea, “probably to not upset the passengers.”
As the SS Moreton Bay entered the Red Sea, fire broke out in the engine room, causing black smoke to billow from its smokestack. Fellow passengers reported seeing sharks circling the crippled ship as repairs were being made.
Audrey Wagner passed time by playing chess, dancing and drinking lots of lemon squash (lemonade). Because food on the ship was expensive ($1.20 for breakfast), she would stock up on snacks at ports of call.
At Port Sudan she encountered “Fuzzy Wuzzies,” native men who smelled of camel urine and chanted while they loaded the ship. The urine, she was told, was what they used to style their hair.
Her trip through the 87-mile Suez Canal was memorable as an officer “who was a bit struck” on her, snuck her to the upper deck where she snacked on buttered rolls and chocolate during her four-hour adventure.
After exploring Malta and visiting the site where Saint Paul once preached, she sailed past the Rock of Gibraltar and into the Mediterranean Sea. Four days later, she disembarked in South Hampton, England.
Two weeks later, she boarded the Empress of France bound for New Brunswick, Canada, where she boarded a cross-country train destined for British Columbia.
Finally, eight weeks after leaving Melbourne, Bettine and Ernest Wagner met her at the station in Yahk, British Columbia, across the border from Bonners Ferry. They drove her to their farm outside Reardan, where a two-month-old Christmas tree, brittle and dry, remained in its spot to welcome her.
Bettine Wagner, playing the role of matchmaker, invited a bachelor named George Wagner (no relation to Ernest) over for dinner.
“I thought he was a bump on a log,” Audrey said. “He was very shy and a bit awkward.”
George Wagner, she soon learned, was “as solid as a rock.”
They fell in love, but it wasn’t until her visa was about to expire that Georg Wagner proposed. Short on cash, he had to sell feeder steers to have enough money to get married.
“I guess I cost as much as 40 steers,” she quipped.
She and George Wagner had three children, Roger, Jeff and Jennifer.
She enjoyed her transition to farm girl and recalled the hours she sat on an overturned 5-gallon bucket working crossword puzzles while awaiting the birth of piglets, whom she would cuddle under her coat until she could get them to the kitchen to warm in the open oven.
“She was quite active in 4-H,” Jeff Wagner said. “In the morning she would work in the pen with the pigs and that afternoon, dress up and go to Bridge Club.”
Audrey Wagner volunteered at the Barton English Language School in Spokane for 29 years. She not only taught immigrants English, but she also actively recruited and mentored other volunteers.
“She instructed them in proper English,” her son Jeff Wagner quipped.
Audrey Wagner, now 95, is grateful the U.S. Army sent warships to Australia during World War II. If not for Ernest Wagner finding his way to her home, she would not have embarked on her adventure to America, where she met George Wagner, her partner of 56 years who passed away in 2010.
Recently, Audrey Wagner moved from her home and into the Cheney Care Center. Her grandson Grant and his wife Morgan now live on the farm that holds so many memories of the life she built 14,000 miles from where she was raised Down Under.
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