Dorothy May Smith, nee Cameron, was brought up in and around Kingston in the South East, where her father, who worked a team of fourteen bullocks, made his home base. May describes in detail how she left school aged twelve to help her mother run a boarding house (for meals, not accommodation) for two years ten miles from Robe for the Drain L labourers while her father carted machinery for the works. May then worked for about five years as a housemaid and waitress, first in the Crown and Kingston Arms hotels in Kingston, then in the Bayview Coffee Palace in Robe and finally at the New Market and Terminus hotels in Adelaide. After her marriage to a labourer she had met at the boarding house, she returned to Kingston to live. During the 1920s Mrs Smith had five of her nine children and in the mid 1920s she and her husband lived in isolation on out-paddocks of the Murrabinna Station.

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