Annie (‘Peg’) MacKenzie doesn’t have any cartilage left between two of her vertebrae, so day-to-day tasks can be arduous.
But the 90-year-old Lalor resident has plenty of fight when it comes to saving the red brick house her late husband George and a team of five other war veterans built in the late 1940s.
Mrs MacKenzie, known in the neighbourhood as Peg, is one of the last original residents of houses built by the Peter Lalor Home Building Co-operative Society.
The co-operative was established in 1947 amid a severe housing shortage in Melbourne. Its aim was to develop a model suburb for returned soldiers and their families, using government-backed loans.
George MacKenzie was a corporal in the 2/24th Battalion, which sailed for the Middle East in 1940. He later became a prisoner of war before finally returning home in the mid-1940s.
Peg met Scottish-born George through her brother, who was also a soldier.
“He was a marvellous man,” Peg says of her husband.
Before their house was built, the couple lived in different quarters within the Lalor Stockade compound with their daughter, Pam, who was just a toddler at the time.
In those early days, George ran a hardware store, later taking over as the stockade’s caretaker.
In a bitter twist of fate, he died in 1967, the day before Pam married.
Peg has lived on her own ever since, and continues to maintain her garden and the house as best she can in her husband’s honour.
She recently requested that Whittlesea council give her property a heritage overlay to protect it from developers.
And she is just as keen to protect the surrounding houses.
“The men who built these houses had seen a lot – they weren’t healthy men,” she said.
Peg said the society was created with the motto: “A step towards a new way of life dedicated by men who returned, to those who died to make a better world.”
