14/12/1929 – 10/11/2023
(Aged 93 years)
On 24th November, Avalon Baptist Peace Memorial Church farewelled one of its beloved elders. As her daughter I have the honour of writing a little about her life and participation in our Church family and Avalon community.
Kathleen, known as Kath, was born on 14th December 1929 at Paddington’s Royal Women’s Hospital. Second of 3 children, Kathleen grew up during the Great Depression followed shortly by the second World War. Perhaps it was this experience that shaped her strong commitment to human rights, peace, and justice.
Kathleen’s family were severely affected by the Great Depression which in Australia started at the time of the Wall Street crash towards the end of 1929 and got progressively worse until employment hit a record high of 30% in 1932.
During early childhood years, Kathleen’s father, Ged, a compositor, and printer with The Sydney Morning Herald, lost his job and had to take what he could find. This included gold prospecting in Oberon and manual labour in a stone quarry. For a period, Kathleen’s family lived in a log cabin. Her father used to catch rabbits for food, but Mum and her older sister Norma refused to eat them because they felt so sorry for the rabbits!
Kathleen, (on right) sitting with her older sister Norma and Uncle Alan
On 29th June 1942, Ged enlisted in the RAAF to help protect Australia against an invasion by the Japanese despite printing being a protected trade. Kathleen would have been 12 years old.
Around this time the family moved to Sydney as Newcastle had been shelled by the Japanese. The family lived in a tiny one-bedroom house at Florence Street, St Peters. Kath slept in the lounge room and Ged only got the rental through a friend as housing was in very short supply due to the war.
Kath went on to high school, left at age 15 and got a job as a typist with AMP. Later however, she saved up and her Leaving Certificate in a single year at St George High School.
Ged got his discharge from the RAAF on 4th March 1946. In 1947 he got the opportunity to get a taxi-cab license in a ballot for ex-servicemen. This changed the fortunes of the Brigden family who were never as desperately poor after that.
In the early 1950’s Kathleen enrolled at Sydney University and obtained a B.A. Dip Ed majoring in English and History and graduating with First Class Honours in History.
Mum always believed that a knowledge of literature and history were very important to understanding human beings and learning from the past.
In her youth, Kathleen was very adventurous, an active bushwalker, mountain climber and caver. She hitchhiked with a friend to Queensland, climbed the 2nd sister in the Blue Mountains and illegally climbed over the arch of the Sydney Harbour Bridge under cover of darkness, during the visit of the Queen.
In the 50’s Kathleen chose to go to Papua New Guinea for her teaching service and met and married her husband, Mervyn George Moody. Three of her four biological children were born in New Guinea.
When Kathleen returned to Sydney with her four young children, she joined Merv as a teacher with AMES and they worked closely together there for most of her working life, teaching migrants English as a second language. This became the career she loved, and she won the respect and admiration of her students and colleagues developing her own imaginative curriculum materials that brought the English language to life and gave her students an insight into Australian culture.
Kathleen had always loved Avalon since visiting Avalon for a camping holiday with her father when she was young.
In the early 60’s she and Mervyn and her four children returned from Papua New Guinea and with the help of a war service loan bought a house in Clareville. This was to become her beloved home of 50 years.
In the early 70’s Kathleen and Mervyn decided to adopt two children, Kym, and Gillian and these became much loved family members and siblings to Martin, Lucy, David, and Chris, then teenagers.
Kathleen and Mervyn were not active Christians when they joined Avalon Baptist Peace Memorial Church in the early 1980’s. However, some of their children had become Christians as teenagers and they had a strong belief in the Christian values of compassion and social justice and were looking for a Church that welcomed and practised those values.
After meeting John Hirt and his family, then Pastors of Avalon Baptist Church, Kathleen was deeply impressed by Liberation Theology and its core belief in siding with the poor. Kathleen was later baptised at the Church and became a strong, active member, deeply committed to following Jesus in a life of love and compassion.
She became the Convenor of the Social Justice Group, a Deacon of the Church and later joined another elder of the Church, Roy Taylor in establishing Avalon Amnesty International group working in partnership with the Church for human rights around the world.
This became her passion and work for the next 30 years which included writing hundreds of letters on behalf of the release of political prisoners both here and around the world; faithfully standing up in Church on a weekly basis to encourage others to sign them, participating in local community events such as Avalon Market Day, helping to organise Film nights to raise awareness of important social justice issues and working together with a local community choir and instrumental group, Loosely Woven to organise regular concerts at the Church to raise money for Amnesty’s human rights campaigns; most recently the campaign to end the detention of children under 10 in Australia’s prison system.
Kathleen with Journalist, Jeff McMullen, and Pastor Mark Hurst on a Film Night to raise awareness of the importance of closing the gap in literacy amongst First Australian children and young people.
It is estimated that the Loosely Woven concerts alone, held at the Church at least 3 times a year for the past thirty years, raised over $40,000 for Amnesty Internationals Human Rights work. No small feat for a lady by then, over 90 years of age.
Kathleen was honoured with two awards, a community service award from Pittwater Council and is on an Honour Roll at Addison Road Community Centre for her peace work. (see Below)
A loving mother and grandmother, she is deeply loved and will be missed by her family, friends. and wider community.
Link: Kath Moody’s Celebration Day Pictures! – 24th November 2023 (humph.org)
Acknowledgement and thanks to Wayne Richmond for all funeral photos in this link.
Avalon Baptist Peace Church 
