A kindly woman with normally a great deal of patience, her mother would not be anyone’s fool when the American GIs tried to push her off the road.

She said where her father always pulled off to the side whenever the American army vehicles approached, her mother would keep moving forward undeterred, ensuring she was provided with her fair share of the road.

After hours of school and then work in the garden, Sylvia said she remembered sitting down with the family to listen to her mother read from her favourite books and sometimes magazines when they’d read everything else in the house.

“There was no television in those days,” she said.

When the war ended, her father again decided to take a risk and pull the family out of Mount Isa where they could set up a camp along the highway leading to Camooweal.

Her father had decided to go into the timber business and won contracts to supply wood for the mine smelters and later at various Mount Isa businesses including a bakery.

Her family would move their campsite to wherever there was a strong supply of wood and her father and brothers would get to work chopping down the trees.

Only nine at the time, Mrs Doyle studied at school via correspondence.

“But it didn’t work out too well because my parents didn’t have the best education either,” she said.

A few years passed and her father had moved on to taking out a copper mining lease at a site near Mary Kathleen.

Mrs Doyle meanwhile, had left school and taken up work as a cook at the mines and cared for her sick mother.

She caught the eye of a young man who worked as a driver on a road crew repairing the roads leading to the mines.

One day she returned home from work to find the man sitting on her front veranda playing the accordion for her.

She said she doesn’t remember what the song he played for her that day, but she said it might have been ‘click go the shears.’

Needless to say, the music won her heart and the pair recently celebrated their 52nd wedding anniversary.

Her husband, Bob, would go on to work at the mines for 35 years and the pair soon settled into a house along Hillary Street where they have been ever since.

She raised her five children there, the house at one stage becoming so overcrowded the couple purchased a caravan for two of their sons to move into in the backyard.

But now all the children have moved on with their own lives and the couple are comfortably settled in their retirement – even finding time to make a few trips to explore the nation in a campervan.

But as far as she roams from the city, she said she would always call Mount Isa home.

“The place has changed a lot since the early days – it was only a little place back then,” she said. “But the people are still just as friendly as ever.”