Alison Fettell (born in 1952) married in September 1970 and had her first child the following April.

Edited Transcript

Roslyn Burge: Your husband—did he propose?

He proposed that maybe we should get married seeing as I was pregnant (laughs).

So I was about seventeen when I fell pregnant. Marriage did not figure in the picture at all. I suppose at the time I felt that I loved Brian. We were going out for two years. We didn’t have sex the whole time. We’d only really probably just started having a sexual relationship when I was around seventeen. I obviously thought that probably was fair enough. I had a lot of pressure, there was a lot of pressure from him to actually have a sexual relationship. Because he was a good deal older. He was five years older than I was. When we got married I was seventeen, he was twenty-three. So although that’s young for a man, it’s still a lot older than seventeen.

So, the relationship was, you know, the normal sexual relationship without full-blown sexual intercourse for quite some time. But then, I don’t think we had been actually having sex for very long when I fell pregnant. Because I didn’t know what the heck was going on. I trusted him to know.

Credit: Alison Fettell interviewed by Roslyn Burge in the Australian generations oral history project, ORAL TRC 6300/300, National Library of Australia. Recorded on 25, 26 August 2014 in Thirroul, New South Wales.

Listen to the rest of Alison’s interview.