10 minutes ago
HIGHLIGHT
'They just continued to love me': How Don and Gail treated Erin amid split from Simon
Erin and Simon’s daughter was born in January 2014, on the same day as their son’s first day of school.
“Simon left the hospital to take (our son) to his first day of school, and then Nana and Papa brought (him) in at the end of the day to meet (our daughter),” she said.
Mr Mandy is now asking Erin about her separation with Simon towards the end of 2015.
“How did the two of you handle that separation? What was the arrangement?” he asks.
“We tried to figure out a good arrangement for the children. You know, they had different needs. (Our daughter) was only one, (our son) was six. (He) had school,” she said.
“(Our daughter) needed a lot of attention, and so we tried really hard to work out an arrangement where the kids could be together and spend as much as possible time with each.”
She said they wrote down what their assets were, including two properties, cash and what was owed to them from Simon’s siblings, then split it between each other.
No lawyers were involved.
She said she didn’t want to separate but felt she had “no choice” but they remained “good friends”.
Asked what the primary issue was in the relationship, she said: “If we had a disagreement or any kind of conflict, we didn’t seem to be able to talk about it in a way where either of us felt heard or understood, we just would feel hurt, and we didn’t really know how to do that.”
After the separation, Simon setup his own engineering consultancy before he got a job with a property development firm a few years later which required long hours.
The family still went on holidays together.
“We went to Tasmania a couple of times,” she said.
“We went to Queensland, went to New Zealand, we went to South Africa, and we went a lot of times to my mum’s house in Eden, in New South Wales.”
They also went to family gatherings together.
Asked if her relationship with Don and Gail had changed, Erin’s voice cracked as she said: “It never changed. I was just their daughter-in-law and they just continued to love me.”
“In terms of Don and Gail, you and the children continue to see them often?” Mr Mandy asks.
“We did. We’d go to their house often for lunch with Simon. Without Simon, they would drop in and knock on my door sometimes to drop things off,” she said.
“They would have (our children) to play and have sleepovers.”
4 minutes ago
Relationship to God, church explored
After returning from WA, Erin began attending Korumburra Baptist Church, where she often chatted with the Wilkinsons.
“I’d always have a chat with them after church, if I could, you know, Ian was very popular as the pastor, and always had a lot of people wanting to talk to him, but Heather would always make a point of coming to talk to me, and I saw them sometimes at Christmas gatherings,” she said.
By 2015, she was regularly attending church with her children.
“What was your attitude to religion during those years? Or to God?” Mr Mandy asks.
“It remained how it had been since 2005 – I was a Christian,” she said, adding her son also went to a youth group.
Erin said she helped with live-streaming of services, and with a website.
“When Covid began in March of 2020, and churches couldn’t meet, Simon and Don and maybe some others, you know, quickly set up an ability to stream the services,” she said.
“Don was … was like a coding genius. He set up the website and made it all happen.”
After Gail became unwell with encephalitis a few months later, she said Don was struggling and so she offered to help out to take “a bit of the load off his shoulders”.
1 minute ago
HIGHLIGHT
'I thought we would bring the family back together': Erin's plans to reconcile with Simon
Mr Mandy asks about her chats with her Facebook friends, and if she ever spoke about her religious beliefs.
“They would sort of gently make fun of the fact that I was religious … but it was sort of all in good humor. But I do think there were a couple of occasions where I might have been maybe unhappy about some sort of aspects of organised religion,” she said.
Mr Mandy now asks about her properties.
Erin said the Nason Street, Korumburra property was bought in 2015, and it remained Simon’s home.
She purchased another property on Shellcot Rd, Korumburra in 2017 or 2018, which she moved into, before buying another property up the road.
A property at Anthony Court, Korumburra was also sold, before she bought a home in Lyons St, Mount Waverley, and a block of land on Gibson St, Leongatha in 2019.
Gibson St was put in both her and her husband’s name.
“Why was that, given that you’d been separated for four years?” Mr Mandy asks.
“From my perspective … I always thought that we would bring the family back together,” Erin replies.
“That was what I wanted and I did that because I wanted some way to demonstrate to Simon that that’s what I really believed and wanted. It was something, you know, tangible to say this is I see a future for us.”
