For the best part of 40 years, Christine Taylor and Rozlyn Gaffney were the kind of friends who simply never let go of each other - a friendship that outlasted distance, decades, and eventually, illness. Even after Christine relocated from Melbourne to Mildura, the bond never wavered.
“Christine made the move when her parents retired up there. She had no husband, no kids, and for 20 years she rented a little unit I bought,” Rozlyn recalled.
“She was a very bright, bubbly and a force to be reckoned with. She was also fiercely loyal.”
It was work that first brought the two women together, in the mid-1980s, as colleagues at Containers Packaging – a part of the Australian Paper Manufacturers Limited Group (now Amcor), where Christine served capably as a Purchasing Officer. From that ordinary beginning grew a friendship that would carry both women through the decades that followed.
True to the tenacity Rozlyn described, Christine simply forged her own path. In August 2006 she established a party hire business Snaz Solutions, which for the next ten years brought colour and celebration into function rooms and dance halls across the region, dressing other people’s happiest occasions in streamers and balloons.
A workplace accident left Christine with multiple fractures in her foot, an injury that would quietly shape her long-term health - but never her spirit. In her final years, as cancer took hold and her world grew smaller, Christine became something of a hermit - but never entirely alone. Confined to a wheelchair, she still lit up for Rozlyn’s regular visits, and for the simple gift of Rozlyn's son Jonathan wheeling her out into the sunshine, a small ritual that must have meant everything.
Christine passed away last July, after a long battle with cancer, at the age of 72. She never married, so it was Rozlyn - her dearest friend - who was entrusted as executor of her will, a final and fitting expression of the trust between them.
“I was Christine’s power of attorney and eventually executor, and when ill health forced her to go into a nursing home I had to clear all her things,” Rozlyn said.
It was among those things that a quiet, unexpected treasure surfaced. “Amongst them was an autograph book and scrapbook which had been tucked away in her study. The books were crammed with photographs, press clippings and signatures of Carlton legends like Ron Barassi and Alex Jesaulenko, and although she’d never told me about them before, I knew she was a lifelong Carlton supporter.”
There is something quietly moving about a devotion kept so private for so long - a whole chapter of a friend’s life, hidden away in a study, only discovered in the sorting through of what remains. The books, which appear to date to 1967, capture Christine not as the capable, no-nonsense woman Rozlyn knew in adulthood, but as a fervent teenage girl, utterly devoted to the old Dark Navy Blues.
Among the pages are photographs of Bill Bennett, Adrian Gallagher, Ted Hopkins, Wes Lofts and Syd Jackson - heroes captured in the innocence of a schoolgirl’s admiration. One image, in particular, feels almost impossibly precious: a black-and-white photograph, believed to have been taken on the neighbouring No. 1 oval, showing a 14-year-old Christine in full Carlton matchday strip, arm in arm with her hero, ‘Jezza’ - a fleeting moment of teenage joy, preserved for nearly sixty years.
In donating those books to the Football Club archive, Rozlyn has ensured that this hidden piece of Christine - the girl behind the woman, the fan behind the friend - will not simply disappear with her. Christine Taylor’s legacy as a fully-fledged Blues fan is now assured, kept safe among the very history she once idolised from the sidelines.
As Rozlyn puts it, simply and generously: “I thought it was important to pass Christine’s books onto the Club because they’d be of more interest to people who were passionate about Carlton.”
It is, in its own quiet way, one last gift from one loyal friend to another – Christine’s memory finding a permanent home at the place she truly loved.
