According to Des:
Florence (Fon) Anderson (1897-1985) was brought up on a property outside Balranald on a big station called Til Til and she nursed in Swan Hill. She did her training in Melbourne. She married Keith Tuck and had three children - John, Mari and Andy.

Keith Tuck... was found drowned in the Darling near Wentworth—he might have gone for a swim, but it didn’t look like it, because he had his clothes on.
(Jonathan Tuck, Keith's grandson, says that the Coroner's report found Keith's death was accidental.)
Fon then became free to marry Bernard Wilkes. Fon, being a nurse in her early days, and being a motherly, beautiful woman, pulled him together and saved his life.

Fon and Bern (Bernard Bede Wilkes, son of Christina and Frederick) had always been close since they were young. Fon had kept a letter from him for 50 or 60 years. It was his reply to her letter in which she wrote to tell Bern she was getting married to Keith Tuck. When, after they were married, she told Uncle Bern about the letter, he admitted he still had her letter that she had written him all those years ago.

Joan Green (nee Sykes) described their 'reunion': Fon wrote to Bern and told him she was marrying Andy Tuck, and Uncle Bern wrote back to her the most wonderful letter – two pages… and by an extraordinary coincidence they both kept the letters, and Fon was able to produce the two letters and showed them to us when we were in Wentworth. He never had a permanent home until he got married. He’d be up at Oak Dene (see map) for a while, and come back to Wentworth (irregularly).

Des continues: The day Uncle Bern (a renowned bachelor, and heavy drinker, aged 60) was to marry Fon, he had forgotten he was due at the church. Jim Loomes found him pruning, but got him dressed and to the Church on time. They were married by Father Higgins in 1943 the St. Francis Xavier Church in Wentworth. Fon, a convert to Catholicism, was very devout.

After they married they bought a property (called ‘Mitti Endi’- originally owned by the Holdings) just above Tara, where they brought up Stephanie Tuck, who was the daughter of Fon's youngest son, Andy, whose wife died in childbirth. Stephanie later married and now lives in Perth.

John Ford wrote: Before Mitti Endi was built on by Bern and Fon, a Miss Holding lived there, it had a large cellar to keep food cool. She used to ride a bicycle to Wentworth & had elastic from the pedals to the bottom of her skirt to avoid the skirt blowing up to expose her legs!

Des described one of his visits to see Bern after he married Fon: One day I went down there… he was a keen fisherman, he said ‘come down and we’ll see if we might get a fish’. We went down and he had two lines stuck on sticks running out in the good old muddy Darling. He said ‘there might be a fish on this’. It looked like a fish coming in but it was a bottle about three quarters full of whiskey. He had a good stiff one and put the cork securely back, a weight alongside it, and tossed it back.

In the fifties ‘Uncle Bern’ would be at Tara for all the family celebrations. According to Jean Roper (nee Loomes) Bern was always great fun. At Christmas time he would wrap presents for the children in layers of paper and various boxes, with a carrot or an onion in the bottom. He also took the family out to the sandhills for picnics. He enlivened celebrations such as Guy Fawkes day, and loved to dress up as a ghost to scare the children.
I remember being very scared of him.

After Bern died in 1964, Fon bought a house in Wentworth, where she lived until her death, aged 90, in 1985. On one of my trips to Wentworth, with my wife Janina, around 1980, we knocked on Fon’s door, but she wasn’t home. We went back to the car, and I saw her in the rear view mirror coming along the footpath. She walked straight past her house and kept going. What was she doing? Was she senile? Did she see us and pretend she didn’t? We drove off for a coffee, and when went back and knocked on the door, she was very glad to see us. I asked her if she saw us knocking on the door half an hour earlier. “Yes” she said, with embarrassment “I thought you were Seventh Day Adventists”.