EVERY small town has its "treasures".

None are so appreciated as those who have skills to share and pass on.

Local music teachers are in this category.

Dorothy McMinn is one. She teaches school-aged children to play the piano.

They come to her modest brick unit in the Murray River town of Tocumwal and plink and plonk away on an instrument that's adorned with family photos - of weddings, of grandchildren, graduations.

I wonder how many realise that to preserve her family unity Dorothy had to leave her native South Africa because of her pearly brown skin colour.

Dorothy's mother was black and her father was white.

Dorothy married Michael, a white South African, in 1955, about eight years after the pro-Nazi Nationalist Party came to power.

Beforehand, blacks, whites and coloureds lived amicably until the incumbent government, the United Party, failed to deliver on its pre-war promise to provide low-interest loans to those who joined up to fight in the war.

Like Hitler, its leader, Dr Malan, believed in a pure white race and proceeded to divide and settle the people into group areas designated by their skin colour. There were Group Areas for whites, Asians, coloureds (those of mixed race) and blacks.

There were separate cinemas, beaches, hotels, restaurants and public transport for whites and blacks and so separateness or apartheid was born.

This policy gouged great divides in families.

Dorothy's aunt, a coloured woman, was rejected by her own children who happened to be born with their father's fair skin colouring.

Dorothy felt humiliated by apartheid.

As a teacher she was paid just two-thirds the wage of a white person.

She could not travel with her children (three girls and two boys) on public transport because there were separate buses for blacks and whites.

One of her sons, whose skin was like hers, was refused entry at white schools, which her four other children attended.

"The principals were all very sympathetic and said they would take him but they would lose their other pupils because their parents would take their children out of the school if my son went there so he had to go to a coloured school," Dorothy says.

The realisation that apartheid could destroy her family hit home when one day representatives from the Group Areas Board arrived to check on her identity after a complaint from a white neighbour.

"Fortunately we weren't home at the time," Dorothy recalls.

"Before this my husband and I had talked about leaving the country but the very next day after that happened I wrote to the Australian Consul and applied to emigrate to Australia.

"We had to get out of the country before these things caused antagonism in our family."

Last year, for the first time in 22 years, Dorothy returned to South Africa.

She was pleased to see whites and blacks living more harmoniously.

Around Tocumwal, Dorothy addresses clubs and groups.

She has much more than music to share. She's another small-town treasure with big history to teach us.