As the Herald reported, scans had shown her unborn child had severe birth defects and was “not viable for life”.

But what she didn't know at the time was that her unassuming weatherboard unit on Nelson Bay Road had witnessed tragedy before, more than two decades earlier. 

The year was 1984 and a newly married Liz Murray was busily making preparations to leave the family home where she had grown up on Slades Road, just outside the eastern perimeter of the RAAF Base. 

With her husband Neil, she moved into the Nelson Bay Road unit and within 12 months, the couple fell pregnant. Ms Murray was delighted.

"All I ever wanted to do was to get married and be a mum. For me, it was family more than anything," she recalled.

But nine weeks into the pregnancy, she miscarried. Losing her first baby was difficult to come to terms with. 

"It was just devastating. I didn't know what I'd done wrong to lose it. It was heartbreaking, not knowing why," she said. 

After a few months grieving the loss, the couple began to try for another child. By 1986, Ms Murray had delivered her first son Daniel, and this time it was a textbook pregnancy. 

"It was a wonderful pregnancy, I was very lucky," she said. 

The family moved to Medowie where they began planning for a second child. But it was the beginning of a harrowing two years for the couple, in which Ms Murray would go on to have three more miscarriages.  

"We had some testing done to see why I was miscarrying. My doctor, he was doing a study on miscarriages. He thought it might have been because I was rejecting my husband's white blood cells," she said. 

"But then he found that it was my body that was rejecting the fetuses." 

Finally, she carried another child to term. Joshua Murray showed signs of spina bifida in utero, but was born a healthy little boy in 1990.  

Ms Murray remembers it as a 'scary' period in her life. 

"Neil was very supportive of me, even though it hurt him too,” she said. 

"After Joshua, we said enough's enough. I would have loved to have had more kids but we were lucky enough to have him and to have Daniel. They're miracles." 

At the time, her doctor told Ms Murray she had lupus.

It was only years later as she was plagued by health problems -  fatigue, dry skin, weight gain and anxiety - that she went to an endocrinologist who diagnosed her with an under-active thyroid, or Hashimotos disease. 

When left untreated, Hashimotos is known to increase the risk of miscarriage. 

It was only years later too, that she found out that for most of her life she had been unwittingly exposed to toxic perfluoroalkyl chemicals - also known as PFAS - silently spilling from the Williamtown RAAF base into the surrounding community. 

An epidemiological study of more than 60,000 Americans in the mid-Ohio Valley who were exposed to one of the same chemicals found they were at a heightened risk of thyroid disease, as well as testicular cancer, kidney cancer, ulcerative colitis, pregnancy-induced hypertension and high cholesterol. 

Several have already been awarded multi-million dollar payouts in a class action lawsuit. 

In animal studies, a host of birth defects were found in the pups when pregnant rats and mice were exposed to the chemical perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS). 

However according to NSW Health, there is "no conclusive evidence" that the chemicals cause "any specific illnesses". 

Ms Murray was stunned to find out the thyroid disease - which her sister also suffers - might have been triggered by a childhood spent splashing through the contaminated dams surrounding their home. 

"I just thought, oh my god," she said. 

She now plans to have her entire family blood tested for the chemicals, but it could be too late to get conclusive results. They have lived at Fern Bay for the last 10 years and the chemicals have a half-life in humans of 5.4 years. 

Ms Murray’s parents, Carmel and Fielding Madden, were well known among Williamtown locals who frequented their corner store on Slades Road, which they operated for nearly three decades. 

Mr Madden worked refueling the military aircraft on the base and passed away in 2005 of non-hodgkins lymphoma. He was 73.

"Are the chemicals why I was miscarrying, and why dad got sick as well?" Ms Murray said. 

"We know that he was subject to them. It's all a big 'what if?'. But I feel for all the families in the area, especially the ones with young kids."  

While their parents manned the corner store, Ms Murray and her siblings would help bring in extra income, by hosing down the rental cars from the airport. 

They will never know what concentrations of the colourless, odourless chemicals were in the bore water. Or if they had found their way into the vegetable patch that Ms Murray carefully cultivated as a teenager. 

"It was great, we had the best life," she said. "We used to walk to the swimming pool on the RAAF base and play with the children who lived in the Defence homes on the base." 

Ms Murray now fears for the future health of her boys, Daniel and Joshua. 

Like her, as children they would muck around in the grid of drains, dams and creeks across Williamtown on steamy summer days.

"We've all been saturated in it," she said. 

"I've got a friend that was in the RAAF from when he was a teenager and he got testicular cancer when he was 23. Now he's 57 and he's got cancer in the chest. 

"He's not well, he's in a lot of pain. 

"I'm scared for my children, what their health is going to be like. God knows."