On the return voyage from a family trip to Britain and Europe, where they attended many concerts, when Janet was 12 years old, she was impressed by the lectures and violin recitals by fellow passenger composer Alfred Hill.
After returning to Australia, on 3 December 1936 she married Francis Mackenzie Mathews (Frank), a mechanical engineer, in Wollongong, and the couple went on to have three children (two daughters and a son).
[1] At the urging of Liberal MP and old friend Bill Wentworth, Mathews became one of the first researchers at the newly established (1964) Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (AIAS).
She recorded the father of the later popular singer Jimmy Little playing gum leaf and an elder from Wallaga Lake who was a fluent speaker of Dhurga.
She was not always welcomed, but after descendants of a woman who had taught Dharawal to anthropologist R. H. Mathews realised Janet's family connection to him (he was the grandfather of her husband Frank), word got around and people became more cooperative.