Up We Grew: Stories of Australian Childhoods

Pamela Bone

Up we grew

Pamela Bone

Up we grew

T stories of australian childhoods

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Ltd (MUP Ltd) PO Box 1167, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia [email protected] www.mup.com.au First published 2004 Text © Pamela Bone, 2004 Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Ltd 2004 This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers. Designed by Kate Mitchell Typeset in Sabon by J&M Typesetting Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Bone, Pamela Dorothy, 1940- . Up we grew : stories of Australian childhoods. ISBN 0 522 85118 5. 1. Children - Australia - Biography. 2. Australia - Social life and customs. I. Title. 305.230922

To my children: Deirdre, Susan, Carolyn and Patricia And their children: Isabel and Jack, Hannah and Joel, Freya and Ella And to my life partner, Jürgen

Contents Acknowledgements

xi

Running Away to Rosebud

1

My story The house that Jack didn’t build

7

Childhoods Lucky, lucky, lucky: Migrant children

43

Jürgen Nelles, June Factor, Abdulkadir Muse

In the doorway of Close’s china shop I sat down and cried: School stories

74

A little liberal or a little conservative:

103

Mark Latham, Helen Coonan, Natasha Stott Despoja

Where the light comes from: Writers and artists

125

Michael Leunig, Maurice Strandgard, Joanna Murray-Smith

Resilience: Adoption, divorce, death

148

Terry Lane, Max Gillies, Norman Lacy, Stephanie, Douglas

Took them away: Aboriginal children

181

Marlene Burchill, Muriel Cadd, Mungara Brown

‘Some people shouldn’t have children’: Hugo and Joseph, Trish and her sisters

204

What i have learned Precious, precious

225

A good place

243

Notes

247

children guessed (but only a few and down they forgot as up they grew autumn winter spring summer)

e.e. cummings

T

Acknowledgements I thank my daughter, Deirdre Pinto, for her invaluable advice on parts of this book, and for saving her mother from her wildest excesses of optimism. I thank all my daughters for what they have taught me: the child truly is mother to the woman. I thank my husband, Jürgen, for his help and patience when my lack of computer literacy threatened to defeat me. I thank my cousin, Jan Whamond, for her research into the Bone family tree. I thank my sister-in-law, Susan Nelles, for her translation of her mother’s letters. I thank my editors, Louise Adler, Sybil Nolan and Judith Lukin-Amundsen, for their help and encouragement, and for giving the book a shape and structure. Most of all, I thank all those people who have so generously shared their stories with me. The lines from E.E. Cummings’ poem ‘Anyone lived in a pretty how town’ are used with the permission of W.W. Norton and Company, London. Photographs from the collection of the author.

Front cover: The author’s father, John Quinton (Jack) Bone, with unidentified child, about 1940. School photo (p.viii): Finley District Rural School, about 1947. Pamela Bone is the third child from the right, in the front row. The teacher is Miss Box, who began each day’s lesson by saying ‘I’m waiting to hear a pin drop’. Woman with child (p.vi): Pamela, aged 30, with daughter Patricia, aged two. xi

Running Away to Rosebud

L

ast week we drove through Rosebud, one of those small, flat towns strung along the Mornington Peninsula: a pizza place, real estate office, Safeway; a bowls club, a quiet main street; and on this still, late autumn day, a grey flat sea. But a long, wide beach, hills behind, a big sky. My mother would have liked those. Bach was on the radio filling the car with divine sound: Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. ‘We were always going to run away and live in Rosebud,’ I said. My mother had never been to Rosebud but she knew it was on the coast and liked the name. Rosebud. When she talked about it I imagined roses against a blue sea, crashing white-topped waves. ‘One day I’ll pack up and take you kids and we’ll go and live in Rosebud,’ she’d say. I didn’t really believe it would

T

1

UP WE GREW

happen, any more than that the white boots in the Marcus Clark catalogue she promised to buy for Veronica and me next child endowment day, or that the proper house my father had drawn such beautiful plans for, would happen. These were nice things to think about only. Would my mother have been happy in Rosebud? I don’t know, now, that she was so unhappy in Finley. She seemed cheerful most of the time. Is there a difference between being happy and being cheerful? She whistled, and she sang: ‘Give me land, lots of land under starry skies, don’t fence me in’. Sometimes, sweeping the floor, she’d laugh out loud. ‘What are you laughing about, Mummy?’ ‘Can’t a person smile at her own thoughts?’ she’d say indignantly. Sometimes when she was in the back yard with the wooden pot-stick, stirring the clothes boiling in the copper, I’d see her sniffing, wiping her eyes. ‘Why are you crying, Mummy?’ ‘Never mind, go and play,’ she’d say. But it worried me to see her cry. If your mother couldn’t hold herself together, who was going to protect you? Once, during what must have been a truce in the long war that was their marriage, she said, ‘Every fight I’ve ever had with your father has been about you kids. I’m just not going to interfere any more.’ And struck terror into my heart. I needed her to be on our side, not his.

T When I was a child I slept in a shed, and put old coats on my bed to keep warm, and wore the summer tunic to school in winter. I failed my Intermediate Certificate. Today I live in a nice house in a good suburb, have holidays in 2

Running Away to Rosebud

Europe and my name on an honour roll in the state parliament. I give speeches at private schools to which as a child I could never have dreamed of going (suppressing resentful feelings because these private school girls are so very nice and treat me so courteously, and it is not their fault they were born rich and I wasn’t). My four daughters have seven degrees between them. My grandchildren have bedrooms full of toys, computer games and books, and learn piano, tennis, swimming, hockey and ballet. How did I get from there to here? Is my story almost typical of the generational upward mobility that has taken place in Australia in the last half a century? People are so rich now, compared to then (though inequality is worse). But whether your temperament inclines to the optimistic or the pessimistic, whether you think the lives of children today are happier or unhappier, few would not agree that they are very different.

T Although one of the childhoods in this book is mine, Up We Grew is not an autobiography, which would require me to reveal more about myself – and others – than I want to. Some of the people who talked to me for this book chose not to tell of some aspects of their childhoods, and several decided not to use their real names. I understand this. Nearly everyone has something they would prefer not to tell, either for fear of hurting others or because they believe that if everything were known about them, or even about their parents, people would think less well of them. Some of these childhoods were happy and privileged; some were unhappy, some were poor, some were abused. 3

UP WE GREW

But what every person who speaks in this book has in common is resilience. The childhoods in this book are not a representative sample of Australian childhoods. That would be beyond its scope. Everyone has a childhood, and every childhood is a story. So some of the people interviewed happen to be well known and others are not; why should the childhood of my next-door neighbour or my best friend’s husband be less interesting than the childhood of the prime minister? As Dr Samuel Johnson observed, the life of every single person is worthy of ‘a judicious and faithful narrative’.

4

T My Story

The house that Jack didn’t build

T

here was a red painted devil behind the bed that was Veronica’s and mine. It had a wicked, grinning face, a long tail and a pitchfork in its hand, and was not scary at all. The devil was painted on timber my father had got from some former internment camps near Tatura, where during World War II people of German and Italian background were kept prisoner. To amuse themselves some of the internees painted pictures on the walls of their huts, and some of these later became valuable art. My father used the timber to line the corrugated iron walls of the sleep-out, which we called ‘the shed’, since it was separate from the rest of the house, and the house was not really a house at all, but a garage. Before we had lived there we lived in what we called ‘the old house’, on land that belonged to the

T

7

UP WE GREW

water commission, or more correctly the Water Conservation and Irrigation Commission, for which my father worked. When he left the WC and IC we had to move, so he bought a piece of land at the end of the main street, and built on one part of it a garage, where we were going to live while he built the house. He drew plans for two bedrooms, a kitchen, bathroom and veranda, which would have made it just about as good a house as any in Finley except perhaps for the doctor’s big house with the high cypress hedge around it. Most houses in those days had only two bedrooms whether there were two children or eight. When you said someone had ‘a threebedroom house’ it implied the height of luxury. But through lack of money, tuberculosis, and a general giving up on things, our new house never did get built, and as time went by even the beautiful plans for it were brought out and looked at less and less often. It was my shame, not to live in a proper house. And if when walking home from school I happened to be about to turn into our block when the Jerilderie school bus went past I would look straight ahead and keep on walking, hoping the kids on the bus wouldn’t know that was where I lived. Though I was not the only child in the town to live in a garage. My friend Fay did too. The same story: bought the block, built the garage, then either ran out of money or just got used to living in the garage. But theirs had a flower garden at the front and nice curtains at the windows, while ours didn’t. I was the fourth, and the middle of seven children. The town we lived in was Finley, in southern New South Wales, thirteen miles from Tocumwal, which is on the Murray River: the mysterious, beautiful and dangerously fast-flowing 8

The house that Jack didn’t build

Murray, where our father would take us on weekend fishing trips to a place called Chinaman’s Bend, stopping at a particular gum tree half-way between Finley and Tocumwal to get witchetty grubs for bait. Fay’s father borrowed my father’s most precious possession, his outboard motor, and lost it in the Murray River, and though my father and some other men went back with him and dived and dived, they never found it. It’s still there, buried somewhere in the river mud. Children from Jerilderie, Tocumwal, Berrigan and farms in between came by bus to the high school in Finley. Before I was born my father, whose name was John Quinton Bone but who was known as Jack, got work on the building of the Mulwala Canal, a project begun during the Great Depression to provide irrigation to wheat and sheep farms of the area, and to give jobs to farmers who had gone broke and other men without work. By that time he was married to my mother, born Mavis Elsie Roberts, and they had a young son, William Charles. The Mulwala Canal went in a roundabout way from Deniliquin to Berrigan, and while it was being built our family moved from Finley to Deniliquin to Tocumwal to Berrigan to Yarrawonga and back to Finley, with a child being born in each town: Heather Margaret, Christine Dawn (so called because she was born at dawn on Christmas Day), Pamela Dorothy, Veronica Jean, John Quinton and Richard Maxwell. But William was Billy, Heather was Margot (she quite liked this as long as it was spelled with a ‘t’, Dawn, who was small and skinny, was Pudden, Veronica was Vonnie, and my younger brothers were Johnny and Richie. It is only in recent years that I have become used to calling them by their proper names.

9

UP WE GREW

T According to family legend I was exactly the seven millionth white baby born in Australia. I was born at home in Berrigan, with a nurse as midwife because the doctor from Finley either couldn’t or wouldn’t come, and my birth was not registered until about three weeks later. It was registered in Jerilderie, and the birth certificate notes my mother as informant and the fact that the child was not present. It is true that at around the time of my birth, in February 1940, the Australian population reached seven million. Perhaps my mother heard this and assumed that I was the seven millionth to be born, not taking into account all those who had been born and died before me, or any Aboriginal people, who were not counted in the census then. There were other family stories: That my father, as a young man, saw the great Harry Houdini bound up in chains and thrown off a bridge over the Murrumbidgee River in a padlocked box, from which he escaped and swam to the surface in less than a minute. My father also told me that his father had the first travelling picture show in the Griffith region and that he and his brothers used to go around the small towns with him and wind up the handle of the film projector. He told me that when he was young he was a champion cyclist and wrestler, and it’s possible he was. Though someone I met years later who had known the family in Griffith said, ‘The Bone boys were terrible skiting liars, the lot of them.’ That my mother, who lived in Sydney while she was pregnant with my older brother, Billy, went to the opening 10

The house that Jack didn’t build

of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932 and saw Francis de Groot of the right-wing New Guard – furious because the opening was to be performed by the Premier, Jack Lang instead of the king’s representative – ride up on his horse and cut the ribbon before the Premier could. That the engineer of the bridge over Lake Mulwala, which separates Yarrawonga, in Victoria, and Mulwala, in NSW, committed suicide when he saw that the bridge he had built had a big dip in it. This is a local legend as well as a family one, and may be true. That my father once caught a Murray Cod that weighed as much as my mother. And that a Mrs Saltmarsh who lived on a farm somewhere between Finley and Deniliquin went mad and killed her children, five or six of them. When women have so much to put up with it’s no wonder they go mad, my mother said. How my sister Veronica got her name is a true story, though I don’t remember it because I was only two at the time. This was when we lived in Deniliquin. Before she was born, my father and mother both wanted a boy and were convinced it must be a boy this time, after three girls in a row. They were going to call the baby John Quinton, after my father. But he was a she, and by the time the baby girl was six weeks old they had still not thought of a name for her. Then a letter came, addressed to ‘Miss Veronica Jean Bone, Deniliquin, NSW’, sent on by the post office because we were the only people of the name of Bone in the town. My parents decided Veronica Jean was a name that would do nicely for the new baby. There was a Veronica Lake, who was a famous film star. Not only that, but the letter also contained a war bond for the sum of one hundred 11

UP WE GREW

pounds, which might, some day, be cashed in. War loans were introduced in 1940 to raise money to fight World War II and were very popular, though not the sort of thing my parents would have spent money on. The longed-for John Quinton arrived three years later. We never found out about the real Veronica Jean Bone and as far as I know my parents never tried to cash in the war bond. But no matter how short of money we were, my mother would say we were not poor, only broke, which was merely a temporary state. Didn’t we have a hundredpound war bond that could be called on at any time? And didn’t she have an English cousin who owned a whole row of shops somewhere in London?

T The first place I remember was Yarrawonga and my earliest memory is of walking across the bridge that had a bow in it and a drowned redgum forest under it, holding onto the big cane pram in which my mother wheeled the baby Veronica. Yarrawonga is in Victoria, but because we were registered in NSW we had to walk across the bridge to the post office in Mulwala to pick up my mother’s child endowment. The first government of Robert Menzies had brought in child endowment in 1941 for all white children under sixteen. It was mainly to stop pressure for a rise in the basic wage, but the result was to put money into the hands of mothers. For big families this could be as much as a pound a week. This did not stop my mother hating Menzies all her life. For fifty years before work on the canal began politicians 12

The house that Jack didn’t build

and farmers – who according to a local history ‘had to watch thousands of sheep die of starvation in times of drought while in times of flood millions of acre feet of water flooded the Murray Valley and flowed in prodigal waste to the sea’ – had talked about harnessing the waters of the Murray River. The Mulwala Canal was the bigger of two irrigation channels that drew water from Lake Mulwala. The digging of it began in 1935 and it was hard, heavy work. Gangs of men worked three shifts a day and moved 50,000 cubic yards of earth a week, with horses, picks and shovels and jack hammers, and were paid eight pounds a fortnight. The complete irrigation system, which takes in the Berriquin, Wakool, Deniboota and Denimein irrigation areas, was said at the time to be one of the greatest engineering feats in the world. Water first came through the Mulwala Canal in September 1939. It’s now known that too much water has been taken out of the Murray. The river is sick, red gum forests are dying and lands are covered with salt. Then, though, they only saw how it transformed the region and made it prosperous. When the building began of the weir at Yarrawonga the unemployed flocked to it as to a gold rush, and there was a great shortage of housing. Workers had to provide their own accommodation and people lived in tents or in huts with walls lined with hessian. The better of these were decorated with pictures from the Australian Women’s Weekly, which was then a broadsheet sized magazine. Half a century later as a journalist with the Age I went to black townships on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa, and there talked to the women who lived in the shacks where the dirt floors were carefully swept and the 13

UP WE GREW

walls lined with coloured magazine pictures. Given any sort of home, most women will try to make the best of it. ‘If they ever erect a monument to the men who built the weir, let’s hope they remember the women who lived through the hard times of the thirties,’ says a history of Yarrawonga. I can’t remember our house in Yarrawonga. My sister Dawn, who can, said it was just two big rooms, and had no ceiling. I can remember our first house in Finley, though, ‘the old house’ where we moved when I was five. On the wall of its sleep-out were pictures of film stars cut out by Dawn and Heather from the Women’s Mirror. I loved these glamorous women except for one, Joan Fontaine, who I thought had a sneering look on her face; so I scribbled all over it. Later I felt sorry I’d done that, and would secretly kiss the picture to make her feel better.

T Set in the midst of brown farmlands, gold under summer’s bright skies, began the school song of the Finley Intermediate High School, after it was promoted from the Finley District Rural School. And so Finley was. Brown paddocks and flat country, as flat as anywhere, flat, flat as far as the eye could see. I didn’t see a mountain or the sea until I was nine. When we went on fishing trips to the Murray River it gave us children a thrill to see the two small, even hills just outside Tocumwal, which were really wartime ammunition stores disguised to look like hills from the air in case enemy planes came this far. Finley was once Murray Hut, a settlement on travelling stock route 1214, running from Jerilderie to the Murray River. Later it was Ulupna, after a parish to the northwest. 14

The house that Jack didn’t build

In the 1870s Francis George Finley surveyed a million hectares of land in the southern Riverina and in 1893 the town was named after him. Sheep were raised in the district and wheat was grown, but despite the good soil of the Murray region, drought was constant. In dry seasons drovers took the sheep miles away to land around creeks and rivers, and sometimes water for the towns had to be brought in by rail, which arrived in 1898. When I was a child the summers were hot and dry, with whirly-winds of dust on the paddocks and on the long straight roads shimmering mirages that looked like water but no matter how many miles you went along that road you never reached it. But from the flat opposite where we lived, near where Murray Street became Jerilderie Road and where the town swimming pool now is, the sunsets were more beautiful than any I have seen since, gold and red glory streaked across the enormous sky. In spring thick new grass filled the paddocks and the purple bells of Paterson’s Curse and the yellow capeweed daisies we called dandelions lined the roadways. On freezing winter mornings, walking to school we picked up the thin sheets of ice, like muddy glass, from the puddles by the road and held them to our faces and looked through them, or put our tongues on them. And after rain in autumn when the ground was still warm, there were paddocks full of mushrooms, pink and closed or flat and black. We collected them in a billycan and cooked them with butter and salt on the top of the wood stove, pressing them flat with a knife blade, the juices staining the stovetop.

T 15

UP WE GREW

To wake up in summer and feel the heat of the sun already on the corrugated iron of the shed and see it streaming through the doorway, to know it was the beginning of the Christmas holidays, and that endless new undiscovered days stretched ahead, was pure happiness. For school was a prison and I hated it. It wouldn’t have mattered how good the school was. The time was not your own. You were not free.

T What kind of child was I? ‘As far as I can remember you were merely an observer in the family,’ a sister said hurtfully one day when we were grown up. But perhaps it is true. There is a school photograph of me when I was about five, the only one I have of myself as a young child. The few others that used to be around have been lost, for we were careless about ‘looking after’ things. In the photograph I am wearing a short-sleeved dress and sandals, and am sitting with my ankles neatly crossed and my hands clasped. I would have been told to sit like that: I look at the camera with a slight, anxious smile. I look like a very good child, but I am not good. I am a silent child. I am a watcher, though there is no cast-iron balcony. When I want to, I drive my sisters to distraction by sitting and looking at them when they are reading or doing their homework (I rarely do mine). There is nothing they can do, because when they cry, ‘Mummy, Pam’s looking at me!’ they’re only told not to be silly. It is said that I’m quiet. ‘She thinks a lot,’ my mother defends me once when someone remarks on it. She also 16

The house that Jack didn’t build

says ‘Yes, well said, Pam!’ when I come out with something I’ve been thinking about. I’m torn between wanting to be popular and secretly preferring to be by myself most of the time. Sometimes, walking to school, I’ll cross the road when I see someone I know coming so I don’t have to walk with them, even though I might like them, because I want to think my thoughts. I still do this. As a child, I have habits. Screwing up eyes, sniffing, clutching myself between the legs. ‘Do you need to go to the lavatory? Then stop doing that,’ my mother says. I am a daydreamer. At school, I spend much time not listening, looking out the window.

T One day I’m sent up the street to the grocer’s shop to buy a shilling’s worth of bacon bones for soup. On the long wooden counter is a sign that says, ‘Broken biscuits, 2d a pound.’ While I’m waiting to be served I say to myself: bacon bones, broken biscuits, bacon biscuits, broken bones. ‘A shilling’s worth of broken biscuits, please,’ I say when Mr Westerdale asks me kindly what I would like today. ‘Phew,’ he says, and goes off to weigh six pounds of broken biscuits. I realise what I’ve done but am too frightened to call him back, so I quickly walk out of the shop and go home to tell my mother there are no bacon bones today. I tell many lies. Sometimes I tell lies to get myself out of doing something I don’t want to do but mostly because they are more interesting than the truth. One day when I 17

UP WE GREW

am with my mother at a neighbour’s house she sends me back to our house to fetch something she wants to show the neighbour. Alone in the house for a minute: open the cupboard, three quick spoonfuls of powdered milk. ‘You didn’t get into the powdered milk, did you?’ asks my mother when I return with the fetched item. No, I say. ‘Open your mouth,’ she says, and I am mortified in front of the neighbour, because the evidence is caked thickly around my teeth. When Heather and Dawn save up chocolates – Polly Waffles, Violet Crumble bars, Cherry Ripes – to send to the poor little children in England who don’t have any lollies because of post-war rationing, Veronica and I get into the box one day and eat some. Because I am the older of us two I am judged responsible. Oh well, we might as well finish them now, Heather and Dawn say, when they get over their rage. I love trees: the two cedar trees in our yard at the old house, with their tiny mauve flowers; the tall, dull grey gums along the banks of the Murray River; the wattle tree in the back yard of old Bertie Thomas the barber, which is a blaze of gold every winter. That tree is such a show-off, I think. And the soft pink petals of the prunus against the blue sky, as pretty as anything can be. I wish for a dress made of just that pink and that blue.

T One day, when my dislike of school is approaching despair, and I fail in my attempt to convince my mother I’m sick, I decide that I just won’t go. So I walk as far as the back lane that runs behind the houses near our place, and sit down with my back to the 18

The house that Jack didn’t build

high wooden fence, and all day I draw with a stick in the cool moist dirt, or on my legs. When I’m hungry I eat my tomato sandwich; I always have a tomato sandwich for lunch, I love the taste of the bread soggy with tomato juice. A long while later I hear the Jerilderie school bus going past, and I know it’s time to go home. I might get away with it, but when I get home I start telling my mother things that happened at school today. Because I never do this, she becomes suspicious. ‘Did you see Pam at school today?’ she asks each of the others, and they say no, they didn’t. My mother tells me angrily that I am sly, and says she is going to tell my father, but I don’t remember that she does. The worst thing a child can be is sly, according to my mother. One day she remarks that one of the Grant kids, who lives down the road ‘looks sly’. Veronica says, ingratiatingly, ‘Pam looks sly too, doesn’t she Mummy?’ And my mother sighs, ‘No, she doesn’t look sly.’

T My memories of conscious happiness as a child are centred round the Mulwala Canal, or the channel, as we called it. All summer we swam in it and in winter when it was drained we played in its dry bed, walking on the cracked mud that looked like big pieces of shiny chocolate, or making echoes by shouting under the bridge. Every year I wanted to stay up on the night they let the water down, but never could. The morning after, I would walk up to the bridge to find the miracle had happened: the channel that had been empty the day before would be filled high to the banks with rushing brown water. 19

UP WE GREW

I thought the channel in summer must be the most thrilling place in the world, as wide and deep as a river, with willow trees trailing their branches in its currents. The water fell over drop bars under the bridge, making fierce undercurrents that could pull you down. More than once I saw children nearly drowned, holding on for life to the top drop bar while a waterfall thundered on their heads, until the arms of other children pulled them to safety. This did not stop the bridge being crowded with children every summer weekend, under a sign that said ‘No Swimming’ (someone had made it ‘No wimmin’). You jumped off the bridge into the current and were swept along until you could grab at the willow branches and pull yourself up the bank to do it all over again. Or you lay on a towel on the hot cement of the bridge, getting up slowly when an occasional car approached. No modern backyard or suburban swimming pool could ever match the channel, for fun.

T Our vegetable garden came and went. One day my father would walk outside with purposeful air, carrying a shovel. He would mark out and dig a large square of earth. He would mark that into precise rows, in which he would plant strawberries, lettuce, carrots, beans, tomatoes. He would tend it carefully for months. We would have fresh vegetables on hand. Then, just as suddenly, he’d stop working on it and let it all go wild, and there’d be nothing left except a pumpkin lying at the end of a forgotten vine. My father was a builder, mainly of houses, though he didn’t get around to building his own. He was very tall and thin, brown-eyed, with thick black brows, was said to have 20

The house that Jack didn’t build

been good-looking when he was young, and liked to dress well though he couldn’t afford to by the time he had seven children. But he still had from the old days a cream silk scarf and a brown leather coat, the leather worn soft and cracked, and a fine grey wool cardigan, and he always wore a grey felt hat and polished shoes. On the Saturday afternoons of my childhood, he would sit on a stool in the cool of the porch, blocking the doorway, the wireless tuned to the races, the Sydney Morning Herald form guide spread out at his feet, a bottle of red wine – ‘plonk’ we called it – beside him, a packet of cigarette papers and a packet of Havelock ready-rubbed tobacco balanced on his knee, and would snarl every time we squeezed past him. We did squeeze past him very often, I must admit. But fathers in those days were a different breed, belonging in a world that was separate from women and children. If you walked up the street at around 5.30 in the afternoon the sound coming from the Tuppal Hotel on one side of the street and the Albion, on the other, was like a very loud excited buzzing and the smell of beer was thick on the air, as the men inside (no women) wrung all the pleasure and conviviality they could out of that brief period between knock-off time and pub closing at six o’clock. For men were mates and bad tempers were reserved for wives and children. I took it for granted my father hated me and I cheerfully hated him back. When one day he gave me a lecture about keeping to the edge and facing the oncoming cars when walking along the road I was puzzled. Did this mean he actually wanted me to live? When he made me wear a sunhat in summer, I thought 21

UP WE GREW

he only wanted to make me look stupid, and I took it off and hid it under a bush as soon as I was out of sight. When I had to stay home and weed his vegetable garden, while watching all the other kids walking past on their way to the bridge, I knew he was keeping me home out of spite. I don’t remember ever seeing my father hit my mother. His violence was in his voice, carrying the threat of physical violence under it. Blurred, black and white memories: of walking down some road, Mummy and all us kids, baby in the pram, Billy, the oldest, stumbling along sobbing, which was awful because he was a big boy then and shouldn’t cry, except most of the time the fight would have been about him. The terrible night when Johnny was about two and our mother was in hospital, probably having another miscarriage (she had several) and our father had to look after all of us. He started to cook our tea, trying to be nice and making a joke of it, frying sausages and potatoes. But then Johnny threw a tantrum over not wanting his tea and everything seemed to go wrong, and our father started smacking him and Dawn, who was about nine and loved Johnny so much, tried to stop him, and it seemed everyone in the house was screaming and I was in the way and was thrown against a wall. We all ran down the road to Mr Dim, whose little house had a big water tank beside it that once had a snake in it. And the night of the fight over the silver salt and pepper shakers that had belonged to my mother’s family, and were some sort of proof that her family was better than his family. He threw them out the window and we all had to search for them for hours in the long grass. My sister Dawn, two years older, says the main thing she remembers from childhood is fear. For me there was fear 22

The house that Jack didn’t build

too, but greater than the fear of our father’s anger was shame. More than my sisters, who commanded status because they were good at schoolwork and sport and were bright and witty, I was ashamed of our poverty, of having to wear sandshoes instead of leather shoes to school, of not living in a real house. I was ashamed there were so many of us – seven was a big family for non-Catholics, even then – because I knew it was not respectable to have very many children even though I didn’t know how babies were made. When I was 11, I didn’t notice my mother was pregnant, and when she came home from hospital with Richard, I still believed you just went to the hospital to get a baby. Dawn says the poverty didn’t worry her much. ‘It made me very competitive. I had to prove I was as good as anyone else. One day this boy sneered at me, Oh, you only live in a garage, and I said to him, Well, I won’t always live in a garage but I will always have more brains than you.’ Which of course she did, and was dux of the school and the first girl at the school to get the Leaving Certificate.

T ‘Every life is normal to the one who lives it,’ someone once said, but I’m not sure this is true. As a child I didn’t think my life was normal. I felt different, but being different didn’t mean being special, it meant not being as good as other people. I thought other families, who lived in houses with a front room that nobody ever went into, with a picture of the little Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose over the mantelpiece, were normal. I believed that other mothers and fathers didn’t have fights, like mine did. I longed to live in a tidy, nice house, a house that was a real 23

UP WE GREW

house, and for my mother to come to mothers’ club meetings at the school (she thought these were a waste of time) and for me to wear a neat school uniform. I was, perhaps, a born snob. I loved pretty clothes and longed for them. Dresses made of waffle pique came into fashion and I badly wanted one, and later I wanted a red corduroy velvet dress when they were in fashion. My mother’s way of answering our nagging for things was to say she’d get it for us next pay day or next endowment day, by which time we’d usually have forgotten about it. She sometimes bought our clothes from Marcus Clark or Anthony Horden catalogues, ordered C.O.D. (cash-on-delivery). Sometimes she would order things hoping she’d have enough money by the time the parcel came to the post office, but she wouldn’t, and it would have to be sent back. We were also given out-grown clothes by the Hawkins family, wealthy cattle farmers whose daughters went away to boarding school. I remember a pink Viyella dress with smocking on the bodice, a white sun-dress with red ric-rac braid. My mother didn’t seem to care about clothes for herself. Her one dress kept for ‘best’ was long-sleeved, in blackand-white checked wool. One Anzac Day I begged her to come to the March, but she said she had nothing to wear, her good dress being too hot for the day. So I offered to cut the sleeves off, and I did, and sewed the hems up with long tacking stitches, and she wore it to the March.

T I think now my father was probably disappointed at the way his life had turned out. He came from a family who 24

The house that Jack didn’t build

thought very well of themselves, and he probably thought he deserved better than seven ungrateful children and a wife who had no idea, no idea at all about how to manage money, who on pay day would give us lemonade and a cardboard block of Peters’ Neapolitan ice cream, and by the end of the week would be hoping the butcher would let her book up some mincemeat. Who would let her children go to school with shoes not polished and safety pins holding up the hems of their tunics. And whose housekeeping didn’t come near the standards of his own thrifty and well-dressed mother. My mother had red hair, pale freckled skin and light blue eyes. She said of herself that she was ugly. Unlike my father’s family, who thought very highly of themselves, she was self-deprecating, and tried, with varying success, to teach us to be. ‘Pride goes before a fall,’ she’d say. ‘No one’s going to get off a galloping horse to look at you.’ It was thought important then that children should not get big ideas about themselves. The dislike between my mother and my father’s mother, who was the only grandparent I knew, was mutual. We children called her Nanna though the name hardly suited her. She was tall and thin and spoke in a drawling, didactic way. I don’t know where she got that voice as her marriage certificate gave her occupation as ‘house maid’. I remember Nanna coming to Finley to visit us one day, wearing a knitted suit and highly polished shoes, and sitting by the fire with Veronica on her knee. Later, Veronica would suffer for this by being cold-shouldered by my mother. Veronica had the added misfortune of taking after our father’s side of the family in looks and personality. I knew better than to show any allegiance to Nanna, but 25

UP WE GREW

remember even then feeling sorry for poor little Vonnie, who only wanted to be nursed. My mother, though generally kind, wasn’t demonstratively affectionate to us once we were no longer babies. Families didn’t touch as much in those days. Friends didn’t either – there was none of this kissing when you met someone you knew in the street as there is today. It was quite normal, if children had been away for a couple of weeks, for their parents to greet them with only a quick ruffle of their hair. But ‘the baby’, whichever one of us it happened to be, was spoilt and cuddled by the whole family. My mother would walk around and around the kitchen table, baby Richard in her arms, singing ‘Stand up, stand up for Richard, the baby is the boss’, to the tune of Stand up, stand up for Jesus, ye soldiers of the cross. Unlike Nanna my mother sewed not, neither did she knit. But she did cook, in the wood stove that heated the whole kitchen – roasts and stews, and rice pudding and bread-and-butter pudding, and sponge cakes using three, even four eggs. Nanna gave her a recipe for a sponge cake made with one egg. ‘Her and her one-egg sponge!’ my mother said scornfully. On Sundays, when we always had roast lamb, I would ride the bike up to the Tuppal Hotel, where there was mint growing through a fence, to get some for the mint sauce, and would ride out to Balcombe’s farm to buy a jar of cream to have with the baked custard. I liked doing these errands. I remember the first time I felt protective towards my mother. I was supposed to bring a cake to school for a fete, and she cooked me a sponge cake. But though it rose beautifully the oven was too hot, and the top burnt black. ‘Never mind,’ she said, ‘I’ll scrape that off and put some 26

The house that Jack didn’t build

icing on it and no one will know.’ So she did, and put it in a tin. But the lid of the tin stuck to the icing, and when I took it out at school there were holes in the icing and you could see bits of black crumbs. No one ate the cake and I was mortified. I knew that cake was the best one there, never mind the look of it. At the end of the day I threw it out and told my mother people had liked it.

T When I was nine I was one of three children chosen from the Finley school to go to Sydney for a month’s free holiday, at a place for sickly country children, called Stuart House. It was undeserved. I was not sick, only good at persuading my mother I shouldn’t go to school. No one I knew had ever been to Sydney, and hardly anyone had even been to Melbourne, which although in another state was much closer. For weeks before, riding along on my bike, I would have imaginary conversations: Did you know Pam Bone is going to Sydney? Oh, Pam Bone is off to Sydney, you know. And a thrill would go down my back. The three of us, all girls, the oldest about twelve, went by train by ourselves, changing trains at Narrandera, sleeping all night in the carriage, pulling into Central Station early in the morning. Then a bus picked us up and drove us through the streets of tall, grey buildings, past the GPO, Anthony Horden’s, David Jones, and to Circular Quay. It was there I saw the sea for the first time, and I remember my disappointment, when we got out of the bus, to see the oily, dark green water with rubbish floating on it. But then we went on another bus, to Stuart House, which was on Curl Curl beach, with the beautiful, 27

UP WE GREW

sparkling, endless blue sea in front of it, and I loved it all, the beach and the waves and the rocks with tiny shells stuck tightly to them and the water rushing in and out between them. I was happy, even though they made us sit in a circle on the beach and sing hymns: Build on the rock, and not upon the sand Build on the rock, the rock will ever stand! Which embarrassed me a great deal, because people would stand around and look at us. I’m so happy, as the days go by, here’s the reason why Jesus took my bird and all away, we sang. But why should this make anyone happy, I wondered. I had three dresses that had been handed down from the Hawkins’s, and everyone there thought I was rich, and pretty, and I was popular. I could hardly believe it. I could hardly believe it either when I stood on the hill behind Stuart House and saw, as far as the eye could see in three directions houses, red-roofed houses stretching into infinity. I could not imagine there were so many houses in the world. One evening before bed, as I was rolling down the lawn in front of the house with a dozen other kids, Edith and Iris, who were the two other girls from Finley, called me over. They were sitting glumly. Isn’t it awful here, they said. We hate this place. Oh yes, I hate it too, I said, and sat with them for two minutes, trying to look unhappy, before I was drawn irresistibly back to the other children, rolling, yelling, laughing down the grassy slope.

T 28

The house that Jack didn’t build

I’ve a photograph taken near Camperdown around 1900, of some children and adults standing in front of an old horse and cart. Two of the adults are Quintin and Sarah Jane Bone, my great-grandparents, and the children are some of my great-aunts and uncles. Sarah Jane, born Sarah Jane Kee, sailed from Liverpool in 1864 as a girl of seventeen with her sister, Arabella Kee, who was twenty-one. She met and married Quintin Bone in Camperdown in 1867, had eleven children, then fell down a quarry one dark wet night and died of exposure. Quintin had come from Scotland, two years earlier, as a boy of nineteen. It took three months then for a ship to sail those wide seas, around the Cape of Good Hope, across the Indian Ocean, all the way to Adelaide or Melbourne. They must have known when they left there was little chance they would ever see their homes or families again. In the front of the photograph, wearing rumpled stockings, a white pinafore and a white bow in her long hair is a little girl of about eight. She is Sarah Arabella Bone, Bella for short, my great-aunt. One of the older boys in the photograph is my grandfather, Thomas Bone, whom I never knew because he died of tuberculosis at 51, long before I was born. Sarah Jane Kee’s family were Irish Protestants from County Tyrone. Quintin Bone was born in Dalrymple, in Ayrshire, Scotland, in 1843. The parish records of Dalrymple show the names Quintin, or Quinton, or Quintine, Bone going back to the seventeenth century. (A few years ago a reader who saw my name in the Age wrote to tell me that in the 1920s the publisher of the Age was a Quintin Bone. I went to the basement of the building where old editions of the newspaper are stored, and sure 29

UP WE GREW

enough I saw ‘Printed and Published by Quintin Thomas Bone, for David Syme and Co, Collins Street Melbourne’. What connection had he to my father, John Quinton Bone, son of Thomas? I can find no dates that match.) Anyway, the Quintin Bone who was my great-grandfather prospered in Camperdown, where he found others from Ayrshire already established. Indeed, by the mid 1800s there was a constant stream of immigrants from Ayrshire to Australia. No wonder they came. By the 1880s the standard of living in Australia was one of the highest in the world. And in Scotland, unemployment and poverty were rife as industries there shrank. Emigration societies were formed to help people leave. One, in the weaving community of Ayrshire, where many of Quintin’s family worked, noted: A fearful gloom is fast thickening over the horizon of our country. Every prospect of comfort to the working man is daily becoming darker and more dreary. Trade and manufacturers are rapidly leaving our shores and, to all appearances, a crisis is at hand in which the suffering of the working classes will form a prominent feature.

Victoria’s Western District must have reminded the Scots of home. I have been to Dalrymple, in Scotland, and the land around Camperdown looks very like it, with its green rolling hills and miles of dry stone fences: the stone fences around the Western District were built by the Scots and Irish farmers, who had brought the skill with them; they were built mainly to keep out the introduced rabbits. Quintin had two houses and a farm. How he got them I do not know, but it is true that some of the Scots who became wealthy landowners did so by hounding the 30

The house that Jack didn’t build

Aboriginal people from their lands. There is a photograph of one of Quintin’s sons, sitting in a chair wearing riding britches, a whip held across his lap. What was that whip used for? In the Camperdown cemetery there is a monument to the Western District Aborigines. The last of the local tribes lived on nearby Mount Leura, and their chief was Wombeetch Puuyuun, also known as Camperdown George.

T Sarah Jane had a baby every two years from the age of twenty to forty-four, though the last two were at longer intervals. Just like my mother, and grandmother, and mother-in-law: women would breast-feed for a year, which spaced things out a bit. Then, as their fertility declined the spaces between babies became longer, until the last, often a ‘change of life’ baby. Three of Sarah Jane’s s eleven children died, which was probably close to the normal ratio of the time. I look at their photograph again, and at Sarah Arabella in her white pinafore, and would like to write her story, a second-generation Australian child of Scots and Irish parentage, such typical Australian ancestry. But such small fragments I have. She was born on New Year’s Day, 1889, after nine brothers. Would Sarah Jane, her mother – who was already forty-two and must have felt overburdened with so many pregnancies – at least have been pleased the baby was a girl? Less than three weeks after Sarah Arabella was born, her older brother, named Quintin after his father, died of a 31

UP WE GREW

heart condition at nineteen. Later that year another brother, John, died aged sixteen. The cause of his death is not recorded. On 5 October 1889, when Sarah Arabella was ten months old, the Camperdown Chronicle reported: A lad named James Bone aged fourteen years met with a painful accident yesterday evening; he was trying to catch a horse in his father’s paddock and had driven it into a corner. The animal, usually a quiet one, kicked out and striking him on the right leg fractured his thigh. Great sympathy must be felt for the parents who have been singularly unfortunate. During the last few months they have lost two sons by death.

T Sarah Arabella was called Bella for short. Would she have been teased in the schoolyard, with such a name: Bella Bone, Bella Bone, Bellabone? She would have gone to the bluestone state school where, along with all the Scottish and Irish children was a boy whose name is recorded as ‘Prince: an Aboriginal’. In 1876 children from this school, including two of the Bone children, planted the sapling elm trees which, huge now, line Manifold Street. Bella would have spoken, not with her parents’ Scottish accent but in the accent of rural Australia, for children born in Australia have no other accent but this one. It is their peers children mimic, not their parents. She would, by the standards of the day, have had a comfortable upbringing. Another photograph of her, when she is grownup and engaged, shows a handsome, well-dressed 32

The house that Jack didn’t build

young woman with a rather haughty expression. In 1912 Bella, who was then twenty-three, was married at her father’s house. The Camperdown Chronicle records that she wore a cream satin and lace-trimmed dress with a wreath of orange blossoms and a veil, and was attended by two bridesmaids in white silk dresses and mop caps, each wearing a gold brooch set with rubies and a pearl, which were the gifts of the bridegroom. The couple left by the five o’clock train for the Blue Mountains, with the bride dressed in navy blue trimmed with silk, braid and buttons and a hat to match. Her brother Colin acted as best man. (Since no member of my family could have expected to have such a grand wedding, clearly some downward generational mobility has taken place). Ten years later Colin, who went to the Great War and was never the same again, lay down on his bed with a bottle of whiskey and a bottle of strychnine. He left a suicide note, saying: ‘I, Colin Bone, is suffering. No-one is to blame.’ In 1920, when she was seventy-three and Quintin had been dead for two years – he left her an amount of one pound five shillings a week and the house on the farm for life – Sarah Jane went out one evening to the chemist’s shop in Manifold Street to buy a plaster for a pain in her ribs. On the way home in the dark she fell into a gravel pit. Her body was found by an eleven-year-old boy the next day. A police constable told the inquest: ‘the body was lying face down and there were no signs of a struggle. Her hands were clasped in each other. It was a very wet and cold night, and such that would cause the death of the deceased’. But from Sarah Jane, eleven children, eight surviving to adulthood; from her son, Thomas, eleven children, seven 33

UP WE GREW

surviving; from his son, John Quinton, seven children, all surviving to adulthood. So life goes on.

T John Quinton, my father, grew up in Griffith, NSW, the second child of Thomas George Bone and Emma Florence Matilda Jacob – our Nanna. Nanna told me that when they were young she and Tom Bone were the handsomest couple in Griffith. I think the strain of conceit running through my father’s family came from her. This handsome pair went on to have 11 children together, but four died as babies: twins, Thomas George and Emma Isabelle died when they were a few weeks old; Maisie Eileen and Keith Austin each died before they were two. It’s important to me to name these, my lost, little aunts and uncles. This was a time before refrigerators, and the death of babies from gastro-intestinal disease – ‘summer diarrhoea’, it was called – was common. Between 1918 and 1921, for example, 2175 infants died during the summer months in metropolitan Melbourne alone. I don’t know what effect it had on my father, seeing four of his little brothers and sisters die. Nanna’s house – I remember it from my childhood – had two purple and pink crepe myrtle trees in the front and a long back yard. Thomas owned a barber’s shop and billiard room where young Jack used to spend a lot of time. He was a clever boy, who won a scholarship to a private boys’ school in Sydney but was expelled after a short time because of his swearing, a habit he had picked up from the men in the billiard room. Then he caught the eye disease known as ‘sandy blight’ and had to spend six weeks in a 34

The house that Jack didn’t build

darkened room. Because he was not allowed to read Jack spent the time teaching himself the multiplication tables up to 50. Or said he did. But it’s true he could always tell you at the drop of a hat what (say) 36 multiplied by 27, or 43 multiplied by 39 was. Thomas, his father, must have been sick for most of Jack’s childhood. According to Thomas’s death certificate, he had tuberculosis for eleven years before he died of it when he was fifty-one, leaving Emma a widow for fortyfive years. A daughter also died of TB.

T Throughout my own childhood my father, too, coughed. As years went by he coughed more and more, and then he was coughing blood, and had TB, and had to go away to a hospital called The Chalet in Mooroopna for nearly two years. It should have been good to have him away, but it wasn’t. When she wanted to be nasty my mother would say that my father’s family was ‘riddled’ with TB. But then she caught it herself and spent six months in The Chalet. Probably the dampness of the cement floor of the place we lived in didn’t help. There’s a photograph, taken long before, of a group of young people on a beach of the Murrumbidgee River, near Griffith. Jack, his arms outstretched, is the centre of a pyramid of young women, holding them up. They are his sisters and their friends; sleek, confident-looking young women in the modest bathing costumes of the day. And standing on Jack’s shoulders is a girl, wearing a shirt and baggy shorts, with a round face and short straight hair. You 35

UP WE GREW

cannot see it in this black-and-white photograph, but her hair is red. It is my mother, Mavis Elsie Roberts. She does not seem to fit in with the others in the group. But when she was seventeen and he was twenty-eight, Mavis was pregnant with Jack’s child. Mavis Elsie, the youngest of three sisters, lived on an orchard in Griffith. Her parents were sober, respectable people; her mother was strict but she was her father’s favourite and could do no wrong in his eyes, she told me. I never knew these grandparents because they both died before I was born. God knows how the news of their daughter’s pregnancy must have gone down at a time when, according to my mother, the sight of a woman in the street without stockings was a scandal. With no prospect of a marriage in sight, she went to Sydney to have the baby. I don’t know whether the intention was that she would give the baby up for adoption. This is what thousands of other young girls did. But Mavis Elsie, my mother, didn’t have Billy adopted. Instead she brought him back to Griffith, where he lived with her and her parents, and was greatly loved by them. Then when he was two he caught diphtheria and nearly died. It left him with a rounded back, and needing thick glasses. When Billy was three my mother and father were married, although it seems his family never liked or accepted her. ‘Oh Jack, you were caught,’ his sister Eilleen said to him. Then Billy was brought from the home of his grandparents to live with his father, who had never bonded with him, and resented him always. A year later, blue-eyed, blonde, curly-haired Heather was born, bright and pretty, and perhaps to my father everything that Billy was not. 36

The house that Jack didn’t build

I wanted to write the love story of Mavis and Jack, but find I don’t know enough about my parents. There was once a love story, I think. I remember when I was little, sometimes, playfully, he would pick her up and carry her around the room, and she’d squeal. We, thinking he was going to hurt her, would start to cry. ‘Don’t be silly, your father’s not hurting me,’ she’d say, but it was spoilt. She sang: ‘Oh we ain’t got a barrel of money, maybe we’re ragged and funny, but we’ll travel the road, sharing our load, side by side.’ ‘That’s us,’ she said to him. When he was in hospital with TB, she wrote him a letter in which she said, ‘I love you like hell.’ In hospital my father wrote poetry. Once, my mother decided she’d write a poem of her own and she did, a long, bitter, accusing poem. I remember thinking it was better than his poems, even though he showed his to everyone and had them typed up by one of his friends. My mother was an atheist, even though her parents had been Presbyterian. ‘I’d like to be able to believe but I can’t,’ I heard her say to a friend one day, when someone they knew had died. Even though his father had been a member of the Church of England, my father hated organised religion. ‘Turn that sanctimonious bastard off,’ he’d say when a religious program was on the wireless. This lack of religion, the fact that we never went to Sunday School, was to me further evidence of our lack of respectability. They were Labor in their politics. ‘Poor old Ben Chifley’ – poor I think because he was dead, as anyone who was dead was ‘poor old so and so’ – was a saint, and Robert Menzies, who became Prime Minister again in 1949 and stayed there, dismayingly, until 1966, was ‘Pig-iron Bob’. 37

UP WE GREW

They read the Sydney Morning Herald, which didn’t arrive in Finley until the afternoon, and listened to the ABC on the wireless. My mother read constantly, craved peace and quiet and suffered headaches. She would send me up the street with a shilling to buy six Bex powders at a penny each, and to borrow two murder mysteries at threepence each from Miss Lewis’s lending library – ‘No trash,’ meaning no romance novels, she warned – and when I came home with them she would take to her bed for the afternoon. Like thousands of other women at that time she was addicted to Bex powders. She would open the folded paper and pour the bitter powder straight into her mouth, without water. Many women had damaged kidneys from taking too many Bex. When I worked in a chemist’s shop after I left school there were husbands who would come in and ask the chemist please not to sell their wives any more of this or that medicine. But the women always found ways of getting it, sending in a neighbour or child for it. Cough medicines, tonics, APC, Relaxa-tabs, all mothers’ little helpers, though that phrase wasn’t yet invented. I read too, anything I could get my hands on: my brother Billy’s comics, the Girls Crystal Annuals, the books won by my sisters for coming first in their class at school: Dot and the Kangaroo, What Katy Did, The Glen Castle Mystery, Children of Billabong, Children of the New Forest, Pollyanna, Little Women, We of the Never-Never, Seven Little Australians, The Fortunes of Poppy Treloar, and every Enid Blyton and every L.M. Montgomery book many times over. Later I read Jane Austen and Dickens and the Bronte sisters. But I also read Emile Zola, Ernest Hemingway, Ngaio Marsh, and any other grown-up books 38

The house that Jack didn’t build

lying around, and no one thought to tell me I shouldn’t. When I was about fourteen I read The Diary of Anne Frank, which put me in sympathy with the Jews for the rest of my life. When I read Zola’s Earth I understood what the sexual act was, and how babies were born. There were never enough books for me, so I read the same ones over and over until I almost knew them by heart. When there was a new book in the house there was great competition for it. I would follow around the sister who was reading it, waiting for her to put it down. One day, Veronica was reading Pegeen, a book I greatly coveted. When she had to go somewhere she hid it, but through some sixth sense I somehow knew to find it under the seat of our father’s old T-model Ford truck in the yard. We had in our family two leather-bound books of poetry: The Collected Works of Henry Lawson and The Collected Works of AB Paterson, which had belonged to my mother before she was married. She liked me to sit beside her on the bed and read them to her. I loved most of all Lawson’s The Ballad of the Drover: The faithful dog a moment Lies panting on the bank, Then plunges through the current To where his master sank. And round and round in circles He fights with failing strength, Till, gripped by wilder waters, He fails and sinks at length.

My mother said she would leave the books to me when she died, and I asked when I might expect this to happen. But one day I took them outside to read and left them there. 39

UP WE GREW

That night it rained and they were nearly ruined, but she didn’t punish me. I can barely remember ever being punished by her for anything. At times, when she had a headache, she’d ask me to comb her hair, and I would stand behind her chair and comb her thick, short hair, the hair that never did go grey. Now, twenty years after her death, I imagine I can smell her hair and I feel a stab for the comfortable, comforting familiarity of her. And when he was old and sick, not long before he died, I sat by my father’s hospital bed and looked at him as he slept, at the curve of his cheekbone, the finely sculpted nose, and saw that my father was indeed beautiful. And on the night of the day he was buried, when I was already grown up and married, I lay in bed and cried and cried, to think of him out there in the cold ground, in the cemetery, in the wind and rain. In my childhood there were fights, and fears, and failures. And our home was poor, by the standards of the town, by the standards of the time. But as Heather reminded me recently, we knew on which sides of the plate the knives and forks went, we didn’t chew with our mouths open, and we didn’t say ‘I seen’. And sometimes there were all of us, sitting around the table lit by the kerosene lamp, warmed by the wood stove, fed by my mother’s good cooking, and my mother and father would share a joke. And we were, for all of it, a family. Because there was love there too, underneath it all, and maybe that’s what made us the solid citizens we all are today. My mother was right. We were not poor. Only, sometimes, broke.

40

T Childhoods

Lucky, lucky, lucky Migrant children

I

n Finley, when I was a child, there were families with names of Maraldo and Marantelli, and Hetrelezis who were Greeks who owned a café, but all had been in Australia a long time, spoke in Australian accents and seemed in no way different from us, even though the Maraldo boys, curiously to me, wore their hair in long black sausage curls until they went to school. The Prime Minister, John Howard, interviewed once about the school he went to in Sydney as a child, said: ‘There were a couple of Chinese boys. It was pretty typical.’ The Australia in which he and I grew up was mono-cultural. Unless, that is, you counted the cultural differences between Catholics and Protestants, which in some ways were as real as any ethnic divisions today. The Grants, who lived down the road from us, were Catholic. We played with the younger Grant children,

T

43

UP WE GREW

Barry, Colleen and Verle, when we were not having a fight with them. Verle was an appallingly bad sport, and would sit down and cry in the middle of a race when she saw she was not winning it. When the feud was going on they would call out as they passed our house ‘Public dogs, sitting on logs, eating maggots out of frogs,’ and we would return the chant, substituting ‘Catholic dogs’ for ‘public dogs’. Ray Grant, who was older, went away to fight in the Korean War and came home with golden and jewelled cigarette boxes made in Asia, strange and beautiful objects the like of which I had never seen before. Some Sundays we would see the nuns from the convent walking past our place, always two of them together, in their long black habits, on their way to visit the Grants. If we had owned a telephone we might have called Mrs Grant to warn her, for we knew such visits, which were always unannounced, threw Catholic housewives into a panic. What if the nuns came and the place was a mess and not a biscuit in the tin to go with a cup of tea?

T One winter day, my sister Veronica, Barry Grant and I were walking in the dried bed of the Mulwala Canal when on the far bank we saw some children, two boys and a small girl, whom we had never seen before. The little girl had curly black hair and wore a long dress. We called out to them and the two boys ran away, leaving their little sister stuck in some thistles, crying. ‘I’m going to chase her,’ said Barry Grant. ‘No, I will,’ I said, but what I meant to do was lift her out of the thistles. 44

Lucky, lucky, lucky

Barry and Veronica watched me walking towards her, but before I was halfway there Barry changed his mind and called out, ‘Pam, help her.’ I lifted her up and carried her down the other bank, and she ran after her brothers. These were the Bonaddio children, Luigi, Locarno and Nadia, immigrants from Italy who had just arrived in Finley and were the first children I knew who didn’t speak English. But in no time at all that family was part of the community, the children going to the Catholic school, speaking in broad Australian accents, the father working, the mother going to meetings of the mothers’ club. The Catholic community had taken them under its wing – for there were no special programs for migrants then, no migrant welfare centres or free English language classes. Children were put into ordinary classes and expected to catch up. And mostly they did.

T August 1945: it is VP Day: Victory in the Pacific. A few days earlier, atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and now Japan has surrendered. But I know nothing of that. On this day I am walking up the street in Finley, New South Wales, Australia, with my mother, who is wheeling baby Johnny in the pram, to join the celebrations. There are crowds of people, there are streamers and whistles, and big boys throwing tomatoes they have piled up on a table. One hits my dress. The hotels have their front doors open and children are running in and out, and there is free lemonade. Far away in another small town on the other side of the 45

UP WE GREW

world is Jürgen, a small boy with a thick, blond fringe and shy smile. On this day, VP Day in Australia, there are no celebrations in Germany, only a beaten and exhausted people relieved that this thing, the war, is over. Jürgen is four years old, living in Zschoppach, in eastern Germany, in a farmhouse. A couple of years before this he and his mother and little sister Brita had been evacuated there from Leipzig, where he was born. The war in Europe has been over since May. Jürgen’s father, Hubert, who was a glider pilot and so exempt from military service, was conscripted into the army in the last desperate days of the war, when Hitler was already hiding in his bunker, screaming that the German people were unworthy of him. Almost immediately after he went into the army Hubert was captured by British soldiers on Lueneberg Heath, where Himmler would later be captured. Hubert was taken to France, to a camp where prisoners were kept in the open, in wire cages. Then he was taken to England, where he remained a prisoner-of-war for another three years.

T Hilde, Jürgen’s mother, has told me about the Russians coming to Zschoppach, how they came into the houses and urinated in the kitchen sink, how the women were terrified of them. Brita, who had heard the neighbours whispering to each other, told her mother she knew what the Russians wanted. ‘They want women!’ three-year-old Brita said. And soon, one neighbour, raped many times, hanged herself on the clothesline. Food was very scarce. Jürgen was sent out to search the 46

Lucky, lucky, lucky

fields after potatoes had been harvested, to find the tiny potatoes the tractor had left behind. Behind a bedroom door was a side of bacon Hilde had been given, kept hidden until they were really hungry. It was still there at the end of the war. One dark night after Germany was divided Hilde, with Jürgen and Brita and a pram laden with belongings, walked through a forest, dogs barking and lights circling, to the West. They went to live with cousins in Bottrop, near Essen. In the months that followed Jürgen remembers lines of men, women and children, working, working, rebuilding the bombed houses, cleaning the bricks, handing them one by one along the line to be put into place. He remembers playing in the bombed churches and collecting the tiny pieces of broken coloured glass he found there. Then, in 1948, Hubert was released and came home from England. ‘Mummy, when is he going?’ Brita asked when he had been home a week. Hubert got a job as a fitter and turner. Thomas was born, then Susanne. One day Hubert came home from work excited. A workmate was migrating to Australia. He began thinking about migrating too. What was the alternative – to live the rest of his life in a third-floor flat in Bottrop? Europe was ruined, he knew that. He thought about Canada and South Africa, but decided on Australia because it was furthest away. ‘I think my father saw himself as an adventurer. My mother was not so keen. She thought of the difficulties and didn’t want to leave her friends and family,’ Jürgen says now. But did his mother have any say? Probably not. Australia needed people, and here was a family of six, with two more on the way. 47

UP WE GREW

T They left Bremerhaven in June 1954. On the ship most of the crew were Indian, there were waiters in white uniforms, the cuisine was French, there were bananas and other fruits never seen before, sweet bread, and coffee in big bowls. Sailing south, past France, Portugal, through the Suez Canal, eastward to Ceylon, they saw elephants and black children selling frangipani flowers. Then, across the Indian Ocean to Fremantle. One month after leaving Germany the ship berthed at Princes Pier in Melbourne. It was a sunny July day and the first thing Jürgen saw was a Kraft cheese factory. Kraft is German for strength. They went on by train to Bonegilla, the migrant camp near Albury, where it was midwinter cold, where magpies screeched and where they slept in an unlined corrugatediron hut, ate mutton day after day and learned English. Jürgen already spoke it quite well, having studied it at school in Germany, and his father had learned it as a prisoner-of-war in England. Hilde, who was pregnant with twins, at first spoke almost no English. Many German migrants wanted to live in Adelaide, where there was already a thriving German community. But Hubert was offered a job as a driver at the Wacol migrant camp near Brisbane. He took it. They stayed at Wacol for two years. Hubert was soon promoted to a camp manager, which meant that one of his jobs was to run the open-air cinema. Jürgen was allowed to take the threepences for the admission tickets, and roll them up into little packets, a job he loved. He was not 48

Lucky, lucky, lucky

allowed to watch the films – the corniest of old black-andwhite serials – because his parents thought them unsuitable for him. Hilde, eight months pregnant, wrote to her sister in Cologne: Dear Aenne, soon I’ll have it all behind me, and I hope, with God’s help, that I can get through it all again. Never before have I been so ueppig (voluptuous) as I am now. I hardly dare to walk through the camp. I go to the doctor every week and they test my urine every three days, as my legs are rather swollen. Everyone thinks I’ll have twins and I do look like I should, but I don’t think I will, I think I’ve just retained a lot of water. We’ll put Thomas and Susanne in a children’s home while I’m away, and the two older ones will stay with Hubert.

Twins, Elisabeth and Michael, were born in a Brisbane hospital. One doctor refused to attend Hilde because she was German. Hilde wrote again to Aenne, from hospital: Most of the Australians are horrified to hear we have six children. The average number here is one or two, and they think they have to pity me, and say there won’t be any time ‘for myself’. Well, whatever, the little ones are here and we need to care for them. You asked about some help in the house. As the wages for any sort of worker are fairly high, we really can’t think about it. Our goal is to buy a piece of land and build a house in the next few years, so we really have to save hard… You asked about the country and people. I must say most of the women in Australia are shapely and very pretty. Nearly all of them are slim and they all wear high 49

UP WE GREW

heels. They have slim legs and an amazing waist. Jean, who shares a room with me, is always getting a tape measure to measure herself. I usually laugh because that sort of thing is not important to me. She often collapses with tiredness; she’s got one child and doesn’t have any milk for it. The baby cries a lot. I suggested that she eats more but she doesn’t want to hear that.

Hubert worked hard and saved. Jürgen went to a nearby state school, where he was puzzled that the children in the playground seemed to be obsessed with radios. ‘Radio, radio,’ they would say to each other. After a while he realised they were saying ‘righty-oh’. And why was it so important that the explorer John Oxley was left-handed? ‘Left-handed John Oxley,’ he thought the teacher was saying. But she was saying ‘Lieutenant John Oxley’. In Germany, little boys shook hands with each other when they met in the playground. You wouldn’t try that in Australia. And Jürgen’s shorts were thigh high, while the other boys wore Bombay bloomers, and laughed at him. He was told his name was too hard to pronounce, and that henceforth he would be called George. Some migrants, who had come as displaced persons, had been at Wacol since 1948. Writing to Aenne, Hilde said: There are people who have been here in the camp for four years and who manage to spend their money each week. They live extravagantly, spend a lot on clothes and don’t have anything to show for it.

Jürgen’s family looked down on Fleuchtling (refugees), just as old Australians did. Hilde in particular, whose family in Germany had owned a small business, thought 50

Lucky, lucky, lucky

she was a cut above some of the people in the camp. Hubert was left in his politics, and was agnostic. Hilde was religious and politically conservative. ‘Migrants: they are either bludgers or they work so hard they show us up. They live on the smell of an oily rag and pretty soon are better off than we are.’ This was said, and sometimes it was true. ‘My parents saw that you could end up staying at Wacol forever. It was like a socialist paradise, everything was organised and provided for you,’ says Jürgen. But Hubert still wanted a house of his own. And a garden. He bought a large piece of land at Mount Gravatt, with a creek running through it. He came to an agreement with another German migrant, Mr Hecker, who knew how to lay bricks: he would give him half the land and together they would build a house for each of them. Hilde to Aenne: You’re enjoying the height of summer and here it’s winter. We never imagined it could get so cold here in sunny Queensland. It’s often bitterly cold at night and you put on all the warm things you have. Susanne will start going to kindergarten as of this week. She should be two and a half years old but Hubert spoke with the director and asked if she could go earlier. I have so much work to do with the two little ones and Susanne is so lively. On the 26th June, exactly one year to the day since we left Bottrop for Bremen, the men turned the first spade of dirt for our new house.

After school on Fridays Jürgen, who was then fourteen, would cycle twenty kilometres from Wacol to Mount 51

UP WE GREW

Gravatt, and sleep in an old hut on the block so as to be up early and have everything ready for his father and Mr Hecker, who would come by motorcycle on Saturday morning, his father driving, Mr Hecker on the back. Jürgen would not get up until he heard the engine of the old Triumph motorbike. ‘I could hear it miles away. And I probably wouldn’t have slept all night, I was so scared out there by myself,’ says Jürgen. There were no other houses on that part of Pine Mountain Road then, and it was pitch black. For two years Jürgen spent every weekend on the building site, while he helped his father and Mr Hecker build the two brick houses, one for each family. ‘Did you think you were badly done by?’ I ask him now. ‘No,’ he says. But it’s those rose-coloured glasses again, because in the past he has talked bitterly about this. Two years after coming to Australia, knowing not much English, Brita came first in her class. And Jürgen was taken out of the state school and sent to a Marist Brothers Catholic college. When he came second in a class of sixty-four boys, Jürgen was given as a prize a Biggles book full of stories of the brave British and the cowardly Huns. Then, despite Hubert’s dislike of anything militaristic, Jürgen had to join the compulsory school cadets. Hubert made him wear the boots that were part of the cadet uniform when he worked on the building site, and no matter how much he polished them Jürgen could never get them back to a mirror-shine for the weekly parade. Hilde wrote to Aenne: Jürgen would dearly love to do two more years at school, 52

Lucky, lucky, lucky

then he’d have his Senior, which is equivalent to the German Abitur; this would allow him to go to university. He would like to be a chemist – he had very good results in chemistry and physics. His director said to me last week at the school leaving award night, it would be good if we could let him do the last two years at school… We really don’t know what to do. On the one hand, it would be a real shame if he couldn’t finish those two years, but then it would be a real struggle for us to then send him to university after that. If he leaves now, he can start working in the laboratory in the food industry or the gas company, and he would go to the technical college four nights a week. After five years, he would have a diploma of industrial chemistry. Well, we’ll see how it will all work out.

That is pretty much how it did work out. Another child, Barbara, was born, making seven. Seven children, the same as in my family; the same number of boys and girls; twenty years between the oldest and the youngest, the same as in my family. But my mother and Jürgen’s mother, who never met, were about as different as two women could be. Jürgen is now my husband. We were born on the same day, a year apart, which, if you believed in astrology, should make us very alike. But we don’t believe in astrology. And though we are similar in some ways, it is simply because we have adopted ways of each other’s thinking. You see, environmental influences do not end at childhood. As far as I know Hubert and Hilde never regretted coming to Australia, though Germany became prosperous 53

UP WE GREW

again, and the cousins who didn’t migrate grew rich. On her fiftieth birthday last year, Susanne made a speech in which she said how grateful she was that her parents had the foresight to bring the family to Australia. Lucky, how lucky, to be here.

T For most migrants the move to Australia was about providing opportunities for their children, and this is largely what has happened. The children of migrants who came here speaking little or no English and working in lowskilled, routine labouring jobs, often became lawyers and managers and doctors and university professors. These children moved from working class to upper-middle class in one generation. And by the third generation the children had inexorably become Australians. June Factor and I both grew up in Australia in the same era – she is only a few years older than I am – but it strikes me how very different our childhood experiences are. When June talks about the game of knucklebones, and I mention that we used to save these from the Sunday roast lamb, she tells me she didn’t ever have roast lamb because her mother cooked Eastern European food. When I was growing up Communism was considered very wicked (though I never got to the bottom of why it was); in her family Communism was as natural and normal as breathing. June Factor is a now well-known academic historian and author or co-author of books about children’s folklore, such as Far Out, Brussel Sprout!, Cinderella Dressed in Yella and Captain Cook Chased a Chook: Children’s 54

Lucky, lucky, lucky

Folklore in Australia. Indeed, for much of her professional life she has been immersed in very Australian aspects of childhood history. As a boy in Poland June Factor’s father, whose name then was either Shalom Faktor or Schulek Faktor, depending on whether you used the Jewish name or the Polish variation of it, walked past a baker’s shop and fainted with hunger at the smell of the bread baking. This was in Lodz, Poland around the time of World War I. He came from a very poor family, one of thirteen children. In later life, because Shalom Faktor foresaw the danger of Hitler – he had read Mein Kampf – he persuaded his wife and her sister and brother to migrate to Australia. Some of the family had migrated earlier. ‘There were the milk and honey letters about Australia,’ June says now. ‘But most people thought my father was mad. They had a comfortable life in Lodz, he was a volunteer in the Jewish ambulance service, he sang in the choir, they went to concerts, lived a pleasant, culturally rich life as working class people.’ June came to Australia in January 1939, when she was two. Her name was then Estera Lea Faktor, which is a beautiful name; but the diminutive she was known by was Edjunia, and when they came to Australia someone decided the closest to it was June. Her father became Saul Factor, and her mother, whose Jewish name had been Mariam and whose Polish name Marilla, became Mary Factor. ‘Marilla like in Anne of Green Gables,’ I said. But June had never made that connection. Later, on her father’s ASIO file – this because he was a member of the Communist Party – his name was spelt differently on every page. And on one page was an impatient 55

UP WE GREW

note: ‘Please determine the correct name of the subject.’ One – almost – felt sorry for ASIO, June said. The stories people have. June’s mother who had also grown up in extreme poverty had a childhood memory of her stepfather standing over her mother as she sliced the bread, making sure his children got enough. But this is what poverty does, says June. ‘The notion that poverty makes people kind – well.’ Lodz was then a great industrial centre, particularly of the textile industry. Although Mary and Saul had both grown up in poverty, they had educated themselves and had good jobs. Saul was a textile worker, a warper. Saul’s family were religious Hassidic Jews – this was common among the poor – but by the time he grew up he was an atheist. His politics were strongly left-wing and anti-fascist, though he didn’t belong to any political party while in Poland. He had helped to organise a strike at his factory in Lodz. There was a sit-in, the workers slept next to the machines, the factory owners had to give in. ‘As a young man he was very aware of inequality and injustice – and anti-Semitism, which there was plenty of in Poland.’ June’s mother had worked in the office of a clothing manufacturer, and as part of her job went around the country buying material for the business. June was an only child. ‘In Lodz we lived in a flat above the street only a few doors from where she worked, and she went back to work very soon after I was born. They could earn enough to have someone live in. This Polish woman, who looked after me, was like one of the family; she wept buckets when we left. My mother would come home from the office and breastfeed me and go back. Even as she lay recovering after giving 56

Lucky, lucky, lucky

birth, people would come from the office asking questions about what needed to be done. She had never looked after me in that domestic way, I think the first time she bathed me was on the boat [to Australia].’ Saul had left for Australia about six months before his wife and child in order to get work and prepare things for them. Melbourne was also a textile city. But now it was the end of the Depression and Saul couldn’t find work. He swept factory floors, did whatever he could do. ‘You see, he had no English. A very common role newly arrived immigrants took was to go hawking. So he went to Coles and bought some brooches and got on a train to the country and took them around. He found out very quickly that Australian housewives looked down on things ‘made in Japan’. So he learned the phrase ‘made in Czechoslovakia’.’ One day when he was hawking Saul reached a house from which music came through the flywire door, an aria that was very familiar to him. When the woman of the house appeared at the door, instead of his usual ‘made in Czechoslovakia’ spiel, he pointed to where the music was coming from and said, ‘Tosca’. As he told it to June later, the woman looked slightly startled, then invited him in. ‘She and her husband were music teachers at the Conservatorium. I don’t know what their names were – all the things you wish you could ask the dead – but somehow it turned out they asked him to sing for them. He had the most glorious tenor, the kind of Italian tenor with the sob in it. They offered him free lessons – but he couldn’t afford free lessons, he had to work... In another time and place he might have had a very different life.’ In January 1939, Mary and little June arrived. The 57

UP WE GREW

family settled in Carlton, as many Jews did, when it was a working-class, immigrant suburb, and before the Italian influence replaced the Jewish. June’s uncle and aunt and cousin Nellie, who was about eight, lived with them. The two families rented a small house in Nicholson Street, a two-storey terrace with its front door right on the street. A week after they came it was Black Friday, the day of terrible bushfires throughout Victoria, and there were ashes in the wind. June doesn’t remember this, she’s been told it by her mother.

T In Australia there were no servants and June’s mother, who had never cooked, had to learn how to. She eventually became a wonderful cook, says June. ‘There was always a gentle rivalry between the women which the men exploited, they’d say, Oh, someone’s tomato soup was better than someone else’s, that kind of thing.’ In Carlton June went on Sundays to the Kadimah, the Yiddish cultural centre. A school for Jewish children had been established by people who were Bundists, which was a Jewish political party in Poland and Eastern Europe. The Bundists, who were socialists, were also bitterly antiCommunist. ‘It was interesting because my father, whose politics they would have abhorred – as he would have abhorred theirs – had no hesitation in sending me to this school.’ Yiddish was at the core of their cultural life. The family spoke Yiddish at home – ‘except my parents would fall into

58

Lucky, lucky, lucky

Polish when they didn’t want me to know what they were saying’ – and at the Kadinah school June fell in love with the literature and culture. ‘I was one of a small number who stayed there until the end, nine or ten years. I don’t think I ever, in my long years of education, was taught a subject called ethics in the way of the Yiddish school. They would take the Old Testament stories and use them to teach ethics, but through a secular prism because they were not religious Jews, they were secular Jews.’ June was the first immigrant child to go to Lady Gowrie Kindergarten in Melbourne, a model kindergarten named after the Governor’s wife. Years later, a woman who had taught at the kindergarten recalled her as ‘a small darkhaired girl with a round face’. June remembers the little camp beds they slept on in the afternoons. She caught whooping cough and had to stay home; one of the other mothers would deliver to her home each day half a pint of milk and an orange, ‘for the little girl who was sick. My mother was touched by her kindness.’ June also remembers being at primary school, playing houses in the long grass. She remembers that teachers were very distant people, and how she was appalled at the casual violence towards children, generally accepted but outside her own experience. Later the family moved to another house in north Carlton, ‘a little dark house, a single-storey terrace with no hot water, a dunny out the back, a lean-to approximation of a bathroom with a chip heater. My mother didn’t know how to work it and would feed it paper for our weekly bath. There was a copper outside for boiling the clothes, and those cement troughs, so rough they would take the

59

UP WE GREW

skin off your hands. I remember my mother with sweat running down her face, lifting the clothes out with a stick. But you know I never heard my mother complain, I never heard either of my parents complain, ever.’ June’s father joined the army in 1942, after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour. ‘He told my mother he needed to be able to protect the family if Japanese came to Australia. To think of my father, who was a slight, spectacled intellectual, standing against the Japanese army!’

T June has a memory of walking with her father down a street in Carlton when she was about five, her little steps trying to keep up with his: her father was in uniform and she was very proud of him. ‘Then he started to sing. You don’t sing in the street in Australia unless you’re drunk. What’s more, he was singing in Yiddish or Italian or something. I remember my feeling of embarrassment but as well as that I remember my feeling of shame at being embarrassed. I realised later these were archetypal feelings of [migrant] children. You didn’t want to stand out, but at the same time these were the dearest people in your life. ‘And you feel guilt... It’s a reminder that children have very complex emotional lives. There’s a tendency to simplify, to think that because they are small everything about them must be small. But I don’t think you feel ever again as deeply, passionately as you do as a child.’ There’s another memory of her father’s singing, that ‘glorious tenor’, from when she was still sleeping in a cot in her parents’ bedroom. ‘I had chicken pox. My father was on leave, I remember him sitting next to my cot singing to me to 60

Lucky, lucky, lucky

distract me from scratching. He sang “Soviet Land, so dear to every toiler”. What I heard was “so dear to every toy-land”. I was an adult before I knew it was not toy-land.’ When she was a teenager, June became a piano student at the Conservatorium, working her way through Bach, Beethoven and Chopin. She had been to Princes Hill Primary and Central School, and then to University High, and later went to Melbourne University, on a scholarship. June’s best friend at high school was Joan Hood, who later became Joan Kirner, and later still Premier of Victoria. Their friendship continued at university, though in those days Joan was less involved in politics than June, who was active in the Labor Club. June’s parents had a clothing shop in Swan Street, Richmond. Her father was a prominent figure in the Jewish community and the Communist Party. Her mother was in the Party too, and as soon as she left school, June joined: ‘As the sons and daughters of earls inherit their titles, so I willingly assumed the political mantle of my parents,’ she would later write. ‘People have to get their head around a different era. In my childhood the Soviet Union was an ally. Not only was it an ally but it was a critical ally; the war hung on the capacity of the Red Army to withstand the German onslaught, which they did, at enormous cost, at something like 20 million dead. So there was a lot of support for Russia. There were drives to help Russia, sheepskins for Russia, the collecting of money to send to Russia. It was not just a Jewish thing, it was widespread. ‘Uncle Joe [Joseph Stalin] was a benign figure with a pipe, and he was presiding over a people who were heroically withstanding fascism... People who didn’t join 61

UP WE GREW

the Party supported it, because it represented the hope of the defeat of fascism and Nazism. And also offered a hope of a better world. ‘My family were deeply, personally, fearful that the Nazis would be victorious. My parents lost almost everybody. To count those who survived, really, the fingers of both hands would be surplus, and this out of very big families.’ June grew up enveloped in talk about books and music and politics. ‘We were deeply involved in what was happening in the world. I remember as a child going with my father to a vigil when the Rosenbergs were to be executed. I remember walking with a candle in a silent place – I’m not sure where it was – maybe outside the American embassy... I wanted to be there, that episode was part of our lives. ‘The world was at our dinner table, discussed through issues of justice and injustice. We were in a way linked to all the suffering people of the world – that’s what the Communist Party meant. These things need to be remembered.’ June did not remain a member of the Party very long. In 1956 Soviet troops rolled into Hungary. Later, the so-called ‘secret’ report of Krushchev on the crimes of Stalin inflicted a deep disillusionment on many. June’s father, however, remained faithful. He did leave the Communist Party but only after the Party in Australia became more independent and was critical of the Soviet Union. ‘Even when I was in the Communist Party my views and my father’s views about the role of the Soviet Union began to differ, and this really upset him – if he couldn’t persuade his own daughter, he must have thought. ‘My father believed to the end of his days that the Soviet 62

Lucky, lucky, lucky

Union was a bulwark against the threat of American hegemony – if he were alive today he’d probably say I told you so! He joined the Socialist Party, a breakaway party that was pro-Soviet. As an adult there were areas of politics we didn’t talk about, because it upset my father that I didn’t agree with him – but I didn’t. However, that still left plenty we could talk about.’

T In the lottery of parents, says June, ‘I won the Tatts prize. They were highly intelligent people. My mother was very gentle, accommodating, sensitive to other people. She was called the diplomat of the family; she was always the peacemaker. Both my parents were extraordinarily ethical in their personal and public life. They had an enormous generosity of spirit. I remember once someone needed a loan, my parents didn’t have any money, so they went to a bank and borrowed it to give to them, then paid it off. ‘I gained from them a sense that you have a responsibility to the world. That was never said, I’m summarising a feeling. You observed it in all the good causes they were involved in, money being raised for this and that, help being organised. That you don’t support cruelty, or injustice. If you grew up in this environment you would be a very strange person not to capture this infection. I think it’s an excellent infection. That’s a disease I have retained.’ June believes reading also had a very significant influence on her world view: ‘I read, all the time. There was always a lot of Russian literature in the house thanks to my father. But two books that were profoundly influential when I was about twelve were [Richard Llewellyn’s] How 63

UP WE GREW

Green Was My Valley and [John Steinbeck’s] The Grapes of Wrath. They were both about the extraordinary dignity of working-class people in the face of awful poverty... Literature can shape your life. ‘I used to write little stories when I was eight, nine, ten. I used to take them to my parents and allow them to “persuade” me to read them to them. They always had a sad ending. I don’t know why, I didn’t have a sad life.’

T The first post-war migrants, brought to Australia to build the population and thus make it safer, had been northern Europeans – the ‘beautiful Balts’, as the then immigration minister Arthur Calwell called them. He organised the selection, believing that because the immigrants were fair and blue-eyed (though many native-born were not) they would be accepted. But while they looked like us they did not speak our language. Italians and Greeks came later. They too not only didn’t speak English but their cooking smelt strange, and they were at pains to keep their daughters away from any possibility of attachments with Australian men. ‘Speak bloody English,’ was said, sometimes to their faces, more often muttered behind their backs. It was the mid-sixties before we saw that people couldn’t just forget about where they came from, before we realised that cultural diversity was enriching to the society. ‘Multiculturalism’, a word borrowed from Canada, then became official government policy. Still, it was hard at times, growing up Greek in Australia, says Christina Bios, who came from Greece to live in 64

Lucky, lucky, lucky

Melbourne when she was four. She was taunted and pushed over on the way home from school. At school, she threw away the feta and salami sandwiches her mother had made her for lunch, and went hungry. Growing up, she put lemon juice in her hair to make it lighter. ‘I just hated to be different,’ she says. Christina was never allowed to go out alone with a boy, even the Greek boy who later became her husband. The Greek culture then was very different from the Australian culture: ‘The girls were breeders, the boys were kings. We were governed by the family. Most of the time the children didn’t have any choice’. Today Christina loves her Greek heritage. But her daughter, who is studying at Melbourne University, doesn’t like going out with Greek boys. ‘Too chauvinistic,’ she says. Judith Miralles came from Barcelona to live in Ingham, Queensland in the 1960s. She was nine. ‘It was like going to Mars,’ she says. ‘We landed on the Friday and on Monday I went to school. I had no English. The nuns just expected me to be like everyone else. ‘We were different. My mother would give us omelette in bread for lunch. They would wonder what we were eating, and would point at us. After a while I learned to eat my lunch on my own and then go into the playground... And of course our clothes were different – stiff and frilly. We were all dolled up, we stood out. And our dresses were too short, so the nuns told me we had to get our mother to let the hems down. ‘But you know it was not hard. There was so much more good than bad. Everyone was very kind. I had been a top student in Spain, and after a few months I did very well. I think it was good for me to be like everyone else. I had no 65

UP WE GREW

trouble fitting in.’ Inta, whom I met recently at a party given by my Afghani friend, Nouria, was one of the ‘beautiful Balts’, though she was born here. She has the blue eyes and fair skin but her hair is jet black. Her parents were Latvian, displaced persons who met and married in Germany after the war and came here as a young couple in 1948. Latvia suffered so much, with the Nazis and then with the Communists, said Inta, who has been there a couple of times. No, it wasn’t hard, growing up in Australia. Her parents spoke Latvian at home, but she learned to speak English before she went to school, just by playing with the kids in the street. ‘I was lucky, so lucky, to be born here. But I know, in my heart – putting her hand on her heart – I know in my blood, that I am Latvian. Oh yes, I am Australian, but I am Latvian too.’ Nyatony came here as a refugee from Sudan four years ago and worked in a hotel so she could send money to support her mother and six brothers and sisters, who had escaped to Egypt. Sudan was, and is, in the grip of a terrible war. Nyatony was permitted to sponsor her family to migrate to Australia, and they are happy to be here. Her young sister wears a baseball cap in stars-and-stripes pattern, worn backwards. The whole family is here now, except for their father. ‘He wanted to stay in Sudan to get the peace,’ says Nyatony. ‘He says, if everyone leaves, who will make the peace?’

T The day after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, Muslim students in a state high school in Melbourne danced on their desks, and ran around the classroom 66

Lucky, lucky, lucky

whooping and cheering. Some people are now questioning the policy of multiculturalism. Should we not be trying harder to promote loyalty to this country? Are not some deeply-held cultural and religious beliefs unacceptable in this society? Let them come, but let them know how it is here. Give them welcome and support. And then hope. Abdulkadir Muse gives reason to hope.

T One day he went into a shop in South Melbourne and smelled incense and suddenly he was back, a small boy in his grandfather’s house in the bush in the north east of Somalia. The trees from which frankincense comes grow in that part of Somalia – the frankincense that the three wise men bore as gifts to Bethlehem when Jesus Christ was born. Except Abdulkadir Muse didn’t know anything about that, being Muslim. His grandfather came from a nomadic people, but had a farm, with camels and goats. The grandfather did not read and write but when he talked, when he told the old stories, he spoke in poetry, said Abdulkadir. The Somali language was an oral language, it was not written down until the 1970s. Abdulkadir’s parents, who were professional people, had learned to read and write in Italian and Arabic. Abdulkadir talks like any other young Australian. He was born in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, in 1979 and lived there happily with his family until the war came, when he was just eleven. The day the war began – started by a rebel army who wanted to overthrow the government – was the day of the end-of-year examinations at 67

UP WE GREW

Abdulkadir’s school. His father, who worked in a government office, dropped him off at school. Soon the guns started. The teachers abandoned the exams, and told all the students to go home. ‘I started walking home. I was really scared. I was walking through the main street, usually it was filled with people and cars and buses, and now it was empty, just one military car was there. I started crying, I was so scared. When I got home at first no one was there. Then my sister came home and said they had been out looking for me.’ The fighting continued for the next few days, and people who lived near them started moving out. One day, a bullet came through the window and nearly hit Abdulkadir’s sleeping little brother. Their father decided then that they would move to their grandfather’s house in another part of Mogadishu. He said he did not think the war would last long. The children were told to pack some clothes in plastic bags. Abdulkadir took two shirts and two pairs of trousers. As it turned out, these were to last him for the next two years. The fighting got worse and it was decided that Abdulkadir’s mother would take him, his older sister and two younger brothers, to stay with relatives in a nearby small town. His father and his older brother were to go back to their house in Mogadishu to protect it and their belongings. ‘The day before we left, I was playing soccer with my friends. My father called me, pulled me to one side and said, “You must help your mother. You will be the oldest boy now.” I was impatient, I just said, Okay, okay. I told him to look after my little cat.’ 68

Lucky, lucky, lucky

That was the last time he saw his father. Abdulkadir, with his mother and aunt and about twenty other children, began walking south towards the border of Kenya. ‘We got lifts some of the way. I don’t know how long it took.’ On the way, he saw houses burning, heard shooting, saw dead people. They arrived at Utanga refugee camp, near Mombassa, where there were thousands upon thousands of people. ‘People were sleeping just on the ground under the trees, there was no water, no sanitation. After a while I started collecting branches, and we built a house made of branches and plastic bags from the UN.’ Near the camp were wild animals: hyenas, lions, wild dogs. You would hear them howling at night, Abdulkadir said, and sometimes people were killed. ‘We would get scared. My mother would call us when it was becoming dark. She watched us all the time. If people died, and were buried, the wild dogs would dig them up. It was really shocking.’ The United Nations people would bring corn, and rice, but sometimes there was no food at all. ‘One night when my mother had put us to bed I saw that she was crying. She knew my little brothers were hungry. She saw I was looking at her and she turned away. She was angry. “What are you looking at?” she said. I said I would go where the UN had been to see if there was any grain spilt on the ground.’

T After nearly two years his mother was given permission to come to Australia, under the ‘Women at Risk’ refugee category. They flew from Nairobi and landed at Melbourne airport on a cold day in May 1993. Abdulkadir was nearly 69

UP WE GREW

thirteen. At first they stayed in a migrant hostel in Maribyrnong, then moved to Reservoir, then to Braybrook, where there were other Somali families living. Abdulkadir spent his first year in Australia in a language school, learning English. ‘Then I went to High School and was put in Year 8, even though the last school I had been to was primary school. I was sitting in the class, I had my pen and my book in front of me but I didn’t know what the hell I was supposed to be doing. I could not understand one thing of what they were saying. I started staying away. My mother would send me to school but I would just walk around the shopping centre. One day my mother came to school to give me a message and I wasn’t there. When I got home she asked me how school was and I said it was okay. She said, “Why are you lying?” She was very upset. I got a slap.’ He went back to school and gradually things got easier. There was a welfare coordinator who arranged help for him. He began to do well, went on to finish Year 12, then went to Melbourne University and got a Bachelor of Arts. He worked as a youth project worker at the Moonee Valley Council, finished a Masters degree in developmental studies. Last year he went back to Nairobi as one of two Australian representatives to the African Youth Parliament. ‘I thought about myself. I said to myself, this country has given you a second chance in life, you had better take it. ‘The Australian culture in a way has been very difficult. Sometimes I am torn between being Somali, being African, and being Australian. I want to fit into the mainstream. I am Australian, I am an Australian citizen, I want to contribute. I have so many friends here, African, Asian, 70

Lucky, lucky, lucky

Turkish, from Iraq and Iran. I have different bonds with different friends. I don’t feel intimidated here, because I know Australia values different cultures. ‘Yes, there has been some discrimination, I’ve been called nigger, go back to where you came from. Yes, there is racism, but most are really good people. Being coloured, being black, sometimes it is difficult when I walk into a class and I’m a very visible person... There is obvious racism and more subtle racism. If there are five young black people together that must be a gang, when if they were white, people would ignore it.’ Since September 11 it has been harder. Abdulkadir mainly wears Western clothes, but his mother and sisters wear the Muslim headscarf. ‘And of course people can tell I’m Muslim because of my name! I am always on the defence. I have to tell people, Islam is not terrorism, Islam is peace. I go to the mosque on Friday, and pray at work. This society respects your religion, you see, the office gives you time to pray.’ For Abdulkadir, going back to Nairobi for the youth parliament was a wonderful experience, but sometimes when he was there Abdulkadir felt strange and homesick for Australia. One day a panel was discussing the legacy of colonialism in Africa. ‘I said, “Look, we have had our independence for fifty years, let’s stop blaming colonialism, let’s blame our leaders for the corruption and bad management.” One colleague said to me, “But Abdulkadir, that is the white man’s mentality.” ‘You see what has happened to me, Pamela. I have become an Australian! I am a pure Aussie!’

T 71

UP WE GREW

In 1992 a Labor Government introduced mandatory detention for unauthorised asylum-seekers, including their children. Two boys, whom I cannot name because they have been the subjects of a Family Court action, were twelve and ten when they travelled with their mother, uncle and three little sisters, by boat from Pakistan, arriving at Port Hedland, off Western Australia, in January 2001. The family had paid a people-smuggler to bring them. Their father had been brought here by a people-smuggler a year before and had been granted a temporary protection visa. The family sought refugee status in Australia, claiming they were Afghans of Hazara ethnicity, a persecuted group in Afghanistan. But interviews with their mother, and language tests and other investigations persuaded the immigration authorities the family were not Afghani but Pakistani. The father’s protection visa was taken away. The mother and the five children were put in a detention centre. In the camp the children – the youngest was only four – saw people throwing themselves on the razor wire surrounding the camp, saw tear gas being used to control rioting prisoners, saw people slashing their arms and sewing up their lips in protest. Their mother sewed up her lips. The boys slashed their arms and threatened to kill themselves. In July 2002, aided by refugee activists, the two boys escaped from the detention centre. Three weeks later, accompanied by a Brigidine nun, they appeared at the British Consulate in Melbourne to request asylum. It was refused; there are no grounds for anyone to seek asylum in Britain from Australia. The boys were promptly flown by chartered aircraft back to detention. In May 2003 a study of children held in Australian 72

Lucky, lucky, lucky

detention centres found that all except one child was suffering a major depression. The children had been in detention for an average of two years and four months, and all had had their applications for refugee status refused. All the children were assessed as having at least one psychiatric disorder and most were diagnosed with multiple disorders. Five of the children had ‘self-harmed’, either by cutting their wrists or banging their heads against walls. ‘There isn’t a cohort of children as distressed as this group that we have been able to find anywhere in the medical literature anywhere in the world,’ said the author of the study. In August 2003 an order from the Family Court of Australia released the two boys I write of from detention. At the time of writing they are attending schools in Adelaide. Their mother, who lives under constant guard in a motel, has given birth to another son. Their lawyer says the children are doing ‘remarkably well’ at school and are now speaking English well. But he believes the oldest boy has suffered serious long-term emotional damage as a result of his experiences. In April 2004 the High Court of Australia overturned the Family Court’s decision, leaving open the possibility of the whole family being returned to detention and eventually deported. No justification, ever, for such a childhood.

73

In the doorway of Close’s china shop I sat down and cried School stories

T

here are undoubtedly worse things than having to face the teacher and tell her that yet again, you have not brought the items needed for the sewing class, but at the age of eleven, I could not imagine them. Half a yard of Caesarine, a packet of crewel needles and a spool of Silko thread were required. ‘Tell her you’ll bring them next week,’ my mother said. ‘I told her that last week,’ I said. ‘Well, I can’t help it; I’ve got no money until payday.’ I went, like a snail, unwillingly to school. In the doorway of Close’s china shop I sat down and cried. Mrs Todkill would roll her eyes, the other girls in the class would snigger self-righteously. Oh, Pam Bone, they’d say. Crewel needles, cruel girls. I put my head in my arms and cried harder. A man

T

74

In the doorway of Close’s china shop I sat down and cried

walking past stopped and asked me what was wrong. I shrank further into myself. It was a moment of the purest misery, over a square of cloth. After a while I picked myself up and walked on to school. This cup would not pass away unless I drank it. ‘Where is your material?’ asked Mrs Todkill, standing over my desk. ‘I haven’t got it,’ I said. ‘Never mind, I’ll see if I can find some for you,’ she said, kindly. The next year, when there was a choice, I chose French instead of domestic science, because you didn’t have to bring anything except yourself. It was a radical choice then, not to do domestic science. Only three girls in the school took French instead of cooking and sewing, and no boy chose French instead of woodwork. Naturally no boy would have chosen to do domestic science, even if such a choice were available to him.

T The desks, two students to each, were of heavy varnished wood, heavily scored with the names of long-past pupils. There was a lift-up flap under which exercise books were stored, a long groove at the top to hold pen and pencil, and an inkwell, which was filled daily from a big bottle by a student given this important responsibility (never me). Floors were bare, chalk-dusty. In winter there was an open fire at the front of the classroom at which the teacher would warm the backs of his legs. Some teachers were nice. Mr Cheetham, who taught me to love poetry: The splendour falls on castle walls, and 75

UP WE GREW

snowy summits, ooold in story! But I had to love it secretly, because to confess you liked poetry was social suicide. Mr Todkill (he and Mrs Todkill met and married while at the school) praised my own poems to the sky, then said he didn’t believe he could write them better himself, which struck me as immodest of him. A teacher whose name I’ve forgotten read us all the William books, one after the other, until his voice gave out, towards the end of one school year when it didn’t seem worth starting anything new. ‘Please sir, read us another!’ we’d cry. The day the new headmaster arrived he wrote his name on the blackboard in big letters. Gollan. We knew that meant Mr Gollan. Our French teacher, Miss Harper, was so nice and friendly one of the girls asked if we could call her Judy. ‘Absolutely not,’ she said. One day Mr Gollan walked into our history class and asked if anyone could tell him the most important discovery ever made by man. Nobody put up a hand for a long time. Because no one else did I put mine up, and answered: fire. ‘Fire,’ said Mr Gollan. ‘Fire.’ He said it twice. It sounded like ‘far’ when he said it. ‘Correct,’ he said, and turned on his heel and walked out. He had an odd way of lifting his heels when he walked. Unlike my sisters I was not good at schoolwork. I had learned to read before I started school and it seemed to me that was all I needed to know. Most of the time I would sit at my desk, staring out the widow, or reading Rilla of Ingleside under the desk while the rest of the class would take turns standing up and reading Captains Courageous, so slowly and boringly it nearly drove me mad. I thought later that in the ten years I spent at the Finley Primary School and Finley Intermediate High School I learned 76

In the doorway of Close’s china shop I sat down and cried

nothing. Yet I seem to know the multiplication tables, some vague facts about Australian explorers and British monarchs, and still can sing all the words of the Marseillaise. And remember a secret liking for algebra, perhaps because letters were always more pleasing to me than numbers. But in general school was a misery. Although I did get better at it later, in primary school I didn’t know how to make friends. I listened to other girls as they walked in pairs and observed that it was done by talking about some third girl. You would start by asking ‘do you like so and so?’ which was an invitation to the other to say no, she hated so and so. So, ‘do you like Margaret?’ I asked Lola one day, knowing Lola and Margaret had had a falling out. ‘Well, I like her better’n you,’ said Lola, crushingly. This lack of popularity was caused or compounded by my being hopeless at sport. My instinct when I saw a ball coming towards me was to shut my eyes and put my arms over my chest. The other girls seemed so big and rough, the softball and the basketball so hard and hurting. The one thing I could do was run very fast, but this was no advantage when I couldn’t hit or catch a ball. On the morning of sports days I would try to do something wrong in class (like knocking over the row of chairs stacked on the desks) so I’d be kept in and made to read in the library in the afternoon. Some punishment.

T Sepia memories of dancing on the windy school oval, a hundred girls in brown sports tunics with gold tasselled girdles, waving batons to the tune of The Merry Widow, in preparation for the celebrations for the Coronation of 77

UP WE GREW

Queen Elizabeth II. Songs at school assembly: Our land abounds in nature’s gifts, a beauty region rare. I didn’t quite know what ‘region rare’ meant. And at Christmas time: O Carmel, ye faithful, joyful and triumphant. Who was the faithful Carmel who must come to Bethlehem? Assembly on Monday morning: ‘I honour my country, I serve my king, I salute my flag. Flag, salute!’ Once, a teacher, standing in a line of teachers in front of the assembly swaying drunk, the other teachers trying to ignore him. Later, in the classroom, he turned his back on the class and peed into the fireplace. He went home that day and was never seen again.

T Going up into Finley Intermediate High, we were ranked according to how brainy the teachers thought we were. In the maths class, on the strengths of my older sisters’ academic performance, I was put into 1A, but six months later I was demoted to 1B. I had a friend whose name was Helen, who came each day on the bus from Tocumwal, a girl so quiet and shy we were bound to find each other. ‘Siwitcha?’ (sit with you) we’d say anxiously to each other when there was a school outing. I loved Helen. I loved her shiny light brown hair, her clear green eyes and her bandy brown legs. She sat in the desk in front of me and I longed to lean forward and kiss the back of her neck below the straight, soft hair. Being invited to go home for the weekend was confirmation of best friend status. Helen invited me to her home in Tocumwal, and I went, but the pleasure of it, riding bikes with Helen and her little brother around the Murray River 78

In the doorway of Close’s china shop I sat down and cried

tracks, was marred by knowing I couldn’t do the expected thing and return the invitation. And I couldn’t tell her why: that I lived in a garage, and was ashamed. ‘When are you going to invite Helen back?’ other girls asked, but Helen never did, and we were best friends until the end of school, and then wrote to each other for a few years until we lost touch.

T ‘Dux of the school. You should have been dux of the school,’ said Mr Gollan, looking at me over his glasses. ‘You’ve failed. I’m sorry, but you have no one to blame but yourself.’ I was fourteen and three-quarters. I had lined up with the other third year students in front of the headmaster’s office to find out whether we had passed the Intermediate Certificate. One by one we went in to get the verdict. Most came out smiling. Then it was my turn. Mr Gollan had thin reddish hair, a long face and rimless glasses, and I was in awe of him. But he was right. I had nobody to blame but myself. My sisters came from the same background and were excellent students. Two years before Dawn had been dux of the school and the school captain, Heather had always been near the top of the class and Veronica was dutiful and meticulous, and was a class prefect. For the first time in my life I felt ashamed, not of my home or my family or my clothes, but of myself. My school exercise books were a disgrace of torn and falling-out pages, covered with drawings of faces. I had not done ten minutes of study for the exams. I had been away from 79

UP WE GREW

school almost as many days as I was there, convincing my mother that I was sick. When Mr Gollan, who was kind behind his severe manner, had a school counsellor come over from Deniliquin especially to see me I told the counsellor lies. I had a room to myself with an electric light in it, and studied every night, I said. Now what was I to do? I had to go home and tell my mother I’d failed, and she would have to tell my father, and then I’d be in trouble, for he was proud of his clever children and despite our poor background expected great things of us. I saw my life ahead of me. On the way home from school that very day I went in to Harry Martin’s shoe shop and asked him if I could have a job there. Martin’s shoe shop was where a girl who was a bit of a no-hoper went. No one really wanted to work there because Harry Martin was known as a dirty old man. I started work there the following week; and yes, he was a dirty old man. I dreaded him asking me to try on the new shoes, because he would sit me on a chair and put them on my feet and run his hands up and down my calves. ‘Don’t worry, girlie, I won’t go up,’ he said when I squirmed. The chemist, Mr Hill, whose shop was across the road from Harry Martin’s, saved me. One day when I was walking home from work Mr Hill stopped his car and offered me a ride. On the way, he said ‘Would you like to come and work for me?’ Yes, I said. He said I was to ask my mother to come into the shop and talk to him about it, and she did, and it was arranged. Mr Hill told me later he had been to see the headmaster, Mr Gollan, to ask him whether he should hire me. Mr Gollan had said, ‘If you give 80

In the doorway of Close’s china shop I sat down and cried

that girl a job you will be giving her a chance’. I would work in that chemist’s shop for the next six years, wearing a white uniform, learning a lot about pharmacy, taking pride in my work, gaining self-respect. If I made a mistake Mr Hill said, ‘Use your brains. You’ve got ’em.’ When I was twenty-one I left my pharmacy job to get married, which was what young women were expected to do in those times. I had four children within five years and then out of the blue came a fierce longing to learn that had been altogether lacking during my school years. In the 1970s Gough Whitlam abolished university fees, so like many other women around that time, I became a ‘mature age student’. What brave new worlds were to be found there, in Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, Pope, Wordsworth, Yeats, Frost, Cummings! What excellent teachers I had! Again, I was saved.

T There were no wealthy children at my school in Finley because the children of wealthy parents went away to boarding schools in the city. When I was in high school, in the mid-1950s, the usual pattern for working class families, and especially for girls, was to leave school as soon as the statutory leaving age of fifteen was reached. Girls worked in shops or, if they lived in bigger towns or cities, in factories. Those with high ambition went into nursing, or teaching, as Dawn did. In rural areas boys worked on the family farm or went into manual jobs that needed little training. Even working-class children had more opportunities in the cities.

81

UP WE GREW

T ‘It was just a typical fifties Catholic upbringing. There are millions walking around with it on their back,’ said Jürgen, when I urged him to remember his school days. Well, there must be: Catholic schools have educated nearly one-third of Australian children. But though today Catholic schools are probably not significantly different to other schools, to non-Catholics back then they seemed strange, mysterious places, and the people in them almost of a different race. Catholic girls wore scarves on their heads to go to mass. Yet the boys and girls who came out of them spoke in broad Australian accents, just like us. The Catholic school that Jürgen attended was the Marist Brothers’ College in Rosalie, in inner Brisbane, close to the Fourex brewery. It was an all boys’ school, not a wealthy one, though there were some sons of doctors and accountants there. There were no women teachers, so the environment was totally male. In the hierarchy of harshness, the Marist Brothers were probably slightly less strict than the Christian Brothers. The Jesuits were generally regarded as slightly softer. Jürgen can’t remember any other migrant boys being at the school. He thinks he was not given too hard a time, though he was called ‘kraut’ and was laughed at because of his clothes. ‘My short shorts were a cause of great hilarity.’ Jürgen’s father, Hubert, had initially been reluctant to allow him to wear a school uniform, because uniforms were a reminder to him of Nazism. He relented, but would not buy him a school jumper. So in winter, Jürgen had to wear his cadet jumper with his school shirt over it. ‘So at 82

In the doorway of Close’s china shop I sat down and cried

assembly, here was the whole school lined up in their grey and cerise school jumper, except for one in a blue shirt – me’. This made him feel an outsider, said Jürgen. The school was big on sports: rugby union, cricket – they played this with mattock handles because the school couldn’t afford proper cricket bats – swimming, and cadets. It was a reasonable academic education. Jürgen liked, and was good at, chemistry and physics. ‘It was like all Catholic schools. There were statues, and crucifixes, and priests in their black cassocks, and you said the rosary every morning and you learned the catechism offby heart. No, they didn’t teach creationism, but very often we were told, you just have to believe this.’ Everyone got the cane ‘the cuts’ every day. ‘You held out your hand and they swung the cane down. No, I didn’t mind, really. It was part of being at the school. I don’t remember that anyone cried – in fact some of the bigger boys would laugh. There was only once I got upset. It was the day of a big athletics meet at the Ekka (Exhibition), and in the morning I got the cuts. I felt they should have been looking after me a bit better as I was representing the school!’ Though much has been written in recent years about the sexual abuse of boys at Catholic schools, there was none at his school as far as he was aware. ‘No, it was just in their cruelty that I remember them,’ he said. But surely, I said, they were just using the discipline that was normal and accepted at the time? ‘Well, as someone at the receiving end, I think they overdid it. There was one brother in particular, Brother Bennett, who took a particular delight in caning. But then I didn’t see any of the brothers do it with a tear in his eye.’ 83

UP WE GREW

Later Jürgen remembers there was one brother who didn’t cane the boys. ‘There was one. He was very soft. And – we destroyed him. We were so wild and undisciplined in his class, but he wouldn’t hit us. In the end, he would sit there and cry. Maybe he had a nervous breakdown or something. Then he left.’ There was another brother, big and round, who looked like Friar Tuck, and who was German, and was in charge in the canteen, and gave Jürgen left-over cream buns. There were at this time only about five boys in the school who stayed on until year 12 to sit for university entrance exams. Jürgen went as far as year 10 – one year longer than I did – then went to technical college to study industrial chemistry.

T Because when I married the first time, it was to a Catholic, my four daughters went to Catholic schools. Today Catholic schools are fairly nice, gentle environments where children’s individual needs and talents are recognised, high self-esteem is instilled and corporal punishment banned. But even as late as the 1970s, at least in the less exclusive Catholic schools, children were considered little sinners who needed to be aware of their natural badness and to have it beaten out of them. Here is Deirdre’s school story, in her own words: Sister Alphonsis was an ancient and angry nun of some obscure Italian order. This incident was typical of her approach to discipline: We were coming back to our classroom from the school 84

In the doorway of Close’s china shop I sat down and cried

hall – in pairs, as instructed. Sister Alphonsis led the neat rows of two across the quadrangle. My partner was a slow, unpopular girl called Bernadette. We talked a little; I can’t remember what we said. Other children chattered away to their partners. Sister’s mood seemed no worse than usual, and everything seemed normal enough. But once we were back in the classroom and sitting down at our desks, Sister said she had an announcement to make. She was very ashamed of the behaviour of her class on the way back from the hall. She said we knew that talking on the way back from the hall was forbidden (we didn’t), and she had specifically reminded us not to talk (she hadn’t).Therefore, the whole class was to be punished. ‘All except one little girl,’ she said, smiling indulgently at me. ‘Deirdre Pinto is always good. She didn’t talk on the way back.’ The whole class – including poor Bernadette, but not me – lined up on the platform at the front to wait their turn at having Sister’s ruler banged hard across their palms. I sat in my desk watching this spectacle, burning with embarrassment. I would much rather have had my punishment with the rest of them. As it happened, by 10 December that year – my birthday, and nearly the end of Grade 2 – I still hadn’t experienced Sister’s ruler. This was a minor miracle – for many children the ruler was a daily occurrence at least – and something that I believe weighed heavily on Sister’s mind. I was sitting quietly at my desk writing out my work in grey lead pencil. Sister came down the aisle and paused, leaning over me to comment that my writing was too faint. Apparently, I wasn’t pressing down hard enough 85

UP WE GREW

with my pencil. ‘I’ve warned you about that before,’ she said in menacing tones. Swiftly, the ruler was produced and rapped sharply across my fingers. Then off she swooped, grey veil and long habit billowing behind her. Sister Alphonsis kept a big picture of Jesus Christ at the front of the class. Jesus had long wavy red-brown hair. He wore a flowing blue robe and a beatific expression. His robe fell open to reveal a large pink heart, tightly wound in what appeared to be barbed wire. Sister would stare lovingly at the picture – the only glimpse we ever got of her better nature – and invite the class to look at the Sacred Heart of Jesus. She wanted us to think about the thorns piercing the Sacred Heart. ‘Children like you put those thorns there,’ she assured us. It was in our nature, a well-known fact – every day, every child pierced the Sacred Heart of Jesus with at least seven thorns. At least seven thorns, possibly more. The thought was more than I could bear. So many children; so many thorns. Each one pressing into Jesus’ soft pink flesh. Jesus looked so kind and brave. I knew about the cross-hanging incident. Hadn’t he suffered enough? At night I stayed awake worrying about my seven thorns, the ones that I had driven into the Sacred Heart of Jesus that very day.

T Deirdre, Susan, Carolyn and Patricia. All educated at Catholic primary and secondary schools, and none are now religious. Did I persuade them against it? I honestly don’t believe I ever told them of my lack of belief until after they were adults. But as Patricia, my youngest daughter, said in an 86

In the doorway of Close’s china shop I sat down and cried

essay about her childhood for a writing course, ‘In our family the sting of Catholicism was absent. It failed to permeate our consciousness and I think we always viewed it from the perspective of the outsider.’ Many strong and successful women were educated by nuns, and have said the nuns taught them feminist principles. ‘I think there were good Catholic schools and some nuns were good feminist role models but the nuns at our school were not,’ said Patricia, of her Catholic high school. Patricia’s friend Jacqueline agrees: ‘I remember in Year 10 the abortion debate was at its height. We were forced in religious education class to look at graphic images of aborted foetuses. I remember girls in floods of tears about the murder of unborn babies. Some anti-abortion group brought out a line of little gold badges in the shape of tiny babies’ feet. Girls wore them on the lapels of their school blazers. They even organised a bus trip to Melbourne so that we could go in a Right to Life march. I used to argue with the other girls about a woman’s right to choose. When you grow up in a family of nine children, how could you not think a woman has a right to choose?’ said Jacqui, with the voice of experience. It was not even very good academically, says Patricia. ‘Of a class of about a hundred kids, only five or six of us managed to get into university courses, and that was in the days when university education was still free and there were places for almost everyone. Because we were the bright girls, the nuns taught us that our options were nursing, teaching or librarianship. If only they had been as passionate about career planning and the importance of a continuing education as they were about the abortion debate!’

87

UP WE GREW

T More than half the students in Alan’s final year went onto University, a high proportion for a state school at that time. Alan also thinks he was an average student who was dragged up by the calibre of the other students. Alan is married to my daughter Susan, and they are both lawyers. In 1976 he began Year Seven at Muirfield High School, then a brand new high school in North Rocks, in Sydney. ‘It was a nice new school, very big and well equipped, and we were the king pins, because there was no one older to boss us around, and this was good,’ says Alan. The headmaster was Mr Stanton, who was the father of the later well-known nutritionist Rosemary Stanton. ‘He ran it as a fairly alternative school – no uniforms, no competitive sport, no school houses, and there were new things called tutorials, where we would sit in the common room and work on our own initiative.’ By then it was expected that most children would have twelve years of education, rather than ten as in my generation. New, alternative ideas about education were beginning to take hold. There were more choices in curricula, and students were encouraged to take more responsibility for the amount of study they did. In some schools competition was played down, and not everybody liked this. ‘I was never terribly unhappy at school – I think your peers make school good or bad, and I had some good friends there – but I hated the fact that there was no competitive sport. There was an emphasis on gymnastics, there 88

In the doorway of Close’s china shop I sat down and cried

was volleyball but no scores were kept, there was a brand new football field that was never used in anger... Sport seemed pointless and you hated going. I know some of the teachers didn’t like it either.’ Still, more than half the students in Alan’s final year went onto university, a high proportion for a state school at that time. And Alan believes that he was an average student who was dragged up by the calibre of the other students. ‘Later my parents wanted to pull me out, but all my friends were there and I didn’t want to leave. When Mr Stanton retired it became more standard, there was interschool debating and competitive sport. The last two years were better – one reason was that all the thugs and dummies had gone by then. There were two hundred in Year 10 and only about sixty in Year 11. It was a strange thing – that from this public school quite a number of people went into law and medicine. There were some very good students there, really good at things like maths and science. ‘I was the first in my family to go to university.’ Muirfield is now a selective school, and a lot of people move into the area so their children can get into it. There is even a growing gap between public schools.

T In the foyer of the Toorak Primary School are three posters: Respect, honesty, perseverance, responsibility, selfcontrol. Treat others the way you want to be treated. Respect each other’s differences.

89

UP WE GREW

A boy who has been sent out of his classroom for fighting sits outside the office waiting to see the principal. He starts telling me that the fight was not his fault, he’s being blamed unfairly. On another wall there is a display of punishments over the centuries: a Barbie doll with a severed head, a description of the guillotine and another of someone being hanged, drawn and quartered. This punishment originated in Persia 2500 years ago, it instructs. In the first classroom Madame (Anne) Gawenda is teaching the Preps French class. She reads them a picture book, in French, about a little hen – petit poussin. The hen’s feet are – what colour? ‘Jaune,’ say the children. Pied jaune. The children can say the numbers up to 10 in French, the colours and the parts of the body. The children are very sweet. One little girl, who is French, came to the school only at the beginning of this year, not speaking any English, but now speaks it fluently. You might expect a primary school in Toorak to be flash. This one isn’t, though it is in a nice red brick building, built in 1890. Boys wear navy pants, girls wear blue checked dresses with light blue windcheaters. The children are mostly not from rich families, as rich children around here usually go to private schools. Some of the students live in the nearby housing commission high-rise flats. Many of the children come from migrant backgrounds. However, some parents who could afford to send their children to private schools choose to send them here. People who don’t send their children to private schools often go to considerable trouble to find the ‘right’ state school. They put their names down at three or four schools and then decide which one, and this distorts enrolment figures. Marilyn Seen, the principal, has been a teacher for 90

In the doorway of Close’s china shop I sat down and cried

twenty-six years. There have been changes in the behaviour of children, she says. ‘There are often inconsistencies between what we teach and what they are taught at home. We try to teach responsibility, but it’s hard, when there’s no one in their world who wants to take responsibility. Rules are a new concept for some children.’ The school teaches an ‘assertive discipline model’. One cross against a student’s name means time taken out of recess. Four crosses means a trip to the principal’s office. It teaches ‘values education’. This year it also took on a ‘You Can Do It’ program, which is designed to teach children self-esteem, resilience, how to deal with conflict. Next year they are going to teach philosophy, Marilyn says. ‘Teaching has to change. We are preparing children for work that has not been invented yet. We have to give them the skills to allow them to be lifelong learners.’ Even the prep grades use computers. From Grade 3 they access the Internet and use emails. Though five is still the official age for children to start school, the trend is for parents to keep children back until they are six. Poorer children, though, come to school at the minimum age, often not yet five, because their parents need to work. In the old days, children starting school didn’t know how to read and write – that was the school’s job – but they did have social skills, like knowing how to obey the teacher and get on with other children. The difference these days, says Marilyn, is that most children start school with some numeracy and literacy skills but without social skills. ‘Kids don’t come to school with manners anymore. That’s more of a job for us. You see more kids not being able to relate to the position of other children. If someone gets hit, they hit back straight away... Kids are tuning out, 91

UP WE GREW

not being able to listen. We have to try harder to make the lessons snappy, otherwise they’ll get bored. ‘The problem is, children are telling their parents what to do. They are the parents, they should make the decision but they are letting their children make the decision. And we are having to deal with this in the classroom.’

T Of course there were always wild, uncontrollable children. In the old days, if they were bad enough, they were sent away to something called ‘reform school’. In Finley in the 1950s I knew a girl who went to the Catholic school, and who one day, when a nun was caning her, lost her temper, snatched the cane away from the nun and hit her back with it. For that she was sent to a girls’ convent school in Abbotsford, where she had to work all day in the laundry. These days, if they find a place, these students are sent to a school like Larmenier, which has a very different, kinder approach to rehabilitation.

T Patrice Duggan, the principal of Larmenier, has been talking to me for less than ten minutes when the first emergency occurs. A six-year-old boy is having an asthma attack. An ambulance has been called and so has the boy’s mother, but if she doesn’t get here before the ambulance Patrice will have to end the interview and go to the hospital with the boy. And there’s already been a ‘biting incident’ this morning, Patrice says. 92

In the doorway of Close’s china shop I sat down and cried

Within a couple of minutes the boy’s mother arrives and we move on. Larmenier, which is run under an order of Catholic nuns known as the Poor Sisters of Nazareth, is a school for primary school-aged children with severe behaviour problems. There are thirty-three students, all boys. All the teachers are women. The students have been referred here from Catholic primary schools. In our time, according to Patrice (meaning hers and mine), they would have been expelled, but you can’t expel them now because of the disability anti-discrimination legislation. Many of the children have been diagnosed with Attention Deficiency Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD). It must be comforting to parents to be told their children are suffering from a psychological disorder, rather than having them diagnosed as just being badly behaved, Patrice says carefully. Some are on the drug Ritalin. The students spend some of the week here and some at their mainstream school. The placements here usually last for twelve to eighteen months, and there is a waiting list. I comment that they are all boys. ‘We have had girls here but the girls tend to manifest their problems differently – they’ll be quiet, depressed, bitchy, where the boys are aggressive.’

T When we leave Patrice’s office she locks the door. The doors of all offices are locked when there’s no one in them ‘so that when a child throws a tantrum and runs away, you know where he isn’t.’ All of the teachers here have training in behaviour management and there is one full-time and two part-time 93

UP WE GREW

psychiatrists who also work with the children. Some of the children are extremely badly behaved. Patrice and the other teachers have been hit, kicked, sworn at, spat at, many times. There are no quick fixes for this kind of behaviour, says Patrice. The school’s philosophy is that there need to be firm boundaries, and that children need to know bad behaviour has consequences. Schools don’t talk of punishment any more; they talk of behaviours having ‘consequences’. One of the consequences at Larmenier is the time-out room. Patrice shows it to me. It is a completely bare, carpeted room. A child who has lost the plot is put here, with two teachers, until he calms down. ‘In that way, their dignity is respected, because the other kids don’t see him losing it’. Patrice also talks of ‘restorative justice’ – ‘For example when one boy bit another on the back this morning, we spoke to him restoratively. We asked him what made him feel the way he did and he explained the other boy said he couldn’t play in the game, and he felt rejected and that turned to anger. In the end he was able to say sorry.’ Patrice is also committed to a strong curriculum focus. She says, ‘Some of the children have big gaps in their learning. Children with these kinds of problems have to be able to kick goals, and one of the best ways of kicking goals is through academic success. We can have them here and send them back feeling all soft and fluffy but unless they can keep up with the others in the class they will feel powerless and there’ll be more problems.’ When I’m about to leave Patrice tells me to look out the window and points out the two boys involved in this morning’s ‘biting incident’. Biter and bit are playing together happily. 94

In the doorway of Close’s china shop I sat down and cried

‘Can you see how that gives me incredible hope?’ she says.

T A few years ago I gave a talk to boys at Xavier College, on the subject of poverty in the Third World. Xavier is a private college for boys, run by the Jesuits, founded in 1878. One of the Year 11 boys had read an article I had written in the Age, and took it upon himself to invite me. The school was having a week looking at issues of global inequality. They did things like dividing a block of chocolate – with one boy having 80 per cent of it for himself, and four boys sharing the other 20 per cent – to represent the allocation of the world’s resources. The school is well equipped and beautiful, with wide green lawns sweeping down to views over the city. How privileged these boys are, I thought. Today I talk to Graham Sharp, who started teaching there in 1968 and is now the school’s development officer. He agrees the students here are very privileged. The school has three campuses and a country property where students go on camps and retreats. Its senior campus covers a huge area, with football grounds, swimming pool, gymnasium, indoor cricket courts, courts for volley ball and basketball, a chapel and drama studio. The Great Hall, built in 1891, is big enough to seat all 950 students and 130 staff, and more. There’s a student exchange program which allows students to spend a year in another country, such as the United States, France, Hungary or Japan. Old boys include the former Victorian Governor Sir James Gobbo, the runner Robert de Castella and politicians Tim Fischer, Richard Alston and Peter and Julian McGauran. 95

UP WE GREW

It’s a traditional school but there have been great changes even in this over the last several decades, says Graham. ‘When I started teaching students were expected to fit in. There was no real recognition of the boys as individuals, and no real attempt to broaden their education to develop such things as leadership skills. And yes, there was corporal punishment and students really didn’t have much say about how things were done.’ Now, with me, the boys were polite and interested in my speech, and seemed thoughtful and caring. ‘Today the students run the school assembly, which would have been unthinkable then, and they organise the student exchange program, and they learn music and drama and debating. The other big difference is that now about half the teachers are women, and these have been fantastic role models. Things have softened a lot’. Year 11 students spend time working with disabled children at nearby Kew Cottages. The school does try to instil a sense of social justice in the students, said Graham. Do I resent this school being so wealthy? It’s hard not to see it as doing good. Even if its teaching is noblesse oblige, surely that’s better than noblesse not oblige? No, I only think all children should have a school as fine.

T Of all the dastardly acts of the former Victorian Liberal Government of Jeff Kennett, perhaps the most mean-spirited was the closure of the Northland Secondary College. When it was closed, in 1992, Northland was a run-down school in the Labor heartland of East Preston. It also had the highest proportion of Aboriginal students of any 96

In the doorway of Close’s china shop I sat down and cried

Melbourne school. It was one of about 350 schools closed as part of that government’s education cutbacks, which also included sacking one in ten state school teachers and slashing millions of dollars from the education budget. In Victoria now, 40 per cent of students go to private schools. A good few of the state schools that were closed were sold and reopened as fundamentalist Christian or Islamic schools. The Equal Opportunity Board ordered Northland reopened, twice. The government appealed, twice. Two years later, after a drawn-out legal battle that cost Victorian taxpayers around $4 million, the Supreme Court upheld the Equal Opportunity Board’s decision, and the school reopened in March 1995. I went to see it in November 2003. It’s not Xavier College by a long stretch. It’s a collection of fairly old, low fibro buildings, like thousands of other public schools across the country. But education is the surest way out of poverty and this is a very good school, with strongly committed teachers and a very determined and dedicated principal, Raffaela Galati-Brown, who led the fight to save the school.

T In the 1970s public schools educated almost 80 per cent of students. Today that is down to 70 per cent. The drift to private schooling continues, as even those parents who have an ideological commitment to public education lose faith in its ability to provide the best for their children. Who, after all, is going to sacrifice their own child’s opportunities for a principle? And the more that talented and problem-free children desert public schools, the worse public schools will get. 97

UP WE GREW

Raffaela told me that when they were given permission to reopen the school it had deteriorated so much it looked like a dump. They organised a group of long-term unemployed people to clean up the grounds and paint the buildings. A man who heard Raffaela talking on the radio was so impressed he donated more than $300,000 for a music technology centre and computers. Today, as well as the usual academic subjects, students learn how to produce music, fix cars, design and make furniture, set up businesses, administer computer networks. About 600 graduates of its art and design centre have gone into fashion and design industries and many have won awards. The quality of some of the work is amazing. A ‘new technology facility’ has recently been opened at the school, which aims to give technology a modern, highstatus image, as well as to overcome the anomaly that, while the surrounding region has a youth unemployment rate of 21 per cent, industries in the area have to go elsewhere to get skilled staff. Northland is helping to improve the lives of young Aboriginal people, the worst-off Australians on any social measure, in the best way there is: by educating them. It is helping to bring status to work done by less academicallyinclined people. And it is training to match skills with skills needed, for the benefit of its students and the economy. This is what good public education can do.

T In Sydney I go with my daughter Susan to take her daughter Hannah, who is eight, into her inner-city primary school. Hannah runs ahead of us and is immediately sur98

In the doorway of Close’s china shop I sat down and cried

rounded by shouting girls. A group of women standing talking nearby, who are friends of Susan, look at us together and laugh at the alikeness of us. Hannah and her friends clap their hands to each other’s, chanting: I threw him over London I threw him over France I threw him over the Harbour Bridge Without his underpants. (Later June Factor will tell me this is a Sydney variation of a common children’s rhyme.) Standing there, watching the children chant, I ask Susan what is different about Hannah’s school compared to the school she went to. ‘Well, mainly that there are nice teachers,’ says Susan. ‘Teachers who treat kids like human beings, who don’t think they need to be put down all the time. I hated school. Hannah loves it. At my school I had one good teacher, Miss Dawson, who taught English literature. She recognised something in me, that I loved literature. She gave me confidence. ‘But she was the only one. All the others were terrible. ‘It was a very harsh regime. There was never a nice gentle word for anyone. There were not nice, gentle teachers like Hannah has. Hannah cried at the end of last year when she had move up and lose her teacher... Yes, there is this thing today about not encouraging competition. One of Hannah’s teachers said to me “By the end of the year I hope to have them all at the same level”, and my heart sank. They should be striving to have each child at the best of her ability! But it doesn’t really work anyway because the kids compete against each other.’

99

UP WE GREW

T I’m taking Susan’s little boy Joel to what he calls ‘baby school’. It’s a childcare centre and kindergarten for two- to five-year-old children. The children here are friendly and confident and when they see me with Joelly, they show me their pictures and ask me to read them books. Joel is three, has been coming here three days a week since he was two. At first he cried, but now he’s quite at home here. Joelly wouldn’t eat his breakfast today, but as soon as we get to baby school he sits at table with the other children and has two sandwiches made from white bread and butter with vegemite, and some cut-up orange and some milk. When Susan makes him this exact sandwich at home, mostly he won’t eat it. Here the children know, without being told more than once, that they must put the tops back on the felt pens after they use them. Without being told, they wash their hands after going to the toilet. Without being told, they put their orange peel and sandwich crusts into the bin. At home they have to be nagged to do these things. At home Joel will never have an afternoon nap. At baby school he does. Joel says ‘Excuse me’ when he wants to get past. He must have learned it at baby school, laughs Susan.

T I am at Freya’s kindergarten in Melbourne. Freya is my daughter Carolyn’s daughter. She’s been worried about having to go to school next year, and Carolyn and Anthony 100

In the doorway of Close’s china shop I sat down and cried

have decided to keep her at kindergarten for another year. I bought her a book called I Am Absolutely Too Young for School. Children’s books today are about calming fears, unlike the old, scary fairytales. Freya is pleased to have her grandmother come to do kindergarten duty. Sometimes her father, Anthony, does kindergarten too. What a radical change that is from my childhood, and her mother’s! Some of the children run to Freya’s little sister, Ella, who came with us, and talk to her and give her kisses. Carolyn tells me you can tell the children who don’t have younger siblings, because they are fascinated with babies. The children who have younger brothers or sisters ignore Ella. The children at this kindergarten are nearly all Anglo, except for one little Vietnamese girl, Anna Rose, who tells me her mother is ‘at the farm, picking strawberries’. One four-year-old girl says to another, ‘But I don’t want to be your friend.’ ‘Anyway, I’m getting a new, special bed,’ retorts the first. I am helping the children to do jigsaw puzzles, which I have never been good at. I would hate Freya to be embarrassed by a grandmother who can’t even do jigsaw puzzles. I cheat a bit by matching the words – truck, train et cetera – under the pictures, rather than the shapes. After a couple I get better at it. Oh, the feeling of mastery when it is done! Freya does a painting for me in thick, bright colours. She is a very sweet girl, says the teacher, Nicole. Oh, she is!

T This is the good news: most state primary schools are happy, pleasant places, attended by children who are well 101

UP WE GREW

fed, well cared for and loved. They are taught mostly by kind and committed teachers. They are much better places than they were in my (and John Howard’s) day, better than they were in my children’s days, and infinitely better than they were in generations earlier than ours. In January 2004 the Prime Minister, John Howard, created a controversy by saying that parents are taking their children out of the state system and putting them in private schools because public schools are ‘values-neutral’. He could hardly be more wrong. In public schools – as in private schools – children are being taught sharing and caring and tolerance and not-bullying. They are taught cooperation. They are taught to think. They might not be the values Mr Howard and I were taught – allegiance to God, king and country, adherence to rigid sex roles, unquestioning of adult authority – but they are values needed to equip children for today’s world.

102

A little liberal or a little conservative Mark, Helen, Natasha

A

t 21 and voting for the first time I voted for the Country Party, purely to defy my father, who would have made me vote the way he wanted if he could. He once had an argument with my sister Heather over politics and got so angry he ordered her out of the house – then realised it was her house they were in. At 22, married to a Catholic, I voted DLP for a few years because I thought that was what good Catholic wives did. And I so wanted to be good! Then, around 1970, when I was about 30, I went back to study. Feminist and political consciousness hit me like a thunderbolt. What on earth could I have been thinking about? Of course I was Labor, had always been. Since then the pencil has scarcely strayed away from the ALP box on the ballot paper, though once or twice I’ve voted for the Greens or the Australian Democrats to punish Labor for something.

T

103

UP WE GREW

In most cases the people who provide us with our genes, are the same people who provide our nurture, so whether political views are formed by nature or nurture is difficult to decide. But what if you inherit a gene from great-uncle Chester that gives you an inclination to right-wing politics (just supposing something as complex as political outlook were caused by one gene), but you are brought up in a family of staunch Labor voters? What wins then, loyalty to family tradition, or the politics of one’s heart?

T Mark Latham, from dyed-in-the wool Labor on both sides, inheritor of Gough Whitlam’s old seat of Werriwa, staunch class warrior, sometimes says things that sound distinctly Tory. Yet, all those things Mark Latham has been saying about ladders of opportunity and working hard to make good – and that poor people might be able to save more if they didn’t drink and gamble so much – he truly believes. Some on the Labor side think the things he’s been saying are dangerously right wing. Others think he is putting forward the most important reappraisal of Labor economic policies since it lost the election in 1996. Mark himself has no doubts about where his political worldview came from. ‘Growing up in public housing has been the biggest influence on my political worldview,’ he says. As to the suggestion that he could ever have been anything but Labor – ridiculous: ‘My whole family is Labor. We’ve always been Labor, Labor by preference and by need.’ Mark Latham agreed to talk to me about his childhood for this book before he was elected leader of the Labor Opposition. He’s commonly described by the media as a 104

A little liberal or a little conservative

‘head kicker’. His language has got him into trouble more than once, as when he called prime minister John Howard an ‘arse-licker’ because of Howard’s support for American foreign policies. He’s trying to tone this down now. But he did famously once assault a taxi driver and break his arm, though he said this was unintentional and he was only trying to stop the taxi driver, who was taking off with his ‘property’ (his briefcase). One understands after talking to Mark why he would be very protective of his ‘property’.

T In any case, when Mark Latham talks to me on a hot September day in 2003 in his electoral office, across the road from the railway station at Ingleburn, he is friendly and helpful. He remembers that my sister Dawn, who works at her local Labor Party branch office during election campaigns, had introduced herself to him the week before at a Party conference. He apologises for having to eat lunch because he’s got to be somewhere else soon, and tries to manage a large salad sandwich while he talks. So, his family on both sides were old Labor. ‘Lang Labor’, his grandparents were. His parents both grew up in Sydney’s inner suburbs. His father, Don, worked nearly all his life at the Redfern Mail Exchange. His mother, Lorraine, stayed home to look after the children, until she later got a job as a school cleaner. Mark, their first child, was born at Crown Street women’s hospital on Christmas Day in 1961. The family then lived in a small terrace house in Alexandria. It’s near Erskineville, he explains, because I don’t know Sydney very well. When he was four the house was to be demolished to 105

UP WE GREW

make way for an expansion of the school next to it. Big new suburbs were being established in Sydney’s west, and the Lathams were given the choice of Seven Hills or Green Valley. His mother chose Green Valley because it already had the sewerage system connected. Can younger people today imagine how important that would have been, I wonder? How it was in the days of the outside lavatory, when if there was a big family the pan was sometimes overflowing by time the dunny cart came to take it away once a week? Today we walk into a lavatory and recoil in disgust if someone’s forgotten to flush it. Green Valley was the biggest public housing estate of its time, and was promoted as a garden estate, an urban paradise for the working class. Houses were fibro, three bedrooms, on quarter-acre blocks. From being a luxury in the 1940s, a three-bedroom house was already judged a necessity by the Housing Commission in the 1960s. Mark’s mother cried, though, when she saw Green Valley. It was so bare and isolated after inner Sydney. Hardly any shops or services. The land had been levelled, trees and bushes cut down to make way for the houses, backyards were red dirt that became clay when it rained. By this time Mark had two little sisters (another sister came later). It must have been hard for his mother, with three children under five, trying to keep their clothes and the house clean. What there was though, was space, for children to grow and play, and there were many children in Green Valley. ‘You had young kids everywhere. You could open the door on Christmas Day and you’d see hundreds of kids riding bikes, you know, new Christmas presents. The demographics were all the same: Mum, Dad, and three, 106

A little liberal or a little conservative

four, five kids from nought to fifteen. The family unit was made very strong, perhaps by necessity – there weren’t many services, the area wasn’t too flash, all we had was each other. Isolation perhaps was an asset in that regard: family became the main source of social cohesion,’ Latham wrote in a history of public housing a few years ago. Mark lived in Green Valley, at Harrison Street, Ashcroft, from 1965 to 1983 – from the age of four until he was twenty-two. His earliest memory is his first day at the Ashcroft public school. He was neither particularly shy nor particularly extrovert, he says. He had friends, loved sport, spent hours bouncing a ball off the wall of his house, with his kelpie dog as fielder. He played cricket ‘every Saturday in the hot sun’ for years and years. But he was a reader, too. He read all of Dickens, Treasure Island, books about cricket and football. I asked him if his home was full of books. No there were never enough, but there was a good school library. ‘I always had at least one book out. For ten years my library bag was the most important part of me.’ Religion didn’t enter into the life of his family at all: ‘They were not anti-religion, but we just never talked about it. We had scripture classes at school, where the Reverend Harris taught us about the Bible. It had no big impact on me. Unless you can sense the spirituality of it, it doesn’t, and I never could. But if others do, good luck to them.’ Sometimes there was ‘strife’ at home. Mark’s mother wanted to get ahead but his father was ‘not good’ with money. ‘Mum believed in the dignity of owning assets, and she was disappointed in that. We didn’t own a house, we were 107

UP WE GREW

renters, we didn’t even own a car.’ His mother had a big influence on him. She drummed into him the importance of hard work, study and thrift. In a speech to parliament in 2004, Mark said proudly, ‘My mother told me there were slackers and there were hard workers.’ Actually, what his mother had referred to were ‘no-hopers’, but an adviser had crossed that word out as being politically unacceptable these days.

T Mark Latham has made much of his underprivileged background. But in his own family, as the only boy he was the privileged one. In common with boys in most working-class families of that time, he was not expected to do any housework. When his mother took a job in the evenings cleaning schools, his sisters – Tracy, Jodi and Toni – cooked his meals so that he could continue studying. The strife in the house was the result of his father’s gambling. ‘My Dad punted. On the horses, mainly. Then when he lost money he’d have a few to drown his sorrows, and come home a bit full, and that would add to the problem.’ But it was the gambling, not the drinking, that was the main cause of trouble, and contrary to some reports, Mark Latham says he had a very good relationship with his father. ‘I would say he enjoyed his beer as much as any other working-class man. But he was not an alcoholic. He was jovial and happy-go-lucky. And I loved him as much as any son could love his father. ‘But I tell you,’ Mark says, ‘where there are arguments about money it makes you grow up dead averse to debt. 108

A little liberal or a little conservative

Today I’d be ashamed to lose more than fifty dollars gambling. I’d feel exposed if my bank balance got below a certain level. If HECS (the Higher Education Contribution Scheme introduced by the Hawke government) had been in when I went to university I would have baulked at going.’ At the end of primary school Mark won a place at a selective high school, Hurlstone Agricultural High School in Glenfield, then an all-boys school. His life was made up of study and sport, and he was good at both. It was in high school, playing rugby against boys from rich suburbs, that he became aware of what he calls ‘urban injustice’. ‘Our values were based on the politics of us-versus-them – the working class versus the North Shore. Our suburbs had nothing. Theirs had everything. It was around then, when I was about fourteen, that I knew I had to get involved in this thing called politics,’ he says. He read avidly the theories of ‘left’ authors and his sense of the injustice of urban inequality grew. When he was seventeen he joined the Green Valley branch of the ALP. Though his mother believed in the value of education it was never assumed Mark would go to university. No one in his family ever had. But Mark was dux of Hurlstone in his final year, and won a place at university. The Whitlam Government had recently abolished university fees, so to university Mark went. Then, when he was nineteen, his father died, at only sixty-one. Mark decided he would have to leave studies and get a job. But members of the local Labor Party and other ordinary people in Green Valley ‘passed the hat around’ for him. That was his university scholarship, he says. Mark Latham left Sydney University with an honours degree in politics, and for five years worked as a research 109

UP WE GREW

assistant for Gough Whitlam. In 1994, aged thirty-three, he won the federal seat of Werriwa, the seat Whitlam won in 1952. Latham has seen himself as the heir to Whitlam. He’s written several books expounding his visions for the future.

T Green Valley today is a lot greener than it used to be when he was growing up. There are still a lot of battlers – he represents areas in which there are unemployment rates of 40 per cent and welfare dependency rates of 80 per cent – but there is also a prosperous new class who live in big, doublestorey houses. For years Mark Latham’s father made the long journey each day from Ashcroft into Redfern to his job at the mail exchange. Other men worked in the local industries the suburbs were set up to service. When Mark was growing up in the 1960s there was full employment, everyone had a job. Fathers worked, mothers mainly looked after children. Today Mark believes the regular habits and social contacts that come out of work are ‘very, very important’, that they promote good values of pride and thrift. He believes the essentials for social mobility are education and employment, and that assets are the key to a dignified life. He believes in the market economy. The purpose of left-wing politics must be to ensure all Australians can get economic assets, decent incomes and the comforts of the consumer age. He’s called this ‘stakeholder capitalism’. In his book From the Suburbs, he wrote: Too much power is concentrated in the boardrooms of big corporations… Under (John) Howard, the old boys’ club 110

A little liberal or a little conservative

is back in town. The power elite in Sydney and Melbourne has the luxury of buying an expensive education and business opportunities for the next generation. The Liberals have managed to turn the reward system in our society upside down. The powerful are given the inside running while other Australians are left on the outside.

Meanwhile, the children of many people Mark Latham represents in his electorate will never inherit anything. ‘I didn’t go to a flash school. Our family didn’t own a house or a car and there was worry and strife about money. But there was love and there were good role models. I learnt the value of effort. My study was rewarded. I would do this (political work) every day without being paid because I believe in it. I’ve believed in it since I was fifteen.’

T A lot of people, perhaps most of us, are on the right on some issues and on the left on others. And most people change their vote at least sometimes, which is a good thing because otherwise governments would never change. Senator Helen Coonan is the Minister for Revenue and Assistant Treasurer in the Howard Liberal government. She’s a former barrister and solicitor who established one of Australia’s first family law practices. She was at one time of her life almost – well, some people might have thought she was – a bit of a leftie. She’s not now, but she’s certainly not stone-cold right either. Helen’s story is interesting because she had what is often thought of as a quintessential Australian childhood: a bush 111

UP WE GREW

childhood. In fact this was not at all typical, considering that most Australian children lived then, and still do, in cities or towns. Nor did most children have parents as comfortable and prosperous as Helen’s. I imagine Helen as the white-haired girl in Bush Christmas, which was the first moving film I ever saw, or as a girl from a book by Mary Grant Bruce – perhaps Norah of Billabong – dressed in khaki shirt and jodhpurs, riding her horse through the scrubby bush. Well, she was a bit like this. Never a girlie kind of little girl, in any case, she says. She rode a horse almost as soon as she could walk, and there was a battle every week when her mother tried to put a dress and hat on her for Sunday mass and the big spread afterwards. The Sunday mass was held on the wide veranda of the old family homestead of the Lloyd brothers’ property at Mangoplah, near Wagga, on the southern tablelands of New South Wales. Helen Lloyd was born at Wagga in 1947, and grew up in Mangoplah until she was eleven, and her freedom ended. Now here’s a happy childhood, if that’s what you want. Kind, loving parents who were devoted to each other and their children and who were tolerant and easy-going, for their time. No shortage of money. And freedom, and space, and a great number of cousins, aunts, uncles. Helen was the youngest of three girls, but she had a huge extended family. Her father, William Patrick Lloyd, known as Billy Lloyd, born 1911, was the youngest of seventeen children. Pleasant View, her father’s property, was a huge sweep of land, of undulating hills and wheat paddocks that Helen found beautiful. Her mother, born Mary-Louise Scantleton, was of German and Scandinavian extract, and had been a schoolteacher before she was married. It was from her 112

A little liberal or a little conservative

mother that Helen got her very fair skin, that used to burn so when she worked with her father in the paddocks. It was common in those days for a farmer who did well to marry a schoolteacher, which usually guaranteed upward mobility for the children of the marriage: the father had the money and the mother had the education. Mrs Lloyd was very ‘aspirational’, and keen for her daughters to have a good education. She intended them to stay on at school to get the Leaving Certificate, at a time most children left at fifteen. The Lloyd brothers had houses all over the place and they were all very close, so that everybody more or less lived with everyone, Helen said. Her family were farmers, and were Catholic and Liberal voters. This did not often go together in those days, when the party of Robert Menzies was seen as the natural province of respectable Protestants, and most Catholics voted Labor. Helen used to ride her horse to school, an isolated, one-teacher, one-room school, tying the horse to the school’s veranda post.

T ‘In those days we could go out and just vanish for the day, no one would worry, as long as we came back when it was dark. I was much younger than my sisters, and totally free. I had a horse, Punch was his name. I loved him. I loved to ride everywhere. I still love riding.’ The farm grew sheep, cattle and wheat. ‘We all worked on the farm. I was very active and loved the property. It was lovely country, good soil, good rain, there were good wool and wheat crops. The Lloyd brothers owned a lot of land, a big sweep of it. Later it was cut up for closer 113

UP WE GREW

settlement... I would sew the bags of wheat, I’d get twemtytwo stitches across, and make an ear on each side of the bag to pick it up with. I can do lots of things like that. ‘There was the main, big old homestead where my father’s family had lived – a great, sprawling house, I don’t know how many rooms, with a big cement veranda all the way around it, where they used to hang the meat to cool – yes, in meat safes. It turned me into a vegetarian. I still loathe the smell of freshly killed meat. ‘Our house was a smaller version of the main homestead, about five kilometres away from it. After school I would drop in at the main homestead for afternoon tea then continue home. I slept in the sleep-out, at the closed-in end of the veranda, with louvre windows. I liked it, it was my place. I was not a very confined child, mentally or intellectually or any other way – not very disciplined. I was extrovert, extremely extrovert, probably too much so.’ Until she was eleven Helen went to that tiny primary school at Mangoplah. Her uncle was the teacher at the school, until his only child, Helen’s cousin, died of tetanus, and the grief-stricken uncle and aunt moved away. Then there was a succession of teachers, and Helen didn’t try very hard, though she learned to read easily, and read voraciously, especially adventure books, or books about horses – The Secret Seven, The Silver Brumby. She ‘accidentally’, she says, read Peyton Place when quite young. And poetry: ‘We were all great at poetry, my father used to recite poetry all the time.’ Part of being Catholic and Liberal-voting (and well-off ) was that you went to boarding school. So when she was eleven Helen was sent off to Mt Erin High School in Wagga, run by the Presentation Sisters. 114

A little liberal or a little conservative

‘I think in retrospect they were wonderful. Well, I think a Catholic education does do something, something about making you postpone instant gratification. It also gives you a sense of inquiry, you question why would this be right, why would that be so. I think some of the nuns were quite wonderful women. I have great respect now for the dedication most of them had.’ But at the time: ‘I hated it. It was so confining, there were so many rules and I felt as if I were in prison. It was hard to cope, and I rebelled, I just stopped learning. I think my parents were pretty disappointed in me. My sisters had excelled. (Helen’s older sister was the first person in the district to go to university.) Everyone just used to shake their heads about Helen. Later in the piece I decided I had better stop mucking around. I decided I had better pull my socks up. I think in the end too there was a need for approval. Everyone needs approval.’

T Apart from holidays Helen never went back to the property at Mangoplah. She won a scholarship and went to Sydney University and studied arts-law. She got married, went overseas and had a son, was admitted as an attorney in New York, came back to Australia. ‘I started my own legal firm when I was twenty-five. Yes, that was unusual for those days, but I had a lot of support from my first husband. There were not many women lawyers around, and there were awful problems with domestic violence, and issues with family law... I did a lot of that work, and the firm was a great success. ‘I took a partner – a guy – then got admitted to the Bar. I was always interested in fringe politics. In the seventies 115

UP WE GREW

there was overt discrimination against women. I was at the forefront of agitating for change... As a young lawyer I got involved in women’s issues, I helped set up women’s shelters in Sydney, I did all the legal work, got the grants.’ It seems that something that happened in her childhood did directly influence Helen’s politics: ‘I remember my mother had a friend who was the victim of quite appalling domestic violence, I remember her coming to our house with her kids, terrified. She ended up homeless. There is no way you can live with someone who is beating you up. That had an effect on me. Of course later there were other things too, such as that you had to leave the public service when you got married and that you could be in a de facto relationship for thirty years and couldn’t get anything when it ended. You used the law as an instrument of change.’ When she was younger Helen had considered joining the Young Liberals. Then, after she became a barrister she joined the Liberal Party. People often say Helen Coonan was quite radical when she was younger, and could have been expected to join Labor. ‘A lot of people say that. But no, I have always been Liberal. I think the more you think about people collectively the more you devalue the individual. I very much believe in everyone being able to make the most of their opportunities. I haven’t thought of a better system than using enterprise and achievement, having a safety net for people who for one reason or another can’t do that. In any case I would not have been welcome in the ALP. Labor tends to be very tribal. I think Labor has historically been hostile to women. I’ve just never been attracted to that blokey unionism.’ Religion? ‘I went away from it for a while. Today I am intellectually very interested in religion and spirituality and 116

A little liberal or a little conservative

take a keen interest in what’s happening in Catholic politics. I don’t fool myself that it [Catholicism] doesn’t influence some of the ways I vote – on things like euthanasia and stem cells. It does provide a moral framework. You test it and temper it but I think you do see things through the prism of your value system.’ ‘My parents were incredibly hard working. And they had a very strong sense of community and family, of being there for people. They were incredibly thrifty, my father insisted on paying the bills the minute they hit the table. He was very neat, punctilious, he kept meticulous records, he’d wear a hat to go and see his solicitor in Wagga.’

T There’s a photo of Natasha Stott Despoja as a seven-yearold with thick, white-blonde curls down her back. She was born in the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Adelaide on 9 September 1969, the first child of Shirley Margaret Despoja, as her mother was named then, and Mario Sime Despoja. Luke, her brother, was born three and a half years later. For most of Natasha’s childhood it was just the three of them, Shirley, Natasha and Luke, though one of her earliest memories is of being hoisted on her father’s shoulders at a rally for Gough Whitlam, then future Labor Prime Minister, in the early 1970s. At twenty-six, Natasha would become the youngest woman ever to enter Federal Parliament in Australia. In 2001 she was elected leader of the Australian Democrats, the youngest person to be leader of an Australian political party. In 2002 she resigned as leader after some unpleasant 117

UP WE GREW

political infighting, but remains a Democrats Senator. Her parents’ meeting had been romantic. Her father, Mario, was born in Zadar, on the Croatian coast. In the 1950s, seeking refuge from then Communist Yugoslavia, he came to Australia, where he learned English and threw himself into study. (He would later, for a time, set up a rebel Croatian embassy in Canberra.) In 1963 he won a television quiz show – and Shirley Stott was the journalist who was sent to interview him. Shirley Stott Despoja is now a well-known journalist, who was for many years a leader writer and columnist with the Adelaide Advertiser, and was also at various times its arts editor and literary editor. When the family lived in Canberra – Mario having become a bureaucrat in the Department of Aboriginal Affairs – she worked at the Canberra Times. After they were divorced Shirley took sixyear-old Natasha and Luke back to Adelaide, and returned to work at the Advertiser.

T In Adelaide, Natasha went to Stradbroke primary school in Rostrevor, just a short walk from their house. She liked school. Although there are memories of that time, around the divorce, that she doesn’t want to talk about, or even think about, her memories of childhood are mainly happy. ‘We lived in a small house with a Mum, who had a job and did her best about childcare, but it was always precarious. As arts editor she attended theatre and other events at night as well as working by day. Childcare was an ongoing problem. I know Mum hated being beholden, but sometimes she had to depend on the goodwill of neighbours and 118

A little liberal or a little conservative

friends if the nanny or housekeeper or whoever we had at the time was unable to come. ‘In the seventies single-parent families were not common. The head of the family, the breadwinner, was not commonly a woman. And the mother, single or otherwise, was not often in the public sphere, a talked-about journalist in a small city. And even most single-parent families had extended family back-up. We didn’t. ‘Mum also had a severe hearing disability – much more severe in those days than she let on. I don’t think she received any help or consideration from her workplace that wasn’t forced by some means she devised, before the advent of anti-discrimination laws. ‘I had a political childhood in the sense that we lived the issues and we talked about them even as they swirled around us – school fees, custody wrangles, child maintenance, disability issues, women’s place in the world, women being denied opportunities, childcare, discrimination against single-parent families – it sounds like the news pages of today! It was our life. We lived these issues. We were the ones looked down on in the street because there was no father and it was thought we rented, and would bring down values in the neighbourhood – yes, that was spelt out to us.’ Natasha is extremely admiring of and grateful to her mother, describes her as an ‘enduring role model’ and the reason she is in politics today: ‘My mother was a radical feminist activist, a life-long feminist, as was her mother before her, who, even if she didn’t giver herself the title of feminist, was one, was an immensely strong woman.’ ‘On a daily level, I was imbued with a love of history, of politics and education. My mother was a passionate believer in the importance of education, as I am. It is my 119

UP WE GREW

entire reason for being in parliament.’ After primary school Natasha and her brother went to Pembroke, a co-educational private school. ‘We were sent to Pembroke to take some of the pressure off Mum – although the pressure of finding the school fees each quarter was always tough. She regarded the school as the extended family we didn’t have – and it worked. When she went overseas briefly for her job, we went to the boarding school there. ‘I feel very fortunate to have had one great parent. I don’t know how my mother did it, to juggle, as a single mother, children and work, in a sexist, patriarchal workplace, as it was. I remember my mother’s angst about childcare, that’s why it’s such an important policy consideration for me now.’

T At school, some of the girls Natasha mixed with were from conservative families who lived in Adelaide’s wealthy suburbs. She remembers at one time the girls talking about politics and herself saying in a lofty manner, ‘Actually, I’m a Labor person.’ ‘I must have been annoying at times, I used to lecture them, say, “It’s not about how you look, and you know, women still aren’t paid as much as men, my heroines are women who work in women’s shelters’’ – things like that.’ But in general Natasha got on well with other students. ‘It would be disingenuous of me to say I was shy. Probably people would describe me as outgoing, but they wouldn’t describe me as a show-off either. I was probably shy about some things, but the activities I was involved in 120

A little liberal or a little conservative

as a kid, debating, singing, stuff like that, were designed to overcome shyness. I was not the most popular girl but not one who had any problems making friends either. I studied hard, though not ridiculously so... I could cruise by on things I knew well – not maths, that was not a happening area, and I was no good at sport, but I enjoyed debating. But I was not a wild child, not skipping school or anything like that.’ There was also the fact of her mother’s writing. ‘Mum, the outspoken arts critic, regularly brought down the wrath of people on her head. Later, when she was a columnist, agreement or disagreement with her views swirled around our heads everywhere we went, including school. ‘There’d be letters to the editor about her in the newspaper, and school teachers would say, I didn’t like your mother’s column this week, while another teacher might use one of her columns to set an exam question. But as a kid it meant I was no stranger to the notion that you get criticised.’ Her mother’s work as a journalist had other positive effects: ‘The greatest privilege I had as a child was a mother who was an arts editor, and also a single woman, and thus she took me to opening nights. So I was seeing ballet, opera and theatre as an eight-year-old. I was lucky. When I was a kid my second home was among the journos at the Advertiser – until the Murdoch takeover of it – but my third home was the Festival Theatre. The politics of the arts were as much discussed as the rest. Also because she was literary editor there were a lot of books, I grew up with books throughout the house, and read a lot as a child. I will still go to bed and read rather than sleep.’

T 121

UP WE GREW

Later, there were court cases to do with her mother’s work, which increased the family’s anxiety – though her mother won. ‘There was a violent workplace incident and Mum’s career ended through no fault of her own. But we coped.’ Natasha had just entered university at this time. There she became involved with student politics. She was elected president of the Adelaide University Student Association. At school, she had always assumed she would support Labor. But by university she was disillusioned with Labor, mainly over uranium mining, and the introduction of university fees. She, and her mother, were inspired by Janine Haines, then the Australian Democrats leader, who was the first female leader of a political party in Australia. ‘My mum joined the Democrats years before I did and she did it as a feminist statement, because she was inspired by a strong female leader and the commitment of the party to those issues we cared about.’ So it was the Democrats, not Labor. University politics were a good training ground, every bit as strong and passionate as Federal Parliament. ‘I think I’m a really tough, strong person, but I still think I’m too sensitive about some things. To this day I get very upset, worked up about issues I care about. But then I think it should be like that. In the past few years [with the leadership battle] I don’t know whether it was growing another layer or shedding a skin, but I’ve come through that a different person, I think I’m much tougher.’ Because she spent so much time around journalists when she was young – journalists like Stewart Cockburn and John Scales, whom she respected – Natasha was ‘astonished’ when she became a senator that journalists wrote so often about her hair and dress. ‘I thought journalists had 122

A little liberal or a little conservative

minds above trivia when dealing with politics,’ she said. When she was leader of the Australian Democrats, and Simon Crean was the Labor Leader and John Howard the Liberal leader, she was the only one of the three who had not had cosmetic dental work done, but it was her teeth that were the subject of media comment. She should have them fixed, one commentator wrote. She hasn’t. They’re still crooked, she says, showing me. I can’t see that they are, not so anyone would notice.

T Of her growing up, Natasha Stott Despoja says: ‘There was no sense of adversity in my childhood. Certainly I don’t feel I was traumatised; but then I am not naïve enough to think none of it had any impact. I also think genes have an incredibly profound effect, apart from the obvious physical ones. I feel my childhood shaped me in a positive way. I have strong memories of living with my mother and brother – good memories. I feel very lucky. To have one great parent, that’s a blessing.’ Mark Latham votes the same way his parents voted and has the same lack of interest in religion. Helen Coonan belongs to the political party her parents voted for, and after going away from it for a while, returned to the Catholicism she grew up with. Natasha Stott Despoja inherited her mother’s left-wing world view and her feminism. Of the seven children of my Labor-voting, atheist parents, two now vote conservative and two are quite religious. I appear to have inherited my parents’ views on politics and religion. The question is, did they transmit it through the genes or the environment they gave me? To prefer nature over 123

UP WE GREW

nurture is supposedly a right-wing stance. That seems to mean, that thinking I was probably just born left-wing makes me right-wing.

124

Where the light comes from Writers and artists

S

ometimes a certain light runs through families. Kingsley Amis passed his on in spades to his son, Martin Amis, and Evelyn Waugh passed a smaller bit of his on to his son, Auberon Waugh. Helen Garner and her sister Catherine Ford are both writers, and so are A.S. Byatt and her sister, Margaret Drabble. Michael Leunig’s sister, Mary Leunig, is a published illustrator too. Look at Australia’s Boyd family of writers, artists, architects. Where does the light come from? Do you need what poet Maurice Strandgard calls ‘a vocation for loneliness’? How did Michael Leunig find poetic meaning in a slaughteryard? Why did my old friend Paul Carey, who is a sensitive man and a deep thinker, not become a writer like his brother Peter, but stay in the family car business all his life? ‘Well, there’s half a generation between Peter and me,’

T

125

UP WE GREW

Paul says. ‘And I grew up thinking my job was to work for the family. Plus we’re different people, of course.’ Of course.

T Michael Leunig might be the most famous person in this book. Not only are old yellowed drawings and poems of his stuck on fridges and notice boards all over this country, he’s known overseas too. When Susan, my daughter, was studying in Canada I sent her a couple of Leunig drawings, which she pinned up to the university notice board. Everyone wanted to know where they came from and how they could get more. My husband Jürgen’s cousins in Germany are mad about Leunig. Some women in England once wanted to make a sort of religion out of him. Leunig’s paintings hang in serious art galleries. His newspaper drawings – I wouldn’t call them cartoons – are alternately charming, subversive, cynical, uplifting, nasty. It’s not a matter of loving or hating him, it’s hating him one day and loving him the next. Or being outraged one day and laughing the next. Some social and political commentators enjoy being hated. Michael doesn’t. It grieves him to be hated. But what can you do but be honest to yourself? You can’t write or draw what you don’t think.

T Where did Michael Leunig, the working class boy from Maidstone, go on holiday once a year? Why, it was to Rosebud, that place to which my mother always dreamed 126

Where the light comes from

of escaping – though she never got there. And perhaps, in the 1950s, it was just as nice as my mother imagined it, the way Michael described it to me: ‘Rosebud was a dream for us, once a year to be able to go to that little fibro shack overlooking the sea. The man who owned it had a factory making packing cases. My father worked for him at weekends and in return he lent us this beach house. It was so divine, it was like a mythical wonderland, the beautiful beach, the wattles and ti-tree and banksias, and so many beautiful birds, the tracks going through the bush, the big ships coming into this beautiful bay of blue water. It was quiet, not many people around then. I remember learning to swim with my father. It was a time when I would see my mother and father together, enjoying themselves. My father would go to sleep on the beach, just a nap, and my mother would say, Don’t wake him, he’s been working hard. She was very protective of him then. I remember she would make us tomato and onion sandwiches for lunch. This was luxury, this glorious golden holiday. It grieves me to go to the peninsula and see it’s all so different.’

T Michael Leunig was born in 1945 and spent all his childhood in Maidstone, near Footscray in Melbourne’s west. His father was Bernard Leunig. His mother’s name before she married was Jean Grounds. It is thought the architect, Roy Grounds, who designed Melbourne’s art gallery, was his mother’s cousin, and that perhaps there’s an artistic strain through that side of the family. Michael’s father worked at the meatworks, as a slaugh127

UP WE GREW

terman. Michael did too, when he was older. He warns me that his memory of childhood is a bit hazy and vague, that what he tells me is bound to be impressions rather than events remembered with clarity. He also thinks people obliterate or forget things that are painful, are more likely to remember the happier times (recent research into human memory indicates that this is the case). It was a working-class suburb. Most of the men were factory workers and most of the women were engaged in home duties. He had a sister, Margaret, two years older, then two younger sisters, Kathleen and Mary born at twoyear intervals, then David, who was ten years younger. It sounds like a Catholic family. His father was in fact a lapsed Catholic, who had been alienated from the church because of his politics, and Michael’s mother was agnostic. Bernard Leunig was a trade unionist, and was in the Communist Party. ‘With my father, this was not related to intellectual communism,’ says Michael. ‘It was not to do with the grand social vision; it was to do with the factory floor. It was how men organised to look after themselves. Workers and management alike valued Bernie for his unique abilities in settling disputes. Although uneducated, my father was always in work. He went into the meatworks because he grew up next to them, his father worked there, everyone worked there. He went there when he was fourteen. Slaughtermen worked very hard, but were actually well paid. It was one of the few manual jobs that provided the dignity of a reasonable income. They were often shearers as well; it was a double-up job. My father, I would say, had a natural intelligence, though not as intense or restless as my mother’s. ‘There was no money in the background to inherit. They 128

Where the light comes from

had to try and buy a house, so we didn’t have a fridge or television until long after everyone else had them. It was a very minimal, weatherboard house, two bedrooms; my father built bits on later. The suburb was treeless, the soil was hideous, just rock-hard dirt. The climate is dryer than the rest of Melbourne, all you could grow were scotch thistles, and there were quarries and a government munitions factory nearby.’

T ‘I grew up to the sound of the blasting in quarries and machine guns from the munitions factory and the smell of the meatworks. This was home. It wasn’t until I was older that I crossed the Maribyrnong, and then the Yarra, and saw the leafy suburbs. ‘I look back with pity but also with dignity on that. That was the nature of it. It wasn’t like a bleak emptiness. I didn’t feel poor, I felt very similar to everyone else. We’d know people who owned a business or factory but they seemed just like us too. I had no acquaintance with wealthy people.’ Was it happy? ‘When I look back I would say it was strong. It was secure. It had meaning and I felt like I belonged. If that’s happiness then it was happy.’ Art was not a word Michael heard as a child. ‘I grew up with common working blokes around me. I remember being held in my father’s bare arms. He was a workingman so he always had his sleeves rolled up; I remember his big strong arms. One of my first memories is of sitting on the bar in the Cathedral Hotel in the city [where the City 129

UP WE GREW

Square is now]. It was crowded and smoky and full of soldiers and sailors. I was sat on the bar by my father, and a soldier brought me a glass of raspberry lemonade. I looked at it, and the sun shone down through the window, through the lemonade and made a red reflection on the bar beside it, and it was so beautiful I was transfixed.’ There was freedom: ‘My mother identified most of all as a mother. I remember her talking to other women about bringing up children. She had definite ideas, but believed in a bit of benign neglect and letting nature play its part, which I don’t think is possible now, when there is all this fear of paedophilia and violation around. It must have been there then but we didn’t know about it. So I was left to my own devices, allowed to get dirty, to play with tadpoles, to play in the quarries and the tip. So there was some danger, some rawness available to me, that is not easily available to children now. ‘There were dogs; we always had a dog, and chooks, and a vegetable garden. We collected horse manure off the roads for the garden. There were a lot of horse-and-carts on the street. I remember riding to school in the baker’s cart, him giving me a fresh hot roll from the oven. And chips of ice from the iceman, and going to shops instead of a supermarket. And the dunny cart, and that smell of phenyl from it! If I smell that now I get all nostalgic.’ ‘But sadly and to my mother’s eternal anguish, I came to serious grief in the rubbish tip one day at about the age of nine. I strayed into a burning pit of coals where I became tangled in coils of red-hot wire. I was horrifically burned on both legs and spent six painful and miserable months in bed where I went into my thoughts a lot and the days were terribly long. I had to learn to walk twice in my life. Also I 130

Where the light comes from

was born totally deaf in one ear and that had a significant effect on my personality, I am sure. Perhaps it inclined me to other ways of hearing and knowing the world. Michael’s mother had ‘a terrific natural intellect and spirit’. She had had a happy childhood until her father died in ‘ghastly circumstance’ when she was eight or nine. It was some kind of dark and horrible end, Michael thinks, though his mother would only ever give hints about it. Before her father died she had lived a middle-class life in Coogee, in Sydney. Then she went from that to extreme radical poverty. She was sent to live with a maiden aunt in Melbourne. If that had not happened she would have had a different, more educated life, Michael thinks. She was musical, played the piano, sang sad or sentimental popular songs, knew many little homilies and folk poetry. Despite her agnosticism Michael’s mother sent her children to Sunday school because she saw it as another resource for them. The theology went over Michael’s head but he loved the hymns and the parables and Bible stories. ‘You asked about the light. My great-grandfather on my mother’s side was an apothecary, a kind of doctor, who had seventeen children with two wives. His first wife died, then he had an Irish housekeeper named Brigid McManus, and he married her. Now the descendants of his first wife all became doctors or medical types, but the descendants of Brigid’s children become sculptors and architects and travellers. ‘My father’s forebears were labourers and miners and meatworkers. My great-grandfather came from northern Germany but the name probably had a Finnish origin, it seems.’

131

UP WE GREW

T Memories: the smell of the Sunday roast lamb, coming out of all the houses in the street as he walked home from Sunday school, and the smell of the mint he would pick through the gate where it was growing, to take home for his mother to make the mint sauce that went with the roast lamb. So familiar these smells, these experiences, I wonder if they are almost universal to our generation of Australian children – the saving of the knucklebones from the roast lamb, to be dried, sometimes painted and decorated, to play jacks. Other games, British bulldog, Queenie, barely remembered schoolyard play and chants. A lot of stories and songs of the war. Leunig’s uncle built them a wireless and they listened to the songs of the war that were still so popular in the 1950s: the Vera Lynn songs – With love that’s true, I’ll wait for you, Auf Wiedersehn, Sweetheart. He had music lessons, learned the piano. ‘There were a lot of children around, the street was a place you could be at night, there was a great sense of security, of community, a reliability. Life wasn’t too dramatically changing. There was solitude, space, and time to think. It was not an overcrowded childhood. I do recall people saying, Oh, Michael’s a dreamer, he’s in a world of his own, but this was not seen to be a problem. I was allowed to be in my world alone, in the sandpit, making sand cities for ants. But I was social too. I think I could be with me or with someone else pretty well.’ He liked to make things, out of bits of wire, bent nails and bits of timber he found where men were building the 132

Where the light comes from

new houses for the growing population; ‘found objects’ from the tip, bits of fuse, shell casings and bullets; he got some gunpowder from somewhere and made explosives – the dangerous things boys did then. He had an impulse to experiment with materials, to put things together that didn’t belong together to see what happened – ‘Like I was resisting the sheer predictability of life.’ He had a paper round. His father would wake him at 5.30am, and they would have breakfast together before his father went off to the meatworks and Michael to the paper round. This was a good time. ‘My father was essentially well disposed to whoever came up the garden path. He was not interested in a divided world. I think in many ways I have inherited his psychological view of the world.’ When Michael was older, after school, he worked in a butcher’s shop. In the 1950s a great flood of migrants, displaced from Europe, moved into the Footscray area and changed the character of it. The schools became populated with ‘new Australians’ – not such a bad term, said Michael, though later it was not proper to use it. By the time he went to Maribyrnong High School it was 60 to 70 per cent migrant. ‘So that meant I grew up with a lot of European influences – Russian, German, Poles, Dutch, Italian and Greek. It was a poor, very under-funded school – we used to have to have some of our lessons in the showgrounds – but there were some astonishingly good teachers. They were English and Europeans, highly educated people in their own cultures, they were different. I would go to Russian Easter services, I’d go to the home of Russian and German friends, I’d hear stories of war, of the bombing, of refugees. I was 133

UP WE GREW

drawn to the depth in these cultures.’ When he was twelve or fourteen, Michael’s older sister Margaret went to the Emily Macpherson College of Domestic Economy. ‘She studied cooking and tailoring and similar subjects at quite a high level. Some of the other girls there including Margaret went on to Melbourne tech to learn art. Things lead on, don’t they? She would bring home pots she made, painting and decorating them at home, and I was interested. ‘Then she started taking me to some of her friends’ houses, who lived in Eltham. I’d never been there, and there would be a mud brick house, blokes with beards and sandals, firing pots, paintings on the walls. They were bohemians, I suppose you would call them – I was probably in the company of people like Arthur Boyd, and John Percival, without my knowing it... Then my younger sister did art at Prahran and mixed with a lot of artistic types and suddenly, there was art in the family.

T ‘I was academically hopeless, though I liked writing compositions. I could do sport but I couldn’t take it seriously. Because of that, because I was not interested in sport, I suffered in the male culture. I got picked on a bit. Tall people get picked on, and I was very tall and I also had a gentle nature. ‘In this male culture where I lived, there was a code of honour, such as that you worked hard, put in a fair day’s work for fair day’s pay. That was good but there was a lot of aggression too, to anyone who was too different. There were a lot of young men in the streets. I saw a lot of terrible 134

Where the light comes from

fights. I was in fights. Once I had a knife tear down the back of my coat. I had to stand up for myself a lot, and I learned to do that. The only way you could beat them was to be either madder than they were or saner than they were.’ He went to university to do arts, but dropped out after about six months and went to work in the meatworks. There was poetry in the slaughter-yard, he found. ‘It was dirty, hard work, it was a cold, dark environment and there were rough types there. But it didn’t brutalise me. It sensitised me. You saw these beautiful animals, and you killed them. This was my job. The beast comes up the ramp to the killing crush, and I put this captive-bolt pistol to its forehead, pull the trigger and it drops dead instantly. And it moves along on a chain, and someone else cuts its throat. I felt pride that I could pull my weight and earn my living doing that. And all the time in my mind while I was working there I was thinking of poems and songs. Some of my most alive times have been when I was working like this.’

T While he was at Monash University Michael had put some drawings into the university magazine. There was a lot of underground publishing happening at this time, and people started asking him to draw for various magazines. He was and is self-taught, has never had a lesson. In 1969 the publishers of the Age launched a short-lived afternoon newspaper, Newsday, as competition for the Herald, and Michael was asked to work for it. He was paid $100 a week, which seemed to him a king’s ransom. 135

UP WE GREW

‘They say a good teacher is good fortune. So is a good employer. I was given a chance and I took it.’ Now Michael lives in country Victoria with his second wife, Helga, and their two children. He also has two sons from his first marriage. He has chooks and a dog and a vegetable garden and is in the local fire brigade. His house does not have a television and his children are home educated. ‘In the country now I feel echoes of what my childhood was like. Modern life is so passive and at the same time so overstimulated. What I had was space, and freedom, and time to be alone and even bored at times. Creativity can grow out of being bored, and coming past that boredom. ‘Cross your fingers, that’s what you try to do for your children. In the acorn is the oak. What you have to do is let it grow. To stunt it, that is what you dread to do.’

T So that at last when the wall of an artery burst like a shell in his brain I could not grieve. On the day of his cremation I went to work as usual.

Maurice Strandgard is a tall, thin old man – a poet would not prefer the world ‘elderly’, I’m sure! – wears very thick glasses and has a wheezy voice, and laughs at himself often. 136

Where the light comes from

He has a black belt in Judo-Jui-Jitsu. It’s a mystery, where the poetry in him came from. His mother, Clara Mendenhall, born into the servant class in London late in the nineteenth century, met an Indian man in a turban working at the Crystal Palace – which had been designed by Prince Alfred to represent parts of the Empire – who persuaded her he was an Indian prince. She married him, when she was twenty-one, and they had two sons. But before long her Indian prince died of tuberculosis, and so did one of her little boys. She was left, just plain Mrs Singh, with the other little boy. It was not a good thing, in those days, to have such a name, and a darkskinned child. Assisted passages were being offered to Australia, so she took one, and she came here, with her small son, and got a job at the Sunbury lunatic asylum. Why on earth there? They were offering some kind of single-mother facility, Maurice thinks. And there she met Maurice’s father, another asylum employee, named Albert Edward after Queen Victoria’s consort.

T ‘My father was a supreme neurotic, as a consequence of being a bastard,’ says Maurice. Albert had been born out of wedlock in Clunes, a gold mining town near Maryborough, in Victoria. Albert’s mother had two other children out of wedlock. One of those children ‘mysteriously didn’t live very long’, says Maurice. He thinks ‘something happened’ 137

UP WE GREW

at Clunes. In any case, his grandmother was ‘an utter and absolute virago’, theatrical in manner, screaming abuse at all and sundry. Maurice’s father had grown up and joined the army, fought in World War I, been thrown out for drunkenness, re-enlisted in another name. Then, after the war, he got the job as an attendant at Sunbury. He was a big man, tall, with broad shoulders, but self-conscious, neurotic, socially inept. ‘I imagine my mother would have proposed to him,’ said Maurice. She had a son to support. ‘So they got married, and I came along.’ That was in 1923. Later there were two sisters. His father got a transfer to Mont Park asylum, as it was called then, and the family moved into a war service house in East Preston. ‘My mother absolutely doted on me. My earliest memories are of having a guts-ache, lying face down over my mother’s knee, her patting me. She must have seen in me her chance to rectify what for her had been a mistake, marrying an Indian. She had unreal expectations of me. ‘As a consequence, my father became insanely jealous of me. Whenever my mother would make an approving remark to me, he would say something disparaging. He sneered at most of society, but I got the full barrage of his envy. It was constant, every day. Whatever it was I had to do, he said I wouldn’t be able to do it. He also disparaged my stepbrother in the most awful fashion, words like black, nigger. The boy had no choice, nowhere to go, so he just had to sit at the table at meal times and listen to this. We all had to.’ Tears come to Maurice’s eyes when he tells me this. His father would lie in bed, screaming, ‘Mrs Singh, Mrs Singh’, at Maurice’s mother. Maurice had night terrors. He was also painfully shy and very short-sighted. At school, 138

Where the light comes from

East Preston primary school, he couldn’t see the blackboard, had no idea what was being taught. But at home, he taught himself to read, and read everything he could find, his father’s true detective stories and National Geographic magazines, books his sisters would get as Sunday School attendance prizes. When he was nine a school doctor saw that he needed glasses, a note was sent home and his mother took him to Coles & Garrard. But his mother didn’t want her perfect child to be seen in spectacles, so told him to wear them only in the classroom then take them off. At school he was bullied, called four-eyes. ‘I was an ideal subject for bullies. It was, Oh here’s Strandgard, let’s get him.’ Then he caught double pneumonia and nearly died, spent a long time in the Royal Children’s Hospital and then at a convalescent home, lost a year at school, which meant that when he went back he had to get used to a lot of different children. As well, while he was in hospital his glasses were put in a drawer somewhere and lost, and he didn’t get another pair until after he left school and started working. ‘I was frightened of male teachers; I was frightened of any adult male. They were all my father, one removed.’ He hated sport as well. The low point in his schooling was getting five out of 100 for maths. In his last year at primary school his teacher discovered he didn’t know the multiplication tables, so he had to stay in each day until he learned them. Sometimes after school he wouldn’t, couldn’t, go home, until it was getting dark and some other boy’s mother, seeing him on the street, ordered him too. ‘The street’ would often look after children whose parents didn’t. One day the class was given a different test. It was an IQ 139

UP WE GREW

test, and Maurice did very well in it. ‘But you know, I never thought I was stupid even though the whole world said I was.’

T Maurice left school at fourteen and got a job in a factory assembling light fittings, then another one putting threads in car handles, then one putting caps on tubes of toothpaste, then as an apprentice in an Abbotsford boot factory. At the boot factory he asked a man working next to him the time. The man said ‘But the clock’s right there.’ The management was told Maurice couldn’t see well, and he was sent off to the Eye and Ear Hospital and fitted for new glasses at last. And his mother, still determined to improve him, dragged him to RSL dances – ‘I had a profound admiration for women, but I was terrified of them. At the boot factory there were young women, they were a bit on the rough side, they’d tease me, but I thought them beautiful. I would look at women, at schoolgirls, walking down the street and see these beautiful, mysterious, remote creatures.’ How beautiful they seem/ Bare arms moving/ stirring remembrance/ of the clear rope-water/of a mountain spring. World War II broke out, and he joined the army. His career there was ‘undistinguished; another failure’. He was sent to New Guinea but wasn’t allowed into the fighting forces because of his poor eyesight. After he was discharged he found a job as a panel beater, then a roof tiler. He got married – ‘to someone I shouldn’t have’ – and had six children. His children have helped to heal him, he says. 140

Where the light comes from

T Maurice began writing poetry, while he was still married, when he got a job at the Epworth Hospital. He saw this job as his career. ‘I always knew I had an inclination to nurturing. I developed my own way of looking after patients and would visit them even after hours. I stayed at the Epworth for ten years. I loved it.’ When there were quiet times at the hospital Maurice read. He read anthologies of poetry, and wanted to write some himself. ‘I just wrote the things that welled up inside me,’ he said. He sent his poems to the poet Judith Rodriguez, who was then running a poetry-writing course, and she told him she believed they were ‘publishable’. Where did the impulse to write poetry come from? ‘God knows,’ says Maurice, who doesn’t believe in God, though the Bible study he had in Sunday School has helped his poetry. ‘My mother read little, my father’s taste ran as far as true detective stories.’ Maurice rose from the table, walked away and wept when I asked him if he had hated his father. ‘I don’t think hatred is in my genes,’ he said. There’s been anger, but not so much now, though he still burns over injustices he reads about. I’ve given up flying/ well actually I had to, my wings fell off. It was all that falling onto my back/ in paroxysms of rage that did it. Broke the hinges or whatever they are called.

T 141

UP WE GREW

If Maurice had had just one good teacher, might his life have taken the turn it did much earlier? Would he have become a poet if he had not suffered? ‘There has to be suffering, without a doubt,’ says Maurice. ‘But I’d much rather have had a happy life than be a poet.’ If he’d had a different life June Factor’s father may have become an opera singer. My great-grandmother, who signed her name with a cross, may have become a great writer, if she’d ever learned to read and write. And Joanna Murray-Smith grew up enveloped in literature, but still, with her own sufferings. Was it inevitable she’d be a writer?

T ‘This could be my earliest memory – lying on my bed, my father lying next to me, reading Tin Tin to me. I must have been awfully young, I’m sure he must have been paraphrasing it. And I remember my mother coming in, standing above the bed, looking down at us and smiling. She had an incredibly excited sound in her voice. She said, “Won’t it be wonderful when you can read, Jo?” And I was excited too, because I sensed that the time was not far away that I would be able to read, and I would be let into this utterly mysterious and powerful world.’ Joanna Murray-Smith is successful, attractive, well travelled, intellectual and nice. She lives in a lovely old house in Mt Eliza, overlooking a beautiful garden, and is married – to Raymond Gill, Arts Editor of the Age – and has two little boys (and since this interview a baby girl). She has made us sandwiches and tea, and has sent Charlie, her two year-old, to be looked after by her mother for a couple of hours, so we can have some peace. 142

Where the light comes from

Joanna has written ten plays – the first, Angry Young Penguins when she was in her early twenties – an opera and two novels. Her play Honour has been performed in London and on Broadway, where she was given a standing ovation for it. She’s just won the Victorian Premier’s Award for Drama for the second time. It’s nice to be recognised in your own town, where your mother runs into her friends in Safeway, she says. She’s the daughter of the late Stephen Murray-Smith, who was the editor of the literary magazine Overland. She does seem to have had a charming, wonderful life.

T Joanna was born in the Mornington Bush Nursing Hospital, not far from where we sit, in 1963. She was the youngest of three children by nine years – truly an afterthought, she says. Her older sister, Cleeve, her brother David and her parents – Nita, a school teacher, and her father, Stephen, a reader in education at Melbourne University – lived here in Mt Eliza, in a big, rambling weatherboard house with a big bush garden. Summer holidays were spent on a magical island, Erith Island, in Bass Strait, halfway between the mainland and Tasmania. Later Joanna would use this island as a backdrop for her first novel, Truce. She started going there with her parents when she was only a few months old, and goes there now, with her own children. That’s another of her earliest memories. ‘We got there by chartering a fishing boat. It was an uninhabited island but there was water on it, and one small cabin that my family had – other families we went with had 143

UP WE GREW

tents. We were there between three and six weeks every summer… The island has probably been the link between my childhood and my creative life as a writer. It was a huge advantage for an imaginative child. There was complete freedom, we literally ran wild, we could disappear in the morning and come back when we were hungry. It was – is – about two miles square, it’s astonishingly beautiful, rugged, massive cliffs rising up from the sea, rocky bays, beautiful beaches, sand dunes and hills. ‘There was time there to think and to imagine. There was no danger, only the water, and we knew about that. We forgot the mainland existed, it was always a tremendous shock coming back on the fishing boat, seeing the neon lights at Port Albert.’ Stephen Murray-Smith came from an ‘upwardlyaspiring, well-to-do Toorak family’. Joanna’s mother Nita is secular Jewish. They were thinkers, intellectuals; as parents they were kind and encouraging but not too intrusive.

T Yet underneath that sunlit childhood, the summers on the island, the big garden at home, the loving comfort of her parents, there were dark places. ‘My mother came to Australia as a little Jewish girl from a village in Poland in 1939. She would have been eleven. Her entire town was basically obliterated, almost everyone she knew before the age of eleven was murdered, including her most beloved grandparents. Their throats were cut in the basement of their farmhouse in Poland. My mother didn’t have a personal recollection of war because they got out beforehand, but as children of survivors, the weight of that 144

Where the light comes from

history was communicated to us. Not necessarily through words and certainly not through religion, but it was felt.’ Joanna was an outgoing, sociable child, an extrovert, she says, but she spent a lot of time by herself. ‘Because I was the baby, because the others left home when I was quite young, I was like an only child. I spent a huge amount of time listening to adult conversation. They’d stay up boozing and talking until all hours, and I’d fall asleep listening to the sound of their voices. I’ve asked myself, why do stories come to me in the form of dialogue? I think it’s from listening to those adult voices. There was a Socratic dialogue always going on, with their friends. They were all like-minded, they were all lefties but they played devil’s advocate with one another... ‘It always intrigues me now, how do you separate the power of a voice from the truth? Is it just the most powerful voice? Is truth something that slips between the arguments? They [her parents] were passionate people, politically passionate but in other ways too. There was always a strong sense of drama. The excitement generated by those voices captivated me.’ She went to Mt Eliza Primary School, in those days a small, bush school. ‘I hated school. I don’t think there was anything wrong with the school. I just felt different. There were a lot of little reasons: I had older parents, they were book readers, I had this other life on the island, I looked different because I had very curly hair – like it is now (pulling at it). ‘I was teased a lot for that. I remember also feeling – this sounds unbelievably precious, but I remember feeling that children were not nice to each other. Why were children not nice to each other?’ 145

UP WE GREW

In 1971 Stephen Murray-Smith had a year’s sabbatical in London, and the family went too. ‘It was that year in London that I began to write. I was eight. It was a fantastic year. The school I went to was Primrose Hill primary. It was an arty, alternative school, where lefty intellectuals sent their kids. There was a mix of kids of the intelligentsia and local poor kids there. I became close friends with a girl from a fairly tough, poor background, and it made me understand things like poverty and class differences. Of course at Mt Eliza there were kids who were poorly dressed, who looked dirty. But class is not as strong here.’

T ‘When I was about nine I told my parents very pompously that I was going to be a writer! They said, that’s wonderful. I started to write little stories. It was a huge advantage to have parents who thought being a writer was a normal thing to be – not only normal but admirable. They made a big fuss about the stories I wrote. My father would bind them nicely so they looked impressive. They were very encouraging. ‘I read a lot. My father had an arrangement with the Little Bookroom [a children’s book shop in Melbourne]. They would send me books in a brown paper parcel, addressed to me, I think once a month. I’ve tried to do this for my kids but they don’t do it any more. I read all the classics and so many others, C.S. Lewis, Enid Blyton, Pippi Longstocking. And my father read me Henry Lawson short stories. They had a huge impact. I think [Henry Lawson] had as big an influence on my writing as anyone. 146

Where the light comes from

‘I think I went through periods of depression as a child. I think that is a fundamental part of being a writer. You were burying down deep inside yourself, being overwhelmed by feelings that were not controllable. I was bursting with feelings I had no way of getting on top of. I felt everything voluptuously – sorrow, fear, happiness, everything very intensely. Like I do as an adult, but I’m better at managing it now. I think my imperative to write comes from an inability to manage my feelings in another way. Writing is a way to survive the intensity of those feelings. ‘Both my parents had a very strong sense of justice, I grew up hearing them talking about justice, talking about the Rosenbergs – they had a very strong connection with the American left. That sense of justice is very alive in me. My plays on some level are trying to come to grips with separating truth from pragmatism and prejudice. The moral questioning at the heart of my plays is very reflective of my parents priorities.’ It’s also in her genes, she thinks. ‘It’s hugely genetic. I would be a very different kind of writer if I didn’t have that make-up. I also know I would be a much worse writer without my children. Because of them I have a deeper experience of life and understanding of my self.’

147

Resilience Adoption, divorce, death

I

n his recent book The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker writes, ‘Contrary to popular belief, unhappy children do not necessarily turn into dysfunctional adults.’ If some do and some don’t, what is the difference? What makes children resilient? We haven’t in recent years wanted to put too much emphasis on genes. To do so seemed like biological determinism, to render pointless efforts to improve behaviour. As Prospero says of Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest: ‘A devil, a born devil, on whose nature nurture can never stick.’ Yet every parent of more than one knows that children are born with different temperaments and different abilities, and that these predispose them to certain behaviours. Science writer Matt Ridley, in his newest book Nature via

T

148

Resilience

Nurture, argues that it is not a matter of nature versus nurture but of nature and nurture interacting with each other. Having a set of genes predisposes a person to experience a certain environment. For example, a person who is naturally athletic will seek out opportunities to practice sport and so will become better at it. And having a set of genes that predispose you to being a sweet-natured, outgoing, cheerful child, prone to smiling rather than scowling, is likely to make your interactions with other people easier and pleasanter. A child born with an ‘engaging’ temperament may become more resilient simply because other people treat him better.

T For Terry Lane, not knowing his biological parents is a kind of freedom. He remembers with love and gratitude the people who nurtured him but knows his nature is not of them. Because he never knew his ‘real’ father he doesn’t have to look in the mirror and say, ‘Oh God, I’m turning into him.’ He is, in a way, a clean slate that only he has written on. And because of the title of this chapter I should point out that Terry Lane had a happy childhood in which nothing occurred that would require unusual resilience to recover from. He has on his abdomen a mysterious scar. It’s a surgical scar, but he doesn’t know what it was for. Doctors he has spoken to speculate he must have been born with some kind of gastric obstruction. In any case, it was already there when Hilda and Doug Lane, who owned a baker’s shop in Williamstown, South Australia, came to the Kate Cox 149

UP WE GREW

Babies’ Home in Adelaide, ‘looked at the range of babies on offer’, and chose him. He was then six weeks old. The year was 1939.

T Terry Lane is a writer and broadcaster, who once wrote a book entitled As the Twig Is Bent, which like this book, interviewed people about their childhoods. In his program, ‘In the National Interest’, heard on ABC Radio National at noon on Sundays, he asks searching questions of politicians and scientists and writers. You would never know, hearing his cultured and educated voice, that he grew up in a family where it was normal to say ‘I seen’. Or guess, from his curiosity about ideas, people and the world in general, how little curiosity he has about his own origins. ‘I have wondered about my natural parents but never enough to want to go looking for them. And they have never looked for me, as far I know. Given that it was 1939 I just assumed an unmarried mother gave her baby up for adoption. I suppose it would just have been another sad little episode.’ Hilda and Doug Lane were in their mid-thirties when they adopted him. He had another name, for registration purposes and for identification in the baby’s home, but he doesn’t know what it is. They took him home to Williamstown, a small town near where the Barossa Valley meets the Adelaide Hills. He was then, and remained, their only child. An only child, adopted by older parents, in a tiny, isolated town, living behind a baker’s shop: you might think it was a lonely, depressed sort of childhood. It wasn’t. 150

Resilience

What sort of house was the house behind the baker’s shop? ‘I thought it was a wonderful house. It was old, nineteenth century, probably one of the first of any size to have been built in the town. Occasionally I make a pilgrimage back to Williamstown and it’s been gentrified like you wouldn’t believe. It’s now got a bistro – it’s called The Old Bakery Bistro!’ (There should be a typeface called ‘ironic bold’, to show when someone is speaking in an ironic tone. As there isn’t, I need to tell you that much of the time Terry is speaking in this tone). ‘It was primitive I suppose, there was no running water in the house, the dunny was down the backyard, where the business had to be buried once a week. I’m sure that’s why I’ve never had hepatitis. I’m immune to it. ‘I don’t really have vivid recollections of my childhood, other than it was generally happy. I could go from the backyard down to the creek to play, and it was assumed I would. Parents then didn’t have the fears they do today. ‘It was isolated in a way. There was no good road into Williamstown so there was a sense you didn’t venture out unless you had to.’ But no, he was not lonely, he had lots of cousins – Hilda came from a family of six – and plenty of friends when he went to school. (I keep wanting to say, but of course they were not your real cousins, but it’s clear he doesn’t see it like that. When he talks about ‘my mother’ and ‘my father’, he means Hilda and Doug.) First memories of his mother were of her working in the baker shop. ‘When I was little I would ask my mother over and over again to tell me the story of her coming to the baby shop to choose me. I don’t remember being told I was 151

UP WE GREW

adopted so I must have been told as soon as I could understand. There was a girl in the town who was adopted too, so I didn’t feel unique.’ His aunts and uncles accepted him as one of their own: ‘There was no sense I was an outsider. The fact that I was adopted was not talked about. I don’t know what they felt about it, but they didn’t say. Now they are all dead and I can’t ask them... When I was an adult my mother told me there had been talk around the town when they brought me home – “Oh you are bringing bad seed into the town, the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree, et cetera.” That would have hurt her. And I think it always bothered my father that I might not think of him as an authentic father.’ But you did? ‘Yes.’ Doug and Hilda were Labor voters, because they saw themselves as working class even though they owned a business. ‘Their political views were a bit odd, because although they were Labor, one of their political heroes was Tom Playford, who was the Liberal Premier of South Australia for about 300 years. They admired him for his integrity and frugality. I suppose you would say their instincts were working-class Tory.’ They were good, loving parents, who must have looked in increasing bemusement at the small stranger who belonged to them, but who became less like them the older he grew. His mother came from a family that was ‘engaged in a process of becoming respectable’. This was a process mainly directed by the women. ‘God’s police, that’s what you would call my mother and her sisters. They controlled – they exercised a very strong emotional restraint on the men. There was a sense that without them the men would have been much more feckless.’ 152

Resilience

Hilda admired frugality because she was very careful with money herself, and was the one who managed the family finances. The women in her family all did. ‘At any time she believed bankruptcy was imminent,’ says Terry. It also had to do with having lived through the Depression, and the fear that it would come again. ‘If you wanted a word to sum up their attitude to life, it was disappointment. But they were very stoic. There was that feeling life hadn’t been all that great, but perhaps it would be better for the kids. They wanted things to be better for the kids. Also, in my mother’s case there was a real timidity. She was frightened of the world beyond the boundaries of the town. She would never have said she was going to run away to Rosebud [as I had told him my mother said she would] because she would never think about herself in any other context but the one she lived in – and in that was disappointment. They accepted things without ever asking why. ‘They never talked about anything intimate, ever. There was that country stoicism, an attitude of mind-your-ownbusiness. Sex was never talked about. It was a great mystery to me as an adolescent, terrifying and mysterious.’

T Terry loved school, the Williamstown Primary School – ‘took to it like a duck to water’. He was never shy. ‘Even from an early age I was pushy and assertive and arrogant.’ And the town, as Terry remembers it, was ‘economically homogeneous. There were a few people who were very rich but they were the landed gentry, and their children went to private school, so you didn’t mix with them. The children 153

UP WE GREW

of the owner of the general store, of the butcher, were like us. There was no sense anyone was richer than anyone else, there was no rich part of town and no poor part of town. ‘This probably had an important effect on the way I saw the world, because the people who were really different were the people who came in from outside – the teachers, the minister. We had a schoolteacher boarding with us for a year or so and he made a tremendous impression on me – because he was so different. I would look at the schoolteachers and the minister, and observe that they spoke differently. ‘Why was it, I wondered later in life, that my father – he watched television, he listened to the radio, so he knew it was not correct to say “I seen him yesterday” – but he still would. I came to the conclusion that if he forced himself to speak correctly, to say, “I saw him yesterday”, he would feel like a class traitor. It would have seemed an affectation to him.’ After primary school Terry went on the school bus to Gawler High School, about eighteen kilometres away. He thrived there too. ‘I was terrible at sport but it didn’t worry me greatly. I and everybody else accepted that given a bat and ball I would have no idea what to do with it. It didn’t matter. As I became interested in the world outside, through reading, I suppose, I was really drawn to these people who came in and spoke differently, had different manners, did different things – they read books, for goodness sake! Probably even in primary school I knew I wanted to be like them. ‘Yes, I think I was a natural snob, absolutely, I think I was born with a snob gene. But that also makes you prey to bitter humiliation, because of the painful corrections 154

Resilience

along the way. In my teens I had friends who came from a totally different background. I have painful memories of mistakes I made. I had a girlfriend who used to correct me every time I said “different to” and things like that. It’s funny how these things stay with you. When I was about twelve a school teacher invited me to Adelaide to visit his parents. We were having what I would call tea and he would call dinner; when we’d finished eating I put my cutlery across the plate – like this. He said, “Would you like more?” I said, “No, I’ve had enough, thank you.” He said, very gently, “Well when you’ve finished you put them together, like this.” ‘That caused me enormous embarrassment. But I learned quickly.

T ‘I think we were terrifically lucky with the teachers we had in high school. There was a little group of us – congenital snobs all! – who formed a solid group of friends at the school, and we tended to be drawn to certain teachers. There was one teacher who would bring her records and play them to us at lunchtime, so we started to discover music; there was another teacher who talked to us about books. ‘The assigned books for first year high school were Julius Caesar, Great Expectations, The Wind in the Willows. The impact of these on me was just astonishing. And there were other teachers – well, I revered them. To me they just represented another world where people knew other things, and they aroused my curiosity and expanded my horizon. ‘Probably if we’d gone to a bigger school it wouldn’t have happened. But in the final year, sub-matriculation, 155

UP WE GREW

there were only nine of us. In French class there were just two, Fay [who later was his girlfriend] and me. One day, in English class, the teacher said to us, Something wonderful is going to happen. Robert Helpmann and Katharine Hepburn were coming to Adelaide to perform Shakespeare, and we should go to Adelaide as a class to see them. So I got to see Helpmann and Hepburn in The Merchant of Venice, and was in a daze for months. ‘There was something in me that drew me to this [music and literature]. I suppose I have a curiosity gene. Why did I understand, when not all my contemporaries did, that there was another world, beyond this little town, stuck in the hills? Out there was a world I wanted to know. I used to listen to the Argonauts on the wireless, I would concentrate intensely but I couldn’t work out what was going on. I felt that if I could work out what was going on, I would understand this unknown outside world.’ He left school after getting the Leaving Certificate, equivalent to Year 11. He worked in the Phillips factory a few months, then in a solicitor’s office in Adelaide. In Adelaide, with a group of friends, including his girlfriend Fay, he went to concerts and saw his first opera. He decided to become a minister of religion. Why? His parents were not religious. They were not atheists, just not interested. But as a child he was sent to Sunday School, and the church was the only centre of social activity in the town. ‘As a small child I loved the fantasy of religion – there were Biggles books, there were William books, and there was the Bible. I suppose also, being no good at sport you are drawn to something else.’ 156

Resilience

When Terry left to study in Melbourne his mother offered him his birth certificate, which had been hidden in a wardrobe somewhere. ‘She was convinced she’d never see me again, that I’d be killed by a tram, or shot by Squizzy Taylor or something. When she offered me the birth certificate I felt it was some kind of test of my love or loyalty, so I didn’t take it. I don’t know what happened to it.’

T Terry Lane was a minister, all up, for about fourteen years, including about five years in the Religious Department of the ABC, but for much of that time was a doubter. Today he’s an atheist, a rationalist, a socialist, a polemical newspaper columnist. After Terry became well-known his father would look up to him, ‘As though I were an alien. He was really proud that he could go somewhere and say he was Terry Lane’s father, but he didn’t really know what it meant, because he’d never read anything I’d written, never listened to me on the radio. He just knew I did something famous. I realised too, that he didn’t think that whatever I did, which he didn’t understand, was work. You couldn’t be paid for just talking. ‘He once said to me, “I heard you on the wireless yesterday. It’s too high for me.”’ Terry Lane does not have a working-class accent. ‘I know, but it’s self-developed. Look, I’m like Zelig: throw me into a company and I’ll become one of it. Except that I can never adjust in the other direction. I used to listen to my father right up until the time he died. And I’d think, why can’t I speak like him now? But I simply can’t. 157

UP WE GREW

‘However I do still call the evening meal tea. I know it’s a class marker, but there’s a conscious drawing of the line. I’ve been gentrified up to this point but I’m damned if I’m going to call it dinner!’ In his book God – The Interview, Terry describes the first seeds of his agnosticism. In 1960 his class of theology students went on a visit to the Kew Cottages, then home to many people with severe mental disabilities. They went to a ward full of hydrocephalic children, children with heads so enormous they were bigger than their bodies. The children were too weak to hold up their grotesque heads, and they could do nothing but lie there helplessly, making small squeaking noises. After they left the ward the ‘young, would-be men of God’ had a session with one of the resident doctors. ‘Gentlemen,’ the doctor said, ‘Do you still believe in God?’ The problem, Terry Lane says today, is that because God is all powerful, and can do anything without being hurt, and could heal these children, and doesn’t, it is necessary to accept that God is less moral than the human beings he created. Do you ever wonder, I asked, what is essentially you? ‘I do wonder what’s in the genes. Whatever quality in me that made me dissatisfied with life in Williamstown had to be genetic. Why did I read so much when there were no books in the house? My facility has always been with language, from a very early age. My mother told me I would wear my eyes out reading. I sometimes wonder what lasting impression my parents made on me at all. When I talk to people who were adopted and who have invested so much into finding their biological parents I think, why haven’t I? ‘I think I am a cold person. No, truly, I am not an 158

Resilience

emotional person. I am not looking for another emotional relationship in my life.’ He is, however, very close to his own children, a son and a daughter. And now has two small granddaughters whom I feel he could talk about for a long time. The oldest, who is two, is just learning to talk. ‘I observe her in a way I never observed my own children. And I just find the acquisition of language such an astonishing thing.’ His children have not nagged him to find his biological parents either. But there are gaps. ‘I’ve been going to the same doctor for about thirty years, but every now and again he’ll ask things like “is there any history of heart disease?” And I’ll say, “Paul, how many times have I told you!”’

T Max Gillies is an actor and satirist, the alter ego of assorted fundamentalists and feminists. His didn’t have an unhappy childhood, though by today’s standards it was certainly deprived. The ‘chink in the system’ that pulled him out of his working class roots was getting into Melbourne High School. The legacy of his parents’ failed marriage was to make him averse to marriage for a long time. But that passed too. The further away we get from childhood, the less it seems to matter to how we are now. The first thing you would say about Max, when he is being Max Gillies and not some unfortunate politician, feminist or historian – is that he is likeable. He doesn’t bignote himself or name-drop, though he easily could. He’s not obviously an extrovert, but not the cliché of a shy person hiding behind an acting persona either. He’s quietly spoken and friendly. During our talk he rarely raises his 159

UP WE GREW

voice – once, when he talks about the late Robert Gordon Menzies, prime minister in Max’s youth and mine: ‘Witty – I didn’t find him witty. He was arrogant and pompous. He represented all that was oppressive and complacent about Australia.’ And again when he talks about the Royal Family: ‘Bowing and scraping to them! It’s the epitome of the class system,’ he says with disgust. ‘The idea of hereditary monarchy, it’s anathema to modern democracy.’ He was always getting into trouble as a teenager for not standing up for God Save the Queen at the pictures. I agree, of course. Of course, bring on the republic. But I don’t tell him I’ve a secret affection for the Queen. I must be still influenced by my childhood, by all those pictures in the Women’s Weekly and Woman’s Day of the little princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, in their beautiful little coats and shiny patent leather shoes. And now, the poor Queen, she being so dutiful all her life, it’s not her fault she was born into that system. But I don’t say this to Max. You can see where Max’s politics come from. From where, though, does his ability to mimic come, his ability to make himself someone else?

T ‘Religion,’ Max says – ‘I’ve never been able to believe. I realise many people find it a comfort but I can’t believe in it. I have no memory of religion being discussed at home but my understanding of it was that it was the opiate of the people... But the thing about loyalty [to Irish Catholic roots, perhaps] is that I have this deep and abiding disrespect for the Royal Family.’ 160

Resilience

Max Gillies’ family could have all been conventional Catholics, instead of a motley of Communists, Methodists, dissidents, atheists and other assorted idealists, had his maternal grandfather, Jack Reilly, not had a bitter falling out with his family, which caused him to leave the family and also the church, losing for future generations of the family its deep Irish Catholic heritage. Doris Reilly, Max’s mother, was not particularly religious. A couple of her brothers became Methodists, but were also in the Communist Party (Max doesn’t see anything incongruous there); one of his aunts joined Moral Re-armament; another was strong in the Tramways Union, and an uncle was president of the Australian Council of Salaried Professionals. At his primary school, Caulfield State School 773, in second grade, a lay teacher would take religious instruction once a week. ‘She told us when we went to sleep at night Jesus came and took us to heaven, bringing us back in time to wake up in the morning. Some people may have found this a comforting notion – I found it really scary. But worse than that, it was unverifiable. I regarded it as a pernicious attempt at indoctrination and a misuse of authority. I told my mother who obliged me by writing a note excusing me from any further encounter with religious instruction.’

T Doris Reilly had met Frank Gillies some time in the late 1930s, when they were both working at the Myer Emporium in Melbourne. And they got married and were happy, Max thinks. Then World War II began, and Frank 161

UP WE GREW

was called up, and was sent to Darwin. Max doesn’t think he went overseas, though perhaps he went to New Guinea for a while. He came home on leave a few times, and Max was born, in 1941, and his brother Don a couple of years later. Max barely knew his father for the first five years of his life. He thinks he remembers his father coming home from the war – seeing the front door opening and his father standing there against the light, but it may be a memory he’s imposed on himself later. ‘So, my father goes to the war and a perfect stranger comes back. He doesn’t settle into any job, he’s a seller of insurance for a while, but not successful or happy. My mother’s take on him is that he’s a wastrel. That must be one of the reasons they fight. I remember walkings-out in the night, her pushing a pram. I don’t wish they’d stay together.’ The fights weren’t violent, just loud. ‘My mother told me that when they fought he would threaten us with violence, but that is her memory, not mine. I remember him as a gentle man, and that is what other people said about him too.’ Other fragments Max has of his father are that when he was single, before the war, he rode a bicycle across the Nullarbor Plain; that he was a talented black-and-white illustrator, played the violin, and taught himself to make things from electronics magazines. Max’s mother had come from a big family in which the boys were given educational opportunities but not the girls. The boys both had scholarships at Trinity Grammar. Doris was intelligent but didn’t have the same opportunities, and remained aggrieved about that throughout her life. She may have had some artistic talent too. Before she was married 162

Resilience

she had designed and made a dress, covered with an elegant lyrebird motif, and won a prize for it in a competition. When Max was about eight, his father came into his bedroom, sat on the bed and explained why he was going away, that it was just the way things had turned out, that it was nothing to do with Max or his brother. In those days there was much more stigma attached to divorce than there is today, and there was not court-mediated access for separated fathers. It was common for men who left to see their children only rarely afterwards. ‘After he left my mother required that he not see us, as she thought it would be less distressing for us. But he used to turn up at the school, mainly to see my younger brother, perhaps he thought he’d be more amenable than me. I felt more responsibility, as the man of the house, I felt loyalty to my mother. It must have been wounding for him to lose us. Years later I won a bicycle from the Junior Argus, it was a competition for the best scrapbook for the 1956 Olympic games. Over the years my father tried to keep track of what we were doing, through things like that, that would be in the paper.’

T The family lived in a rented house in Caulfield. There was a sandpit in the back yard, Max remembers. But Max grew up with no concept of home ownership. There was a housing shortage in the 1940s and 1950s and for his family, as for many others, there was a constant fear of not being able to pay the rent. His mother had had their name down for a Housing Commission house for years, and when Max was twelve, they moved into a new 163

UP WE GREW

Housing Commission area in Moorabbin. Once the gloss of having a brand new house wore off, the area was pretty bleak, Max remembers, a sea of mud when it rained. There were always worries about money, worries about things bought on hire purchase being repossessed. ‘When the wireless was broken, we couldn’t get it fixed for about six months, things like that. We used to pile overcoats on the beds to keep warm. I didn’t feel sorry for myself about that, I thought it was what you did. ‘My mother was a very anxious person. She worked in the public service as a punch card operator, and there was the constant anxiety about her getting permanency there... Her values were about getting her boys educated, she wanted them to have higher education – my mother was bitter about being denied the education her brothers had. I grew up understanding the unfairness of that. I also saw unfairness in her getting a lower salary than men’s and not being able to get permanency.’ In the 1950s government offices used to close at six minutes past five. On Fridays, being payday, Max would get on the train and go into Queen Street in the city, where his mother worked. She would come down and meet him and give him money to buy food, and would then keep working, doing overtime to earn more money. She worked overtime two or three nights a week. ‘I remember her sitting at the kitchen table working out the bills, worrying about how to pay them, always waiting for the maintenance from my father, that never came. To get permanency in the public service would have given her security.’ Today people move suburbs to get their children into schools like Melbourne High where Max was educated. As 164

Resilience

well as traditional academic subjects Melbourne High had an emphasis on music, drama and the performing arts. He was in his element. ‘I did well at literature; I got the school prize for literature, I was heavily into art and debating, I edited the school magazine and did cartoons for it. My brother was very talented at art; I thought he would have been an artist, but no. We did school plays, I got the school drama prize, debating prize, a prize for magazine editing. I was so heavily into the extra curricular subjects that I didn’t do well in things like maths and science. Literature was the only subject I excelled in.’

T ‘At school I had a mate, Christopher Akehurst. We started impersonating a couple of teachers. Chris was the entrepreneur, we would have twenty or more kids behind the lavatories watching us.’ One day one of the teachers saw them doing their act, but was so taken by it that instead of punishing them, encouraged them to do it for a wider audience. They became so popular they added a new teacher to their repertoire every week. This was the first time Max remembers studying people so as to impersonate them. ‘I was not particularly extrovert, but was never shy of getting up on stage. I suppose to some extent I was a loner, I led an imaginary life, especially in adolescence.’ Short of money as they were, Max remembers being taken to the ballet and the theatre by his mother and her sister. ‘I went to the Tivoli and saw the vaudeville acts. I loved live theatre; to me there was nothing more exciting. I also loved the movies; I saw all the Charlie Chaplin films; I 165

UP WE GREW

thought Chaplin as a mimic was wonderful. I loved the Marx brothers too, I could still tell you all the stories of the Marx brothers films. ‘My mother’s family were into causes. My mother was sympathetic to dissident politics; my uncle was a distributor of a Communist newspaper. When the Menzies Government tried to ban the Communist Party I thought it was outrageous, it was an issue of free speech. We had just come out of the war, it was about protecting things like that. They wanted to ban people from having an opinion! When I was very young I used to listen to Parliamentary Question Time on the wireless. I loved to hear people getting one over Bob [Menzies]. There was the theatre of it but it was also deadly serious.’ In 1950, Frank Hardy was prosecuted over his book Power Without Glory, and Max also remembers this.

T One of the reasons Max Gillies’ mother put off getting a divorce was that a divorced woman couldn’t get permanency in the public service. So when feminism came along, and it was a middle-class movement, it seemed strange to Max because it had all been such an issue in his workingclass family. For a long time Max had great difficulty with the idea of marriage and family; so much so that he didn’t get married until he was nearly forty. ‘It seemed to me an ideal that failed more often than it worked,’ he says. In his case, it has worked, at least for twenty-two years so far. ‘Look, it’s not like I had a grim, deprived childhood. It was a happy childhood but in adolescence I was more 166

Resilience

aware of the responsibilities. My mother had a good sense of fun. I remember her laughing a lot. I liked her. I think my father was a good man, I think my mother was a good woman. But it just didn’t work out for them.’ Feminism has been recognised as the biggest social change of the twentieth century. I had long assumed it was my generation, the generation of women who forced the changes who had borne the brunt of the changes. I’m now beginning to think it has been the next generation, my children’s generation, who felt the effects most; it was they who had to live in those families in which the women, their mothers, were desperately trying to assert an independent identity and the men, their fathers, felt threatened and bewildered by this revolution which was not of their choosing, and reacted badly to it.

T Stephanie doesn’t want her identity revealed. She was born in 1968, in Melbourne, after two brothers. Her parents’ marriage was stormy. Her mother had grown up in the country on a farm, in a fairly poor but educated family, and had gone into nursing. Her father’s background was exotic. Stephanie’s paternal grandmother came from ‘some strange kind of Euro-trash’; her father’s parents met and married in Moscow and went off to the tropics to live as bohemians in Tahiti. They separated when her father was five, and his mother brought the boy to Australia. Then she remarried and told Stephanie’s father that his own father had died (he only recently found his true name and origins). His stepfather was cruel: the boy was dark-haired and different-looking and besides, as Stephanie points out, he 167

UP WE GREW

was someone else’s child. This treatment may have had some effect on the way her father was, she thinks. In Australia, her father was a good student, and won a scholarship and put himself through university. He studied geology and became an engineer. Later he became a senior academic. Stephanie’s family lived in an inner-Melbourne suburb that has since become very expensive. ‘I have very poor memories of my childhood,’ says Stephanie. ‘I don’t remember much at all until I was about twelve. Unfortunately what I do remember most is the fights. My parents were each the worst thing for each other. Dad needed to be married, I think, but he was more interested in his work. He was quite cruel to my brothers. He decided my older brother, who was actually very intelligent, was sub-normal. Then when my other brother turned out blond and blue-eyed Dad decided he wasn’t his, even though he was the image of him.’ For much of Stephanie’s childhood her mother was studying. She worked in a hospital as a theatre sister but decided she was going to become a doctor. So she went back to high school – Stephanie remembers as a small child going with her mother to classes – and then to university to study medicine. She didn’t finish: Stephanie says her mother later told her ‘your father wouldn’t let me do it’, but she’s not sure of the rights and wrongs of it. If he didn’t outrightly forbid her, she says, ‘Probably he told her she was stupid.’ ‘Unfortunately my mother’s reaction to any argument, instead of trying to resolve it, was to yell and scream and rant.’ There were a lot of noisy fights, which sometimes included physical violence – towards her mother, and her brothers, and Stephanie too, a little. Her mother was into 168

Resilience

horrible point-scoring, emotional blackmailing. Stephanie spent a lot of time at the house of neighbours, to get away from the fights. When Stephanie was about ten her parents separated; her father went to live in another suburb, and they were divorced. The three children went to stay with him on occasional weekends. ‘He couldn’t cope with us. He couldn’t handle three kids on his own. So when we fought – because that’s what kids do – he’d lose it. I’ve seen him holding my brother down on the floor with his knee in his face, pushing down on his face until his nose bled.’ And when they were with their mother, she complained constantly to her children about their father; told them – especially the middle child, her brother – things children shouldn’t know about their parents’ private lives, including things about sex. This brother was troubled, Stephanie said. As a small child he would throw tantrums and hold his breath until he blacked out. When he was thirteen he tried to kill himself with sleeping tablets. He’d taken them before, and there’d been episodes of projectile vomiting, but his mother had thought he was just sick. He was in a psychiatric ward for several weeks, and the family had to undergo a lot of counselling – as a family and individually. Stephanie was nine, and remembers feeling very stressed about this, and resenting these strangers asking questions about her family. When Stephanie was thirteen her mother got a job interstate and took the children there to live. ‘She was very busy, she worked nights, she was never around,’ says Stephanie. ‘I was by this time a little shit, getting up to all sorts of no good with my friends.’ She always made close friends easily. 169

UP WE GREW

Her brother, the younger one, tried to discipline her. ‘I had numerous beatings from him. He was Dad, again, really.’ Then when Stephanie was sixteen her brother did commit suicide, on Christmas Day, which was also his birthday.

T Stephanie’s mother went into deep isolation. ‘She went bush,’ said Stephanie. Her mother went to work in remote Aboriginal communities in outback Queensland. Stephanie was sent to her father in Melbourne, ostensibly for a holiday, but she had with her a letter from her mother, telling her father she was now his responsibility. By this time, because things had been so bad with her mother, Stephanie wanted to live with her father even though he was, according to her mother, ‘this evil monster’. In Melbourne she went to the local (fairly rough) high school, dyed her hair purple and had some body pierces done, got into alcohol, dope, speed, acid. She had a friend who took heroin but Stephanie never took it. Her father’s way of showing concern was to give her far too much pocket money. ‘He didn’t want to know about things girls might need, like tampons. So he made sure I always had plenty of money.’ He did try to be a parent then, though. ‘One day I remember he said to me, “You are not going out, you are sick, you are going to bed.” I felt really pleased that he said that, that he acted like a parent.’ One day she went to her father and asked if she could go to a good private school. ‘He agreed, so I brushed out my dreadlocks, dyed my hair brown, and became as conservative as any of the other girls at that conservative school.’ No particular crisis had prompted this change. She had just 170

Resilience

come to the realisation that she was ruining her life; she felt she had been through a year of ‘shame and stupidity’. Stephanie was in counselling for several years. The first, very expensive therapist was paid for by her father. ‘Dad’s reaction is to make up for things financially – “I’ll pay for the best!” he says.’ The psychologist was not very good, always trying to game-play, to trick her into making admissions. ‘Later I found an Indian psychotherapist and he was really good. He’d say to me, “You are now grown up. Stop whingeing about your family. There comes a time when you can say to yourself that the decisions made by your family don’t affect your life.” Though I’m not sure this is entirely true. I believe there are some things you carry with you.’ Stephanie went to university and became an architect, although she has just quit her job to see if there is more to life than working sixty hours a week. She is one of a generation of mid-thirties, intelligent, attractive women who want marriage and children but haven’t yet been able to find a partner. She still hopes she will: ‘But I think I am in a good place now,’ she says.

T ‘I cannot readily and easily remember my mother’s face,’ says Norman Lacy. ‘I remember particular things about her, but when I try to conjure her image I see an outline of her body, and of her head, but I cannot see her face. I seem to have blocked out the memory of her face.’ But Norman can remember with absolute clarity, and could take me to it right now, he says, the exact place on the footpath outside the Lincoln Hotel in Church Street, Richmond, where when he was fourteen, his brother, who 171

UP WE GREW

was four years older, said to him: ‘You know Mum is going to die, don’t you?’ And he can see in his mind the shop his father sent him and his brother to, the day after his mother’s death – ‘I suspect we walked along, not saying a word to each other’ – to buy a black tie each for her funeral. The bleakness of that shopping excursion, the inability of the brothers to communicate their grief to each other, is unbearable to think of.

T Norman Lacy, former Victorian Arts Minister, former college lecturer, former Anglican vicar, former Richmond plumber, was born in October 1941 in Richmond. After his birth his mother had severe post-natal depression, and when he was a few weeks old he was sent to live with an aunt for six months. His mother suffered it again when his sister was born five years later, and he again went to live with Aunt Dorrie, in Preston. His father was a self-employed plumber. A.H. Lacy Brothers, Plumbers, was a respected business in Richmond. Like most people in business in Richmond in those days, his father had to put 10 pounds in the top drawer of the Richmond City Council’s town clerk if he wanted to get something through, like permission to put a pipe in some road. Both Norman’s parents grew up in Richmond, although his father had been born in South Africa and came to Australia with his parents as a young boy, around the time of the Boer War. Norman’s mother was religious and civic-minded. Her 172

Resilience

family had lived closer to Richmond Hill, and didn’t consider themselves working class, as his father’s family definitely was. Richmond in his father’s youth was mostly working class. The 1930s depression had hit the suburb hard: 28 per cent of men were unemployed, and families who couldn’t pay the rent were evicted. Houses were tiny, weatherboard, four roomed, built right up to the front fence, and luxuries such as a bathroom were rare. Things were getting a bit better for most people in Richmond by the time Norman was born. And his family was considerably better off financially than most. Because of the war, the plumbing business was growing. It was contracted to lay concrete and plumbing for American servicemen’s camps around Melbourne, which meant his father was not required to enlist. The family moved into a much bigger, better house in Church Street. It had been a private hospital, and was a big, bluestone, Edwardian house on two blocks, one of which is now occupied by the office of Newman’s Chocolates. When Norman was a boy that second block was empty, and had on it a fig tree that rats used to climb, which he could shoot with a shanghai from his bedroom window. He was working class, but knew he was not typical. Most of his mates lived in the working men’s cottages, long since demolished to make way for high-rise Housing Commission flats. ‘My mates used to look at our house with awe. It had eight or nine rooms, a billiard table. Compared to theirs it was a mansion.’ Yet even though his parents were better off and he lived in a bigger house, his life and his expectations were no different from his friends. He went to North Richmond primary school, now called Yarra Primary School, in 173

UP WE GREW

Davidson Street. He swam with his mates in the Yarra River, walking across the railway bridges to the swimming spots on the South Yarra side. ‘We always knew the other side of the river was where the rich people lived,’ Norman said. ‘The highest aspiration of anyone in Richmond then was to get into a trade. There was no high school in Richmond: there was never any question that boys in Richmond would go to any school other than Richmond Tech. I always knew that was what I was to do.’ His father was a calm, kind man but he drank too much. (Didn’t everyone’s in those days?) It caused some conflict. ‘The hotels closed at 6.15, but the bowling club kept serving beer until eight, and he would get home half stung.’ ‘There’s the hotel I had to drag my father, and grandfather, out of,’ says Norman, as we drive around Richmond’s streets.

T Even so, until the illness came it was a happy childhood. Norman went to Sunday school, was taught to say his prayers, to be a good citizen. His father took him camping, and shooting rabbits and mushrooming, and Norman looked up to him. His father was a good sportsman, played tennis at the St Ignatius Church club, was the secretary of the Richmond Union Bowling Club, and played first-grade cricket at Como Park, across the river in South Yarra. When Norman’s mother was forty-four she died of cancer, after many years of illness and two mastectomy operations. Norman’s brother told him, about three months before she died, that their mother was not going to get better. 174

Resilience

‘He was nineteen, I was fourteen, and he had to be the one to tell me. My father didn’t ever talk about it to me... Men don’t talk about these things – it was a very difficult time. ‘I sensed, on the day it happened, that it was going to happen. My mother was in her bedroom. I was supposed to go to school, but I just refused to go. I knew. ‘I suppose I didn’t feel prepared – it so affected me that I think I had no consideration of how it affected other people in my family. I never talked to my brother and sister about it.’ After Norman’s mother died, his grandparents moved in. Norman remembers his grandmother, who was of Dutch descent, as ‘an aggressive, unattractive, Boer kind of person’. His grandfather, like his father, was a plumber. This period when his grandparents lived with them was not a happy time. Anything rather than stay home, Norman threw himself into sport. He spent hours and hours basketball training, and became the captain of the Victorian under-16-year-old basketball team. He left school at fifteen and took up a plumbing apprenticeship. When he was eighteen, and his mother had been dead for four years, the American evangelist preacher Billy Graham came to Melbourne, drawing crowds of hundreds of thousands to the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Norman was one in the crowd. ‘I suppose today you would say I had a born-again experience,’ he said. He decided then to go into the church ministry. Then, when Norman was nineteen his father died too, of a heart attack. If you could say he was resilient, it probably 175

UP WE GREW

came, he says, from knowing at the age of nineteen, with both parents dead, that he was alone in the world.

T Norman left the plumbing job and went to theological college, passed his Leaving Certificate, spent the money he’d inherited from his father on getting a theology degree, became vicar of St John’s Church in Healesville, spent nine years altogether in the Anglican Ministry. While studying for his theology degree he lived in Ridley College, in Parkville, surrounded by leafy gardens, with students who had been to private schools, listening to classical music. ‘As kids we were conscious that we were working class, that it was the people on the other side of the river that were wealthy. It was like crossing to the other side’. Norman’s parents had passed on good values to him. And his involvement with sport had probably saved him getting caught up with the street gangs – ‘seriously rough kids’ – that were so much a part of the inner city culture in the 1940s and 50s. Now, he discovered a love of classical music, and bought his first records, and never went back. Norman joined the Liberal Party, and in 1973 he stood for the seat of Ringwood. The government of Rupert Hamer was elected with a solid majority. Six years later Norman was appointed Arts and Educational Services Minister. But he would not, he said, have joined the Liberal Party led by Henry Bolte (a former long-serving, very hardline Victorian premier). He was among those who stood outside Pentridge Prison – he in his vicar’s dog-collar – in the crowd protesting 176

Resilience

against the hanging of Ronald Ryan. When he spoke in parliament in support of the bill to abolish capital punishment in Victoria, eight Labor members crossed the floor to congratulate him.

T Douglas says he doesn’t love his mother. But he does care enough about her not to want his identity revealed, in case she should ever read this. Douglas hasn’t seen his father for twenty-two years. He telephoned Douglas a few years ago, but Douglas didn’t even return the call. How will he feel when his father dies? ‘It will mean nothing to me. Wouldn’t even go to his funeral.’ In three generations Douglas’s family has gone from prosperous middle class to lower working class and back again. It was Douglas’s mother who dragged them back. ‘Do I admire my mother? Yes. Do I love my mother? No,’ says Douglas. Today Douglas runs a successful business. He mixes with politicians and big businessmen, travels, lives in a nice house in an expensive suburb. To understand his childhood, he says, you need to go back a couple of generations. His mother’s father was a professional man, a high achiever from a good family. Before he went to war he married Douglas’s grandmother. It was not a good marriage. His grandmother, Douglas said, ‘was not up to standard’, nowhere near the intellect of his grandfather. They had two children, one of whom died. The other was Douglas’s mother. Then Douglas’s grandfather went off to fight in World War II, became a captain in the air force and was killed in Egypt. 177

UP WE GREW

When her husband was killed and she was left alone with a nine-year-old daughter Douglas’s grandmother didn’t cope. There was not enough money. Mother and daughter had to leave their middle-class house in a middleclass suburb and live in a one-bedroom house in a much poorer suburb. ‘She was a good woman but she didn’t have much strength of character. So when the male figure was gone her daughter – my mother – in effect became the force in the family. I knew my grandmother well when I was a kid. It was a place to go for a cuddle because my life was so sad. But I don’t remember ever having a real conversation with her. She’d just sit in front of the TV all day and smoke.’ Douglas’s mother was intelligent. She resented her family’s downward mobility. Nevertheless, when she grew up, against all good advice, she married a man whose background, Douglas said, was pretty despicable: ‘My father was handsome and probably sexually appealing. But it was a bad marriage, a shocking marriage. He disappeared a lot, he had affairs, he didn’t want to work.’ There were many fights, and both parents beat Douglas and his brother. ‘When I was a little kid, he would lay into me. My mother used to hit me too; she would break wooden spoons over me. I had behaviour problems at school because of the violence at home. And when they would fight my mother would tell me things – about what my father did – that no child should hear. ‘No. I don’t forgive. ‘My mother discovered religion, that’s what got her through. She was trying to keep everything together; she wanted to keep us [Douglas and his younger brother] out of the lower classes. Our house was kept spotless, she made 178

Resilience

sure the rent was paid every week, the lawns were mowed, everything looked respectable.’ They lived in a housing commission house, but Douglas’s mother was desperate to get out of the commission area and into their own house. When Douglas was fifteen his mother discovered her mother was eligible for a war service loan. ‘She got a loan in my grandmother’s name and we moved into a house in the eastern suburbs. When I was seventeen my father left, or rather, he was kicked out. It was pretty low morality where we lived, there were kids around us being sent off to reform school, that sort of thing. My mother kept us on the straight and narrow. She kept us busy with sport and religion... No, I never believed it. Sunday School was just a chore.’

T Douglas wanted to be a policeman, but was too short, so he stayed on at school, put his head down, passed his Leaving Certificate, then matriculated, began his career, married, had two children, divorced and remarried. His mother is now ‘doing uni’ as a mature-age student, studying languages, just for her own enrichment. ‘My mother is a very strange woman. She craves recognition, craves acknowledgement. Any conversations you have with her are all about her. ‘I feel bitter about my childhood, about the violence, being made to stand between them, having my mother telling me about my father’s behaviour. I was lucky to have a strong mother, but I don’t love her. And I don’t believe abused kids grow up to be abusers. I have never hit a woman. I can’t remember ever even slapping my kids. I 179

UP WE GREW

never brought my kids into my divorce, or tried to turn them away from their mother. ‘I am lucky, I am very, very lucky in the people I’ve been associated with since my childhood, including my ex-wife, and most of all Mary [his present wife]. She’s just terrific. ‘Yes, lucky, I’m resilient. Must be some genes I got by accident.’

T Martin Seligman, author of Learned Optimism and The Optimistic Child says the effects of events in childhood on adult personality have been overrated. What has happened, says Seligman, is that, ‘In their enthusiasm for the sway of childhood, researchers failed to control for genes. Blinded by bias, it simply did not occur to researchers before 1990 that criminal parents might pass on genes that predispose to crime, and that both children’s felonies and their tendency to mistreat their own children might stem from nature rather than nurture.’ Now this sounds like biological determinism. But isn’t ‘environmental determinism’ equally harmful? How deterministic is it to assume that if you were brought up by nice, middle-class parents and went to a school where you mixed with children of the same background you will turn out a better product? What does that say about all those not lucky enough to have been brought up that way?

180

Took them away Aboriginal children

J

oey Miller was an Aboriginal boy who lived with his family in a terrible little shack made of rusty tin and hessian bags, a mile or so out of town, off the Jerilderie Road, near the rubbish tip. They were the only Aboriginal family in Finley and were truly the ‘fringe dwellers’ read about many years later in Nene Gare’s book of the same name. The only times I saw the Millers’ house was when my sister and brother and I made one of our excursions to the rubbish tip, where we would find and take home various treasures, such as the broken pieces of coloured china that we used as ‘tors’ when playing hopscotch. It didn’t occur to me to wonder why the Millers lived out there, so far away from anyone else. I was friendly with Dorothy, or ‘Dottie’ Miller, who was

T

181

UP WE GREW

about my age. She passed our place on the way to school, and we’d sometimes walk together, and sometimes at the weekend would go up the street to Hetrelezis café and buy a glass of orange crush. There were other children in the family – Clive, otherwise known as Dusty, and Pearl, and Archie. I have three recollections of Joey Miller: one is of his face, contorted with terror, as he clung to the top of one of the drop bars under the Mulwala Canal bridge, a torrent of water beating down on his head, one thin arm outstretched to the children who were trying to grab hold of it to pull him out. After what seemed like ages, they did. The second: one day, when Joey Miller was exploring on the rubbish tip, he found a sealed cardboard box. He opened it, and inside was a baby – a newly born, newly dead baby. His parents took the box to the police, and there was an investigation. A girl I knew who worked at the chemist’s shop said the police came in and asked if anyone had been in there buying large quantities of sanitary pads. A woman who had been working at the hotel was charged with ‘concealment of birth’. And this is the third: ‘I do not want you to think I keep Pam away from school for any little reason,’ my mother wrote self-righteously to the headmaster, Mr Gollan, one day (she was very good at writing letters to teachers, and always signed them ‘Yours etc’). The fact was, she wrote, that Pam was being terrorised on the way to school and had been kept home because she was frightened of a boy. This boy went to the same school and his name was Joey Miller. ‘Terrorised’ was certainly an exaggeration. The most Joey Miller would do was to chase me, and if he managed 182

Took them away

to catch me, thump me on the back. It was very common in those days for boys to chase girls and give them a push or a thump, and I was especially frightened of the Catholic boys I had to pass in the back lane that went between the Catholic school and the public school. I don’t know why Joey Miller decided I was thumpable, but the day after my mother’s note I was called into Mr Gollan’s office and so was Joey Miller. This was a very serious thing. Mr Gollan had ginger hair and square spectacles and was intimidating enough without ever having to raise his voice. In his office, Mr Gollan said to Joey, ‘Now, Joey, can you explain to me why you have been hitting this little girl?’ ‘Well, sir, she called me Blackie,’ said Joey. I hadn’t. I never, ever had. It had just never even occurred to me that the Miller children were black. Well, they weren’t; a couple of them even had fair hair. But I knew at that moment in the headmaster’s office that there was no point in denying it. I didn’t even want to deny it. So I just said nothing. Mr Gollan told Joey to go back to his class and not to let it happen again. Then he gave me a talk, in his quiet voice, about how people all had to get on together, how it didn’t matter whether people were white or black, that we were all the same, and it was wrong to call other people names. I think now he was ahead of his time, saying that. And somehow I did feel ashamed even though I hadn’t said it. Because I knew Joey Miller was further down the social scale than I was, much further down than anyone else in the town. And in a vague way I thought this was my fault. Maybe time has clouded my memory, but now I can’t remember feeling that I had been unfairly treated that day. 183

UP WE GREW

T After I grew up and left Finley, Joey Miller and his family moved from their shack on the edge of the Mulwala Canal into a little house in the town, not far from the public school we used to go to. Though much better than the one they had lived in, it was not a very good house either, and has since been knocked down to make way for units. Mrs Miller was a nice woman who tried to keep them all in line, though not very successfully, because terrible, drunken domestic rows could frequently be heard coming from their place. Joey Miller died, probably of a heart attack, about twenty years ago, which would have made him only about forty. No one seems to know what happened to his sister Dorothy. Their brother Dusty Miller still lives in Finley, but he is pretty sick, and drives around the town in one of those little motorised chairs with an oxygen cylinder strapped to it.

T In 2000, Aboriginal children were twenty-one times more likely than white children to be imprisoned and twenty times more likely to be homeless. They live in families with the lowest income levels in the country. One third have left school before they are fifteen. Aboriginal babies are twice as likely to be of low birth weight. The teenage pregnancy rate is four times higher in the Northern Territory than it is in southern states, reflecting the greater numbers of young Aboriginal women there. ‘I’d be hard-pressed to find a 184

Took them away

Koori girl in this community that hasn’t been sexually abused,’ said an Aboriginal family services coordinator in a report into Aboriginal family violence in Victoria in 2001. A report in 2003 of one Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory found two hundred girls under twelve who had been diagnosed with a sexually transmitted disease. There are also Aboriginal success stories. My friend Marlene Burchill’s is one, though her life has not been without tragedy.

T Marlene Burchill has a strong face, beautiful, deeply set green eyes and short grey hair. She had a happy childhood, is proud of her family, and says there are many Aboriginal families like hers; it’s just that you don’t hear about them. I first knew Marlene when I lived in Shepparton. She was the librarian at the college where I was studying at night, while working part-time and looking after children in the daytime. Twenty years later, over lunch in a café in Shepparton, we congratulate each other on how well we’ve done. I’m at the Age and she’s completing a Master’s thesis. Talk about upward mobility, I say. This is Marlene’s story, but before she tells me it, she wants to talk about Aboriginal politics. She has strong opinions on politics. I didn’t tell her about Joey Miller, but if I had she would have said he was playing the ‘race card’. ‘They are still going cap in hand to the government and when things get tough they are still playing the race card. When they don’t have the answers to alcoholism and domestic violence, they bring in the race card. There are 185

UP WE GREW

families where no one has ever worked, sometimes three generations where no one has ever worked. If the kids don’t feel like going to school they don’t go.’ Marlene’s childhood was poor, but her family was hardworking and respectable. She was born in 1944 and grew up in Echuca, where her family owned their own home, which was a proper house with bedrooms, a kitchen and a bathroom, probably better than the house I lived in as a child. Before Marlene was born, her mother had sent her father by bicycle from Moroopna, where they lived then, to Echuca to buy the house. There were other Aboriginal families in Echuca who owned their own homes. ‘We had wonderful matriarchs in our family. Koori kids now, they lack leadership. In traditional society the elders were respected, others learned from them. Now there are not the grandmas around to pick up the pieces. You see, a lot of those good people have passed on. Welfare dependency is so harmful. Whites have got to stop being missionaries and we have to find our own level playing field.’

T Marlene’s parents grew up on Cumragunga Aboriginal mission in north-eastern Victoria. Her mother had an Aboriginal mother, but her mother’s father came from Mauritius. He came to Australia in the late nineteenth century to study medicine at Melbourne University, ‘but he got a fever on the boat out, which left him with a shake in the head,’ Marlene says. Because of that he was not accepted into medicine. Because he was black he was asked to take up a teaching job at Cumragunga. 186

Took them away

He taught Aboriginal children there for forty-five years, and married one of his students, whose name was Ada Cooper, who became Marlene’s grandmother. Marlene: ‘They had seven children, four of them girls. They were very strong on education, and had the girls learn to sew and play the piano. This helped them in their lives. My mother and aunts sewed for their families, they were beautiful cooks, they could budget well, they grew their own vegetables. My grandfather was very religious, so everyone on my mother’s side was religious. There was no alcohol in the family. They were very strict. ‘My father was also born at Cumragunga. His mother died when he was a baby and as often happened [in Aboriginal communities] his father then married his wife’s sister, who then reared my father. My father was only allowed to go to school until he was eight or nine, then he had to go to work. There was a strong work ethic in his family. His father worked on Moira station, and he worked there too. But during the depression in the 1930s my father was out of work, and he would walk the roads looking for work. One day someone told him he should try to get social security, and he went to the social security office and joined the queue. But when he was asked his name and replied “Atkinson”, the girl behind the counter said, “Are you a blackfella? Get out of the line.” Atkinson is a common Aboriginal name in the area. ‘The dole was only for the white man.’ Later her father got work again, and became a shearer and married her mother, and they went to Echuca to live. ‘My father always provided, but Mum worked too. She used to take in ironing. We didn’t go without. Every Show Day we would have all new clothes – pants, socks, dress 187

UP WE GREW

and hat, they were our new clothes for the year. We were never hungry, we had chooks and grew our own vegetables, and my mother used to bottle fruit and make jam and relish. ‘My mother was well respected in Echuca. She was known as Mumma Atkinson. She was a wonderful cook. She was in the football club, the basketball club, the mothers’ club committee at the school. We were very much a part of the community. She had a job as the sweets cook at the Echuca hospital. When I was fourteen she got me a job at the hospital, washing pots. ‘Yes, there was some racism. We were good at sport. When we beat them they would call us Blackie. But I was not confronted with it too much because I was fair. I got this [fair skin] from my paternal great-grandmother, who had three children to a white man. When we came home to our mother and complained about racism she would make us go back and deal with it. She told us, “Sticks and stones may break your bones, but names will never hurt you.” ‘Later my father became an alcoholic, and became violent. I wanted my mother to leave him for a long time. When I was seventeen she did leave him, because his drinking was out of control. ‘However, she didn’t escape him because he shot her. He wouldn’t leave us alone. One night he came into the house. My mother was in bed, he turned on the light, when she saw him there holding the gun she turned over to protect herself and he shot her in the spine. She was left a paraplegic and we nursed her for twenty-one years. ‘He went to jail for eight years – and when he came out he wanted to reconnect with the family. ‘I had been very close to him as a young child, and it was 188

Took them away

hard for me. I felt very let down by him, the pain and trauma of what he had done was extremely difficult to deal with. Some of the family wanted nothing to do with him. ‘My mother divorced him while he was in jail, and he could never understand why she didn’t want him back. I did to an extent rekindle my relationship with him, but he never really understood the magnitude of what he did, what he had done to our lives. He never said sorry, he was only ever thinking about his own pain. ‘I have forgiven him. I know the struggles he went through growing up. He grew up on the mission and went to work when he was still a boy. But Mum was such a good woman; she was beautiful, outgoing, musical, and he resented her for what she was. One day he put an axe through her piano.

T ‘When I was growing up we were very poor but in other ways we were rich. There was an old tree stump in the yard, and we used our imaginations to take us on adventures with it. One day it was a train, one day a plane, the next a house. We were always busy organising what we would do the next day. We made up concerts, and Mum would always encourage us. When my Dad wasn’t home we were very happy.’ Now Marlene has a son who is a doctor and a daughter who is a lawyer. It’s a close, loving family. Both her children identify strongly as Kooris. Yes, upward mobility. It goes back to Marlene’s upbringing. ‘My mother would not have used those terms, but that is exactly what she was always teaching us,’ said Marlene. 189

UP WE GREW

T You cannot talk about Australian Aboriginal children without talking about the stolen children. In Australia until the 1960s Aboriginal children were taken from their mothers and put in orphanages or foster homes, or adopted by white families. In 1995 the then Labor Attorney-General, Michael Lavarch, asked the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission to consult among the Australian people, particularly among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, about the effects of these separations. The result was the report ‘Bringing Them Home.’ There was no food, nothing. We was all huddled up in a room … like a little puppy-dog... on the floor... Sometimes at night we’d cry with hunger, no food… we had to scrounge in the town dump, eating old bread, smashing tomato sauce bottles, licking them. Half of the time the food we got was from the rubbish dump. [Evidence from a man removed to an Aboriginal compound at three, during the 1930s.] Your family don’t care about you anymore, or they wouldn’t have given you away. They don’t love you. All they are, are just dirty, drunken blacks. You heard this daily. [From a woman removed to Cootamundra Girls’ Home in the 1940s.] When I was 14 years old and going to these foster people, I remember the welfare officer sitting down and they were having a cup of tea and talking about how they hoped our race would die out. And that I was fair enough, I was a half-caste and I would automatically live 190

Took them away

with a white person and get married. Because the system would make sure that no one would marry an Aborigine person anyhow. And then my children would automatically be fairer, quarter-caste, and then the next generation would be white and we would be bred out. I remember when she was discussing this with my foster people, I remember thinking – because I had no concept of what it all meant – I remember thinking, ‘That’s a good idea, because all the Aborigines are poor’. [From a woman removed to Bomaderry Children’s Home as a baby in the 1940s.] We made a series of errors through our ignorance and paternalism. We brought him up separate from the Koori population… away from the Koori people. The ones we’d heard about in the paper were having big problems, so we thought we’d keep him away from those problems until he matures. We didn’t understand the full ramifications of invasion, of dispossession or dispersement. We learnt all this later. So we were – in the 1960s we’re talking – we were ignorant, well-meaning whites. We had some problems of course when he was about 10 – identity problems. [Evidence from a couple who had adopted an Aboriginal boy when he was a year old.]

Some of the people who helped to carry out the policy knew it was wrong. Lang Dean, the son of a policeman who worked in the Echuca district in the 1930s, has written of his father’s distress at having to take children away: During 1937–1938, when I was seven or eight years old, he would sometimes come off duty and, as was his custom, sit on a stool outside our kitchen and take his helmet off. On occasions he would be crying and sobbing 191

UP WE GREW

like a child, I would be upset to see such a strong man cry and ask him why. He said he would not tell me as I was too young to understand but he would tell me when I grew up. What he did say then was, ‘Son, don’t ever be a policeman, it’s a dirty job.’ After he left the force, when I was about sixteen years old, he and I were camping on a fishing trip and we were sitting around the campfire. I had often thought about how Dad cried years ago so I asked him would he tell me the reason. He told me when he went on duty those mornings his sergeant would order him to accompany two welfare officers to Cumragunja, a mission station, to give them protection when they entered the nice clean simple homes of half-caste people and bodily removed nine, ten, eleven and twelve year-old children from loving mothers and fathers into commandeered taxis. They were then taken to the Echuca railway station and sent to the far reaches of NSW and Queensland. They were farmed out to service wealthy businessmen and graziers. No doubt a few were treated well but the rest would be thrown on the human scrap-heap when finished with.

‘So that was the reason my father cried in those days.’ Lang Dean is now in his seventies, and he’s still working with programs to help drug-dependent young people. He says these memories of his father have stayed with him all his life. As a child, he says, he was friends with many Aboriginal children, and could not understand why they had to be treated differently.

T 192

Took them away

In 1955 Colin Macleod, who had grown up in the Melbourne suburb of Williamstown, went to the Northern Territory as a cadet patrol officer. He was twenty-one, and his job was to register Aborigines as wards of the state. At that time, as wards, Aborigines could not drink alcohol, travel freely or even marry without the permission of the state. It became part of Macleod’s job to make recommendations about whether part-Aboriginal children should be removed from their families. Many times, he did recommend removal. He has written a book about it, called Patrol in the Dreamtime. ‘Without a doubt some churches, particularly the Methodists, believed that if you could remove the heathens from their culture, dress them in European clothes and give them an education, then they would become good little Christians. They would often send the children down south to keep them away from their own culture. Yet they didn’t do this out of spite. They thought they were doing the right thing.’ Many people believed the policy was cruel, and in many cases, it was. Ted Egan, who worked with Colin Macleod, wrote in a report after a trip he had made to remove children from Wave Hill Station that he had seen things ‘the like of which I wish never to experience again. The engines on the plane are not stopped… and the noise combined with the strangeness of an aircraft only accentuated the grief and fear of the children, resulting in near hysteria in two of them. I am quite convinced that news of my actions at Wave Hill preceded me to the other stations resulting in the children being taken away prior to my arrival.’ ‘But what,’ asked Colin Macleod, ‘if the mother was under the influence of some dissolute itinerant stockman? 193

UP WE GREW

Young girls were becoming mothers way before they were old enough to be good mothers, in conditions of unspeakable squalor and cruelty, often inflicted by the child’s father – if he had bothered to hang around – but more likely at the hands of those in the Aboriginal community who had no truck with “yella fellas” [children of mixed parentage].’ He was more likely to recommend the removal of a girl than a boy. This may have been the result of the patriarchal attitudes of the time, or may have been because girls were more likely to be in danger. In a report recommending against the removal of a two-year-old boy he wrote: ‘If this child had been a girl I would possibly recommend it. In this case I am hesitant, as I often wonder if the pain of separation is worth it in the lad’s case.’ Today Colin Macleod defends the policies he helped implement. The criteria for removal were strict and fair and had as their overriding concern the welfare of the child, he says. ‘The policy was assimilation. Yes, it was paternalistic, but sometimes this is the only way. Look at the position [Aboriginal people are in] today. Whatever the alternative is supposed to be, it hasn’t worked.’

T Colin Macleod’s son is Andrew Macleod. A couple of years ago he wrote a letter to major Australian newspapers, calling for an apology, on behalf of the nation, for the stolen children. ‘I am not too proud to regret past wrongs, even those not undertaken by myself,’ he wrote. Andrew, an international lawyer, says now, ‘As children we had Aboriginal people come and stay with us each Christmas, which seemed normal to us, and we had a lot of 194

Took them away

Aboriginal memorabilia around the house. I never really knew much about his [father’s] work until much later in life. The first time we spoke about it was when I was about fifteen.’ He has since talked with his father about it at length: ‘The truth I think is that when the two cultures first came into contact, on each occasion with each tribe, neither the white nor the black cultures were able to fully understand the gravity of the decisions they made. Once contact had been made life would change because of the contact, and that could not be undone. For example, in the late 1950s there was a severe drought. Many tribes came in from the desert for the first time in search of food and they heard white man had it, although they had not met white man. So they came in. Many years later a tribal leader was asked why, and he said, “We came in because we were hungry, we didn’t realise we could never go back.”’ Andrew says he and his brother have different views on the subject, which he puts down to education. ‘My brother left school at fourteen and at fifteen was working on the cattle stations and in the gold mines of the Northern Territory. In Katherine he would see drunken Aboriginals in the streets each night getting their welfare cheques. He would be jealous, as many in his socio-economic group were. That attitude remains with him. He even went so far as supporting the Jo [Bjelke-Petersen] for Canberra push and voted for Pauline Hanson. I spent longer at school, went to university and was taught to ask why things happen, not just notice that they do. So when I see the drunk Aboriginal in the street of whichever town, I look at the deeper issues of cultural clash, dislocation, failed government policy, and then begin to think on solutions.’ 195

UP WE GREW

By the late 1970s the adoption of Aboriginal children by white families was being phased out. But the reasons were not only that Aborigines were opposed to whites taking their children, or anger that so few Aboriginal families were able to meet the formal selection criteria to adopt children themselves, but that by this time child adoption itself was being seen as ‘a possessive and intrusive intervention’ that treated children as transferable property.

T There are many different views among Aboriginal people on the stolen generations, says Bernice Clarke, an Aboriginal woman from Warrnambool: ‘In my father’s generation they were taken away because they were black. People would see the policeman coming and everyone would be scared, thinking, who have they come to get now? In this generation they are taken away because of alcoholism and violence.’ In Victoria, the rate of substantiated abuse of Aboriginal children is, shockingly, ten times higher than for nonAboriginal children. But some in the Aboriginal community believe the Victorian welfare authorities too often confuse child abuse with welfare concerns that arise out of poverty. As one Aboriginal welfare worker put it, ‘A child who has to sleep on a mattress on the floor because the family can’t afford a bed is not necessarily neglected.’ A policy of removal that was begun for the most racist of reasons has become in some cases necessary for the protection of children, says Muriel Cadd, an Aboriginal woman who is now the head of the Victorian Aboriginal Child Care Agency. She also has experienced generational upward mobility. 196

Took them away

Muriel knows, more than most, of the lives that have been wrecked by the policies of the past. Even so, sometimes today she recommends that Aboriginal children be removed from their parents: ‘We must be prepared to make those decisions, because sometimes it’s the best thing. Sometimes the parents are incapable of looking after them.’ This is Muriel’s story. She was born in a Carlton hospital in 1953. Her mother travelled from Healesville by train to Melbourne a week before the birth, and then went back by train with the new baby. Muriel was the third of nine Harrison children. She grew up in Healesville, in an old wooden house with gaps in the floor. She and her eight brothers and sisters all slept in one room, which had no glass in the window, so in winter they would huddle together at one end, away from the window. She also knew family violence as a child, but still she thinks her parents were good role models. Especially her mother: ‘It was Mum who pushed us all. She always wanted things to be better for us than they were for her. I have a memory of Mum walking towards the school for a parent–teacher day. She was a big woman, and she would have walked three miles in the heat, but she wanted to be there. She so wanted us all to do well.’ The state school at Healesville was terribly racist, says Muriel. ‘I didn’t know as a child why people didn’t like us. But you knew you were the lowest of the low. The only friends you would have would be kids who didn’t know you, new kids who came from the army school, or other kids who were misfits for some reason. It made us very close as a family, though. I would bash up anyone who tried to hurt my younger brothers. But I didn’t get into feeling angry and 197

UP WE GREW

being sorry for myself. I suppose that is a form of resilience. ‘Most of my family have done well. When you do well you often have to cope with envy from other Aboriginal people. Some, when they see someone getting up they want to pull you down. I have cousins who’ve said, “Oh, you Harrisons, you think you’re better than everyone else.” If you don’t drink you can get ostracised in your community. I think, well, I don’t have to be in the gutter stoned to know where I come from. ‘I lived in Queensland for eighteen years. It is so racist. You are on a bus in Townsville, no one will sit next to you even if the bus is crowded. When my son was five he came running out the school gate crying, because the kids said to him, “You’re black, and here comes your black mother.” There’d be birthday parties, everyone in the class would be invited except my son. What do you do? You can’t punch up five-year-olds. ‘People like [Aboriginal leader] Noel Pearson say we should get off welfare. But some of our families have been so traumatised they can’t cope. We do need to see what is happening on the ground, but further punishing is not going to help.’ The Aboriginal Child Care Agency works with the child protection unit of the Victorian Department of Human Services. Though removing children from their families is sometimes necessary it would be far better to do ‘the hard work’ with parents before the families got into trouble, Muriel says: ‘Here we are funded only when children are involved with child protection. If we had funding to work with families before they get to that stage, to set up support groups for new parents, things like kindergartens and child health 198

Took them away

centres, we might stop some getting into crisis. Stopping kids getting into drugs and alcohol is so important. Marijuana use is becoming a psychosis for our young people. Schools see kids turning up with no lunches, the lice in their hair. We should be able to work with schools. Then there would not be so many notifications for child protection. ‘We should also be challenging the parents to take responsibility. If we take their children and put them into care we are letting them off the hook. It’s become too easy for families to say, it’s too hard, we’re not coping, you take them. The first time they lose the children it’s very hard for them, but after the second or third time they think, let them have them, it means we can go and get into the drink. ‘Sometimes I really am in despair for our children. But I wouldn’t be here if I was not an optimist. We can change what is happening to our children.’

T Mungara Brown, who is eighteen, also knows of the misery that has visited Aboriginal people. His great-grandmother was taken away from her family and put on a mission. He can tell me the names of some of his uncles who’ve been stolen. He knows about Aboriginal politics but right now is more interested in football and in passing his VCE. The teachers are helping him, giving him extra tuition to help him with his exams because he spent too much time during the year concentrating on football. He’s at Northland Secondary College, the one that was shut down by the Kennett State Government in 1992, and only opened again after a two-year battle culminating in the Supreme Court. This school has the the highest 199

UP WE GREW

proportion of Aboriginal children in Victoria. It’s a grouse school, says Mungara Brown. ‘Some people say this school doesn’t have enough discipline but I think it’s the best because it teaches you self-discipline. The teachers say, Okay, you didn’t do your homework, you are the one who’ll be missing out.’ Mungara is articulate, polite, friendly, and happy. Everything the stereotype of Aboriginal youth is not. He’s also handsome enough to be a movie star. His mother is Lynette Briggs, who works for Aboriginal Health Services and is also an artist, and his father is Alan Brown, who works as a curator in the Aboriginal section of the Melbourne Museum. Mungara (his name means ‘land’) is very proud of his Aboriginal heritage: ‘We have the longest living culture in the world,’ he says. Alan, his father, is from the Gundijarra people, a Western District tribe, and his mother, Lyn is from the Yorta Yorta people of southern New South Wales. Mungara grew up in the Melbourne suburb of Thornbury, in a good house with a big backyard. Yeah, it was a happy childhood, he says. His earliest memories are of playing in the backyard and seeing his mother through the window doing her painting, and of school, and of getting a bike for Christmas. And most of all, football. He went to Thornbury primary school and has spent all his life in the area except for a year in Cairns, in Queensland, and that was good too. He has three brothers. The family was not well off, he says: ‘We were battlers, but my parents were always very good.’ And there was always a big extended family. ‘We always had people over, it was like a big family there all the time.’ Football has been the biggest part of his life. His 200

Took them away

father played football too, and so did his uncles. Mungara tells me about his uncle, Kutcha Edwards, a big man with dreadlocks, who is a popular player for the Fitzroy Stars. Or maybe he is not his ‘real’ uncle – ‘We are taught to call our elders uncle or auntie, whether they are related to us or not, it’s the way we show respect,’ he says. Another uncle is the Aboriginal poet Richard Franklin, whose poems were put to music and performed at La Mama theatre by Mungara and other students from Northland.

T Mungara’s been in Canberra playing football, and made the Aboriginal All Australia team. ‘Football taught me skills, talking, listening, discipline; it kept me active. It’s helped me to be a role model to younger kids,’ he says. He’s got lots of friends, Koori friends and non-Aboriginal friends. He introduces his Koori friends to his other friends, wants everybody to mix and get on together. He’s not into drugs, or drink, or sniffing glue. ‘If we win I like to celebrate with a drink, but drugs, no way,’ he says. ‘We keep away from that stuff. If I know someone who’s getting into it I say, “What are you doing, Bros?” ’ Mungara thinks Aboriginal people are unfairly treated by the media. ‘The only time you hear about Aboriginal people doing good things is in sport. I mean, Cathy Freeman [the runner] deserves all the praise she gets, but what about the Aboriginal people who are keeping communities together? ‘I used to cop it a lot when I was playing football but not much any more. Things are better now because the clubs 201

UP WE GREW

have been cracking down [on racial abuse]. Yeah, I get annoyed when people say things like, Are you an Abo? I tell them it’s either Aboriginal or Koori, it’s insulting to say Abo.’ But Koori people are in some ways luckier than nonAboriginal people. ‘Our families are so wide that we can all rely on each other when anyone has problems. When there is a problem we all come together. We respect our elders. I see my cousins having problems I say to them, Well, Bro, you can choose. You choose to pick up the bottle, you don’t have to. Don’t be like sheep. ‘When I think about all the problems I could just sit and sook about it, but it makes me feel strong not to. Sometimes you have to hide your tears and smile to make everyone else smile.’ Apart from football, what he likes best at school is drama. His school drama class put on a play called What is a Warrior? ‘It’s an Aboriginal story, and it’s about being a warrior. Being a warrior is not getting into drinking and fighting and robbery. It’s about being strong enough to say no to violence, and about being a good role model.’ Providing he passes his VCE Mungara will leave school this year. ‘In a way I’ll be happy. I won’t miss school but I will miss my friends here, and the teachers. Without those teachers I would not make it, I know that.’ What drives him now is getting into Australian rules football. ‘I pray to God next year I’ll get picked up by the AFL. That’s what I’ll do next year. Otherwise I’d like to become a fireman. When I’m on the footy field I feel proud and strong. I can control things. I think, it’s war. I think, I want to win.’

T 202

Took them away

In April 2004, announcing the scrapping of ATSIC (the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission), Prime Minister John Howard said it had become ‘too preoccupied with what might loosely be called symbolic issues’. An apology for past wrongs is about symbolism. I asked Colin Macleod if he believed an apology was needed for the children who were removed wrongly. ‘Yes, we might as well apologise. Apologise and get it over with. Now what do we do tomorrow?’ Marlene Burchill says, ‘Yes, an apology if it means a lot, if it moves things along maybe it should be said, but our problems are greater than that.’ ‘Yes, there definitely needs to be an official apology,’ says Muriel Cadd. ‘Children were removed from their people and their land. You cannot understand what this means. The first thing we say when we meet one another is “Who’s your mob?” Not to know who your people are is very disempowering. People have to realise we are the indigenous people of this country. I had to leave Australia to understand what this means. It was only when I was in Geneva that I realised this. I felt so dislocated being away from my land. White people can come and go, but we belong here.’

203

‘Some people shouldn’t have children’

I

n the corridors of the Children’s Court in Melbourne there are many grandmothers. They are here to try to get custody or guardianship of grandchildren. This seems to be a new phenomenon: older women, and sometimes men, who have had to step in and take care of the children of their own drug-addicted, mentally ill or otherwise incompetent sons or daughters. One couple, about my age, have with them a three-year-old and a fiveyear-old, their son’s children. Their daughter-in-law is a heroin addict and their son is useless and irresponsible, they say. ‘Some people shouldn’t be allowed to have children,’ says the woman. ‘Sterilise the lot of them,’ says the man. Outside Courtroom Two a young Asian man holds a sleeping baby tenderly over his shoulder. This baby was found crying in a car outside the casino, where the parents

T

204

‘Some people shouldn’t have children’

were inside gambling, and now the Victorian Department of Human Services has applied for a custody order. The story’s been all over the papers and television. ‘These people shouldn’t be allowed to have children,’ said letters to newspapers. The public can be so self-righteous. But this baby is obviously loved and cared for and the parents have expressed great contrition and say they will never do it again. The magistrate returns the baby to his parents’ care.

T The Children’s Court is a useful antidote to excessive optimism about children today. The following story is not the worst I heard, bad enough though it is: I can tell by the way he points his foot and wiggles his backside as he leans across to his lawyer that David thinks he’s just It. He’s sitting in front of me in Courtroom One of the Children’s Court. He’s tall and very thin, with long bleached hair and an earring. He keeps leaning forward and interrupting his lawyer in the middle of her crossexaminations of witnesses. He asks her to pour him a glass of water from the jug on the bar table. This is the story of David’s sons, Hugo and Joseph, whom I have never met or even seen, except in a photograph their grandmother has shown me. Hugo and Joseph are made-up names. I can’t tell you their real names, or where they were born or where they live now, because these children, who are ten and eight, are the subjects of an application by the Victorian Department of Human Services for guardianship, and cannot be identified. David is not their father’s real name either. And Cathy is 205

UP WE GREW

not the real name of their mother, who has a pretty, babyish face and long straggly hair and is sitting, lost and vacantlooking, next to David. ‘Mum is very drug-affected today,’ remarks the lawyer for the Department of Human Services (DHS) to the other lawyers, during a break. David and Cathy haven’t been together for a long time, but are sitting together in court now, while strangers decide what is to be done about their children. Hugo and Joseph have been looked after by David most of the time since they were babies. Their mother, Cathy, has a psychiatric illness and has been, and maybe still is, addicted to heroin and amphetamines. The prescription drugs she has been taking have left her with some permanent impairment. The DHS says that David has not cared for the children properly, has neglected them and emotionally damaged them. If it gets the order – a ‘Guardianship to Secretary Order’, it’s called – the department, not their parents, will make all major decisions about Hugo and Joseph’s welfare. DHS proposes to assess the boys’ paternal grandmother, Margaret, and her partner, Frank, as carers for them. The boys have said they want to live with Margaret. At other times they have said they want to live with their father. But Margaret has a ten-year intervention order against David since he punched Frank in the face (Frank says), or only pushed him (David says). David says he gave Frank a push because Frank made some ‘smart-arse comment’ and he, David, was ‘under stress’ at the time. Cathy has played such a small part in her children’s lives. But she loves them, and persists with access visits (although she does fail to turn up sometimes, her lawyer admits) despite the fact that the boys mostly ignore her and sit and 206

‘Some people shouldn’t have children’

watch videos during her visits. Cathy doesn’t give evidence. She’s not up to it. And besides, her lawyer knows any evidence Cathy could give would go against her.

T Margaret, a plump, neat-looking woman in her fifties, gives evidence about Cathy’s housekeeping. When the children were little and were with their mother and father ‘the house was always filthy, the babies’ cots were filthy, the food was terrible’, Margaret says. ‘I have seen Cathy in terrible states, states where she can’t stand up or hold a conversation... I believe she has schizophrenia. She’s been in a psychiatric hospital at times. The boys have said to me their Mum’s stupid, she gives drugs to their Dad. They’ve said they feel sorry for her – Yes, they probably do love her. Every child loves their mother. But she’s popping pills, drinking alcohol. Cathy lives in a little world of her own. She’s oblivious to her children.’ There are five barristers at the bar table: one for the DHS, one for David, one for Cathy, one for Margaret and one for the boys. All except Margaret are on Legal Aid. Add a magistrate and a clerk. The case was set down for eight days and has gone for twelve. What must it all be costing? In another recent case, I’ve been told, there were eight barristers crowded around the bar table, one for the department, one for each parent and one for each of five children. Perhaps, if the money it costs for these court cases were put into social support for families, there would be less need for such cases.

207

UP WE GREW

T Hugo and Joseph are not at the court. They are at school – a special school for children with behavioural problems, where they have been since they were suspended from their primary school. They have been living at a secret address, in a group unit run by DHS since they were taken from their father eight months ago. Margaret said she cried for three days at the idea of her grandchildren being taken away and cared for by strangers. David and Cathy separated when Hugo was three and Joseph was one year old. David later formed a relationship with Susan, who moved in with him. They made themselves into a family, and she looked after the boys and then bore him another son. But she left him, taking the baby with her. This was very traumatic for Hugo and Joseph, David tells the court. After he had been evicted from a house he was renting, David and the children moved in with his mother, Margaret, and she helped look after the boys. David smoked marijuana day and night, locked himself in his room for hours, sold her jewellery, bashed his head into the wall in a temper in front of the boys. Margaret said she had to leave because of his ‘verbal violence’ towards her. After she left she would go back and do their washing, and buy food for them because she knew they wouldn’t otherwise have any proper food. ‘When I left I would often get a call from the school to say David hadn’t picked up the boys, I would go and get them and take them home, and he’d be asleep on the floor,’ said David’s mother. 208

‘Some people shouldn’t have children’

The boys have told carers they love Margaret, their ‘Nan’. But they also love their father. The boys have ‘divided loyalties’, a psychiatrist tells the court. The principal of the school they used to go to before they were suspended, asked to describe the boys’ behaviour, says: ‘Well, how can I say? It was extraordinary. They lacked any social graces, they just didn’t know how to behave, like other children.’ The boys had hit and kicked other children, one of them had punched a pregnant teacher in the stomach, and had taken a teacher’s car keys and thrown them away. They came to school with filthy clothes, filthy nails, matted hair, without lunches. They used language children of that age should not know. ‘You suck cocks,’ Hugo said to his teacher. Margaret says she can’t understand this behaviour. The boys don’t have any behavioural problems when they are with her, she says. When it’s his turn to give evidence Margaret’s partner, Frank, agrees. ‘They are two lovable little boys,’ he says. He and Margaret have talked it over and he’s decided he wants to help her look after the boys, give them a chance.

T The court is read some statements the boys have made to their school principal at various times: I have cuts on my face and neck because we were in the back seat of the car when Dad and Mum drove us to Mum’s boyfriend to get some drugs. Mum’s boyfriend came to the car and smashed all the windows and the glass cut me. 209

UP WE GREW

Mum came to school and took some clothes from the lost property and then went into the classroom next to the hall and took someone’s wallet and phone. Mum took all the cards to buy medicine for herself. She sold the cards to someone who would give her money for drugs. My Dad and Mum take drugs. I don’t go anywhere or do anything. Mum and Dad go into the bedroom and fall asleep and we’re not allowed in. Dad had some of Mum’s medication and I don’t like it. I had to empty my piggy bank and run across to the service station to get Joseph a meat pie for tea because he was so hungry. How would you like it, I didn’t have any tea that night because I gave it to my brother. I’m so angry. Dad sold my bike and game-boy. We had great fun at Nan’s. We had a roast dinner and I loved it. Do you know that my Dad likes me better than Hugo? I just wish he would tell him.

Hugo deliberately stuck a fork into his eye and spent three weeks in hospital. The school principal becomes tearful under cross-examination. She says that despite their problems she has great faith these boys can be all right, and that she believes they are very resilient. All children need consistency in discipline, she says. It doesn’t help that the school is teaching about non-violence if at home they are seeing violence. She agrees with the lawyer for David that David probably loves his children. ‘I have ticks on Dad for love, but no ticks for proving it in an appropriate way,’ she says. 210

‘Some people shouldn’t have children’

The lawyer for Cathy, the boys’ mother: ‘DHS are not magic people. Can anyone guarantee love and nurture will be provided?’ David has asked the court for Hugo and Joseph to be returned to him. A psychiatrist is asked his opinion of what it would do to the boys to be placed back in that environment: ‘I would be very concerned about that. I think you would see more aggression, more self-harming and it would become more desperate.’ Hugo has been diagnosed as having ‘conduct disorder’. This behaviour, even with treatment, could go on for the next twenty years, the psychiatrist says. Yes, he agrees, some children manage to cope with this kind of background remarkably well. Others don’t. ‘What do kids of this age need?’ asks the lawyer for DHS. The psychiatrist answers: ‘They need parents to be reliable and dependable, to love and take care of them and to prevent them doing harmful things. They need to know the rules.’ The boys have had hours and hours and hours of ‘counselling’. Yes, Hugo has shown reluctance to talk to him, the psychiatrist agrees in cross-examination by David’s lawyer: ‘I am part of a nebulous big system he doesn’t understand,’ he says. ‘Has he expressed this unwillingness to see you forcefully?’ asks David’s lawyer. ‘He does most things forcefully,’ smiles the psychiatrist. ‘Is professional overload a form of abuse?’ asks the lawyer then. ‘You could interpret it that way,’ the psychiatrist says. 211

UP WE GREW

T Outside the court I talk to the principal of the special school, who tells me that for a while she worried she would not be able to keep them there, because of safety concerns for the teachers and other students. ‘I’ve been bitten, and punched and kicked. And the language! They can be charming and compliant. At other times...’ She says she has great hope that these two boys will make it. ‘They have so much going for them. They have lovely personalities. They are endearing, they are charismatic, they are fun children to be around. They are very nice-looking boys. They are both highly intelligent, and they have a love of learning and a love of reading. They are both very good readers.’ One day, after DHS had taken him from his father, Hugo armed himself with a stick and began threatening teachers at the special school. He tried to tie the cord of a window blind around his neck. The police were called, and had trouble controlling him. ‘Where’s my dad? My dad’s in hell,’ Hugo shouted. Another day, put into the ‘time out’ room to calm down, he began spewing out hatred, terrible insults, pornographic imagery. In another time it would have been said that Hugo was possessed by a devil, and a priest would have been brought to rid him of it through an exorcism. When David was a child he also had behavioural problems, had anxiety separating from her, his mother, she tells the court. And when he went to school would throw things at the teacher and run away. 212

‘Some people shouldn’t have children’

No evidence has been given to the court of David being physically violent to the boys. ‘I do not believe my son would physically harm his children, but mentally they were being harmed by him,’ says Margaret. Sitting there, it suddenly strikes me deeply that it is a very serious thing, to take children away from their families. And it seems to me wrong and terrible that this family’s intimate details are being teased out and argued over at length by strangers.

T On the second day of his cross-examination David is threequarters of an hour late. He tells the court he was sick, and he does look sick. He has to be asked to speak up several times. The women lawyers questioning him are tough. The lawyer for Margaret says, ‘You don’t ask the questions, you answer them.’ The lawyer for DHS asks him again about the compulsory counselling sessions he was supposed to go to, as part of the conditions for getting emergency housing. He says he went. She says, ‘You understand you are on oath, that you are before this court to tell the truth? You don’t want to take time to think about your answer? ‘You said you asked everyone for help, the department, the school, everyone. But [the principal] said you never, ever turned up for the parenting programs. You said you needed a nurse for your broken leg? But your mother said she saw you jump over the fence at the station yesterday. You were offered help from the Strengthening Families program? You never wanted them in the house, did you, with good reason, because there were bongs and marijuana, et 213

UP WE GREW

cetera, in the house. Didn’t a protection worker repeatedly try to talk to you about protective concerns?’ David: ‘I did the best I could for my children.’ Lawyer: ‘This is not about you.’ Lawyer: ‘You have heard the teachers talk about their behaviour? What responsibility do you take for this behaviour?’ David: ‘My kids are repeatedly being asked, does your father smoke drugs, does your father touch your bottom? They are told, “We are thinking of taking you away.” They have seen their dad being asked the same things so many times, over and over again. The department is responsible for their behaviour.’ Later, David says tiredly, ‘I am responsible. I take responsibility.’ David is narcissistic, irresponsible, selfish. He’s constantly put his own needs before his children’s. So why do I wish he could be given another chance? The children are no angels, either. Hugo has something wrong with his mind probably partly inherited. They’ve told stories about their father they’ve later denied. The children know their mother’s sick, David’s said, but they do love her. Cathy has said she wants to look after her children, but she’s not ready just yet. David’s said that if he is given another chance he will do better. The order is given. The boys will live with Margaret and Frank, under the department’s supervision. They will have access visits with their parents at the department’s discretion. Margaret has told the court she loves the boys and she also still loves her son David. ‘I’ll never give up on them’, she told the court.

214

‘Some people shouldn’t have children’

T These children might get through. They do have people who love them. Everyone who’s talked about them has said Hugo and Joseph have ‘engaging personalities’, and this might help them. But an experienced social worker I talk to about this case later is less optimistic. The boys are in serious trouble, with one having made suicide attempts before he was even ten years old. She doesn’t agree that the boys’ ‘engaging personalities’ will be enough to get them through. Children with serious attachment problems often have well-honed skills in being engaging, ‘when it suits them’, she says. It’s a desperate survival mechanism, not necessarily a sign of resilience. She agrees that the boys should have access to their parents. This is the case for the vast majority of kids. But not all: some kids are being forced into traumatic and unwanted access arrangements with parents they would really rather forget about.

T What excuse did Trish’s parents have? They were not addicted to drugs or alcohol, they weren’t unemployed, they weren’t rich but neither were they of ‘lower socio-economic status’. In fact, they were respectable members of their church and community. No. The problem, says Trish, was that her father was ‘a degenerate mean fucker who then turned around and married a woman so awful she made even him look half 215

UP WE GREW

human’. Then they had nine children, whose lives they set about doing their best to wreck – but most marvellously and inspiringly, did not succeed. You may think the story exaggerated. ‘It is too hard to accept myself let alone expect the normal world to believe,’ says Trish. Because there is sexual abuse involved I can’t under the law identify the family, even though Trish and her sisters would prefer to declare themselves. Why shouldn’t they? They’ve done nothing to be ashamed of and much to be proud of. Trish is now in her early forties. Her parents grew up and were married in Ireland, then migrated here. They had no relatives in Australia and few friends. Trish was born in the same year as her sister Rose, eleven months apart. After them in quick succession came seven others. Their parents, whom Trish and her sisters now sarcastically refer to as ‘Fred and Rosemary’ were practising Catholics, and the whole family went to mass every week. Neither parent drank alcohol or smoked and they lived frugal and careful lives. This was a necessity which, Trish says ‘had the unexpected bonus of permitting them total self-righteousness’. Trish remembers her mother as an attractive-looking young woman, but filled with bitterness and hatred. The kindest spin she can put on her behaviour is that she was depressed and sad about being so far from her home in Ireland, and didn’t have the necessary social skills to make or keep friends. Instead she threw all her energies into housework and cleaning. She was obsessed with the fear that anyone might judge her house untidy or unclean. And, Trish came to realise, she loathed and resented her children. Her father was an arrogant man who needed to be right 216

‘Some people shouldn’t have children’

on every issue, and had no interest in the views or beliefs of others. He read voraciously, lectured and hectored his children constantly and was obsessed with their education. All the children were habitual readers. This, Trish is convinced, is what saved them: ‘Everybody in my family would read a lot. We all loved books and what money my parents had they spent on new books both fiction and reference. This is not to say we were not a normally noisy and rowdy bunch of children. When we were not reading we kids would put on plays and pretend schools, argue and annoy each other, much like we do in our adulthood, really. ‘We were seldom allowed to go anywhere and almost never permitted to have friends in our home. I think in many ways we were an introverted household containing a family of extroverts. In hindsight I see that my parents’ personal and family isolation enabled them to abuse their children with almost no interference from anyone else. It was very important to my father that we did well at school and he took great pride in our educational achievements, which he attributed to himself. He had been educated by Irish Christian Brothers who had nurtured a love of learning in a climate of violence and fear – a model my father emulated without insight. ‘When not working our father dominated our home. My mother deferred to him and their roles were clearly delineated. My mother was a very angry person and we feared her with good reason. Beatings with belts, other objects and fists were very common in our family and my mother in particular would often punch us in the head while holding us by the hair. I remember her helping me with my arithmetic homework by slapping me every time I got the 217

UP WE GREW

wrong answer. Eventually when I was crying so hard I could no longer continue with the homework she would give up and ‘help’ someone else. ‘Many times at school I would have to sit with great difficulty because the back of my thighs and knees would be covered with red welts from my mother’s slippers. We all feared her temper. Many times my older sister and I and sometimes even my father intervened to stop her doing serious injury to one of my younger sisters or brothers. ‘But even more terrible to me than her daily decision about who would be beaten was her constant yelling and screaming abuse at some younger child who was usually already crying. She insisted that we all stay in the house, supposedly to help her with the housework but in fact providing her with an outlet for her violence, which was always on the boil. ‘As we grew older we came to realise the inescapable fact that not only did our mother not love us but that she hated us, and her violence and anger were manifestations of her inability to control the rage she felt towards us. I recall being very sad and depressed as a child and as a teenager. Because we were largely imprisoned in the house we read constantly. The Readers Digest condensed books saved my life, I’m sure of it. We had many copies in the house dating back many years and though the stories were old and cut maddeningly short they also had adventures and escape to somewhere other than the reality of our lives. As soon as we were old enough we all joined the local library and would catch the bus there straight from school, taking out as many books as we could and swapping them with each other. ‘We all did very well at school in English and English literature and I’m sure we were the only kids at the school 218

‘Some people shouldn’t have children’

who had not only read our own prescribed books for the year but our siblings’, as well, all before the school year had even started! I really enjoyed reading the stories of the lives of the saints and any story that involved adventure and good times. I spent one entire summer when I was at primary school reading every one of the Famous Five books. With my sisters and brothers, often the unspoken judgement about how good a book was depended on how it could take us out of where we were at the time. ‘When I was in high school there was a teacher who seemed kind and sympathetic, and one day I went to her in tears. I confided in her my feelings of despair at my mother’s total disregard for all of her children and me in particular. I didn’t tell her about the violence, as by this time I was aware this was not normal in all homes (as I had earlier thought it was), and was deeply ashamed of my parents’ behaviour. The teacher reassured me that I was wrong and said all mothers love their children and I was just at a sensitive age. I recall many years later running into this teacher and her reminding me of ‘my adolescent angst’ and her laughing and teasing me for having been so silly. I just said nothing. ‘My father, though seldom as angry as my mother, would use his belt to hit us and it was not unusual for us to have belt marks across our arms and legs. Both parents always accompanied their beatings with verbal tirades about what worthless, lazy, horrible children we were. He called us ugly and stupid even though we did well at school. He would often talk about the children of people he knew through the church and compare us unfavourably with them. ‘My father believed all women were fundamentally useless 219

UP WE GREW

and held sexist views of an extreme nature even for those times of the seventies. Ironically, my mother held the same views, believing that women who worked outside the home were greedy and grasping. She refused to learn to drive, never read and constantly reminded us that we were too smart for our own good. ‘My mother had no sympathy for other women whatever their circumstances. So my sisters had no one to turn to when my father began to sexually assault some of them. ‘As adults, my sisters gave evidence at criminal trials of my father that my mother had known all of this and had walked into rooms where he was sexually assaulting them, and had done nothing.’ Trish was not sexually abused. She didn’t find out about what had happened to her sisters until one day when they were grown up adults they were on a ‘Walk Against Want’ together, raising money for a charity. They started talking about how their parents had treated them, and one of her sisters said, ‘But that was not the worst of it,’ and told how her father had sexually abused her.

T Yet it was not until many years later, when Trish found out that her father had begun to sexually abuse her beloved niece, that the sisters decided to take action. They went to the police, and their father was charged, and had three separate trials. He was acquitted at the first trial. The second was declared a mistrial close to the end of it because the prosecutor made a mistake, and Trish’s sister was too anguished by the experience to go through it again. At the third trial her father, then aged seventy-two, was 220

‘Some people shouldn’t have children’

convicted for the sexual abuse of a child under twelve and was sentenced to three years jail. He spent six months in jail and the rest of the sentence was suspended. ‘During the trials the police and the court staff often commented to us about our closeness and unity as siblings, in taking a stand against our parents. In the court we held hands and supported each other. We cried while we watched our sisters in the witness box being cross-examined, but then during the lunch break we’d be laughing together and arguing and teasing each other.’ I asked Trish how she and her sisters and brothers had escaped their upbringing. ‘Well, we had all left home as soon as we possibly could. Interestingly, we have all gone on to have very good lives. With the occasional exception of my youngest brother none of us ever see, speak to or have anything to do with my parents. Not one of their twenty grandchildren or stepgrandchildren has anything to do with them. What a terrible waste. Even today with all we know about child abuse it is still almost impossible to believe that any mother can hate her children, or that if she did hate them it would not be obvious to all who knew her that she was psychiatrically ill. This is despite evidence that quite a few women kill their children or allow them to be killed by a violent partner.’ By coincidence Trish and one of her sisters both became child protection workers. There’s no doubt, she said, that if a child protection agency had been aware of what had been happening in her home they would have removed the children ‘as quick as you could say Children’s Court’. She is so glad they weren’t: ‘We would have been separated. We might have gone 221

UP WE GREW

into nine different foster homes. It would have destroyed us. The best thing about our childhood is that we survived it. It was very bad, but it’s over. We’ve found happiness – in the love and loyalty we have for each other, in our own families – and there was some justice in that my father was eventually punished.’

T Some abuse experiences are more damaging than others. The children in Trish’s family at least were taught the social skills they need to function in society; they were given a good education; their parents did not steal from their schoolmates to buy drugs; they were never cold and hungry because their parents were too spaced-out to feed or clothe them properly; their mother didn’t take drugs when she was pregnant with them; they were not left alone as babies for long periods while their parents were out looking for a hit. Trish and her sisters are resilient, and so probably are Hugo and Joseph. All these children have had intelligence, good looks and a love of reading on their side. But Trish and her sisters were always in there with a better chance than the two boys simply because they were taught how to behave in a way that would see them accepted by society, not rejected as Joseph and Hugo have been and will be, unless they can now be carefully taught.

222

T What I Have Learned

Precious, precious

T

‘I

have lost two or three children in infancy, not without regret, but without great sorrow,’ wrote Michel Montaigne, the sixteenth-century French essayist. Until the eighteenth century in England and Europe, the death of an infant or young child was a minor event, met with a mixture of indifference and resignation. Investigations of the English family of the sixteenth and seventeenth century have found no evidence of symbols of mourning for the deaths of very young children and parents seldom attended their child’s funeral. It was common to name newborns after a brother or sister who had died. This practice was not unknown even in twentieth-century Australia. In Roman times unwanted babies were left to die on hillsides; the Spartans threw them over cliffs. In eighteenth 225

UP WE GREW

century England good citizens were offended by the large numbers of unwanted infants left along roads and in gutters. During the 1840s, 43 per cent of all babies baptised in Florence were babies who had been abandoned. There’s an argument among historians over whether the great love parents have for their children is a modern thing. Some say today’s ‘precious child’ is the result of the falling birth rates and falling rates of infant mortality that began a little over a century ago: that in periods of high infant mortality parents protect themselves from the emotional pain of a child’s death by not investing too much love in the child; and because there are fewer children today each child is more precious. Other historians, especially some who are mothers, disagree. ‘The old idea that in the past no one gave a damn about children was mainly promoted by men,’ says Melbourne University’s Shurlee Swain. There is indeed plenty of evidence that mothers throughout history fell in love with their babies. To do so is biologically driven: newborn babies’ cries change their mother’s hormone levels and increase her heart rate, pulse and perspiration, modern science tells us. Fathers fell in love too. Giovanni Morelli, in the fourteenth century, writing about his son: ‘And then when he was born, male, sound, well-proportioned, what happiness, what joy I experienced; and then as he grew from good to better, such satisfaction, such pleasure in his childish words, pleasing to all, loving towards me his father and his mother, precocious for his age.’ Morelli sounds just like today’s engrossed fathers, who are supposed to be an historical novelty. In The Forsyte Saga the cold and repressed Soames, who at first turns away when told his newborn 226

Precious, precious

child is a girl, dissolves into helpless love when the baby Fleur is placed in his arms, and ever after is unable to deny her anything (which causes no end of trouble when she becomes a wilful young woman). But how they used to die, the little babies. In Australia even as late as the end of the nineteenth century it was common for a woman, especially if she was poor, to lose most of the children she bore. A study by Melbourne University’s history department of one hundred babies born to poor women at Royal Women’s Hospital in 1886 found that only eleven of the babies reached adulthood. But just because the death of children was common doesn’t mean it was easy to endure. My grandmother must have suffered when five of her eleven children died. ‘A woman spends her life trying not to get pregnant, and then when she does and has the baby she spends her life worrying something will happen to it,’ my mother said to me one day, when I told her I thought I was pregnant again. Women have always loved their babies, and when they abandoned them or gave them up for adoption, as they did in the days before abortion or reliable contraception were available, it was with great pain. A year ago I sat on the ground with a grandmother in Malawi, with her ten grandchildren, all orphaned by AIDS, as she told of her struggle from first light until dark to find enough food to keep them all alive for another day. As she talked, with great patience, backwards and forwards, she stroked the knee of the smallest child sleeping on her lap. Nonsense to think these children not loved, or their deaths not mourned.

227

UP WE GREW

The useful child and the useless child Old European paintings show children dressed in elaborate grown-up clothes, and have them in adult poses. In paintings of the Madonna and child the baby Jesus is a miniature adult, with adult face and limbs. In Centuries of Childhood, Philippe Aries argues that children were painted this way because in the cultures of the time they were viewed as little adults. Childhood, he contends, didn’t exist until around the seventeenth century, and then only in the upper classes; the concept of childhood didn’t penetrate the masses until late nineteenth century. No. Children were always children, says June Factor. ‘It is quite clear that in any culture we have any record of, children develop and celebrate ways of being that are special to children. Children always played. They played knucklebones in ancient Greece. During the Nazi Holocaust they played in the concentration camps and in the ghettoes. The children in the ghettoes had a game like cops and robbers, called Germans and Jews; the best role to have was the German because that meant you could chase the Jews. Children would even play with the carts that were used to take the dead bodies off the street when these were not being used. ‘Those collaborative children’s games of clapping, marbles, jacks, skipping, chasing, hiding, are in every culture. In every culture and throughout history, children have played as long as they had breath in their body and strength in their legs.’ But it may be only in modern western societies that childhood is as sentimentalised as it is in ours. Children in the past – and still in many developing countries – were expected to be useful once they were past infancy. They 228

Precious, precious

went into apprenticeships or worked on farms. Girls became maids and nurses for other children. After the industrial revolution they worked in factories. Increasing affluence and recognition of children’s rights led to the demise of the ‘useful child’, though not without a struggle. Twenty years after education became compulsory in Victoria, a third of children enrolled in Richmond were not in school because their parents relied on the wages they earned. Opponents of the abolition of child labour complained that child-labour laws and compulsory education were turning children into a luxury only the well-off could afford. In my own childhood it was common for the oldest daughter of big families to be taken out of school to help look after her younger siblings. Today, child labour scarcely exists in Australia. And where it does, it is mostly seen as training, or characterbuilding. Helping out on the family farm is approved of, and helping in the family shop is just okay as long as it is not for too many hours, and having a newspaper round is good. But the use of children by some migrant families to help out with contracted sewing of clothing is not tolerated, and there are campaigns against it. In general, today’s children don’t do housework, don’t look after younger brothers and sisters, don’t even run messages, a task constantly required in my childhood. In economic terms they are useless: worse than useless, very expensive. But in emotional terms, they are priceless.

Getting better or getting worse? The assumption with which I began this book was that children in this society are better loved, richer, safer, healthier, better cared for and better educated than ever 229

UP WE GREW

before. Now I think they are probably as loved by their parents, not more, not less. The rest, I think, does hold. Though there are caveats. When I began, I believed my childhood would out-poor most. Now I know it wouldn’t. Kids did sleep in sleep-outs where the rain came in, and did pile old coats on their beds to keep warm. Children did sometimes go hungry when the money ran out before payday. They went to school in overcrowded classrooms, with regimented learning and corporal punishment. They had whooping cough and measles and chilblains, and some were crippled by polio. The attitudes to children were much harsher then. Parents saw it as their duty to knock the nonsense out of children. Nearly everyone seemed to have had a father who drank too much. Anne Summers, in her autobiography, Ducks on the Pond: ‘This is a very Australian story... I am astounded by how many women of my generation have similar stories of alcoholic fathers, some of them very violent, almost all of them incapable of developing decent relationships with their daughters, and often their sons too.’ Deborah Forster in the Sunday Age: ‘My father drank too much, raged too much, and was too passionate. He was an angry man… Most of the fathers drank too much or were distant, members of different species to us kids and women.’ Inga Clendinnen, in Tiger’s Eye, wrote of her parents’ marriage: It ‘was not a failure, or not in the dour terms of those days – the children were fed and educated, the proprieties observed – but there was neither joy nor affection in it.’ These days one in three marriages ends in divorce, but at least that means the ones that survive can be assumed to be reasonably happy. And despite the constant worried reports 230

Precious, precious

about the extent of family breakdown, nearly 80 per cent of Australian children live at home with their biological father and mother.

It’s harder to be poor when others aren’t Judged by the standards of the past most families today are incredibly rich. Infant mortality is one-fifth of its 1950s levels. Houses have become bigger as families have become smaller. Most children live in warm, bright houses, with rooms of their own, full of books and games and stuffed toys. Few children go hungry and few go to school without shoes. But there are still schools where the teachers know that if they expect the children to be able to learn they will have to give them breakfast first. In a country like this, where there is little absolute poverty, you have to talk about relative poverty. The vast majority of children are better off. But 22 per cent of families in Australia have no breadwinner. And the bottom 50 per cent own only seven per cent of the country’s wealth. Inequality is worse than it used to be. And children and their parents feel the inequality keenly. As one parent in Eleven Plus, a study by the Brotherhood of St Laurence said: ‘Camp – we’ve never been able to afford it. They can’t take part in everything. It makes them and me feel bad.’ It probably makes them feel the way I felt when I could not bring the half-yard of cloth to school for the sewing class. And as you can see, I still have not got over this.

T Today problem families are called ‘dysfunctional’. In the old days they were ‘rough’. Respectable parents kept their 231

UP WE GREW

children clean and tidy and disciplined. Undisciplined children and drink went together, it was said. Bad mothers gave their babies condensed milk, which made them unhealthily fat, and dummies to suck. Bad mothers today feed their children junk food and let them watch television or play computer games all day. The casually accepted brutality towards children that used to be commonplace in the home and in schools has gone. Families and schools are more democratic. In the past things were simply done to children, without them having the right to ask why. Today children are encouraged to be assertive, to question. Judged by today’s standards, parents in the past were much more neglectful (indeed by today’s standards it’s likely much of the population over sixty would have been victims of child abuse or neglect). It doesn’t make it any more acceptable today. A teacher friend told recently of a five-year-old girl, on her first day of school, whose father didn’t come to pick her up until 5pm, long after all the other children had been taken home. There were, and are, some sadistically cruel parents. There are parents, as retired Family Court Judge John Fogarty wrote recently ‘whose blackness of heart or indifference to those they should cherish is unimaginable’. While these cases are an extreme minority, some things do get worse. In the old days, many fathers drank too much but mothers usually didn’t, which meant there was usually one competent parent. There are today more families in which both parents are drug addicted and there appear to be more parents who are psychiatrically ill. At the other extreme, the biggest cause of harm might be overprotection. Where once children walked, rode horses 232

Precious, precious

or bicycles to school they are now nearly always driven. In 2001, about half of Sydney children were driven to school (compared to a third of English children and only one eighth of German children). Parents drive their children because they are worried about the traffic or frightened of them being abducted by a stranger; paradoxically, if more children walked there would be less traffic and more people on the footpaths, making both safer. In Australia, an average of one child a year is abducted and murdered by strangers, which puts the odds for an individual child at about one in four million.

Too much attention? My mother would have agreed with Michael Leunig’s mother that children need some ‘healthy neglect’. June Factor says the problem with children being driven everywhere is not just a matter of them not getting enough exercise, but of them not being able to spend enough time away from adults to develop independence and form friendships. She is also incensed at the ‘foolish restrictions’ that are put on children in school playgrounds. ‘You can’t throw a ball here, climb a tree there, can’t have a swing because of the fear of accidents and litigation,’ she says. In the meantime, to counter the epidemic of childhood obesity, schools are introducing more structured phys-ed – when children’s own traditional skipping and running games have been shown in studies to be more effective at burning energy and improving fitness. In any case, she says, do you want to engender rebelliousness in children by forbidding these activities? ‘Children will find ways of defying this. Children will play, whatever adults do or don’t do. They always have, 233

UP WE GREW

and short of serious genetic engineering, they always will.’ In other times children were less scrutinised, less analysed, less of a project of their parents. ‘Our children are hamstrung by our expectations of them,’ says Joanna Murray-Smith ruefully. ‘I think my parents – who were thinkers, who were intellectuals – I still don’t think they turned their intellects so much on their children. They didn’t see their children as particularly important as subject matters. I think they were much more free-spirited in their approach to parenting than Ray [her husband] and I are. You know, we sometimes sit up long into the night analysing our children. And we do it because we’re concerned about them and we love them, but ultimately I don’t think it’s to their benefit. I think they feel the huge weight of us. I think there are significant advantages for kids in being ignored, I mean in being loved but not having that spotlight on them. I’m trying not to.’ Children of my generation were not bombarded with advertising. Fast food was almost unknown and so was the fear of getting fat. Today about a quarter of children are overweight or obese, and nearly all children are made to worry about it. It is possible that great affluence, too many toys, too many books, too many treats and excursions, are bad for children. Maybe they need to be bored sometimes.

T What else is worse? More children suffer from depression (though depression in children may have been hardly noticed, let alone diagnosed, in earlier times). The psychologist Martin Seligman, author of The Optimistic Child, 234

Precious, precious

points out that the epidemic of childhood depression has coincided with the ‘self-esteem movement’. Praise is seen as an unqualified good. Children are told how special they are (if everyone is special, is anyone special?) and that they can do anything. A chart in a grade two classroom asks ‘How are we feeling today?’ and thought bubbles underneath say ‘happy’, ‘jealous’, ‘bored’. Pass-the-parcel games at toddlers’ birthday parties have a present under each layer of wrapping to make sure everyone wins a prize. The losing hockey team members must be given medals as well as the winners. It doesn’t work: children understand very well who the winners and losers are. When you praise your child for a sloppy, listless piece of work you are not teaching your child mastery, says Martin Seligman. When you tell your child she can do anything, you are setting her up for disappointment when she finds out she can’t. The dilemma for parents is to find a balance between giving children self-confidence and giving them unrealistic expectations. ‘Praise your child contingent on a success,’ writes Martin Seligman. ‘Wait until he fits the little peg man in the car before applauding. Also, grade your praise according to the accomplishment. Do not overpraise and treat the peg man achievement as if it were an amazing accomplishment.’ This is sensible advice, though quite difficult to follow, especially for grandparents.

A bad childhood doesn’t always ruin your life Parents observe in their children mannerisms, a way of walking, even a preference for certain colours or styles of clothing, that seem to come from aunts or grandparents the 235

UP WE GREW

child has never met, and wonder how these things could have been learned. Bookish parents usually have bookish children; parents who are very careful with money mostly raise children who are careful too; the children of geniuses are at least unusually clever. But how can you tell what’s the result of genes and what of environment, given that the people from whom we get our genes are usually the same people who bring us up? What’s nature and what nurture? The Australian Temperament Project has followed 2443 Australian children from the time they were infants until the present, when they are twenty. These are some of the findings in its latest report: Temperament closely represents an inborn style of behaving, and is observable in early childhood, well before an individual has had time to amass enough experience to have formed a personality. Temperamental style tends to remain similar for an individual across life, but it is nevertheless modifiable, not fixed. People react differently to children of different temperaments, and are likely to be warmer and more positive towards a cheerful, sociable child than they are to a negative, withdrawing one. A positive and engaging temperament may protect children living in situations of deprivation and adversity, by allowing them to overcome obstacles and maintain positive relationships and self-esteem. A study of 81 children from 32 families described as ‘stressed’ – chronic illness, low-income, drug addiction, marital disruption, unemployment, single parenthood – found the children judged resilient were particularly characterised by an easy-going and positive temperament – and a very warm mother-child relationship. Social class clearly exerted a persistent effect, with children 236

Precious, precious

from families whose parents were better educated and of higher occupational status having an advantage from the beginning of life in their chances of success at school. ‘This unsurprising finding is repeated in studies all over the world,’ the report concluded.

T Margot Prior, one of the authors of the study, says a ‘difficult’ temperament is a significant predictor of whether there are later problems or not. ‘A difficult temperament makes it harder to get on with people. A difficult temperament can be managed, but some people don’t know how to, and can make it worse. Temperament affects things like vulnerability and resilience. We looked at kids in situations of adversity, some of them in the same family. Even if things were really tough, if they had a positive, easy going, adaptive kind of temperament they got on much better at home and had a better time at school.’ Other research has found children are more likely to be resilient if they have a nurturing and affectionate relationship with at least one adult, a sense of connectedness to their school or community, some academic or sporting achievement, or some social involvement with other children.

T Some children are more resilient than others, but there is a limit to what any child can recover from. Historian and writer Dorothy Scott uses this metaphor: ‘If we were to raise the temperature in this room, let it go up and up and up, some people would become unconscious 237

UP WE GREW

before others; some would have a natural physiological resilience; but it would only be a matter of time before all succumbed.’ She says there is also evidence that some children who did not succumb to very significant adverse life events had as adults high levels of self-containment and an impaired ability to trust, which limited their capacities for intimate relationships. ‘We should be careful of assuming that some children are invulnerable or that we can somehow train children to be resilient,’ she says. ‘It’s factors in the environment, not just the characteristic of the child, that decides how resilient the child can be.’ Yet there are comforts to be had in not putting all your faith in nurture. It means everyone who was abused as a child needn’t fear he will become an abusive parent. It means our nature can help us overcome our nurture.

Different, anyway Today’s children have fears and worries that were almost unknown to me as a child. Even though I was born during World War II, war seemed very far away and enemies were clearly defined. Now scenes of war and terrorism are shown nightly on television news bulletins and even interrupt children’s television programs. We don’t know yet what will be the long-term psychological effects on children of so much talk of terrorism. In my childhood nearly all mothers stayed home and minded the children while fathers went to work. Today most mothers are in paid work and most children will spend some time in paid care. On present trends, a quarter of Australian women will have no children and a large 238

Precious, precious

proportion will have only one. When an only child marries an only child, that couple’s only child will have no brothers or sisters, cousins, aunts or uncles. And will have four anxious grandparents pouring all their love and hope into one small person. Friends may take the place of families, but even then there will be a lot of loneliness. Already, I read this morning, an enterprising nine-year-old has advertised her services, at two dollars an hour, as a friend to children who need one. A society in which children are not common will be an older society, a less tolerant and more selfish one. There are already signs of this, with an attitude on the part of some that ‘You had them, you pay for them’. Will our grandchildren, when they grow up, walk through streets empty of children, or sit alone in single-person, minimalist apartments, with not a small, sticky handprint to be seen? I don’t think so. In every survey taken on the subject, young women and men both say they want to have two to three children. And when the things that need to happen to allow them to have more children – longer parental leave, more flexible workplaces, better childcare, more respected part-time work – do happen, then they will have more. Besides, another big factor in women’s decision to have children – fathers helping to look after them – is also happening. When I pick up my grandchildren from their primary school once a week, about a quarter of the parents there are fathers. At a grandchild’s birthday party two fathers arrive holding the hands of their three-year-olds, who carry presents nicely wrapped by fathers; fathers are bathing babies and feeding them, and doing school and kindergarten duty and loving it – or at least as much as mothers do. 239

UP WE GREW

When the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition publicly argue about who spent more time reading to their children, you know progress has been made.

But optimistic Whether you set out to prove things are better for children than they were half a century ago or worse for them, you will find research and anecdotal evidence to prove either case. Many, perhaps most, social commentators are pessimistic. People like me, who believe things are not only better but will continue to get better are known as ‘linear optimists’. Perhaps optimism is something in my genes. Or perhaps I am influenced by the astounding resilience of people I’ve talked to for this book. I am grateful, and thank everyone who has remembered their childhoods for me. Those who talked to me of their bad childhoods – Trish, and Douglas, and Stephanie, and Maurice – are, by the fact of being able to talk about it, the resilient ones. I don’t know how you get to talk to the ones who were not resilient, who may be in prison, in psychiatric hospitals, or dead. I have learned that every single aspect of childhood I have tried to explore is incredibly complex, and would need at least a dozen books to do it justice. I have learned that people from poor backgrounds who have done well often think everyone else can too, forgetting how much of their success was due to luck. I have learned (or already knew) that older children are terribly protective of younger brothers and sisters and no matter how they might fight with them at other times, will 240

Precious, precious

defend them against a stranger, or a parent. I have learned that reading can save a child, a fact that seems to be rather well known anyway. Reading provides an escape from present reality, an education, and opens doors to another world. Though I’m not sure the kind of addicted, engrossed reader, who reads while the tram goes beyond her stop to the end of the line, who reads while the kitchen tap overflows the sink (I have done both), can be made. I have learned that grandmothers are often holding troubled families together: in the Children’s Court, trying to get custody of the neglected children of their drug-addicted sons and daughters; in Aboriginal communities, trying to stop the violence and drunkenness and restore respect to communities… I should have written a book about grandmothers. The child who is born with brains, beauty, a cheerful temperament, who has the luck to have good parents, to have been born into a well-off, functioning family, to have been born in this country, has a head start. The child who at some stage has a good teacher, or football coach, or a grandparent in the background, can be saved. It’s the ones who have none of these we have to worry about. Because nature, and life, is so unfair, we have to create fairness in our institutions, build better safety nets, make sure there is help for families, tell governments they must put children’s welfare and education at the very top of the list. I have learned, and remembered, that childhood is a very big part of everyone’s life. Have remembered how when you are in it, it stretches on forever – unlike the years now, which pass in a flash. That is why, even if bad childhoods 241

UP WE GREW

can be overcome, we must do all we can to keep children safe and happy as children. Because childhood is not a preparation for life. It is life.

242

A Good Place

W

hen my first child was born and was put tightly wrapped into my arms, when I saw her squalling little face, tiny lips quivering with outrage at having been spat into the loud, bright world, when I looked at her crooked little fingers that are also mine and my mother’s and my mother’s father’s, what I felt was recognition: an overwhelming feeling of familiarity. ‘So it’s you,’ I said. ‘I’ve known you all my life.’ And so I had, for the egg that she grew from was growing in me even while I was in my own mother’s womb. I had that same feeling three more times, when three more were born. That I already knew them: of familiarity; of family. Newborn babies look into the eyes of the person who holds them and fix their gaze, firmly and steadily. They are

T

243

UP WE GREW

able to focus their eyes only the distance this requires. With this look they are pleading, Love me. When I held my first grandchild, felt her warm weight, I knew again the same burden of love. It is a burden, and one that will never leave me, nor do I want it to. I have known five generations – my grandmother, mother, me, daughters, grandchildren. There’s a feeling of continuity, of generations, of life going on; of blood thicker than water. Isabel and Jack; Hannah and Joel; Freya and Ella. I study my grandchildren in a way I didn’t study my own children. I stare at them. ‘Why are you looking at me?’ asks Jack. ‘I can’t help it, Jack, you’re so beautiful,’ I say. ‘Oh,’ he says. I hold Isabel’s small hand and feel the palms are hard, from climbing trees, from swinging on the monkey bars, from playing hockey: Oh! strongly adorable hockey-girl’s hand! (apology to Sir John Betjeman). I am amazed to have grandchildren who are confident, popular, good at sport, who like school. None of these things come from me. Hannah’s been sent to get dressed, but has forgotten and is reading, head bent low over the book, her long hair covering her face, intently devouring words. When she’s reading she doesn’t hear you; just like her mother, and me. Joelly is anxious about things – monsters in his bedroom, the waves on the beach, the coat-hanger board at my house that has three clowns’ faces with long tongues as coat hooks. I’m reading him a book about a little monster who is afraid of children, who believes children are hiding in the wardrobe and will grab him when the lights are turned off. ‘Don’t be silly Dear, there’s no such thing as children,’ says the mother monster. Joelly loves this book. 244

A Good Place

‘I can do it, Pammy,’ says Freya, when I start to turn down her bedcover. The giraffe must go this side, blue teddy this side, the blanket this way up so she can hold the satin edge to her face. ‘You make a cup of tea and come back,’ she says. When I come back she’s already asleep. Ella doesn’t want to hold my hand and walks stoutly along by herself, staggering a bit, up the ramp to the library doors, stopping to examine tiny plants growing in cracks in the concrete and bits of thistledown that are barely visible to me. People look down at her, then look up at me and smile. They’ve done studies that show the pupils of women’s eyes dilate when they look at babies. So life goes on. Ella is in a good place. The past was not terrible, it was not stultifying. But now is better. And the future will be better still.

245

246

Notes The House That Jack Didn’t Build Page 13: Loughman, Noel (ed.) Harnessed Waters: A River Dammed, The Yarrawonga Shire Council, 1989. Page 30: Hewitson, Jim, Far Off in Sunlit Places – Stories of the Scots in Australia and New Zealand, Melbourne University Press, 1998, p24. Page 34: Getting Equal, Lake, Marilyn, Allen and Unwin 1999, p70. Lucky, lucky, lucky: Migrant children Pages 72–73: Munro, Ian and Debelle, Penelope, Age, 30 April 2004. A little liberal and a little conservative Page 106: McHugh, Siobhan, Shelter From the Storm, Allen and Unwin, 1999. Where the light comes from Page 136: Strandgard, Maurice, Loneliness, Five Islands Press, 2002. Pages 140, 141: Strandgard, Maurice, The Nailing of the Right Hand, Penguin books, 1994. Resilience Page 148: Pinker, Steven, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Allen Lane 2002, p392. Page 149: Ridley, Matt, Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience and What Makes Us Human, Fourth Estate, 2003. Page 180: Seligman, Martin, Authentic Happiness, Random House Australia, 2002, p67. Took them away: Aboriginal children Page 184: Age editorial, ‘Black Families in Crisis’, 11 May 2001. Page 190: Wilson, Ronald, Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997. Pages 191–2: Letter, Age 24 May 1997. Page 193: Macleod, Colin, Patrol in the Dreamtime Mandarin, 1997. 247

UP WE GREW

Page 196: Haebich, Anna, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800-2000, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000. What I Have Learned Pages 225–6: Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer, Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants and Natural Selection, Pantheon Books, 1999, p312. Page 229: Zelizer, Viviana, Pricing the Priceless Child, Basic Books Inc 1985, p209. Page 230: Summers, Anne, Ducks on the Pond, Viking, 1999, p58. Page 230: Deborah, Forster, Sunday Age 7 September 2003. Page 230: Summers, Anne, ibid. Page 230: Clendinnen, Inga, Tiger’s Eye: a memoir, Text Publishing, 2000, p125. Page 231: Taylor, Janet and Fraser, Alex, Eleven Plus: Life Chances and Family Income, Brotherhood of St Laurence, 2003. Page 232: Fogarty, John, Age 31 December 2003. Page 236: Prior, Margot and others, Pathways from Infancy to Adolescence: Australian Temperament Project 1983-2000, Australian Institute of Family Studies, Report no. 4. Page 240: Eckersley, Richard, Well & Good: How we feel and why it matters, Text Publishing, 2004. Richard Eckersley takes a less optimistic view of the present and future outlook for children than my own. (For an alternate view to those of Ridley, Pinker, Seligman and Hrdy, see James, Oliver They F… You Up: How to Survive Family Life. Bloomsbury 2003).

248