Sawdust
Page 1
Glass House Books
Sawdust
Deborah Kay has three adult children and three grandchildren, and has made it a lifelong goal to be vigilant over their safety. Although she grew up in a quiet, rural setting in Central Queensland, she has travelled widely through Australia and overseas, including living in Malaysia for three years, which has broadened her appreciation of different cultures. Currently Deborah works with small children as a teacher aide in Ipswich. Having now told her story in print, Deborah is keen to talk publicly on child sex abuse and do what she can to impact positively, and highlight the issue. As she puts it: ‘I am no longer silent... I now have the freedom to speak out for the sanctity of childhood’.
Barry Levy is a prize-winning journalist, including the Australian Human Rights Award for Journalism – for a multiple series of stories on child sex abuse, domestic violence and homelessness; the Anning Barton Memorial Award for Outstanding Journalism (Central Queensland) – for a series on child sex abuse (incest-rape); and a Walkley Awards Queensland State finalist – for a series on homelessness. Levy’s works of fiction include: The Terrorist, the story of what happens when you drop an Arab Muslim student into a Western Jewish home; Shades of Exodus, a portrait of migrants, particularly South Africans, who have come to Australia; As If! a realistic depiction of life on the streets for Australian kids; and Burning Bright, a story of young love, hate and child abuse.
Glass House Books
Brisbane
Sawdust
…when the dust has settled
Deborah Kay
with Barry Levy
Glass House Books
Brisbane
Glass House Books
an imprint of IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd)
Treetop Studio • 9 Kuhler Court
Carindale, Queensland, Australia 4152
sales@ipoz.biz
http://ipoz.biz
First published by IP in 2013
© Deborah Kay, Barry Levy, 2013
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
Printed in 12 pt Cochin on 14 pt Myriad Pro.
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Author: Kay, Deborah, author.
Title: Sawdust : ...when the dust has settled / Deborah Kay, Barry Levy.
ISBN: 9781922120380 (ebk.)
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.
Subjects: Child sexual abuse.
Other Authors/Contributors:
Levy, Barry, author.
Dewey Number: 362.76
Also by Barry Levy from IP
As If!
Shades of Exodus
The Terrorist
Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without words, and never stops at all.
– Emily Dickinson, American poet [1830 – 1886]
I have loved and been loved, not always in the healthiest of ways. I may have seemed splintered at times, even though I’m not quite as polished as I’d like, this sapling has matured and is in no way warped, worn-out or gone to sawdust. Those pockets of sunlight eventually shine through… trust me.
– Deborah Kay
Acknowledgements
Writing this book has been emotive and intense at times and once again I found the need for counselling. The adult and mother in me found reliving this journey far more difficult than the child who lived it.
My three children, you inspire me to be a better person, along with my grandchildren, who give my life meaning and joy. You all love me and I love you. I’m grateful to my “real” family for their support and belief in me, which has enabled me to go ahead with this book without judgement.
My closest friends for their unwavering support through the years, in particular, Kent the most honest man I’ve ever met, and Shaz, so kind and compassionate, whom I have relied on over and over. Frank and Nat… thank you for everything my darlings. I have been fortunate to have crossed paths with many positive people over the years and each of you knows when you impacted on me and that you continue to do so.
My “book” family – Barry, you have been incredibly kind and uplifting throughout this process. This book would not have been possible without you. Lauren, your editing has been invaluable and your sensitivity to my feelings is very much appreciated. Thanks to David and IP for believing in this worthwhile cause and being a publisher with a conscience.
Aside from being readable, there is nothing I would like more than for this book to be empowering to others. It is a saga, my saga, that in my humble opinion and deepest hope is worth sharing with the world.
Names and places, other than major cities in Queensland, have been changed to protect the innocent, especially those that are not ready to face the past or simply were unaware of it and my story did not impact on them.
Thank you all. I’m indeed very blessed and am so humbled by your unwavering love, support and friendship.
– Deborah Kay
Prelude
I was born into a hard-working, timber-cutting family in 1962. My father, Dan Gallagher had to marry my mother, Julie, because she was pregnant. He told us many years later he “had to get married” as her mum, our Nana, was hitting him over the head with a frying pan and he felt he had no choice. My mother was a stay-at-home mum in those days and already had her hands full with my seventeen-month-old brother, Jim. My conception wasn’t planned either, just like my sister, Marge who arrived fifteen months after me, and then my little brother, Sam, thirteen months after that. Mum was overloaded I would say, without help from anyone. So she also became punch happy with us kids.
Life was a struggle on many levels for them. Dad found it difficult to cover costs and it was hard putting food on the table, pay mounting bills, and keep a roof over our heads. The more children they had the harder life became. There were, I suppose as was to be expected, many heated and at times psychological stoushes in those early days. It wasn’t until later that the arguments became more physical.
I know the age I was when Dad’s abuse began because I clearly remember my brother Sam coming home from the hospital... It wasn’t long after that we moved to another house and the abuse started then, when I was three going on four; at any rate, that’s my earliest recollection of it.
At first it was only looking and touching but it progressed to far worse, until at fifteen, I couldn’t stand it any longer and would have been quite happy when Dad said he could choke me and no one would know. It was difficult enough when Mum would pack all of us up and make a run from Dad over the years, but she always came back to him within a couple of weeks and it would start all over again.
The worst time was when Mum decided to leave Dad, when I was twelve going on thirteen, and only took my sister Marge with her, leaving Jim, Sam and me behind. But again she managed to return after a few months, when things weren’t working so well with her new fella.
Having said that, Dad would gladly give the shirt off his back, give his last twenty quid to others, and make sure Mum stretched the family meal to help a struggling nobody off the street. He abhorred violence to other peoples’ children, and if he saw them being hurt in any way, would become extremely angry with those parents, sometimes even stepping in to help. He just couldn’t see it in himself.
I saw a way to escape all this when Chris came into my life just before I was sixteen… Life has been an amazing ride to get to where I am now. I feel so blessed in so many ways and so glad Dad decided not to kil
l me as he suggested that night on our way back home from Grandma’s...
1.
We were the ones in the dilapidated house everyone wondered about, the family on the Bruce Highway, just outside Gladstone. The ones who the passing world, adults and children, wondered what those people did for a livelihood, if they had money, how they could bear living there. While all these people raced by on their way to enjoy school holidays, to clinch deals on business trips, or whizzed by on their way back home from relatives and friends, they probably imagined a scruffy, scraggy family, Mum, Dad, kids, definitely too many kids, struggling to make ends meet. I often wondered, the dirt blowing into my windswept, tiny girl’s eyes, what it was they thought, those cars whooshing by our dusty property.
On the best of days, sometimes even the worst, as a child I thought Dad was a good bloke. At six foot and three inches he towered over everyone, and with his square-jawed Ricky Nelson looks and remnant Elvis Presley hairstyle, the larrikin in his sparkly hazel eyes would tell us stories about his youth, how he used to run amuck and get up to all kinds of mischief.
But also he would tell us how in the end he always did the right thing, how he helped out on his own mother and stepfather’s property that was in the Anondale district, near Lake Perenjora, not that far from where we lived.
Without boasting, he would tell us children how he was the young lad who carried the Olympic flame as it was heralded through the district for the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne. He is even mentioned in a book for it and had a large medal the size of my palm back then, in acknowledgement of the feat. I still have that book and my little brother Sam is the proud owner of Dad’s medal these days.
But the thing is, through his stories, through his gregarious and charming ways, he made us feel connected, and with him, or by ourselves, we would pick watermelons off the vine on hot summer days, especially at Christmas time, and the pink juice would pour from our mouths and drizzle through our fingers back to the thirsty soil from which the fruit sipped its nourishment.
On the surface of it, it could be easily gleaned from the highway, we may have been scruffy and scraggy, even scrawny and wanting, but we were children in love with life. On the best of days, sometimes even the worst, I loved Dad. I couldn’t help it. He had that sort of “connectedness” about him.
Always phenomenally dark-skinned from his work outside, a tan that continued even through the cold months, on crisp winter mornings he would look out from the back door and seeing the property covered in a layer of white flakiness that looked like someone’s sugar-frosted flakes had spilled over the earth, he would tell us Jack Frost had been around and left his tidings.
For us it was a huge mystery, and Jack Frost, although he never gave us anything but a scene of vast ice cold, was no less a figure in our imaginations than Father Christmas.
On those icy winter days, in the early morning cold, all of us kids would sit on the backstairs eating hot white toast covered in thick yellow honey. As the orange sun slowly rose on our expectant faces and over our bodies, the warm honey would slide down our hands and shine golden through our fingers. The image of frosty mornings with warm toast and melting honey shining through little fingers is one that will never leave me.
Inside the house, Mum, forever busy, would always be preparing something, usually meals, but also at times there was the sweet smell of things being baked in the oven. Usually it was biscuits made from no more than flour and sugar, but always hungry, we knew that smell meant there was a treat in store.
Her special treat for us on the odd occasion was a dessert called Roly Poly, which naturally we whooped and carried on about as though it was the best thing since Tim Tams, but in actual fact, personally, I didn’t really like Roly Polies. I think it was because of the mixed dried fruit she flavoured it with – it was hard on a kid lacking a sweet tooth. But then again I did look forward to the delicious warm custard that was inevitably served with it. Tim Tams we never had.
Mum had seductive curls of dark brown-red hair and I am told that’s where I received my own thick helmet of bushy, rust-brown hair that made my head look like a dramatically curly version of an echidna. In later years Mum would dye her hair black, giving her an Italian look that was apparently very appealing to men.
But she stood a mere five-foot tall and was, so to speak, half Dad’s size. She was also never “half” the match for him, either verbally or physically. She worked tirelessly in the kitchen and outside too. All day long, as Dad cut the timber, she would be the one snigging the cut logs with a tractor.
How hard could life have been for them? It’s hard to imagine even from my modest home in suburban Ipswich. Everything seemed dry and stoic in those days, everything a tough physical chore. Everything taking a mental toll. While the Beatles may have been starting out on rock and roll’s most lucrative career, and most people were beginning to really relish the post-war comforts that flooded into Australia’s cities through the fifties and sixties, we may as well have been struggling to survive on Mars.
The first two houses I remember were never our own, the one rented on the right side of the highway as we faced Gladstone, our biggest nearby city, and the other, which we moved into before I was three, on the left-hand side of the highway. Yes, between 1962 and 1965 we moved from one side of the highway to the other, and either way, the terrain was always hot and flat and dusty and people looked into our lives and made aspersions about us from their safe glass windows as they whipped by on the highway.
Dad always told us kids in those days life would have been different if his own father had not been killed in Singapore. In the War. It happened before Dad even had a chance to recognise the word Dad. With gargantuan courage and tears streaming in his eyes, he one day gathered us kids around his knees and told us his story: how his father was shot and killed defending the Commonwealth.
He even showed us a picture in an old magazine of Australian World War Two soldiers boarding a boat for Singapore. He pointed with a badly rasped working man’s finger at a tiny blurred head with a slouch hat and duffle bag whose face we could not see, and told us that was his dad.
He was very proud to have in his possession his dad’s War medals and carefully unfolded and then refolded the frail, yellowed telegram that his mother had received telling her that her husband, Bennett Gallagher, had died a hero, killed in action.
Also with tears in his eyes, he would tell us kids of his pet kangaroo and its cruel, eventual end, with its guts spilling out. He would sometimes drive us out to his first house, which was a shed with a corrugated tin roof that had no more than hessian bags for walls. It had a dirt floor. If we thought we had it bad, he had it worse.
Dad’s stepfather, Uncle Harvey, just happened to be their mother, Grandma Glad’s first cousin. There was a whiff of scandal associated with the union, especially in that there never seemed any proof of an official marriage certificate. But to us kids it didn’t really make much difference and we were happy to call Grandma’s “husband”, Grandad Harvey.
In Dad’s time, because his sister Dulcie did not get on with her stepdad – actually hated him – and because the small old farmhouse was now overflowing with two younger stepbrothers and four stepsisters, he and Dulcie managed to make a break from the cramped home, and moved in with Dad’s grandmother, our Great Grandma Cecily Flanagan and her son who was always known to us merely as Uncle Col. A bit complicated? That’s how it was in those days.
Dad, the hardworking timber-cutter, would talk to me more than to any of the other kids, or so it seemed to me. He would talk with me openly and matter-of-factly especially while he constantly sharpened his knives and saws in the old work shed.
When he was out working in the field, no one but no one, not even me, was allowed to come near him. We were only allowed to approach him when he got back to the shed of an evening. I always felt at those times like I was being loved. There was a part of me that trusted him, not just in any ordinary way, but deeply, in the skin.
The only children allowed over, and only at times, belonged to our nearest neighbours, the Groves, who had a couple of kids around me and my older brother Jim’s age. Because of the size of the open, dustbowl properties, near wasn’t exactly over the fence but was near enough to sometimes even hear the neighbours.
On the negative side, there was a feeling of isolation on the property, on all the properties we lived on, the one on the right side of the Bruce Highway as well as the one on the left – not to forget the property at the centre of my life, the large acreage Dad would eventually buy from the Crannies.
The Crannies were an older couple who thought the world of Dad. He would assist them in every way he could, always helping to cut things as well as hammer and move and fix things, and they treated him like a son. Eventually, at a rock-bottom price, they sold Dad 300 acres of their property on Perenjora Dam Road.
It was this property that we kids really grew up on. It had a border right on the rail line and the noise of tooting and shunting trains became the noise of my childhood. Not only did we have passing trains now, but we were still within a hop of the Bruce Highway. Wherever you looked, there were eyes that could see into our place. Not just from the cars now but from the trains as well.
Just like Dad was to the Crannies, he stood up for everyone who needed help. Always willing to lend a hand, he especially stood up for children.
Nevertheless, there was at times something in the way he treated animals that shook me. He called cows “beasts”, and I remember once how he belted the hell out of our one lone cow when it would not move into its milking stall. He was beating the cow so badly with a piece of four-by-two that as the animal went down on its knees and its body curved down to the earth, I was absolutely sure Dad was going to break its back.