by Hazel Baron
Dulcie still liked to be liked and continued her knack of being liked for someone she wasn’t. She loved talkback radio and always had it turned on in the background. Like many older people whose lives have shrunk to the confines of their own homes, her conversations were mainly about what other people had been saying over the airwaves. She became so familiar with the radio hosts that she felt they were her friends and drove them mad with her calls and comments, a lot of which were racist. Her favourite talkback hosts were John Laws and Ray Hadley, who eventually got wise to her and refused to take her calls. She argued many times on air with 2GB’s Brian Wilshire on his night-time radio programmes. Eventually, Dulcie took to using several different names when she called the stations but she never managed to trick the producers and get them to put her on air.
Bill had begun to make forays into Dulcie’s unit when Hazel visited once or twice a year, unable to maintain his hostility. Always the gentle soul that Hazel married, he was able to wipe the past and start from today no matter how badly people had treated him. Dulcie realised Hazel was still wary of her and decided to make Bill her best friend. She was shameless and Hazel watched on amused as her mother all but flirted openly with the son-in-law she had never approved of. Dulcie soon found out Bill’s weak spots — food and jokes — and, despite himself, Bill found he had fun in her company. One thing Hazel never did when visiting her mother was eat any of her home baking; she always said she wasn’t hungry and packed her own sandwiches to eat later in the car. One day Dulcie insisted they take one of her apple pies home with them. Hazel handed it to the staff in the office — then worried if it was a ‘safe’ one. It was and no one became ill.
Dulcie began to love publicity. She dressed dolls to raffle for charity and she featured in the local paper several times as she handed over the dolls to the local fire brigade or ambulance station or another good cause. Of course the articles never mentioned her real past. She made cakes for the local state MP, Morris Iemma, before he went on to become Premier of New South Wales in 2005. One year some of the locals got together and approached him to put Dulcie up for an Order of Australia. At one word from the police, the suggestion was slapped down.
While Dulcie’s two oldest sons Billy and Ronnie still showed no interest in ever seeing their mother again, Ruby — or Shirley McGloin — couldn’t quite let her mother go. Mother and daughter had not kept in touch after that one time they met at Silverwater jail. In 1984, Ruby’s son Michael McGloin registered with the Salvation Army to see if they could track Dulcie down for his mother. One night he was watching TV when the Salvation Army rang to say they thought they had found Dulcie but they couldn’t hand out her contact details. Michael told them to pass on his mother’s details to Dulcie who rang and said she would like to see Ruby.
This time Ruby took Michael along to meet his grandmother. Unlike the first meeting, this one was not a success. As a young man, Michael didn’t really want to sit around in the unit and didn’t warm to the grandmother he had never known. Ruby felt uncomfortable and only stayed for about fifteen minutes. They didn’t meet again and Ruby died in 2013.
As Dulcie got older and her health worsened, she would call Hazel day and night, trotting out sob stories and saying she wanted to live with her. She was unwell. She was lonely. But Hazel stood firm. She had her family to protect.
In cries for help — or attention — Dulcie stopped taking her heart and blood pressure medications as prescribed. She would be listening to the radio, drop off to sleep, wake up and take her tablets, then fall asleep and take them again when she woke up next. A carer checked on her every day and one day in 2006, Dulcie was rushed to hospital semi-conscious with signs of a stroke. It turned out to be an accidental overdose of the medication and Hazel and Bill drove to Sydney to visit her.
Hazel discovered her mother had been creating havoc. She had not been allowing the carers to cook or clean for her — Dulcie said they were lazy and she didn’t trust them. Her unit was filthy and stank of urine and Hazel told the staff that Dulcie could not go back there. The reply was that it was Dulcie’s choice whether to move out, so they took her back to see how she would manage. As they waited, the staff asked Dulcie to make them a cup of tea so they could check that she was capable of living alone. Dulcie fiddled about with the stove for some time before telling them it didn’t work. She appeared vague and disorientated. So it was back to hospital for her.
Hazel visited her in hospital the next day and Dulcie told her that she had outsmarted them all. ‘They took me home but I was too smart for them. They wanted a cuppa and I pretended the stove didn’t work when it really did.’ Hazel thought yet again how she would never understand Dulcie’s mind. One side of her was funny and kind but the other was so cool and calculating in planning her crimes, however big or small. Hazel was sure that even then, if someone had known what Dulcie was planning and had challenged her, she would have been horrified at being found out.
Hazel shopped around to find a nursing home for Dulcie and found a suitable one at Blakehurst, only fifteen minutes from the Riverwood unit. Dulcie was savage when told the news. She refused to go. She wanted to go home with Hazel, full stop. Hazel persuaded her that it was only for a short time until she was stronger. The day after Dulcie moved in, Hazel asked the staff if she and her mother could talk in private. Dulcie became excited, thinking Hazel was going to take her home. Instead, Hazel had become the calculating one. For the first time in sixty years, she felt safe and strong enough to say to her: ‘Mum, you can’t live with me, I can’t trust you. I don’t know what you might do to me or my family.’
Dulcie started with the high-handed mother talk: ‘You can’t speak to me like that!’
Hazel very firmly replied: ‘Yes, I can and this is why.’ Then she unveiled her secret weapon.
She showed her the newspaper clippings she had brought along that covered the years of Dulcie’s crimes. Hazel was fully prepared to show them to staff and reveal the real Dulcie but she much preferred to use them as blackmail. It worked.
Dulcie was horrified and demanded to know where they had come from. For a moment she appeared to crumble; she put her head in her hands and said: ‘Well, I’ll just have to kill myself.’ Hazel was finished with the histrionics and amazed Dulcie by telling her: ‘Well, that’s your choice.’ Then she turned around, left the turmoil behind and went home with Bill.
Dulcie soon had the staff of the nursing home eating out of her hand. All her life she had prided herself on appearing ‘respectable’ and she never swore. But either there was a new Dulcie or she had just always suppressed the real Dulcie because she suddenly had quite a tongue on her. Many of the nurses were big Maori or Fijian women and Dulcie always commented on their size. She would shout at them things like: ‘Get your fat arse over here, the phone’s ringing.’ Or when the doctor would visit, she yelled: ‘Here comes the doctor; get off your arse and go and talk to him.’ The doctor would laugh, the nurses would laugh, and Dulcie laughed along with them, pleased to have an audience again.
One day Hazel got a call from a couple of Dulcie’s Riverwood friends that took her by surprise. The two women demanded to know how she could do this to a good, decent mother. They said it was obvious that Dulcie had been right when she said her daughter and her family didn’t care about her when she had done so much for all her children! Dulcie had told her friends that Hazel had dumped her at the nursing home with no clothes and had taken all her money. Hazel had had enough. She countered by asking one of the women if she knew that Dulcie was a compulsive liar and had served time for murder.
‘How low will you go to denigrate such a good person,’ Dulcie’s friend retorted.
Some weeks later Hazel received letters from both of the friends saying they had found out the truth about Dulcie’s past and reprimanding Hazel for not telling them because their ‘lives could have been in danger’.
Barely a day went by when there was not a call to Hazel from the nursing home to say Dulcie had do
ne this or that, always for attention. Hazel went on to remind everyone yet again that while Dulcie was witty, she was still dangerous and forever a fire bug. One day a nurse walking past her room saw her up on the bed trying to push waste paper into the electric strip heater on the wall when she was supposed to be confined to a wheelchair. The nurse stopped her before there was a fire. Dulcie told Hazel she had just been bored and thought it would get her thrown out of the nursing home. It was a wake-up call for the head doctor at the home. He called Hazel and she got Bill to drive her to Sydney. She took along some of those same old newspaper clippings about Dulcie, feeling she should tell him the whole story. After reading that he had a serial killer in his care, the doctor put his head down on the desk and said: ‘How did I get this lucky?’
He said he had to put the safety of the other residents of the nursing home first and asked for Hazel’s permission to restrain her mother. She signed her mother up for every kind of restraint, chemical and physical. She told the doctor: ‘Just do whatever you need to.’
Dulcie hated it at first. There was a belt around her waist that tied her into the wheelchair. On the back of the chair was a chain with a clip that was fastened onto a hook in the wall of the office. It was the only way they could keep an eye on her and keep everyone safe. After a while Dulcie quite enjoyed being at the centre of what was happening and watching everyone come and go from the office. She was given extra medication which made her quite mellow and pleasant and even the head doctor, who had worried about having a serial killer as a patient, was won over by her.
Eventually, in 2006 at the age of ninety-seven, Dulcie moved back to live not with her daughter but as close as she had been for decades. The hospital where Hazel had worked, just a few steps from her home, was old and when it closed down, it was converted into an aged care nursing home and she managed to get Dulcie a room there. She was flown from Sydney in an air ambulance. She had started to slow down but her mind was still sharp and her health fairly good, and she liked to sit outside the front of the nursing home in the afternoons and chat to people walking past.
By then both Hazel and Bill had retired so they had plenty of time to visit Dulcie, taking cakes and pies with them on their visits because Dulcie no longer had the facilities to bake for herself.
In the first few days of September 2008, Hazel noticed her mother had slowed right down. With a lifetime’s experience of nursing, she knew the signs when people began the process of dying. For Dulcie, it began on a Tuesday. Hazel sat by her mother’s bedside until late that night and again on the Wednesday night. By then Dulcie was semi-conscious and needed oxygen to help her breathe.
By the Thursday, Dulcie was really low. At one point she squeezed Hazel’s hand and asked: ‘Is that you, Hazel?’ Hazel stayed at her bedside until 2 am and was back there by 7 am on the Friday when she gave her mother a sponge bath and dressed her in a fresh nightie. Hazel knew this would be the final day.
At 10 am, Hazel wanted a cup of tea and on the spur of the moment before she left Dulcie’s room, she leant over her and said: ‘Mum, I’m going for a cup of tea. Why don’t you close your eyes and go to heaven? Your mother and father have opened the gates. They are waiting for you. You know it is a nice place where everyone forgives everyone. If you have it in your heart, forgive us and we have it in our hearts to forgive you. So just close your eyes.’
Hazel was sure her mother had heard. She looked peaceful for the first time in her life.
Dulcie was breathing hard when Hazel got back to the room fifteen minutes later. Hazel placed her hand over one of her mother’s hands and Dulcie flicked her eyes open.
‘Hazel, are you there?’ she asked and Hazel replied that she was. Then Dulcie took a deep breath and closed her eyes. She was ninety-nine. To Hazel it seemed as if Dulcie had asked her permission to die.
Hazel was broken-hearted. When she had once thought that her mother deserved to go to the gallows, now she was left feeling desolate. She had been cranky, hurt and bitter in the 1960s. Now she thought of all the sad things that both she and her mother had gone through and all the bad — and some good — times that had been part of their lives. She felt empty that it was all over. She thought about her father and Tommy Tregenza and Sam Overton and wondered just for a split second if Dulcie would see them in her next life.
But Hazel also felt relief — relief that she no longer had to worry about what Dulcie was up to and who might get hurt. It hit her that few people had lived such tortured lives but she no longer had to bear the burden of responsibility. For almost the first time in her life, Hazel could relax.
She had already brought clothes to the hospital to lay out her mother in. She had bought her a new pink flannelette nightie with lace down the front, pink and white striped socks and a pink shawl. Dulcie, who had never felt the cold when she was younger, liked to have her shoulders and feet covered because she had started to feel the chill. Hazel bathed her mother again before dressing her for the last time.
Hazel and Bill gave Dulcie a simple but respectable Salvation Army funeral. Hazel did not want to be defined by her dysfunctional mother and by her life but by the worthwhile things that had happened in her own life. Yet as she stood at the front of the chapel and gave the eulogy, she knew that the ties between mother and daughter can never really be broken. There were twenty-one grandchildren and dozens more great-grandchildren that Hazel knew of. She thought it would be difficult to think what to say about Dulcie’s life — which bits to leave in and which bits to leave out — but the words, which she had written down in advance, had come to her easily.
She had them made up in a printed leaflet with a recent photograph of Dulcie on the front looking, as she had her whole life, as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. In her wheelchair, with a halo of white fluffy hair and a bright smile, she looked like the kindest and sweetest old lady.
‘She touched many lives. Some would say she was witty and generous and a good friend and you would be correct. Some would say she was difficult and out of touch. You would also be correct,’ Hazel read out.
‘She was a tough cookie at times and us kids knew about the school of hard knocks. We know that our past is not our future and what we see depends on mainly what we look for, but life is not about how fast you run or how high you jump but how well you bounce.
‘In the name of cricket she had many runs on the board and probably more than enough innings but last week she thought I am so weary and it’s the end of my day so I will leave you and go into the next room.
‘It is peaceful and full of joy and one day I will greet all of you so don’t weep because I have gone but smile because I have been.
‘Now the radio has stopped, the crochet hook is still, the oven is turned off and the scones are no more. Rest in peace, Mother, and God bless you.’
There had not been many people to invite to the service. Hazel didn’t bother letting her mother’s two mixed-up ‘friends’ know because they would have thought their lives to be in danger if they had turned up. She had lost touch with Harry, and Dulcie never mentioned him after learning he had remarried. Allan and Margaret were dead. The small congregation was made up of immediate family including Hazel’s brother Jim, his wife Alma and Hazel’s friends. Hazel reminded them that her mother’s friend Morris Iemma had left parliament on the same day Dulcie died — 5 September 2008. As Dulcie had been a great cook, Hazel figured her mother would have approved of the spread that was put on for the wake in her honour.
When it came to cremating Dulcie, Hazel couldn’t find a birth certificate because there had never been one. All she had was the Centrelink document in which Dulcie had revealed her true age. A stickler for protocol, the undertaker said he had to have the paperwork before he could organise anything. Hazel told him point blank that he would have to keep Dulcie in the fridge because he would never get a birth certificate.
So Dulcie was cremated, but she had left Hazel with one final burden. What to do with the ashes? Dulcie had said
she wanted to be buried close to Ben Hall the bushranger in Forbes General Cemetery, because they were both innocent and had both been badly treated. It was lost on her that while Hall was infamous, he had never killed anyone, while Dulcie was a serial killer. They were both outlaws in their own way.
Forbes General Cemetery on Bogan Gate Road is not only home to the bushranger’s grave but a resting place for a who’s who of Australian bush history. There is the grave of Rebecca Shield, a great-grand-niece of Captain Cook, who died in 1902 aged eighty-four, and Kate Foster, who was Ned Kelly’s sister. All this history makes Ben Hall’s final resting place one of the country’s most-visited cemeteries. It would have been totally illegal to bury Dulcie’s ashes there.
Instead, her ashes were scattered to the wind in the Forbes vicinity. Hazel thought that if her mother and Ben Hall met up, they might just get along and have a good laugh. Not long after Dulcie’s death, a white fence with a gate was put up around Ben Hall’s grave. Later a padlock went on the gate. Hazel never figured out whether it was to keep Ben Hall in — or Dulcie out.
EPILOGUE
THEIR SPRAWLING SINGLE-STOREY HOME WAS ALWAYS FULL OF children and noise and the smell of baked dinners as Hazel and Bill added foster kids to their swelling brood. The kitchen, with its wood-burning fire and a big dining table with a cluster of chairs, opened onto the living room, where there was always a dog or two sharing the comfy couches or panting in the sun. The back garden was like one big playground.
Like the first house the young couple had bought in Wilcannia, this one in country NSW had a big porch and Hazel liked to sit out there with a cup of tea in the summer evenings. Conveniently, the house was just around the corner from the hospital where Hazel worked until the day she retired.