by Dasia Black
I love teaching these Aboriginal students. They are eager, though very sensitive to any possible indicators of prejudice, a sensitivity I understand in my bones and they somehow know that I understand. I relish the opportunity to come to grips with what teaching is about – and it is about the students and what motivates them, what is in their minds rather than mine. It is also, perhaps primarily, about our relationship, our mutual trust. At my first lecture in another course they have been offered on Communications, I quickly realise that my nicely-developed course program, based on assumptions arising from another culture and perspective on what and how we shall teach and what students will learn, is quite irrelevant. So I toss it away and ask: ‘What do you want to get out of this course? What is important to you?’ And they tell me, at first warily, and then with greater confidence as they notice that I am listening.
I am enjoying this teaching experience more than my regular work with non-Aboriginal students back in Sydney. I also love our evenings, often in one of the students’ extended family homes, sitting on a blanket in the garden under the stars, cooking barbecue, eating and talking to their elders. Among them there are some remarkable, wise Aboriginal women who are struggling to keep their children on the path to education and away from alcohol, that dreaded scourge. They are eager to learn, while coping with deprived conditions such as refuge centres, overcrowded homes, and demands from extended family members, frequent ill-health and often lack of support from their communities. They also have the challenge of developing a concept of themselves as people who can read and write and analyse ideas in the face of the insidious, covert or overt prejudice of non-Aboriginal people in the country towns in which most live.
I am involved. I feel alive. And then suddenly I am overcome by a wave of sorrow, aloneness and longing for Henry. The good thing is that I know that when I come home from such a weekend, there is invariably a call from Simon, practically as I open the door, greeting me with his dry: ‘How are you, Mum?’ A life-saver.
Henry’s secretary Greta, with whom I keep in touch, and who has been a widow for a year or two longer than I, says that I still have a long, weary journey ahead of me before I perceive myself to have a life as a single woman without a husband.
28 September First day of Rosh Hashanah. The week has been full of grief. I am hurting inside. My friends Mark and Susan daughter’s wedding was lovely but I felt alone and lost at the reception. On Monday morning was interviewed by Ruby for the Holocaust exhibition at the Sydney Jewish Museum. On Friday morning I drove out to Rookwood Cemetery and sat by Henry’s graveside. Such a strong sense of connection to him – and with this comes a moment of peace.
Missing Jonathan and Paula and baby Adrian.
My mother seems to prefer complaining to me about her shoulder pain and the burning feeling on her face rather than seeing a doctor. She is a sad woman who dumps her misery on me. I react to this with heartburn and chest pains which, I am assured by my doctor, are tension-rather than heart-related.
In December, Jonathan, Paula and Adrian arrived home for a holiday. We decided to spend a week together with Simon, Ruth and their children as an extended family. I rented a couple of apartments at Shoal Bay. I was still fragile but found the experience of being with my four grandchildren and their parents deeply nourishing, in spite of some tensions between the couples. They had quite different attitudes to raising children, one relaxed and on the permissive side, the other with firm schedules and on the over- protective side. I formed the impression that when in one another’s presence, each family exaggerated their beliefs as if to emphasise the correctness of their position. I tried to remain neutral, seeing the benefits and limitations of both approaches.
There were some unforgettable times on this break, such as eight-month-old Adrian and nine-month-old Rachel crawling side-by-side and on top of each other and exploring toys belonging to them both, all the while babbling in their baby language. In the swimming pool, Simon encouraged the two older boys, Zak and Nathan, to swim. Simon and Jonathan chatted and swam together while we girls were in the kitchen cooking. Then we would all sit at a big table eating, talking and attending to the little ones’ stream of demands.
The end of the year was approaching. I was paralysed with fear at leaving the year in which Henry had still been alive. I just did not want to cross into 1993. How would I survive New Year’s Eve? My dear friends Julie and Max arranged for me to join them at the Sydney Opera House at the play Dancing at Lughnasa. Afterwards we strolled along the promenade in front of the Opera House gazing at the beautiful Harbour nightscape. They were so gentle with me. When I returned home, I joined Jonathan and Paula for a short time. They were entertaining a group of their friends at my place. I chatted to them all but felt as if I were on another planet – and in a way, I was.
Jonathan and his little family returned to America a couple of weeks later, expecting to return home permanently in two years’ time. I was sad to see them go but pleased that Jonathan had this opportunity to extend himself in a challenging research environment.
At the beginning of 1993, I felt I had done it. After a dangerous swim in dark waters, I had managed to stay afloat. I was deriving pleasure and nourishment from a number of sources. I kept up my early morning walks with friends and stuck to a sensible diet. I deliberately made an effort to develop friendships with single friends, both female and male. We went out together to the theatre and movies and planned bush-walks and short weekends away. My married friends also remained part of my life.
I started entertaining. If I was invited to a dinner party, I invited people back. I did not want to be thought of as poor Ester. I loved my occasional visits to Ruach, the country home of my friends Naomi and Olek. Ruach is the Hebrew word for spirit. As part of an eighty-acre property with steep rocks and bush they had created a place of peace and tranquillity. I recharged there. They usually also had other friends staying, so I took time out to explore the bush tracks on my own and absorb the healing environment of magnificent eucalypts and banksias. The sight of the gold-coated Haflinger horses with their flaxen manes and tails grazing peacefully on the sunlit fields of the neighbour’s property also gave me pleasure.
But every day I missed Henry. I missed intimacy. Once I had a vision of him on high casting down a thin filament, the tip of which touched my skin ever so lightly and transmitted his love. If only it were really so.
My research was the one area in which I could invest energy, and in turn it energised me. In collaboration with my colleague Andrina, I set up a project exploring mainstream Australian children’s attitudes towards Asian Australian and Aboriginal children, applying the methodology I had learned at McGill. We set aside every Wednesday to write up the results. Andrina would come over in the morning, bringing beautiful ripe tomatoes and red onions to add to the lunch I had prepared. We would go upstairs to my study and, with me at the computer, write, clarify meanings of words and phrases, and write some more. This was a time-consuming and ultimately most rewarding task.
At the conclusion of the study, we decided to submit a paper for publication in one of the best international journals on child development. The day we heard that it had been accepted, Andrina and I went out and celebrated, lunching in a charming old Paddington bistro. Then we presented papers at conferences all over Australia, receiving considerable media attention in newspapers, and on television and radio. I went to Jerusalem and presented papers at conferences dealing with the psychology of stereotyping. In Italy I gave a talk at a conference at the University of Padua, one of the oldest in Europe. In the evenings I explored the city, noting the balance and harmony of its Renaissance buildings. I ate my meals alone but quite at peace, watching people at adjoining tables and enjoying the softness of the twilight.
Back home, apart from work, I continued to visit Simon and Ruth and my grandchildren, helping as they started school and celebrating with them and my mother Friday nights, birthdays and Jewish holidays. On a day-to-day basis, I focused on my
lecturing and my research. Friends commented that I had become too single-minded, that I declined too many invitations, that I was neglecting my social life, that I was not me. I agreed that what they said was probably true. But I tried to make them understand that the raft of my post-Henry life was still rather flimsy and the waters beneath me still too turbulent for comfort. I had to strengthen my raft one slim reed at a time, slowly, doggedly, with all the courage I could muster.
Twenty months into my widowhood, I had an extraordinary experience. I was walking along the Opera House forecourt towards a couple of woman friends whom I had arranged to meet to see a play. It was late afternoon on this glorious Sydney summer day. I was wearing a light summer dress and my body also felt light. Quite suddenly I was struck by an awareness of something new in me. For the first time since Henry had died, I was walking alone and whole without that ubiquitous sense that his phantom presence was beside me.
I met up with my friends and told them how I felt. I did not attempt to explain it.
Then Jonathan phoned me with the thrilling news that he and Paula were expecting their second baby. It was due in February 1994 and it was going to be a girl. It was the best news I could have received.
XIX
Seeking Adventure
The following years were full of adventure. They started off with the birth of my second granddaughter – a healthy, alert and beautiful baby named Anna by her joyful parents in America. It was a time when I was hungry for challenges, professional as well as physical and spiritual ones. My friends Liane, a travel writer and her husband Bernie, my GP and an excellent amateur photographer, casually mentioned that they were planning to trek in the Annapurna region of the Himalayas. In a flash I asked, May I come with you? They replied that I was more than welcome.
That gave my life a focus for the next few months: getting fit for this great adventure.
At the beginning of April 1995, we set off for Kathmandu in Nepal and then moved on to Pokhara, the starting point of our trek to the icy peaks of Dhaulagiri on the southern side of the Annapurna Range. We climbed to the top of Kopra Ridge, 4000 metres above sea-level and well above the tree line. The high altitude slowed down our movements. After a short excursion we were warned by our Sherpa leader to head back, since it was starting to snow. Our group crowded into a Nepalese hut with a roof so low you could only crouch, where we were offered a cup of tea and dinner. As we sat around the fire I confided softly to Liane that I was still in love with Henry and would never again have a serious relationship.
Before she could reply, our leader called us outside. As I stepped from the hut, my eyes opened wide as they beheld the most magnificent sight I had ever seen. Against the glowing blue northern sky, the Dhaulagiri Himal and part of the Annapurna Himal were etched with breathtaking clarity. Every crevice and every fold in the mountains revealed themselves. The Western sky, by contrast, was so dark it was almost black. Was this majesty and grandeur real? Very soon the light changed and this vision disappeared.
Liane and Bernie stood close, holding hands, together in this awe-inspiring moment. I was aware that I stood alone. Sensitive Liane reached out and embraced me with her free arm. We stood silent, stunned.
This trip was an experience that was unforgettable for the sheer beauty of what we saw. It gave me a new understanding of how, in Eastern religions, human beings’ lives are seen as tiny and transient against the immensity of these great Himalayan giants. Most of all, I learned appreciation that there was nowhere towards which you must rush. Just taking one step forward at a time in one’s life is enough.
On the flight home, I reflected on these insights and wrote: I still have many productive years ahead of me. No need to rush with work or anything else. I can pace myself. Slow and steady will get me there quicker and I’ll be more relaxed. Enough of the hassle.
The following year I helped organise a group of six women friends to take on the Cradle Mountain Wilderness Trek in Tasmania. It involved four days of challenging walking. We Cradle Maydels (maydel being the Jewish word for girl) were a terrific group of women. We were respectful of one another’s strengths, vulnerabilities and idiosyncrasies and managed to laugh at and with each other. Bea was the one who screamed at each challenge: Oh, my God. I can’t do it, as she proceeded to do it most competently. Judy refused to sit on logs and rocks at our picnic stops, remaining standing to keep the leeches away – not very successfully. Tanya observed and made us aware of the poetry of our surroundings. Rose, the purist, had brought her own coffee beans and proceeded to grind and prepare fresh coffee every morning. Chris managed to look fresh and elegant at all times. I organised and made sure that we maintained our schedule.
We walked and talked along the way and during our overnight stays in comfortable lodges. It was wet, wet, wet. At the end of each day we emptied our boots and turned our packs upside down to let the water stream out. Rose and I decided to take an optional walk to a waterfall, amid the heaviest rain. Were we mad? Perhaps, but we bonded.
On our return home, each of the others had a husband or partner waiting at the airport. There was no one for me. Jonathan had said he would pick me up but had not managed to get there. The taxi driver who took me home was rude.
A couple of years after my Tasmanian adventure, we formed a new walking group to go on an eight-day trek in the Annapurnas. Back home, energised by and feeling more alive after this second encounter with the Himalayas, I quite happily resumed my teaching and research and my role as mother and grandmother to my brood. I also made plans for a sabbatical at Cambridge University. My application to become a visiting scholar in the Centre for Family Research at the University had been accepted.
I arrived in Cambridge two days before the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah. As soon as I had unpacked, I was overcome by the realisation of my aloneness at a time of the year when Jewish families were all together. My friend Rose phoned from Sydney to wish me Happy New Year. Her timing was impeccable. Then Simon called with warm greetings from his darling family.
Friends had recommended that I contact a Cambridge couple for social support while I was there. They were the remarkable Felicia and Howard. They invited me to dinner and arranged for me to join them at their friends’ home for the breaking of the fast for Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
It was an evening to remember. Helaine Blumenfeld and husband, our hosts, lived in Granchester, that quintessential English village near Cambridge. The older parts of their house dated back to the fourteenth century and the newer parts to the 1700s. The low ceilings, small rooms, antique furniture and low lighting created a sense of intimacy and permanence.
Helaine was a sculptor working in Carrara marble, creating large ambitious forms, several figures layered around a central space portraying the movement between strength and vulnerability, the feminine and the masculine, intimacy and distance. They were passionate statements about our human complexity to which I could really relate.
The Centre for Family Research was housed in rooms that had been occupied in the 1930s by Ernest Rutherford and his team as they worked on radium, and the staff was still nervous about possible after-effects. The Director took me on a tour of this great University. We strolled on the lawn in front of King’s College, founded by Henry VI, past the library of Trinity College designed by Christopher Wren, and the college where Isaac Newton wrote his Principia Mathematica. It was intoxicating to feel the presence of these giants.
All was not historical grandeur, courtesy and scholarship. My lodgings were in a rundown B&B in a dilapidated old house, a tiny room up a flight of stairs smelling of musty carpets with a faint whiff of urine. The landlord was hairy, red-headed and rotund and always wore a singlet and baggy stained pants, no matter how cold it was. I survived the breakfasts in the dungeon-like dining room beneath the stairs by spending them with a charming Japanese lady scholar who was also visiting the University.
The evening meals were a challenge. My Australian dollar was worth half an English pound
, but a simple pasta dish cost twenty pounds. I ate Indian and Italian food or went to the nearby pub and ordered whatever was on the board for the day. Nutritionally this must have been the worst period I had been through since the War.
A few days before the end of my stay, a pipe burst and flooded my room. I could no longer take the smell and the discomfort and accepted a friend’s offer to move into her tiny two-room digs at Emanuel College. What a relief! I enjoyed her youth and intellectual curiosity as well as the company at High Table at College dinners.
Back in Sydney I attended grandparents’ day at three-year-old Anna’s kindergarten, Jonathan and family having returned to Sydney after their American stint. It was a wonderful occasion. Then, for my birthday, my mother gave me a thoughtful gift. It was a certificate showing a many-branched tree heavy with leaves, a tree in full bloom. An inscription informed me that five trees had been planted in Israel in honour of my five young shoots: Zak, Nathan, Rachel, Adrian and Anna. This was one of those rare moments when I glimpsed my mother’s deep concern and love for me.
Simon and Jonathan urged me to shift the focus of my life from research and writing at my computer to getting out and looking for a new partner. Often I wished they would just leave me alone. I felt I had created a reasonably good life for myself and did not need a man. This was certainly true most of the time – but not always.
One morning I was in my car outside the townhouse scraping the old registration label off the windscreen with a sharp little knife – and not doing it well. My neighbour Henrika passed by and I called out in frustration: I need a man for this. I need a man in my life.