by Bunkie King
Maria was canny enough to avoid him thereafter and consequently was not significantly affected by the situation. He was the one who gave me the nickname ‘Bunkie’. When I was a baby my sisters called me Honey Bunny; he used to bounce me on his knee and call me Hunkie Bunkie.
Father was working long hours doing shift work and then slept during the day. Being psychologically fragile, he too was in denial. Eventually, though, he could no longer ignore reality and insisted on a change of environment.
I was six years old when we moved to the big old house in Tathra with its long dark hallway, creaking doors and eerie sounds. There was a dark room with furniture covered by cloths, an excellent place for hide and seek on rainy days. We had family dinners at a huge table, looking north out the verandah windows. There was lots of laughing and storytelling with Mother repeatedly telling us, ‘Don’t speak with your mouth full!’
We also owned the block behind the house where a couple of small wattle trees grew; they became my cubby-house. I had sticks for my broom and twigs for kitchen utensils. I was in my element playing with tree fairies and the spirits that protected Mother Nature’s garden on earth. I made little tar babies on the side of the road with the sticky black goo and chips of blue metal. Other days I would make little roads in the dirt at the base of the back stairs and play with my brother’s Matchbox cars. From dawn to dusk I was out and about, mostly alone, but sometimes my brother or neighbourhood children played with me. I saw my first carnival in Tathra, the dodgem cars’ tyres rattling over wooden boards, the thrilled, shrill screams as the rides went round and round, the fairy floss and clowns.
This idyllic period ended when our parents’ relationship deteriorated. After a phone call from the bank manager, Mother discovered that Father wasn’t paying the bills. He didn’t have a job and couldn’t cope with the responsibility of providing for his family. Mother decided to move us back up to Wollongong in the hope this would improve his chances of employment. However, it didn’t work and our parents separated. My once-happy family completely disintegrated — my brother was sent away to board with another family (to make a man of him — too much feminine energy in the house) and my three eldest sisters all left home.
***
Fourteen-year-old Le was put in charge of me when Mother found her first-ever job. She was away for days on end driving around the state distributing road safety booklets to primary schools. Le and I fought a lot. I challenged everything. As a feisty nine-year-old I resented her power over me and took all my anger and frustration out on her. Le just wanted to be with her friends and her boyfriend, Chris Winter, whom she was dating despite the distance between Sydney and Wollongong. She resented having to take care of her little sister. She’d tell me to have a shower and I’d refuse. She’d tell me to go to bed and I wouldn’t. I was angry, acting out. It wasn’t right, I believed. With my brother, three sisters and father gone and my mother rarely home, I was lonely, sad, confused, moody and angry. We moved five times in four years and there was nothing dependable or stable in my life. I was always the new, strange kid at school.
At the end of 1963 we moved to Sydney and the promise of a brighter future when Mother got a job as a sales assistant in the boyswear department of David Jones in the city. She went to work each day dressed in the DJs uniform, a black skirt and jumper, to which she added a pearl necklace and pearl earrings. Mother always dressed smartly and took care of her appearance.
We had Christmas that year in our new place, a three-bedroom unit on the ground floor of a granite-blue two-storey block of flats in Holbrook Avenue, Kirribilli. The family was together again, or at least six of the original eight — Hyone was living there with her husband and two daughters. Maria, who worked at a private nursing home nearby, came and my brother was home for the school holidays. Good times, new beginnings, joyful days. The sounds of Dave Brubeck, Bach and Bruch wafted through the unit. Morgana King purred out the open windows with their triangular leadlight detail as I played outside, shaded by the old hydrangea bushes.
Life still had bad moments, though, as Father had taken to standing on the footpath outside the flat, drunkenly shouting for Mother to take him back. She refused, telling him he had to prove himself: to get a job and provide for us.
The local children enjoyed bullying me and chased me through side streets and down stairs. I escaped on rollerskates as rocks and rolled-up newspapers were thrown my way. I was a loner; I considered myself a freak. I didn’t understand what I had done to make these kids hate me, but I accepted that was just the way things were.
Instead, my friends were the books I found refuge in. There was so much food for the spirit and mind to process — so much collective experience. I read everything I could. Books, where I gleaned my knowledge of humankind, held the answers to life, the universe and everything. I’d also lose myself in romantic, Jane Austen-type stories, where true love could be a bumpy ride but everything worked out in the end. I deeply believed in the whole ‘happily ever after’ syndrome — the cad who turns out to be an absolute gentleman, honest and trustworthy, that type of thing. I loaded my young head with these stories.
Yet although I read a lot, I didn’t think I was smart. My self-esteem was very, very low.
By the end of summer darkness fully descended on our family. As Father had decided to marry his landlady’s daughter, he requested a divorce. Mother was devastated. She went into shock and completely withdrew, suffering what was possibly a minor nervous breakdown. While she was there in body, her spirit had gone. Retiring to her bedroom, she shut out the sunshine, turned her face to the wall and turned her back on us. There was no more music in the house, no laughter, no ‘good night’ kisses, just whispers and mutters of ‘Shhh! Be quiet.’ At regular intervals Sao biscuits slathered with peanut butter, accompanied by an enormous blue and white Arabia-ware mug of steaming tea, were directed to Mother’s room. My basic needs were taken care of by Hyone, who kept the home running. She helped me make my lunch to take to school and cooked dinner of an evening.
At dusk I often wandered down to Kirribilli wharf where I would sit on the pontoon watching the colours of the sunset and the lights of the city buildings shimmer across the harbour waters, reaching out to me. The despair and grief I felt at the collapse of my large family made me apprehensive about my future. I came to the realisation that I needed to take care of myself, as nobody else would; there was no one to guide me or with whom I could discuss my feelings, what was happening in my head and my heart. I decided I was not going to marry, as marriage didn’t offer security and happiness. Instead, I would get a job so I’d have enough money to live well. I wanted to own one of those big units with large windows that overlooked Sydney Harbour. That was my dream.
I came to notice that each day the owner of the little shop on the wharf dragged a trolley full of grocery bags up dozens of steps to deliver to the people who lived in the blocks of flats nearby. I went up to him and suggested, ‘I’m a lot younger than you. I see you carting that trolley up to the old ladies. I’ll do it for you.’
In 1966, at the age of 11, I pulled a heavy newspaper wagon up dozens of stairs to deliver provisions to the dark, antique-filled units belonging to mature-aged women smelling of mothballs and talcum powder. It toned and strengthened my nut-brown body. My first pay, a whole $1, was spent on a block of chocolate, a packet of biscuits and chewing gum, rare, tasty and forbidden treats. These weren’t the only things forbidden at home: TV was definitely out; Mother felt it intruded on the dynamics of our family. Comic books were another no-no. I was, however, allowed to listen to the radio; The Goons were a particular favourite.
From then on I saved up and bought my own clothes.
The divorce shattered some of Mother’s more naive beliefs about the spiritual aspect of love. Awakening from her depressive episode she took advantage of the cultural shift that was taking place. With the advent of the Pill, women were stepping out of their traditional roles to enjoy the sexual liberation on offer. Moth
er enjoyed this freedom by having sex with as many men as she could. I guess I must have been in bed when visitors called because at the time I was completely unaware of this side of Mother’s life; also, she often sent me away to stay with friends on weekends. I was too young to understand what was going on but my sisters later remarked on the sexually charged atmosphere in the house. One day Mother brought home some shopping and, with a wicked grin at my visiting sisters, pulled out a sheer leopard- print nightgown and pranced around in it. ‘My God, Mother!’ they exclaimed.
When Hyone, her husband and her two young daughters moved out, the family feeling in our home disintegrated. By mid-1967, Mother, Le and I were the only ones left. Mother was able to afford to buy a semi-detached house with a five-metre frontage in Waverton on the lower North Shore, but there was growing tension between her and Le, who was about 17. Le was rebelling. When Mother told her she had to have a shower, she refused. ‘I will have it when I’m ready. I’m not going to jump to and have one because you tell me to. I’m a grown-up person, and I will have it when I fucking well want to.’
‘Don’t say that word!’ Mother replied. She got really upset if we swore and sometimes washed our mouths out with soap.
Le started jumping up and down on Mother’s bed and running down the hallway chanting, ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.’
The last thing I saw was Mother with her hands around Le’s throat, choking her, then Le hit her and ran out of the house. Mother looked deflated, powerless. Horrified, I backed into my room. I realised that beneath her dominant personality and apparent sophistication, she was only human and could be hurt. With the sense of unity shifting in the house, I was confused and unsure what might hold the remains of our family together.
I started my first year at Cremorne Girls’ High School when Le was in her last. By 17, she had developed into a self-assured beauty. Slim and stylish, she never left the house without her glossy auburn hair coiffed, and carefully applied make-up highlighting her large eyes, full lips and classic bone structure. She studied the new trends and made her own outfits: an orange and black paisley pantsuit and a ribbed, sleeveless rollneck sweater that she knitted. At school she made jewellery, a pair of dangly copper and enamel earrings. She was artistic and had a real flair for ’60s fashions. I was in awe of her.
I soon learned that an all-girls school was different to the co-ed state schools I’d been to. Girls can be very exclusive and often treat you with virtual indifference. Most of the girls were from intact, seemingly stable families with relatively strict boundaries on their behaviour. I felt different and tried to keep under the radar so nobody would notice me or be mean to me.
At the beginning of the following year Le moved out of home and began university, studying to be a teacher.
When I was a child Mother rarely expressed interest in me, let alone demonstrated warmth, tenderness, sympathy or understanding. But when it became just the two of us, I gained more of her attention. Sharing her cultural interests substituted for the maternal qualities I had missed. Together we listened to a BBC radio production of Under Milk Wood narrated by Richard Burton. For school holidays she would relent and hire a TV and together we’d watch old black-and-white British movies on Sunday evenings. More often than not she’d say, ‘I went to RADA with her’, or ‘He’s a famous old actor’. These films took her back to her youth and what might have been if war — and marriage — hadn’t intervened.
When she took me to a production of Man of La Mancha at the State Theatre I was thrilled. Dressed in my best clothes, I sat enthralled, loving every moment of the musical. But when Don Quixote’s love interest Aldonza (his ‘Lady Dulcinea’) was pack-raped by the muleteers and carried off by them, I was a little shocked. Afterwards Mother didn’t discuss this dramatic incident or enquire what effect it might have had on me.
Although I didn’t have many friends my own age, I had the company of Mother’s friends who came to her regular Sunday afternoon events. She was ‘discovered’, theatrically speaking, at David Jones when a man approached her and said, ‘You’ve got a lovely voice, would you like to be in a play?’ Her friends were the actors from the plays she performed in with Dramsoc, the University of New South Wales’ drama society.
After rehearsing or performing during the week, as well as doing matinees on Saturdays, the cast were often at a loose end on Sundays. Mother organised get-togethers for them and their friends; these became her ‘Sunday Soup Kitchen’. The entrance fee was a can of soup, and they played music, drank wine or coffee and talked endlessly about all sorts of subjects. I was too young to participate in the adult conversations but sat and listened, absorbing everything. I remember Lex Marinos, Arna-Maria Winchester, Betty Bobbitt, John Clayton and many others. These friends were Mother’s lifeline — they shared a sense of fun and a love of culture.
I loved it. Music and revolution was everywhere, too, from the Beatles to the Woodstock festival, Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix, and later ‘happenings’ like the stage show Hair and local ‘scenes’ like artist Martin Sharp’s Yellow House and the passionate, sometimes crazy speakers who’d gather to get things off their chests on soapboxes in the Domain. I longed to be older, to be part of these amazing times.
Mother continued being cast by director Aarne Neeme in various productions for Dramsoc. I often accompanied her to rehearsals and helped Aarne’s wife sew costumes. I sat in the audience night after night and ‘the smell of grease paint’ got under my skin. One night, Mother and I watched a performance of Hamlet and I couldn’t stop giggling at the Ghost, whose shiny black shoes squeaked every time he walked on the stage. We went backstage afterwards to chat with Mother’s friends. I later learned Jack Thompson had played the Ghost.
I made the decision to become a stage actor as I thought it looked liberating to take on a different persona and play a character. I no longer felt insignificant.
I asked Le’s boyfriend David for help to compile a photographic portfolio. I needed photographs that illustrated how my outward appearance could change depending on my ‘character’ — everything from innocent schoolgirl (complete with school uniform) to what I thought could pass as a movie star look, having borrowed Mother’s false eyelashes and mink stole. David wanted shots of me looking sexy; this was something I didn’t believe I could pull off, but I did don some tops that showed my pubescent cleavage. To make my breasts appear fuller he instructed, ‘Push your arms together.’ Although I wasn’t very relaxed with this, I accepted that I needed a range of images for a comprehensive portfolio. Looking at these shots now, I realise I came off as a Lolita type, but that was neither how I behaved nor how I thought of myself. I didn’t even know that sex appeal existed. I simply wanted to prove to the world that I could be versatile.
At the same time, Mother was approached to do some photographic advertising work and the photographer took a picture of me in a white lacy mini dress. He told me that I could possibly pursue this as a career and arranged for me to appear as the teenage daughter in a car advertisement. I also featured in a music film clip in a train carriage as the only girl with the band.
In Year 9, I channelled my creative energies into school theatrical productions, taking responsibility for choreographing, directing and playing the lead role in The Importance of Being Earnest, Cremorne Girls’ High’s production of the year. I was gaining more confidence, slowly losing the outcast feeling.
On some weekends, to give Mother a little space, I’d stay with Janne Walmsley, from Mother’s theatrical circle, in her tiny one-bedroom flat at the top of William Street in the inner-city suburb of Darlinghurst. Janne played the part of Ned Kelly’s girlfriend in the Australian film starring Mick Jagger, using the name Janne Wesley. I didn’t know at the time that by ‘a little space’ Mother actually meant an opportunity to explore her newfound sexual freedom, but that didn’t really matter. It was exciting and fun staying with Janne; visitors would often drop by. One of them was a blond-haired man who smoked French cigarettes — I beli
eve it was the same man who’d played Hamlet’s Ghost.
I got my second job, when I was 13, at the corner shop on Union Street in North Sydney. It was owned by a man named Jack, so we simply referred to it as ‘Jack’s shop’, even though we had no idea of the shop’s proper name. I worked behind the counter on weekends and school holidays. It made me even more determined to support myself and pay my own way; I wanted to be a truly independent person. I maintained my dream of owning a flat overlooking the harbour. That seemed like heaven to me.
Just as I was starting to feel worthy and beautiful, with my self-esteem developing as I realised my potential, and my vision of a professional career as an actor a distinct possibility, I fell in love and gave myself completely to someone else’s dream.
Chapter 4
‘I love you both’
In early 1970, Jack and Le travel to Broken Hill for the filming of Wake in Fright, his first real break in movies. The film’s stars Donald Pleasence, Gary Bond and Chips Rafferty are big names. I miss Jack terribly and mope around at school, uninterested in lessons. At home I sit by the telephone waiting for him to call, which he does almost every evening. Heaven knows what we talk about but I’m excited that he wants to be in contact with me as much as I want to hear from him.
On Jack and Le’s return, Bev and Patrick move into the Bank Street house with them. When Bev needed somewhere to live, Le offered her one of the rooms in the share house. Now within 30 metres of each other Jack has his ex-wife, his current girlfriend and an enamoured teenager. An interesting arrangement!
After months of attention and special treatment Jack has my heart in his hands. I am besotted and easily convince myself of the possibility that he could love me in return, so when he starts to take me ‘parking’ at Ball’s Head Reserve in his blue Datsun station wagon, I am in heaven. I experience my first kiss, the most intimate experience of my life thus far. His breath is warm against my cheek, then his soft, tender lips touch mine. Suddenly, his tongue is inside my mouth, my senses come alive and I want this feeling to continue. Over the next few weeks our sensual kissing moves on to being something a little more intimate. I give myself to him with an open heart, though I technically remain a virgin.