The Matriarch

by Adrian Tame

  In the end, before he died, he didn’t know who the fuck I was, because he used to brandish guns at my head, too. Half the time I think he thought I was his girlfriend. There was only sixteen years’ age difference between us. There were a couple of girls that he went with that were like me to look at. I’ve got a photo of one of his girlfriends that later had her head shot off, and she looks like me in the picture.

  But when Kathy visited Dennis in Pentridge after writing the letter, they both found it difficult to raise the subject. ‘We didn’t talk about it,’ she says. ‘Didn’t mention it. We don’t show emotions in our family.’

  That didn’t mean Kathy was incapable of showing Dennis affection. To most people, particularly Gladys, Peter was the more lovable of the two brothers, reminding Kathy of the way her own sister, Wilma, had always received more attention than she had.

  Gladys and Harry showed Peter the love and affection. He was like my sister, Wilma. He had naturally curly hair; Dennis was more like me, the surly one. But it was Dennis I gave my cuddles to.

  There was no doubting, however, that Gladys, Harry, Dennis and Peter were a family that did things together—like the time they buried a car in the backyard.

  There was a big tree where nothing grew. I don’t know why they wanted to get rid of this car. So they decided to dig this hole, and I go out into the garden and I can’t find them. I could hear the voices, and they’re right down this hole. It’s big enough to put I don’t know what in. A car, anyway. The four of them had dug it, and the next thing I know the car’s been put in there and covered up. And I thought they were fucking idiots. I don’t know who bought that house later—they must have had some surprises.

  As Gladys and Harry raised Dennis during his formative years it could be argued that it was their influence or lack of guidance that started him on the wrong path. But Kathy prefers not to confront this question, although for some time she incorrectly believed Peter blamed Gladys and Harry for his life of crime.

  It was after Gladys died in May 1993. Peter put a death notice in the paper the day after I put mine in. He wouldn’t put it in the same day. It just said: ‘You made me what I am.’ He didn’t mean it in a wrong way, but I misconstrued it as meaning she had made him the criminal he was.

  Kathy and Billy Peirce were, by financial necessity, living apart in August 1954, when their first child—Kathy’s third—was born. Kathy was working in a boarding house in Bairnsdale, 250 kilometres east of Melbourne, while Billy was woodcutting in a nearby timber town. He made it to the local hospital for the birth, but wasn’t of much assistance to Kathy—’I had her on my own, he was too busy chatting up the nurse. The baby was snuffling and sneezing, but there was nobody there to clean her up.’

  The baby was called Vicki-Jean, and is generally believed to be Kathy’s only daughter. That doesn’t take into account her three ‘lost’ children.

  Most media accounts of Kathy’s life have wrongly stated she had only seven children. In fact, she had ten, but three were taken from her and placed in care shortly after they were born. Six of the ten were born to Kathy and Billy Peirce during the eight years they were together from 1953 to 1961. They were Vicki, born 11 August 1954; Shelley, born 8 July 1956; Stephen, born 15 July 1957; Victor, born 11 November 1958; Lex, born 7 January 1960; and David, born in July 1961. Of these six, Vicki, Victor and Lex stayed with Kathy; Shelley, Stephen and David (names Kathy uses for them to protect their real identities) were taken from her. It is only during the last six years that Kathy has re-established contact with two of her three ‘lost’ children— Shelley and Stephen. David’s whereabouts are still unknown.

  Shelley and Stephen traced Kathy through Freedom of Information and other sources, discovering one another in the process. Their reunion with Kathy came just before a legislative change which now protects natural parents from being confronted by fostered children without agreeing to see them. Although Kathy would not have denied Shelley and Stephen the opportunity of meeting her, and is glad they did, she wishes she could have been prepared for the event, instead of it occurring in circumstances she remembers as especially traumatic. The two ‘lost children’ had travelled to Melbourne to find Kathy without any prior warning.

  It was in 1989. I was staying with relatives at the Carlton Housing Commission flats during the committal hearings concerning Victor and then Trevor over the Walsh Street killings. I had enough on my mind with this, and I was walking to the court every day from Carlton, and walking back. Gladys and Harry were living at 49 Cubitt Street in Richmond, and Gladys phoned saying she wanted to see me urgently.

  It was a Sunday morning and Trevor’s wife Debbie and me came out of the flats and there was a bloke downstairs fiddling with his tow-truck. Debbie’s cheeky, and she says: ‘Give us a lift down to Richmond.’ We hop in the tow-truck, and I’ve got a mink coat on, full-length mink, mind you. And we’re talking and laughing, and we get out, not expecting anything. And I go into the house at Cubitt Street, and there’s a girl standing beside Gladys’s bed, because she was bed-ridden then. Gladys said: ‘This is your daughter.’ And with that, this voice behind me said: ‘And I’m your bloody son.’ It was Stephen. He was angry because I’d let him go, and the reasons why. Shelley was scared of me, my reaction. I was shocked, and then I cried, didn’t I? I’ll never forget it. Shelley didn’t come near me. She was too scared to talk. I believed them straight away because Stephen looked so much like Dennis, and Shelley looked like Gladys.

  There was no doubt. And I’d always known they’d come to light some day. But I was angry, because they should never have sprung that on me like they did. Later I took them by the arm and we walked around and I showed them 35 and 37 Stephenson Street in Richmond, and I said: ‘That’s where we lived.’ I said: ‘If you’d stayed with me, and you’d been down here with the rest of us, you’d either be dead or in gaol. I did the right thing.’ How would they have got a chance if I’d kept them? But they both said: ‘We’d still rather have been with you.’ Later that day I took them straight out to H Division in Pentridge to introduce them to Victor. He wasn’t impressed. Because he didn’t know anything about them. He didn’t want anything to do with them. Since then he spoke to Shelley on the phone, and he saw Stephen on several occasions.

  Kathy has no doubt, however, about the wisdom of allowing the three children to be adopted. Meeting Shelley and Stephen forced her to come to terms again, as a loving mother, with the realisation that the only chance those children had for a normal life was if they were taken from her at birth. Being re-united with Shelley and Stephen helped Kathy confront this awful truth— probably the most damning indictment of her turbulent life. She had ten children, three of whom were taken from her shortly after they were born. Of the seven she reared, three are dead; two have recently been released from gaol; one is lost to Kathy forever, living under the witness protection scheme, and has not seen or contacted her mother for four years; and the other has also spent time in gaol for crimes of dishonesty.

  The two children with whom she has re-established contact have both been living useful, well-adjusted lives. Shelley owns a pet shop in north Queensland, and is happily married with a teenage daughter. Looking at a family portrait of Shelley, her husband and daughter, the sheer wholesomeness of their appearance shines through. It is difficult to avoid the obvious, painful comparison between this photograph and one of Kathy’s other family portraits—guns, tattoos and all.

  Stephen is a professional chef living in Victoria, and is also happily married, with two children.

  How does that make me feel as a mother, that my only successful children are the ones that got away? Terrible: terrible now, and terrible at the time. It’s not meant as an excuse for letting them go, but most of the time around then I had five children with me, and Billy Peirce in and out of gaol.

  The circumstance of the first of the three adoptions was, in itself, highly irregular. Kathy has more than a suspicion that someone made money out of her and her ‘los
t’ daughter. An assistant at the Royal Women’s Hospital, where Shelley was born, made the arrangements and, Kathy believes, was later the target of an investigation into her activities.

  With Shelley I was introduced to a young couple, then we went to a solicitor’s office, and they offered me money. I said: ‘No.’ I wasn’t going to sell her. I’m not that much of a Granny Evil. They told me the baby would have a good home, would have this and that, nothing to ever worry about.

  I didn’t see any of the three of them. They take them away from you straight away. You don’t even get to hold them. They’re gone. If I’d seen them I wouldn’t have been able to give them up. What you don’t see you don’t miss, terrible as that sounds, but I thought her life would be better. I remember the assistant, she was shifty. She arranged everything for the first one. Because I knocked back the money, maybe she got it.

  Stephen was taken in by a children’s home in Broadmeadows, an outer Melbourne suburb. When they were reunited Stephen asked Kathy if his father, Billy Peirce, had bashed her.

  I told him, yes, but when I was heavily pregnant it was only on my back and that. And Stephen was born with bruises. Dennis Ryan and James Pettingill, the fathers of my other two kids, never bashed me. Only Billy Peirce. Mostly when I was pregnant, out of frustration, I suppose. The funny thing was I seemed to always be going into hospital after a bashing on his fucking pay day. He was usually drunk, but it was fists and all. I couldn’t fight back, I had to cover myself up. One time I was talking to my friend Dolores and he was making eyes at her or something, and I said something, and I got two black eyes. I went into hospital to have Victor with black eyes.

  When I came home to my great-granma’s place two days later I went straight upstairs so she wouldn’t see my eyes, but she said: ‘I’d like to see the baby,’ and she saw my eyes then. Five minutes after it happened he was apologetic, but it was too late. I stayed with him because I still loved him.

  When Billy was serving time in Bendigo prison for burglary, Kathy regularly stole tobacco from the milk bar where she was working. She would take it up to Bendigo and attach it to a rope hanging over the prison wall. Billy would haul it up and over, and enjoy the benefits of being the prison’s tobacco broker. When he was in Pentridge he would hide the tobacco in hollowed out cabbages in the prison garden.

  * * *

  Before Kathy fell pregnant to Billy Peirce for the sixth and final time she enjoyed a brief relationship with another man. Billy was in gaol, and this unnamed lover provided Kathy with something she found difficult to cope with from a man—kindness.

  That was one of the boys from my childhood that really did love me. He was so good to me, I couldn’t live with him after Billy Peirce. He was too kind to me, and I’m not used to that. I couldn’t, because he was too nice. Buy me flowers, and do this and do that. I couldn’t cope. I dunno why, I couldn’t get used to it.

  As usual Billy Peirce was in gaol for burglary for most of the time Kathy was carrying David, their sixth child. Unknown to Kathy, Billy was out for long enough to get married to another woman between the births of Lex and David. Since then Kathy and Billy’s legal wife, Valerie Peirce, have got to know each other and occasionally meet.

  Kathy’s pregnancy with David didn’t stop the third man in her life, Jimmy Pettingill, from falling in love with her. Kathy still more often than not refers to him as ‘Mr Pettingill’, an oddly quaint expression of her lasting respect for him. ‘I met Mr Pettingill when I was pregnant with David,’ she says. ‘He was willing to take me, pregnant and all, but I didn’t thinks it was fair for him to have to bring up someone else’s child.’ So David was taken into care.

  During the early stages of Kathy’s relationship with Jimmy Pettingill, Billy Peirce made an attempt to win back the mother of his six children, despite being legally married himself.

  We were living in this little house in Brunswick, and the kids went to school at Albert Street Primary. Vicki happened to tell me about how this man used to pick them up and buy ’em ice creams, which was Billy Peirce. He was out of gaol. So he came to my house and said he wanted me back. I told Mr Pettingill and he left for the night and Bill moved in. They confronted one another in the passage, and I warned Jimmy: ‘Don’t turn your back on him for a start.’ But the next morning I thought to myself: ‘This is not on.’ One night was enough, I couldn’t go back to the old ways. And I begged Jimmy to come back.’

  Jimmy Pettingill remains something of a mystery figure. When he and Kathy met in 1961 he was already married with a family living in South Australia, and was quite open with Kathy about this. What he didn’t tell her was that he had a third family living in remote central Australia.

  There was no question of bigamy—Pettingill was married only to the mother of his children in South Australia. But throughout the six years he and Kathy were together he maintained regular contact with both his other families. Strangely his legal wife and his two de factos were all called Kathy—’No wonder if he talked in his sleep it wasn’t any problem,’ Kathy comments wryly.

  One of the reasons Jimmy could successfully juggle these three separate lives was his job as an interstate truck driver. But the strain of the long hours and overnight trips told. ‘He would just get in the house and fall asleep against the front door,’ Kathy recalls. ‘And I couldn’t take it no more, because I never had him there.’

  Jimmy Pettingill was to father her last two children—Jamie, born 18 December 1963, and Trevor, born 1 February 1965. Kathy remembers him as a kind man, an opinion not shared by Lex, her fifth child by Billy Peirce. Lex describes his stepfather as a ‘mongrel’ who tortured him as a child, inflicting serious physical and emotional scars. According to Lex, Jimmy broke both his arms on separate occasions. Nevertheless, Kathy maintains she didn’t know about his ‘sneaky’ brutal treatment of Lex. ‘He was a truck driver, and they use pills, hallucinate and that,’ she says. ‘Maybe that was it. But he must have been remorseful, because he killed himself in the end.’

  There was an element of the bizarre about the deaths of Billy Peirce and James Pettingill, like many of those who came into contact with Kathy from the time she was a little girl. Billy was the first of the two to go, on 8 December 1968.

  He was in a cave-in at a building site in the late 1960s at Clayton. He was digging drains. Trevor had slammed his thumb in a door, and we were in a friend’s car, driving to the children’s hospital. While I was in the hospital it came over the radio in the car and the friend heard. Hal Todd was the announcer, and he cried. One of the men was pulled out, and as for the other one, well, the trench caved in again. The chap that drove me to the hospital, he knew it was Billy from the radio. So when we got back home with Trevor he suggested I take all the kids and put them to bed. And I was thinking: ‘Who’s he to tell me what to do?’ He said: ‘I’ve got something important to tell you.’ So I get rid of all the kids, and then he explained to me that Billy’d been buried alive. Well then I watched the news and saw his tattooed arm coming out of the grave, I saw the mud that had fell on him. It was close to Christmas because I had stuff on the lay-by for the kids. So I got the stuff off the lay-by to buy clothes to wear to his funeral. I had a go at the cops after he died. ‘You’d be fucking happy he died,’ I remember the police had come for him one night and as he was being taken away to the lock up, I said to them: ‘There doesn’t want to be a fucking mark on him either when he comes home.’ You know what they did? They put him in a locker and turned him upside down in it, and they put a bucket over his head and hit him through the bucket. That’s where I learned about police.

  Unknown to Kathy, Billy had had a premonition about the manner of his death. The day before the accident he told his wife, Valerie, he was worried there would be a cave-in at the building site, and said: ‘I think it will be me.’

  At his inquest, on 11 June 1969, Coroner Harry Pascoe heard how Billy and the foreman, Jack James, had both been buried when the three-metre-deep trench in which they were working cav
ed in. Their fellow workers thought Billy had scrambled his way to safety, so concentrated their efforts on freeing James, whom they dug out after forty minutes or so, still alive. When James’s head was pulled clear of the mud he said, ‘Where’s Bill?’ By then it was too late. It took another half-hour before they uncovered Billy’s body. His legs were doubled up underneath him and there was no sign of life.

  * * *

  James Pettingill died in 1972, five years after he and Kathy split up, but she didn’t find out about it for another seven years.

  Mr Pettingill killed himself. I don’t know whether it was because he knew the kids were in trouble. I think it was in Mt Gambier. Jamie used to run away to South Australia all the time when he was young. I think he was looking for him. Jamie was young in Pentridge when we found out his dad had died, and I went out there with the priest. Jamie said, ‘Who’s dead?’, thinking it was one of his brothers. I said: ‘Your father.’ He said: ‘Well, I’m not bloody worried about him.’ I didn’t get told officially because I was the de facto.

  James Pettingill’s adoptive father, Mr F.J. Pettingill, is still living in Mt Gambier. He is reluctant to speak of his adopted son, but confirms that he had taken his own life in 1972. ‘James was happily married as far as I’m concerned. He never said anything to me about this family in Melbourne, and I don’t want to hear about them.’

  The Coroner’s Court in Adelaide failed to turn up any record for the death of a James Pettingill during the 1960s or 1970s.

  After Kathy’s six-year relationship with Jimmy Pettingill ended in 1967 there were other men in her life, but no more children—a tally of ten was somehow pre-ordained.