by Biff Ward
I enrolled in a distance Diploma of Education from Armidale which required a one-week residential session on campus. Dad picked me up at the train station. He took me to the house to collect the things I’d left in a tea-chest three years before. There was no sign of it. Gone were my teenage diaries, all those dresses I’d made, my uni memorabilia.
That’s when I discovered that the photos in the chocolate box and the two albums were gone too. What had happened? Did she look at each image closely and then tear it in half? Did she put them out with the rubbish? Did she burn them in the incinerator which stood beside the original brick dunny in the furthest corner of the garden? Dad was vague—missing photos seemed a small footnote to the lurching changes in his life.
Mum cleaned out the pantry, was all he said.
Next day, the course started and I met Richard. He was part of the Vietnam Action Committee, the first Sydney cabal to organise protests about the war. We talked politics the whole week. We circulated a petition against the war among our colleagues. The last night we were carousing with a crowd at the Golf Club when he leaned over and kissed me on the forehead. I love you, he said.
At twenty-two, I felt dowdy, middle-aged and corralled in my marriage. I hadn’t dreamt of this. We started meeting secretly. It lasted a month before I told Ken, and Richard told his partner. It was a fait accompli: we were moving in together. The place we found turned out to be a small two-storey terrace in the middle of Paddington, with packing crates for furniture.
I landed a teaching job—no interviews necessary in those days—as a high school English teacher. I started in the middle of winter term and had eight out of eight lessons the first day. It felt perfectly natural to be in front of a class, which convinced me that I could cope with this teaching business. Genna started in childcare and named her institution The Padding Street Girls, a nice comment on the old reputation of that suburb. In the science lab where he taught boys in a southern suburb, Richard mixed a concoction designed to stop me biting my nails. After a few weeks, I had learnt to tolerate the taste and my biting was as savage as ever.
On one of his Sydney visits, Dad lobbed another memorable question to me. He’d been in touch with Mum and it was clear they would not be living together again. He was concerned to do the right thing by her and she had expressed some preferences.
If Mum wanted to, would you be okay with her living near you, here in Sydney? he asked.
This time, for the first time, I said, No.
No. I don’t want her to ever do to Genna any of the things that she did to me. Each word was clearly enunciated and they came out of my mouth like darts. The sentence—thwack, thwack, thwack—was fully formed and spoken before I even knew I had the thought.
Dad started back, then nodded. He looked at me closely and said, Okay, darling.
He probably patted my knee. But he didn’t ask me what I’d meant by what I’d said. What things? What had she done? He ignored the possibilities in these questions, so the happenstance of my sharp words cracking a breach in our usual silence was missed.
In his letters to his mother and Jean in that period, he tells them he has repeatedly asked Mark and me what we think of the notion of him and Mum divorcing. I don’t remember it. My answer would have been such a quick, Of course! that it flitted past me, some little thing he needed to do to button up the past. It was keeping her away from Genna that mattered.
At the beginning of that heady year of 1968, Richard and I moved to Canberra. We were wildly happy and a year later our planned pregnancy turned out to be twins, Ben and Hannah. They grew into snowies, two little ice-cream heads such as Mark and I had been.
Those were the years when I didn’t speak to my mother. Richard remembers that when she was mentioned, I would become highly agitated, so he would let it drop. One incident he told me about occurred shortly after we arrived in Canberra. We were in the backyard, he said, and with no warning, you said, ‘You know what’s wrong with me?’ and I said, ‘What?’ and you said, ‘I don’t have a past.’
Presumably, I was noticing—mid-twenties—that most people talked quite a bit about their childhood and I didn’t seem to be able to. There was a blank place inside me.
Vietnam filled our days. We absorbed every frame of the black and white evening news, we read tatty left-wing journals, we confabulated theories and ideas, we magicked up bigger and bigger protests, we partied and picnicked. We were young at that historical moment when all the shibboleths of middle-class propriety fell over or were shoved aside. That year of ’68, we really believed, some of us, that socialist revolution was around the corner.
Mark was back in Sydney, living with Mirabel who turned out to be his soul-mate. She introduced us to the two acres of bush on a beach near Bateman’s Bay which her savvy parents had bought in 1951. I and my children have holidayed there down the decades since. Mark and Mirabel also bought one of the original farmhouses on a hill in Leichhardt and it became the Sydney way-station for the rest of us for the next thirty-five years.
Dad married Barb, a literature academic who was a couple of years younger than I was. They started having children in faraway Armidale. Those years of growing our children—Dad, Mark and I—geography determined that we were more distant from each other, enmeshed in our new families.
Mum faded completely from our few conversations. By 1973, I hadn’t seen or spoken to her for eleven years, not since that day at Sydney Airport when I left for England. She sent occasional cards or little letters which I didn’t answer. But when my closest friend Julia moved to Adelaide, I decided to visit her in the school holidays. I asked Dad for Mum’s address and wrote, giving her Julia’s phone number and my dates. I was going to spend the time with my friend and I would see my mother in passing, an unsettling but small aside. Not writing to her was one thing, but to not acknowledge her proximity would be quite another.
The first night I was there, the phone rang. The voice was so loud and disconnected from normal speech that I could hear it across the room. Julia said, It’s not your mother. It’s someone else.
I knew it would be her. Here it was, the grotesquerie gushing back into my life, Julia not able to believe that someone who sounded like this was my mother.
Hello? I said.
Biff. Is that you?
Her voice was loud, excessively loud, like a deaf person in a state of confusion. It was also so flat that it achieved a monotone of unintended aggression. There was no nuance. Everything inside me swooped and sank.
When we met in the Botanic Gardens for morning tea, there were the gloves. I hadn’t seen them for eleven years and that’s what clinched it: nothing had changed. Her mouth had sunk in because she had no teeth—the occasional removal of her plates in Armidale had obviously become permanent. The white cotton fingers were slightly grubby. Her clothes were drab-coloured and though clean enough, unkempt. In the café, there was her piercing voice and the lack of teeth, as well as eating cake with gloves on. My stomach turned over. There were beating sounds in my ears.
We drank our coffee and I watched the ducks slipping their heads under the water. The distress that rocked my soul meant it was all I could do to stay on my chair and not blunder into the water and join them. I didn’t tell anyone—not Julia, not Richard when I got home—how I felt when I saw her. They didn’t ask and, anyway, I couldn’t have explained.
It was around this same time, happy with Richard in a way I found hard to credit, that I began to unravel. I had some sexual encounters. I told Richard. Stuff happened, as it does when you play with fire. I unravelled further. An image of an oil painting, a glistening seascape of yellows and blues and greens appeared in my mind. Huge splodges of black muck had been splattered on it, oily goop dribbling over the luminous bumps of colour. It filled my mind. I carried it with me, this vision of my shattered relationship with Richard. All my own doing.
I took Valium so that I could get through lessons full of kids with sharp eyes.
Friends beseeched me.
We tried a counsellor: the very early days of marriage guidance. It was hopeless. I wanted to fix it but I had no idea how so I withdrew.
Coming home late in the afternoon one day, I noticed something peculiar. As I approached the door to enter and actually put my hand on the handle, a wave of dread engulfed me. I stood still and let myself feel it, let myself notice what was happening. A miasma of fear began in my stomach and then spread out through my limbs which became disconnected, floating away from me. I stood there a little longer, feeling it, and suddenly I knew—this had started in the flat in Canberra when I was twelve. Through most of my teens this happened every time I stood at the door of my home. It was a pause, an instant, guts falling through space, then I’d swallow it down and burst in. I guess it started after that night she came to my bed.
It stopped when I left home and over the years of its absence I’d forgotten. Here it was back again. It had been happening for many weeks before I noticed it, slowed it down and identified it. And as recriminations flew and our voices became louder, the ‘fighting’ of my parents crashed into my psyche. I was so scared of having a real argument, a fight which might, in fact, have helped, that I ran away. It happened one night without warning—the fear became so great that I literally ran away. I couldn’t explain, so the children were told very little. It traumatised all five of us, a truly dreadful separation.
When I told Dad he said I was being mad—not a useful epithet in the circumstances.
So the chance to create a loving family and be healed in its balm passed me by. It would be fifteen years before I even began to understand how the shards from my upbringing were clattering about inside me and that the sharp points were damaging other people as well as myself.
After I left Richard, it became clear that Mark and I were each channelling different parts of Dad. Mark acted out the best of him: the solid rock of family rectitude, the dependable patriarch, though with a hippy sheen and a preternatural focus on this haven he had found. Mirabel and their two sons were his raison d’être; he was gentle, creative and kind—a near-perfect father.
I utterly eschewed my mother as a role model and instead acted out the wild boy in Dad, the rebel, the activist, the restless tomcatting soul with one paw in the saucer of addiction. Where Mark embraced, I ran—from family, from stability. Even within the harbourage I had found with Richard, I was running. The world beyond my skin—politics, people, intensity—was where I wanted to be, out there where there must be something more exciting going on than here, where I was.
I recently obtained a copy of my file from ASIO—Vietnam and Women’s Liberation—a large pile of paper, more than a ream high, consisting mostly of phone-call transcripts to our house. They are studded with people and conversations I have long forgotten (as well as some I recall), but mostly I am struck by the me who is embedded in these frenetically busy pages. I am pinned here, exposed as a dynamo, a case study in ceaseless political activism.
How did I manage to do so much with a family and a job?
Teaching was contained within school hours in those days, and I mothered with one hand, off to the side, while I played the main game—my activism. I was often sick—lengthy, vague bouts of flu afflicted me, kept me in bed for weeks on end. Maybe I had a dream-wish I was not conscious of, that a person with my mother’s nursing hands might drift into the house with the first light of dawn and minister to me.
When the Vietnam activity morphed into Women’s Liberation, my political self took wings. While I had taken Dad as my model of how to be a parent, what I didn’t know was that I had also internalised his particular delight in me when I was politically active and that my unconscious (that old trickster) was using this to cover the terror which had been laid in my soul. My running self felt like the real me.
After leaving, I rented a house near Richard and it was there that I next heard her voice. It was seven on a Saturday morning. Hannah, aged six, was in the doorway, saying, There’s a lady outside.
A lady?
I was struggling to open my eyes. Her voice. It scythed from the front verandah through the living room, down the hall to my bedroom, and landed at my feet: heavy, flat and piercing.
Oh, my God, I breathed.
I burst out the front door, manners all blown away.
What are you doing here? How did you get here? How long have you been waiting?
Overnight, she giggled. I got the bus. It was easy.
Oh.
Taking in the gloves, the no-teeth, the glinting eyes but now it was here, here in my own grown-up house for the first time. I remember the children’s round eyes, three sets of blue, looking from me to her. This is your grandma, I said.
She was staying for three days, she told me, and then she would go on to Sydney to Mark.
Does he know? I asked.
No. I’ll surprise him, like you! She lit another cigarette.
I’ll ring him. My voice had taken on the flatness of hers.
I don’t remember much of those three days except that I was shaking. A friend took me to task over how rude I was being. I had no words to justify or explain. I could hardly speak.
Richard told me that when he called by during that visit to collect the children and met her for the first time, he thought she was an almost normal little old lady.
But you, he said, you were agitated beyond belief. You were obviously under the most God-almighty stress at having her there.
Those were the days, the mid-’70s, when the women’s movement, my feminist sisters, decided from time to time that we would have a discussion about our mothers.
We will look at our mothers with new women-sensitive eyes, someone said. We’ll have a fabulous time.
Another would pipe up, Well, we all love our mothers, really, don’t we? It’s just that they drive us crazy. Ha ha . . .
I would be silent, heart thumping to leave my chest and take on a life of its own. Where to start? What to say? So I said nothing.
My feminist politics were as passionate as my anti-Vietnam War stance had been, but their impact constituted a tsunami of change. Ideology tore through my life. Critiquing the nuclear family merged seamlessly with my endless running to new excitement. As a friend said later, There’s no revolution without fire, and sometimes I would see the flames reflected in my children’s eyes as I flared away, unable to stop my scorching progress through our days.
Dad’s second family and Mark’s two boys grew up having beach holidays together. I twice invited myself and my children, just for a night or two, and we slept in a tent between the two houses. It was my black sheep period. I longed to feel as included by these two other parts of my family as they were with each other but in that period I wasn’t—what I got was obliquely turned-away shoulders. I think it was not so much because I was a single parent in a lesbian relationship as that I was not ‘settled’. I kept changing my lovers (too many), my jobs (not sensible) and even where I lived (unstable). Being able to commit to a relationship long term seemed to have passed me by. I had inhaled what I saw in Dad: I-can-cope-on-my-own.
I was very open with my emotions (trying to turn the tables on that silence I grew up in) and genuinely believed it was better for children to see this than to see a dishonest blandness. Now I realise that all I was showing them was the blur of my running; the real issues were still invisible, way below the surface.
I attended all the major Women’s Liberation events. Sometimes Dad’s work and what it stood for erupted into my world in ways I didn’t see coming. In 1980, at a huge conference in Melbourne, I went to a session on ‘Australian Culture’. One paper was an attack on The Legend for its failure to include women. It was delivered in a waspish and scornful style, the tone of feminism we used then which interpreted every aspect of the world through the prism of sexism. I could do it myself when I chose.
I sat in that room with my heart and stomach heaving, adrenalin hacking through me. I was appalled by the ahistoricism of the analysis but worse, much worse, I was si
lenced by the onslaught of the very style of speaking we had created. As the speaker conflated Ward, the person, with her vitriol for the book’s lack of focus on women, my whole being wanted to cry out, But he was good. And nice. It wasn’t like you’re saying it was!
When the session ended, I stumbled out into the corridor to find my friends. In a silent rush, several women surrounded me. It was the Communist women, older than me, Dad’s generation, and they were shaking nearly as much as I was. Wendy Lowenstein took my hands in hers and said, Oh, Biff, that was so dreadful! She had tears in her eyes.
I nodded. Yes.
His book was so important! she said. It changed everything. It changed how we could think about who we were. It made ordinary people important. After that, you could study new things . . . She trailed off.
Yes, I said. Yes, I know.
She stepped forward to envelop me in a hug. We snuffled together as we talked through our tears. Her friends stood around us, a huddle of women in agreement. Later, at dinner with my own gang in a noisy Greek restaurant, I sat at the corner of our huge table and wished I was with Wendy and her crowd, with women who understood the complexity of what I was feeling.
In this period, I wrote my own book, one of the first books in the world on child sexual abuse. I was working in a women’s refuge when a family came in to protect two young girls from a much older stepbrother. It was a period most people can no longer remember, before 1985, when the term child sexual abuse, ‘CSA’, did not exist. A handful of feminists in the US and also here in Australia had realised that ‘interference’ or ‘molestation’ or ‘diddling with’ were euphemisms for something really serious, that some girl-children were being sexually assaulted or raped, usually within their families. It blew our minds.
My book was an attempt to create some language with which to discuss this phenomenon. What we now refer to as the perpetrators I called the ‘Fathers’ in order to indicate the role of trusted adult males. I also used the capitalised ‘Mothers’ and ‘Daughters’ as a nomenclature for this triangle of unholy sexual predation in the family. To encapsulate the theory I was developing, the book was entitled Father-Daughter Rape.