Mother of Ten

by J. B. Rowley

  Sexual abuse of children in orphanages, including Ballarat Orphanage, has now been well documented. Staff and older boys would take advantage of vulnerable young boys who were desperate for affection. The other boys lived in dread of it happening to them. Golding writes: ‘...whenever sexual abuse happened, I felt grubby because there seemed no good reason that it wasn’t me.’

  Luckily, Noel escaped sexual abuse at Ballarat Orphanage. He recalls an approach by a staff member on one occasion but he took defensive action by running away and, on passing a line of football boots, picked one up and threw it at the man. He was a kid who was ready to fight and therefore not a soft target for an abuser. Perhaps that is why he was spared this betrayal, at least.

  For Noel too, no-one came. He says it did not bother him because he did not know any better. However, some children felt the pain of loss on visiting days and would go off on their own and watch, unseen, the other children with their parents. Some, like Lorraine Rodgers, who was at Ballarat Orphanage the same time as Noel, ‘would go in hiding, so no-one would know that I was crying’. (Submission to Senate Inquiry.)

  Noel does remember one visitor when he was around ten years old; a lady who called herself Aunty Marj and gave him a copy of Gullivers Travels. I would like to think that this was Myrtle posing as Noel’s aunty but I cannot imagine how, given our family financial situation and her commitments as a wife and mother, she would have been able to travel from Orbost to Ballarat. She had a friend who lived in Lydiard Street, Ballarat and they corresponded regularly so perhaps, assuming Myrtle even knew where Noel was, her friend took the book to him. On the other hand, it might have been a relative on his father’s side.

  Like his sister Audrey, Noel suffered the disappointment of just missing out on being adopted. The owners of the milk bar in Queenscliffe where the children from Ballarat Orphanage spent their summer holidays had a son the same age as Noel. The two boys got on well and the family sometimes took Noel on holidays with them to Mildura. When Noel was thirteen they decided to adopt him. Unfortunately, he was only six weeks into his six month probation period when the family circumstances changed as a result of an accident. Adoption plans had to be shelved. Noel was sent back to the Orphanage. His adoption did not seem to be subject to his father’s approval as was the case with Audrey. It is possible the superintendent of Ballarat Orphanage was deemed his legal guardian because his father had not paid the mandatory maintenance. Orphanage records state: ‘The father paid the maintenance for about three months and left the state. The Police and our Solicitor have been unable to contact him.’

  Agnes Bishop appears to have aided and abetted her son in his deception of Ballarat Orphanage. In 1948, in response to an official registered letter from the Orphanage’s solicitors addressed to Henry Bishop, she wrote: ‘I am returning it to you as he hasn’t lived here for some considerable time, about two years.’ The information she supplied in the letter was probably true but the implication was that she did not know where he was living and that was certainly not true. Ultimately, her efforts to conceal the whereabouts of her son were in vain because in 1948, the Ballarat Orphanage managed to locate Henry Bishop through the Albury Police.

  Faced with the possibility of having to fight criminal charges for unpaid maintenance, he wrote to the Orphanage, apparently to come to an arrangement in respect to his debt and future payments. The contents of this letter reveal the spineless nature of Henry Bishop. He justifies his negligence in not making payments by claiming that ‘my wife deserted me and my children while I was in the army and I just had to do the best I could under the circumstances.’ That makes my blood boil, not only because the claim that Myrtle deserted her children is untrue but because no self respecting man in the 1940s would use his wife as an excuse for anything even if she were at fault. If he had any sense of decency he would simply not have mentioned it. To hide behind a false claim about her is downright cowardly. He further excuses his actions in not making payments with: ‘I have since been married and I have two young children and my eldest son to keep. I am just an ordinary painter and I do not collect any fancy wage and besides I have to live and pay rent.’

  Although he claims in the letter that ‘I will do my best to wipe off the debt’, it appears to have been a delaying tactic. According to the Orphanage records, Henry Bishop left the address in Brisbane where they had managed to locate him and they ‘have heard nothing since’.

  Of course, Noel was unaware of all this. In fact, he did not even know his parents were alive and was not aware he had a brother and a sister. Noel, Audrey and Bertie were all unaware that many kilometres away their mother was alive and well with a new family and a new husband.

  Chapter 16

  By 1963 my father’s illness had advanced considerably. He lost weight and his dark, tanned skin started to take on a yellow hue and there was a gauntness about him. The optimism, confidence and the hint of mischief that had characterised him were no longer there. My mother probably noticed that his sleeping patterns had changed; how he tossed and turned. Perhaps she sometimes awoke in the middle of the night to find his side of the bed empty and the sheet damp and clammy from perspiration.

  Nevertheless, my parents took care to make sure their children’s lives continued as much as possible in the normal way. We were hardly aware that Dad was sick and certainly had no inkling that his illness was serious. Apart from anything else, Mum and Dad were both of the generation that believed children did not need to be burdened with what was happening in the adult world. We did not hear either of them complain and, as was her habit, my mother used cheerfulness and laugher to hide her emotions. Dad continued working, although it must have been extremely difficult for him to do so.

  The pressure on my parents was made worse because, although I did not realise it at the time, Nan also started to show signs of ill health about a year after we moved in. I do not know the nature of her illness but she was in her seventies so presumably it was something age related. She started to spend more time in her room resting and was quieter than usual. My mother became more concerned about any noise we made.

  Inevitably there was tension in our home. Bobby and Maxie were entering adulthood. Maxie had become moody and refused to sleep in the same room as his brother. He was now sleeping in the dining room, the room that had once been kept in pristine condition for Sunday lunch and Christmas Day. The twins fought with each other daily. They had also moved to another bedroom. Well, it was really just a section of the back veranda that my father had partitioned off for them. I had entered the self-absorbed moody teenage stage and that must have been particularly difficult for the adults to deal with. It is no wonder that the noisy, unsettled brood in the household tested the patience of both my parents and Nan.

  One wet afternoon we were all ‘cooped up inside’. My sister Irene was with Mum, watching her breastfeed the baby. This was also one of the intimacies I enjoyed with my mother as a young child. Another was brushing her long hair in the evenings. She was patient and loving in the way she suffered my clumsy yanks and pulls at her hair. Eventually, she taught my young hands how to handle the brush without hurting her and I would give her hair one hundred smooth strokes.

  On this particular day, I was in the kitchen with the twins while Nan was preparing the vegetables for the evening meal. Mum and Nan shared the cooking but when Mum ‘had her hands full with the baby’ Nan would usually cook tea for all of us. Kevin and Georgie, who were around ten years old at the time, were playing a board game called Snakes and Ladders. It was a game I liked playing but on this occasion I had been delegated to supervise the twins and keep them occupied. As usual, Kevin and Georgie were arguing with each other.

  “You landed on the snake. You have to go down.”

  “I did not. I was here.”

  Georgie moved his die back to the square it had been on previously, according to his reckoning.

  “If I move five spaces I get to here.”

  He placed the die one squar
e before the top of the snake.

  “You weren’t there,” said Kevin.

  “I was so.”

  “You liar! You were here. Tell him, June.”

  “I was not. You’re stupid. Tell him, June. He’s stupid.”

  “June,” said Nan, who had her back to us at the sink where she was working her way through a mountain of potatoes, expertly peeling them with her kitchen knife. “Keep those kids quiet. I can’t hear myself think.”

  “Stop it, you two,” I said. “You’ll have to start the game all over again now.”

  “That’s not fair. I was winning.”

  “Were not. I was.”

  “Shut your gob.”

  “Shut your big fat gob.”

  “Shut your cake-hole.”

  “That’s enough. I’m packing up the board. You can go and play somewhere else.”

  I began packing up the game. Kevin started yelling at me. Georgie started crying.

  “Now look what you’ve done,” said Nan.

  “It’s not my fault. I shouldn’t have to look after these bloody babies.”

  “We’re not babies!”

  Nan turned from the sink.

  “That’s no way for a young lady to talk,” she said sharply, drying her hands on her apron.

  “I don’t care. I wish they weren’t my brothers. I hate brothers!”

  “That’s enough!”

  Her sharp tone stung me. I had a close relationship with Nan from spending many happy hours with her in the kitchen. Any indication that she did not love me cut me to the quick, sensitive child that I was. I felt warm tears welling and got up from the table, ready to storm from the room.

  “You’re always picking on me,” I yelled at her.

  “What nonsense,” scoffed Nan, reaching for a saucepan to put the peeled potatoes in. “Now leave your brothers alone and go and do something useful.”

  This curt dismissal was too much for my breaking heart to bear. The tears started to roll down my cheeks but I turned my head quickly so that no one could see. Like my brothers, I viewed crying as a sign of weakness. Since Nan was, in my eyes, deliberately trying to hurt me and picking on me for no good reason the appropriate response was to hit back. I wiped away the tears, took a deep breath to prevent any trace of tremor entering my voice and turned to face her with fury steaming from every pore of my skin.

  “I hate you!” I yelled

  Quickly turning my back on her I yanked at the door handle. The saucepan Nan had been holding became a projectile. It connected painfully with my heel as I escaped through the kitchen door, slamming it hard behind me. I raced around to the side of the veranda, curled up in a corner under an overhanging plant and bawled my eyes out. As I often did during this period of my development, I sank into a mire of melancholy. The whole world was against me. No-one cared about me.

  Poor Nan. The adult me can look back and appreciate what a terrible thing that was to say to her especially after she had so generously taken us all in, cooked for us, played with us and allowed her house to be taken over.

  I regret to say that I once also yelled such spiteful words at my mother. It was when we were still living out on the Bonang. I was around five or six years old and was angry at being thwarted by her authority. In my frustration, I stamped my foot and spat out the words with childish fury in each syllable.

  “I hate you. You’re the worst mother in the whole wide world.”

  Her face blanched. Anguish swamped her soft hazel eyes. Her hands gripped the edges of her apron as though she was trying to rip it from her body. I knew I had scored a bull’s eye. The sense of satisfaction this gave me extinguished my anger. Yet my defiant triumph collapsed as I watched my mother. She closed her eyes and quickly turned away, busying herself at the kitchen sink. There was no indication of anger, no slamming down of pots or cutlery. Her movements were slow, methodical and quiet.

  This reaction startled me. She was used to my childish tantrums and usually just laughed indulgently or calmly ignored me. I had never seen her react this way before. The warm invisible thread that connected me to my mother had been inexplicably severed to be replaced by a cold void. Fear held me captive. I did not fully understand. I only knew that somehow my words had torpedoed into a vulnerable place within my mother. It frightened me to realise that the source of my security could have a weakness that allowed her to be toppled like the lofty trees of the forest that swayed and crashed to the ground when they were felled by my father’s axe.

  I wished anger had been her reaction. Her anger, which erupted when I tested her to breaking point, was something I understood and expected. She might grab my skinny arm and slap my bottom with her hand. If I was quick enough to escape her grasp she gave chase, sometimes pursuing me around the house with a broom or a saucepan. If I managed to get out the back door and down the steps before she caught me, I knew I was safe. She never chased any of us beyond the back steps.

  Her anger never frightened me but this silent withdrawal terrified me. I stood watching her back. My eyes took in her pretty brown hair coiled up at the neck, her shoulder blades moving under the floral cotton of her dress as she arranged plates on the draining board, her slim waist with the strings of her apron tied at the back, her bare legs and flat slippers. I breathed in the musky smell of her talcum powder. She was as familiar as she had always been. Yet, I knew she was not the same. Confusion filled my child brain. Several long minutes passed. Outside, cockatoos screeched across the sky.

  Finally, I left the kitchen and headed for my usual sanctuary, the hayshed at the far end of the back yard, clambering over the rectangular bales of hay inside to make my way up to the top. Once there, I crawled into a gap between two bales and decided to stay there forever.

  Later, Mum retrieved me from the hayshed. She stood outside and called my name. She always did this, called to me from outside rather than coming into the hayshed. It was as though she did not wish to intrude in my private world. Her voice revealed no hint of hostility or coldness but I was hesitant about facing her and climbed down out of the hay reluctantly.

  Emerging into the sunlight, I took slow steps toward her, head bowed, not wanting to look into her eyes. I knew I was guilty of a grave offence even though I could not fathom exactly what it was. When I reached my mother, she rested her arm lightly on my shoulders as we walked back to the house. Her warmth embraced me. I inhaled the closeness of her and heard her words, softly spoken.

  “It’s all right, love,” she said.

  She had the merciful wisdom of a caring mother and recognised that I had no understanding of the pain I had caused her.

  Likewise, the teenage me that had been so hurtful to Nan had no understanding of the seriousness of our family’s situation. I was not aware that my grandmother was ill and my father was dying. Not only that, but I was at the stage when I was the only important person in the world. Yet, I did not seem to be important to my parents anymore. I was able to come and go more or less as I pleased. While my friends’ parents imposed curfews on them when we went riding on our bikes or for picnics along the creek, Mum and Dad did not. I took this as a sign of their neglect and lack of caring. Now, of course, I realise that they had so much on their minds and were in such deep despair about their situation that minor details like what time I returned from daytime excursions with my friends must have seemed inconsequential.

  During this period we also saw more of my father’s temper than we had ever done. His anger was fearsome in action but was usually slow to kindle. However, his illness and no doubt our crowded living conditions meant that his tolerance was frequently stretched to breaking point. Discipline of the day was ‘the strap’ administered across the buttocks or backs of the legs. As a rule, Dad used this only as a last resort and more often on the boys than on me or my sister. However, he now used it more often on all of us, including me.

  Oblivious to the stress that the adults in the house were under I was concerned only about myself. I have no doubt I push
ed them to the limit of their forbearance. As a result, my father sometimes felt it was necessary to give me a good hiding. I saw this as a serious betrayal because he had always been gentle and caring and generous spirited toward me. So, in order to punish him for punishing me, I would refuse to cry when he strapped me. This was a bit silly because whenever any of us started to cry when he was using the strap on us he would always stop. However, using flawed childish logic, I reasoned that if he couldn’t make me cry he would think he had not hurt me. That would be my revenge. Perhaps that was also Audrey’s attitude to the nun who tried to ‘break her’.

  One day I decided to be particularly stubborn. Dad had brought his belt across my legs several times and red welts had formed. However, I kept my mouth firmly shut and my eyes dry until his belt accidentally caught on an ornament I had hanging on the wall. It was something I had won in a competition and meant a lot to me because of that. The ornament, made of porcelain, smashed into pieces when it hit the floor. I burst into tears. My father stopped belting me immediately. With tears streaming down my face, I directed an accusatory stare at him. He looked a little non-plussed, as if he couldn’t understand why the breaking of a worthless little trinket could cause me to wail like a banshee when his physical punishment could not. I saw the anger in his eyes dissipate to be replaced by something else; regret I think. Not regret that he had given me a good hiding because he never belted us without cause, but perhaps regret that he had allowed his anger to control the length and intensity of the beating.