In 1913 Ernest Austin rapes and cuts the throat of eleven-year-old Ivy Mitchell in Queensland. Between December 1976 and February 1977 Christopher Worrell rapes and strangles seven young women – Veronica Knight, eighteen; Tania Kenny, fifteen; Juliet Mykyta, sixteen; Sylvia Pittman, sixteen; Vickie Howell, twenty-six; Connie Iordanides, sixteen; Deborah Lamb, twenty – and dumps their bodies in the outskirts of Adelaide, aided by James Miller. John Travers and four others rape and stab twenty-six-year-old Anita Cobby to death in 1986 in the western suburbs of Sydney. In 2003 Kevin John Hender rapes and strangles Samantha O’Reilly, aged fifteen. The years come and go. The names change. The violence cycles on, like a virus infecting hosts in each new generation. Our pipe dream of possessing Australia’s pop princes might have cost us dearly.
Roland Barthes writes of that moment in which the lover becomes aware that the ‘difficulties of the amorous relationship’ stem from the ‘ceaseless desire to appropriate the loved being in one way or another’; this realisation results in the decision to ‘abandon henceforth all “will-to-possess” in his regard’.
Our year of zealous fandom ended gradually as our ‘will-to-possess’ our temporary idols petered out. At sixteen, just a few years after our Sherbet summer, Emma started dating Derek, a boy who lived five doors down, and they went on to marry and have two children, now adults. In the decades since, Emma and Derek have lived not far from her childhood home, while I’ve lived eight of my nine lives in different states and countries, in seven significant intimate-partner relationships. ‘Our lives just took a different path, didn’t they?’ Emma observes.
Our lives also took a different path regarding Sherbet. Emma remained a staunch, lifelong fan, while I disowned my Sherbet roots and forgot my 2SM soft-rock past in Sydney’s 1980s post-punk scene. Surrounded by musicians, I was introduced to a wealth of music across decades and cultures and genres. Time can be a harsh but often fair judge: though the satin flares haven’t stood its test, the Sherbet catalogue remains undeniably significant in Australian music. It was the soundtrack to an era when the nation was not yet on the world stage, not yet digitised and wired, isolated in its own summery, settler-colonial troubled puberty.
Emma’s most vivid memory of those days is of me hamming up 10cc’s ‘The Things We Do for Love’, the theme song for our misadventures. ‘If I hear it now,’ she says, ‘I think of you singing it to me.’ My obsession with Sherbet, and all that I did in the name of that obsession, was ultimately about my friendship with Emma. She was my partner in playful crime and she held the space in which I could be what I needed to be – a child, beginning to move in complex ways away from childhood. We still dwell in the archives of the ABC, declaring our undying love for Sherbet as code for our love for each other.
Less than eighteen months later I’d leave school in the middle of my second year of high school, not yet fourteen, having persuaded my mother I had no need of formal education since I was destined to be an artist of some kind, a prediction that proved both true and false. Alice Cooper reportedly wrote his 1972 hit ‘School’s Out’ after someone put a question to him: what’s the greatest three minutes of your life? There were two great moments in a young person’s life, Cooper decided: Christmas morning anticipation and ‘the last three minutes of the last day of school when you’re sitting there and it’s like a slow fuse burning’. He set out to capture that moment in song, and he succeeded. If at times in my childhood I looked towards school as a haven, it often failed to be one. School, it turns out, can be a hothouse of trauma.
This is how it happens, how trauma snowballs, how it infiltrates and reproduces structurally and institutionally.
The first years of my life, before my parents separated, I lived in Frenchs Forest, on the bushy outskirts of Sydney, in a house opposite a shopping centre and a primary school. My mother was often distracted, caught up in her own concerns, and sometimes there were consequences. Like the time I overdosed on Disprin as a toddler. I’d taken a packet from the kitchen cupboard into the bathroom and eaten the pills one by one, because I liked the taste, while she was enjoying a long phone conversation. I was rushed to hospital with my mother shaking me in the back seat to keep me from losing consciousness.
I spent a lot of time in the backyard, under a willow tree that’s no longer there, and sometimes I wandered over to the property of an elderly couple who lived next door. The old man had a shed down the back. I was very young, three or four, and I don’t remember what happened there exactly. The vagueness and unreliability of traumatic memory is even more pronounced and precarious when it comes to early childhood, and only a few impressionistic imprints remain. I remember tools on a bench, a concrete floor. I have a flash of light streaming in through a grimy/broken/small window. I don’t remember his penis. I remember being surprised/curious/scared. I don’t remember touching it. I remember standing in front of him. I might remember rubbing on my bum. I remember he had an old-woman wife. I don’t know what my mother was doing. He said it was a game called trains.
I can only be sure I was sexually abused because my mother told me. This was the story according to family lore: one afternoon, when my grandparents were visiting, as they often did, I tried to get my grandfather Johnny to play ‘trains’, the ‘game’ the aged paedophile next door had taught me. Instant commotion and panic ensued. Questions about where I had learned this so-called game. My grandmother Glady was the most affected by this dark surprise, having been sexually assaulted by an uncle over a long period of time as a child (she eventually had a nervous breakdown as a result). There was a family conference about what to do, whether to call the police or not. A decision was reached not to report him or involve the police lest it make this event and the abuse itself more traumatic for me.
Their strategy was to disallow me to visit next door and keep a closer eye on me, to let it fade into the background so that I would not feel that I had been at the centre of a scandal, that I had been bad.
In recent years I learned that not everyone was down with this decision. My brother says he was outraged at their inaction and that at the tender age of twelve he had wanted to leap to my defence and to go next door and give it to the old bastard, but was held back and left to stew in impotent fury. I had ‘forgotten’ all about the ‘game’ in the shed and its upsetting revelation in the family living room by the time I reached adulthood. It wasn’t until I signed up for a professional development course on child sexual assault in my late twenties, when I was working as a drug and alcohol counsellor in an adolescent rehab, that it resurfaced as a cloud of untraceable, murky affect. By the end of the three-day course I found myself in an odd state: restless, disturbed, as if I was being followed by someone, as if something was brewing. Finally, I had the faintest cluster of recollections of a bespectacled silver-haired predator coaxing me to touch his wrinkled old penis surrounded by his tools. I phoned my mother, who promptly confirmed it. But the unsettling conversation didn’t end there. ‘There was also that time with Stuart Jones,’ she said, in a matter-of-fact way. I had completely forgotten the fingering incident, though its palpable aftermath of misery in Stuart’s house had not been dimmed by the passage of time.
Cut.
Fade up on the kindergarten classroom of a suburban primary school. It’s a large space with children’s art on the walls. Muted daylight pours in through the windows. A group of young children sit on the floor, cross-legged, listening to the teacher who sits up front. There I am, right in the middle among the knot of small bodies, a pretty girl child with shoulder-length dark hair and a fringe. I turn to the girl sitting next to me and whisper, initiating a game of you-show-me-yours-and-I’ll-show-you-mine. We take turns pulling the soft cotton crotches of our tiny underpants to the side to reveal our bald-babyish labia in sly-quick flashes while the other leans forward to sneak a glimpse. Stifled giggles and the titillating thrill of naughtiness pass back and forth until we are caught as I’m taking my turn. The class is
called back to order and one by one the children dutifully take their places behind their desks. Except for me.
The now-faceless teacher has dragged me out front of the class to reprimand me before a cohort of witnesses. Her words are lost in time, fallen through a crack of consciousness. My developing brain goes into shock and struggles to comprehend what is happening. The only thing that is clear is that I am shameful, shamed, humiliated. I have done wrong and my punishment is to be told so in such a way that the whole world knows. She turns me around and pulls my underpants down, exposing my bare bottom. She makes me stick it out and then she slaps it, hard, several times. When class breaks for little lunch I wander around the playground in a dissociated daze, alone and devastated.
I don’t know why I chose that moment for genital peer play. Perhaps I was bored. I don’t know if what I did was healthy childhood exploration, an expression of normal curiosity (if inappropriately timed and placed), or whether my behaviour was the kind of typical acting-out identified as commonplace in children who have been sexually abused. When I put the scenario to my friend, sexuality educator Deanne Carson, without identifying myself as one of the children, she said it could be either, but the prior abuse would raise an acting-out flag. What I do know for sure is that the teacher’s actions were profoundly traumatic, perhaps more so than the original abuse. The horrible irony of punishing me for exposing myself to a fellow student by exposing my buttocks to the entire class and beating me was apparently lost on her. As was, it seems, the significance of the bum, and the mastery over the anus, for children that age. When my mother found out she stormed up to the school and complained, but the damage was done.
We’re all too familiar with tales of hideous abuses by clergy, and my youth was peppered with the horror stories of friends who were sent away to boarding schools. As a teacher of teenagers and young adults, I find the degradation of young people and the abuse of power more unthinkable than ever, and an institutional, educational system that would allow it is unacceptable. ‘Corporal punishment’, as it’s politely referred to, has largely fallen out of favour, but it is still perpetrated in some countries – many schools in the Southern United States, for example, still use ‘paddling’, the beating of students with an implement shaped like a cricket bat, and it’s only recently that the last bastions of institutionalised assault have been laid to rest in Australia. Alan Corbett writes in New Matilda that though corporal punishment has been outlawed in many Australian schools for years, some non-government schools have condoned physical punishment until quite recently. Christian Community Ministries Ltd reportedly only gave the directive to its schools to cease the practice in 2016. Australia ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1990. That’s twenty-six years in between. Why did successive governments turn a blind eye for all that time? Why do they turn a blind eye still?
An exposé of the routine torture of young people in Northern Territory youth detention shocked the nation when images of seventeen-year-old Dylan Voller, shirtless, hooded and strapped to a restraint chair, aired on national television. This and other horrendous abuses took place at Don Dale Youth Detention Centre, a purpose-built maximum-security prison for almost exclusively Indigenous ‘juvenile delinquents’. What happened at Don Dale – the stripping, assaulting, gassing and isolating of prisoners without access to running water – is, apparently, not confined to that institution. And it is perfectly legal. Helen Davidson reported in The Guardian that Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, in calling for a royal commission, asked that the investigation undertake an examination of ‘the culture which allowed it to occur’ and ‘should not be confined to the culture of the detention centre alone’. So, a royal commission into neo-colonial patriarchy then?
There are people, children and adults, who appear to be freakishly unlucky, who seem to attract abuse and misfortune like trauma magnets, apparently destined to it. Many severely or chronically traumatised people are disproportionately subject to seemingly unrelated traumatic events, time after time, so that looking upon them you might be tempted to wonder if the woeful story you’re hearing is imagined, or embellished, if they’re telling tales to garner sympathy or to procure favour through victimhood, or whether they somehow masochistically bring it upon themselves. The traumatic cycle works in both mysterious and logical ways, gathering speed along various trajectories. New trauma sticks to old trauma like Velcro.
In his exploration of writing trauma in The New York Times, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh discloses terrible harassment that occurred during his tertiary studies. Sayrafiezadeh starts out recounting an early major trauma: a neighbour raped him at the age of four or five, and, like mine, his family chose not to report it. Years later, he continues, he was sexually harassed by a male professor at college, who befriended the unwitting young man and insisted Sayrafiezadeh was gay, despite his protestations, and repeatedly attempted to seduce him. The stalking began when Sayrafiezadeh was a freshman and continued throughout his studies, which, unsurprisingly, he did not complete. Reflecting on this experience, Sayrafiezadeh reasons that he did not take appropriate action in the face of relentless harassment because, thanks to the inaction of his family, he had no model for how to assert and protect himself in the face of abuse. He goes even further, stating that ‘what was happening between me and the professor had originated some fifteen years earlier’ on the afternoon he was brutally raped, concluding he had been playing out a ‘fundamental need to be menaced by a predator, and then, in the final moment, to elude that predator’s trap’.
My feelings split in two reading this. At one level, I understand exactly what he means, and know all too well the way trauma replays in what seems to be a paradoxical attempt to come to terms with an indigestible reality. I am intimate with the impulse, the compulsion to try to rewrite the script of a film already cast, shot and screened. An old friend of mine calls this baffling and beleaguering attempt to master trauma our ‘genius’. When I phoned her once, self-flagellating and reeling in shame over having made a mistake I felt I should have seen coming, thereby repeating an old pattern, she consoled me that all was as it should be. Reaching through my bitter disappointment that my shiny new awareness was not enough to stop me running headlong into yet another rendition of the same old sad tune, she reassured me that – rather than berate myself for failing to prevent a painful situation that mirrored my familial past – I might thank my ‘genius’ for setting up another opportunity to heal. At another level, though, I’m uncomfortable with the way Sayrafiezadeh seems to take excessive responsibility for the harassment. This is what chronically and severely traumatised people tend to do, what victims of sexual assault and harassment often do. Self-responsibility and understanding = agency. Both are crucial to untangling from trauma’s stranglehold, but the repeated patterns of victimisation, the systemic traumatic transmissions, will continue until and unless we sufficiently address the socio-political conditions that create them.
My brain is numb after two solid days of grading. I’m teaching pathway provider college: students who didn’t get the ATAR to get into university, and international students funded by parents who pay hefty fees upfront. Many of these students are immigrants from war-torn countries: it’s a different ballgame to teaching second-year sandstone English majors at elite varsity. Even those students who do come from money, or at least come across like they’ve grown up with a sense of entitlement, walk on thin ice here in the lucky country, out of their element, often disadvantaged by a poor grasp of English. I’ve taught a lot of first-year university. There are students who shine, students who want to learn and are committed to doing their best, but there are those too who flail through semester, half-arsed and half-hearted. I never know how many choose to be in my classroom, how many among them even want the careers they are training for, how many understand that – however slick the university’s promotion – there are only so many jobs to go around, how many are resentfully doing what’s expected, draggi
ng their feet through one assessment after another.
I was excited about starting school, and, being a sociable child, I liked the concept of school, if not always the daily reality. I open my photo album to find my first formal school photo, in black and white. I’m probably five, and it can’t have been long before we moved from Frenchs Forest to the inner west. I don’t know if it’s the teacher from my kindergarten class or a different one. She stands at the back with mousy brown hair and a benign face. She doesn’t look like a woman who would beat the naked flesh of a small child. I’m in the front row, in possession of one of ten pairs of feet neatly pressed together, as directed. The other children have their hands on their knees but, already disobeying orders, I have mine clasped in my lap. My back is ramrod straight and I’m wearing a goofy grin, head held high, hamming it up, over-compensating.
I have few memories from my time there, but I do recall having an early existential crisis in assembly one day, overwhelmed by a feeling of dislocation, of unreality. Heightened experiences of depersonalisation (a feeling of disconnection from one’s thoughts, body or emotions) and derealisation (a feeling of disconnection from one’s surroundings) are, of course, associated with trauma. I remember the peculiar feeling of finding myself in a body yet not feeling of that body, in that body, sat in a sea of other bodies, and none of it making any sense. I don’t know whether that particular sensation was trauma-related or the result of one of those eerie existential fractures in time in which one experiences the self as alien in a moment of metaconsciousness. I’m not even sure if there is a difference.
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