They were all young, none more than about twenty years old. Most, like me, could fit all their worldly possessions into a suitcase, though some did not even own a suitcase. In the many long talks we shared, I learned that they all had aspirations, all wanted to do something better with their lives, had an eye on the future, and each had a story of family disintegration or alienation which had to a very large extent determined their present circumstances. However, despite their frankness with me, I felt unable to share my own story. Instead I picked out bits and pieces to tell them when it became my turn to speak. The secret pain I carried was still too raw, too ugly, too heavy, for me to lay at another’s door. Thus began my year of living dangerously.
My path home from Sydney Hospital took me past a discotheque, then known as Sound Lounge, which my new Black friend had taken me to one night after work. It became the centre of my life. Scarcely a night went by without me slipping in there and dancing myself into a state of exhaustion, before going home to sleep. It was, I found, a very good way of keeping the demons at bay, of preventing myself from going into ‘shocks’.
My frenzied rhythmic dancing, with which I had already won applause and competitions in Townsville, transformed me and I spent as much time dancing as I possibly could. Soon the manager of a Kings Cross nightclub asked me if I would be interested in dancing on stage and being paid to do so. I couldn’t believe it. And when he said that I’d be paid more than double what I earned carrying plates backwards and forwards at the hospital, I thought I was having a fantasy. Because my life had been so unsettled I had been unable to write to my previous employers for copies of my references. Carrying dishes had begun to look like being my entire life.
It was not until I had given notice at the hospital that I learned there was a catch to the offer to dance. The costume I was to wear was brief. By today’s standards it would be considered seriously over-dressed for work on the stage, but at the time any skimpy costume was generally thought to be downright immoral. Police came into the clubs from time to time with tape measures to ensure that the sides of the bottom of women’s two piece costumes were no narrower than four inches. In these days of the string bikini, see-through clothes and topless beaches, the norms of the early 1960s seem ludicrous in retrospect. Still, even at the time New South Wales laws were considered progressive when compared to Victoria, where hotels closed at 6 pm and no alcoholic beverage could be served without being consumed with a meal after that hour.
I wasn’t particularly happy about dancing around on a stage in a brief costume with everyone in the audience, fully dressed, watching, and my attitude showed. Another entertainer, Kahu, a Maori who used fire and snakes in his acts, took me under his wing. He suggested I include a snake in my own performance and I nearly fell off my chair. Why hadn’t I thought of this myself? After all, my totem is the snake and I got along with them very well.
Under Kahu’s guidance I bought a large python from a pet store near Central Station, made an appropriate costume which couldn’t snag on the snake’s skin and had a wooden case made in which to carry the snake from one venue to another, with a fine brass gauze panel installed in the top so it could breathe.
Kahu became a special friend to me, perhaps because he, too, was a long way from home and knew about depression and isolation. Also probably because we were two dark-skinned people trying to survive in the otherwise very white and quite closed world of entertainment. The other Black entertainers we saw were Americans—big-name stars visiting Australia for a few days to perform at expensive venues, such as Chequers, the Chevron Hotel and other classy nightclubs. They were often surprised to see our brown faces in their audience and some came out front after their shows to talk with us. A few even came to watch Kahu’s performances or to sit around and chat. I particularly remember Earl Grant because he perched on my snake box when he joined us as there weren’t enough chairs. After half an hour or so someone at our table told him that his uncomfortable seat was a snake carry-case. In disbelief he bent down and peered through the shiny panel, then let out a scream and went running up the stairs and into the street. We didn’t see him back there that night.
Kahu was the first man I had met who could cook and sew. He kept his tiny flat immaculate and I was always a welcome guest. On what could have been the loneliest day of my life, Christmas Day 1961, in the late morning Kahu sent two of his friends to rouse me from my bed and bring me to his place for lunch and a small festive celebration. I was so overwhelmingly grateful for his concern for me that my tears threatened to ruin the day until he took me aside and said, ‘We’re all in the same boat here, all alone, and we all look out for each other. I cooked. Your job is to smile.’ He had the capacity to make the complexity of life seem quite simple.
Over time I had several rock pythons, carpet and diamond snakes come to live with me. I named them, depending upon their gender, Lucifer, Satan, Diablo, Delilah and Jezebel, reflecting the way society reacts to these beautiful but largely unknown and unloved creatures.
Snakes provided me with personal security. As well as carrying them around with me in their box, I put up mesh on the windows and gave them free rein in my apartment. I often wore them under my coat, draped around me, and I would bring them to parks for sunshine and air, and the chance to climb in the trees. The snakes, like me, were from the north and unused to being in an urban environment. I took them mainly to Rushcutters Bay Park to start their training and get them accustomed to being handled. Snakes are used to having their ten and twelve-foot long bodies almost completely supported along their length. Each one, therefore, required a great deal of love and patience to develop sufficient trust to allow it to be held aloft with only my hand beneath it for support.
To gain the snake’s trust I would let it slide across my hand on the ground and lay there, then successively raise my hand a little higher, until at last the snake would have only its head and tail on the ground, the bulk of its body supported by my hand. It often took weeks to get this far. When at last I felt we were both ready, I’d raise the snake that last little bit further, and if my intuition was correct, the snake would allow itself to stay suspended for a few minutes. If not, the creature would whip its head and tail frantically and lash itself around me, struggling for purchase, sometimes almost strangling me in the process!
The snake was happier to be worn when I was out walking than to be carried in its box. It would cling to me with the minimum strength required to hold itself in place, wound two or three times around my waist. If I stopped along the way to have a coffee or chat, however, it would squirm around to see why we’d come to a halt. Snakes love warmth but are unable to generate their own heat, so it’s easy to see why they are so happy to nestle against a warm body.
Snakes do not hear but they pick up vibrations—and there aren’t too many vibrations in their natural habitat. So exposure to loud music was another source of anxiety for them until they became used to it.
Because of my experience, and although I struggled against it, being out on the street, especially at night, made me very fearful. With my snakes, however, I felt much more in control since most people are afraid of snakes and know very little about them. On my occasional dates with men, for instance, it was not difficult to manoeuvre the outing to finish up at my place, where, of course, my snake would be just where I wanted it, waiting for me inside the door. In winter I’d leave the radiator on and thus be assured that it would be curled up in front of it. In summer, a baby’s bath weighted down with a few inches of water in the bottom of it had the same effect—snakes love to lay in cool water on a very hot day. Otherwise the snake could be found in warm places, such as on top of my refrigerator or water heater. Men invited in for a coffee after an outing were usually on edge and anxious to leave at the earliest opportunity as soon as they realised we had company, that is if they didn’t go screaming up the hall and out of the building as soon as I opened the door. I was asked to leave quite a few apartment buildings because of men screamin
g on their way out.
By accident, therefore, I had found the perfect way to keep men at arm’s length. Rapists or potential suitors, they were all the same to me. Emotionally I was badly damaged and needed time to heal. I was not ready to get involved in relationships of a sexual nature. My lack of interest in men in this way was a source of curiosity and sometimes mirth to my small circle of friends, who nicknamed me ‘Capon’—a desexed chicken. A couple of women who referred to themselves as ‘camp’ picked up on my disinterest in men, but I had no interest in sex with them either, though one in particular made a tremendous effort to befriend me. She always seemed to arrive at one of my favourite haunts just before me and arrange for the staff to have the strains of ‘I want to be Bobby’s girl’ playing as I walked in.
I had moved from Victoria Street, Kings Cross into a variety of bedsitters and flats, including a period living in the Tor, a large old castle that housed entertainers, writers and eccentrics. It had seen grander days and been subdivided into huge rooms-to-let.
Leila knew the area where I was living and started hanging around Kings Cross and trying to get into my group of friends by telling them she was my sister. I was extremely unamused. She managed to pick up people who I knew only slightly, and I was forever being given messages from her. I met two Canadians, Buddy and Jimmy, who Leila latched on to, initially as a channel to pass on titbits of irrelevant information to me. However, when she broke into their boarding house and stole some of their musical equipment and cameras, she became more than just a nuisance.
One morning I was walking along Darlinghurst Road and the proprietor of a small cafe was standing in his doorway. He greeted me and cheerily told me that he had given my ‘sister, Leila’ a loan to enable her to fly to Townsville and bring back her son. My blood ran cold. Leila had shown him a photo. When he described the child, I knew it was my son, Russel, who she was talking about and that the photo was one of those she had stolen from my suitcase.
I ran to the nearest post office and hastily wrote a note to Mum. Although I had told Mum what I was doing and how I was making a living, and sent her money for Russel, I had not written to her about the drama that had occurred between Leila and myself. My message to her was brief: I am concerned for Russel’s life and safety. Please do not leave him alone with Leila for any reason. Do not let her take him out anywhere. I’ll write a longer letter later to explain. I sent it off airmail express and special delivery.
My concern that Leila intended to abduct Russel was well founded, but Mum was alerted and no opportunity arose. I had begun to suspect that Leila was taking some sort of drugs, a guess based on the company I had heard she was being seen with She returned to Sydney but did not pay back the cafe proprietor’s ‘loan’, a fact he apprised me of from time to time. Instead of moving back to the Coogee flat she briefly took a room in Kings Cross.
I next heard that Leila had gone to work at a hospital somewhere around Surfers Paradise. I felt relieved as she was a threat to me in so many ways—embarrassing me by telling people she was my sister in order to get close to them, then stealing from them, telling lies, not to mention the physical threat that she posed. When I learned that she had gone, I arranged for Russel to spend a few weeks with me.
What a lovely time we had together! He was about eighteen months old and full of mischief, and his stunning looks turned heads. However, he wasn’t very interested in learning to talk as he could get anything he wanted by pointing and raising his expressive face towards any adult within cooee. What money I had I squandered on him, buying him a wardrobe of little Italian shoes and dapper clothes. When he returned to Townsville, Mum wrote to me: ‘He went to Sydney a baby and came back a little man.’
A few weeks after Russel had gone home, I answered a knock at the door to find a man from the government welfare department standing in the hall. He had come, he said, to inspect my flat and ask me some questions, having learned that I had a child with me. He looked around my small but spotless flat, even though I told him that my son had returned to North Queensland. When I offered him a cup of tea he accepted and, more relaxed now, became quite chatty. He explained that it was his job to remove children from unsuitable premises and family situations, and that a large number of these removals were ‘dark’ children. They were sent to homes, he said, and some were adopted out.
Towards the end of his visit he assured me that, since Russel was no longer with me, I would not be bothered again. As I was seeing him out, I asked him who had drawn the attention of the department to me. ‘Your mother,’ he said. I was shocked. How could she have done this, I wondered, after all the trouble she had had from the welfare when I was a child? Much later, when I was again living in Townsville, I told her about this caller and asked why she had done it. ‘I wrote to ask them to look at your place,’ she said, ‘because I couldn’t get down there to see for myself,’ as if this response was completely self-explanatory.
Not long after Russel went home Mum wrote to me of Leila’s death. Like her mother before her, Leila had committed suicide. Following her many attempts over the years, she had finally succeeded. But, Mum said, at the last minute, as the emergency staff were pumping the pills out of her stomach yet again, she had changed her mind and begged them to save her. Her father, Laaka, was broken-hearted as Leila was his only child. ‘She has gone to a peace,’ Mum wrote, ‘that she was never able to find on this earth.’
Despite Russel’s recent visit and the veneer of exuberance that permeates the entertainment industry, I envied Leila in the peace of complete oblivion.
Mum’s regular correspondence kept me informed about some of the events happening in Townsville and with the movements of my sisters. In my early teenage years, two brothers had, for a time, hung around in our area and visited us at our house. The elder, Bobby, was tall, dark-haired, good-looking, articulate and bright; the younger, Barry, was much fairer and a little slower, physically and mentally. He was always lagging behind, and we called him DK, which meant ‘Dumb Kid’, even though he was a little older than Dellie and me. The brothers had been around for a short while and then disappeared, as youthful friends seemed to do. We had never been very close and I had all but forgotten them.
Out of the blue I received an extremely angry letter from Mum telling me that ‘your friend, Barry Hadlow, has committed a heinous crime’. He had raped and murdered a five-year-old girl and hidden her body in the boot of a car. This was in November 1962. When her parents had reported her missing and a search had been mounted, Barry had joined the search parties, but eventually he was charged with the crime. Perhaps Mum used her letters to vent the repugnance which all Townsville residents, indeed people everywhere, feel towards this type of crime, but it seemed terribly unjust to slant it somehow towards me—claiming that he had been my friend, instead of someone who was just about the place when I was thirteen.
Following her letter I endured a period when I had very short, troubled sleep and suffered recurring nightmares in which this poor raped and murdered child and I were constantly changing places. I would wake screaming and sweating profusely, from a dream in which I was trapped in the boot of a car. ‘Let me out, let me out, I’m not dead,’ I yelled in my sleep, yet, awake, I often wished that I was the one who was dead.
A few years later, Barry’s brother, Bobby Hadlow, stopped me in the street. I told him how surprised I was that he would dare to speak to me in view of what his brother had done, but I joined him for a cup of coffee. His brother, he said, had enlisted in the Army and had been shot in the head during training on the rifle range. A metal plate had been inserted in his head, and he’d been discharged a completely different person from the one I had known. He was so odd even his family didn’t know him. The court had disallowed evidence regarding this accident to be admitted during the trial and the Army had refused to release information about it. Bobby and his family were devastated by everything that had happened, but the streets were a safer place with Barry, so severely mentally damaged, no
t walking along them, Bobby said. Although, he would have preferred Barry to be in a hospital rather than a prison.
I was learning more about the awful things that can go wrong in this life, and that such a series of tragedies had touched people I knew made me feel both afraid and reckless. What meaning did life have, if things can go wrong at any time, regardless of our own best efforts?
Some time later I was again walking down Darlinghurst Road when I experienced an overwhelming urge to go into a newsagency and buy a newspaper. I regularly bought the Australasian Post for its giant crosswords, but apart from that my reading consisted of fiction and non-fiction books. The feeling that I must buy a paper was surrounded by other sensations I had experienced when I was receiving paranormal messages: light-headedness, no thoughts other than the direction I was somehow being given, and an urgency and anxiety about the mission that caused me to do it immediately in order to alleviate my distress about it.
Running home with the paper in my hand, I was very hot and bothered, though there had been nothing in the headlines to alarm me. I couldn’t imagine what would have any significance for me in the paper. But as I flicked through its pages, moving towards the centre where news items grew smaller and smaller, the paper itself became warmer and warmer. When I arrived at that page which it was obviously my destiny to read, the paper felt positively hot. There, a tiny paragraph, a bare few lines, informed me that a child had been killed in a bicycle accident in Newcastle. I read it over two or three times, trying to work out its meaning, before it hit me. The child’s surname, Appleby, was the name Mum had told me was the surname of my brother, the child Mum had given birth to and reared almost twenty years before I was born. From somewhere deep in my memory, I recalled that my brother Jimmy lived in Newcastle, though I had never known his address. Certainly it hadn’t occurred to me when I was staying with Skip’s relatives in Newcastle. I was filled with the certainty that in my hand was a notice of the death of my nephew, a child I hadn’t known existed.
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