When, long after his death, I got hold of his military and medical records, I was able to piece together a more plausible account.
Like his two brothers my father left school at the age of twelve. He began a five-year carpenter’s apprenticeship for the purpose I believe of joining his father’s construction team. But when he completed it in 1945, he defied his family’s wishes and enlisted in the army. He cheated on an eye test, memorizing the chart to conceal the corneal opacity in his right eye, and passed an entrance medical examination. No check was undertaken on the mental fitness of the eighteen year-old.
His conduct in the first few months after his recruitment must have been exemplary for he was promoted to corporal. But then he went AWOL for fifteen days during some training in New South Wales, for which he was penalised a month’s pay, fined £5 and demoted to private. A few months later he was incarcerated for 14 days and fined another £5 for ‘offering violence to his superior officer’, somehow avoiding a dishonourable discharge.
When the Second World War ended he volunteered to serve in occupied Japan. Assigned to the 66th Battalion of the Australian Infantry Forces, he arrived at the military port of Kure, which was a smouldering ruin, on the 26th of April, 1946. The barracks where he was billeted were twenty kilometres out of town at a place called Kaitaichi on the road to Hiroshima. In the weeks that followed he went on patrol around the port and perhaps even into Hiroshima. No doubt he witnessed some terrible sights but he made no complaint and his superiors considered him diligent and reliable. He showed no signs of anxiety or shock. There was no warning of what was to follow.
On July 4th, American Independence Day, he went berserk in his barracks, attacking other infantrymen, smashing furniture, overturning bunks and lockers. It took ten men to subdue him. He was put in a straight jacket and removed to the 92 Independent General Hospital in Kure.
As his Field Medical Card reveals, [he] suddenly became violent this evening about 20.00. Stated he was suffocating from the scent of a frangipani. Has not had a drink of any alcohol. Usually a quiet lad. He is a good worker. Th is is the first time he has shown any signs of unstable mind.
He was treated with morphine.
On admission he was quite rational though he stated the Japs had been trying to suffocate him by bringing flowers into his room, which used up all the air. He was in a state of fear and believed in the reality of his recent experiences. He said he had had suspicions of the Japs for the past three days but had only become certain of their intentions this evening.
He woke the next morning much calmer but still defended his account of the frangipani ordeal. By the following day, however, he began to feel he must have been imagining the whole thing and referred to it as a terrible nightmare.
His return to sanity didn’t last long. Further violent psychotic episodes—more smashed furniture, more attacks on army personnel—followed. Then he disappeared for three days and was found in a public area with bruises all over his body at the bottom of eighty or ninety steps, without any recollection of what had occurred. Did he fall? Was he pushed? Did it cause brain damage? The incident is barely mentioned in his military record.
During his confinement the resident psychiatrists and medical staff discovered a history of mental instability in his family (already quietly preparing a Departmental defence against liability). A maternal grandfather and an uncle had suffered mental illness. And Denny had shown neurotic traits ever since a fall from a tram in childhood. He had suffered blackouts, dizzy turns, and amnesic attacks, where he would wander and have no recollection of what had happened for an hour or more. He told doctors that since his arrival in Japan he had been extremely anxious and depressed. The doctors concluded that he had experienced a psychotic episode. He was diagnosed schizophrenic.
Eventually he recovered sufficiently to be discharged but was still suffering from anxiety. His army doctor, who considered his psychiatric condition ‘constitutional’, recommended he be reclassified as unfit for military duties and repatriated to Australia to avoid an inevitable relapse.
The definitive diagnosis was ‘psychopathic personality with emotional instability’. It was written across his military file and appeared on the majority of his Repatriation Department medical reports over the next few decades, as if it were immutable. But the degree of disability was deemed ‘negligible’.
Did he reveal what had happened to him in Japan to the apparition on the swing bridge?
Six months after his discharge, he was in the icy water of the South Esk River in Launceston, below the rapids where it reached the Tamar. He was clad in army issue fatigues, heavy boots, and a trench coat whose pockets were full of stones. There was a police launch nearby and a hefty hand grasping his collar. He wished the law would leave him alone. He was furious with its lightning response, furious he hadn’t yet sunk beyond its reach. The anger only made him feel more impotent.
Denny had been discharged from the army in late October 1946, but within weeks was seeing a psychiatrist, who worked for the Repatriation Department in Launceston. He told the doctor he was unable to concentrate, his ears buzzed and at times there were clicking sounds in his head. Then there were his blackouts of five minutes duration, which occurred about every eight to fifteen days. He also said he suffered from insomnia due to an overactive mind.
His inability to concentrate meant he had been unable to work since his discharge, which increased his anxiety and depression. He had been taught the importance of work growing up, and wanted to return to the trade he learnt before he enlisted. His family had always valued hard work. His father was a plasterer, a mean, overbearing figure who expected his three sons to follow in his footsteps, into the family business, which was built upon canniness and toil.
The doctor reported that his patient felt he was controlled by some outside agency, often experiencing a sense of unreality, as if he were watching himself acting on a screen. The doctor noted ‘depersonalisation’ . Denny fidgeted. As he sat, his legs moved constantly. His eyes darted around the room. He said he often felt as if something supernatural was happening. Hallucinatory voices commanded him to do violent things. These voices appeared to come from the back of his head. Sometimes they were vague and sometimes quite distinct. Startling the doctor, he slapped his head hard, as if to frighten the voices away.
The psychiatrist considered these symptoms of early schizophrenia and strongly recommended Denny’s immediate admission to Millbrook Rise Psychopathic Hospital.
Millbrook Rise was in New Norfolk, outside Hobart on the moody River Derwent. Set up with funds from the Tasmanian Veterans Trust after the First World War, it gave priority admission to servicemen and their families. Denny stayed there for a week. His official diagnosis came in one word: hysteria. But the hospital disturbed him, and he soon convinced his medical officer that he felt well and wanted to return home. He said he was confident about himself and was ready to go to work . He avoided more talk of voices in the back of his head. The doctors discharged him with advice to attend a psychiatric clinic in Launceston if he felt he needed further treatment.
Then paranoia set in. Three weeks after his release, a letter was sent to the Deputy Commissioner of the Repatriation, signed by his mother but in his handwriting, requesting information on the diagnosis reached for her son at the hospital. She had heard through outside sources that there was nothing wrong with her son; that he was just putting on an act in order to obtain a pension. She went on to defend his integrity, demanding an explanation for the turns he had, convinced he would never do anything improper that would distress his parents.
Perhaps his mother had heard the rumour and was affronted. Perhaps she was illiterate, and could produce little more than her own mark, so had dictated the letter to her son. But with a few of his letters before me I’m able to compare their styles and have an uneasy feeling he authored it, then cajoled his mother to sign.
The Deputy refused to release any details, citing privacy protocols.
Three weeks lat
er another letter followed. This time it bore his signature and repeated the complaint about slanderous rumours. It authorised his parents to obtain his medical records.
He should have ended the letter there. But the rumours must have infuriated him. They must have offended his self-esteem and the belief he had in his own integrity. He began to rant: about the leaking of his confidential medical history, which he suspected had found its way into the hands of unauthorised personnel at the Launceston Red Cross; about his doctors—one in particular, who had apparently told him to take up wood chopping as a cure for all his mental problems; and he denied he had ever applied for a pension, other than on discharge.
And as far as I’m concerned you can take the pension I’m supposed to be trying so hard to get and go to hell with it, both your Department and the great psychiatrists on your Commission.
He demanded an X-ray of his head to discover what made it ‘behave like nobody’s business’.
By this stage he had worked himself into a state of pitiful indignation and he threw caution to the wind.
But this I would like to forward into the great psychiatrist Mr Commissioner, if by chance they [the doctors] should hear of someone being mysteriously killed or even hurt only slightly and I’m the culprit tell them to have a laugh for me would you and to think how they discharged me and said that I was only putting on a big act. I tried to explain all this to the so called doctors but it appears to have been taken with a grain of salt like the rest of the information I so hopefully forewarded [sic] to them.
But now Mr Commissioner if you’re not in hell, and that’s where your whole department should be along with a few so called mental doctors, seeing I’ve voiced most of my complaints I would just like to ask one more question before I sign off. How do I stand as regards a pension?
No pension was forthcoming.
A few months later he threw himself from a bridge into the South Esk River.
He was fed up with everybody and believed that all were against him. He had argued with his girlfriend and jumped. The police fished him out. He spent the next seventeen days in a watch-house before he appeared in court on a charge of attempted suicide, a crime, apparently, in those days. Later he insisted that he had felt compelled to jump.
Soon after, the Repatriation Department granted him a pension. Its medical officers probably thought he wouldn’t need it for long.
If the girlfriend mentioned at the time of his suicide attempt was not my mother, he had met her by the following summer. Pat had come to Launceston at the end of the war to work as a seamstress, an exile from the mainland, escaping her father’s callous housekeeper-mistress. They met one Saturday night in a dance hall when, at the entrance, Denny bumped against her, a tall brunette, whose hair was set in the cascading fashion of the day, revealing her ears and slender neck. Without introduction he led her onto the dance floor and impressed her with his mastery of the waltz, the foxtrot, the quick step and every other step they tried. She was dazzled by his bold poise and ingenuous smile. He was intoxicated with her soft laughter. By the end of the night she had decided to dump her boyfriend, who was away somewhere, and accept Denny’s request to meet again.
He courted her on the cheap, taking her to dances and the roller skating rink, where she paid her own way, accompanying her on picnics at the Cataract Gorge, which was his idea of dining out.
In September 1948, they married. There is a photo of them, taken outside the imposing door to St John’s Anglican Church in Launceston, in the first moments of marriage, matrimonial attire and nuptial smiles unable to conceal their incredulity.
I have no idea how much she knew of his mental instability, or whether it would have made a difference. If she was the girlfriend at the time of his suicide attempt and his jailing, she must have had a hunch about what to expect from their marriage.
Whatever she knew didn’t discourage her from starting a family. By the end of 1949 my elder sister, Jean, was born. And despite more psychotic episodes I followed two years later, just in time for the next major drama.
THE EARLY 1950s
I was less than a month old at the time of my father’s first siege.
Denny had bought a house in Invermay, a suburb of Launceston, about the time I was born, apparently with the help of a solicitor who had employed him to renovate old houses which were then sold for a profit. Living in one room at his parents’ house with a second child had become too much of an ordeal. He wanted to live the dream all young couples had of a quiet family life in their own home. The tenants, who had lived in the house for nine years, refused to leave. On advice from the solicitor, he sought an eviction order in court, but his action failed. Once more he felt the system conspiring against him. Brooding on the court’s decision, he went to the premises and asked the tenant if he could begin some renovations. His intention was to request two rooms be vacated so his young family could share the premises. She allowed him to strip the walls of some rooms in preparation for repainting. But when he pulled down a tool shed and a woodshed, her husband went to the police. They paid him a visit, but it failed to discourage his activities. He believed one of them was a relative of the tenants. Next he pulled down a fence.
Then early one morning in late November he knocked at the door and said he wanted to do some more repairs. The woman scowled at his suppliant tone. Imagining she had the upper hand and the law on her side, she told him it was inconvenient and asked him to wait until her husband came home. While he sat mutely on the back verandah, she sent a message to a neighbour, a hastily scribbled note hand-delivered by her youngest child, asking the woman to come over as soon as she could. She felt vulnerable on her own. The neighbour, sensing some urgency, obliged. They were having a cup of tea in the kitchen when Denny entered the house. Unsettled by the intrusion, the tenant requested he wait on the verandah. He took no notice. Instead he walked through the house, aggrieved. He moved from room to room, imagining what it would be like with his wife and two kids living there, his furniture, his pictures on the walls. Then like a gift from the voices inside his head he came across a .22 calibre rifle on a rack in the living room. That was the moment his mind tripped. Aggression was the only way others took any notice. He was nothing without it. Taught to use weapons in the army, he strode into the kitchen brandishing the gun and ordered the women from the house. He bellowed threats as they escaped into the street.
Later he would tell a psychiatrist that he could recall going to the house and becoming angry when the tenant refused to vacate the property. But he remembered nothing of the next hour and a half until he became aware of the rifle in his possession and an empty house. It seemed like a dream. He realised he should surrender but felt compelled to maintain the siege and shoot at anyone who came close, even his own brothers who had been brought in to negotiate. Eventually, in the early hours of the morning, sleep pacified him.
He woke at dawn with a very severe headache and only a vague recollection of what had happened; he no longer wished to continue with the siege. He realised the foolishness of his actions.
It ended when Denny put his hands through an open window to show he no longer held the gun.
The siege had lasted nineteen hours. Sixteen shots were fired, but thankfully no one was injured.
Court appearances followed. He pleaded guilty to three assault charges. After a trial, where his misadventures in Japan were presented as mitigating factors in his defence, he was sentenced to six months’ jail. Many locals wanted him to receive twenty years.
With the coverage the siege and subsequent trial received around Australia, Denny gained a good deal of support from fellow landlords who faced similar problems trying to remove unwanted tenants. They wrote letters to papers, declaring their admiration for his tactics. There were other letters from people who thought he had been treated scandalously as a returned soldier, having suffered a mental illness in the service of his country.
I have no idea how my mother felt. Decades later when I learnt about
the siege, having lived through a second in my teens, I didn’t have the heart to discuss it with her. Nor do I have any idea what happened to the house or its uncooperative tenants. As far as I am aware we never lived there.
After he was released Denny shifted us around a lot, like a fox unsure of its lair. Launceston… Flinders Island… Portland… Launceston. Pat told me that we went to Flinders Island in the wild, treacherous seas of Bass Strait, because Denny found a job building houses in its main town, Whitemark.
I’ve seen a faded photo of an infant she claimed to be me. I’m twelve months old or so, standing on a drab beach (or at least the photo makes it look that way), bandy in a jumpsuit, arms akimbo, struggling to maintain my balance and a semblance of dignity, with a pose (and this corroborates her claim) that I find repeated in photos throughout my childhood, adolescence, and alas into adulthood where I’m more confident of my identity: head awry in an attempt to compensate for an eyelid that drooped over the left pupil, peering with mouth ajar, as if the external world was distasteful.
Was it the same beach where she had taken her cherished infant son to make sand castles, and looked up from her magazine to see him floating facedown in the shallows?
I nearly drowned on Flinders Island but my father was drowning in his own way. His work and home life were going badly. My mother saved me but could do little to rescue him.
He returned twice to Launceston to consult doctors about his mental instability.
One doctor wrote: [ He] returned from Flinders Island with his family two days ago. Is feeling no better. Very depressed and miserable. Says he is fed up with everything and everybody including himself—can’t concentrate or take an interest in anything…Paranoidal trends quite marked—says everyone says he is a no-hoper and a bludger—this infuriates him as he feels that he has tried to help himself as much as possible.
You Never Met My Father Page 2