Storyteller

by Zoe Daniel

  Sitting at the front of her makeshift mud-house in one of the massive camps, a woman clad in a deep-pink headscarf calmly speaks to us, surrounded by her large extended family. Their village was attacked and burned to the ground. Her husband is missing. She asks me if I have kids. I say no. She laughs, then asks earnestly if I can take two of her eight with me.

  African women often ask me how many children I have. They’re deeply shocked that I have none. Most have had children far too young, in my view, and they’re struggling to support their families, but I get the strong sense that they feel terribly sorry for the tall white woman with no babies.

  I’ve been a bit ambivalent about having children, while Rowan has always seen himself having a big family. He’s one of four and grew up in a happy, stable home. My childhood was different, unsettled, and I wanted a career and financial independence first. I agreed to two kids, but Rowan still wanted four, so we settled on maybe three at some stage. There didn’t seem to be any rush.

  But suddenly, in my early thirties, with many friends in family mode and others desperately trying and failing to get pregnant, the idea of not being physically able to have a baby has become a source of anxiety. When good friends announce that they’re expecting, I start seriously wondering how I’ll feel if I put career first and then find out that I’ve left motherhood too late.

  I’m only about halfway through my posting. It’s a dream job and it’s taken years of hard work to get it, but running around Africa to conflict zones, famines and natural disasters doesn’t seem to gel with pregnancy and motherhood. I have to accept that one will probably cancel out the other. How to choose?

  The trips that affect me most are those involving women and children. Jumbled snapshots in my head.

  Skeletal children wail in Malawi, their exhausted mothers queuing for help from the World Food Program.

  On the Somalian border, women fight one another with teeth, fingernails and buckets as an Oxfam truck dumps a tank of water into a hole in the parched fields. A mother walks home across the desert lugging one container for her family of eight – it needs to last a week.

  In South Africa, a mother grieves for her lost son, stolen and murdered by criminals who sell the body parts of children for traditional medicine. A granny holds my hand in a Joburg shack as she rattles out her last breaths. Her grandchildren were orphaned by AIDs, and now they’re alone.

  In Sudan, a woman gives birth shaded only by a sheet of UNICEF plastic held up with four strong sticks. It’s around fifty degrees Celsius.

  Still, I want a baby. Go figure.

  ‘Let’s leave it to fate,’ I say to Rowan. ‘It will probably take a while anyway.’

  A month later I’m pregnant.

  In 2006 we fly out of South Africa just short of two years into the posting. Our son, Arkie, is born in Melbourne a few weeks later. We give him the middle name Amandla, the Zulu anti-apartheid rallying cry that means ‘Power’.

  TWO

  I spend a blissful year at home in Melbourne with our son.

  We move back into our little Victorian cottage, perched on a hillside in the city’s historic inner-west, and I revel in motherhood. I spend my days pushing the pram along streets of picket-fenced houses, most under gentrification as the city’s old, working-class suburbs get a lick of paint and become new again. I measure the days by seasons, not stories – gutters full of crunchy fallen leaves, then drizzly southern winter, the caress of spring sunshine and the few teases of summer that Melbourne offers.

  Rowan might disagree with my rosy memories of this time and of course new motherhood brings exhaustion and confusion. I do have twinges of unfulfilled ambition, particularly when big news is breaking. Overall, though, I feel a deep sense of relief.

  I have no deadlines. Every night I go to bed looking forward to the next day. It’s utterly liberating not having to read the papers or sleep with a mobile phone on the bedside table, ready to jump up and file at any moment. I enjoy being at home, washing and folding baby clothes while Arkie gurgles on the mat, then wandering the leafy green streets sipping a weak, milky latte while he sleeps in the pram. I doubt I’ve ever been happier and feel almost guilty about enjoying it so much: I’ve gone through life planning to meet my own feminist expectations of shattering the glass ceiling, and then realised that’s not what actually makes my heart sing.

  Occasionally I do a shift presenting TV news or hosting radio. It’s fun, but I’m still happier at home with my boy and my elderly border collie, Maggie, who has returned to us after being in my mum’s care while we were in South Africa. In the past she’s been a bit snappy with kids, but when it comes to Arkie she’s a committed protector, sitting proudly by the pram on trips to the park like a black and white Sphinx.

  Previously so career-oriented, I begin to wonder how I’ll ever get my act together to go back to work. When I do, I’m given the freedom to dabble in a bit of this and a bit of that: some presenting, some reporting, some TV, some radio, some news, some current affairs, but I still struggle. Work/life balance, whatever that is, seems impossible to find.

  With Arkie in childcare part-time, and both my mum and Rowan’s lending a hand, I can be at the office three days a week. But I hate it. I feel like I’m half-working, half-parenting and not doing a particularly good job at either. I’m completely torn, and Rowan and I start getting itchy feet again. I may not miss work but, after so many adventures, we start to find Melbourne so easy that it’s boring.

  When Rowan gets an offer to manage ABC radio in Darwin for a year in early 2008, we jump at it. Years ago, he was a stockman on cattle stations in the Territory, and he’s keen to experience the laid-back life again.

  Work asks me if I’d like to report out of the Darwin newsroom for a while but I happily decline. There doesn’t seem to be much point in working for a few short months: I’m pregnant again.

  In Darwin, I keep a very low profile. Arkie is one and quite a handful; it’s also hot and I’m growing bigger by the day. I hang out with one or two friends who also have small kids, but apart from that I stay close to home and don’t engage with work at all. That’s Rowan’s thing now – our dynamic has completely reversed. He’s become the primary breadwinner and that suits me fine … mostly.

  I am, at times, conflicted. There’s the occasional strong pang when a colleague gets a foreign posting, and I worry about what I’ve given up and assume I’ll never get it back. I wonder what the definition of ‘having it all’ is. It seems to me that it’s possible to have one or the other, or a bit of each, with a fair amount of juggling, but there will always be sacrifices. I muse jokingly on Facebook about whether two kids could fit in a backpack along with a camera and satellite phone, but the choices have been mine.

  Rowan’s hours aren’t too demanding and we try to explore a bit before baby number two arrives. The Northern Territory is a unique place where the locals fiercely protect their lifestyle. Compared to the rest of Australia, which strikes us as a nanny state after the places we’ve travelled, the Territory’s lack of respect for rules and regulations is refreshing. Darwin is a small town and it’s extremely isolated, but it’s culturally diverse, heavily influenced by its proximity to Asia.

  It’s also warm and beautiful and the gateway to some of the world’s most amazing wilderness, so we take the very busy, toddling Arkie camping at Kakadu. We’ve done a bit of camping here and there but we’re not experts. Rowan and I get massacred by mosquitoes while we set up our brand-new tent in the glare of the car headlights while Arkie stays strapped in his seat. The mozzies are so bad that, despite the heat, we put on every piece of clothing we have with us. We almost leave the next morning when they’re still out in force, until we realise that everyone else at the campsite is happily eating breakfast outside. We unpeg the tent and drag it fifty metres to a different spot. No mosquitoes. There must be local knowledge that we’re missing.

  The next morning we take a cruise through the wetlands. The birdlife is incredible – and so
are the crocodiles. The Territory is known for its enormous ‘salties’, which can be metres long and resemble gnarled logs in the shallows, waiting for prey like something from a prehistoric horror film. Arkie does his best to jump into the croc-infested waters, but even wrangling a wriggling toddler, I can appreciate the scenery in the rose-pink dawn light.

  While we explore caverns filled with ancient Aboriginal rock art and play in spectacular waterfalls, I worry a little about meeting a big man-eating croc, despite the fact that it’s the dry season and they’ve been cleared out of the swimming areas by brave rangers. Playing with Arkie in a rock pool, I feel all my protective instincts kick in when an enormous water monitor lizard surfaces beside us. Without a backward glance, I scramble away across slippery rocks, seven months’ pregnant and carrying a pudgy toddler. It’s not elegant. An Aboriginal family sitting on the bank laugh themselves silly and so do we.

  We go back to our tent, cook sausages on the portable barbecue and eat them in soft white bread. Arkie smiles from ear to ear as he has a bath in the campsite sink. We begin to feel at home in the Territory.

  We’ve spent six months in the Top End when Pearl is born. I’m feeling settled, but soon we’ll be on the move again. Rowan has been approached to take on a two-year job in Cambodia and he has the interview the morning after Pearl’s birth.

  I’m completely blissed out when he arrives in my hospital room, carting Arkie and looking tired and a little wired. ‘So, are you still up for Phnom Penh?’ he says, unsure of my response to the idea of moving to a developing country with a toddler and a newborn baby.

  ‘Why not?’

  He looks surprised. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yep.’

  Amid post-birth bliss I think I would have agreed to anything.

  We hang out in Darwin for a few more months while Rowan winds up his work. I juggle Arkie and Pearl while packing up the house, sorting out the kids’ passports and making travel arrangements. There are difficult moments as Arkie nears the terrible twos. His tantrums and meltdowns mean that a simple trip to playgroup can feel as challenging as a major expedition to Timbuktu.

  I also have to make some tough decisions about what to take to Cambodia. We have a tiny freight allowance, so most of our belongings are put on a truck to Melbourne for storage. Our dog, Maggie, is on her last legs and we leave her with some wonderful locals who volunteer to give her a happy home for her retirement. She’s been with me for fifteen years and I find it very hard to leave the old girl, but I could never have put her through the trip to Cambodia. We hear a few months later that she has died peacefully in her sleep.

  We farewell our tropical oasis a few streets from the sea with its louvred windows and jagged decks that catch the breeze, and head all the way down to autumnal Melbourne, where the leaves are red-gold and the trees are skeletal against the pale sky.

  The kids get to see their grandparents for a few days. Curly blond Arkie runs like the wind through the vast parklands and walks with his granny for hours along the river in the soft March sun. Open space and clean air will be the things I miss most over the next few years.

  Then we fly back over northern Australia and into the tropics of Asia.

  We land in Phnom Penh in March 2009, at the hottest time of the year. With Pearl five months old and Arkie just two and a bit, Rowan and I feel both excited and slightly nervous about the life we’re all about to experience. I haven’t spent much time in Asia and my expectations of Phnom Penh are low after so many assignments in the backblocks of Africa.

  We walk out of the airport into a red-hot morning at the tail end of the dry season. After months without rain everything is dull beige, the road, vehicles and vegetation all covered in a layer of dust. The traffic, of course, is mad, and the airport road is lined with unremarkable, tatty shop-houses and tangled power lines. I get a sinking feeling: what on earth have we done?

  For the first three months we’ll be house-sitting for a Dutch expat couple who are heading home to have a new baby. The deal has been done via internet and email, and while I’ve seen photos of the house I feel suddenly concerned about whether my grand scheme for a soft landing will work.

  It’s a half-hour drive from the airport into town through a sea of tuk-tuks, motorbikes and the odd shiny black 4WD. We pull up at a nondescript gate in a grotty backstreet. Here goes. I gulp.

  It’s magic.

  Hidden behind high walls, the house is a French colonial villa: grand, creamy white and draped with bougainvillea. It’s in a big tropical garden, its charming terraces set with outdoor chairs that are just catching the sunshine. Out the back, ornate French doors lead to an enormous swimming pool. The whole place is decorated in the style of old Indochina – teak furniture, silk lanterns and patterned fabrics set off high-ceilinged rooms made spectacular by antique patterned floor tiles.

  The Dutch expats have asked their staff to stay on: a housekeeper, a cook and a driver with an old Toyota LandCruiser. In Joburg we came to terms with the fact that in some countries having house staff is not only the norm, but also expected as a way of sharing wealth and providing employment. But our South African housekeeper only came two days a week and didn’t live with us. Having so many people around all the time will be hard to get used to.

  Rowan starts work pretty much straightaway and I dive into an unfamiliar world of expat motherhood, exploring Phnom Penh with the kids. In 2009, it’s more a big country town than a city, busier than Darwin of course but a much easier place to live than it initially appears – you can cross it by car in twenty minutes.

  After lying so low in Darwin, I’ve promised myself I’ll get out and about as much as possible, so we cruise around in tuk-tuks, exploring the backstreets and finding hidden gems. The kid-friendly cafes are a great place to connect with other mums and their little ones. Le Jardin has a sandpit and low-set tree house in a courtyard garden overhung with shady boughs laden with jackfruit. The brightly covered daybeds make the perfect place to while away an afternoon with a baby sleeping in the pram and a toddler digging to China – or Australia, as the case may be. The decent coffee and croissants are remnants of the French influence on Cambodia, which gained independence from French Indochina in the 1950s.

  As I find my way around, I also locate good bread and luxuries like cheese, smallgoods and wine. Once I’ve established where to find both the Western basics and the local specialties, everyone’s happy. Our cook serves up platters of fresh mango and pineapple every afternoon and Khmer food most nights for dinner: the local beef dish with oyster sauce called loc lac, or steamed fish amok, a curry cooked in banana leaves or inside a coconut.

  Before we start looking for a permanent home, I have some work to do. The ABC has asked me to report on the first case being heard by the court examining war crimes committed by the brutal Khmer Rouge regime. The regime controlled Cambodia between 1975 and 1979 and is held responsible for the deaths of about two million people during the implementation of extreme communism. Dissenters were tortured and murdered, and the rest died of either starvation or illness. The court has been set up as a joint initiative of the UN and the Cambodian government and is funded by a number of foreign countries, including Australia.

  It’s been a while since I’ve worked and I get a stressful reminder of how difficult it is to file on my own and on a tight deadline with limited equipment and dodgy internet. I’m using our home video camera to film the story myself.

  The start of the first case is a significant, symbolic moment for Cambodians who lost family members under horrifying circumstances, although straightaway it’s clear that the process will be difficult and results will be limited. The Khmer Rouge’s leader, Pol Pot, is dead and the court will seek to prosecute only a few remaining leaders, all of whom are aged and ailing. Funding the court will also be an ongoing problem.

  I find the content of the trial confronting and terribly sad, although I’m hardened by my experiences in Africa. The court hears stories of the murder of prisone
rs inside the notorious S-21 torture centre run by Comrade Duch, the first Khmer Rouge leader to face trial. Questions are raised about why he’s being tried first when he wasn’t part of the regime’s top leadership team, but he’s confessed to his crimes to some degree and believed to have been responsible for the deaths of thousands who went into the prison and never came out.

  It’s a tough story to embark on just a couple of weeks after we arrive, but I want to try to understand the situation. While some Cambodians question whether talking through what happened is a good thing, I’m keenly aware of similar approaches in South Africa and Sierra Leone, and I believe in the process. I’ll end up covering the story on and off for a number of years, even after we leave Cambodia.

  Our nanny, Sokha, a smiling Khmer woman in her thirties, lost family members and fled to live in a refugee camp during the reign of the Khmer Rouge. She finds my interest surprising, but she seems pleased to tell me about her experiences as a child living on the Vietnamese border. Hers is a common story in Cambodia, where so many parents literally carried their children away from terror on foot, all the way to the borders. Many died. I’m stunned by people like Sokha who pick up and get on with life despite the trauma they’ve experienced.

  Because of the tragedy of the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia has a very young population. The people are generally positive and outgoing and, in the cities at least, speak English. We love the ambience of inner-Phnom Penh, the ornate buildings and the French vibe mingled with the culture of the Khmers, who come out in the evenings to do aerobics and fly kites. Often we take an evening tuk-tuk ride, soaking up the last golden rays of sunshine. Pigeons settle in the eaves of the yellow-painted royal palace, which gleams in the dusk as orange-robed monks pass by. To the kids’ delight, sometimes Sambo the elephant, who gives rides around the Wat Phnom temple, wanders past. It’s hard to imagine that only about three decades ago, as part of its Year Zero policy, the Khmer Rouge evacuated Phnom Penh and forced its residents to work on farms. In 2009, the city is thriving and growing.