On her first day at university, a photographer with long hair and a cigarette sitting on his lip approached and asked whether he could take her photograph. On the back cover of the Union Recorder’s next issue was her photo in black and white, captioned ‘Gail’. We still have it. She wore little make-up and no nail polish, but was naturally beautiful, with a beauty spot on one of her glowing cheeks, fine fair hair and a direct and candid smile. It was a photograph that would come to the attention of a medical student named Chris O’Brien.
Falling in Love
The year 1975 was drawing to a close. Gail and her best friend, Jenny, sat in a noisy pub near the university. They had both completed the three gruelling years of their physiotherapy course, involving viva voce exams, clinical placements and maintaining grades high enough to avoid year group culling. Many of Gail’s placements were at Royal Prince Alfred (RPA), the large public teaching hospital in Sydney’s inner west: now Jenny was suggesting that they should apply to work there. Gail was familiar with the dark old buildings of C and D blocks, built in 1882, as well as the Page Chest Pavilion. More time in that dingy place did not appeal to her. She had recently broken up with a long-term boyfriend and was looking for a change of scenery and more independence from her parents.
Gail wanted to go to Newcastle or perhaps a country hospital, as she told Jenny. ‘You can go to the country later,’ Jenny said. ‘Just come to RPA with me for a year. We’ll earn lots of money and go travelling together.’ It was tempting; Jenny was smart to appeal to Gail’s desire to go overseas. Still dancing every day, she yearned to attend professional ballet classes in Europe. RPA had a reputation as one of the best placements for providing enormous experience and a diverse workload. More importantly with overtime they could earn good money. And so they both applied to RPA and were accepted.
Young physiotherapy residents at RPA had enormous responsibility. On her first weekend Gail worked day and night, putting orthopaedic patients into traction, applying plasters to arms and legs in emergency, percussing chests in intensive care, suctioning and changing tracheotomy tubes as well as administering chest physiotherapy to patients throughout the main hospital. She worked two twenty-two-hour shifts and was back at work on Monday morning. There was no such thing as time off in lieu. The overtime was limited only by hours in the day.
Gail’s first ward placement was the head and neck ward. Head and neck treatment involves the soft tissues of those areas, such as the mouth, throat, sinuses and salivary glands, and secondary cancers in the lymph glands of the neck. Gail changed scores of tracheotomy tubes in these patients and administered physiotherapy to poor immobile bodies. Many patients were unable to speak, chew or swallow. Some had undergone a ‘commando’ operation — a huge procedure involving the removal of the tongue, mandible and/or lymph nodes in the neck. An acronym for combined mandibulectomy and neck dissection operation, the ‘commando’ involved transporting a piece of skin from the chest to the face, forcing patients to languish in hospital for weeks while the flap of skin took to its new surrounding tissue and blood supply.
Late in January 1976, the medical residents and interns invited the new physio residents to a welcome party in their quarters. A group of girls gathered in Gail’s room, strategically delaying their entrance. There was a knock on the door and in breezed an extremely attractive young doctor, with thick wavy hair, black eyebrows, green eyes and a Zapata moustache. He was wearing short white shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. ‘Are you girls coming to the party or what?’ he asked the room. Gail was drawn to him immediately.
Chris O’Brien was a medical resident from Sydney’s western suburbs, the middle of three children. His mother, Maureen, was a dynamic, gregarious school headmistress. She read voraciously and could carry on three conversations at the same time. She had been the bedrock of the family during Chris’s youth; his father, Kevin, bore mental scars from fighting in Singapore as a teenager during World War II. Chris’s older brother, Michael, was a livewire and a wit; he and Chris would encourage each other in Goon Show–style hilarity that would have everyone in stitches. Carmel, the youngest, spent her childhood trotting after her two older brothers as they engaged in harmless mischief such as throwing stones at passing trains and making themselves sick by smoking their father’s cigars.
Chris had star quality. At his high school, Parramatta Marist Brothers, he had been a charismatic, popular, rugby league–playing, premiership-winning school captain. He was a devout Catholic as an adolescent and conscientious objector with a strong sense of social justice. Although, like Gail, he had considered studying architecture, his values led him to study medicine instead.
Chris and Gail had walked the same paths and hallways of the university for the previous three years without ever meeting, but once they had met they kept coming across each other. They found themselves standing side by side in line at the canteen. They ran into each other outside Balmain’s Unity Hall where a somewhat inebriated Chris tried to elicit an introduction to her. Then one day Gail walked past Chris in a hospital hallway. He made his move with a smooth line: ‘Hmmm, is that Y by Yves Saint Laurent you’re wearing?’ Gail tilted her head and shrugged her shoulders. But inside she squealed, yes!
A few days later, Chris asked Gail for her telephone number. When he rang the Bamford family home, Murray called out, ‘Geely! It’s a Chris O’Brien on the phone for you.’ And then as he handed her the phone he added, ‘O’Brien. That’s a very Catholic name.’ She cringed and slid around the corner for privacy, pulling the telephone’s cord as far as it could stretch.
Gail didn’t care whether O’Brien was a Catholic surname: she liked the Irishness of it. Like everything else about Chris, it seemed just right. He was boundlessly energetic and, like her, filled his life with work, a hectic social scene and physical activity. He jogged and played rugby, tennis and golf (or at least attempted the latter). He represented Prince Alfred in inter-hospital rugby competitions, and occasionally Gail would wander over to St John’s oval and watch him play. For the first few months the pair weren’t dating exclusively. In fact, on one occasion Gail was waiting to say hello to Chris after a game while another of his admirers did the same. But by the end of the year they were an item.
Gail was living in the residents’ quarters at RPA, but Chris shared an apartment with two friends. Their place regularly saw rowdy dinners where garden furniture was dragged inside to seat twenty or more at a long makeshift table. Their culinary expertise often left something to be desired. One evening Gail walked through the paint-flaking doorway to find Chris and a flatmate shovelling rice out the window.
‘I think we put too much rice in the pot and it’s overflowing like it’s alive,’ Chris shouted over his shoulder.
‘How much did you put in?’ she asked.
‘Um, well, we figured it was a cup per person. So we put in twenty cups.’
Gail took the overflowing pot off the stove and tried to subdue the gluggy mess. Later, Chris took cheeky delight in the fact that their guests had seen her at the stove and mistaken the disastrous meal as her doing.
One day at the Bodenweiser Dance Centre near Broadway where she was still training, Gail spotted a pamphlet for a summer course in Paris to study fine and performing arts and French language. Her desire to go overseas was undiminished and she saw this as a perfect opportunity. She mentioned it to Chris over dinner that night and, in what she interpreted as a grand gesture of his commitment, he asked whether she would wait a few months so he could go with her. Chris had to complete two more short secondments as part of his training. The first was at Dubbo Base Hospital and he suggested Gail go there with him. She agreed and also worked there as a physio. Despite her parents’ disapproval, Gail and Chris lived together in the residents’ quarters.
It wasn’t long before Chris was inviting hospital colleagues home for dinner parties, and the number of guests regularly ballooned to more than a dozen. It could have been seen as presumptuous for a twenty-five-year-old surgical
resident to invite senior surgeons, anaesthetists and their spouses to his quarters for a dinner hosted by himself and his twenty-two-year-old girlfriend, but Chris and Gail didn’t think twice. Together, they were natural entertainers. She cooked spaghetti bolognaise while he topped up glasses with cheap wine. Gail was besotted: life with Chris O’Brien was exciting and fun. And when in the hospital she saw him tenderly nursing a tiny baby just a few weeks old, she knew she wanted to marry him.
At the conclusion of Chris’s Dubbo secondment, the pair travelled back to Sydney. Because Gail had planned to go overseas, she hadn’t applied for a second-year residency at Prince Alfred. While Chris completed his second secondment she bided her time by working at a private orthopaedic practice in Sydney’s inner west for a surgeon who drove a Rolls-Royce, wore a gold watch on one arm with usually a platinum blonde on the other and where patient numbers swelled with mysterious work-related back injuries. Gail hated working there, but continued as she waited for Chris.
Just before the pair were finally about to set off for Paris, Gail’s father, Murray, gently chided, ‘I don’t believe that you should have the honeymoon before the wedding.’ Impulsively, the young couple agreed that they should be engaged for the sake of their parents. Murray and Grace were elated, as were Chris’s parents, Kevin and Maureen.
But Gail could see that Chris was perhaps not quite ready for this move. She let him off the hook by saying she didn’t think the timing or reason were right. When she saw the relief on his face she knew she had guessed correctly. But her parents weren’t so pleased. As an engagement present, they brought to dinner a beautiful set of cutlery. ‘Mum, I’m sorry but we’ve decided not to get engaged just yet,’ Gail said. When Grace and Murray left, Grace took the cutlery set with her.
The first stop on their premature ‘honeymoon’ was Ireland, where Gail took Chris to meet her family in Malahide, a beautiful coastal village forty minutes north of Dublin by car. Grace’s brother Hugh and his wife, Clonagh, welcomed their niece and her boyfriend with a sherry. Then Hugh awkwardly explained that there was only one spare bedroom in the house. For the sake of Gail’s elderly and conservative grandmother, they had borrowed a caravan that could accommodate Chris. It was sitting in the garden.
From Ireland they travelled to Paris, ready for a summer in continental Europe. They enrolled in a six-week course at the Paris American Academy and rented a tiny studio apartment on the Boulevard Raspail in Montparnasse. After language and history classes in the morning, Gail spent the afternoons immersed in ballet and French cuisine where a temperamental chef would shout at his students ‘chaud chaud chaud’ as he ran from the oven with a hot tray. Chris took classes in painting and photography. He visited Gail in the dance studios and took beautiful black-and-white photographs of her. We still have them.
Their budget was five dollars a day, which meant picnic dinners that were cheap but romantic with food and wine from a local charcuterie. They discovered Le Dôme café on the Boulevard du Montparnasse and it became one of their favourite places. Here they would enjoy a kir — white wine with a few drops of crème de cassis. For years after, my father would pour the same drink for my mother in the early evening, handing it to her as he leaned into her smile for a kiss, both transported back to those Parisian summer days.
After a couple of months in Paris, Gail and Chris bought a small second-hand Renault and set off around Europe, following the roads to Belgium, Germany, Austria, Italy and Switzerland. Gail’s French and German were slightly better than Chris’s, but he had more nerve, and would simply make up words he didn’t know with a French or German accent. ‘In Winterthur bist sie verkin?’ he asked a loud group of smoking and drinking Germans in the restaurant carriage of a train. Gail pointed out through her giggles that ‘verkin’ wasn’t a word and that if he was trying to say ‘working’ the correct word was ‘arbeiten’. But Chris spoke so confidently that the Germans responded without hesitation.
Towards the end of the trip Chris developed tonsillitis and was very unwell with fevers, chills and throat pain. Gail cared for him, feeding him and wrapping him in warm blankets. It was the most severe illness Gail would see him suffer until decades later.
When the time came for Chris to go back to Sydney to complete his surgical training as a resident medical officer, Gail decided to stay on and travel to London. She found a room at the YWCA in Chelsea and took professional-level ballet classes at Covent Garden. A fellow student asked her whether she wanted to make extra money by covering some shifts at a retail shop nearby. Gail jumped at the chance and showed up for work. The store turned out to be a sex shop that attracted a lonely and quiet clientele where Gail would sit at the counter and pass the time knitting, pointing out this product or that item to customers.
She arrived back in Sydney with a letter of recommendation from her Covent Garden instructor addressed to the Australian Ballet’s Dame Peggy van Praagh. But she never followed it through. Ultimately, she didn’t believe that she could become a prima ballerina, and unconsciously her life and plans had moved away from dance.
Her reunion with Chris was passionate but she was crestfallen to discover that things between them seemed unchanged. One night over dinner she asked him where their relationship was going. ‘You know that I have to do a secondment in Darwin for a while,’ Chris said.
Gail realised that this could mean further months of waiting. If he’s not sure of me now, after all our time together, he never will be, she decided. ‘Well, in that case I’m going to start seeing other people,’ she said. Chris was spurred to action; before he left for Darwin he proposed.
Chris and Gail married on 16 February 1980, in the Great Hall of the University of Sydney. The Catholic ceremony, attended by about a hundred guests, was followed by a simple reception in the Holme Building, part of the Sydney University Union complex and very close to the Great Hall. There were no wedding cars; just the family cars driven by friends. A friend was asked to record the day on the family video camera but his obsession with planes resulted in a recording that has the camera veering towards the sky every time a passenger jet went overhead. (The friend later became a Qantas pilot.)
Gail wore a white lace crinoline-style dress she had found and bought cheaply (and optimistically) in London. She matched it with a wide-brimmed hat, lace gloves and a parasol, and was feminine beauty personified. Chris looked dashing in tails and gloves. She walked towards him on her father’s arm while Offenbach’s ‘Barcarolle’ rang out from the grand organ. As her hand was passed to that of her new husband, Gail felt a strong sense of symbolism now sometimes considered antiquated and patriarchal, telling herself: I am no longer Gail Bamford, I am Gail O’Brien.
To my dear mother,
To think of you on your wedding day, and all that lay ahead: you at twenty-five, Dad twenty-eight. On the edge of a life together, with no concept of how much greater than the sum of its parts your union would be.
You have a photo of Dad that he has written on. It says something about soulmates. What did you think of soulmates on your wedding day? And what do you think of them now?
With my love, Juliette
* * *
My darling Juliette,
My favourite photo of your father was taken when he was the director of the Sydney Cancer Centre in 2003. It is the photo that appeared on all the SCC documentation, newsletters and reports.
It is symbolic of an immensely happy time in our lives. He was charisma personified with his black Irish good looks and humour and I believe this photo captures his essence.
I remember handing this photo to him and saying, ‘I love this photo of you, honeybunny. Will you please write on it for me?’ It seems an odd request to make of your husband but we both knew what it meant: he wrote what we were unable to articulate otherwise. ‘To my darling Pinkie my eternal soulmate. Thank you for sharing my life.’ (‘Pinkie’ was his nickname for me since shortly after we started dating, inspired by my blushing at something he had said.) When he h
ad finished writing, his handwriting now shaky but his mind clear and strong, our eyes lingered on his words and this undeniable truth. ‘Thank you,’ I said without looking into his eyes, ‘that’s beautiful.’
The force of attraction that originally brought your father and me together which we refer to as ‘chemistry’ is a mystery indeed. Does that immortal part of us, our souls, find each other through some celestial contract and dovetail to unity? Or does the soul need time to bond with her mate? Whatever it may be, your father and I were soulmates. We completed each other and our union was to last the test of time with all its highs and lows.
In his younger days your father’s intellect and pragmatism told him that in reality there must be hundreds of partners available to any one of us. But I knew from the beginning that we were supposed to be together. It all felt right, even his name, the Irishness of it.
With the benefit of life experience, I realise that the bride and groom grew far more in their human experience through the adverse situations that they confronted head on together over the years, rather than through the comfortable and privileged lifestyle to which they had become accustomed.
Your father’s resolve to survive that horrible disease as long as he could took steely determination and tenacity for us both. A life-threatening illness affects the whole family and takes its toll on the carer, physically, mentally and emotionally. I believe your father was so grateful that I did not falter under the pressure. Perhaps that was the turning point in his thinking. Perhaps without all the previous distractions prior to his illness, he could now see the truth.
This is Gail Page 2