The Sunday morning newspaper read/wrestle was just one of many rituals our family preserved back then. Most of them involved the extended family: Grandma, Grandad, Grandma’s mother (whom everyone called Grandma Heath), Grandad’s sister Auntie Greta, and her husband, Uncle Siddie. Oftentimes, Grandad’s other two sisters from Brisbane would blow into town. They were Auntie Dorrie and Auntie Muriel, and together with Auntie Greta they were known collectively as ‘The Mad Aunties’.
Every spring, a Sunday would be put aside and the whole clan would gather on the shady side of my grandparents’ house and spend a few hours eating an enormous watermelon together. It wasn’t a day of particular significance, and it didn’t have a name—it was just an event that happened every year, and Mum has photo albums devoted to it.
Every Wednesday night, Grandad would come over to our house with milkshakes. It was Grandma’s ‘Lodge’ night, and as they only ever had one car, he’d drop her off, come and blow a few hours at ours, and then go and pick her up. I’ve never really been sure what ‘Lodge’ was/is (it might still exist). I think it was a ladies’ equivalent of the Masons, which my grandad was in. She used to wear long white dresses there, with a matching purse and beautiful white closed-toe shoes with thick, tall block heels. Most glamorous of all were the elbow-length white gloves. On a Wednesday night in Toowoomba! I thought she looked like the Queen, and I still think the shoes were rather amazeballs.
As for the Masons, well, I have no idea what went on in there. Mum used to say Grandad was going off to ‘ride the billy goat’, which sounded cute then, but is buried deep in my ‘I don’t want to know’ basket now. I only ever received one smack in my life, at my grandparents’ house, and it was for flipping through Grandad’s Masonic handbook. I actually have it in my possession now, but I’ve never once had a read. Just doesn’t feel right.
We were dropped off at our grandparents’ place every Saturday, and usually spent the day wandering around the neighbourhood with Grandad, calling in on Grandma Heath and Auntie Greta, who lived within two blocks of his place, and who may have had the other two mad aunties staying with them. Uncle Siddie had a sort of secret garden hidden behind a fence halfway down their backyard. It contained lots of beautiful flowers, including snapdragons, which I loved best. In between our destinations Grandad stopped every couple of houses and chatted with neighbours he’d known all his life; I’d hang around their fences picking flowers and patting dogs and hoping he hadn’t forgotten the lollies we were eventually supposed to buy at the shop. Quite often we’d catch a session at the local rollerskating rink at which Grandad had been skating since his own childhood.
I slept over about once a month, allowing Mum and Dad a night out on the town. I always slept in the enormous timber bed that had been my father’s, and I dare say the pillows were at least as old as he was, judging by their completely inflexible and inert contents.
It was an idyllic childhood, I have to say. I spent a lot of time around old people who smelt like lavender, had hankies tucked away in their sleeves and seemed to live on tea and fruitcake. I was doted on, as my father had been before me by the same crowd. I never had to wonder or worry about things that I realise some of my schoolmates had to. I knew I was loved by heaps of people, and I knew they all loved and cared for each other. I knew that food, clean clothes and warm beds were in abundance.
Later in my teens I cursed it for its loveliness, because I missed it so much. I used to think life would’ve been easier if it had always been miserable.
Now I’m so grateful for those beautiful years, and I try very hard to recreate them for my own kids. I’ve met people along the way for whom life has always been hard, and I’ve noticed in some of them an inability to believe that loveliness will ever find them. That is a difficult world view to work around.
CATHOLICISM AND
THE MODERN GIRL
There’s not a doubt in my mind that our spiritual wellbeing was everything in the whole wide world to Mum. As far as she was concerned, Catholicism was the one true faith, and our success as Catholics was by far her greatest ambition.
We weren’t just any old Catholics, mind you. We were Irish Catholics, the truest and toughest of them all—and to become a successful female Irish Catholic was a difficult quest indeed. Back in the old country, ‘fallen’ women were still sent to workhouses as late as the 1990s. You might be surprised to learn just how easily a woman could be declared ‘fallen’—or maybe, sadly, you wouldn’t be surprised at all. Women could fall in many ways. Unwed pregnant girls were a shoo-in, of course, but oftentimes a sassy attitude was really all it took.
The Church’s theory about women was clear. No matter how hard they tried to adhere to the rules set down for them by the men of the church, and no matter how closely they were supervised by the men in their families, a woman’s good judgment and moral fibre must never be taken for granted. Women could ‘fall’ at any moment.
Would Mum’s mother Peggy have been considered ‘fallen’ back in the old country? Well, mental illness and unsuccessful marriages were certainly considered clumsy. Irish Australians didn’t have workhouses to send their troublesome daughters to, but I’m sure Peggy was well aware of the gravity of her failures. Little Mary was well aware too, and knew she had some serious ground to make up with her own family. She planted herself and her children firmly into the Irish Catholic community of Toowoomba.
We were led by ancient priests who bellowed through cavernous cathedrals in their thick Irish accents about God’s forgiveness, while promising very little of their own. On and on they’d sing-song about the Almighty Father and Heaven and Hell, but never did I see one of them smile; in fact I don’t know that I ever made eye contact with one. They swanned around the church grounds in long black smocks, nodding every so often at a bowing passer-by, but I never heard of anyone conducting a conversation with one of them, let alone obtaining advice or comfort. I guess it happened, but not for people like us. We always wanted to be the family that carried the communion stuff up the aisle of the church to the priests halfway through the service, but Mum explained that those families were ‘connected’ to the church.
We weren’t ‘connected’ in any way. We didn’t have any clergy in our family, we weren’t from one of the big Catholic clans around town, and we didn’t have any money to donate beyond the $2 Mum put in the plate every week at Mass, so we were just part of the throng, and the old Irish priests knew how to treat us as such.
In any case, there was an air of a bygone era about those old boys, like they were there to remind us rather than inspire us.
I listened to Mum reminisce about the good old days when the pews were overflowing, Mass was said in Latin and nuns flogged the living daylights out of her, but by the early ’80s it was clear to me as a small spectator that I was observing an empire in decline.
Mum knew it too and it troubled her. She loved nothing more than bowing to a stern old priest who barely acknowledged her existence, but the younger clergy, with their sneakers and casual sermons, didn’t seem as other-worldly as they should. They were supposed to be God’s representatives on Earth, not guitar-playing hippies. Walking away was not an option though, so she hung in and tried to surf the wave of the evolving Catholic Church. With most of her family dead and buried, I suppose it was the only link she had left with her roots, the only thing that bound her to the Earth.
We attended Mass at least once a week, prayed nightly and gave up things for Lent. In return for our devotion, God monitored our every thought and action and shrouded us in a cloak of abstract guilt that was so long and heavy it was difficult to move freely. Sometimes it immobilises me still.
Ah yes, the old cliché of Catholic guilt. Where does it come from? I can’t tell you for sure, but I can tell you that a stubbed toe in our house was God punishing us for something. For what? Well, that was for us to ponder, but it was obviously something Mum had missed, and for which He was helpfully picking up the slack. God was good like that. We we
re completely clear that His eyes, and those of Jesus, Mary and all our dead relatives in Heaven, were upon us at all times, and they could hear our thoughts as well. Try masturbating with that morbid chorus hovering over your bed. Talk about a turn-off! For them too I’m sure!
It was hard to believe that was the point of it all. You live a great life, you do the right thing, you go to Heaven and spend all of eternity helping God spy on small girls in Toowoomba? All those old rellies who’d been so nice to me when they were alive were now in Heaven bugging my little brain like some sort of spiritual Stasi? It never really added up. It was like all the other stories Mum would tell us before bed, about giants living on clouds, and puppets becoming real boys. It was a good yarn, it hinted at bigger issues, but it didn’t stand up to a lot of questioning.
Mum hated questioning! Questioning is not what Catholicism is about, and successful-female-Irish-Catholicism would never be achieved by a doubting Thomasina! Fewer questions and more Hail Marys was the order of the day, driving a thicker and thicker wedge between Mum and me.
Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t some sort of wise little monkey philosophising about the meaning of life and amusing myself with Mum’s quaint faith. I was terrified! I wanted it to make sense. I yearned for someone to fill in those gaps, but no one did. Instead they urged me to believe by reminding me of their own fear of what would happen if I didn’t.
Mum’s biggest concern was that we kids would end up in Hell, for all eternity, with Hitler. Hitler was the worst person Mum had ever heard of, so he was obviously Satan’s number-one ticket-holder. As if to familiarise herself with her nemesis, Mum took every opportunity to watch Hitler documentaries. I’m sure she could recount every event in his life, major and minor, chronologically, and possibly in German. Inevitably, she’d be moved at some point during every screening to shake her head and utter one of the greatest understatements of all time: ‘God, that Hitler was a bastard.’ She never had much time for Germans in general because of Hitler’s bastardry, and was quite miffed when I discovered her family tree was absolutely riddled with them! ‘You’re as German as Goebbels,’ I told her happily. ‘I’m Irish!’ she wailed, which is also true, though predictably it was her German forefathers who kept better records and are much easier to trace today.
As far as I could make out from my many conversations with Mum about heaven and hell, it seemed that the Führer was at one end of the scale of all humanity, and at the other end were the three special children of Fatima. Mum really loved those kids.
Of all the saints and martyrs, who were as close and as real to my Mum as anyone in our own family or at our shops, it was those pious little peasant children from Portugal whom she admired most and who epitomised everything children should strive to be. They were so pure of heart that no less than The Blessed Virgin Mary, in consultation with God presumably, decided to deliver through them several important messages for all humankind. Word spread and crowds gathered, and eventually, although no one else could ever see the Virgin, thousands of pilgrims claimed to see the sun ‘dance’ in the sky during one visitation.
As if the idea of the anchor of our entire solar system spinning above people’s heads wasn’t terrifying enough, there were the secrets of Fatima to add to the drama. There were three secrets delivered to the children, although the first one, about Hell, was more of a quick tour than a secret. The Virgin took them down there, showed them around, then brought them back to remind us how hellish it really was. The second secret was that the First World War would end, but there’d be another one. That would’ve been more impressive as a prediction if the children had revealed it at the time, in 1917, rather than in 1941 when the Second World War was already well underway. I only found out about that thanks to Google, because Mum conveniently left it out of her version.
It was the third secret, however, that really spooked me. The story went that the Virgin instructed the children not to tell anyone about the third secret until 1960. Lucia was the only surviving visionary by that stage, and according to Mum, when Lucia told the third secret to the Pope he promptly fainted in fright! When he came good, he instructed Lucia that the secret was too terrible to tell the world and it must remain a secret forever. It was still a secret, Mum said, although she was pretty sure it had something to do with the end of the world.
Okay, lights out! Nighty-night kids! Off you go to dreamland with images of dreadful messages and fainting Popes dancing across the ceiling like the sun in the Portuguese sky.
Nice one Mum! She clearly hadn’t considered my flamboyant imagination before telling me that story about a thousand times before bed. Consequently I spent the entire ’80s believing the Cold War, the Falklands War and every Four Corners report I witnessed were the third secret of Fatima coming true. On top of that, my dad never prayed or went to church, so he was going to be Hitler’s homeboy for sure. I was a nervous wreck!
Many Catholics talk about periods of their childhoods in which they were in love with their religion and fantasised about being nuns or priests. I can honestly say I never felt anything at all for it but scepticism and boredom. Mum tried everything to help me engage: pretty dresses to wear to Mass, kids’ bibles, biblical movies. I vaguely remember her taking a night course about sharing Catholicism with your kids, in which some kind of cartoony flash cards of Jesus were involved.
None of it worked at all. By my mid-teens I was in full-scale revolt against Catholicism, and Christianity for that matter. A lot of it just made no sense at all. I really didn’t want to believe all the scary stuff was true, so I resolved to live as though it wasn’t and take my chances. I found it very tough to forget God though. He was planted deeply in my psyche and no amount of rational thought could shake Him. After much consideration, I concluded that if He was out there somewhere, there wasn’t a single blow-hard on Earth who was an expert on His thoughts and motivations or could judge me on His behalf. No matter how in tune with God anyone had ever claimed to be, they were just little guessing humans like me. God didn’t invent Christianity, or any other religion. Little guessing humans did.
I may have relaxed for the first time in my spiritual life upon that simple realisation.
PRIMARY SCHOOL/JUMPING ON
THE FRENEMY ROUNDABOUT/
THE RABBITS OF DOOM
Before I was born a deal was struck between my mother and my grandparents regarding our schooling. We were to attend a state primary school, and a Catholic high school.
Why Mum agreed to any deal pertaining to her own children I’ll never know. I can’t imagine agreeing to send my kids anywhere I didn’t want them to go, especially to appease a couple of bigots, but I suppose ‘things were different back then’, and she made certain sacrifices to enable us to enjoy the love of a big family (which happened to contain a couple of bigots).
Given Mum’s concerns about Hell and Hitler, her agreement to the deal was nothing short of courageous, because it meant that she alone would be responsible for our spiritual maintenance until high school. My mum is never truly confident in her ability to do anything, no matter how well qualified she is. (Every day of the 30 years at her last job she went to work expecting to be sacked.) So her self-doubt in the face of this most important task must have been profound. She’d have slept much better at night knowing nuns and brothers were watching over our daylight hours, which was not yet ironic in the early ’80s. Instead she was playing a game of catch-up, counteracting the kind of values to which we were exposed at our ‘heathen school’, Harristown Primary.
My earliest memories are of the little preschool attached to the ‘big school’. I remember struggling to obey rules that seemed stupid. Discipline at home was pretty tight, and there were plenty of smacks for people who disobeyed, but preschool presented a whole new social order. Of course it did: its purpose is to introduce children to the dynamics of the group—something I still struggle with today, I’m afraid. I’m just not the Christmas party/staff meeting/team-building-skirmish-on-a-Saturday type. I�
��m not the networking Friday-night-drinks type, or the get-out-there-and-be-seen type. The most efficient way to ensure I don’t attend an event is to tell me it’s ‘compulsory’.
Maybe it’s simple, immature rebellion, but something deep inside me will not allow me to attend these kinds of events. It feels like a fear when I really sit with it for a minute. I visualise a mule in its famous posture of refusal, with its front feet planted into the ground, way out in front of its body, pushing it back, its backside almost touching the ground. I’m about as socially eloquent as a mule too. The truth is, I’m not very good one-on-one, and getting worse at it as I get older. I have a small number of admittedly eclectic passions, about which I love to chat, but outside of those, I got nothin’. I end up trying too hard and talking shit.
My old compadre Marty Sheargold says he has a ‘fear of arrival’, but then gets over it once he’s there. Well, I never really get over it. I’m fixated upon getting out of there for months before the day of the event even dawns. Mind you, Marty once told a table of radio station clients that he and his partner sometimes wear motorcycle helmets while ‘making love’. By his own admission, the delivery was slightly off, and they didn’t know if he was joking or not, which led to a rather awkward meal. I’m not sure anyone overcame the nerves during that particular lunch date.
Maybe I can’t do group activities because I failed preschool and nobody noticed at the time.
Once, probably around Easter I guess, we were all given a piece of paper with the outline of a rabbit on it, which we were expected to decorate with cotton wool balls. We were all seated around a low table, excitedly imagining how we were going to go about it all when the teacher declared we were only allowed one cotton wool ball each. That struck me as utterly ridiculous, but worse, it completely devastated my vision! How was I supposed to create anything resembling a furry rabbit coat with one lousy cotton wool ball? I said nothing, waited my turn for the glue stick and then, in an orderly and sensible fashion, began sticking as many cotton wool balls as
The Fence-Painting Fortnight of Destiny: A memoir Page 3