by Peter Lalor
Two weeks after the birth Kath booked in to be sterilised. Her haste seems almost indecent, but possibly she was content to have a boy child to go with the three girls. Either way, she was going to make sure this was the last one. At 35, with four kids to three fathers, Kath was hanging up her uterus.
A few months after Chillingworth bought the van, Kath went through an intersection and got hit by another car. The L300 rolled and was a write-off. She wasn’t hurt. Around the same time she sold the block of land for about $35000, which helped her pay off the house and left her enough to buy another van.
While Kath had been violent with Saunders and Kellett, she was more circumspect around the new bloke. He was bigger than her for a start; not that she couldn’t handle herself. She was as strong as any woman Chillingworth had ever met. She’d go collecting wood with him, bring along her own chainsaw. When they needed top soil for the yard she matched him shovel load for shovel load. That said, to hurt this one she had to be more cunning.
On one of many nights of beer and words, Chillingworth says he threw his hand back and accidentally hit Melissa in the mouth. The kid says he deliberately punched her. The next morning he woke up to find the bottom plate of his false teeth smashed to pieces in the bathroom. It couldn’t have fallen, he knew that, and he figured it must have been Melissa. It cost $600 to replace and it wasn’t until much later that Kath confessed to the destruction of his teeth.
—You hit my kids I’ll get even with you somehow. Hurt them and I’ll hurt you.
She’d tell him how she squared up with Saunders by slashing the dog’s throat. It was a simple incident. He hurt her, she killed the dingo. No remorse needed. She still got shitty thinking about the last relationship; it played on her mind that he had gotten away so easily and sometimes she would talk about smashing the windows of his ute when it was parked at the pub, but Chillingworth counselled against it. One time, however, Saunders came around to pick up some things from the shed, and Kath and her new partner ganged up on him, telling him he couldn’t take them. Eventually they called the police, who thought some of the stuff had been pinched from the mines, but it hadn’t. Just another shitty incident. Things were always complicated.
Chillingworth says Kath was a good mother to a degree. While she may have been denied love or encouragement as a child, she did her best to give her own kids what she could. It wasn’t much, but it was more than she had got. She had a quest to protect her daughters from abuse, at times to the point of hypervigilance. Of course she had no qualms about disciplining them, resorting to kettle cords when all the wooden spoons were broken. Melissa says you learned never to cross her and to do as you were told. That way your life was relatively easy. She was strict with the girls and while Melissa was the apple of her eye and the one who was going to succeed in life and get away with anything, Natasha never seemed to be able to do anything right. When the second daughter was around 12 years old Kath and John had a couple of friends visiting from Ipswich. While the adults were talking, Natasha gave her mother a bit of cheek. Wrong move. Without blinking, Kath punched her full in the mouth, splitting the child’s lip open and then told her to get out of the house before returning to the conversation with the visitors as if nothing had happened.
‘Mum had a heart of gold; you just didn’t cross her.’ That’s what Melissa says.
Katherine clearly loved the two youngest and indulged the boy with toy guns, soldiers outfits and shoot ‘em up videos. He wanted to be in the army when he grew up. She was even closer to the girl, but at times seemed to resent having to mind them. Melissa told relatives she left home because she got sick of being a live-in child minder. Natasha then found herself with a new job.
Kath got tied up with one of the local churches during those years and became a keen student of the Bible, going to weekly classes, rediscovering a faith in God she professed to lose after Barbara’s death. She was following in the footsteps of her brother Neville, who had been some sort of lay preacher. The kids too were sent off to Sunday School. Then she started on sewing classes at the local TAFE. She became passionate about the sessions and wouldn’t miss them for anything. They were the highlight of her life and stayed that way for the next decade.
She began to design her own clothes and they were appallingly tasteless. Kath loved to show off her body and would wear skirts that barely fell below the panty line. Patrons of the 1992 Scone Horse Carnival were treated to a revealingly short American Indian style dress with tassles and great big boots. She looked cheap, to say the least, but Chillingworth was in love and couldn’t see it. Behind Kath’s back the people of Aberdeen were fascinated with her clothing choices. She could often be seen in gaudy jumpsuits, terrifyingly short skirts, backless tops without bras and other provocative items. It was a town joke, but one you made sure she never heard.
Kath suffered a lot of skin problems over these years and had a number of small cancers removed. She suffered from a reddening of her face that resembled rosacea but the doctors struggled to treat it. It gave her a frightening, angry expression that only exacerbated the impact when she lost her temper.
Chillingworth gave up drinking after his son was born, but nothing changed. By late 1993 Kath and he were fighting regularly and things just seemed to be getting worse. Melissa had moved out of home around this time. Despite her mother’s desire that she be an air hostess, she had run off to Muswellbrook when she was barely 16 and set herself up in a caravan.
Melissa has some pretty startling memories of the Chillingworth years, as she did of her mother’s experiences with all men.
Mum [then] met John Chillingworth when I was about 13 or 14, but he never lived with us. He stayed at the house a lot but Mum would never let him move in. She didn’t let him move in because of how nasty he was. He lived in Scone with his mother and when he beat on Mum she got him out of the house so he couldn’t hurt us kids. He was particularly cruel to [Saunders’ daughter] and myself. Mum was hospitalised by him several times. He put her through fibro walls. I think with him Mum really tried to protect us from him. There was one night there when he started on her and she got him in the car and was driving him to Scone when he punched her continuously to the left side of her face. I could not recognise her as her face was split and bruised.
I remember him pinning her down on the lounge and strangled [sic] her. She ended up severely bruised. I think the only reason she survived that was she passed out. He picked up Natasha and threw her into the wall. She had her arms up and broke the impact to the wall. She was about 10 at the time. He was a football fanatic and one time [Saunders’ daughter] skipped past him, watching TV. He tripped her and she fell and skinned her little face. She was about two years old. Mum would go cranky at him, but he would simply backhand her. I think what hurt Mum the most is that she couldn’t protect us either from physical abuse or sexual.
There was another occasion Mum had gone out and we were left with him. [Saunders’ daughter] was in her bedroom, picking up toys and making a noise. He walked into her room and there was a loud smack. I couldn’t hear her cry, then I heard her take a gasping breath as if she had stopped breathing. I walked in and saw her crying and her entire face was the print of a hand mark. When Mum came home we told Mum and she upped him. He blamed us that we had picked on [his son]. John Chillingworth didn’t drink. He was just nasty and would beat up on Mum and us kids. She was with him for about two to three years.
Natasha had her own memories.
I remember seeing John hit Mum and also my sister Melissa. I can remember John hit Melissa in the face with the jug chord. John was aggressive towards me and the other children and also towards Mum. John also used to abuse Mum physically and mentally. I can remember feeling very helpless when Mum was being abused because I was so young and scared and I couldn’t help her.
Chillingworth’s relationship with Knight was chaotic, dysfunctional and there was definitely some violence, but hospital records fail to reveal anything to back up Melissa’s or Nata
sha’s colourful account, apart from the bruises to Katherine’s face after the fight in the car. The former defacto admits he hit her then, but says that was the only time. He says he has never physically disciplined the children.
I only ever hit Kathy once during the time I was with her. It is not my nature to hit women. Kathy is the only woman I have ever hit. I have been married once before I met Kathy and I have since remarried. I have never hit either of my other wives … I hit her in the car and she had me charged. There were no other times that I hit her or caused an injury to her. In saying that, there was never any times where Kathy hit or injured me apart from the incident in the car and the time she broke my teeth. We had a lot of verbal arguments almost constantly, but I was never threatened by Kathy with violence. She would always get back at me in other ways.
He says that in an instant she would turn into a screaming monster. She agreed that their relationship was bipolar in an interview with the psychiatrist Dr Delaforce. ‘When I hated him I hated him. When I loved him I loved him’. She told the doctor that he only hit her the once but he was nasty to the children.
It was all getting Chillingworth down and he wanted to get out of town, move up to Ipswich where their friends lived and buy a place. In 1991, with Kath’s help, he gave up drinking, got his licence back, and now it seemed a good time to make a new start. Kath wasn’t so sure. In late 1993 he took a week off from the meatworks to have a bit of a look around and got a bit distracted, staying an extra couple of days. The meatworks sent a telegram to his home address saying he had to be back within 24 hours or he’d be sacked. By the time he got the message it was too late. It seemed to be fate.
He came back to Aberdeen and Kath agreed to move up with him and see what it was like, but already she had something else on her mind. One October night in the pub a curly headed little bloke had asked her to dance. He was full of happy-go-lucky energy, outgoing and relaxed. Chillingworth was aware she was taking in some sewing from this hard-drinking miner, but didn’t think too much of it. Kath was always doing favours for people. She had a good heart if you went looking for it.
Chillingworth found a place at the Woombye Caravan Park on the Sunshine Coast, just south of Nambour and he was happy. They were going to start a new life. Kath still wasn’t totally convinced but agreed to come up for six weeks to see what it was like. She was only up there ten days at best when Chillingworth came home and found her in the van with another bloke from the park. She was hardly wearing anything and it was pretty obvious what was going on, although she tried to deny it.
—We weren’t doing nuthin’ and anyway, I don’t want to live with you any more. You’re a jealous cunt and I’m pissing off in the morning.
That night she told him to sleep with the kids. He got into bed and put his arm around her and she went berserk. Said she’d ring the police. Chillingworth retreated and waited for it all to blow over. The next morning she packed the car and headed off. He figured she was bluffing and waited a while before heading around to their friends Phyllis and Ray’s house to get her. She had been there, just as he had assumed, and had said she was going into town to buy some wool and would be back in an hour. Their friends said she seemed pretty upset and might not want to see him.
He waited one hour. They said she wouldn’t have just gone without saying goodbye to them. Another hour passed and he decided to go looking for her. He started on the highway towards Aberdeen which was an eight- or nine-hour drive away.
I was worried, concerned, pissed off—all emotions mixed into one. I thought she would come to her senses, not thinking that this was serious. What happened was nothing. I was thinking why would she carry on like that? It was only a blue, a bit of jealousy on my part. Nothing to worry about.
Chillingworth stopped at a service station in Wallangarra on the border and asked the bloke if he’d seen a woman come through in a red Lite Ace van with a couple of kids.
—She’s got red hair and is wearing a pink jumpsuit. You’d have to remember her.
The bloke did. He said she’d been through a few hours before and was in a real hurry. Chillingworth had thought that maybe she had seen his car at the house in Ipswich and taken off, but by the sounds of it she had headed for Aberdeen the moment she said she was going for some wool. Kath had a bit of cunning about her.
The chase was on. John had an 1983 Falcon XE V8 and he floored it all the way to Tamworth, where he had to stop and get more petrol at about midnight. She had been through there at about 10 pm and also stopped. He’d made up about fifteen minutes on her in six hours. In his desperate state he jumped back into the car, thinking he could still catch her before Scone which was only two hours down the track at the most.
I belted straight through Scone and here’s her van parked outside her place. She never said goodbye to Ray and Phyllis, never said goodbye, kiss my arse or nothin’.
He noticed another car, a little green one, also parked outside her place but didn’t think much of it. He jumped out and checked her car. The tyres were cold. She’d beaten him home by a long way. Defeated, he went back up the highway to his mum’s place at Scone, but couldn’t sleep. Chillingworth was starting to unravel. Later he reckoned he must have been having a nervous breakdown. Kath should have recognised some of herself in the frantic way he was reacting to the separation. Right at that point Chillingworth just felt like somebody was shitting on him and he didn’t know why or what to do. At 7 am he rang Kath and Joy was already there. She was pretty clear about the situation.
—Kath ain't gonna talk to ya, she says to tell ya it’s finished. Don’t ring no more.
Chillingworth kept ringing and ringing. When he wasn’t trying to get her on the phone he was cruising past the house in the Falcon. A couple of times he knocked on the door but she didn’t answer.
He went back up to Ipswich to fix things up and ended up staying for a week. It was Christmas and he was so uptight he couldn’t eat. His guts felt like he’d swallowed barbed wire. There was something in there. Christmas is a bastard of a time to be abandoned and you couldn’t pick a worse place to reflect on your grief than a caravan park in a strange state. On Christmas Day it really got to him. There is a shop on the other side of the four-lane Bruce Highway and he figured if he got some bananas he might be able to eat something. If God wanted him to. With his head down and no regard for the traffic he set off for the other side of the road. It was a passive form of Russian roulette. Nobody ran him over so he bought a few bananas and tried again. He made it back to the caravan park. Maybe the roads were empty because everybody was at home opening presents and having turkey with their dumpling wives and two by two families. He felt so bloody sorry for himself.
Women, Kath excepted, have a capacity to respond to trauma or crisis with stillness; a man generally needs to do something. Anything. Drink. Fuck. Fight. Flee. Anything. If you are moving you are a more difficult target for the tip-truck of grief that’s waiting to pour its load. Somehow John was staying off the grog and he wasn’t of a mind to find comfort or violence with somebody else, so he kept moving.
Two days after Christmas Chillingworth loaded all his gear back onto the blue trailer and headed back to Aberdeen, pulling up outside her house in the early afternoon. She said to put the car around the back and come in for a coffee. He thought it might be a good sign. Maybe she had come back round and was tired of the torture. He unhooked the trailer, but inside she told him there was no future for them. It killed him to hear this. She had his son, he’d given up the grog for her, lost his job in an attempt to find a new start away from all the shit and strife of Aberdeen life. He’d even parked the trailer in the backyard. And she still wanted out.
Then she really let him have it.
—I’m seeing someone else.
—So soon?
—Yeah. So soon.
—Well, that doesn’t fucking surprise me, Kath, ‘cause you split up with Dave on a Friday and got with me on a fucking Saturday in the pub and I bet you got with
this fella in the pub too.
She said it was the club, actually. He wanted to know who it was. She said, ‘You know him but I won’t tell ya because you’ll only go and beat him up.’ The news didn’t bring Chillingworth any piece of mind; if anything he started to get crazier. With no one to fight he hooked the trailer back up and drove up to his mum’s place at Scone, where he unhooked it and in his distracted state let it roll down into the back of the car, smashing the back of it. It made him angrier but in an irrational way. He loves his cars and has always kept them immaculate. He didn’t care that it was dinged; it was just another little thing to piss him off.
His mother has been watching all this and told him he needed to pull himself together. They exchanged words, Chillingworth telling her there was absolutely nothing wrong with him and he would get Kath back. All the time his guts were churning and his mind was racing up and down a highway between Kath and nowhere. Pissed off with his mum and the world, he hooked the trailer back up and said he was going back to Queensland. His mother could do nothing but watch and worry. He stayed two more days up there before coming back down the highway, arriving back at Scone on New Years Eve. He unhooked the trailer again and headed off down the road where a mate waved him over and told him that Kath was knocking around with John Price.
—That ratbag? You must be joking.
He wasn’t. It was insult on top of injury. He’d got off the grog for her and she’d taken up with a pisspot. The next day he headed off towards Price’s place at St Andrews Street, where he started banging on the front door. Only then did he note the little green car that had been hanging around Kath’s for so long. Pricey arrives at the door in his underpants and said she was in the bedroom. It was mid afternoon New Years Day. In John Price’s room he finds his two-year-old son on the floor and his mother naked in bed, the airconditioner going. He was insane with rage.