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by Larissa Behrendt

  When she finished, he continued to look at the fire, watching as the logs turned into blackened charcoal. “I cannot look after them. Take them.”

  “Your eldest daughter is too old …”

  “But you can take the other three.”

  It was arranged that they would be put in a church-run orphanage.

  From the next room, Patricia strained to hear, listening as her father, inert and indifferent, destroyed their family, giving her brothers and sister up without a fight. She clung to the wooden door frame as she heard his words, “I cannot look after them. Take them.”

  Grigor withdrew into himself, his alcohol and his frayed ideals, becoming obsessed with the propaganda to arouse fears amongst Australians through scare-mongering about socialism. He predicted the upcoming attempts to ban his Party. It was simply history repeating itself, he concluded, seeing himself re-entering a period laced with those same sentiments that had seen Marx’s ostracism, vilification and persecution. Grigor had fevered meetings with his comrades at the Lithgow branch of the Communist Party where political discussion focused on the surging tide of hysteria directed toward organised workers. They saw the rise of Robert Menzies as a bad omen. In seeking to hold back the wave of anti-Communist fervour, Grigor found a crusade to distract him from his memories of Elizabeth.

  The departure of her family extinguished life in the house for Patricia. She harboured a deep resentment against her father who had given them away so easily and who had made no attempt to prevent her move to the city. She had written in response to advertisements in the Sydney papers and found herself a job as a seamstress.

  As she packed her suitcase, she recalled William packing his bags and herself tearfully having to pack bags for Bob and Danny while Daisy chose the dresses and toys that she wanted. Now it was her turn to take what she wanted from this old life and leave her mother’s house.

  The fury in her brewed and she intended to tell her father how he had abandoned them, how despicable he was to have allowed three of his children to grow up in an institution. But as she faced him sitting in his armchair, her packed case in one hand, the other cradling the jade brooch that she had retrieved from the trash after one of his tantrums had seen it tossed away. Instead of shouting what she felt struggling within her, she could only utter stonily, “Mother told me once that nothing matters more than family. It will be too late when you realise she was right.”

  17

  1943

  BOB DID NOT BELIEVE, when he first entered the children’s home, that he and Danny would be there for long. At times he thought it was just like in one of his dreams when something bad happened, like a tooth falling out. It felt real, but then he would wake up and realise that it was just imaginary and feel a flood of relief as his tongue touched the teeth firmly planted in his mouth. That, he thought, was what this ward, these sobbing boys, was going to turn out to be. It would disappear when he awoke and be replaced by something strong and reliable, like teeth.

  Bob was only six when he was taken from his father’s house in Lithgow and placed into the children’s home with his younger brother and sister. Although freed from the fear of their volatile father, the younger children missed the attentions of their older siblings, especially Patricia’s devotion and her ability to comfort and organise.

  Bob and Danny were placed in a large ward that, even with almost thirty boys crowded together, seemed cold. The night air was filled with the sound of muffled sobs. During their first nights in the new surroundings, Bob had crept into Danny’s bed when he heard his younger brother sobbing. Danny would cling to him and Bob would wait until he heard Danny’s light snoring before slipping out of the warm sheets to cross the cold stone floor to his own bed. As he held his younger brother close, he experienced the gratification that comes with the ability to reassure someone helpless and in need. It eased his own suffering to know that he had to be strong for Danny, who was more frightened and fragile than he.

  The adjustment to a new life was hardest for Daisy, placed in the girl’s home across the road from Bob and Danny. She had a strict routine like the boys: dress, check beds, help younger ones dress, inspection for school, prayers, church services, meals, duties, lessons, dinner, bed. All announced by the ringing of a bell. No one explained to Daisy what the routine was and she was scolded and ridiculed until she learned the rules and procedures. This was vastly different from the family freedom she had known, from the adoration of her brothers, especially William, who would bounce her on his knee and bring her presents of paper dolls and paste jewellery. He called her “Princess”. Daisy saw her father as the lesser evil for when she was living with him at least there were times when she was beyond his gaze and, with her brothers and sister, she could do as she pleased.

  Bob and Danny would see Daisy at the nearby school each day. At first, the three huddled in the playground, clinging to the familiarity of each other. But slowly, Daisy, drifted off into her own social circles.

  Bob found, over time, that other boys welcomed his good-natured camaraderie. A small group — Thomas Riley, Frank Phillips, Charles Wainwright and Benny Miller — gathered around him. Danny found it hardest to make friends and tagged quietly along after his older brother. He dreaded leaving for class when he would be separated from Bob, and was looking forward to the hour when he would see his brother again.

  Bob, always bright, attacked his studies and began to excel at school, but was never more than mediocre with sport. Clumsy at cricket, he never dropped a catch nor hit a century. Playing football, he could score a try as easily as miss a tackle or fumble a pass. He was small-framed and fast, but this was neither asset nor liability. His average ability ensured a stable popularity. Despite their strictness, the discipline of rules appealed to Bob. He felt secure knowing what was good and what was bad, and he developed a dislike for unreliability and irregularity. Against these standards, his father became a disappointment.

  Every Sunday, after the church service, all the children would sit on the stone wall that surrounded the orphanage and wait for visitors. It was a way of passing time, time that was slipping away in weeks and months. At first their father came to visit every second weekend, but as the year stretched out his visits became sporadic. As the winter chill arrived, only Danny remained atop the wall waiting as parents or relatives plucked off the luckier children. He was convinced that if he went off to play like Bob and Daisy did, his father would turn up and, unable to find them, leave.

  Bob preferred to have no expectations and to just respond to good things when they happened. He thought that Danny set himself up to have his feelings crushed, especially now the weekends of dashed hopes were becoming more and more frequent. He tried to encourage Danny to join him in a game of cards or cricket, but the younger brother was determined to watch for their father. With this new toughness, Bob finally surrendered his dream that his mother would return, walk into his classroom, claiming him as her own for all his classmates to see. He understood; he was not going to wake up to the solid reassurance of teeth. It had been hard to abandon any hope of her return. There was far less to lose if his father never came back — giving up on him was easier.

  As their father’s visits came further and further apart, their eldest sister, Patricia, began to visit on the odd weekend, rewarding Danny’s patience. She would arrive in her neat, fashionable hand-made clothes, bringing small treats of penny candy and sometimes books — Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe and Frankenstein. Coming from Sydney, it would take her all morning to ride the train and walk from the station. She would have two hours with her family before having to return. Bob loved the smell of her perfume, and her gentleness. He was infatuated with her dark eyes and soft mouth. She gave the whispered promise of a warmth that he thought had died with his mother. Danny would chatter excitedly when she arrived. But as the first hour stretched to the second, he would grow silent and glum. When Patricia would announce it was time to leave, he would cling to her, pleading, “Don’t leave me.�
� With Danny’s small hands clutching her, Patricia would be reminded of Daisy’s last plea to William. She longed to be able to take Danny, Bob and Daisy with her, to have had the money to give them a home again.

  During these visits, Daisy remained aloof. Sometimes she only spent an hour with Patricia. She would eye her older sister’s clothes accusingly and under her gaze Patricia would feel a flood of guilt. Daisy would make demands — for new shoes, leather gloves, a silk scarf — items Patricia could not afford. And when the elder sister toiled to make or buy something to satisfy Daisy’s wishes, her gift would be met with criticism or indifference.

  Daisy’s anger towards her stung Patricia as much as Danny’s pleas. And she could not help but be reminded again of William when she felt the wrath of her sister. Patricia decided that, unlike her missing brother whom she could never reach, she would succeed at getting Daisy to love her, she would lift Daisy’s anger and allow her to be happy again.

  Bob always knew he was different, that there was a mysterious ingredient he shared with his siblings and mother; he remembered his mother’s dark skin and even darker eyes. At first this being different was an instinct. Then it started to take form in teasing words — gentle from friends, harsh from others — and names that made him wince, even when said playfully.

  On one of his increasingly rare weekend visits, Bob asked his father why he and his brothers and sisters were dark. His father’s face clouded at the question and he was silent as he thought about an answer until asserting firmly, “As far as I am concerned, your mother was as white as everyone else.”

  Bob never mentioned the subject again to his father and from that moment on he knew there was no easy escape from his ancestry. To those jibes made to his face he would respond, with the same terseness his father had used, “I am as white as you are.”

  The nagging intuition consolidated into something nameable. His Grade Six teacher had been talking about the bravery of the men who had discovered the Blue Mountains. Lawson, Wentworth, Blaxland were names that still dotted the area in which he lived. It was “the natives” who had tried to stop them. All eyes turned to Bob Brecht. He felt their stares boring into his brown skin with hatred. It was he who had tried to prevent the explorers from crossing the mountains. It was he who had killed white settlers. Bob reddened, he willed himself to disappear, wishing himself as white as thick smoke. He wished that “the natives” had not been troublesome, that they had been helpful, or just disappeared, rather than causing him this public shame.

  He came to dread history classes. He would scan through the assigned texts to see what nasty revelations might be made, to find what accusations might be levelled at him: “the natives”, “the blacks” and “the Aborigines”. When, in Grade Eight, he was issued F.L.W. Wood’s A Concise History of Australia, he was relieved that it began with the way the Greeks and Romans hypothesised about the existence of a southern land. The text then told of the Dutch who, upon arriving on its shores, declared that there was “no sign of gold or spices or civilized inhabitants” in Australia.

  The Aborigines were not mentioned until the landing of the First Fleet. But, Bob noted with relief, they quickly vanished.

  The Endeavour anchored about 2 p.m., and the Englishmen watched the natives cook their fish for dinner. Then a party of 30 or 40 rowed off towards the land. As they drew near, two natives seized their spears and prepared to resist the landing party. After a quarter of an hours fruitless parley, the natives threw their spears at the boats, and the Englishmen fired muskets loaded with small shot. The natives ran away, and the party landed in peace.

  Bob found only one other reference in his book to Aborigines, and that was in relation to something called the Tasmanian Black War. Here, too, Aborigines showed their propensity to disappear:

  In 1830, therefor, [Governor Arthur] made an effort to round up the natives, but they slipped through the fingers of soldiers and settlers. The white men complained that a native could run like a dog, and, if he chose, look just like a tree stump. Arthur’s black drive cost £30,000, and 3,000 men took part in it. But they caught only a woman and a small boy, who had been asleep under a log. The Governor therefore very sensibly gave the work to men who really understood the natives, in particular George A. Robinson and John Batman. These men collected the remnants of the natives — fewer than 200 — and settled them on Flinders Island. There they rapidly died off, and Tasmania was left to the white men.

  His class would not study this “Black War”, but the knowledge of it left Bob with one nagging question: if the Aborigines all disappeared, why were his brothers and sisters here? Since his father was white with a German surname, Bob figured, he was only half-Aboriginal. But when the children in his class had stared at him accusingly, the white part of him seemed to have vanished from their view, as though Europeans could disappear like Aborigines were supposed to.

  Bob decided that he just needed to make the European part more prominent, make it reappear, and then he would no longer feel guilty or ashamed. He needed to embrace, he thought, the things that white people seemed to admire so much. Bob found these virtues in the story that had been the source of his embarrassment and ridicule — the crossing of the Blue Mountains. Bob reread the story that his history book told:

  They kept to the right ridge until almost at the end of their journey, and so found a way through the mountain barrier. It was desperately hard work. They had to fight their way through the undergrowth and over rough, dry country … On the 28th day they were on Mount York. Here they had lost the main ridge, but fortunately, at this particular point, there was a way down into the valley … They had crossed the region of barren sandstone and found the fertile, well-watered country which lay beyond … So the little party turned and tramped back towards Sydney. They were tired and ill from hardship, but triumphant, for they had overcome an obstacle which for more than twenty years had defied the bravest and most skilful explorers in the country.

  W.C. Wentworth, Bob would learn, had done other things to bring civilisation to Australia. He had advocated trial by jury, established the Australian in 1824, promoted freedom of the press, and insisted on self-government. Born in the colony, he was a cattle farmer by the age of eighteen, later a successful lawyer, an orator who could often carry an audience with him and convince them almost against their own will. By 1836, Wentworth was one of the richest squatters in the colony and, to protect the rights of those, like him, who were trying to make the country prosper, had attempted to draw up a “Squatters Constitution”, a version of which became law in 1855.

  These achievements seemed to be the sorts of deeds that spelt success for white people, for people not stained with black like him. If he’d been the heir of an explorer or a squatter, a descendant of W.C. Wentworth, his classmates would have looked at him admiringly, perhaps enviously.

  The recent war, the one that was ending when the Brecht children entered the orphanage, had renewed the hatred of Germans that had been simmering since the Great War. “Brecht” gave Bob the added shame of association with another loathed presence, but irritated him more because the German name meant nothing to him. His father had an accent but never spoke a word of German or talked about his homeland. Bob knew no German other than “Kraut”, which he thought was the German word for “German”. And although he could not find Germany on a map, he had two brothers who had disappeared to fight the Germans and never returned.

  People never noticed Bob’s whiteness unless it meant something bad, like Germans. However, his name could be easily forgiven. Thomas, Frank, Charles or Benny would jump to his defence if anyone tried to make an issue or a joke of it. “Leave off, Bob’s alright.” But they were silent when mention was made of explorers impeded by Aborigines.

  At night, however, amongst the sounds of the other boys breathing and snoring, Bob’s sense of abandonment would surface. Bob’s life, though missing many pieces, was filled with the intrigues of the daily lives of the boys, and eventually the girls, wit
hin the home. He even looked forward to the outdoor chores, when it wasn’t cold, to tending the vegetables and feeding the chickens. A monthly roster dictated his turns for cleaning toilets, bathrooms or dormitories, or tidying up the yards. Even the cleaning, with the lemon smell of the disinfectant, was tolerable. Bob revelled in the hard work. Vigorously scrubbing, he would breathe in deeply, the citrus fumes permeating his dreams.

  From his place in the long line of beds, he would think about his mother, his scented fingers held close to his nose. Although she had died when he was only five, he could still remember his hands grabbing at the loose flesh of her stomach as he stood behind her, his arms around her in a hug. He could see her setting the plate of biscuits in front of him and chiding him when he grabbed a handful. He could see her long dark hair falling around her face as she bent to tie his shoelaces or straighten his collar.

  It seemed that things were bigger and slower when the lights were out. What seemed frantic during the routines of the day would stretch out slowly over the empty hours of night. At night he could reflect on the memories of long ago in a boisterous house. He could feel his inconsequential body disappearing and his thoughts and mind growing as large as the whole ward, until he encompassed all within it. It was this Bob, this larger-than- the-physical him, that felt like the real Bob Brecht. At these moments, he was bigger than all the things that trapped him and kept him small.