A FEW WEEKS before the Christmas of 1971, when I was six months pregnant, my destiny changed drastically. It happened due to my inexperience of life and people, which made me a sitting duck for the unscrupulous.
A Dutch woman had roped me into a networking company—the soon-to-be-notorious Golden Products. She was like a mother to me, taking an interest in my affairs and treating me to cooking creations. I never suspected her, not even when she knocked me and James out of bed in the middle of the night to sign a contract ‘because it has to be in by morning, sorry I didn’t notice before now’. James grumbled, but did not want to deny me. We were soon in possession of a tonne of water-adulterated soap products, which we eventually gave to a monastery because we couldn’t sell them.
James didn’t know how to husband a woman. In spite of his good qualities, he had not fully come into his own manliness. His horror of the macho made him too pliable and agreeable; he didn’t have a strong will and relied on my lead. This was a big mistake.
James and I lost all of our savings to Golden Products. It was this that made him decide to head for the north of Western Australia, to work as an electrical engineer for good money. I was to be a temporary housekeeper in Perth until the baby was due. We left our belongings with a friend.
Suddenly I was without a husband and without a private space to call home. During the day, I kept house for a farmer and tried to cook Australian meals for him and his son. It was hopeless and the farmer had nothing but complaints about me. I cried as I walked around on the farm, feeling utterly alone and abandoned. As my baby’s due date got nearer, an irrepressible desire grew in me: I wanted to be with my mother for the birth of my child.
I quickly hatched a plan. Two co-drivers appeared in answer to my advertisement for a non-stop journey to Melbourne, and we left immediately in my Ford station wagon. One was an experienced male driver, the other a young American girl not really used to driving on the left side of the road, but she would do. One person was to talk to the driver to keep him or her alert, while the third slept in the back of my station wagon. That third person was most often me, at the insistence of the male driver, who wanted me to stay in one piece until after our arrival. We made it in a blur of forty-five hours, stopping only for toilets, food and petrol.
My parents were welcoming, although completely at a loss to understand my irregular actions. No information was forthcoming from them to prepare me for birthing; they didn’t appreciate that it was all new to me, and that being thirty-three years old would make a first birth more arduous. The pains soon took over. My father took me to the Box Hill hospital, where they strapped up my legs, then cut me to let the baby through. On the morning of 27 March 1972 my beautiful baby daughter was born. They whisked her away and I found myself alone in the operating theatre, where an uncontrollable urge to vomit overtook me. By the time someone arrived to clean up the mess, I had passed out. Once more—as when the warts were removed at Benalla—the after-effects of the anaesthetic would have their way with me.
I first saw my little girl at four that afternoon, when I finally woke up. I was full of remorse that she had been such a long time without her mother: I imagined life-long scarring from emotional deprivation, and trembled with guilt and anxiety as I offered her her first drink at the breast. What a pleasant and relaxing sensation to have my baby suck from my nipples! I felt we were bonding.
Still thoroughly washed out, I went back to my parents’ place two days later, while the stitches were still healing.
JAMES FLEW TO Melbourne to be with me and little Caroline. He arrived three days after the birth and felt terrible about it. When I was well enough, we said goodbye again, piled all our belongings into and on top of our station wagon and once more crossed the great continent, to a town far to the north of Perth, where a good income awaited us.
James worked as an electrical engineer. I was employed in the company canteen, a lone woman in a sea of men with hungry looks, while the kind wife of the personnel manager looked after baby Caroline. I took away the dirty dishes and cleaned the tables, all the while catching with supersensitive ears the opinions about me flying about the room. Three tables away, a group of men were discussing the size of my breasts, wondering if they were real. Because I was breast-feeding, my breasts were larger than they had ever been, but they were still on the small side compared with the posters I imagined to be in their rooms. Their interest was not in the size, but whether my breasts were real or not. It bothered me. Without looking at them, I moved so that they bounced.
‘Geez!’ one of them exclaimed in a subdued tone—he didn’t want me to know they were talking about me. ‘She bounced them just as we were talking about them!’‘They’re real, all right!’ said another, but there were no favourable comments about their size. Ah, well.
In the kitchen was Kev the chef—a small, round, congenial man—and his offsider, Ross. Kev was Irish and had a very welcome sense of humour. His jokes brought out the best in me. I genuinely liked him and could feel his private glow of satisfaction at being such a hit with me; but that’s where I believed it ended—until one day when Kev had to go to hospital for an operation on a cyst.
The next day when I turned up for work, I was confronted by Kev’s stocky wife, Janice, menacing me with a large scullery broom. ‘You keep out of my husband’s way!’ she shouted, waving the broom at me hysterically.
I was nonplussed, but Ross filled me in. Kev had talked under the anaesthetic and said all sorts of things about me in his unconscious state, proving to his dismayed wife that he was in love with the ‘tall willowy blonde’.
When Kev came back, things weren’t the same. He avoided eye contact with me, and made a point of blaming me when a chicken went missing from the freezer. It was thoroughly miserable and I planned to quit by the end of the week.
But Ross wasn’t done with me yet. He believed Janice’s story that I’d been dallying with her husband and he wanted a piece of the action for himself. Ross’s wife was expecting a baby and she wasn’t available for sex. I was appalled when he approached me and said he wanted to meet me at my home. I refused outright, not only because I was married to James and had no intention of being unfaithful to him, but because I felt not the slightest attraction towards Ross.
He came to my house anyway and would not take no for an answer. He was in my living room, all on fire, raving mad. Why hadn’t I locked the door? I knew I had to be quick on my feet, think of something to prevent him touching me, but my mind had gone numb, my limbs refused to show me what to do. I backed away as he came for me—uselessly, since we soon hit the wall. He had me in his grasp and started desperately groping. Spotting the bedroom, he steered me into it, pushing me backwards. My legs shook with apprehension and loathing, but at the same time it registered in my reeling brain that he would do worse things if I resisted.
He smacked me onto the bed and dragged my panties down. ‘Take those off!’ he thundered. He was all fired up now, his hair falling over his red contorted face. I did as I was told, and he entered me with a sickening thud. It was over in a moment: he gave some more desperate shoves then went limp. His animal lust had been satisfied.
Trembling, I cleaned myself up. I didn’t realise I had been raped. I was still shaking when James came home, but I said nothing, not wanting to upset him and not wanting Ross to get into trouble for his temporary insanity. Ross had begged me not to talk, of course, after he had zipped up and regained a shaky sanity. Wasn’t Ross like my father, except that he had forcibly demanded silence?
Unconsciously, I was repeating the old pattern, adhering to that childhood response of acquiescence and silence. Ross was fortunate to have chosen as his victim a woman who was true to her word. I resigned from the canteen and spent more time with my little daughter, Caroline.
THE MOST INNOCENT event can bring about huge change. My parents announced their intention to come to the west to visit their two daughters for Christmas and New Year. They would stay with Berta, who now lived
in Perth.
I decided to head south in the car and leave ten-month-old Caroline with a couple who had become our friends. My advertisement for a co-driver was answered by Aaron, who worked some distance away at the iron mine in Pannawonica and was going home to Perth for a break with his friends from university who were all on the loose for the summer holidays. Aaron got himself over to my town. The deal was that on the way back from Perth I would drop him off at Pannawonica and then make my way back home alone.
He was nineteen, tall and slim, with loose blond wavy hair to his shoulders. Our hands touched as I explained the workings of the Ford’s gears to him. The spontaneous charge was so electric that it caught us both by surprise, and we couldn’t help showing it.
If I had been a mature woman, I would have closed off that circuit which connected me sexually to Aaron. But I wasn’t mature. I hadn’t enjoyed anything like a normal teenage life, and had minimal experience of boyfriends. That in itself made things difficult, but there was more: I felt a powerful urge to explore my sexuality, to unravel its mystery. I thought of James and my love for him, but James’s friends were about to be proved right: I didn’t have it in me to deny this fantastic new stream of adolescent energy. Although I spent some time with my parents in Perth—notably New Year’s Eve, when I fell asleep from sheer boredom well before midnight—my attention was with Aaron.
He was a student of architecture on a six-month break from university to earn some money up north. Most of my encounters with him were at his parents’ house, while they were away on holidays. We saw movies together. A Clockwork Orange was everyone’s must-see and made me incredibly wild with sexual energy and the satisfying feeling that I was, finally, a woman of the times. It was a strange thought, since I was thirty-four after all. We swam in the pool with lots of his friends, partied to his music—new and wonderful experiences for me, full of the beat of life—and spent many hours in embraces so natural and sweet and young that I forgot my other life.
The time finally came to return and Aaron and I packed everything into the car. I said goodbye to my parents, whom I had neglected, hoping that my sister had made up for my absences.
Neither Aaron nor I were wide awake at the start of our journey; the night before had been one last party, and the last night we would be together. We stopped once along the way to fall into each other’s arms under the shelter of a bridge—which didn’t add to our alertness. We did notice, however, as the car swung off the main road onto the dirt track leading to Pannawonica, that the rainy season had begun. What that meant, Aaron explained, was that we couldn’t risk stopping again—we would have to travel non-stop to the very end to avoid getting bogged. Getting bogged was unthinkable; being stuck out in this bush might mean death. Few people were mad enough to travel long distances by car in the wet season, and if we broke down we would be isolated with scarcely any supplies.
Hour after hour, Aaron drove on in the faithful Falcon, a silver machine with a powerful engine. Suddenly the car went off the road onto the shoulder, then into the adjoining paddock, jumping wildly over rocks and uneven ground, jolting Aaron awake. He had fallen asleep at the wheel!
It was my turn. To change seats, we climbed over each other, grabbing at the steering wheel, keeping the accelerator down and the engine going. We agreed to keep each other awake, but it was no good. I fell asleep too after a while, and it was sheer luck that there was no ditch at the side of the road to halt our madness, no kangaroos, no sheep and no insurmountable rocks. The ground beneath our wheels was mostly mud, sometimes gritty sand. Temporary firmness would suddenly give way to more slipping and sliding. It was safest to ride on the tufts of grass in the middle of the track, to keep at least two wheels from sliding.
Our indescribable exhaustion overshadowed the feeling of relief when we finally reached our destination. At Pannawonica, the officer in charge of the camp came out of his office as we drew up. Suddenly it was time to say goodbye. Aaron left quickly, so quickly that the pain of it only registered in a very tired part of me.
The officer saw the fatigued state I was in, sat me down in his office, and left to get me some dinner. When he returned, he found me sitting bolt upright on his hard wooden chair, so fast asleep that he thought I was dead! I woke up and ate some food, but the car—poor abused horse—was too overstrained to start up again a few hours later. I wasn’t sorry; I was glad to rest overnight. I flew home early in the morning, in a Cessna with the postman.
JAMES DESERVED BETTER than this, but he had chosen me for his wife. It was hard to watch him suffer because I no longer wanted to be with him, so instead I turned my attention away. I didn’t intend to hurt him, but how else could he interpret my behaviour? I didn’t clearly know myself what was driving me to break up what we had together; all I knew was there was a restlessly growing urge in me to leave.
James found it impossible to discuss the details of our separation. I had my own money and would use it to rent a house in Perth. As we no longer owned a car, we both flew to Perth. From there James boarded a plane for Sydney, wanting space and time to get over the bitter wounds of our parting. His letters to my sister Liesbet, whose sympathy he could rely on, carried his grief and, briefly, his anger. I still carry a great regret for his hurt, for he was a thoroughly good man.
Our marriage was over. Aaron—the catalyst for my newly awakened sexual drive—was also gone, but I was now open to a new sort of passionate connection. I looked in the mirror and saw that I was beautiful. My long blonde hair fell gracefully around a face with smooth fair skin and clear grey-blue eyes. My body was lithe and graceful and I had long shapely legs. I was in my prime at thirty-four and I felt invincible.
‘This is how I am going to be for ever,’ I told myself. It would take years—decades, in fact—for me to come to my senses. I had no idea then of course, how I would feel at the age of fifty-five, having been cavalier with the vitality of my own body and the emotions of others. ‘Your biography becomes your biology,’ says Caroline Myss in her book, The Anatomy of the Spirit. I think she is right, although the statement is a little on the grim side.
I installed myself and my daughter Caroline in a house with generous proportions in Floreat Park. Barely two weeks later, I advertised for a new husband in the personal columns, stating that to be eligible the pretender had to beat me at chess. I wasn’t all that good at chess, but it had been too easy to beat James.
Several would-be suitors turned up, and one even returned three times, but I beat them all. None of them had the presence of mind to kick the chessboard aside and just take me out, for goodness sake! Shortly after, I told my tale to a taxi driver, who quietly stopped at a convenient coffee shop, took out his chess set from the boot and beat me convincingly. It took me down a peg or two, and redeemed my faith in men. No, I didn’t marry him. I never even saw him again!
In spite of my confidence in my good looks and my adventurous spirit, my self-esteem was really still in tatters. Deep inside was an unacknowledged hurt, abused and frightened child.
BUY ME
IT WAS EARLY spring, 1973. I never thought of asking James to support Caroline and myself, and as for social security—it was some time before I even learned of its existence. When I did, my heart filled with appreciation for such a generous welfare system. I used it when I needed to, but I didn’t believe a person could live decently off social security. I started looking for work in the local papers. The option of teaching felt totally uninspiring, and so when I saw an advert for unskilled workers to make plastic rainwear in a clothing factory in Balcatta I went to check it out. I wanted to see what life would be like doing something useful with my hands. My mother was a seamstress; was there something of her in me that could help me earn my living here?
The manageress looked askance at me, but ushered me into the large shed that was the factory. The air was saturated with the smell of plastic and the oil that the women used to stop the slippery material escaping their needles. A steady drone filled the air from
the rows and rows of sewing machines, all tended by women with bent backs—mostly Italians and Greeks, I thought. I suspected I was in a sweatshop.
‘How much an hour?’ I asked. The manageress had to answer this one, but how could she coolly say ‘$2.50 an hour’ when the average rate of pay was about $8.00? ‘Before tax?’ I said in surprise. ‘Yes, before tax.’ The manageress studied my face. Was she wondering if I would report her factory to the unions for the exploitation of women who didn’t have enough English to know their rights?
These women are prostituting their skills and energy for a pittance, I thought to myself. Prostitution! Once the word entered my head, the next thought appeared:
I would do better, I told myself. I would prostitute my body for good money and have fun, as well.
As long as I enjoyed myself, my young, inexperienced and only seemingly sane brain rambled on, I wouldn’t be prostituting myself nearly as much as those poor women in the sweatshop. Or anyone else, for that matter, who worked just for money—as I might have done, by going back to teaching when my heart wasn’t in it.
My first step was to find a woman to share my house. Her name was Kelly, and although she hesitated when I told her of my imminent plans, she agreed to be my babysitter. Caroline now had a little playmate: Kelly’s son, Jimmy. Sharing was not new to me, having lived so much in community, and it was much less lonely, having Kelly and another child around.
I knew no one in the sex industry and, typically, asked no one for guidance. I began exploring the possibilities for this different, daring career by perusing the personals in the daily newspaper. Escorts required to accompany gentlemen; phone Stella’s for interview caught my eye.
‘Stella’s Escort Agency. How can I help you?’ A husky voice, almost male but soothing, answered the phone.
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