ABOUT THE BOOK
Jocelyn Moorhouse has a successful career as a gifted scriptwriter and film director, as well as a maintaining a marriage and a family of four children. How did she do it? Her memoir is a moving story of growing up with adoring parents and siblings. She knew early on that she wanted to be a filmmaker, and her dreams were encouraged by her family and by her teachers.
Meeting P.J. Hogan, becoming parents and filmmakers together was a turning point. But when they discovered that two of their children were autistic, Jocelyn’s life turned upside down. In Unconditional Love, she talks from the heart, with humour and intelligence, about her fears for her children, the highs and lows in her international career, about Hollywood and home, and about her love for what she does best—filmmaking and motherhood.
For Spike, Lily, Jack and Maddy
CONTENTS
COVER PAGE
ABOUT THE BOOK
TITLE PAGE
INTRODUCTION
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT PAGE
Introduction
In the end, we’ll all become stories.
MARGARET ATWOOD
My mother had a big green typewriter. It sat on our dining-room table, along with piles of notes and typewritten pages. We kids were all told not to touch these pages, because Mummy had a system we were not to disrupt. The machine had a little bell that pinged when the carriage reached the edge of the paper. This was a cue for Mum to swipe a silver lever that would shift the page up and slide the carriage back to its starting position. Then she would start typing the next line, the keys clickety-clacking at a furious pace.
Mum was always writing something: letters, stories, even radio plays. Sometimes, when I was a teenager, Mum would show me poems she had written about me, but I would cringe. I was still childish enough to feel awkward about my mother’s overflowing emotions. I loved the fact that she loved me, but that knowledge wasn’t new. Now I want to slap myself for being so ungrateful. Mum stopped showing me her poems, but she never stopped writing them. After she died, I found boxes and boxes of her writing, including over a hundred poems about her children.
Now, here I am, writing a book that I hope my children will read one day. I want to write about being a mother, and raising four extraordinary children. Being their parent is like having an intense love affair with four people at the same time. And I want to write about making movies and writing screenplays.
I come from a long line of storytellers. My mother’s grandfather, Denis Tobin, could not read or write, but he would gather his grandchildren around him at the end of each day, and fill their heads with marvellous stories. The best stories were the ones from when Denis was a child on his family’s sheep station. He would have to sleep outside overnight to protect the family’s precious flock from the dingoes. One night he got so cold he decided to grab a sheep to keep warm. The ensuing wrestling match between boy and sheep was so wild that the entire flock fled in terror into the forest. Mum used to tell that story, and many others, to my older brother Greg, my younger sister Kathy and me, carrying on the tradition and keeping us enthralled for hours.
We all carry stories in us. The stories our loved ones share with us about their lives give us clues to who they really are. I was afraid I would never have any stories to tell when I grew up. ‘Nothing has happened to me,’ I complained to Mum.
‘Don’t worry, Jossy,’ she reassured me. ‘When you grow up, things will happen that you can turn into stories.’
It’s true. A lot of things have happened, and I do have stories to tell.
By the age of eighteen, I loved photography, music and storytelling with an obsessive passion. That’s when it dawned on me that filmmaking could be a wonderful way for me to combine all my passions. It felt like a piece in the puzzle had dropped into place—this will be my life.
At twenty-three I fell in love with another young filmmaker, P.J. Hogan. Five years later we married. We had a baby boy, made some movies together in Australia, and got invited to make movies in Los Angeles. Hollywood! The real thing! Palm trees, beaches, glittering premieres. We lived in the USA for fifteen years. During that time, three more children were born. So many dreams came true, while others came crashing down. Two of our four kids are autistic. Our family shifted into what felt like a parallel universe. Everything looked the same, but life had altered irrevocably. Filmmaking took a back seat while we searched for a cure for autism.
We never found one. And that’s okay. What began as a quest to help our kids be ‘normal’ evolved into a journey of acceptance, understanding and love. That’s the story I want to tell.
1
Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding.
DIANE ARBUS
In addition to being a writer, Mum was a shutterbug. She was the daughter of a professional photographer. She always had a camera with her. Her love of images must have been in her blood. And she passed it on to me. She taught me how to use my first still camera. Then she taught me how to use her Super 8 movie camera, and how to edit the footage. It’s all her fault I became a film director.
My parents were completely in love for their entire sixty-year marriage. They wrote to each other whenever they were apart. Their letters were love letters, funny and warm. My mother also kept diaries. In all, I have found thousands of pages of her writing.
Jack Moorhouse and Denice Tobin-Wood met on a tennis court in Melbourne in 1950. Dad and his best pal, David, were playing doubles with David’s girlfriend Dierdre. She had brought along a friend from work, Denice, a teller at the Union Bank. Dad loved to tell the story of how, every time Denice hit the tennis ball, the exertion would cause her undies to slip down a little.
‘The elastic was loose!’ Mum would always shout when he got to this part of the story.
Jack, a handsome young accountant, couldn’t help noticing Denice constantly hitching up her undies under her tennis dress. He thought it was undignified and completely adorable. Denice was an outgoing country girl, a bit of a tomboy, with her black curls cut short, and a beautiful smile. Jack was a shy boy from Middle Park who was very smart. They were immediately smitten. They used to go to the St Kilda Town Hall and dance to local bands playing hits by Perry Como and Bing Crosby. When rock-and-roll arrived in the mid 1950s, they embraced it and became mad twisters!
They married in 1951. She was only twenty; he was twenty-six. He used to lovingly refer to her as his ‘child bride’, even when she was in her seventies. Jack was conservative, straight-laced. Denice was spontaneous, adventurous.
For their honeymoon, Jack and Denice spent one night in the Blue Mountains, then drove, with their best man David, all the way back to Melbourne so Jack could return to his job at the Union Bank. They managed to buy a small weatherboard house in Croydon, then an outer suburb on the edge of the bush, and lived there with hardly any furniture, completely happy. It took them a while to conceive. Eventually, my brother Greg was born in 1957. He had black curls and impossibly long eyelashes. I was born in 1960, and eighteen months later came my baby sister Kathy.
Denice had been born during the Gre
at Depression. Her father, Archibald Virtue Gilmour Wood (what a name!), was a journalist and photographer, born and raised in Brooklyn, on the Hawkesbury River. Her mother, Mary ‘Mid’ Tobin, was a seamstress, the daughter of Bathurst sheep farmers. Mid was twenty-nine, working for her dressmaking aunt in Darlinghurst, when she met Archie, ten years younger than her. A fan of fashion, Mid had chopped off her waist-length hair into a sleek bob and embraced the life of a flapper, as had her sisters Lou and Alma. Her other sister, Nellie, was studying music at the Conservatorium in Sydney. Besotted with Mid, Archie married her in 1926, when he was twenty. They decided to merge their last names to create a new surname for them both, Tobin-Wood.
Secure work was hard to come by, and the young couple moved home many times in the 1930s. When no jobs could be found, they stayed at Taberatong, the Tobin family sheep station. Soon they had two children to look after, Denice and her younger brother, Hunter Raleigh Tobin-Wood (another magnificent name). At one time Archie worked on a ship, shovelling coal into the boiler, and would send money home. He was slight of build and the work was exhausting, but times were desperate.
By 1939 the Tobin-Woods were back at Taberatong. Too proud to sleep in the main house, Archie built a bark hut half a mile away, and the little family slept there. He strung up hammocks for the kids, and built a proper bed for Mid and himself out of saplings and bark, three feet off the dirt floor. Mum always laughed when she recollected the two large goannas who would park themselves below the kids’ hammocks in the early mornings. I don’t know how my Grandma put up with it, but she knew it was important for Archie to feel like he was providing for his family. Every day he would walk to nearby Sofala, an old gold-rush town, and pan for alluvial gold in the Turon River. Sometimes he would catch rabbits or kangaroos for meat, and sell the skins.
Archie did allow Mid and the children to take their meals with their grandparents. My Uncle Hunter remembers sitting at the large Taberatong dining table for lunch, when Archie entered the room and announced he had joined the army. It was December 1939. Only three months earlier, Australia had joined England in declaring war on Germany. Hunter’s mother and aunts burst into hysterical tears. His only thought as a five-year-old was, ‘Well, this will delay lunch even longer now!’ Desperate for a reliable income, Archie had chosen to become a soldier for the steady wage it ensured.
Archie was away from home for most of World War Two. He served in the Middle East, and one of the many boxes of photographs my mother kept safe all her life contains pictures he took in Egypt. One tiny snapshot shows some Australian soldiers dwarfed by the great pyramids. Archie soon became an officer and by the time he left the army in 1945, he was a major with a handful of medals, which he brought home to Sydney. He also brought back a German bayonet, a jar of desert sand (with a dead scarab beetle in it) and an empty German mortar shell. Grandma Wood used to let me polish the shell with Brasso. I used to stare at the scarab beetle in the jar for hours, imagining I was in the deserts of Egypt. The grains seemed much coarser than Australian sand.
Archie arrived home to a daughter and son in their early teens who barely remembered him. Mum always said it was a difficult adjustment for the family. She had grown up at Taberatong. It had been an idyllic six years in the country, with beloved grandparents, all the grandchildren, and their mothers—Mid, Lou, Alma, Pat and Nellie—together, like something out of Hope and Glory, the John Boorman movie about life during the London Blitz.
The Tobin-Wood family moved back to Sydney. Archie was now an angry man, who drank and gambled and fought with his wife and daughter. He was obsessed with table manners and would hit the backs of Denice’s and Hunter’s fingers if they used the wrong cutlery at lunch. He was full of contradictions. He made his daughter a diary for her thirteenth birthday. Every page featured a different watercolour illustration of a wildflower. She loved it and it became her treasured personal diary. One night, when his friends were over, Archie wanted to show the book to the grown-ups, so they could see his handpainted illustrations. Denice was embarrassed to bring it out because it was filled with her personal writing. He insisted she bring the diary to him. When she did, he began to read it aloud to the guests—her secret thoughts. They all laughed. Mum never forgave him for humiliating her.
Archie died in 1969 from mouth cancer. He was sixty-three. He had been a chain-smoker his whole life. I was nine when he died, so I only have a few memories of him. The Archie I remember was a funny man who did magic tricks for his grandkids, and who always hid Cadbury Cherry Ripe chocolate bars up his sleeve for us to find. I remember his box of round poker chips, some red, some white. I remember a set of tiny porcelain elves and the little display case Archie made to present them to me as a birthday present. Glass walls and a green-velvet floor. The case broke years ago. I still have one elf, missing an arm.
Years after he died, Greg, Kathy and I used to play with Archie’s old photographic equipment, which was stored in Grandma’s dusty garage. I remember the glass negatives stacked willy-nilly and the old studio camera. It was large with cardboard bellows that slid in and out, open and shut, moving the lens back and forth. We thought it was a mysterious and magical object. We played with it so much we eventually tore holes in the bellows. I feel pangs of guilt at how roughly we played with those irreplaceable items.
Mid was grief-stricken at losing her Archie so young. She had always assumed, because she was ten years older, that she would die before him. They had fought like cat and dog (about politics, religion, money) and she loved him ferociously. I can remember hearing Grandma Wood talking to someone on the phone soon after Archie’s death. I was lying on her couch, my usual spot when I was sick, when she said to her friend, ‘I’ve had enough life. I am ready to die now.’
Terrified she was about to die on the spot, I jumped off the couch and ran to her. ‘Don’t you want to see me grow up?’ I cried.
Both of my grandmas became widows in the late 1960s. Each weekend would be devoted to spending time with them. On Saturday, it was Grandma Wood’s house in outer-suburban Ringwood, where we were allowed to roam free and explore. Mid would create an extravagant afternoon tea for us every time we came. She would bake an apple pie for Greg, a pavlova for Kathy, and a cheesecake for me. Every Saturday!
On Sunday, it was Grandma Moorhouse’s house in inner-suburban Middle Park. Grandma Moorhouse did not bake. She lived in a small, dark terrace house, the same house where my father and his brother Ted had grown up. Sometimes Peg would play hymns on the piano for us, but mostly she would sit with Mum and Dad. She missed her husband, Joss. (I was named after my grandpa, Joshua Moorhouse.) Grandpa Joss had died unexpectedly at the age of sixty-five. He had gone to fetch some pills from the bedroom for Peg and had never come back. She found him sprawled across their double bed. His heart had stopped. The night it happened, Mum woke Kathy, Greg and me from our beds to tell us our Dad had lost his father. We saw him crying for the first time in our lives and were frightened.
I only have sweet memories of Grandpa Moorhouse, a quiet bear of a man who exuded gentleness. Grandma Moorhouse, however, always seemed so sad and bitter. It was understood that children got on her nerves. Greg, Kathy and I would be herded into the piano room and told not to touch anything. The room was full of small porcelain ornaments, milkmaids and praying angels. There were also teapots shaped like houses. I loved those. I always imagined fairies were living inside them. I also loved her little crystal chandelier, a mantle lustre, which sat on the windowsill to catch the light. Sometimes it would reflect miniature rainbows onto the silent walls.
We three grandkids would listen to the old clock ticking away. When it chimed four o’clock, we knew we would be going home soon. It was always a relief. We never knew what to say to Grandma Moorhouse. We always felt uncomfortable around her. I now realise this was because Mum did not get along with her at all. She blamed her in some way for not loving our Dad enough as a boy. We didn’t know what Mum meant, and Dad never enlightened us.
Peg died in 1973. Two years later, in November 1975, Gough Whitlam was dismissed as Prime Minister of Australia by the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr. Mid, a staunch Labor voter, was so incensed at this outrage that she had a massive stroke. She died a few weeks later on December 7th.
2
It is the power of memory that gives rise to the power of imagination.
AKIRA KUROSAWA
Images have always fascinated me. At a very young age, I would watch dust motes drifting around my room, illuminated by a shaft of light. At other times, I would half close my eyes to see the prisms of light distorted by the moisture in my eyes. I could do this for hours, enjoying the kaleidoscopic shapes and colours. My earliest memories are vividly coloured, and imbued with emotional resonance. I can still retrieve images from when I was a child, even from when I was a toddler. My shoes. They are dark-brown leather, and sit neatly together on my red-stockinged feet. I am in a stroller. I love the feeling of the wheels on the footpath beneath me. My favourite bit is when the stroller is lifted up and back when we come to the kerb. The cement path rolls away beneath me. I am safe and happy.
Now I am in Daddy’s arms. He wears a white shirt. I can feel his warm chest through the thin fabric. Men’s voices. We are at a bar, a counter. I see leering grins; I smell beer and tobacco up close. These are Daddy’s friends. I don’t like them. Their voices are too low, too loud. The only man I like is Daddy. He has blue eyes.
Soft light and shadows. I am sinking into a puffy bed. My mum strokes my forehead, the way I like it at bedtime. She sings the same songs she always sings, ‘Mexicali Rose’, ‘You Are My Sunshine’ and ‘Tea for Two’, and recites the prayers ‘God Bless’ and ‘The Lord’s Prayer’. Then she goes into Greg’s room and sings the same songs, recites the same prayers. I like hearing it all twice.
Pastel green, a kitchen wall. Morning light. I am in a highchair. I see Greg with his curly hair below me at the small Formica kitchen table. Steel trims in ripples around the sides of the table. Daddy standing there, looking lost. He has made us cocoa, but we have rejected it. It is not how Mummy makes it. He has failed in his attempt to be Mummy. He seems perplexed. Now another image: Mummy arriving home, at last, from somewhere. She has a bundle of pale cloth in her arms. She walks past me and doesn’t notice me. I see her legs. I love them. Dark shoes. Pantyhose. My brother on a dark-red trike. The back door slides open into the kitchen. I follow. The bundle is my baby sister, Kathy. She is important.
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