Part 2 - Riding the winds of reflection

Part 2 - Riding the winds of reflection

Until I started composing the leaves in Part 1, I left my past largely untouched, apart from one brief moment late in a Mexican afternoon. It was unexplored territory, hidden from everyone, including myself. If I had ever turned a light, as Karl Popper suggested, onto that forgotten region it was only a small and weak torchlight for a few seconds and directed to the fringes.  The process of writing, reflection and sharing of various drafts of the memoir had brought me to the cusp of a critical decision. Would I exchange the torchlight for a searchlight and was I willing to alter my history to account for new facts? I had shared earlier drafts of my stories with a small circle of friends to get their feedback but had hesitated to share these drafts with my family, especially my mother.  My mother, now separated from Dad, was not on the internet so my choices about how to share were limited. I could mail it or I could travel north to Devonport and ask her to read it.

 My past is also her story. By sharing, was I asking to open a conversation about my natural father and my early years? Would she read it or talk about those times? Throughout history, authors, especially where they directly mined their own lives for content, inspiration and story ideas, had been confronted by their choice to reveal secrets long kept buried by others in their family or to form judgments favourable or unfavourable on the actions and inactions of those around them.  These authors, often simplistically depicted family members as villains, self-centered or they selfishly opened difficult and intensely private decisions to public judgment and walked away from the fallout. Others have learnt more about themselves by learning to understand the ‘others’ around them -- to appreciate the lover, young girl/boy, old woman/man who before, simply wore the label ‘mother’ or ‘father’. In my life, my mother had simply not discussed or hinted at period after I was born until my first tentative memories.

I half played with the idea of heading to Devonport, over the Christmas period, to share the stories with mum. However I jumped at the slightest excuse to delay the journey northwards and into my past.

The decision was made for me. Lance, my son, had headed north on a Sunday night, after Christmas, to visit a girlfriend’s family in Devonport. In the glove compartment of his car were his sister’s Falls Festival tickets.  Lance was not returning home until after the festival. By 6am on Monday morning, with a new version of the draft printed out, I was on the Midlands Highway playing Dylan Live 1975 and The Clash with two missions: retrieve the tickets; and share my reflections with mum.

Mission 1 was easily accomplished.  I reached Devonport around 9am, had a late breakfast with Lance and caught up with Dad. Mission 2 was just as easy. I made a quick visit to Mum, explained I had been writing about my journey and had come north looking for old photos but would also like her to read the stories. We arranged to meet the next day for lunch. I left the printed out stories on her kitchen counter.

During the afternoon, Dad’s brother in law from Queenstown, Kevin popped in to chat with Dad. He was in Devonport for his regular visit to watch the Devonport athletic carnival. The afternoon passed in a lazy conversation between Dad and Kevin, two men in their 60s who had intricate and overlapping histories of family, work and sport and the experience of living most of their lives in one small remote town and working for the Mt Lyell Mining Company.

I always had difficulty keeping track of family conversations. Dad and Kevin were recalling the past, mostly about their workmates from West Lyell and stories connected to playing footy in the 1960s on Queenstown’s famous gravel oval. The conversation was an ongoing ebb and flow of free association, name recall and a challenge for me to piece together bits and pieces of stories and keep up with a constant turnover of characters and relationships.

Dad “His mother worked in the corner shop, she had married Buster’s son Old Flabby….”

Kevin “ You mean Doreen’s cousin Nell who lived up near the smelter who married the guy at the pump station before she took up with the oldest boy of the Craigbourne’s.”

Dad: “Dickie James from the Comstock?”

Kevin “You mean Stewie Jones played half back for Gormie when Tiger Barnes was coach.”

As I tried to align their oral history with my faint knowledge of places and people, my carefully created understanding of my own history was flipped on its head by another turn in the conversation.

Kevin “He played for Smelters with Dougie Gamble.”

Dad “Yeah Dougie was a good player, I played against him” ….turning to me and in a rare venture into the personal simply announced “that was your real dad”.

I stopped listening, as I struggled to take this in, and the conversation headed off into new side tunnels.

In my history, Doug Gamble was simply a name on my original birth certificate and a man who had exited stage left before the real drama of my life had really started. To this point he had no history, no presence and no real story that connected at all with mine. Now his ghost had returned and it had played footy against the only man I had called Dad.  Where was I in this story? If my Dad had played against Dougie it had to have been in the early 1960s after I was born. Nothing in the fragments of my past or photos had suggested an earlier association with the West Coast.  However old information started to have newer connotations. When Mum had taken us to Queenstown in 1966/1967 her parents and brothers were already living or working there. How long had they been there?  A long forgotten memory resurfaced where as a very young boy I was watching my Mother’s brothers walking up the old Sand Hill, after a day working at the mines, at the top end of Queenstown, near the Central Queenstown Primary School. This memory had always been out of synchwith the way I had constructed my history. Now I was sitting there with new pieces of a puzzle and did not want to pry further until I had talked with mum.

Later that night I started to sort through and scan the old photos. With each photo especially those of my mother when she was a young woman, I looked closely at any men in the picture. Was this man my father? That one? Was that man in the background a cousin or family friend? Meanwhile, Dad and I kept up a conversation about footy and relatives. We have very few areas of common ground or interests. He has never read and all his spare time has been spent working on cars (he was an auto-electrician), in the garden or doing up the house. The only travel he is interested in is trips back to Queenstown. My lack of interest and skill in most things mechanical kept us restricted to a narrow band of topics.  My tales of Botswana, Mexico or Vienna were politely listened to.  For Dad sheer hard, or long, manual work weighed the measure of a man. Reading books and office work (uni) seemed to be an easy life.

Late next morning, I visited Mum at her apartment. She had prepared scones and sandwiches that we ate while I set up the scanner. We started to talk.  We edged closer to the key point of my visit, each of us treading carefully. Mum’s main concern with the stories were their intended publication. She has always been a private person and she felt that people would look at her like a scarlet woman, moving from relationship to relationship, having exposed her young children to a troubled childhood.  She contrasted her life and parenting to the longevity and stability that Esther and I had created. There is no escaping that both Esther and I have worked hard to achieve that stability based on a strong mixture of love, as well as a reaction to both our childhoods.  I told mum, I admired her for following her own heart and surviving in a tough environment. The early 1960s were not kind years to lone women with two young children.

We used the scanning of the photos as conversation bridges and inroads to our shared past.  Mum would fill in details for me of people, places and surrounding events often struggling to recall times and places. What follows are the newer segments of my history many of them reworking my story as I had known it.

Movements

Mum confirmed my hazy memory of moving frequently. After mum left Doug we left Cornwall, a small village on the East Coast up in the hills behind St Marys and seemed to be endlessly on the move. First we stayed with mum’s Aunty Clarice near St George’s Square in Launceston and then a large house in East Launceston at Hornsey Avenue. Nan and Pop Gleeson rented the downstairs area and shared with Mum, my baby sister Julie and mum’s Aunty Clarice and her partner Roy. During this period Pop Gleeson contracted TB and was in hospital for a fairly long period. Somewhere in this period, I have a faint recall of being encouraged/forced to toss my dummy into a fire in return for getting a Sooty teddy bear.

After Hornsby Avenue we moved to Melbourne, living in St Kilda, with Mum’s new partner and, for part of the time, in country Victoria. I have a faint recall of living in St Kilda and the detour to a Victorian country town but the recall was too faint and indistinct to expand upon in my early stories. I remember playing behind Punt Road Oval, going to the shops for milk and being somewhere that had a pigeon coop.

We then returned to Launceston and a downstairs flat in Elphin Road near city park where Aunty Clarice and Roy lived in an upper flat. Roy was the old man I recalled teaching me draughts. Clarice and Roy would often look after Julie and I when mum was at work.

My speech impediment

My speech difficulties started earlier and lasted longer than I originally remembered.  When we were living in country Victoria, neighbours remarked how chatty a little boy I was but they were unsure of my nationality as they couldn’t make out the words I was saying. Mum and others close to me could understand, with some effort, but strangers were left with the distinct impression I was from another country. The problem was a combination of speed, a struggle to form understandable syllables and difficulties with ‘th’ etc sounds. The end product was not the stuttering found in The King’s Speech but the same crippling level of anxiety, frustration and social isolation – without the castles, servants and money to soften the adversity.

It seems I had started kindergarten while living in St Kilda and my speech problems continued both, at East Launceston Primary School and to a lesser extent in the early months of our move to Queenstown. Mum recalled constant hours spent helping me to try and pronounce words under the guidance of the speech therapists. I recalled none of this.  However 3 to 4 years of struggling to communicate must have been frustrating to family, teachers and myself. As I write this I have vague recall of spending my play and lunch times at school in East Launceston on my own, isolated and often fearing having to ask questions in class. The move to Queenstown seemed to trigger a major communications breakthrough.

Doug Gamble

As we talked about the various photos I was scanning, mum reached for an old photo album and said, “[t]he picture you are looking for may be in here.”  Mum pulled out an old group photo taken with a box brownie camera. I’m in the front, aged about 1 or 2, along with a very young looking Pop and Nan Gleeson and my uncle Basil with a dog.  In the background, wearing some type of cap and overalls, is Doug Gamble. It is the only photo mum has of him.  This was not the photo or man I was thinking of when I had written about Doug’s photos in my Mum’s old tin.

We then had our first and brief conversation about the man who was my father. Mum said he was a good man and their breakup was mostly caused by her and her immaturity. Their split came shortly after Julie was born when Mum was about 24. At that point the shutters went up and our conversation stopped.

The destination of this journey

Mum asked what I intended to do with the writing? At first, with the urging of Professor Gary Meyers, a friend at the Law School, I just tried to capture a few of the key stations of my journey: the story of a recently promoted law professor who had followed an uncertain and meandering journey from a working class, West Coast environment to become the first in my extended family to attend university.  By the time I had travelled to Devonport, the story had become much more complex, multi-layered, hybrid concept, somewhere between Patricia William’s Alchemy of Race and Rights and a Rough Guide to Teaching.

The next step in the journey was enriched by the intervention of Taylor Bildstein. When I first meet Taylor, as a postgraduate Masters student, I was struck by her beauty, her earnestness and her determination. Taylor would become my first postgraduate student, strangely, in journalism rather than law, and I learnt to fully treasure her skills as a writer, editor, researcher and friend.

Yet, it was in the personal part of my life rather than the professional that Taylor would forever place me in her debt.  When Elise was in Grade 9, the parent-daughter relationship became very rocky and under intense pressure. I was doing my best to aggravate the problems by channelling the only male role model I had  - my loving but strict disciplinarian father. A lunch time conversation with Taylor rescued me from the gravest of parental errors. My response to the problems with Elise was to assert my will. But I was confronted by a daughter, proudly and deliberately raised to be independent, strong willed and more than capable and stubborn enough to see through any struggle of wills to the end, no matter the consequences. As Esther said, “[s]he’s your daughter.”

Seated across from me at a small café in South Hobart Taylor, simply advised me to stand back. She described a similar confrontation with her father and advised what I  needed to do was to let Elise know I loved her, and would always be there, but let go of the reins. This would allow mother and daughter to keep open the lines of communication and avoid the inevitable escalations when Elise and I butted heads. This advice and the circuit breaker of Elise spending 6 months in Spain as an exchange student, allowed us to form a much more understanding and supportive relationship. A few years on I now share a strong and intense friendship with my daughter.

A couple of years later in a small coffee shop in Salamanca Square, after my dash to see Mum and Dad, Taylor put me in her debt again.  In between our meetings and relaxed sharing of coffees, she had moved to Ottawa and undertaken a Masters course in International Relations in French.  She quizzed me, with all her skills developed as a communications director and editor. What type of book was I trying to write? Who would be the main audience? Why was I writing it? I couldn’t give a clear answer to any of these questions. Taylor, generously and without criticism, allowed me to mumble a few incoherent explanations. She then asked, had I read Obama’s  Dreams From my Father? She had half read it in French and thought there was some degree of similarity with what I was attempting to describe as the end result of my writing.

After Taylor and I had said our goodbyes, I walked through the bus mall to a bookshop. I was surrounded by “bogans.” a term invented well after I had left Queenstown, but which would have fitted so well with the younger version of me.  If the current version of me now met the bogan me of yesteryear would I be aware of, and wary of the latent aggression and the coldness in the eyes looking at me? Would a slightly more radicalised and older youth hold this middle class academic in contempt? Later at the bus stop, I watched as these reflections of a younger me walked away towards a future of limited options. I started to read Obama’s search for his past and his attempts to construct and understand his identity.

Dreams from My Father blew me away. I was impressed by the use of words, Obama’s reconstruction of scenes, his careful but frank interrogation of his surroundings and his willingness to expose himself on the eve of his plunge into adversarial politics. Taylor was right, there were faint echoes of my tale in Obama’s book but he has forged a much more poignant, perceptive and in many places, rawer account than I had accomplished. I loved and responded to the passage where Obama wrote:

“Then they’d offer a story to match or confound mine, a knot to bind our experiences together—a lost father, an adolescent brush with crime, a wandering heart, a moment of simple grace. As time passed, I found that these stories, taken together, had helped me bind my world together, that they gave me the sense of place and purpose that I’d been looking for. Marty was right: there was always a community there if you dug deep enough. He was wrong, though, in characterising the work. There was poetry as well — a luminous world always present beneath the surface, a world that people might offer up as a gift to me, if I only remembered to ask.” At 190.