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.
