The Dressmaker's Daughter (20 page)

Monday 29 January: Kids up at 6 am again. Hell. Beach 9.30 am–12.30. Fresh bread and tomato sandwich lunch. Lovely sea. Swam. Hannafords did come. Barbecue tea with salad. R. and Hugh played table tennis after lunch with Caroline interrupting. She screams when I swim. Goes out to her chest now!

How Richard played table tennis, I don’t remember. I think he held the bat, and the ball was sent down to him towards the bat and with his wrist, if the ball hit the bat, he hit it back. This was the only physical game he could ever play with Hugh and it is a regret of mine that neither Richard nor I thought about having Hugh taught to play sport by some other father. I feel our son should have been offered football and tennis like other boys. But we were so intent on making a life that was as normal as
possible that we did not see that our son needed help to link him into the male world of sport. We were in denial – as much as trying to pull the wool over everybody else’s eyes that we were a normal family – and our children were the ones who suffered for this.

Tuesday 30 January: 109 degrees. Today our 8th wedding anniversary. Beach 9 am. Llews [Richard’s parents] came down with mail and cold meat and nectarines. Pasty lunch and buns. All laid on lawn and listened to temperature rise on radio. Down for another dip at 5 pm. Cold meat and salad tea on lawn. Llews left 8 pm. I slept upstairs with children and bugs. Awful.

R. had shower.

Wednesday 31 January: Boy, am I sick of this. I feel like going home. Children up at 6 yelling. I decided to let them do as they please and it worked well. All went to beach at 8.30. Rough and windy so left at 10.30. Boys played darts. Lunch sandwiches then I slept upstairs in boiling room. Better chips on beach.

R. had shower.

By boys, I meant Hugh and his cousin Philip, who was the same age and who had come to stay with us.

Friday 2 February: Cool am. Sunny pm. Beach 9 am with sad Philip. He is getting us down. Homesick poor boy. Walked with children to shops for sweets to cheer him up. Tears. Tears. Home 11 am. I swam 200 strokes. Lunch. Caroline slept and R. sunbaked. Complete change in weather and boys and I swam 600 strokes. Sunbaked here and boys played. All happy now. Barbecue. Swept and packed.

Saturday 3 February: Cleaned and packed for return home. Beach at 8.30. Quite a surprise – Llews came and day got warmer and was perfectly lovely. Pies and pasty lunch on beach.

1.30 returned and had cup of tea. Home 4 pm. Dark hints from Llews about smells from fridge!

Shriek!

So much to do here I feel like leaving. Tired and depressed. Huge wash. Unpacked food. Good TV.

Sunday 4 February: Up early. Vacuumed. Church 11 am. Very hot walk. Hugh pushed Caroline [in her pusher. He did that because I was pushing Richard in his wheelchair.].

Grilled lunch. R. sliced Miss Kydd’s peaches for dessert. Slept.

Washed floors, folded linen. Posted letters to Sir Hugh Foot and Arabella Boxer. Egg tea. Children loved noodles and mince. Made Hugh a lovely smock for painting from R.’s naval shirt.

Miss Kydd, a retired schoolteacher who used to practise her Italian loudly, shouting it unwittingly into our bathroom window, was our next-door neighbour. Her peach tree hung over our fence and every summer was laden with big, yellow freestone fruit. Sometimes I went in with a basket and she let me fill it with peaches. (It was this same fruit that I used in the recipe that won a contest for a description of a meal that was judged by Robert Carrier.)

Monday 5 February: Prepared Hugh’s things for school yesterday. Hot day again.

Our lawns green thanks to M. [Richard’s father] pouring on precious water. Reading
The Nude
still. Grilled tea. Made 16 jars peach, onion, tomato, fig and grape chutney. Delicious. CAA (Community Aid Abroad) meeting here. Wrote to Paul [Paula Dorrington, a nursing friend].

Richard was on the State Committee for CAA and they met at our house because it meant he did not have to travel. They sat around the big, oval, black dining-room
table and at ten o’clock I took them in tea and biscuits. Then they all went home. This group raised money for farming projects in India. For wells, too, and sewing machines. They organised an annual Walk Against Want, which raised thousands of dollars for these projects.

Tuesday 6 February: Cooler. Hugh’s first day at school. He is very pleased and excited. M came to drive us but car wouldn’t go. I walked with Caroline and Hugh. Hugh said, during a discussion on school and jobs, ‘I’m not going to be a mountain climber or a window cleaner!’

Caroline said, ‘Where’s my chair?’ She cried when I took her home.

Collected him at 2.30. Cleaned silver.

I now see that the puzzling thing Hugh said about mountain climbers and window cleaners, which at first I thought merely the product of his original mind, relates to his lifelong fear of heights. He must have seen a window cleaner working high up on a building. This phobia with which he was born and that I have – I took care, as far as I know, never to let him know about my phobia – meant that he had a desperate struggle when he was a cadet at Duntroon to conceal it. Even walking on a bridge is difficult for us.

Wednesday 7 February: Preserved peaches. Boy what a mess! Did 15 jars. Grilled tea.

Thursday 8 February: Vacuumed. Tidied. Lunch at Margie Devitt’s. Took Caroline with me. I spoke on cutting down trees and Stobie poles.

Each guest at Margie Devitt’s lunches was invited to give a short talk on a subject close to their heart. This was because Margie felt that she had nothing new to say to her husband when he returned from work. She had been an air-hostess and now at home with two small children she felt she should be able to talk to him about interesting subjects. So she invented these lunches.

R. sold a painting. Typed CAA newsletter. Grill again. Made crème brûlée with grapes in it. Nice! Children like it! Made another for tomorrow. Washed.

Friday 9 February: Changed linen and washed. David [Richard’s cousin] took me to Central market. Good fun. Found Budapest cake shop again. Bought 4 buns and apple slice. Delicious. Coffee here with David. Vic Mednis and B.P. called. Preserved half a case of tomatoes. Caroline helped. M. called in.

R. sold Franz Kempf print! Grilled tea again. Made curry.

Sunday 10 February: Sunbaked. R. did Patrick’s work and addressed envelopes till 8 pm. [Patrick Pak Poy had begun to employ Richard in calculating time sheets and pay sheets for his employees.] I finished Miss Kydd’s peaches – 7 jars. Curry tea. Made crème brûlée for tomorrow. Washed floors. Cleaned up kitchen. Preserving makes terrible mess (or I do.)

Saturday 11 February: Polished floors. Table set with grapes and peaches. Victoriana! Ken and Bronte and Colin and Helen Lawton to lunch. Roast leg lamb with potatoes, carrots and beans. Crème brûlée with grapes. Slices peaches and cheeses. Claret. Sarah let oil out of R.’s lifting machine.

Sarah was the three-year-old daughter of our friends Mary and Neil Robbins, and she must have been playing in the bedroom and undone a screw on the lifting machine. Without it, I could not get Richard into bed.

Ken drove me to get Bob Todd to fix it. We left the table at 5.45 pm. Washed up with Gwen and M. [Richard’s parents must have called in and offered to help me.]

R. tight [drunk]. Bob came at 8.30 pm.

Monday 12 February: Cleaned brass last night. Sunbaked. Walked with Caroline in pusher to Demasious and bought pink and red sundress $11. Hot.

Hugh too frightened to eat crab. Crayfish given to us by Miss Kentish for tea with eggs and salads.

Caroline said, ‘I don’t like ‘nake!’ (snake). [Perhaps she thought the crayfish was a snake.]

Now here is an eerie entry. Blame arrives trailing the smoke of anguish even almost forty years later:

Tuesday 13 February: Vacuumed. Caroline said, ‘I closed the gate. I close the gate every day.’ And, ‘I had lunch with Muttee [my mother] yesterday and you didn’t even come!’

Curry and rice.

Why didn’t I lunch with my mother and daughter? I can’t remember. I don’t know where they went or how it all came about. There is nothing more on the page. It sounds as if this may have been something my mother said to Caroline and that she repeated. She was two and a half. Would her sense of grievance be so fully formed then?

Here, the next day, are Richard and I on a day out.

Wednesday 14 February: 95 degrees. Llews came and minded children and gallery. R. and I went to town
in a taxi.
The Advertiser
Art Exhibition. Met Major General Hopkins who lent us Japanese sunshades. Thence to new Public Library. Cool! Chose two art books. Then to National Gallery [I meant the State gallery]. Pottery – ‘Forms of Earth’ – and Modern Australian prints. Wonderful.

Lunch at Arkaba Steak Cellar. Met Helene Kinnane.

Then to Max Harris’s book shop [Mary Martin’s Bookshop]. Bought books. Home 4 pm.

Now I see how frail Richard was because, although he sat propped up in his chair all day and would have been put to bed almost as soon as we got home, the day affected him.

Thursday 15 February: Hot day. R. very tired from trip to town. I am reading
My Life
by my favourite painter, Marc Chagall.

Terrible grilled tea on lawn with fights all round. Washed floors. Jack and Daphne called with my pearls restrung. Talked on lawn where it was cool.

Here now, is the night I met my friend Wendy, who remembers this dinner while I do not. She was to become one of my closest friends but that was not until we met in 1975 at university. Although I haven’t recorded it in my diary, Wendy was at this dinner with her husband at that
time, Chris. He and Richard knew each other because they had been in the same form at school. The events of Wendy’s life and mine have almost mirrored each other throughout, coincidences that no-one can explain. We holiday together and have done all those things women do that involve supporting each other through divorces, and the milder form of those, broken love affairs. She makes me laugh as no other. I remember laughing bent double over an oil heater until I could not stand. Another friend who has made me laugh like this is Ghilly (whom I had not yet met at this time, although she was our best man Rob Trotter’s daughter). We laughed in a hotel room in Paris until we stuffed pillows into our mouths to stifle our shrieks. We laughed on that day about two Moroccan men who followed us around trying to pick us up. With Ghilly and Wendy, I have laughed until I’ve cried and with them both I still do. Laughter is hard to come by. But blame and regret have no end.

Friday 16 February: Took Caroline to design fair. Met Christobel and Marg Devitt. Chicken sandwiches lunch and champagne $3.

John Mayfield called with gin and ice and had talk.

7.15: Dinner at Pat and Richard Duncan’s with Beverley and Roger Brown. Melon with strawberries then veal and mushrooms. Rum mousse. Home 1 am.

Let us leave her there. When I read these pages thirty-eight years later, the woman who wrote them, who took her family to church and who tried to be normal, is almost unrecognisable. And yet my diary now, although on a bigger page that holds more explanation, still records the time of day events occurred, the weather, what I cooked and ate, what my children said, where I go and whom I meet when I get there.

I
t happened because I went to the hairdresser. My friend Paula’s mother, Lily, was a hairdresser who worked from home. One day in 1972 when I was coming home after Lily had cut my hair, the taxi went through the parklands. The contrast to some of the bare suburbs the taxi had driven through was so marked that I saw the trees as if for the first time. I thought, ‘I would give my life for these parklands.’

A few days later there was a notice in
The Advertiser
saying that the City Council planned to pass a by-law so that they could use the parkland for car parking for the Christmas shopping period. I put down the paper and said, ‘Over my dead body.’ I knew that once cars were allowed into the park, it would only be a matter of time before they were not just there for a fortnight, but would be there forever. It might start with Christmas, but soon it would be Easter, long weekends, sporting events and, in
the end, it would become normal and nobody would remember exactly when their virginity had been swept away.

I wrote a letter to the newspaper protesting about the Council’s plan. A woman I did not know called Jenny Walker rang me up and said that she agreed and that she would do all she could to help stop the car parking going ahead. More letters to the paper from us followed and soon Jenny and I were meeting and making plans. We began to go to City Council meetings. One of the problems was that many of the councillors had interests in Rundle Mall stores. They may have had only the purest of interests for the city but it was hard for us not to think money may be involved. Jenny was clever at research, so, during a council meeting, as we sat in our frocks and high heels in the public gallery, when a councillor made some claim during a speech in defence of their plan for the park, she would say, ‘That’s not right. I’ll go into the archives and check. You stay here and keep listening.’ She’d come back after fifteen minutes or so and then stand up and interrupt and correct what was being said. We quickly became knowledgeable about these men, who we thought were marvellously glib. Once, when a councillor said, ‘I stand on my record!’ I called out, ‘Well, then you would sink.’ Other such rude calls led to us being warned by the town clerk that if we were not quiet we would be evicted. We didn’t want that because we needed to know what was
being planned so we quietened down. For several months we went to meetings and wrote letters to the newspaper.

I had a bright idea that we needed to get more publicity by staging protests that would allow us to speak directly to reporters. One of the first events we held was the St Valentine’s Day Massacre protest outside the Town Hall. On that day, 14 February, the Council was to vote on the by-law for the car parking, which they would then have to get ratified by Parliament. I bought a little tommy axe and tied a wide red satin ribbon around the handle. I made a wreath of laurel leaves (my mother’s wreath-making lessons had come in handy). I put these things and one or two other symbolic artefacts into a basket, and phoned the television stations,
The Advertiser,
a radio station and a taxi.

When the taxi pulled up, Jenny was waiting with big posters she had made with ‘St Valentine’s Day Massacre by the Council’ written in red on them. It began to rain heavily. Our friend Margie Doley came too, and the three of us stood outside the main door with the rain splashing some of our posters while we waited for the councillors and the reporters to arrive. I remember saying to Margie, ‘Take your shoes off, Margie; we need to anchor these posters down.’ To her eternal credit, she gave me a short look and took off her shoes. She was not exactly a woman who would be expected to appear in the street in the rain without her shoes. I suppose Jenny and I took off our
shoes too, but I can’t remember. Reporters arrived and a television news crew. When a microphone was brought out, our opportunity came and either Jenny or I spoke quickly into it, as we had learnt to do to make the evening news and the next day’s
Advertiser.
We spoke about what the Council was planning to do and why we were there calling attention to it.

I then walked into the Town Hall and asked to see Mr John Roche, a councillor who was passionate about car parking, because I wanted to hand him my little axe. I thought that if he was willing to vote to use the parkland for car parking, which would lead to the loss of trees either then or quite soon, he could be the first to cut one down. That was the symbolism of it, anyway, but whether it would be clear to him I could not tell. (I have found in a lifetime of such gestures that not everybody understands my metaphors or symbolism that seem so blazingly obvious to me. Yet, some years later, when I said to my mother, ‘Mother, I am divorced!’ She said, ‘Who from?’ I said, ‘From my husband, of course. I am not speaking metaphorically!’)

As I stood there, axe in hand, with the laurel wreath for the Lord Mayor in my basket, I suddenly felt afraid. I had startled myself with these symbols of death. The clerk said that none of the men would be coming out to accept their gifts, but that he would take them in and distribute them. This he did.

Another stunt, which this time I did alone, was to hold a picnic inside the Town Hall. I rang my mother to tell her to watch the evening news and she said, ‘What are you going to wear?’ ‘My navy-and-white mini-dress by Prue Acton.’ I had a navy-and-white Italian Graziella bicycle and the dress matched it. As I rode up with the picnic in the basket on the back of my bike, the cameras began flashing. I spread my picnic out beneath the chandelier in the foyer and settled in. A reporter asked me why I was eating strawberries and champagne. Without thinking, I said, ‘What else?’ Richard later said this was the most definitive thing I ever said.

Explaining that if the Council intended to take our parklands for car parking at Christmas time, I would have a picnic on their turf, so they could see how it felt.

Some weeks earlier, because we could see that we were unable to melt the hearts of these stony men and that we would lose the fight to save the parklands, Jenny and I decided we should change tactics and try to influence Parliament, as it would have the final say on the by-law the men were so determined to pass. We used the free publicity from the protests we held to announce that we were taking a petition to Parliament. We invited people to come to our gallery or to Jenny’s home and to collect copies of our petition to sign.

The marvellous thing for Jenny and me was that neither of us belonged to any type of community group
so we never had to be involved in meetings to organise our campaign. We simply had quick chats on the telephone to plan new events for publicity. We did whatever came into our desperate heads. Sometimes one of us would become exhausted and the other would say, ‘Take a week off. I’m feeling fine; I’ll do it all and you have a rest.’ This went on for a year. About three months into our campaign, Jenny became pregnant.

The ecology crusader and political activist Ralph Nader came to town, so I went to his meeting in Elder Hall on North Terrace, dressed symbolically in a long black dress with a green satin ribbon holding back my hair and asked him to sign our petition. He explained that he was unable to support local political action because he was not in a position to know all the facts but he wished us well. While we were talking,
The News
took a photograph and our campaign gained more precious publicity.

In the end, when Jenny and I felt we had enough copies of our petition signed, Richard did a rough count and found we had about 48,000 signatures. We saw that the huge size of the petition was going to be a problem for us to transport, so when I saw an advertisement on television for a folding wheelbarrow made by Hills Hoist I rang the managing director and explained our project to him. I said that I could get his wheelbarrow on to every television station on the evening news because we would fold it into Jenny’s small car, drive it to Parliament, and
carry it up the steps holding the petition, which we had rolled into bundles and tied with red ribbons to distribute to the members of Parliament. He said, ‘And what are you going to do with the wheelbarrow when you’ve finished with it?’ I told him I was planning to give it to my husband. He laughed and said, ‘At least you’re honest!’ And then he told me to bring the petition around to him and he would sign it and hand over a wheelbarrow.

Jenny and I rang members on both sides of Parliament and told them we would like to bring them copies of our petition if they would agree to accept it. David Tonkin, a Member of Parliament (later the Premier), and other members and men streamed out on to the steps as Jenny and I unfolded the barrow, which was shaped like a stationery envelope, and lugged it up the steps.

After we had given the men the bundles of our petition, a reporter asked Jenny what she was planning to do next. ‘Have my baby,’ she said, and within a short time her daughter, Victoria, was born.

Parliament threw out the Council by-law. The parklands were safe for a few more years.

I learnt the power of individual action and suddenly I saw that anything was possible if you cared enough and were willing to go to almost any length to achieve it. It frightened me because I saw the colossal, terrifying power of the individual. I made up my mind that I would never again take up a public fight.