Unfettered and Alive

by Anne Summers

  De Klerk was kind and courteous towards me but I found myself tongue-tied; I so wanted to tell him how much I admired what he had done, but I did not want to appear gauche. This was a serious political gathering, not a fan club. I envied the facility with which the natives of this world of international politics so easily made their way through these social trenches. I did not have their easy ice-breaking phrases with which to engage people I’d never before met. At the first reception for delegates, where I’d found the luxury of the chamber dazzling and distracting, I knew no one. I didn’t have the moxie to stride-up boldly to a world leader with outstretched hand, so I cast my eyes around hoping they might land on someone who was as stranded as I. Soon an attractive and expensively dressed couple engaged me as if I were a lifelong friend. They turned out to be minor European royalty, and they knew how to do this. Not for the first time, I regretted that I had not forced myself to acquire the art of small talk. It would have helped me glide more gracefully around New York society, and it certainly would have made it easier for me in Prague. There were so many luminaries there and I had easy access to all of them. But none of them had ever heard of me and, despite my star billing, I had not given the attention-grabbing performance that might have put me on their radar. Had I had more experience in performing in public for Greenpeace, I might have been able to do better at Forum 2000. Instead I was disappointed in myself, and that unnerved me. It is not easy to be assured when you are the object of the kind of open contempt exhibited by the men who had escorted me from the airport. In my head, I was a second-class attendee, riding around the Forum in that battered little Skoda, and it affected the way I conducted myself. I did not exude the authority or the bearing that said, I am the Board Chair of Greenpeace International, and so no one of any importance approached me or showed any interest in the organisation I represented. Shimon Peres, Israel’s Minister for Foreign Affairs (and, of course, sometime Prime Minister and future President), swept past me several times, surrounded by a clutch of bodyguards. His room was in the same corridor as mine in the grim concrete bunker that was our hotel. He always nodded and gave a slight smile; he certainly did not emanate the incipient hostility I felt from other men at the Forum, but I could not find the words to greet him.

  The Forum provided my first encounter with political leaders as peers—all invitees were supposedly of equal status. I had met plenty of political leaders before, of course, but this was not the same as sitting across from Caspar Weinberger, my reporter’s notebook at the ready, or interviewing the President of Argentina. I had nothing these men wanted—I wasn’t a reporter; or an influential thought-leader; not even, given my age, a potential roll in the hay—so mostly they simply ignored me. In this setting women were mostly inconsequential, unless they happened to be very famous or very powerful, and I found this invisibility difficult. Although Greenpeace was often portrayed as male-dominated, a perception fed by our action teams being mainly men, the culture of the organisation was far from hostile. We knew we needed more women in senior management roles, but a woman invariably led the board, which itself managed to achieve gender and geographical diversity. And, interestingly enough, it was women who had done the work to open each of our non-European offices. Apart from Anne Dingwall’s efforts in Russia, Hong Kong and Manaus, Lyn Goldsworthy had opened India and Southeast Asia while, earlier, Tani Adams had opened the three Latin American offices. I was treated with courtesy and respect wherever I went in the organisation, even in countries that traditionally were unaccustomed to women in leadership roles. This sheer rudeness in Prague was a shock and I found myself internalising the contempt.

  Maybe it would have been easier if I’d been there as a journalist. The reporter’s notebook would have given me cover—and access. I knew I could have written a powerful article about this extraordinary gathering. Here were world leaders and other influential people who were among the first to try to articulate what the September 11 attacks meant for democracy and human rights. The sessions were all open to local media, and transcripts of all the proceedings were on the Forum 2000 website for many years (sadly, those for 2001 were taken down in October 2016), but as far as I could tell, there was no international media coverage. The press tends to cover only people who are currently in power, not those who might be influencing, or even determining, events from other positions and perspectives. Havel apparently no longer attracted US or even European media attention. I don’t know if I could have persuaded an editor to run my report on Forum 2000, but I would have liked to have been able to try.

  I had finally achieved reconciliation with my father in 1988, the year of his death, and while this pleased my mother immensely, and brought me an unanticipated sense of peace, it turned out there was other unfinished business in our family that would not be resolved for another quarter century. During those years we had to deal with the shock of the deaths of my mother and my oldest brother David. Both deaths were sudden, and while my mother was 81, an age where death is not unexpected, she was healthy and fit so we were unprepared. She had died in her sleep, at home, in her own bed, in exactly the way she wanted to go. Once we got over the shock, my brothers and I were relieved that she had not suffered, she had not lost her faculties, nor had to endure the indignity of losing her drivers’ licence or having to go into a nursing home. We were sad of course, but our grief was tempered by the knowledge that she was finally at peace. One of my Greenpeace Board colleagues informed the Trustees of my bereavement, and I was immensely moved to receive letters of condolence, many of them intensely personal, from every one of the 27 Trustees, including some with whom I was in constant and not always amicable battle over governance matters. That they could set aside these squabbles to write such words of consolation demonstrated that while Greenpeace could be a tough and even ruthless organisation, it was also a family, and one with plenty of heart.

  David’s death, in 2010, was different. He’d fallen from a ladder on his farm, struck his head on soft soil yet died instantly, in front of his wife Annie and second son Patrick. He was 63. Just a year earlier they had sold their house in Adelaide and, fulfilling a lifelong dream, moved to a property on Kangaroo Island, where he intended to build a house with his own hands. He and Annie were managing their first flock of sheep, and preparing to start on the house, when the terrible accident occurred. Less than three weeks earlier, my brothers and I had all gathered for something of a family reunion at David and Annie’s holiday house at Penneshaw, on the other side of Kangaroo Island. It was my first visit to this unique part of Australia, reached by a ferry that was an hour’s drive away from Adelaide. Our reunion was the result of a determined effort on the part of a family that rarely got together. We’d wanted to remember our mother and to acknowledge ourselves as a family of adult orphans who for all the little we had in common, were bound inextricably and permanently as siblings. We’d vowed to do it again, perhaps in a year’s time. Then came the phone call and we headed back to Kangaroo Island, our numbers augmented by our mother’s two surviving brothers and their wives, all in their eighties, a few of our cousins and Annie’s family. The service was in a tiny multi-faith picture-perfect church facing the water and later we stood by David’s grave, on a hillside overlooking his favourite fishing spot. There had been too many deaths in our family, I thought, as I watched David being lowered into the ground. We’d been six kids. Now we were four.

  The year my father died was the same year that I became a business owner in New York, raised what seemed (then anyway) a huge amount of money on Wall Street; got a Green Card which gave me permanent residence in the United States; and become a well-known and, for a short time, sought-after person in the place where, according to the song, if you can make it there … I was unrecognisable as the sullen teenager who had stirred up so much anger in him. Nor was I any longer the ‘ratbag’ radical of the 1970s who enraged him. I’d met my parents once in Sydney, after I’d been to a political demonstration, and as I stomped across the grass in Hyde Pa
rk to our meeting point, I could see the disappointment—or was it disgust?—on their faces. Their only daughter—and look at her. Both he and my mother had had such conventional hopes for me, about the sort of person I might marry. They’d hoped for a doctor or a lawyer, someone whose status I would automatically assume. They had never expressed any ambition for me. My father had actually told me, while I was a teenager, that sending me to university would be a waste of money. Not that it cost him anything when I finally made it there, thanks to a Commonwealth Scholarship and the fact that I had totally supported myself since the age of fourteen. Now, both my parents were proud of me—of what I was doing and how I looked. I had my share of designer clothes, although many of them had been bought cheaply from Loehmann’s, their labels snipped off. My photograph was in the New York Times, in New York and Time magazines, and similar arbiters of achievement. I was under orders to send home copies of all such mentions, and my mother meticulously documented my life. After his death, I discovered that my father had fixed to the wall beside his bed a framed glam photo of me, taken in 1983 by Australian Vogue. This was the daughter of his dreams. Finally, he was pleased with the way I was. In July 1988, after Sandra and I had done the deal in New York, he’d written a letter telling me how proud he was of me. I flew to Adelaide for my brother Paul’s wedding on 20 August. My father looked wretched; he was gaunt and slow to move. Again, we did not talk. I did not even acknowledge that he had written to me. But back in Sydney, just before I returned to New York, from a friend’s house in Rozelle, sitting on the floor to be close to the telephone, I rang. Finally, we had the conversation that had been building up inside both of us for almost three decades. It was still hard. Neither of us was accustomed to expressing towards each other any feelings, except hostility. But we both knew this might be the last time we talked and perhaps it was easier that we could not see each other. He raised it first. He said he knew that we’d had ‘difficult periods’ in the past, and he got upset as he tried to say how sorry he was for the way he’d treated me. I listened with astonishment, and was so overcome with unfamiliar emotions that I barely knew how to respond. I kept saying, ‘It’s all right. I forgive you. I forgive you.’ And, in the end, sobbing, just before I hung up: ‘I love you.’

  Back in New York I wrote to him. I told him how much I’d appreciated his letter and, especially the business advice he had given me. ‘It is pretty ironic, as I’m sure you appreciate’ I’d written, ‘that of all your kids I am the one to end up a capitalist.’ I assured him that the ‘difficulties’ we had had were ‘long forgotten’ and that he should not ‘harbour any feelings of remorse about that time’. Then, not knowing if I even believed what I was saying, I set out for him why I thought he should be proud of his life, of his family, of his accomplishments. I told him that he and I were more alike than we had ever wanted to acknowledge. I told him that as I wrote, I was listening to Kiri Te Kanawa singing Verdi: ‘My love of opera is something else I learned from you.’ I told him that I admired how he had finally been able to stop drinking, acknowledging how hard that must have been for him, and how glad I was that I’d been able to play a small part in helping it happen. ‘I would like to be able to help you now,’ I wrote, ‘as you deal with a difficult and painful illness.’ I told him he needed to accept that he was sick: ‘As you have shown in the past, you have the strength and character to deal with it’. I folded the four sheets of heavy cream paper and placed them in the matching envelope, with its maroon-coloured tissue lining. I addressed the envelope, using the same Montblanc fountain pen with my signature brown ink that I’d used for the letter and stamping it Air Mail, sent it on its way. It arrived the day after he died.

  He was alone, in the Repat Hospital in Adelaide on 20 September 1988, when he succumbed. My mother had left just an hour or so before. She’d recounted in her diary later that day, ‘because of his drowsiness I probably wouldn’t get to say all the things to him that I wanted to.’ She’d been on the phone to her sister Gwen and when she hung up, it rang again immediately. It was the hospital ‘telling me my darling had died just fifteen minutes before’. When my letter arrived, my mother was overcome with happiness that her husband and her daughter had finally reconciled. She determined the moment should survive so she scrawled in capital letters on the envelope: ‘VIP. NEVER TO BE DESTROYED.’ Seventeen years later, after her own death, I found it among her papers.

  In New York the night my father died, I’d been touched by the immense practical kindness shown by Joanne Edgar, one of the senior editors and a member of the original Ms. team. She immediately got on the phone to Qantas and organised a ticket for the next day. The problem was that I had submitted a Green Card application. If you left the country during the application process, you were deemed to no longer want to proceed. With my immigration lawyer, I headed for the offices of the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) early the next morning and, after the inevitable wait, told the officer that I was seeking a temporary parole so I could return to Australia.

  ‘Not possible.’

  ‘My father just died. I want to go to his funeral.’

  ‘Everyone says that,’ he told me.

  Thank goodness for new technology. My brother Greg faxed me a copy of the death certificate, the only proof INS would accept. I made it back to Adelaide with just hours to spare, arriving at St Ignatius Church in Norwood where I’d been to Mass as a teenager, where in 1976 seven Jesuit priests presided at Jamie’s Requiem Mass and where, in 2005, we would celebrate the life of my mother, with the consoling sound of Gounod’s Ave Maria soaring towards the vaulted ceilings of this suburban church. My father’s was a far more modest service, with nothing like the 600 who’d attended Jamie’s funeral, just a few people he’d worked with, a couple of AA mates and other friends, together with members of both his and my mother’s families, but my father would have been tickled pink to know that among the small number of floral tributes laid beside his coffin was one from Gloria Steinem.

  In July 2005, just a few weeks after we’d buried my mother, I joined the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland to set sail for Mataui Bay, an idyllic spot with clear turquoise waters near the tip of the north island of New Zealand. It was the resting place of the first Rainbow Warrior, which had been scuttled there in December 1987, two years after she had been sunk in Auckland Harbour in an act of terrorism by the French government. Although I had now been with Greenpeace for six years and had been on board most of our ships, I had never actually sailed with one. Finally, although it was just for one night, I was on our iconic flagship. We were not sailing into any kind of confrontation; the only risk on this voyage was seasickness. I had followed the onboard doctor’s advice, and was very glad I’d taken the pills when I saw the Japanese students who were travelling with us green faced and retching, because they had decided to tough it out. I felt honoured to be on board this boat because of what we were about to do, and because I finally felt joined to the history of this remarkable organisation.

  The next morning we dropped anchor above the scuttled ship. It was 10 July, twenty years to the day since the bombing. Several of our divers went down to inspect the hull while we on board made preparations for the formal commemorative ceremony. We would be honouring both the ship and its decades of service to the cause of world peace and environmental integrity, but also the memory of Fernando Pereira, the young photographer who had been killed in the explosion. His daughter was with us as we threw flowers into the water. She had been eight-years-old when the French government murdered her father. It was still hard to believe a government had done such a thing, that it had attacked a non-government organisation whose mission had merely been to try to secure a more peaceful planet. I would still not call myself a pacifist because there are times when force is needed but I recoiled from any kind of violence. Whether it was dispensed by soldiers on behalf of governments, by individuals pursuing their demented fantasies, or men against members of their own families, I felt sickened with apprehensi
on and fear whenever I contemplated the scale and intensity of the wanton violence that seems endemic in our world and which engulfs so many of us. Even my own family.

  On an overcast day in October 2014, in a far corner of the Catholic section of Adelaide’s West Terrace Cemetery, my family gathered in front of the unmarked grave that for 79 years had held the remains of our grandfather, John Patrick Cooper. We were there for a final act of reconciliation.

  When my father’s father died suddenly aged 51 in 1935, his wife and sons bought him a hole in the ground, but that was all. No headstone, no marker of any kind. Not even his name was recorded. He had lain unlamented in the ground ever since. Nor, until my brother Greg Cooper decided in 1988 to search for his grave, had anyone visited him. Greg had been shocked to discover the plot was full of weeds, and that a tree was growing up through it. Now, all these years later, his five surviving grandchildren—my three brothers, Tony, Greg and Paul, my cousin Pam Kelly, and I—had decided to give him a headstone.

  My father never spoke about his father. As we were growing up we knew practically nothing about him, apart from a few fragments of family legend. He’d been a stretcher-bearer on the Western Front during World War I, my mother had told us. He was the only survivor when the four men carrying a loaded stretcher across No Man’s Land had stepped on a land mine. We were given to understand he was a violent man, but we were told no details. And we never asked. It was only as they approached their own deaths—my father in 1988 and his brother Arthur in 1997—that they started to open up to their children about the brutality of their upbringing. My father visited Greg at his home one night early in 1988, when his wife and kids were out, and spoke for hours about the horrors of his childhood.