by Anne Summers
There were stories of smashed toys and holes in walls.
My cousin Pam Kelly also had a conversation with her father Arthur as he lay close to death, and learnt that in 1928 our grandfather had put him, then aged seven, in hospital with a broken arm and jaw, injuries so severe the medical staff refused to believe that a father could have inflicted them.
There are no records of any of this beyond our fathers’ late-in-life disclosures. We have tried to find more, but while official records have yielded details of his work as a clerk for the tramways, and that he played the banjo in a small band that entertained prison inmates and performed at weddings, there is nothing that tells us what kind of man he was. We will never know how much the brutal experience of the trenches contributed to the way our grandfather was. We know war has a brutalising effect, and that his generation of returned soldiers often made their families bear the brunt of how the war had changed them. That was what had happened to our fathers. We grew up living with what World War II did to them with their ‘surly moods and intermittent brutalities’, as George Johnston put it in My Brother Jack, his brilliant novel about young men of our fathers’ generation. We had not, until now, really confronted what World War I had done to their fathers, and how that had shaped them as well.
Richard Flanagan begins The Narrow Road to the Deep North, his powerful novel that won the 2014 Man Booker Prize, with a scene about the impact of those who returned from the First War on the men who went to the Second. Flanagan’s central character is Dorrigo Evans, who endures the murderous conditions of the Japanese forced-labour camps. As a young boy Dorrigo had watched, astonished, when his older brother Tom returned from France: ‘He had swung his kitbag onto the hot dust of the siding and abruptly burst into tears.’ In 1918, men did not cry. It was so rare that it was frightening: ‘It was a sound like something breaking.’
Thousands of Australian families have lived for almost a century with the consequences of that breaking. John Cooper was 32 when he enlisted and his wife, our beloved Nana, tried to leave him then but was forced back to the marriage by her own father. This suggests he may already have been a violent man. We know he hit his wife so hard, she fell backwards against a door and knocked it off its hinges. We can speculate that his elder son’s relationships with his own children may have been affected by the cruelty of his childhood. We do know that he, his mother and brother wanted nothing to do with his memory once he was gone. Over the years, both sons accumulated enough money to buy their father a headstone. They chose not to. They buried their mother in another cemetery altogether, many kilometres away from her husband, with a handsome headstone that, inexplicably to us grandkids, mentioned her ‘loving husband’.
I’d written some of this in The Lost Mother in 2009 and it had prompted Patricia Smith, a woman in her 80s, the daughter of a World War I soldier, to contact me. She had visited France, she told me, and ‘wept in countless graveyards and read the inscriptions on headstones, and the thousands of those whose names were not known and read down the lists of those who have no known burial place’.
‘You do know where your grandfather is buried,’ she wrote, ‘It is too late for forgiveness, but bring him “home”, give him a name and a defined resting place and hope that his story shows the young in the family the utter futility of war.’
I showed the letter to my brothers and my cousin. Greg and Tony reminded me that they had initially talked about placing some kind of marker on the grave when Greg had first found it, back in 1988. Smith’s email gave that idea a new impetus. We were also influenced by Rosie Batty. After her son Luke was murdered at cricket practice in a small Victorian town by his father earlier that year, she had spoken of the need for families to talk about the violence so many of us harbour. We decided we would give our grandfather a headstone.
We talked a lot about what it would mean to do this. Were we forgiving him his violence? One brother was sentimental in that he just wanted to complete our family. Another felt we should respect the inaction of Nana and her two sons: the violence must have been pretty bad for them to have done this, was his thinking. I was insistent that our action not be seen as condoning this man’s behaviour. Then there was the question of what should be written on the headstone. We concluded that it was not for us to countermand the decision of Nana and her sons by now including their names. We did eventually agree that his war service should be acknowledged. He was the only member of our family to serve in World War I (Mum’s father, a good Melbourne Irish Catholic, had obeyed Archbishop Mannix’s stricture about not getting involved in what he saw as primarily a British war). Greg obtained permission from the War Graves Commission to use the AIF emblem. The headstone we erected on the dismal patch of ground that had been his resting place for so long listed his name, and gave his dates of birth and death. ‘Served in WWI on the Western Front,’ it read. ‘Remembered by his grandchildren Anne, Pam, David, Tony, Greg & Paul.’ Greg had checked with David’s widow, Annie, about including his name as we were sure that David would have wanted to be part of this.
Joining Pam, my cousin, and her husband Steve, and my brothers and me at the graveside that day was Greg’s older son Matthew, Tony’s son Jake and Paul’s older son Richard, as well as David’s daughter-in-law Linda and her three children, Jasmine, Josh and Chelsea. Three generations of Coopers confronting our grandfather’s violence, the younger ones listening as we, the grandchildren, made clear that while we were bringing him ‘home’, we condemned the way he had treated his wife and children. We understand more these days about the ongoing trauma inflicted on those who go to war—how it damages people, often permanently (especially if left unacknowledged)—but we have talked less about the lethal impact on their families and the cycle of violence it perpetuates across generations. My family hoped that by acknowledging the person while repudiating his behaviour, we might help start to break these cycles, so men can learn to deal differently with buried pain and raging emotions. I was grateful that my brothers were the kind of men who could talk about these things. I hoped the cycle of violence in our family was now spent. As it needs to be in so many other families. Looking around that unkempt corner of the cemetery, at the plots up and down the rows where our grandfather now lay acknowledged, it was chilling to see just how many unmarked graves there were.
CHAPTER TWELVE
UNFETTERED AND ALIVE
I’ve had what I wanted, and, when all is said and done, what one wanted was always something else. There is an emptiness in man, and even his achievements have this emptiness. That’s all. I don’t mean that I haven’t achieved what I wanted to achieve but rather that the achievement is never what people think it is.
Simone de Beauvoir The Paris Review, 1965
In 2011, I was named one of the world’s wisest women by Vogue; one of the world’s most influential women by Good Weekend; and my face appeared on a postage stamp, along with three other well-known feminists, as an Australian Legend. I was not as thrilled by these accolades as I should have been. I might have felt better if they were gratifying little peaks in the roiling ocean of my everyday activities. But they were, essentially, all that was happening in my life. Greenpeace was long behind me and my nine-year tenure at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum, first as Trustee and then Deputy President, had ended in 2009. I had very little work and what I did have was mostly making me unhappy. I had a very well paid part-time corporate consultancy, but I hated it. My job had been to produce a newsletter on gender equity issues for the company and its clients but the innate conservatism of that company (my copy was vetted by around nine different people, each of whom usually had ‘a few suggestions’), and its fear of offending any of their many clients meant what I was permitted to produce was bland and boring. Then an act of sabotage by a female careerist inside the company had me floundering. I was unsure of how or even whether to save myself. The newsletter was abruptly cancelled. Now no one knew what to do with me, and I was not sure what I could offer. My patron inside the compan
y said she wanted me to stay on ‘forever’, but she was undecided about what I might do to justify my big monthly fee. ‘Would I like to advise some of their clients on how to increase the number of women in their employment?’ No, I would not. I was a thinker and a writer, not a gender equity practitioner. That called for an expertise that I simply did not have. I supposed I could have studied up and forced myself to do it, but my heart just wasn’t in it. I saw my job as being to research and identify the wrongs, and leave it to other more practical souls to make them right. Perhaps I could write a history of the company, it was suggested. Nothing came of that, and nor could anyone think of anything for me to do. Before long, I followed the advice I used to give to the mostly female audiences who asked me to talk about ‘women’s leadership’. I would say: ‘If you are not happy in your job, leave. Life is too short.’ Easy to say, of course. I was very glad to leave the constant humiliation of so patently being just a ticked box. I had no other income, but we would not be broke. Chip was in his second year as Artistic Director of the Sydney Writers’ Festival, where he was having great success broadening the program and its audience. I was happy to be the supportive partner at home, helping however I could with his wonderful job, as he had so many times in the past supported me, while I looked for something to do.
A year earlier I’d ended my involvement with a businesswomen’s conference I had curated and emceed for almost a decade. ‘Serious Women’s Business’ was an annual event created by Taren Hocking, a talented and energetic young events organiser from Adelaide, who realised there was an opening for an intelligently designed, beautifully presented, high-level private conference for women aspiring to succeed in the corporate world. SWB brought together some of the biggest female names in business and politics who, because the conference was Chatham House rules and they could speak freely and frankly, shared their experiences of trying to work in a world where women were still not always welcome. I hosted the event, helped select the guests, delivered a keynote to open proceedings and then interviewed most of the high-level guests over the two days of the conference. Businesswomen such as Gail Kelly, Margaret Jackson, Janine Allis, Ann Sherry, Linda Nicholls, Katie Lahey and Diane Grady participated, giving SWB the lustre of authenticity, and making it very worthwhile and personally rewarding for those who attended. Women were now flooding into corporate jobs, mostly into middle management, and they were looking for guidance, encouragement and—all too often—some assurances that they were not alone in experiencing tough times at the hands of male colleagues and superiors. We usually had around 400 attend each year. Alison Watkins, now CEO of Coca-Cola Amatil and one of the few female leaders of an ASX200 company, was an SWB chair, as was Megan Dalla-Camina, at the time an IBM executive. I also made sure to include a range of inspiring women from other fields such as chef Christine Manfield, Governor-General Quentin Bryce and political figures so that attendees got to hear the likes of Carmen Lawrence, Nicola Roxon, Sussan Ley, Senators Natasha Stott Despoja and Judith Troeth and, in a truly inspiring session in 2009, acting Prime Minister Julia Gillard.
A highlight of each year’s SWB conference was a dinner of exceptional quality in a room that was dressed to perfection, and where we were entertained by stars like Julia Zemiro or Renee Geyer. We also included a panel of leading male CEOs who were willing to submit to my questions about what they were doing in their companies to increase opportunities for women. I learned during those years that I was good at interviewing people in front of an audience. I also learned that people valued my keynotes for what I liked to call their ‘stats and facts’. They did more than exhort or inspire; they informed people.
‘I always learn something from your speeches, Anne,’ Katie Lahey, the CEO of the Business Council of Australia told me one year.
I was grateful for the reinforcement. I believed strongly that we need facts to inform our views and our actions. I had approached my job with Paul Keating in just this way, using facts about women’s experiences to support policy proposals, just as I had always tried to anchor my newspaper opinion columns with solid information. If people learned something, they were more likely to remember what I’d said or written, and perhaps be motivated to take heed. That was my philosophy and I believed it could apply to all areas of my work. SWB was an immensely successful concept, and I was very pleased to be associated with it for around eight years. In the final year I produced a newsletter, Serious News and Views, that was a compilation of stats, reporting and opinion about women in business and politics, which we sent to those who had attended the previous conference. It was similar to what I had tried to do for the corporation but without the constraints, and so it was a more interesting and engaging read. But SWB was about to change focus. It would veer away from business and politics to well-being and a focus on women’s spiritual and physical health. This was not me. It was time move on. But to what?
I was shedding another skin, just as I had done so many times in the past when I had changed jobs or moved cities and, venturing into the unknown, had left behind home, friends, possessions and work colleagues. This would be a less drastic move—I was not changing cities or countries—but I wondered, and worried, what would become of me. The accolades from the magazines and Australia Post were for what I had done, not what I was doing now. And the truth was that I did not have much of a now. The phone seldom rang and the emails delivering invitations to speak or to write had pretty much stopped. My once regular opinion column for the Sydney Morning Herald had dwindled into occasional appearances. I was published only three times during all of 2011. Was my working life over? I wondered. Was I expected to step back and bow, express my appreciation for the plaudits, and then just stop? No, I told myself, I am not going to do that. I might be 66 years of age, but I was not yet ready to retreat to the margins of life. Besides, if I didn’t have a job, how could I retire?
It was a year since the paperback edition of my most recent book, The Lost Mother, and two years since the book’s original publication. I was proud of how I had eventually succeeded in finding a way to tell the very complicated and layered story of three women whose lives intertwined around a portrait of my mother, painted when she was a young girl. This book had challenged me as no previous book had. It was more like writing a novel than the non-fiction of my previous works. I wanted my next book to be similarly testing. I considered a biography, a big book about an important Australian whose story deserved re-telling or even being told for the first time. I’d enjoyed researching the Australian art scene of the early to mid-twentieth century; maybe I could stay in that world. I wondered about a biography of Sam Atyeo, the avant-garde artist whose 1933 work Organised Line to Yellow is credited with being the first abstract work exhibited in Melbourne, if not Australia. He left Australia in 1936 and later became a diplomat but he, and the few works he left behind, had enormous influence on the next generation of artists, including Sidney Nolan, who saw Yellow hanging at Heide, the home of art collectors John and Sunday Reed. But would anyone be interested in reading about Atyeo in the 2010s? I could not afford to write a book no one would read. I needed a subject people still cared about. Maybe Nolan himself? I could not believe there was not a major biography. I thought hard about whether I was the right person to do it. Did I know enough? Was it too late, given that so many people close to him were now dead? It would take three or four years. I was tempted, but I also wondered how I would fare immersing myself in the life of a man who, by reputation, was pretty obnoxious. What if I came to hate him? Could I write about someone I despised as a person, even if I admired his work? This was a question that had preoccupied feminism for decades now and has been subjected to an even sharper scrutiny in the wake of the #MeToo movement that emerged in late 2017. Should a male artist’s personal conduct, particularly misogynous behaviour, be held against him when evaluating his work? How do we reconcile the demands of art with the conduct of everyday life? The question had been asked about such artists as Philip Roth, Philip Glass, Norman Ma
iler and, of course, Picasso. Drusilla Modjeska had addressed it in Stravinsky’s Lunch,1 a book whose opening scene had the composer demanding that his family eat lunch in total silence so as not to interrupt his creative processes. If I was to tackle Nolan, I would have to address this, and that would mean taking on the art world, where such issues tended to be mostly ignored. Then I heard that a big biography of Nolan was in the works; it would eventually be published in 2015. I turned my attention elsewhere.
I wondered about H.V. Evatt, the idiosyncratic Labor leader from the 1950s. Maybe it was time to introduce to a new generation of Australians this brilliant and erratic man, whose extraordinary career has never been matched. He had been one of the founders of the United Nations, was the youngest person ever to be appointed a High Court judge, had been a state MP, then federal Attorney-General, Minister for External Affairs and, eventually, leader of federal Labor, before leaving politics for his final destination: Chief Justice of New South Wales. Evatt had been central to some of the biggest political contretemps of the era: the Egon Kisch affair, the attempt to ban the Communist Party of Australia, and The Split of the ALP. There had scarcely been a political life like his. He and his wife, Mary Anne, were also avid art collectors, supporting local artists by buying their works, and they owned a number of European modernist paintings. Evatt’s story had been told many times, of course, but I felt I could bring a new perspective, and cast a feminist eye over a man who had always been more accommodating of women’s participation in public life than was usual at that time. It was Evatt who had ensured that Jessie Street attended the meeting in San Francisco in 1945 that established the United Nations. Street was one of the handful of women there; they banded together to ensure that sex discrimination was outlawed in the inaugural UN Charter and that women could be employed at this new global body. I could perhaps add another chapter to the feminist history of Australia through the story of H.V. Evatt. And perhaps a reassessed ‘Doc’ (as he was known, something we shared) might fare better than he had while he was still alive? I spoke to a few people but received nothing but discouragement. No one, it seemed, wanted to restore Evatt’s somewhat tarnished reputation. I could not afford to spend years on a book that no one wanted to read. I reluctantly abandoned that idea.
