by Carmel Bird
From my own office window, here at the Black River Psychiatric Detention Facility (BRPDF), way out in the distance, I can see the sea. If I die in the sea, don’t leave me here alone. The words of that drowning child keep coming back to haunt me, keep ringing in my heart. I look out to sea and I think of her. If I die in the sea, don’t leave me here alone.
The Norwegian architect, Thor Gulbransen, who in the late eighties designed this building where I write and work, constructed the place such that the heart of the interior of the main building would resemble the interior of a nautilus shell. He worked closely with Sophie Goddard, the Director of the facility. Sophie was at the time establishing a world reputation for her work with the criminally insane, and she had a particular interest in the physical design of the buildings, seeing this as central to the treatment of the prisoners. The place is really quite beautiful, but has caused considerable controversy, since people are inclined to get excited about a bunch of criminal lunatics living in luxury inside a great new work of art shaped like some magic shell. There is a distinct hint of the work of Gaudi in the irregular soft shapes of the inmates’ quarters. The architect called these rooms ‘chambers’, each one individual in many ways, each one inviting, embracing, stimulating, the walls softly moulded, the lighting discreet—all in all there is little about them to suggest that these rooms are prison cells. The colours go through a range of pastel lilacs and peaches and limes and primroses and so on, but we quickly abandoned the ‘chamber’ idea and went back to ‘cells’. These are cells, and the inmates are dangerous rejects from society because they have done incredibly mad and unspeakably terrible things. In another time, another place, Caleb Mean himself would have been executed, and in the United States he would be on death row. I liken him to Charles Manson. But the last Australian execution took place in 1967, and in spite of anything people do, they will not be murdered by the state for it, but will live somewhere like BRPDF in pastel chambers surrounded by people such as myself who aim to understand them and to play a role in the repair of some of the damage that has been done (to them).
Thor gave the cells names from Norse mythology, but they were too confusing for the staff. Apart from being utterly ridiculous—do you want Caleb in a room called Bifrost or Loki or Njord? These days the cells are simply numbered, like any other prison cells. And Thor put in a tower, and he put what he called ‘eyes’ into the tower so that the staff at least could contemplate the world outside, the sky and the ocean and the misty forest. In my own fantasy they are the eyes of one great giant squid, the largest eye in the animal kingdom. Imagine that, the biggest eye of all. My office eye is a slit, a slot, rectangular with soft rounded corners; the eyes of squids are truly fully round, round as saucers or as the lids of paint tins.
I am reminded of the eyes of the dogs in The Tinderbox, eyes as big as teacups, as big as millstones, as big as the Round Tower in Copenhagen. We grew up on European stories, and I still have my childhood copies of Grimm and Andersen in English and also in Dutch, well-worn volumes in which the tales of The Red Shoes and The Snow Queen and The Juniper Tree are contained between beloved covers. Thinking of the window and the sea and the sea monster, the Kraken, my own imagery becomes confused—am I, the watcher, therefore myself a great sea monster peering from the deep? Am I afraid of myself, as well as being afraid of the sea? ‘Worse things happen at sea,’ my mother used to say, when any little thing went wrong. Well yes, worse things certainly do happen at sea. I spend a lot of time gazing out towards the ocean, dreaming, imagining. I need this kind of drifting thinking time in my work. I comfort myself with Mozart flute and harp concerto, the pinnacle sound for me of sophisticated beauty as well as being the sound of deep heart-stirring, as I stare out at the primitive blue distance, as my mind goes blank, as my imagination swirls and riots. Just the one piece of music, I’m obviously an obsessive.
People must not suppose I’ve got wide sheets of windswept glass offering tourist vistas of Bass Strait here—no, this eye of mine is just a medieval slit high up in the white turret that rises from our criminal psychiatric fortress in the forest. It is an aperture through which to shoot an arrow at an enemy. As a joke we sometimes call my office ‘Rapunzel’s Tower’. We abandoned, as I say, the Norse references, and went back to numbers, and to the more familiar images of Grimm, close as we are to the bleak cape that marks the Landsend, the Finisterre of Van Diemen’s Land. So gradually Thor Gulbransen’s concept was adapted to our use.
On the door of my tower room there’s a hand-carved board made by my father, a father who is incredibly proud of his upwardly mobile son. The design on the board is by my mother who, besides working on the flower farm, runs a business making floral aprons and embroidered oven mitts. ‘Dr Paul Van Loon’ says the sign on my door, and all around the edge there runs a stylised carved and painted border of tulips and poppies. It’s just a piece of kitsch, Thor would be horrified, but I am stupidly fond of it, and when people visit us from elsewhere it is always a useful talking point, although there are moments of embarrassment when it is assumed the board was carved by a patient in the craft room during sessions of occupational therapy. It doesn’t matter very much to me and so I sometimes let them think that anyway.
My father is the son of Dutch immigrants who came here after the Second World War, doing their time in the camp at Bonegilla before coming to Tasmania. Hence his joy in what he sees as my lofty position in society. His father worked on the Hydro at Bronte Park, making our family part of the special and only time when the population of Tasmania grew at a faster rate than the population of the rest of old New Holland. I offer here, for the record, a simplified version of the family story more or less as it appears in the front of the old family Bible, leaving out the uncles and aunts and tracing a straight line to myself.
Joost Van Loon, schoolmaster, married Claesgen Sofie Siebenhaar in 1901. (Claesgen’s older brother Willem had in fact emigrated to England and then to Australia, ending up in Perth in 1891.) The son of Joost and Claesgen, Piet Joost Van Loon was born in 1911 and he married Gisela Schuyler in 1938. Their son—my father—Piet Hendrik Van Loon was born in 1939 and he married my mother Karel Maria Engel at Christmas Hills in 1958. I was born in 1959.
I went to the mainland to do my training, and then I travelled overseas. My colleagues have expressed strong doubts about this whole project, saying that writing a story that is so close to my own life, and revealing material that has its origins in my work will do me no good at all. Unethical they say, and nod their heads. Well, be that as it may—time will tell. Sue me, strike me off—whatever. I don’t even have to publish it if I don’t want to. In my travels I visited Britain and the USA, Mexico and several European countries. In the village where my father was born, I found no living relatives, but there were a few people who remembered the family. All memory of my mother’s people, it seems, has completely disappeared from Amsterdam. Yet I did discover, on the side of a very old building, an elegant and faded sign, ‘H. de Beer, Handschoenmaker’, and I knew this was where my mother’s mother used to work, making gloves. A few pairs of those gloves miraculously survive to this day in far off and improbable Christmas Hills. My mother keeps them in a drawer of her dressing-table—they are fine kid, embroidered, with rows of impossibly small pearl buttons.
I never imagined I would take a job back home in Tasmania, but when they opened the facility at Black River, it seemed too good to resist—it’s one of the most impressive new centres of its kind in the world. I think my mother was disappointed that I wasn’t going to be some hot-shot society shrink in Sydney or maybe New York, but I know my father was really pleased that I decided to come back.
My father and his brothers and sisters, and my mother and hers as well, were treated pretty much as outsiders here when they were growing up, refugees from a strange place, unwanted second-class citizens. My mother and her younger sister, my Aunt Margot, used to sum it all up by telling the story of a girl called Cleome Gordon who had a gang that woul
d hide behind a huge chestnut tree on frosty mornings and jump out as the migrant girls came by, yelling insults and showering them with sharp pebbles, broken bottles and tin cans. My own schooldays were bad enough. My right eye was ‘lazy’ and so I had to wear a pirate’s black eye-patch over the left one. The other kids loved to tease me, but I didn’t feel particularly foreign or unwanted. Although several members of my family were a source of embarrassment, they were nevertheless treated by other kids as quaint and interesting. Some of the boys really loved my funny old Aunt Edda. She made good sweet spicy Dutch gingerbread and gingerbread men, for one thing, but it was more than that—she naturally inspired such love and affection. When she went to church in the little local hall she wore a brown felt hat that was laden with tiny flowers of all different colours, and from these flowers, at the back of the hat, there bobbed a little robin red-breast. He was a source of fascination to all who sat behind her in the pew, especially children. These Sunday excursions to the tiny Reformed Church were a time when the men of the family were all spruced up, their foreheads gleaming with soap, hair plastered down, grey suits with collar and tie, brown shoes cleaned with Nugget polish on a black brush, and buffed with a black velvet cushion. They all had a white linen handkerchief folded in their breast pocket. They all looked—I don’t know—just very very Dutch. And proud, and kind of sad. Clumsy and sad. I was a second generation Dutch boy, and by the time I was growing up the family had learnt the trick of coping, and the world here had begun to absorb us, to need us, to value us, but we had to work for that, and all those years the family spent with the Hydro were no joke. I learnt to suppress any eccentricities, to merge with the colours of my surroundings. Not for me a robin red-breast on my hat.
My father and uncles, who did not really believe in the God of the Reformed Church, gradually gave up their suits and their churchgoing and spent a few hours on Sundays drinking their home brew and fishing on the Duck River with their sleeves rolled up. I used to go with them, and those times are some of the sweetest of my life, sitting on the jetty, baiting the hooks, waiting for the fish to bite, sniffing the dark tobacco of the men’s pipes, half-listening as they reminisced in Dutch, waiting, always waiting for something to happen, to break the spell. We also had a little boat with a Seagull motor, and sometimes we would go out to sea and I would dream of high adventure and discoveries and whales and glory. I would look down into the deep deep water and shrink in fear from its unknown terrors. I pretended to be brave.
The end of my mother’s story about Cleome Gordon was that when she grew up she became a dressmaker and married a smalltime gangster with an Irish name in Hobart and he eventually slit her throat. This was one of the great true life morality tales, containing within itself the vividness and the satisfying elements of a fairy story mingled with a horror story. It serves as a kind of moral tale of vindication for the immigrant over the cruel, flash power of the ruling class—such as it was. My mother likes to tell the story, embroidering the details, and she always surprises me when she seems to revel in the gory bits. Apparently Cleome’s ballgowns and wedding dresses were much sought after far and wide, but Cleome did what was called ‘too much running around’ and the gangster husband put an end to her.
During my parents’ teenage years at Smithton High School the Dutchies were generally laughed at for being Dutch. And being called Van Loon didn’t exactly help. Even my mother’s name ‘Engel’ would not have been exempt from mockery—just because it was foreign, not because anybody would make the connection with the angels. My mother remembers fondly and wistfully two beautiful dark-eyed Jewish girls who befriended her, two sisters called Zillah and Eva. They were so kind and so sweet and so clever and they made her life bearable, teaching her English and sitting with her at lunchtime. They moved to Queensland and she never saw them again, but I bless them and thank them for their grace in the midst of what was my mother’s bleak Tasmanian teenage migrant life. Generally she and her brothers and sisters were mocked for talking Double-Dutch and Gobbledegook, for eating thick slices of bread wrapped around slabs of bitter chocolate, for their clothes, their hair, even their teeth, which were bigger and stronger than any other teeth around. Most of us in our family, including me, have white eyelashes, and that always was, and sometimes still is, a subject for derision and mockery. It particularly bothered my sisters who spent their teenage years experimenting with make-up, and devising clever ways to get mascara to work, like mixing it with linseed oil which almost ruined their eyesight. Nothing ever seemed to work or to give the right effect on the Van Loon eyelashes. And I had the added problem of my lazy eye and the eye-patch. The right eye got stronger in fact as time went on, but an eye-man I talked to recently told me that it might have gotten better without the patch anyhow.
After a while the other students came to like our Dutch cooking. My mother swears her family introduced hazelnut chocolate spread to this country, and we also gave the neighbours a taste for homestyle smoked or pickled herrings which are very very Dutch. I don’t really know much Dutch history myself, but I do know that in the thirteenth century El Niño brought the herring industry to the country and launched Holland as a maritime power. How about that!
People in Christmas Hills didn’t care, or even realise, that Tasmania itself was once long ago named after a Dutch navigator. First of all a Dutch sea-explorer, Abel Tasman, named the island, as people from outside will name things, on the twenty-fourth of November 1642. He called it Van Diemen, in honour of the Governor of Batavia who had sent him on his voyage of exploration and discovery in the Great Peaceful Ocean. And there’s a little island off the east coast of Van Diemen’s Land called ‘Maria’, named by Tasman for Governor Van Diemen’s wife. Tourists now go on guided walks on Maria Island which has become very trendy. The really interesting part about this, I think, is that Abel Tasman was madly in love with Maria Van Diemen, the boss’s wife. I like to think that, when the name was later changed from Van Diemen’s Land to Tasmania, Abel and Maria were together at last, taking off their stiff white lace collars and getting down to business in heaven.
I’m quite sentimental about these things, and sometimes even fanciful. There’s a fine and treacherous threshold between honest sentiment and foolish sentimentality, and although I try to follow the former, I confess I sometimes lapse quite badly into the latter. For instance, I used to think in a quaint way that Maatsuyker Island was named because it and its neighbours resembled sprinklings of sugar, but I recently read somewhere that Tasman gave it the name because when he saw it the tea-trees were blooming there, and he thought the fluffy white flowers looked like sugar. But I also imagine it’s possible that the name was simply in honour of Joan Maetsuijcker who was one of the Batavian signatories to the papers granting Tasman his voyage. You could write a history of the human imagination, the human heart, just by telling the stories of the place names of Van Diemen’s Land. They resonate so sadly and wistfully with ancient observations, hopes, fears—Jerusalem, Paradise, Mathinna, Bay of Fires, Chain of Ponds, Tinderbox, Black River, Christmas Hills, Cape Grimm.
The whole country of Australia was once called New Holland, but it isn’t Dutch any more, and a form of English is spoken here these days. Yet if you go back to 1840 you can see the Governor of Van Diemen’s Land had a kind of hope that things would not be so narrow, so black and white, cut and dried. The foundation stone he laid for a little museum in Hobart was written in English, French, Italian, German, Latin and Greek. The Dutch had already faded from view at that stage. But I think it is a beautiful inscription, so full of foolish, sweet and scholarly hope.
I spend a lot of time here staring out to the terrible sea, thinking nothing, or contemplating my own fears, imagining the monsters of the ocean floor, imagining the boats that brought the explorers with their expectations, noble and ignoble, brought then the soldiers and the convicts and their jailers. As a kind of face-your-fear therapy I try to imagine the bottom of the sea as it is everywhere around here littered with th
e wrecks of boats, shattered and whole, furred and fuzzed with slimy green, quiet-sprouting barnacles, and I have sometimes in sleep dreamt of figureheads, fabulous wooden women, their hair blown back, their gowns billowing behind them in the ocean spray, their blind wide eyes like the eyes of crazed fairground horses forever staring through the weeds and rocks and unknown corals that jumble and twist and loom in the soundless, lightless world to which they have been abandoned perhaps for eternity. Eternity.
As well as staring out to sea, I spend a lot of time in the facility gym—I am addicted to the rowing machine—and we play tennis here in the summer. We also field a rather scrappy staff cricket team that plays the inmates. The inmates always win. I regret that the pool doesn’t have views of the ocean, but everything here generally looks inward. I have described the place as resembling a fortress or a castle, but that really applies only to the outside—what you get inside is more like one of the sets for James Bond. Gulbransen was apparently addicted to Bond movies as well as to the organic shapes of his hero Gaudi, so that no doubt explains it. The outside romantic look is consistent with the current marketing image of Tasmania. It is as if the grim facts of a history that is not so old must be re-presented as sweet and charming, even amusing. I guess it’s much the same all over the world. It’s one way of coping with ugly facts. You can hide them or you can dress them up in fancy costume and sell them, since people are forever looking for things to buy.
I have the time to read a lot. I read the papers with a greedy obsession, and I watch too much television. I read a rather incredible number of books, I dream, write poetry, and I listen to music. I study the professional journals and keep in touch with colleagues in other places. Recently I was offered a job at a state prison completely unlike this one, in Florida. I found the offer quite tempting. There are prisoners there on death row, which makes it highly attractive—I would be most interested in them. I sound as if I never do any work but, as well as looking out the window and listening to music, I do spend much of my time with the patients, and a hell of a lot of time in meetings with my colleagues and administrators.
