Home

by Larissa Behrendt

  Bob let his concerns drop, knowing that he would never change Patricia’s mind. He hoped he was wrong that the distrust he felt was not as accurate as Patricia’s faith. But he had met too many women like Daisy, women who saw men as a resource and other women as competition. He knew how vulnerable Patricia’s sense of duty had made her to the demands of Daisy and Danny. And he never forgot how Daisy had treated him when she was in the home, ignoring him when he came to speak with her as though he were an embarrassment. Unlike Patricia, he could not forget the feeling of being rejected by his sister. And neither of them, he thought to himself, had ever forgiven their father.

  Bob often remembered the last time he had seen their father, that chance encounter in Strawberry Hills. His father, descending the steps of the tidy, yellow-painted terrace house, had looked so surprised to see Bob. Months later Bob was sent to deliver a telegram to that address. When the telegram was handed to him, Mr Scott seemed to smirk with his grunt and Mr Green gave him a wink with his good eye. “Well, Bob,” said Mr Reed, “I don’t think we will blame you if you take longer than usual at that stop.” Then Bob realised that the house he’d seen his father walk out of was a place where men paid women to do things to them, the sort of things he still imagined doing with Annabel Stewart.

  He realised that the family would always mean something different for Patricia than it did for him. She was always looking back and trying to recreate it the way it was when their mother was alive. He knew that it was gone irrevocably, that what had been lost — Thomas, William, their mother — could never be regained and that what had changed Daisy and Danny meant they would never be the same as they were as children in Lithgow. If he wanted a family again, he would have to create one himself. He was pleased when Patricia finally married after so many years of putting all her energy into bringing them together under one roof. Pasquale had given her a chance to start her own family, to begin again.

  The first time Bob looked into Carole Dyball’s face he knew that there was something about her that made him feel that if she were with him, he would find a home. She was like Annabel Stewart who had given him confidence and acceptance; similar to his sister, Patricia, who had given him a place in the world, a feeling of stability and warmth that he had yearned for ever since those days when he could grab his mother’s flesh in his tiny hands.

  24

  1970

  BOB BRECHT’S GOOD FORTUNE was to marry a woman very much like his mother. The tragedy for Carole Dyball was that she had married a man who shared too many of the views held by her father. The wedding was intimate and simple: Carole’s mother was the only one of her family to attend, Patricia the only one of Bob’s. Their Navy friends filled the small church. Carole’s father had refused to attend. She had travelled home to introduce Bob to him. He’d taken one look at Bob, rebuffed his outstretched hand and said to her: “You are not going to marry him.”

  Carole could only imagine what battles her mother must have fought with her father to get to the wedding in Sydney. “He is much easier to get around in his old age,” she said when Carole asked her about it.

  Bob felt the sting of his father-in-law’s rejection. He had tried all his life to fit in, to be accepted. He had a job and could provide a home; he was aggrieved to find that seemingly this was not enough.

  “It makes no difference to me,” Carole said of her father’s refusal to wish them well. “I don’t like him much anyway.”

  “Even so, it would be nice to have him happy for you,” Bob said sulkily.

  “Well, if he’d asked my permission to marry my mother, I would have told him he wasn’t good enough for her and boycotted their wedding.”

  Bob kissed her affectionately.

  Carole, aware of how much Bob liked to read, encouraged him to continue his education. He took a correspondence course to finish his High School equivalent and resumed his studies in Australian history, but found, with the eyes and experience of an adult, that he was no longer unquestioning of what he read. Where once he had accepted words on pages as absolute truths, he was becoming sceptical of the receding lines and the curves, the ideas and assertions. He began to ask himself: What is this history, this silence that could be broken by whispering.

  Drawn to travel tales now that he had sailed to foreign lands, he read Darwin’s diaries and could see what Darwin had seen in South America: Everyone is fully convinced that this is the next just war, because it is against the barbarians. Who would believe in this age that such atrocities could be committed in a Christian civilized country.

  Darwin was not surprised by what he saw when he arrived in Australia in 1832. Tasmania, in 1803, had a community of twenty-four prisoners, eight soldiers and twelve volunteers, including six women. 1804 saw the first massacre of Aboriginal people by members of the new colony. In 1827, the London Times reported that sixty Aborigines had been killed in revenge for the murder of one settler. Two years later the colonial government decided to concentrate the natives in a barren area on the west coast. Prisoners were sent out to hunt down the natives and given £5 for every Aborigine that they brought back to the white settlement. Nine died for every one that was delivered. In 1830, as part of a further attempt to eradicate the natives, a human line spread out across the vast island with forty-yard gaps between them. No Aborigines were caught but by the end of the exercise there were only three hundred left.

  Darwin wrote in his diary in 1836: “there is no doubt that this train of evil and its consequences originated in the infamous conduct of some of our countrymen.” Darwin had also written that, in some landscapes, weeds take over most tenaciously and the only constant in nature is superior force. His observations fascinated Bob and helped to explain the reason why history was told to him the way it was.

  Bob also read George Orwell, whose Animal Farm detailed the easy corruption of power, and whose Burmese Days recounted the infectious corruption of colonisation. With these new insights, he returned to the telling of Australian history, concluding that might did not always equal right, but it did equal victory and the privilege of writing the winner’s version of history.

  In his correspondence course, the assigned text was A.G.L. Shaw’s The Story of Australia. There, Bob read:

  In India, South Africa and New Zealand, English colonists were opposed by native peoples, vigorous and often highly civilized; in Australia there could be no serious resistance from the aborigines with their primitive culture.

  It was still there, the inevitable assertions of his inferiority and the continual accusations that he was the descendant of savages, primitive tribes. He realised that he was not seen as equal to white people. He saw also the continual attempt to tell the story that he and his family had simply vanished into the mists of time, inevitably overcome by the superiority of the whites.

  As he started to question the conclusions of historians Bob also began to question other things he had been taught. He recalled how, in his youth, explorers like Wentworth seemed to embody all that was noble, good and civilised. Wentworth represented the economic development of the colony, which the blacks had threatened to prevent. He also represented the push to take sheep farming further west where the land was considered uninhabited. Wentworth crossed the Blue Mountains with Lawson and Blaxland, propelled by their desire to find any good pastures beyond the existing limits of settlements — Bob had thought these actions heroic. Keeping to the mountain ridges, instead of seeking the valley pathways, the party took fourteen days to reach the western edge of range. In doing so it was proclaimed that they opened up an area “equal to every demand which this country may have for an extension of tillage and pasture lands for a century to come”. Until he read Conrad and Orwell, Bob had loved the accounts of the conquest.

  There was also the contribution of Wentworth to the government of the time. Here the history books seemed to tell a different story to the one Bob remembered from childhood history lessons. Wentworth had dominated the constitutional debates in New South Wales and
fought vigorously for local self-government and colonial control of land policy. When the push began to wrest political control from the squatters, whom Wentworth represented, and hand it to the people, he fought hard against it. He feared that if greater democracy were allowed, “all property and intelligence” would leave the colony, for “who would stay, while selfishness, ignorance and democracy hold sway?” To check it, he proposed that the distribution of seats should be weighted against the towns and there should be an hereditary upper house.

  Through this reading of history Bob began to realise that the truths taught to him in his youth could be challenged by looking from a different perspective. As a young boy he’d aspired to be like the explorers who had forged their way across Australia and had daydreamed of a lineage going back to W.C. Wentworth, who, he thought then, embodied the excitement of the taming of a wild country. The story was now being rewritten, particularly with the work of historians like Henry Reynolds whose books Frontier and The Other Side of the Frontier included accounts of massacres and exploitation as well as evidence of subversion and resistance by Indigenous people. They had a new way of telling history, from the viewpoint the local Aboriginal people whose ancestors had been travelling across the mountain range for thousands of years and had aided Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth in their crossing. His people had also been explorers, even if they were eclipsed by the Wentworths of recorded history.

  Bob’s faith in the indoctrination received at school was further fractured when he read that his boyhood hero had said, while arguing in 1844 against a proposal to allow Aborigines to give evidence in courts, that it would be “quite as defensible to receive as evidence in a Court of Justice the chattering of the orang-outang as of this savage race”. The explorer who had conquered the Blue Mountains was not interested in extending his notion of rights to everyone. His notion of government would not have included Bob. No matter what Bob did, no matter how he tried to fit in, he would never have been acceptable to W.C. Wentworth. Just as he would never meet with approval from Carole’s father.

  Formerly, Bob had been frustrated that Danny would not make the effort to fit in. But, Bob now realised, Danny had always known that it didn’t matter how hard they tried, that some people would consider their blackness a barrier they could not break through, that they would never be white enough. Bob had tried to make himself into an image, to turn himself into a white person. That, he had believed, was what was expected of him. Now he was to find there were those who would never truly accept him as being white: in that sense he had been set up to fail. But, he was also to learn, that to some he had never been Frankenstein’s monster at all.

  He’d been sitting in a pub on a Sunday afternoon with his old Navy buddies, Ernie Gibson and Colin Reid, all former radio operators now working for the Department of Civil Aviation. They would meet and reminisce about their times together in uniform and keep up with news from Geoff Young, who’d married a girl he had asked out for a bet, and Bemie Sinclair, who was now running the airport at Cooma.

  “Ain’t that Neville Bonner something,” Ernie said.

  Bob felt the familiar instinctive twinge, dreading a conversation about Aborigines and their inferiority.

  “You know,” Ernie continued, “I think it’s really something that he’s made it all the way into parliament. That’s a first we can all be proud of. An Aboriginal Senator. And in the Liberal Party. We’ve come a long way.”

  Ernie then turned to Colin, telling him that he’d decided to buy one of those new Japanese cars, a Mazda. As Bob listened to their banter he thought about Ernie’s words. His remarks hadn’t been directed at him, as an accusation or patronising observation as if to say, “You can be white like everyone else.” It was, instead, an honest feeling of pride and at that moment Bob started to think that maybe the reason his mates never mentioned his dark skin was not because they were being polite but because it really didn’t matter to them. He sat back while Ernie and Colin went on to argue about patriotism and the Japanese, and he realised that Ernie’s remark was the first positive thing he’d heard about an Aboriginal person. Ernie thought it was the most normal thing in the world for them to succeed. Carole was always trying to tell him this, but Bob had dismissed her consolations because he felt she could never understand what it was that he was going through. Now, hearing Ernie speak on this lazy Sunday afternoon, he began to realise that perhaps she was right.

  Carole had always loved a happy ending. Her favourite movie was still An Affair to Remember—when Nickie Farrente swept Terry McKay up in his arms, realising that she was paralysed, it seemed as though their life together was just beginning. But films rarely focused on what happens after the wedding, and after four months as Mrs Bob Brecht, she knew why.

  She was required to resign from her position from the Women’s Royal Australian Navy upon marriage, and Bob had insisted that she should anyway. “I want my wife to stay at home. I can support you and look after you. Trust me.”

  Having his wife stay at home was an important status symbol to him; it showed he was a good provider. But there was not enough to keep Carole occupied in the house, and after preparing breakfast for Bob she spent the rest of the day thinking up chores. She found herself vacuuming the entire house daily and cleaning the curtains once a week. She missed the financial independence a job had given her. Now she relied on the money that Bob gave her and had to economise.

  “We could use the extra money,” she would say to him.

  “I don’t want you working. It’ll look like I can’t support you.”

  “Why do you care what people think?”

  “It matters to me. That’s the end of it. That ought to be reason enough.”

  “But Patricia works …”

  “I don’t care what Patricia does. It’s not how I want things to be in my house. I can take care of you. It might be tough now but things will get better. Trust me.”

  Carole had not spoken to her father and sister since her engagement, but she wrote her mother a long letter every Sunday night, and would receive a response the following week. Their letters were full of housekeeping details, new products to try, a trick for getting red-wine stains out of the carpet, and comments on the latest gossip about the royal family. Although Carole could write to her mother about the trivialities of their life — the new towels she had bought, planting pansies for the summer, her latest haircut — she could not write about how suffocated she felt with Bob, how she felt as though the walls in the house were beginning to close in on her. With a slow panic she began to realise that she was in exactly the same position as her mother.

  This did not stop her from loving Bob. Rather, she felt trapped by her love for him. Much like the small birds and injured marsupials she had nursed as a child, she discovered there was something lost and broken within him. For all his fun-loving, outgoing attitude and his desire to be one of the boys, there was a large part of him that felt unworthy and self-conscious.

  Carole had sensed the way he prickled when anyone spoke of his skin colour, or when they passed an Aboriginal person in the street or when anything about Aboriginal people came up in conversation. She had not understood this self-consciousness when they met. Now she tried to reassure him.

  “Do you know what I would change about you?” she would ask him as they sat together on the porch of their modest weatherboard home in Sydney’s southern suburbs, watching the sun drift below the skyline.

  He would look at her expectantly.

  “Nothing,” she would say with a smile.

  Silently he reflected that given the chance, she probably would change his skin colour to win her father’s approval.

  Secretly Carole thought to herself, if she were given the chance, she would take away his increasingly bad temper. It was as though he never trusted her to really love him because he didn’t believe he was worthy of it. He would be jovial and relaxed with his friends, light-hearted and playful, but alone with Carole he would delve into his books, his mood
becoming serious and agitated as he read. If she asked him if he would like a cup of tea, he would snap at her curtly to leave him alone. But if he felt his needs were not being met he would snarl that it was obviously too much trouble for her to get him just one lousy cup of tea.

  Carole would merrily ask him about his day when he came home and fuss to get his dinner ready for him as she engaged him in conversation about the stresses of his work at the airport. He would grumble about the shift-work roster, sitting at the table while he waited for Carole to serve his dinner. She would listen patiently, but when she would begin to tell him about her day he would snap. “I’m too tired to listen to chatter.”

  Some nights he’d look at the plate she put before him. “What is it?” he would ask as he poked the food with a fork.

  “It’s a fish curry.”

  “I don’t feel like fish. What else do you have?”

  “You haven’t even tried it yet.”

  “This looks too runny and I had an upset stomach today. Haven’t you got a steak?”

  “I’ll see what I can find,” she sighed as she rose to look in the fridge.

  “What do you do around here all day that you can’t have a decent bloody meal ready for me?” he would ask irritably. Inside him, dark and light seemed to live side by side.

  He seemed resentful of any contact she had with people who might not accept him. About her letters to her mother he would snipe, “I suppose you are going to write to complain about me and tell her what a lousy husband I am.”

  “I’m just telling her about what I’ve been up to, that’s all. I don’t complain about you.”

  “It shouldn’t take too long to tell her that you sit around here all day. I bet your father’s glad that you seem so miserable all the time. Does he say ’I told you so’?”

  “I don’t speak to him, as you well know. And remember that my mother did come to the wedding. She was happy for me when I married you.”