by Doris Brett
I have always imagined deserts to be stark and empty places; striking, but barren. The land that stretches beneath me is clearly desert. The red sand is marked only by the tough semi-spirals of spinifex; nothing else for as far as the eye can see.
And yet, despite the absence of any other visible life, this is the most un-empty landscape I have ever encountered. Something emanates from it; a force or spirit so powerful and unexpected that it takes me utterly by surprise. The land is alive, I am sure of it. Alive and watching.
I am still dazed and exhilarated as we drive into Alice Springs. From our hotel, the West MacDonnell Ranges rear into the blue sky in an arc that makes me want to weep every time I see it. Everywhere I go, I feel I am in the presence of a great, ancient energy. It is a presence beyond words. It is allowing me to visit, to be a guest, and I am grateful.
The conference has a packed schedule, but there’s time to roam around Alice Springs, take camel trips and coach tours to Standley Chasm and the Ranges. I feel wonderful, energised. I’ve always considered myself to be a city person, but everywhere I go here, I find myself thinking, ‘I could live here.’ It is as strange as travelling to Mars and discovering that it contains your home.
On the last day of the conference, Martin and I take a tour of the Alice Springs Desert Park. We wander through the different terrains and arrive back at the gate with time to spare before our coach departs. I respond to the radar signals generated by my shopping gene and motion Martin in the direction of the souvenir shop.
It’s full of all the usual suspects—toy kangaroos, koalas, emus—all in assorted shapes and sizes, lining the shelves. Along the side of the shop are rows of glass-covered counters containing white, diamante jewellery versions of the same. And there, in among all this dazzle of white is a lone bright red brooch. It seizes my attention immediately. I strive to make out its shape, disbelieving my eyes at first, because what they are telling me doesn’t fit with this cornucopia of Australiana. And then I catch my breath. The brooch is a pair of red sparkly shoes—Dorothy’s shoes, whose magic she learned about from the Wizard of Oz, in Emerald City; the shoes which took her home to Kansas.
‘Excuse me,’ I say to the shop assistant, ‘could I have a look at that red brooch over there?’
‘Oh, you mean Dorothy’s shoes,’ she says airily. And she hands them over.
And so here I am, in the centre of the country and the unexpected country of my heart, holding Dorothy’s shoes and remembering my dream from all that time ago.
It was the dream that came to me as I waited to have my recurrence confirmed, where I found myself in the centre of the country which was also the country of my heart; the country that felt like Kansas, from the Wizard of Oz, where I went to recuperate and heal.
The dream that came during days of acute anxiety and fear and filled me with extraordinary and mysterious peace; the dream that left me with the calm certainty that whatever happened next was supposed to happen; that there was a pattern to the universe, a meaning that I could feel without needing to understand. The dream that I have lost touch with, denied, felt cheated by, for so many months.
And yet here it is, tapping me on the shoulder again, as if it has been here all the time, merely waiting for me to arrive.
And so I stand in a small shop in Alice Springs spellbound, as Dorothy’s shoes sparkle fabulously, incongruously, in the middle of the great, red Australian desert and I recall the words from The Wizard of Oz:
‘Is your name Dorothy, my dear?’
‘Yes,’ answered the child, looking up and drying her tears.
‘Then, you must go to the City of Emeralds …’
‘Where is this city?’ asked Dorothy.
‘It is exactly in the centre of the country …’
‘How can I get there?’ asked Dorothy.
‘You must walk. It is a long journey, through a country that is sometimes pleasant and sometimes dark and terrible …’
I come back from Alice Springs, Uluru and Kata Tjuta feeling as if I have visited a different planet. I have only been away for a week and have worked for a fair amount of that time, but I feel as refreshed and renewed as if I have been away for months. I am carrying Dorothy’s shoes with me in a small velvet box. I wonder sometimes if a second pair of the shoes will be laid out among the glittering animals and for whom that brooch will be waiting.
As I flip back through my journal, I remember that as well as the Northern Territory, Perth was the other place I associated with the beginning of my recurrence. By coincidence, three weeks after I return home from Alice Springs, I am due to fly to Perth to run some more workshops.
I get off the plane at Perth and find a taxi. ‘The Mount Street Inn,’ I say to the taxi driver. This is the hotel where the Perth organisation always puts me up.
He nods. ‘You know it’s changed its name,’ he says casually.
‘What is it?’ I am only half listening. I’m trying to find something in my overstuffed luggage.
‘It’s the Emerald Hotel.’
Three days later when I come home, I am still amazed. Einstein once said that the most beautiful thing in the universe is the mysterious. I feel enveloped in that eerie wonder, as if I have been touched by a state of grace.
A couple of days after getting back from Perth, I am in my car, on my way to give an early morning lecture. I turn the corner past my house to discover a buzzing nest of police activity. It is so incongruous in this quiet suburban neighbourhood that at first I think it is a film set. While I am wondering about the cause of the commotion, the news comes on the radio. A gangster has been found shot dead outside his home.
I have heard other news reports over the years of criminals murdered. Why is this one so startling? You don’t expect it to happen around the corner from home, of course. But it is more than that. It is the juxtaposition of the two jarring realities—the cosy suburban group of houses and the darkness that one of them has hidden inside. How we think we know where we are and then, with one quick twist, we discover that we never really knew at all.
As I drive home after the lecture, I am still thinking about this. The answering machine blinks at me as I enter the house. Several messages are waiting. I play them through, listening with one ear while I open my mail. And then suddenly, I drop the envelopes. The voice on the phone is telling me that I have won one of the country’s major literary awards, the Judith Wright Poetry Prize.
It is like being in a country where the drought has finally broken. A disbelief, and then elation, mixed with an extraordinary relief. And permeating it all, an exquisite and lovely sense of strangeness that plays around this odd timing—the letter, the red shoes and the hotel with the name of the Emerald City, all following so closely on each other’s heels.
Five days after that, I am again opening the mail. There is a letter from the organisers of the Gwen Harwood Memorial Prize, another of Australia’s top poetry awards. I scan it, thinking it’s just a form letter, telling me that I haven’t won. But something doesn’t seem right. They’ve used the wrong words. I read it again. This time I realise they’re telling me that I’ve been given an honourable mention. But still my brain is registering something wrong. I shake my head and try again. And this time I really read it. I have won! They are telling me that I’ve won. I’ve won two of the country’s most prestigious poetry awards in five days.
Welcome to the land of Oz. And yes Dorothy, I think we may have been in Kansas all along.
Autumn Again
Autumn again. The city of leaving
is in all of us. The spirits are flying from the trees,
the trees are becoming the memory of trees.
Last night I dreamed the hospital windows,
green as aquariums, the IV lines
weaving like sea-weed.
This is the enchanter’s country,
the one that you never come back from,
even though you rent back the house
on the old street,
the border is always calling
and your passport begins to grow leaves.
You hear it murmuring through dreams sometimes.
Who is coming? Who is leaving?
One day the table bursts into flower.
The clock is discovering its fingers
in fine, articulated sighs.
Don’t look now.
The pot-plant’s perceptibly larger.
Outside, the trees are getting used to sky.
IT’S TWO YEARS SINCE ALICE SPRINGS. Life has settled into normality. I am about to write ‘back to normality’, when I realise that ‘back’ is a street that has been blocked off. This is the new normality. The usual setbacks and triumphs have been mixed with a scattering of health scares, which have seen me hustled off to CT scans and ultrasounds. Each time it happens, I am jerked back from what has felt like solid ground. Apart from these times, and the regular blood tests, I don’t think much about it. When I think of events years into the future, I see myself as being there. I have lost the daily, slicing sense of uncertainty that came with the recurrence.
I am at a psycho-oncology conference in September 2000. The conference is contained in its own world—vast hotel foyers, strip lighting and the general sense of unreality that comes from rising too early to read the newspapers and coming home with a brain over-packed with speakers, seminars and lectures. In the middle of it, a friend rings me.
‘There’s an interview in the Bulletin with your sister that you might want to read.’ She pauses. ‘Lily says some pretty nasty things about your mother.’
I sigh. Should I be used to this by now, I wonder? But repetition doesn’t seem to blunt the distress it causes me. I get up extra early the next morning and buy a Bulletin on the way to the conference.
I read it rapidly, appalled at what has been said. Our home is described as ‘a house full of anguish’, with a ‘tyrannical mother’ who survived the war with only her beauty intact. Lily describes an episode where she is taken as a child to get her long hair cut short. The interviewer suggests that the motivation for this is her mother decreeing that, ‘I’m the pretty one around here, so you’ve got to be ugly.’ Lily agrees with this interpretation.
This hair-cutting episode is also depicted in Lily’s book of autobiographical essays. There, Lily imputes a further motivation. Her mother, she says, had an unconscious need to make Lily experience something of the horrors she had undergone in Auschwitz, where inmates had their heads shaved on arrival.
I am struck yet again by how memory is coloured by interpretation. I too had my long hair cut short in the same style, to the same length, by the same barber across the road. It was the practical, short haircut that many of my friends sported. I didn’t experience it as an attack on me, but rather as a symbol of growing up and being able to prepare myself for school in the morning. Long curly hair is difficult for a child to take care of.
Lily also talks about our mother being obsessionally concerned about Lily’s weight. In fact, Lily was a significantly overweight child and teenager. Any responsible parent would be concerned. Lily’s doctors were also concerned, fearing that her excess weight was significant enough to impact badly on her health.
And of course, Lily herself has said that she hated being overweight. It was an age like today’s, where slimness was aspired to. There was a profusion of fad diets, gadgets and medically sanctified treatments, including modified fasting in a hospital setting. These remedies may sound appalling to us now, but back then, it was what you did.
I am driving to the conference with a friend who has known my mother. She reads the article while I drive and is equally shocked.
‘That’s not your mother,’ she says. ‘She was never like that.’
I nod. The picture Lily has drawn is unrecognisable to me. I am close to tears. I keep thinking of my gentle, affectionate mother whose life revolved around loving and taking care of us. This is how she’ll be remembered—as a tyrannical, jealous shrew. It is as if her name, her good and loving self, is being blotted out and replaced with this stranger.
It’s eleven years since I’ve responded to Lily’s public writings about our mother. My letter to the Jewish News taking the reviewer to task for confusing literary fantasy with literal truth upset my father so much that I’ve remained silent. It’s a source of wonderment to me that he can view the disparaging things Lily writes about his wife with seeming unconcern and yet be furious and distraught when I write to offer a different perspective. In private, he agrees that my image of my mother coincides with the way he also saw her. In public, he defends Lily’s version.
A part of me can understand that. He needs to be loyal to Lily. I’ve never asked him to choose between us, publicly or privately. He has two daughters. He loves each of us and that’s as it should be.
I’ve been trying to ignore the awful images of my mother that are such a continuing, indeed seemingly inevitable, part of Lily’s interviews, essays and books; the images that have been her only public representation.
It’s hard though. When someone dies, all that is left is how they are remembered. I have adopted silence for all these years, thinking to protect my father from distress. But in the process, have I betrayed my mother?
It’s a question that is also part of a larger issue. Who owns stories? Who owns ‘the truth’? If other people are a part of our stories, do we have the right to propel them, unasked, into the public arena? What are we as writers? Storytellers, continuing the most ancient and honourable of traditions, or parasites? Historians or propagandists? Where do one person’s rights begin and another’s end?
I don’t know the answers, but I know that right now, I can no longer bear to be silent and allow this to be the only portrayal of my mother. I need to speak up on her behalf. I need to say that there is another point of view, another story.
I say to my friend, ‘I need to write to the Bulletin.’
She nods. ‘Yes. This time, I think you have to.’
I craft my letter to the Bulletin carefully. I want to address the issue as thoughtfully and calmly as I can. I want to say that my memories of our home life are different from my sister’s. I want to describe my mother as I remember her.
I write too that I am not claiming some immutable truth, but that I simply feel the need to add to the picture of my family; that I believe when real people who cannot defend themselves are named in public, it is important to recognise the complexity of the way individuals remember and interpret experience.
I add that memories are fluid, responding to and changing with successive layers of experience and interpretation. This issue was highlighted at a recent writers’ festival in a panel featuring authors who had written thinly veiled autobiographical fiction. Some of the writers spoke of the way their memories and the fiction they had created became interwoven, so that it became difficult at times for them to know which was which.
Psychologists will attest to these tricks of memory. In a recent study, it was shown that thirty percent of people who had been asked to imagine an object believed when questioned afterwards that the experimenters had actually shown them the object in real life.
I note as well that in Lily’s book of autobiographical essays, she has written that as a child, she was always concocting stories about herself (she favoured those featuring imagined hardships) to the extent that she actually forgot the truth and that as an adult, she continues to embroider events with elaborate interpretations.
When I’ve finished the letter, I read it to several people. I want to make sure that it doesn’t sound attacking or vindictive. I don’t want this to be a slanging match. I simply want to add to the public perception of my mother and say that there are complex issues involved here.
And then I show the letter to my father. I have been dreading this part. I don’t even know if he’s seen the Bulletin article yet, but I know he won’t want me to send the letter.
My father has been back in Australia for some time now. He came ba
ck to live here four years ago, just a few months before the recurrence of my cancer. His return could not have been easy for him, but he coped with it in his usual admirable style—making the best of the new circumstances in which he found himself. After his absence, it felt almost as if we had to get to know each other all over again.
In the last couple of years it feels as if we have reestablished our old warm relationship. I have been taking him to the theatre or pictures every couple of weeks and cooking meals for him; he particularly loves cholent, a traditional Jewish dish of rich, slow-cooking beans, potatoes and meat.
Afterwards, my friends ask me, ‘Why did you show the letter to him before you sent it?’ Some of them roll their eyes at me, in the universal ‘you idiot’ sign.
‘I just felt it was the right thing to do,’ I say. ‘It would feel as if I was going behind his back if I didn’t tell him.’
My father also says to me, ‘Why did you have to tell me? I could have had a couple more weeks of peace if you didn’t tell me.’ He is not rolling his eyes in the idiot sign. He is angry with me.
It begins when he comes over to pick up some soup I have cooked for him.
‘Have you seen this article?’ I hand over the Bulletin interview.
He nods and says nothing.
‘I felt I had to write back and say that I experienced Mum as a good person and a loving mother.’ I give him my letter to read.
He reads it slowly and carefully. Finally he looks up. ‘Every word that you say is true,’ he says, ‘but I beg you not to send it.’
He is an old man, he says, and the one dream left to him is that one day his daughters will be friends. If I publish the letter I will ruin any chance of that. I will leave him nothing to live for.
I sigh. I can understand his dream. What parent wouldn’t wish for daughters to be friends? I don’t point out to him that I’ve kept silent for so many years and that hasn’t made us friends. Or that a friendship based on one person’s silence is not a friendship worth having.
