Unconditional Love Page 2

  These images stayed with me, settled into my mind and became a part of my emotional DNA, in the same way that scents can, and certain tactile sensations, and especially songs. Like songs, certain images created intense emotions. I collected them and carried them with me all my life.

  I remember being in line with my mother for the cash register at the supermarket. I was still small enough to fit in the kiddy seat at the front of the shopping trolley. In the line next to us there was a woman about the same age as my mother. Her face was pale, thin. She was staring into the middle distance and her expression was full of pain. My mother noticed I was peering at the stranger. She looked at the woman, then back at me.

  As we got to our station wagon in the car park, I asked my mother, ‘Why did that woman look so sad?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Mum, lifting me into the back seat. ‘She’s tired. Hates grocery shopping.’

  ‘No. She was sad,’ I insisted. I couldn’t get her expression out of my head. The memory of her upset me. My mother explained that what I had seen on her face was a small moment in her day. Forgotten already. I had to try to forget it too. But I never did. I can still see her.

  I also remember what I saw from my back seat in the station wagon. We were stuck in traffic on Alexander Avenue, not far from Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens. I looked out my window and saw a woman sitting behind her steering wheel, sobbing violently, tears streaming down her face. Just as I was about to ask my mother why she thought the woman in the next car was crying so hard, the traffic moved and we drove ahead.

  Years later, on more than one occasion, I would become that woman crying in her car. Crying hard about something, in the middle of traffic. Maybe a little girl glanced out her window and saw me, and wondered why.

  Landscapes have emotional power over me. And gardens. Houses too, especially the house I lived in during my adolescence. In my dreams and memories, I can walk into each room of that house, and remember all the emotions I felt in each one. But other houses and buildings have visceral, unpleasant effects on me. I cannot wait to leave them.

  When artists create pictures, it is because they feel a strong emotion about a particular image and want to preserve it. It’s the same for me when I compose a shot through a movie-camera lens. By making films I have learned that images can tell a story. Words are not always necessary. Our brains begin to understand the world before we can speak.

  In 1964, when I was three and a half, our family moved from damp and chilly Melbourne to hot and humid Papua New Guinea, a hundred and fifty kilometres north of Australia’s Cape York, across the Torres Strait. My dad’s career was the reason for our abrupt shift from suburbia to the steamy jungle. An accountant who worked for the ANZ Bank, he took a promotion to become a bank manager in the coastal town of Lae, where we stayed for three years.

  I have vague memories of the plane trip from Melbourne to PNG. My grandmother Mid had made matching travelling outfits for Greg, Kathy and me. The fabric was stiff and itchy. We had to change planes in Brisbane. We sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to our mum in the airport cafeteria. She was turning thirty-two. The Kodachrome colour slides show a pretty young woman with curly black hair. She is wearing hoop earrings and holds aloft a cigarette in a fancy holder. Six-year-old Greg is jumping around, peering out the windows, while Dad is barking at him to sit down and behave. Greg inherited Mum’s hair, and with his dark-brown eyes and olive skin he could have been an Italian waif.

  From Brisbane we flew in a small cargo plane. I remember holding on to some rigging. We kids had a great time. It was thrilling to be up among the clouds for the first time in our lives. Mum seemed tense. Up until now she had been raising her children in a brick-veneer suburban home; she had no idea what to expect in the jungle. She was a brave woman, devoted to my father, and would have followed him anywhere.

  Lae turned out to be a bustling port town, filled with expats from Australia, the USA and Germany. We soon settled into our airy house on Coronation Drive. It was blue, built on stilts, full of louvre windows and ceiling fans. The garden was lush and a vivid green. There were frangipani trees and lizards and exotic birds. Everything about our new life was radically different. Gone were the high wooden fences around suburban blocks; now jungle surrounded us and steamy mountains rose in the distance. The air was thick and moist. Even the daily rain showers were warm.

  The bank paid our rent and provided two servants, Malalek and Bebe, who lived in a two-roomed cement hut in our large backyard. Mum did not have to do any housework. Now that she was a bank manager’s wife, she had to attend endless social events and host frequent parties for visiting bank officials and other expatriates. She took to this glamorous life like a duck to water, and was delighted to have free time in which she could write again. Bebe was our nanny. Malalek did all the domestic work. He was called a ‘house boy’ even though he was in his thirties. Every day he wore a clean white sarong around his waist, and not much else—the uniform of the Lae house servant. At first, my suburban mum was startled by this half-nakedness (and also thrilled, I am sure). My conservative dad was even more startled by the bare-breasted New Guinean women he saw in the street outside his bank, or in the marketplace.

  I remember when I first met Bebe. I was sitting in the front seat of our car eating an ice cream. My mother was driving. I turned around to stare at the small Papuan woman in the back seat. This was our new nanny. Mum and I had picked her up from an employment office. Bebe was eating an ice cream too. She kept smiling at me as I stared back at her. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Her skin was dark-brown. Bluish tribal tattoos lined her face and chest. I came to love Bebe. She had a soft, lilting voice and smelled like coconut milk. I used to watch her rinse her hair in it. She would crack open a coconut, lean her head down, then pour the coconut liquid over her curly hair. Then we would eat the coconut together while her hair dried in the sun. She smelled so good. I never learned her last name. She lived in one room in the cement hut. Malalek and his seventeen-year-old wife, Tarbet, lived in the other room.

  Our house was across the road from an enormous military cemetery containing the graves of thousands of Allied soldiers who had died in World War Two. The war had been over for twenty years, but its scars were still visible. The wreckage of downed fighter planes appeared in the port at low tide. Old bomb craters had left mysterious indentations in the neighbourhood streets.

  Sometimes, Mum and Dad would take us for drives into the jungle or to visit exotic villages. Mum always took along her 35mm camera. She would take photos of lonely Japanese war graves, of flowers and landscapes. Among her amazing collection of images are misty mountains and sun-baking crocodiles. Once our car broke down in the middle of nowhere. A group of highland tribespeople wearing coloured feathers came to the rescue. Mum took photos of them to add to her collection.

  At least once a month she held a slide night for family and friends. After darkness fell, she hung a white sheet on the lounge-room window—that was our screen. The little projector only took two slides at a time. My job, as Mum’s helper, was to insert new slides, right-way-up, into the holder. While I did this, Mum placed the discarded slides in a pile. We would exclaim at the landscapes, or laugh at the family snaps. From the garden, Bebe, Malalek, Tarbet and all their friends would be watching the slide show too. Maybe that’s why Mum hung the sheet against the window, instead of on the wall.

  Close to our home was a broad, smooth-pebbled river. On weekends, we would visit the river and play in the shallows. Mum kept us away from the deeper areas by warning us about crocodiles. I can still picture the pebbles and the tiny fish in the crystal water. I can see my black-haired father, like a friendly whale, with Kathy on his broad back as he swam. Dad always promised not to go under the water when I was on his back, but he often broke his word. He said it was good for me to face my fears. He did not realise how terrified I was. I was anxious about everything. It tested the patience of my parents, especially when Greg was such a crazed daredevil. He w
as only seven, but he would happily jump from cliffs into the river below with all the local kids. Kathy also seemed completely fearless. Going under the water made her giggle.

  Bebe took Greg, Kathy and me to the movies one day to see Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins. I loved the scene where Mary and Bert and the children jump right into the chalk picture on the footpath. I wished with all my heart that I could do that in real life. I became obsessed with the movie and begged Bebe to take me back to see it again and again. We bought the soundtrack album and learned all the songs by heart. Bebe loved movies. She had seen The Wizard of Oz and used to tell Kathy and me the whole story over and over. Bebe’s daughter had been taken away from her. We didn’t know why. At some point we got confused and mixed up Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz with Bebe’s lost little girl, swept up by a terrible tornado and whisked away from her mother into some strange land, far away.

  Kathy and I would play at making movies. I used Dad’s golf bag and clubs as a pretend camera. Kathy was my star: I told her what to do (directed her!). This was a lot of fun. I once told my obedient actress to climb on top of one of our spinning bar stools and do a pirouette. As I pretended to film her with my golf-club camera, she fell off the bar stool. Her screams brought Bebe and Mum running. Blood was gushing from her head. Mum made me sit in Emergency, watching the doctor sew up Kathy’s right eyebrow.

  ‘It is your duty,’ explained Mum, ‘to listen to Kathy’s screams, so that you never forget what your silly game has done to your sister.’

  It worked. I still feel guilty, but it didn’t put me off cameras and filmmaking.

  There was no TV in Lae, so we often listened to the radio. We had a big old radiogram that had all its dials on one side and the record player on the other side. You could pull the radio forward and it would light up. I thought the radio was magical and had a tiny orchestra inside it. I used to pretend to be the musician inside the radio. I would build a wall of books, then put my toy piano behind the wall and hide. I played my ‘music’ on the piano, while Kathy danced about in her ballet costume.

  Bebe would peek around my wall of books. ‘Jossy, take the books down,’ she would say. ‘We want to see you!’

  ‘No!’ I would shout. ‘You’re not allowed to see me! I’m the radio!’

  To Kathy and me, Bebe’s small cement room seemed fit for a princess. She had fine netting on her bed, like something Sleeping Beauty would have. In fact, it was to guard against the armies of mosquitos, some of which carried malaria. Kathy and I would pester Bebe to show us her tattoos. She never complied if our parents were nearby, but in the privacy of her room she would unbutton her blouse and reveal them, explaining that her tattoos were a great honour, given to her when she was thirteen. They signified that she was no longer a child.

  Bebe came from Salamaua, a small town on an isthmus across the Huon Gulf from Lae. It had been destroyed during the war and Bebe had come to live in Lae as a child. In her late teens, she had fallen pregnant to a white American. When her pale-skinned daughter was born, the Australian authorities took the baby away. A German family in Lae adopted the little girl, Diandra, and sent her to boarding school in Australia. Bebe occasionally saw her daughter when she came back to Lae during school holidays. But she and Diandra were not close. Of course, we kids knew none of this. Bebe was our playmate, our beloved babysitter, our tattooed Mary Poppins. I never learned what happened to Bebe, and to her daughter, after we left New Guinea.

  My memories of PNG all swirl together. I remember starting kindergarten at the local school. One day all the kids were told to line up, single file, down the long school corridor. I could hear the sounds of crying. I stood on my tippy toes and craned my neck to look at the front of the line, where I saw a nurse in white, and a man with syringes. I hated injections. I slipped out of the line and ran as fast as I could, out of the school grounds. I didn’t run home, as I knew that Bebe or Mum would take me back to school. So I hid under my friend Kimmy Costello’s house. I stayed there in the safety of the cool, damp shadows for most of the day. I stayed very quiet when Kimmy’s mum or the house servants walked past. Finally, I saw a pair of legs I recognised. It was Greg. He had been sent to look for me and had figured out where I might be hiding. His face appeared.

  ‘What’re you doing?’ he asked.

  ‘Hiding,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to get an injection.’

  ‘Your teacher says you have to come back to school.’

  ‘No. Not if the doctor is there.’

  ‘He left hours ago,’ said Greg.

  So I came out and Greg walked me back to school. Mum took me to the doctor the next day to get my shots.

  My fear of doctors, or anything medical, probably grew from the number of times I ended up in a doctor’s office. I was a sickly baby. I was forever coming down with chest infections and was constantly on antibiotics. I had been asthmatic since birth. Mum told me that as a toddler I used to say that I had kittens living inside me. Whenever I breathed out, the wheezing sounded like meowing. In Lae, I could breathe easily for the first time in my life.

  In another memory from Lae, a large python lay captured in a grassy stormwater drain. Native men were spearing it over and over. I remember Bebe rushing me away, telling me not to look. It was too late. For years after, I had nightmares about enormous pythons trying to eat me. Another memory is full of noise and colour: it was Chinese New Year and my family and I were standing on the balcony of a restaurant in Lae’s Chinatown. The night air was full of floating red paper from the hundreds of fire crackers exploding around us. It was the most noise I had ever heard and I had my hands over my ears. The smell of sulphur added to the excitement. Then out of the smoke appeared a spectacular Chinese dragon. Its head was huge, its mouth cavernous. The creature was made of colourful fabric and concealed two or three men, who were making it writhe and shake. I was high above it, but I couldn’t be sure it was not going to eat me. Dad held my hand and told me it was all pretend.

  The sing-sing festivals in Goroka were also unforgettable. Thousands of New Guineans would travel from all over the country and take turns to present their unique tribal songs and dances, wearing glorious ceremonial headdresses and bright body paint. The music was rhythmic and throbbing, overwhelming and hypnotic.

  Mum grew close to Malalek, Tarbet and Bebe. When Tarbet’s second childbirth became life-threatening, Malalek woke Mum in the middle of the night and they rushed to the cement hut at the back of our garden. Dad stayed in the house with us and called the local hospital, who refused to send an ambulance because Tarbet was a native. Dad raised hell, so the hospital agreed to break the rules and send an ambulance right away. Meanwhile, Mum found Tarbet naked, about to faint, trying to birth her baby’s placenta in a semi-standing position. The newborn boy was on the ground, covered in blood and dirt, its umbilical cord still attached to Tarbet’s body. Every time the village women yanked on the cord, the screaming baby was dragged over the ground. Although reluctant to interfere with the village practices, Mum cut the cord, and wrapped baby Anthony in a towel. She encouraged Tarbet to lie down as the welcome sound of the ambulance siren grew louder. When the baby suffered a dislocated foot that required surgery, Mum and Dad paid for it.

  Now that I have read my mother’s letters from our time in PNG, I can see her evolution from a Melbourne housewife into a worldly woman whose mind was open to new experiences. The day we were to return to Melbourne, she was inconsolable. I remember looking out the plane window to see Tarbet, Malalek and Bebe standing on the tarmac, all weeping. We begged Mum to bring Bebe with us to Australia. She was our loving, caring playmate, a member of our family. She had made cubbies for us in the jungle, climbed with us into the sweet-smelling frangipani trees, and told us she loved us more than anything in the world. Dad explained that life in Melbourne would not be right for Bebe. Mum cried the whole flight home. Kathy, Greg and I worried about what Bebe would do without us to love her.

  3

  You know that place between sle
ep and awake, that place where you still remember dreaming? That’s where I’ll always love you. That’s where I’ll be waiting.

  J. M. BARRIE

  We returned to chilly Melbourne in 1967, back into the neat suburban house on Somer Street in the leafy suburb of Heatherdale. It had been built the year before we left Australia: pale yellowy bricks, a wide front patio with metal railings, on which grew redcurrant vines. A weeping willow tree stood in the front yard, and green mountains of nasturtiums grew along a steep driveway that led down to a dirt road.

  As soon as we arrived back, my asthma flared up. The brutal Melbourne winter affected my lungs so badly that I spent many long nights in the steamy bathroom, the only place I could get some relief. Mum would stay up with me, sitting on the floor next to the tub, while the taps ran hot and I breathed in the steam. In our lounge room we had an old-fashioned divan that Mum called my coughing couch. On bad nights she made a bed for me there and I slept sitting up. Other times she would lie me on the coughing couch facedown. My head hung over the end, a bowl on the floor beneath my face. Mum would hit my back the way the doctors had shown her, trying to get what she called the ‘corks and plugs’ out of my lungs.

  I was often too sick to go to school. Mum, who was now working as a secondary school teacher, would drop me off at Grandma Wood’s, where I lay wheezing on her couch, watching her TV shows with her. My favourites were the old black-and-white Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis movies. I napped through the Mike Walsh midday talk show, then in the afternoons we watched Australian shows. Grandma loved Homicide and Division 4.