Category: Writing

The incest taboo serves perpetrators

2023, the year of the rabbit, of jumping over obstacles and coming into luck.

None so far from what I see. Or so says the miserable me. While every day is a day of luck, says the optimist.

Be grateful you’re still alive. These words have a church-like quality, as of straight from my mother’s mouth.

I’ve been thinking about her lately. The anniversary of her death on 10 August, nine years ago. The way she cried in her 92nd year when she heard about the death of her six years younger sister far away in Holland.

My mother did not grieve so visibly over her three brothers. They went before their sister, even the youngest, the first to die when he was only eighty. 

My mother and her siblings. In 1982 before they hit advanced old age.

My mother had expected it, given her youngest brother’s years of ill health with leukemia. And expectation of the worst outcome is a good way to foreclose the feeling when it happens.

It’s no surprise then.

You’ve grieved ahead of time in tiny increments and never fully experience the full rush of sorrow that comes on you unexpectedly when someone drops dead out of the blue.

Out of the blue. Out of nowhere, only it’s never quite like this. There are hints of its arrival beforehand, however much we ignore the red flags of the future. 

I went to an all-day seminar on the perversity of child sexual abuse where three women speakers filled the day with their words at the Wheeler Centre. They organised this event themselves. No one else had wanted to put on such an event. And because of the sensitive content, they restricted numbers.

The first speaker opened the session to say nothing in the room should leave it. One of those events when we’re urged to secrecy. This is strange when I think on it because the whole time during the discussion – still seeping into my bones – they encouraged us to speak out about our truths.

The incest taboo only serves the perpetrators and one way to counter it is to talk about it. Yet here we were, a group of some forty people, encouraged to speak and to listen while also urged to wrap ourselves inside a bubble. 

Now writing about it here, I find myself perplexed.

Funny the way incest begets more secrecy. It happens in secret and then you’re urged not to speak about it. When you do, shame washes over you yet again. As if you hold a terrible secret that no one else can know and it becomes so powerful it’s almost overwhelming.

For me there was an additional load. The ghosts of the analysts were there in the form of one speaker, an analyst whose paper was most harrowing of all because she talked about the sexual abuse of infants and young children. The whole time she spoke I wanted to vomit. The room was electric, and everyone sat silent, mesmerised. 

As much as these talks left me reeling, the day itself was an adventure. Into the city on the tram, then out on a train towards Brighton – my first ever journey on the Sandringham line – in drizzling rain, for an early birthday dinner for a friend who also joked about keeping her age of seventy a secret. 

I told her there was nothing to be ashamed of. But she worries about the prejudice of publishers who won’t touch a writer past a certain age for fear we will not produce more. 

In the middle of this sumptuous and generous dinner with nine people, including the birthday person’s friends and family, we listened on and off to the gruelling game between the determined French soccer team and the wonderful Matildas. 

I’m not given to paying much attention to sport of any ilk, but this game had me hankering for success. Mostly on behalf of my youngest daughter who was out with friends in Brunswick to watch the game.

She was desperate for the Matilda’s success. A soccer team emblematic of change. Women playing a traditionally male game. 

We might say there’s one obstacle leapt over in the year of the Rabbit. But still one woman a year is killed in Australia through intimate partner violence. An underestimated fact that sticks in my throat.

My mother could once have been such a statistic. And we in turn. 

The bus trip I took as a child in my memory, seated beside my mother. A yellow bus that travelled along Canterbury Road and took you into the heart of the Camberwell shops. It dropped us at the top of the hill near the railway station.

My mother wanted to visit Dickory Dock, an underwear specialist, still standing today. She needed a new girdle.

In those days women were fitted out, not trusting their own ability to match their body size with the underwear needed. The cost of a girdle was an investment, like buying a new overcoat. Maybe almost as expensive. 

There was a picture theatre nearby on the corner of Broadway Boulevard and Bourke Road that’s since closed. Could it be I worked there as an usher when a teenager?

I have memories of doing this but no evidence beyond a faded memory of wandering through the Hoyts’ theatre aisles, torch in hand with an open flat box of ice-creams held by a cord around my neck and protruding from my chest. 

If I held this job, it was not for long. I was fourteen when we left Camberwell, so it must be the sight of myself as usher blended within my imagination and memory that has turned me into this young girl, purposeful and strong as she carries her goods to sell. And for the first time earning money of her own. 

Dickory Dock was nestled alongside other non-prepossessing shops near the Palace Hotel with its stench of beer and stale cigarettes. This was where my father must have bought his alcohol in the days we lived nearby. 

My mother in the fitting rooms of Dickory Dock and my father flashes bright in my mind. Like a shadow.

Through the gap under the curtain, my mother’s pink feet splay alongside the neat black heels of the assistant who was prodding and poking at her thick form to get the fitting just so. 

I watched my mother’s toes, a bunion on either side. The bunions had grown so big all her shoes were misshapen. I dreaded the thought the same might happen to me. Those deformed feet, nails poorly clipped as if it had been too hard for my mother to bend over and tend to them.

My sister often sat on the floor in front of my father’s chair to clip his toenails. He liked her to cut them short, and she, young person of many talents, obliged. 

My father will kill us all one day I thought waiting outside that cubicle. My mother first, then my useful sister, then me and my younger sisters and finally my brothers. 

And we would all lie there in pools of blood, our bodies piled high like the bodies I had seen in books on the Holocaust, only those bodies were naked, and my father would not have taken off our clothes beforehand.

At least, I hoped he would not. 

We took the yellow bus home again that day, back through the leafy streets of Camberwell and when we arrived home, my father was seated in his chair by the fireside, blue soldiers of flame standing in formation along the gas heater. My mother timid as a mouse.

All this in 1966, the year of the horse in the Chinese calendar. People born that year have good instincts and powers observation. They can think for themselves, despite their enthusiasm and friendly impulses. And they’re good at jumping over hurdles. 

Buried alive

The squish of jelly fish on crumbling sand under my feet bothered me more than sharks, until I saw the film Jaws. Then for years I found myself scanning the horizon for signs of a triangular fin menacing the water’s surface. 

Years earlier, in summer we took the blue Ventura bus along Warrigal Road and jumped off before it turned towards Mentone shopping centre to walk the last stretch before our first sight of blue water curving its way towards the peninsula.

It wasn’t a popular beach as beaches go, but good enough for us, even on weekends in summer when you could barely find a spot to sit among the towels, umbrellas, and bodies.

Father Walsh drove us during the holidays when my sister was home from college. He parked his grey valiant in the side street alongside St Bede’s College, as if the sight of that venerable institution reminded him of his calling. 

I did not know this then, only that a trip to the beach in a car, in anyone’s car other than my father’s, was an exquisite pleasure to be savoured even as the seats were sticky hot and there was scarcely room on the back seat to breathe, jammed against two sisters and one brother or whichever of the kids made the trip with us. 

The water sparkled and the breeze whipped up eddies that frothed white like a row of marching girls in formation. 

At thirteen that awkward age between childhood and adolescence when your body is pushing itself out of shape from the thin angularity of your child self into some hideous shape I did not recognise, with fleshy bits here and there on my hips and bum and breasts pushing against my nipples. My bathing suit tight against my back was ready to burst at the seams. 

‘You’ll need a new one,’ my sister said, ever the one to notice, as if she was keeping an eye on me while I kept a closer eye on her. The way she moved beyond that awkward age into something I did not recognise. She was still short, not much taller than me, but she was rounded and wore bras. She wore a girdle like our mother, waist to thigh, with an add on suspender belt that kept her stockings in place. 

Dreadful things. I never wanted to wear one and as soon as panty hose hit the shelves I wanted no more of the dreaded strip of fabric you tied around your waist with bits dangling from front and back of your thighs to clasp onto stockings. When those bobbles broke off, as they invariably did in winter, when fawn coloured stockings were essential against the cold. Long brown socks were okay, but the older girls laughed at them by the time you were my age. 

On this day, no one was thinking about stockings or pantyhose. On this bright blue day with white clouds chasing one another in little tufts across the sky, the sun high and brightest yellow, it hurt my eyes. We thought only of reaching the water, sharks, and all. 

We swam. We splashed one another and the last one in shuddered at the indignity of an involuntary splashing. You did well to take control by leaping under the water without hesitation, while my sister and Father Walsh sprawled side by side on towels deep in conversation.

I wanted to be with them as much as I wanted to be in the water with the others. As if on cue the two oldies on the sand, my seventeen years old sister and the priest, no longer recognisable as a priest, in his navy-blue swimming trunks, nudged their way into the water. They could have been any other couple. He older, judging by the creases in his skin, but equally matched for vigour and a certain pleasure in each other’s company that I longed to share.

Home was a disappointment after Father Walsh took his leave. My sister retreated to her room alone and the rest of us propped in front of the television until the click of the front door and a shadow falling across the lounge room signalled my father. His shadow visible through the half open venetian blinds.

We switched off the TV as if by remote, in the days before remote controls, and scattered first to the kitchen, to the back yard, the two boys, and me and my sister, once our father was clear of the hall way, into our bedroom for safety.

My mother hummed in the kitchen as she boiled rice on the stove in readiness for nasi goreng, a recipe she brought from Holland. A recipe her family borrowed from the Indonesians whose land they had conquered.

In the late 1940s my father fought in Indonesia when the people there decided they wanted no more of colonial control. And the experience added to the pain of his participation in the war against German invasion. 

He brought those wars home and sat sullen in the front room grunting orders at my mother as if she was his inferior by rank while the rest of us knew to stay clear.

We were not guerrillas but needed the stealth of undercover fighters to protect us from his fury. It bubbled under the surface of his tired white shirts, brown around the cuffs and collar from wear. He ripped off his tie and let it fall to the ground beside his black shoes, which he had already kicked off. 

It was always the same. My father drank to a pattern. He kept the bottle in its brown paper bag even as he used a glass for its contents, as if he was tearing open a chocolate bar and breaking off bits to keep the rest for later.

He drank the lot in one sitting, slowly at first. You could gauge his mood as he spoke lightly to our mother at first sip as though she mattered. Only she knew as we knew, in no time, the gaiety of that first drink would shift to an irritation, as if something was scratching at his skin. Then into fury as if someone was kicking his shins. Finally to the vitriol that left my mother silent in her chair. Wary of any provocations, as he could not abide anyone’s existence, including his own.

Father Walsh was long gone by then. My sister bunkered down in her bedroom. I in my bed hidden behind an Edgar Allan Poe mystery as if I was looking for something that might scare me more than the tension in the house. 

A man buried alive.

I cannot think today that I should ever want to read such stories but in those days they offered a respite from life. As if they became my entry into a crazy state, when we knew only horror.