15

MY HOME TOWN

What started out as a story for Sarah and Brendan has also become a story for my family into the future so they’ll know a little more about what happened all those years ago. Still, I find myself avoiding the time that I most need to write about. Before I can go back to some difficult places inside me, I need to write a little about the life I live now and the town I love.

The Hunter Valley is the country of the Awabakal people, who have lived here for many thousands of years, but when Europeans came to the area, the best they could do was to use it as a jail. New South Wales had been settled as a penal colony, where convicts were transported for minor misdemeanours; then, if they committed further offences in the colony, they were sent to Newcastle for secondary punishment. So Newcastle was originally a place for the worst convicts. It became a coal-mining town, a port and an industrial city. This is where I was born on 17 March 1950, less than three kilometres as the crow flies from where I live today.

My youngest daughter and I live on the edge of the city with the Pacific Ocean at our doorstep. Below our house on The Hill is Telford Street, where Mum and Dad first met at a dance in Tyrrell Hall. From our roof deck, the city skyline is dominated by Christ Church Cathedral, where my parents were married. It was also the place where they were farewelled to their final resting places. In 1990, Newcastle Fire Brigade formed a guard of honour for Dad; fourteen years later, Mum was honoured as Newcastle’s first citizen, with a police escort and a corridor of green traffic lights from the cathedral to the cemetery.

In the distance we can see Stockton cemetery, where my parents rest in peace side by side. On their gravestone, it is written of Dad: ‘His gift was abiding love’; of Mum, the inscription speaks of the ‘vision splendid’ with which she ‘inspired us all’. There is a story about Mum and Dad and their life together, but someone else will have to write it. I couldn’t do them justice.

At dawn, kookaburras laugh in the Alexander palms and the morning sun rises out of the Pacific Ocean, turning the sky orange, pink, mauve and then the bluest blue imaginable. The breeze quivers the fronds of the giant date palm in the park outside my bedroom window, and the magpies sing their mournful call.

Most mornings I walk through the rotunda in King Edward Park, down past the sunken gardens and the frog pond, and up the stairs winding around the cliff to Fletcher Park. There I can take the high road with a view of the city, harbour and beaches, or go down to the low road at the bottom of the cliff, where the ocean crashes on to the sea wall at high tide.

I’m wary of walking along the bottom of the cliff. I’ve always taken heed of our original inhabitants, who tell many stories about rock falls. People laughed at my fears until a boulder the size of a truck crashed down and blocked the road for years.

Both walks are spectacularly beautiful. About 8 am, with the eastern sun glistening on the water, the panorama over Newcastle beach, the ocean baths and the busy harbour is second to none in the world. Dolphins weave in and out of surf riders summer and winter. Out to sea, the big ships line up waiting for our dancing tugs to escort them into the loading docks, where they take on their cargoes of coal. The profound beauty of this place always takes my breath away.

By lunchtime, the ocean has changed colour and texture with the afternoon southerly buster, as we call it, blowing in. Giant white prehistoric-looking pelicans wait for fishing trawlers bringing in their catch, which also provides a feast for seagulls at the local markets. On special occasions, our big working tugboats dance a pirouette in the harbour. There can be nowhere more beautiful than the Newcastle I see each day. I consider myself the luckiest person in the world to have it at my doorstep.

Like most Australian children, I learnt to swim early in life. If you didn’t, you sank. To avoid being dumped by big waves in the surf, I learnt to dive underneath them. It was exhilarating to feel the wave explode over me, knowing I was safe as long as I kept my body horizontal to the sandy bottom and my lungs full of air. Then I’d surface and watch the backwater thunder on to the beach, knocking over anyone who’d missed the dive. It was triumphant.

Most days I feel in harmony with the universe. If my body were a musical instrument in an orchestra, it would be in perfect pitch with every other instrument. Cars seem to slow down and drivers become more courteous. When I’m close to the early-morning ocean, my heart beats a quiet, gentle rhythm in time with my breathing and pulse. My head is clear and uncluttered, and everything around me is on pause. The ocean whispers something familiar, haunting and ancient. I’m alive.

On days like these, I look to the heavens and say thank you to God. A strange thing for me to say, because I’m not totally convinced there is an Almighty. Jesus, with all his wonderful stories and teachings, yes; divinity, not sure. But then who do I thank when this feeling of happiness and contentment overwhelms me? Who should I thank when the world looks and feels this beautiful? It can’t all just come from nowhere … and then again perhaps it can. I am a Pisces, swimming in opposite directions, tugging against myself.

It wasn’t always like this. I remember the other times only too clearly – times when I avoided sunsets and sunrises, and the earth in all its beauty left an ache in my heart. That time lasted too long – for almost fifteen years, from the late 1970s until about 1990.

I now think that, because of what I’d been through, I may have suffered a depression that was never diagnosed. My life was out of tune, and the earth spun out of control. My heart beat out of time with my breathing. I tried desperately to get them both working in rhythm, but I didn’t know how. Talking was almost impossible. Pent-up emotions got stuck in the back of my throat and threatened to choke me.

Depression wasn’t talked about in the 1970s and 1980s, but what I experienced was real. Although it was never diagnosed, that black cloud hung over me for a decade and a half. Food was what I ate to keep me alive. Waking up in the morning was torture. In those first few seconds of consciousness, I’d struggle to assemble all the bits and pieces of my personality, and I couldn’t help remembering the awful past. Once the adrenalin kicked in, I had to get out of bed quickly and begin the day, whatever time it was, to ease the knots in my stomach. Sometimes I dream that I am back in this space, with the heavy weight of sadness crushing me. Then I feel the joy of waking to a different day.

The fact that my children and I escaped and survived doesn’t mean the sadness and fear are over. Our memories don’t allow selective recall. I’ve come to the conclusion that it would be easier to lose a limb than to return to the darkness again. People often come out with ridiculous clichés – they say ‘Move on’, ‘Get over it’, ‘Build a bridge’, ‘Forget the past.’ You may learn to live with the past, but you never forget it.