22

TODAY

The tragic events in Heathcote had a terrible effect on the Cummings and Wynter families, but the strength of our relationships has helped us through. My life is rich and full, and there is joy in watching over the next generation of our big family as they take the baton from us.

My sisters and brother all have loving, loyal, lifelong partners, which in this day and age is rare. Margaret and her husband Badger found their little piece of paradise at Nelson Plains in the lower Hunter Valley. Ray and Julie reside happily on the side of a Merewether hill with music and betting slips. Kathy and Geoff maintain an eco-wonderland in their own little rainforest in a New Lambton gully, which they share with the parrots and possums.

The partners they have chosen are dear to me. We rarely use the term in-law. We are family. I know this closeness is a legacy of everything my mother and father taught us. The active attitude of goodwill, which is what love is, is alive and well in my family.

We have an immeasurable love for each other’s children. Just recently I watched Julie and my nephew Nicholas deep in convers-ation at a family gathering, her arm on his as she looked up to his gentle face on a 6 foot 4 inch frame. When I am old and only have memories to recall, it will be moments like these I remember rather than what I earned or where I worked.

Music has remained an important part of my life. My brother Ray is a funny man and plays a great lead guitar. At my recent birthday celebration, I was delighted by how easily the younger members of our family shared the joy that dancing, singing and celebrating can bring – those precious moments when a generation gap doesn’t exist.

Stuart’s brother Michael Wynter and his wife Jane looked out for Sarah and Brendan after Stuart died. They’ve not only helped them financially but also played an important role in their lives as aunt and uncle. Their four children are part of the close network of cousins in the next generation of the two families.

A year after Stuart died, I took a job with the Family Court in Newcastle. For the next twenty-five years, I lost myself in the bowels of the public service. In March 1988, I married Mark Williams in the garden of our home in Cooks Hill, surrounded by friends and family. Brendan, who was fifteen at the time, gave me away, and Sarah sang us a love song. Our marriage lasted for more than twenty-two years and was a great source of strength for me.

When Mark and I met, I’d become good at hiding my sadness, but for some reason my past grief began bubbling to the surface during the early days of our courtship. I remember one day hopping off a bus in Hunter Street trying hard to camouflage the tears after a bus driver had been unnecessarily rude to a young boy. I toyed with the idea of medication, and in the early hours of one morning the grief was such that I considered asking Mark to have me admitted to hospital. I didn’t, because in the end I knew there was nothing anyone could do or say to make me better. The ache in my heart gradually subsided during our time together, especially the years we spent in our first home.

Rainie Beth, our daughter, was born in 1991, when I was forty-one. By then, Sarah and Brendan had both left home, but they have remained a big part of her life. She also has good role models with her many friends. For Rainie, life is good and that is how it should be. A teacher once told us at parent–teacher night that he had never met a child so sure of who she was. When she was about four years old, she told both her parents in no uncertain terms that she was taller than us.

When Sarah and Brendan attended primary school after I’d separated from Stuart, I was very much in the minority as a single mother and often felt out of place and alone. These days, the tables have turned. There are so many blended families and single parents who do an admirable job of parenting. I wonder if Rainie is the exception rather than the rule in having had a mother and a father who lived together for longer than most. At a very young age, she asked us why she didn’t have two fathers like everyone else at school. You can’t win all the time.

Stuart’s life insurance policy nominated Sarah and Brendan as his only immediate family, and his estate paid out the small mortgage on our Cooks Hill terrace. His will and his brother Michael’s support have made it possible for both my children to have educational opportunities I could only have dreamed of.

After Stuart’s death, Sarah made a number of important decisions about her future. She researched all the boarding schools in Sydney, then made her choice and enrolled at Sydney Church of England Girls Grammar School in Darlinghurst to complete her high-school years. As a child, she used to sing ‘Australians all are ostriches’ – her interpretation of ‘Australians all let us rejoice’ – and at the age of seventeen, she went off to find America, travelling to New York to study drama. Since then, she has become well known as an actor in television and films.

Sarah now lives an extraordinary life in America, a country I have also come to love. She has recently taken out American citizenship, which she can now adopt without being required to relinquish her Australian ties. On my many visits to the United States, I’ve met the ‘dear hearts and gentle people’ of my Bing Crosby childhood. I suspect I know more songs about American cities than they do, and have amused many in proving this. In August 2005, Sarah married a New York boy, Dan Peres, in Sydney. Their first child and my first grandson, Oscar Dallas Wynter Peres, was born in 2008. Life goes on.

In lighter moments I laughingly refer to myself as the mother of a famous daughter and daughter of a famous mother. Sarah has been in some scary places, but she has a wonderful philosophical attitude and love of life just like her grandmother. She came home from Sydney on the day in 1989 when the Newcastle earthquake struck, the epicentre only a couple of miles from our home. A visit to New York in 2001 found her trapped in Manhattan behind the exclusion zone during the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. In the middle of 2006, she and Dan decided to travel to London and were there during the terrorist subway bombings. The next year, she came home for ten days to celebrate Rainie’s sixteenth birthday, and we both watched in horror as the bulk carrier Pasha Bulker floundered off Strzelecki lookout at the end of our street in cyclonic weather and became grounded on Nobby’s beach a few minutes later. I have friends who joke about checking Sarah’s whereabouts before they make their travel plans. After her last visit, though, we came to the conclusion that she is actually our guardian angel and is sent to protect us at these times. Bless her heart. She was born to be close to historic and sometimes tragic events.

In her home in Irvington, New York, Sarah has some paintings by her father. One in particular is a watercolour of a country landscape. It’s full of dark clouds – a storm brewing – with a solitary isolated farmhouse. I find myself drawn to this painting when I am there. Am I trying to find a clue? What does it mean? Is the house a symbol of human isolation and loneliness? The painting brings me no joy. A happy, contented person could not have painted this.

Brendan graduated from the University of Sydney like his father many years earlier. He has worked and taught in different jobs in London and Norway. A family in Norway is close to his heart, and he speaks fluent Norwegian. He’s currently a senior public servant in Sydney, dipping his foot in the world of acting at a drama school. This means of self-expression surprised him at what he calls a late age.

He remains a Newcastle boy through and through. He feels a yearning for the Pacific Ocean if he ventures too far away. He’s funny, intelligent, serious, passionate and thoughtful. He’s loved by many and he loves his Novocastrian roots, family, friends and soccer club. We share his company on weekends in Newcastle, which is only a couple of hours drive from Sydney. Summer finds him at Newcastle baths or Bar beach. He has a sorrow buried deep inside, but has also found a way to manage it. Together, we’ve experienced everything that is meaningful – family, friends, work, community and love.

I was in Los Angeles with Sarah in 2003 when Woman’s Day pub-lished an article about Stuart and the murder–suicide in Heathcote. We’d come to dread the prospect of such an article as Sarah became better known in Australia and the United States. I suppose this is the burden of celebrity. When you put yourself out there, everything is up for grabs.

We were grateful there hadn’t been more publicity about what had happened. Over the years, the media, especially the Newcastle Morning Herald and the local television station, have treated Sarah and her grandmother Joy with respect and sensitivity. Many people, especially in Newcastle, had a vague idea about what had happened in March 1984, but there hadn’t been any publicity. It wasn’t a subject we talked about even among close friends. I was surprised recently when a friend I’d known for over thirty-five years said she thought Raken had been garrotted by Stuart. So you see the problem with skeletons and elephants.

When the story finally surfaced, it was definitely hard to read. I was just relieved that it was factual. Megan Norris, the author of the article, has spent years exposing the terrible blight of domestic violence in our society, and she has since told me that she suspected there was another real-life story behind the one she reported. She’s become an enormous source of support and inspiration for me.

Younger members of our family, including Rainie, weren’t aware of the events of 1984, and in some ways the Woman’s Day story was a wake-up call. I knew I’d have to tell the real-life story from my perspective as honestly as I could, both for myself and for future generations. There are some events you have to live through before you can tell the story. The decision to write for a wider audience was still a few years away, but maybe, just maybe, the seed had been planted.