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MY GRANDMOTHER WAS born on 18 May 1919, at the height of the influenza pandemic. She was born in Gympie, a town named after a creek named after a plant the local Gubbi Gubbi people call gimpi-gimpi. The gimpi-gimpi is reputedly the most painful of all stinging plants in Australia: if touched, it leaves a sting that lasts for days – even months. This tropical shrub, Latin name Dendrocnide moroides, is covered in heart-shaped leaves that belie its toxic nature.

She was christened Constance Joan Herbert. To me, for most of my life, she was Nanny. But to most people, for most of her life, she was Joan. When she married, she took her husband’s first and last name, as was the custom, and became Mrs Stirling McWhirter. After they divorced in 1955, she kept his surname – her children’s surname, the name I suppose she felt she’d earned – but reclaimed her own first name. For the rest of her life, more than half her life – close to forty-five years – she was Joan McWhirter. Joan McWhirter was her legal name. It is the name inscribed on her headstone.

When she died in August 1999, I was asked to give a eulogy at her funeral. Three of us were to speak: my cousins Mandy and Stacy, and me. I don’t remember thinking it was odd that this task of remembering and celebrating her life had fallen to her three oldest granddaughters – that none of her children, and no one who had known her in her youth, would speak on her behalf. I was twenty-six, old enough to know that a eulogy could or should encompass a whole life, not just the life I knew. But if this thought occurred to me, I don’t remember it now. I know I wanted not to sugar-coat her character. I wanted, as much as was possible, to be honest.

The service was to take place in the non-denominational chapel at the funeral home in Nambour. My mother and I flew from Sydney to Maroochydore; my sister, who was working for a Sunshine Coast news network at the time, met us at the airport and we drove together to our motel in Montville – the quaint, touristy town in the Blackall Ranges where Joan had lived as a young girl. The day of the funeral dawned clear and sharp-edged. I woke early, feeling panicked, because I still hadn’t written the eulogy. I’d thought about it a lot and made some notes: about the nature of death and tragedy, her so-called tragic life. I had tried to construct something meaningful, but everything I wrote sounded trite or pompous. What did I know about death or tragedy? What did I know about life – hers or mine or anyone’s?

I set off to find a local cafe. I sat there with a coffee and a cigarette, thinking about the things I did know. All her tics and foibles: her fetish for all things Hawaiian, her love of a bargain, how she could never be wrong. Her tendency to try and control everyone and everything around her with a bullying force. And when that didn’t work, with tears and manipulation. Her stubborn belief in her own independence, which was forever offset by her overwhelming fear of being alone. When we stayed with her as children, she would demand that one of us sleep with her in her bed, and we would fight with each other to avoid the torture of lying awake next to her snoring, farting form, while the American-style coffee percolator, set to boil before breakfast, tick-tick-ticked on the bedside table. I started sinking, just thinking about it all.

Then, just as the early morning chill began to soften into day, I had an idea. I scribbled and I scribbled, now running out of time. After a few minutes, I looked at what I had. It was whimsical, honest, heartfelt and – I hoped – might even make people laugh. ‘Where’s your sense of humour?’ she used to roar at us if we dared be offended by her jibes.

It would do.

My mother, who is rarely on time for anything, let alone early, was the first of her siblings to arrive at the funeral. She took great pride in this, thought it was somehow significant. It meant she had time to see her mother one last time, lying in her casket, small and frail and cold to touch. I didn’t go with her. While we were waiting outside for the service to start, I met my grandmother’s younger brother, Noel – her only sibling – for the first time. They had fallen out sometime in the late 1950s over their father’s will and had never spoken again. My cousin Mandy had reached out to him, convinced him to come. He seemed a gentle soul, nothing like his sister.

When it was my turn to speak, I stood behind the pulpit and told the small group of friends, family and acquaintances of my thwarted desire to put my grandmother’s life into perspective within the confines of a short eulogy. As a complex woman, she was full-length book material, I told them, something she would have been glad to hear. ‘So instead of making sweeping philosophical statements,’

I said, ‘I’m going to play with the idea of heaven and what goes on up there.’ I began by suggesting I wanted to believe that, in heaven, she would finally be free, that she would finally recognise that chaos is a natural state and embrace uncertainty with open arms. I paused dramatically and corrected myself: ‘Hang on, that’s my idea of heaven. Nanny’s would be different.

‘In Nanny’s heaven there’s a luau every night, muu-muus are compulsory attire at all times, everything’s always on sale, food has no use-by date, hearing aids are not affected by background noise, everything is predictable, you can play the same pokie machine for hours using only one coin because you always get out exactly what you put in, there are regular cruises to exotic destinations, all the fruit comes from Erbachers*, an allergic reaction to humidity – characterised by a rocking sensation – is a legitimate affliction and is treatable, everyone agrees with you (if you want them to), the grass really is greener on the other side.

‘I’m sure that if I’d mentioned this to her when she was alive that we would have argued the point extensively. She wasn’t one to be fooled by anyone else’s notion of reality – or fantasy, as the case may be. Far from it. And just as we reached a point where I was sure I was on the verge of having her see it my way, she’d throw in that phrase that made my blood boil. “Well, this is the thing.” Those five words were her trump card, played time and time again. As though what you were saying was what she’d been trying to say all along. As though it was she who’d actually created this vision of herself in heaven. That she knew all along what was out there. And for once I don’t mind. I don’t doubt for one second that in the next world, like this one, she will always have the last say.’

Mandy and Stacy were more emotive than me, more personal. Stacy cried. I worried afterwards that I had misjudged the situation, that people might think me heartless. But after the service many people, some of them strangers, told me I had spoken well and that I’d touched them. They said we’d all spoken well in our own way. My father signalled his pride with inappropriate bluster and competition, in a throwback to my prize-winning childhood, telling me my eulogy was the best. Relatives still mention it from time to time. I wonder at my audacity now. But perhaps, knowing what I did and feeling what I did, and having yet to realise that a life is so much more than any one person can see, it was the best I could have done.

I didn’t see my grandmother’s brother Noel afterwards; I was told he had left as soon as the service was over, that he was too distraught to talk to anyone, too upset to attend the burial. Did I see him during the service, did I catch his eye while I was speaking? In my mind I did. In my mind I see him sitting there in the chapel, listening to his great-nieces speak about a woman he’d grown up with and now barely knew. I see a grown man reduced to the emotional state of a boy, face white with shock and eyes red from crying, shoulders cowed by that unfathomable weight: half a lifetime of regret.

My grandmother was buried at the lawn cemetery in Kulangoor, on the road between Nambour and Eumundi, within cooee of the Bruce Highway. She didn’t plan to be buried there. She didn’t plan to be buried anywhere. She refused to even state her preference for burial or cremation until her final days. She was buried on a gently sloping hill dotted with gums that stood so tall and straight they pierced the sky. Clouds rolled in while we were standing there, watching her body being lowered into the ground. The clouds threatened rain. The rain stayed away. I didn’t cry.

We gathered afterwards at my aunt’s home in Mapleton. We ate and we drank. We remembered Nanny with fondness. We laughed. We surrendered ourselves to the web of family, taut in places and frayed in others, the intricate convolutions that she herself, in her furies and wilfulness, had woven. The numbers dwindled. My youngest uncle left. My father left. My brother fell asleep on the couch. My aunt went upstairs to bed. I remember being quite clearheaded, for once not feeling the urge to drink, and instead watching the others who stayed – my mother, my uncle Bruce, my cousin Stacy and my sister – grow more and more drunk. Mum and Bruce danced, the way they did when she used to drag him to the Surfers Beergarden in the sixties. My sister sang into her fist and tried to wrangle us together to go to the Mooloolaba Surf Club, a fortyminute cab ride away.

As the night wore on we talked more about our own lives, our own problems, standing and sitting in loose-knit, ever-shifting constellations – two of us here, three of us there. It was as though her death had given us permission to feel things and express things that weren’t about her, and were only connected to her in the way that each of us were. My mother spoke, with a lucidity that surprised me, about her childhood and the woman my grandmother was before I knew her. She had been beautiful once: funny and rambunctious, sassy and capricious. What happened? I asked her. What changed? Why did she become so bitter and fearful, so controlling, such a bully – the kind of person who demanded rather than asked for what she wanted, then cried when she didn’t get her way?

With the kind of clarity that professes to be truth, my mother told us of her mother’s affair. How one afternoon in November 1953, her mother had left her father, taking all four children with her. How she never went back. How instead she shacked up with this new man, and her four children, in a concrete housing-commission home in Coopers Plains. How she was later accused of adultery, first in court, then in the tabloid papers – and blamed for her marriage’s demise. That it was this – the shame of it – that had ruined her. As for the man, all Mum knew was that he played the cornet. And his name. And that he looked, somehow, like her father: tall and dark. How did they meet? She couldn’t say. How long did he stay? She wasn’t sure. When did he leave? She couldn’t remember.

She did remember one dark night, Joan at the wheel of the car, all four children in the back. A precipice, her mother’s tears. Her mother’s threats. She remembered the rain. The fear.

In the years since then, I have asked her again about this memory of the night in the car. I have asked my Auntie Jean, her sister. The story is never the same. They both agree that the incident, whatever it was, happened at Cunninghams Gap, where the highway between Brisbane and the Darling Downs rises from sea level to its cool, wet, ear-popping peak as it cuts across the Great Dividing Range. They were on the way home from boarding school. At times my mother remembers that the car is stopped on the side of the road, her mother crying: she is prepared to drive straight into the darkness beyond. It was this image that I was drawn to, which I could see so clearly in my mind, the night of my grandmother’s funeral – caught up in the melodrama, perhaps, or craving some kind of narrative turning point even then, years before I realised I would write this story.

At times my aunt has corroborated this story. At others she has not. Their mother had picked them up from boarding school, Jean says, after having dinner with friends in Warwick. On the drive home, as they were crossing the Gap, cloud closed in around them. Joan could not see the road edge for the fog, couldn’t see a thing. She stopped the car at the side of the road and waited for the fog to lift. No threats, no crying, just cool-headed pragmatism, thinking only of her children’s safety.

So now I can also imagine how, late at night, that experience of veering towards a verge they could not see might fill a child with fear. They did not feel safe. They were not safe. Their father wasn’t there. Their mother was not in control. I can see how later, when your mind knits together those broken threads of memory, bodily and otherwise – being woken from half-sleep on a dark, wet night, pulse hammering in your ears and throat tight with fear – you might ascribe a story to the feeling because it seems to fit.

 

* A family-run fruit and vegetable store at Diddillibah on the Sunshine Coast.