FOREWORD

What Will Be Worn started life as a story about my grandparents: the grandfather who gambled away his inheritance, the grandmother who had an affair, and the legacy – emotional and otherwise – they left behind. This is a story about middle-class families, I thought – it’s about my middle-class family: how wealth and prestige were gained and lost and gained and lost again; how patterns are repeated through time and across generations. It’s about a family that was once well-known, whose name is still well-known because of the building in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley that still bears its name: McWhirters.

It’s more complicated than that, though. Stories about families always are.

For me, at its heart, What Will Be Worn was never a story about a building or a name. I have had to reckon with both, and my own feelings about both, but as the granddaughter of a woman who was cast out from Brisbane society, the granddaughter of a man who was considered the black sheep of his prominent Brisbane family, I have grown progressively wary of my own deep-seated sense of illegitimacy, my subconscious urge to reclaim what was lost. I did not grow up in Brisbane, and I never met my grandfather, Stirling McWhirter – he died before I was born. There is nothing to reclaim. I have lost nothing that was not mine to begin with.

In many ways this is my mother’s story more than it is my grandparents’ or mine. It is about how she was born into wealth and a name that mattered, and lost both. But I could not tell my mother’s story without telling her mother’s story, and I could not write their stories without writing mine. So ultimately What Will Be Worn is about my grandmother, my mother and me – and the women who came before us. It is a story I inherited but which I also chose to tell, because I could, and because I owed it to these women who did not have the opportunity to tell their own stories, or to make their lives their own.