I didn’t speak English for the first few years of my life. It wasn’t any other native tongue, either. My father couldn’t understand me. For all her efforts, Mum struggled. Their boy lived in something of a language bubble that made each of them wonder what they had managed to produce.
Toby, a few years older, was the only one capable of comprehending my youthful gurgles, mangled words and dial-up-modem sounds. He was not exactly a linguistic genius. The broadest range of his vocabulary—a set of sweeping profanity—presented itself just once when he stole a baby emu out from under the nose of its incredibly fast father. He understood me, however.
Toby was enlisted as my interpreter in this world with which I could not connect. It was a fairly limiting job because I hated talking to people and tried to avoid them as best I could, which was mostly very easy in our isolation. Occasionally, Mum would wander into the lounge room and find me parked in front of the television watching a French-language news service, apparently engrossed. Other days, Spanish. Some days, neither of us knew what country’s bulletin I was tracking, though the men all had moustaches and there was lots of smoke.
The station had a cook called Melissa, whom I called Issa. My name was Ricky but I couldn’t say it properly, introducing myself as Icky. I’d have made a bad pirate. A stranger would respond, ‘Oh, your name is Icky?’, and I would scream at them: ‘No, it’s Icky!’ And we would continue on in this fashion until one of us died.
The incomprehensible gibber came to a sudden end one day when my father sat on my hand and wouldn’t respond to my pleas for help. They didn’t make sense, as usual, because I was half farmyard animal and half boy. Mum tells the rest of the story: ‘Then you just looked up at your father and said, clear as day, “You don’t understand me do you?”.’
It was as if I couldn’t trust my own family with clarity until that moment. I was about two or three but had never seen a doctor about my speech. Mum never had a single scan while she was pregnant with me; we just lived too far away from the hospital.
The incident served as confirmation for my father that I was not his son and proof to my mother that I was also not hers, at least not according to the strict definitions usually applied to mother-hood. She had long suspected it, chasing my father around the house and yelling at him: ‘He’s different, Rodney. Can’t you see that?’ To her, it was inexplicable. Two parents, neither of whom had finished high school, produced a boy who liked mustering cattle and being outdoors. This makes sense to anyone who learned about Punnett squares in Year 8 biology. Then I came along with my bird-like limbs, wide eyes and hesitant approach to the world.
I studied everything from a distance before becoming involved, if I became involved at all. Loud noises annoyed me and minute fluctuations in my routine—such as leaving the house, or breakfast—upset me. I couldn’t speak properly, was almost certainly going to be gay, and one day showed Mum I could read by completing all the answers in my school workbook while her back was turned.
In an ordinary environment, such as a city family, these milestones would be seen as a credit to the parents and their tutelage of their son, probably called Rupert or Harrison if we are being honest. Their son would be the result of their efforts in the same way a pavlova is the product of oppressive forces like whisking. Every child born in the city is 1500 mandatory violin lessons away from greatness.
Mum saw no such reason to claim responsibility and when I was at an early age she first explained to me my providence, in earnest tones. ‘You’re not my son,’ she said. ‘The aliens left you under the cabbage patch to observe humanity and one day you’ll have to go back and tell them what you saw.’
The news ought to have shocked me but it did not. In the normal fashion, children who are told they are adopted—be it from Africa or interstellar supreme floating intelligences—tend to have a bad reaction. Maybe they try to run away, maybe they rebel and take up the flute. To me, however, it made sense. Of course these people were not my parents. They liked horseriding and checking the rain gauge. They did things that confused me. Dad played polocrosse in outback events, a game that seemed to have been invented by someone who liked neither fun nor meaning, possibly an economist.
Our nearest neighbours were half an hour away by car, the nearest town an hour or more. We only had each other, in that sense, but even so my family never felt like they were mine. I watched them as if through glass at the zoo: observing, wondering how they came to me, analysing what would happen if the glass fell in and they rushed from the enclosure. Other days, I was the one enclosed—the boy in the bubble.
Our mythology did not burn away with the years. During the dark times to come, Mum would ruffle my hair and whisper: ‘You’re certainly going to have a lot to tell the aliens.’ Neither of us had read Nora Ephron, but this phrase became our variant of ‘Everything is copy’. Even the worst experiences became fodder for my eventual report back.
The stories continued into high school, when Mum would watch TV news reports of strange phenomena around the world. Unexplained lights in the sky, weird weather patterns. Crop circles. ‘That’s the aliens looking for you,’ she would say from her armchair without a hint of a joke. In our very small world, the many permutations of this phrase became our own cultural touchstone. The longest narrative arc in my existence, the piece of thread to which my mother and I clung. Proof that despite it all, we had not been replaced by mutant beings. We were us, still.
There were times when our reliance on the alien MacGuffin perplexed even me and I called Mum out on it. ‘Sometimes you seem so serious I feel like I actually am adopted or you know something I don’t and you’re using the aliens thing as a cover story,’ I prodded her on more than one occasion. These little interludes would end in hysterics, Mum in tears, laughing, and me in pretend outrage: ‘Just admit it, you stole me from an orphanage run by dogs!’
Not once has she broken the fourth wall and admitted it was just a story of domestic exceptionalism, a way to frame her belief that I was special. Every parent thinks they have a special child. Some of them actually do, though why would anyone believe them in the chorus? You know these parents. Mr 8 was beating Russians in chess by the time he could walk. Miss 11 was a founding member of The Saddle Club. Thomas invented double-entry bookkeeping for the Venetians. The difference for us was that Mum couldn’t bring herself to take the credit.
When I became a cadet journalist in 2005, it was meant to be, Mum said, because this was how the aliens could make sure I gathered enough information. Sure, outwardly I was working for a large regional daily newspaper, but inwardly I was an intergalactic researcher, sent from the heavens to sniff out the essence of humanity and pop it in a dossier. At times, though, I desperately hoped the fantasy could be true. At night, when I heard Mum crying in the room opposite because Dad had stopped paying child support again, I tried to imagine that all of this, all of our suffering, had been for something.
Maybe it was just for a story, the right to tell someone else about us. I imagined being beamed up into some orbiting alien spacecraft and urged to brief them on what I had found so far. And I could tell them the story of humanity from the beginning, if the moment struck me. I would tell them that the oldest written story we have is the ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh’ and that it contains the not insignificant detail of a man, created by a god, who sustains an erection for seven days and seven nights.
We told stories before that, too. Ones that were never written down. Had I known it at the time—had the world known it—I might have also explained that the Neanderthals who preceded and briefly overlapped with us Homo sapiens made jewellery and buried their dead. That they plucked the dark feathers from birds, possibly for ceremonial use. Never the white feathers.
They did these things, I would elaborate, because they had found a reason to do so. Because they told each other stories. Neanderthals likely had high-pitched, gravelly voices. If you were to go back in time to visit, it is quite likely that our ancestor’s story time would sound like a small animal being run over on an unsealed road.
Henry Molaison, I’d venture, had an operation in 1953 to treat epilepsy but which ended up destroying his hippocampus and amygdala. This wiped out the story of Henry’s life, the picture reel we all have that tells us who we are and from where we have come. Henry lived for many years but he never formed new memories for more than thirty seconds. Every half-minute his world would reset and he would forget, again, that his parents were dead. When he was told they had died, he grieved once more. And then they slipped away, lost to him all over again.
But in my own mind that is not the report I handed back to the aliens in space, the ones who had sent for me. The only story I wanted to tell them, in those lonely moments when I imagined being summoned instead of trying to sleep, was that Mum was the hero. I wanted them to know, even if she didn’t, that she had prevailed.
There are shades of victory, I know. Winning, in our sense, meant subsisting. Nothing more. In a way, our family became a version of Henry Molaison. After we were cleaved from our old life and thrust into the new one, there could be no more living, just surviving. Our most interesting memories all existed from a time before this violent fracture and we repeated them, as if to solidify them in our minds.
When I moved out of home to start work, my phone calls with Mum would often revert to discussions of my father’s dysfunctional family: the brutality of my paternal grandfather, the court case to win control of Barraroo Station from him, my father’s own emotional and physical attacks on Mum. When she was angry, she told my brother, sister and I that we had inherited his bad qualities. Or in lighter moments she’d say to my sister: ‘Geez you walk like your father, Loz.’
We heard all the same stories on a loop. None of us could have known that by plucking these memories out and rolling them around the contours of our tongue, enunciating them, we were also destroying them, making them less real.
Plato saw memories as fallible, approximations only of what was truly real. They were impressions left on a wax tablet and easily erased. Writing in the ‘Timaeus’, Plato likened our memories to portraits or landscapes painted on the canvas of the soul by an internal artist. Up until recently, most everyone disagreed with Plato, believing memories were formed and immediately stored somewhere in the architecture of the brain. It was ‘consolidation’, as they called it, and memories were filed like sensitive documents in an archive, perhaps to be collected again or just as likely forgotten in the dust. But around the turn of the second millennium, Karim Nader, a postdoctoral researcher at New York University, demonstrated that one of the biggest memory heresies was, in fact, true.
Nader showed memory was not a thing made once but again and again. He proved the intuition of many in the arts, such as the playwright Eugène Ionesco, who once wrote: ‘I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.’
Nader trained rats to fear a sound. In his lab at NYU, he played a tone and then delivered an electric shock to the feet of the animals. He did it many times so that the rats’ blood pressure rose when they heard the noise; their fur stood on end. The world knew, and so did Nader, that the creation of a memory required some kind of chemical reaction in the brain. But he introduced his own sacrilegious twist: Why was everyone so sure a memory was only created once?
He left his rats alone for a day, to give their newfound fear of the tone time to settle, and then he came back and played it again. This time, however, he injected a drug into the rat’s amygdala that prevented the formation of proteins needed to forge memories. If a memory was formed only once, the drug would not work. But if, by the very act of recalling the memory, the neurons re-created it with new proteins, it might disrupt that process.
Nader injected the rats within hours of making them recall the memory—by playing the tone again—and waited. Two weeks later they showed no fear at all. It was as if the memory of the shocks had never happened. Less fortunate rats who received neither drug nor a placebo injection continued on in a state of sound-related anxiety. The good news, one supposes, is that rats tend not to live very long.
Nader’s results shattered the status quo: the very act of remembering something could also change it. Memories were not stored in the filing cabinet of the brain. They were reconstructed with proteins each and every time a person needed them. The most pure memory is the one we never come back to. Everything else changes, the wax tablet.
Between us, Mum and I, we wore our memories down. For the aliens, for the story, for some poorly defined purpose neither of us could quite articulate.
The first thing I think I remember, at age two, is a litter of puppies underneath some outdoor stairs on Currawilla Station. Then nothing until moving day at Palparara Station. It is nothing grand, just a faint vignette of me sitting on the linoleum floor playing with a single, yellow Duplo block that had been left out of the packing for me. I remember seeing the bright-blue budgie cage my father had welded for my mother underneath a tree in the dust outside. Perhaps deliberately, it was made from so much metal it was too heavy to move. There was something of a motorcade on our way to the new homestead at Mount Howitt. Several cars, men on motorbikes and five white gates. I remember using one of the three new toilets at Mount Howitt and discovering a rat in it. I didn’t shit for days.
When my life outside of home started as a teenager on the Gold Coast, working in my dream career, I began collecting new stories. But amassing more wild stories—bizarre run-ins with powerful figures and the odd outlaw motorcycle gang member—only served to remind me that Mum’s story had stopped. Whatever new things I might have to tell her, we would end up back in the past, raking over the coals of our existence. And I stayed there with her, promising myself that if we made it through I would help Mum continue her story.
There are a handful of people in the world with a hyper-accurate memory. Not the ones who can recite pi to 22 000 decimal places. They call what they have a highly superior autobiographical memory, because ‘good at remembering stuff’ was apparently taken. Two Americans with hyper-accurate memories have revealed what it has done to them.
When Bob Petrella is stuck in traffic, he flicks back through his life and catalogues the best Saturday in every June since he was a child. He remembers every detail of the best days of his life. One of them was when he was sitting on a rooftop age sixteen, listening to a neighbourhood battle of the bands. Jill Price remembers everything that has happened to her on every day of her life since 1980, including on which day each event took place. She remembers the worst days.
Both say their ability developed after learning at a young age that nothing ever stays the same. It’s as if they are obsessed with what could have been, hoarding every scrap of information in case it is the best scrap. Jill calls it a ‘burden’. She remembers her husband’s eyes the day he died. Hearing a date can trigger recall, whether she wants it to or not.
When my brother was taken away to hospital with burns, my own mind went blank. But there are things from the weeks that followed that I have never been able to forget.
I remember, for instance, my father’s semen on his bedsheets as they were being taken from his room to be washed by our nineteen-year-old governess. The woman with whom he had been sleeping. The woman who was not my mother. I passed her in the upstairs hallway as she was leaving Dad’s room and asked her what the droplet stains were. Water, she’d said.
A seven-year-old is not meant to know what semen looks like, and I didn’t, but would later make sense of it all in my head. The memory stayed with me because I knew even then something was happening. They were hiding something.
The first clue came when I attempted an ill-fated game of surprise. Freshly showered, I crept down the stairs of the homestead at Mount Howitt and snuck up to the doorway that led into the living room. I sprung from around the corner and scared the governess, my father and myself. She was sitting on his lap in the leather recliner, curled in close to his chest. I had never seen my father with another woman before and the circuitry in my head froze. She heard me first and was shot into the air by the force of her own surprise.
I didn’t think about this in the moment but it has since occurred to me that my governess was not particularly bright. Nor, for that matter, was my father. Both of these things did not bode well for my education though it gives me some sense of reprieve that my younger self outsmarted them both.
We didn’t have much luck with governesses. The first ended up in court after whacking Toby with an iron bar. The second one lasted less than a week, which was just as well because she had such a high-pitched sneeze that dogs would come running whenever she let one off. My mother was a governess when she met my father on Durham Downs Station, an almost 9000-square-kilometre expanse of cattle country in far south-west Queensland. So I guess that’s a win, on account of the fact I was born. But governesses three through four were bad news. Especially Vanessa. We called her Vanessa the Undresser even before the affair because slut-shaming hadn’t been invented yet. It was the early 1990s and even if we were inclined to be ‘woke’, in the modern sense, back then it was simply a word that described the condition of waking in the middle of the night to a brown snake in the house.
History now tells me I ought not to have been surprised. A governess worked her way into the English royal family after being employed by John of Gaunt and his children, mothering her own children with him and becoming, eventually, the great-great-grandmother of King Henry VII of England. Louis XIV of France took as his last mistress Madame de Maintenon, the governess of his illegitimate children. And who can forget Maria von Trapp? In fairness to her morals, at least she pounced four years after Agatha von Trapp succumbed to scarlet fever. In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the governess marries her employer, too. In Vanity Fair the governess makes a play at deception in all its many forms to carry her through Regency high society.
The Victorian era was the heyday of the European governess. They were better than servants but not of the same social milieu of their employers. They—young, childless and unwed women all—were expected to live a life of virtual solitude lest they get too close to the master of the house. Good advice, really. The outback Australian version, however, is not the same breed. As near as I can tell, the only requirement of the job is that they be alive. Most of them come from the city, eager for a taste of the bush romanticised by Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson. Many of them leave quickly, having been acquainted with the version of the bush in which everything they hold dear is trampled, bludgeoned or otherwise beaten to death.
Vanessa was neither from the city nor from one of the grazing aristocracies that peppered the bush. Her family ran a trucking company from Toowoomba and Tambo in Queensland. It appeared not to be the future she wanted for herself, so she raided someone else’s instead.
If the lap incident hadn’t been the smoking gun, the night I caught Vanessa and my father kissing in the kitchen after dinner was. I went to return my dessert plate and she had one leg wrapped around his and they were going at it. They looked like two shit slinkies that had become stuck together in a drawer. I left quietly and put my plate back on the table. They never saw me.
It is hard to describe the feeling you get as a very small boy, when your mum is 1500 kilometres away with your newborn sister and new-burned brother in a hospital in Brisbane, and you realise you contain a world-shattering secret. Is this how a new president feels when they are handed the nuclear codes after taking the oath?
People with highly superior autobiographical memory have brains with larger regions where memories are created and retained. This is evidence of some correlation, to be sure, but nobody can be certain whether the large brains have come about because the subjects are so good at memory recall, or whether they are so good at memory recall because their brains were abnormally large in the first place. It’s a chicken-or-the-egg argument, only in this instance the egg can remember being squeezed out of an asshole. A new theory of memory is emerging, however. And it involves both the mind and the body.
Early stress changes the way genes express themselves. Even if your mind forgets, like mine did in the days after my brother was burned, the body finds a way of remembering. An octopus has entire neural systems—each like mini-brains—in its limbs so they can be moved independently of each other in response to different stimuli. Sometimes, our bodies do the thinking for us, too.
Late one night I made sure I cried loud enough in my room so my father would come in. He asked me what was wrong and, without mentioning the puzzle pieces I had heaved into place, I told him: ‘You don’t love Mum anymore, do you?’ The lie he gave me in return was effortless. It’s not that he had practised it—I’m not sure he foresaw his son asking in such a direct manner—but it was easy for him to do because he was the only player in his game. He was fighting for his comfort, not mine. It was a coward’s war.
Toby was covered head to toe in brown pressurised bandages when I finally saw him. It took Dad a week to visit. We drove the fourteen hours from the station in silence, save for the tape of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons in the LandCruiser. Big girls don’t cry. My brother had endured round after round of skin grafts. They took whole rectangles of skin from his inner thigh and transferred them to his arms and face. His body looked like farmland from the air, a patchwork of shades and hues and grafts and scorched bits. I remember the way he screamed during shower time at the hospital. His skin stuck to the bandages when they were peeled off and replaced with new ones. Every day was a series of new traumas.
When Dad arrived, he propositioned my mother for sex. When she declined, citing the case of her firstborn lying horrifically injured in the hospital bed, he accused her of having an affair with the doctors while he stayed behind on the station. Dad, abandoned so many times in his own childhood, was convinced of his obsolescence. He saw ghosts leaving him at every turn. In the end, for once, he left first.
Over six weeks passed before Mum returned to Charleville with my brother and sister, now a few months old. Apart from Dad and his mistress, I was the only person who knew about the affair. Mum, having shepherded the family through one catastrophe, was about to be confronted with a bigger one.
The act of living through post-traumatic stress disorder, they say, is not simply remembering the bad memory but reliving the bad experience, as if it were happening all over again. I still feel exactly what it was like to know ahead of time what Mum was walking into and not be able to tell her. Physically, emotionally, lexicographically: I couldn’t marshal the resources to do it. I didn’t even know the word ‘affair’ existed.
There is guilt. All you do is think and think and think about the secret you have and it stains you from the inside. Your stomach hurts all day long. My brother and I used to practise holding our breath underwater, going as deep as we could for as long as we could. It felt like those final seconds, before you’ve made the call to come up for air. Cells screaming, the sense of urgency like tar in the lungs.
Two years before the gun buyback and new laws governing how farmers should store their rifles, we had several guns hanging on a rack in the office on the homestead. The ammo was in a drawer in the same room. ‘I was going to shoot them both,’ Mum tells me later. ‘But I was visited by a guardian angel. I’m not kidding, Rick. A little voice told me to think about you kids. That would have been the end for all of us.’
Voices, angels, divine intervention. There is a favoured saying among believers, for we were counted as believers, and it goes like so: God never gives you more than you can handle. God dispenses Her tests in the same way the progressive tax system collects its revenue. Mum, it turned out, was targeted generously in the first instance.
After telling Mum about the affair, Dad played it safe. He hid Vanessa a half-hour’s drive from the homestead, at a dam we had dubbed the Turkey’s Nest because it was lined with blue tarpaulin and looked like a giant, circular swimming pool.
Again, my memory ran away. A black hole formed where these events took place, which only closed when we were living in a housing commission in Charleville. There was no money, little hope and four of us. Just like that, our lives had been completely rewritten. The street was in a dysfunctional part of town and Mum’s anxiety crackled in the new environment. The neighbours screamed at each other during prolonged domestic disputes deep into the evening. Mum changed Toby’s pressure bandages every day—he wore one on his face, arms and legs—and my sister’s nappy as needed. Then we all got chickenpox, because life is funny like that.
The alien backstory that started as a whimsical meme between Mum and me now became necessary to give purpose to the pain. This wicked hurt, all of it, was material for the beings who had sent me. So I took notes, committed them to memory. I would have to tell it all some day.
More than two decades later I pop home from Sydney for a visit. Mum beams at me from the garden, where she’s ferreting about, pulling up weeds. ‘You’re home to see your Earth mother,’ she says. ‘You’ll go back someday. They’re expecting a report.’
‘When do you think they’ll come for me?’ I say.
‘When you’ve got enough information.’