Merridie was always more mature than me. Still is. Our relationship took us through some ups and downs over seven years; we had periods of several months apart at a time. (I should explain it was always ‘on’ from my perspective – my early premonition about Merridie had become a settled part of my mental furniture in the relationship – but periodically it was ‘off’ from her side.) Over those seven years I received seven letters that were more purposeful than the usual ones she had sent.
In the early stages one such letter followed a meal she had at our home with the family. I must have been nearing the end of my final year of school and Dad was as usual firing with his humour, which often had a bit of a sting in its tail. He was telling me to get focused and think ahead: ‘Yep Son, aim high – aim at least for working at Blackburn Railway station.’ Unused as she was to this type of Irish humour, and on top of a few other things where I was clearly a bit slow on the uptake, she wrote me to break it off. In her words, she didn’t want to date or be stuck with a man less intelligent than her. Snookered. That was a difficult one to defend.
A few years later the most pungent of all the break-off epistles was the one about my mother. Merridie was deeply offended watching how I teased and jousted with my mother about, among other things, her lack of spirituality and biblical knowledge. This was a sore point, given that Merridie had lost her mother, and she rightly thought a man showing a lack of respect for his mother was a telltale sign of him not being good husband material. In my defence, my mother was always robust in her teasing and conversation; she always gave as good as she got. (And, to be fair, the world, not spirituality, was more of interest for her.) But clearly, we had grown up in very different family settings. Merridie was on a steep learning curve being around us.
She came to Monash University a year after me but was studying Arts to become a teacher, so our libraries were in different places. When we were on together we would catch up for coffee or maybe stay back for dinner and study near each other. But by and large our worlds were separate. She moved into a shared house with other girls and had her own circle of friends in a different church to mine. We both were part of the Evangelical Union, so there were lectures and camps where we’d be together. But it was not an intense relationship where we needed to be together constantly.
In the early years when we had a break I would accept the end of the relationship each time as final, but something would happen, and it seemed to me she would always come back and reinitiate the romance. Not that I minded. Of course, we both continued to care for each other and keep an eye out for competitors!
From about the age of twenty-one our relationship was steady, and we worked together in the youth leadership at a church in Oakleigh. She would come with me every Sunday. It wasn’t great for quality time, but we certainly learnt each other’s strengths and weaknesses. One night when we were having an amorous farewell under a pine tree in her garden I impulsively proposed to her. It was the night of her twenty-second birthday and I was on a bit of a high. I was only six months older than her and had barely enough money to pay for petrol. She accepted my proposal but cautioned me to go home and think it over, saying, ‘You don’t ask a girl that question lightly.’ I had bluffed with the answer: ‘Of course I’ve thought this out!’ I remember driving home in the FJ Holden I had inherited from my father and banging my head on the window with shock at my foolishness. I knew I wasn’t ready for marriage and had to call back the next day and awkwardly rescind the offer. She overlooked such poor caddish behaviour with good grace, reminding me that she knew I needed the night to think it over!
Finally, a year later, I was better placed. By this stage I was doing my education diploma and some paid pastoral youth work, so I had at least a pittance to my name. She was working full time as a teacher, so we knew we could scrape together money for a start to a shared life. We were also both committed to leading a growing group of young people at the Oakleigh church, so our lives were busy and mutually dependent. But again, in my faith experience I needed divine reassurance. So I went on a weekend prayer retreat where I asked God to be very clear that this was still the right course of action. Even my intuition at seventeen with the sight of the back of her head needed a good check! On that retreat I read Philippians 2 and the verse ‘to be of one mind and be united’. It was sealed. While I am sure that historic text has nothing to do with romantic logic and had a completely different meaning in the first century context, the heavens lit up for me. It was a moment of divine reassurance that I should propose and marry this woman. And not look back!
But before making it public there was another daunting hurdle. That was my father. God might have signed on, but Dad hadn’t yet been told. He still held the cards as I was still living at home, and he had a dictum that men should not marry until they were at least thirty, had a job and a house deposit, and there was clear evidence that they were in love. Perhaps his broken engagement came into play there. I was twenty-three; in my first, low-paid, job; had never left home; had no house deposit; and, in his mind, with all the on-again, off-again stuff we went through, he could not fathom if I was in love.
We decided the best approach would be to spring the news without warning, and alighted on the idea of announcing this on a semi-public occasion. It was a Sunday tea at our home, with the family gathered, to mark Merridie’s twenty-third birthday, so we had a cake to share. Dad deeply admired Merridie and her esteemed family, but when I announced that we were getting engaged he was struck dumb. My mother was equally shocked, but always knew the right social move. She called for a celebratory toast and found some words to express family joy. Dad was so shocked he sat speechless for a long time. A few times he went to speak, and we saw his lips move, but no audible voice came out. My siblings and my mother kept prompting him, as the patriarch, to say something – but he couldn’t. I still remember my mother’s pained words: ‘Russell, isn’t this wonderful news? Say something.’
I knew I must have flummoxed his plan for my life. I didn’t realise then, but maybe fleeting images of his own broken engagement overwhelmed him. Maybe he was comparing and contrasting his obsessive deep infatuation when dating Mum with my laid-back style, and so decided I was not really in love. Finally, after an excruciating silence, he said the unremarkable words, ‘Well, I have not lost a son, I have gained a telephone.’ That was it. (I was always on the home phone to Merridie or others, so me marrying and moving on gained him a telephone!) Unsentimental and hardly the patriarch’s blessing that we both craved.
Most women would be crushed by such an inauspicious beginning, but not Merridie. I think by this time she was used to Costello ways and even Costello humour. She and Dad had a warm relationship. He admired her ability to organise and her unemotional way of dealing with me. And, thankfully, I think we had been through enough by then for her to know and trust me well enough to get through whatever lay in our path.
I contrasted this to the nervous formality with which her father, Ridley Kitchen, had greeted me the day before when I went to ask for his blessing. By this stage he was happily remarried, but Marjorie was not there that afternoon; maybe Ridley sensed the occasion and sent her scurrying. He offered me a cup of tea, which I accepted, but I did notice how nervously he carried the tray of cups and saucers. A fair bit of tea missed the intended cups on the pouring. He then proceeded to ask me about the cricket! His teacup rattled the whole time. I quickly got to the point, put him out of his anxiety and asked for his blessing to marry his only daughter. He was very dignified and warm in his acceptance. And there were no wisecracks about phones, either. That man knew what was decent and in order!
We got married in May 1979, on a coldish afternoon. I was twenty-four and Merridie twenty-three. The service was at the Carey Chapel, my old alma mater; Peter was my best man, and my good friend Bill Hallam was groomsman, replete with his long blond hippie-style hair, thoughtfully washed for the occasion. Merridie had as her attendants Evelyn Hauw, a good friend from university, and my sister, Janet, as well as her two lovely nieces. At the reception Peter started his best man’s speech by talking about me and saying that I was none too good at securing things. ‘In fact,’ he said, ‘Merridie would often write letters and Tim would leave them in places the rest of us would find them.’ He reached into his pocket for his notes, but Merridie, assuming one of her missives was coming out, screamed and lunged across me towards Peter’s notes. None too becoming for a blushing bride, but funny for all to behold. A foretaste of the life that was ahead of her.
We set off the following day for a honeymoon driving around Tasmania, where neither of us had been before. It was a low-key but happy start for our life together. At the time we thought we were so grown up. Merridie certainly was, as she had lived a life of too much responsibility for one so young, whereas I had never left home, never learnt to cook and was only just working out how to do a full day’s work. Yet here we are some forty years later with three children to show for our love, and a wealth of rich life experience behind us. Sometimes youthful undertakings lead to great enterprises. How grateful I am for the wife of my youth!
At the beginning of 1979 I had taken articles at a fledgling law firm in Box Hill run by Alan Moore. I may have surprised Dad and individuated by getting engaged, but I hadn’t left home yet and this job was another safe move. Alan Moore was a Baptist leader and he took me on as his first article clerk. My mother’s brother, a QC, had got me an interview at the prestigious Labor-aligned firm Maurice Blackburn and I had received an offer of articles there. Most would have chosen a city firm over that cupboard of a suburban conveyancing practice in a nanosecond – but I turned down this legal icon of social justice to stay in the leafy Bible belt. Social justice was of little interest to me then.
I loved court appearances and took ridiculous risks that, if found out, would have ended my career before it began. I was briefing myself to appear as a barrister in the Magistrates Court and on one occasion in the Supreme Court, where I was not yet admitted. It was a ruse of front and cheek; I was only an article clerk. I could have been barred from ever being admitted as a barrister and solicitor for this dissembling to the magistrates and judges. I even won costs in one case in the Supreme Court! I do not admire this recklessness, but I realise that I was more of a risk-taker than my impeccable obedience to the family script indicated. Maybe it was because of my family constraints.
Faith is also a synonym for risk-taking, and maybe I had sensed a deeper instinct to live by faith than the safer dictums of my father and my church world. So, my first stint as a lawyer was to be just three short years. I loved it and I loved the challenge of taking an ordinary set of facts and persuading a judge or a jury to see it my way. For me there is no greater exhilaration than moving people from a static set position to a new way of thinking. I guess I was still an evangelist at heart! But I was terrible at the detail and all the work that had to be done at a desk. I would get lost in the paperwork and long for an escape. I stuffed up a few land conveyances because of this and was only saved by a very forbearing conveyancing clerk at our firm.
There was a tricky crossroads when I was offered a partnership at the end of my first year as a solicitor. It would mean lifelong financial security, as it was an immensely successful niche practice, and was servicing the large evangelical Christian public and was therefore growing like Topsy. My long-suffering new wife and I could look at options for the future as to where we would buy a house and settle down. And my father could be assured that despite some errant judgements I was now acting in a financially responsible, adult manner – plus, a Christian law firm, from Dad’s perspective, was still a form of ministry. All I had to do was buy in and join the firm as a partner.
What goes on in these moments when the right thing is so obvious to everyone else? Whatever it is, the risk-taking DNA was already unleashed in me and I finally declined the partnership offer because I had decided that I needed to study theology. I felt like I had many unanswered questions, and between work and church commitments I was close to running on empty.
I knew I needed a deeper grounding in what it meant to pursue justice. In part it was the corrosive impact of representing clients on criminal charges who were always repentant before the case, renouncing a life of crime, but, once I had managed to keep them out of prison, invariably swung back to their old ways. I was already a director of a new ministry that started in 1980 in Australia called Prison Fellowship. It was started by the Nixon legal advisor Chuck Colson, who went from the White House to jail. His time in incarceration opened his eyes to the neglect of emotional and spiritual support for those inside. Prison Fellowship advocated holistic engagement with the client when in custody and sought to build a relationship that could lead to transformation and rehabilitation. So already I was not just like a taxicab-rank barrister who takes the next case – short or long trip, guilty or not guilty – and, without emotional entanglement, finishes the trip and then moves to the next client on the cab rank. I was into personal transformation and using justice as a tool for lasting change. I was easily hurt and disappointed.
It was also the corrosive effect of doing matrimonial law in the family court and the despair of working with people who once loved each other but now, after relationship breakdown, were scratching each other’s eyes out over access or custody of the kids or the matrimonial property. I grew up quickly, acting for our church’s women’s refuge and rushing to court to get restraining orders and injunctions, only to find these battered women returning to their abusers. All this profoundly confused me, and I realised by the age of twenty-five that I knew very little about human nature. I needed deeper reflection if I was to sustain this work as a transformative lawyer, or find a pathway to another form of work for justice.
Merridie and I continued to have up to forty-five young people from the church and neighbourhood attend our home group each Tuesday night. Some of them came from difficult backgrounds and needed our counsel. It took time to manage this group. We trained a team of leaders, and so that meant another night of the week to meet with them. This was in 1979–80, and the effect of the ‘Jesus Movement’ was still being felt. (It was the religious parallel to the flower power of the 1960s: a revival of faith, especially among US hippies, that rejected institutional religious structures and met informally in homes, parks and on beaches.) We all talked about community and wanting to do things differently from the past generations. We heard stories of groups trying out new styles of ministry on the hippie trail or in tough places in Europe and India. It all had appeal.
Things came to a head for us when one young man, a brilliant musician who had recently joined the group and was struggling with depression, tragically shot and killed himself during a bad episode. We were not equipped for such tragedy and had no training in mental health to speak of. His funeral was particularly sad because it was for a life we never really got to understand or knew how to reach. An accumulation of all these things led us to take a weekend away together down on the Peninsula. There, walking on the beach, we decided to apply to a seminary overseas – an opportunity to study and train away from all the pulls and demands of our world. We both knew it was essential that we have time and space to be better equipped for the challenges we were facing.
The year we married, both of my mother’s parents passed away. Her mother was active and caring for Granddad, who was having treatment in hospital for a few weeks. Mum had been spending a lot of her time making sure they were both okay and helping her mother get around, on top of her full-time work as an education psychologist. Her role involved visiting schools and testing children or advising the welfare team about difficult students. Mum had the added care of Dad’s mother, Nana, living at our home, so she was not able to take in her own parents, which must have been a heavy burden for her.
Mum’s parents both attended our wedding. Grandma approved of Merridie much more than she ever had of Dad. Grandma was to be the first one to die, and it was not expected. My mother was distraught with grief, particularly as she had not visited with her mother that weekend. Grandma had a stroke in her home, and she was not found for two days. She lingered for three weeks, semi-conscious but reciting lines of poetry from memory. She could not talk coherently but Mum was puzzled when Grandma said to her, ‘Remember to water them geraniums.’ Grandma didn’t have any geraniums. And she definitely never used her pronouns badly! It took Mum and her sister some time to work out that this phrase was from a Henry Lawson short story about a woman dying and leaving a tribe of her children on their own in the Australian bush. Her husband had either gone droving or died and had left her to feed and raise the family on her own. She was dirt poor and scratching out a living, but was singularly proud of one thing: the geraniums in her scrubby garden. With her family gathered around her bed she told them with her last breath, ‘Remember to water them geraniums.’ Grandma, in whatever state her mind was in at the time, had said her goodbye in her own inimitable style.
Her funeral was unforgettable. As the oldest grandchild and probably as the one seen to have the spiritual calling, I was asked to speak for the family about her life. But to start the service the fine Presbyterian minister thundered from the pulpit in a rich voice . . . ‘You don’t think you can kill Jessie Northrop? Nothing can kill Jessie Northrop.’ And it hasn’t. Her memory lives on. I see so much of how she shaped my mother and realise she was a truly great woman.
Granddad outlived her by six months, but his demise was a sad one as dementia had set in. His fine mind for figures and all his labyrinthine ideas on changing Australia’s taxation system were to die with him.