I LEFT BRISBANE AFTER I finished up at The Telegraph and drove my car to Melbourne with my oldest brother, Ian. Crossing the border from New South Wales to Victoria at 3 am, I was spooked by big gums hanging over both sides of the highway at Echuca. I was as far from home as I’d ever been. Ian was asleep on the back seat and I couldn’t rouse him no matter how hard I tried. I longed for a human voice, so I turned on the radio and listened to country music. It was Johnny Cash, ‘The Long Black Veil’, which made me laugh—the reach of Dugald. At dawn, we had apple pie and cream and ice-cream for breakfast at a truck stop Ian knew from another trip.
At eleven o’clock that morning, Ian left me at St Joseph’s Convent in Grattan Street, Carlton. He was going to stay with friends and then hitch a ride home to Brisbane. I remember I didn’t want him to go; I stalled him with small talk at the gate, became close to desperate as he became keener to extract himself. Finally, he said he must go and off he went.
I waited a few moments more and then went up the path to the door and rang the bell. It was answered by a nervous-looking nun who took me into a parlour and said she’d get Sister Mary, who was in charge of the girls. The first nun made me a cup of tea. There were lemon crisp biscuits. I took two. She watched me eat them. I worried about the crumbs.
In Melbourne during that time, someone who caught the tram from the city, alighted at the corner of Swanston and Grattan streets and headed along Grattan would pass the Royal Women’s Hospital across Swanston on their left. They would cross another street and then walk a little way further to 99 Grattan, which would be followed by 103, a double terrace, St Joseph’s Convent, where the Sisters of St Joseph lived. That was the door I was told to knock on. There was no 101 Grattan Street.
But for years, 101 Grattan Street was where I thought I lived. It’s where people addressed their letters to us girls. The nuns—whose terrace covered a double block—gave us that address so that there would be no real address if someone came searching for one of the girls. The postman knew the letters were to go to the convent at 103. The nosy neighbour or father-to-be might ring the bell at the convent and the nuns would tell them, ‘No, this is 103. There’s no 101.’
I only learned this years later, when I went back to Grattan Street with David, trying to understand something of what had happened, what I’d done. I went looking for the place I’d been and found it had never existed.
In the home, I had my own room with its own sink. I met the other girls, one of whom became my good friend. Jill was a nurse and the father of her baby was an apprentice from her home town in northern Victoria. He was young, like us. I told Jill the father of my baby was a boy I knew at university, also young like us. The father of Jill’s baby came to visit Jill each month. They were going to be married one day, Jill told me, but not yet. They were not ready yet, their parents said. Same with me, I said.
Jill and I sat up late smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. As our bellies swelled, we didn’t talk about babies. We talked about what we’d do when we got out. We talked about the other girls. There was a girl we hated, Paula, who came back at the end of September, after her baby was born, much changed.
Paula was a chatterbox, never shut up—it was what we criticised in her—but when she came back to pack up after her baby was born, she had little to say. If this unnerved us, we never spoke of it. Later we heard she changed her mind and came back a second time, within the thirty days, and took her baby home. She changed her mind. Typical, Jill and I would have said, if we had said anything. Paula was weak.
Another girl, Jane, wasn’t booked into the Royal Women’s Hospital like the rest of us. She was a patient at the private Catholic Mercy Hospital. I think her people were unhappy about what she’d done. She was alone at St Joseph’s. No one visited her despite the fact she came from Melbourne. She never mentioned her baby’s father and we never asked.
Lily was a prostitute, pregnant for the second time, giving up a second baby. She’d had polio as a child and walked with sticks. When she was with us, we walked slowly. She said she didn’t know if she would give up this baby.
When we went to antenatal classes at the hospital, we sat up the back of the room and giggled while the other women stretched and blew and panted on cue. There were men in the antenatal classes. They were the husbands of the women who were having babies. We were at the back of the room because we didn’t have husbands. The husbands blew and panted too, as if the baby was inside them. We giggled more when we noticed this.
I never thought of the locals. Did people see us, pregnant girls in a line, and think we were the ones from the home, the ones without a man to speak for us? I didn’t feel self-conscious or guilty, not then. If I felt bad, it was for what I’d done to my teacher. I was young enough to believe I was on an adventure, like my teacher and her husband said. My only cause for shame was what I’d done to them, what I’d done to my teacher. I felt it was all my fault. I’d ruined something for them.
I went to the zoo. I had only been to one zoo before, in Sydney on the family holiday when I was twelve. I drove to the Dandenong Ranges, going first in error to Dandenong the suburb, from where I could see the ranges miles away. I went into the city—it was such a big city—and wandered the shops.
As my belly swelled, I began to see it as a lump, an inconvenience, that stopped me sleeping. Not as anything else. I never looked at books with pictures of babies in them. I didn’t notice if ever I happened upon a woman with a baby in the street. I didn’t see women with babies at the hospital when I went for appointments.
Sister Mary told us that an occupational therapist was coming to see us on Thursday mornings. She was blonde, the occupational therapist, and worked hard to act as if we were normal. She smiled and trained her eyes on our faces, ignoring our bellies. In one of the first sessions, I said, ‘Are we going to do basket weaving?’ She told me I could leave if I wanted to, so I did. I went and hung around Sister Margaret in the kitchen.
Sister Margaret was the cook at St Joseph’s. She cooked for the nuns and for us. ‘The same food,’ she told me. ‘I cook the same food for you as I do for us. I don’t let them do the other.’ She didn’t tell me what the other was. I think it was that the nuns would eat different food from the girls. This is what they did in some of the girls’ homes. The girls ate poorer-quality food.
In some of the homes, girls were made to work. At St Joseph’s, before my time, girls were made to work. The nuns took in linen and the girls washed it and wrung it out to earn their keep while they waited for their babies to be born. They were treated as unforgiven sinners. That was why their food was different from the nuns’ food. Their sin was not that they were going to give up a baby. Their sin was the sex that made the baby. Giving up the baby, sending the baby to a good home with two Catholic parents, was what redeemed them, got them out of the home where they were sinners unforgiven. It got them forgiveness which was worth having.
The memory of these beliefs was still fresh when I was in Melbourne. There were still nuns living in the convent and this was their view, including Sister Mary, who looked after the girls. She liked me, because I was intelligent and read books. I think she might have found my behaviour hard to square away with who I was, would have preferred, I think, sinful girls to be unintelligent. It was such a sad place when I think back now.
I liked Sister Margaret best. She was tall and large-boned, in her fifties when I met her, the youngest of twelve children. She told me that when her father died she was not allowed to go home to attend the funeral, so when her mother died she didn’t ask; she just said to her superiors that she was going. They said she had to take a chaperone. She took an eighty-four-year-old nun who had no idea who or where she was. Sister Margaret sat the old nun in a chair and left her there while she mourned her mother’s passing with her siblings.
Sister Margaret had a red face, as if her heart was about to let her down or she’d just come in from a windy walk along a headland. She added so much salt to our food that sometimes it was hard to eat. ‘I have to cook it to someone’s taste,’ she said, ‘so I cook it to mine.’
When we met up again in later years I felt uncomfortable around Sister Margaret but was unable to articulate why. Eventually I stopped replying to her letters and we lost touch. I kept a coffee mug she gave me, beige Dunoon porcelain with brown sheep embossed on it. I’ve tried to throw it out several times, but it keeps getting out of the bin and up onto the sink, so I’ve given up.
I was living on sickness benefit, the only support available to pregnant women. I bought vitamin E because my teacher and her husband told me to take it for my skin, so I didn’t get stretch marks. I got them anyway, long red welts across my breasts and down my belly. I bought cigarettes and toiletries. I shopped at King & Godfree. Some nights the other girls and I went down Lygon Street and bought pizzas. I went to the cafes my teacher and her husband told me about. I went to Mass at South Melbourne, the parish of the priest who found the home for me.
His name was Father Bob and my teacher’s husband knew him because he’d been an army chaplain. My teacher’s husband rang him on my behalf and told him that one of his wife’s students, a nice girl, had got herself in trouble and could Father Bob help. My teacher’s husband told me this, that he had described me as a ‘nice’ girl. It was a joke. I was not a ‘nice’ girl, we all knew, because I was already in trouble at school before my teacher and her husband met me. They’d helped me get out of trouble. I was lucky they’d done this. This was what I believed. It’s what they told me.