Tracy Bartram

Pictured: Edward George Bartram, Tracy Bartram, Stephanie Bartram, and Kellie the boxer.

Tracy Bartram’s diverse performance career has extended to live cabaret, top-rating breakfast radio, singing, and a co-hosting role on cooking show The Intolerant Cooks. There have been raucous times and sad times, as well as a successful battle to overcome the addiction issues that ran in her family. Throughout it all, Tracy’s relationship with her mum hasn’t always been happy – but there’s always tomorrow.

It was a crazy household.

My father was an alcoholic – and a very unwell alcoholic, which is a tautology because all alcoholics are unwell – and I think the first thing that springs to mind is that my dad would go into these rages and punch holes in walls. We lived in a flat in Dandenong – a 1960s thing with hardboard floors, beautifully built – and Dad would just punch holes in the walls. Then my mother would very carefully take pictures out of magazines and put them on the wall with sticky tape, all over the place, covering these holes. So you’d have a picture of Normie Rowe out of the TV Week on an angle on the wall and another one at the bottom of the door and no one ever asked why they were there. If we got home and there were new posters up, we knew Dad had been on a bender. It may not sound like it, but this is a happy memory.

We used to go to church on Sundays and even saying that sounds strange because we weren’t a religious family. My mother had been raised in a Catholic convent but she didn’t practice Catholicism at all. I was baptised as Church of England but we went to the Methodist church around the corner because it was a two-minute walk.

My mum and my girlfriend’s mum would walk up and down the street a hundred times – talking all the way – but they would never come in for a cup of tea. I’m sure it was because things were really bumpy at home. Whenever my dad would go into one of these rages, my mother would just spontaneously start singing: ‘With Jesus in your heart, it’s a happy, happy home,’ and we would just scream laughing. Her way of dealing with a crisis was to laugh about it and I think that was the biggest influence she’s had upon me. We have always shared this ridiculous sense of humour and we are both very loud laughers. We are just raucous. We’re not melodious like magpies – we’re more like cackling crows.

My parents are cockney so I grew up with cockney humour and very British humour – The Benny Hill Show and Morecambe and Wise were regular viewing. What I remember most is us rolling around laughing at stupid things.

We would have the radio on all the time at home, and the first song I remember hearing was ‘She Loves You’ by the Beatles. I was three. I remember that coming through the radio and thinking: ‘Wow, that is just so great,’ and then, years later, I remember Mum came home with the single of ‘Help Yourself’ by Tom Jones. Mum and Dad cleared the furniture and pushed the green lounge suite with the bendy timber arms to one side and they danced around the lounge room.

When they were courting, they danced. Even when we were in England, when I was very little, I can remember they would go dancing. Mum would have on her beautiful lemon chiffon gown and I’d say: ‘Mummy, Mummy, twirl around for me.’ I thought she did it like a princess. I remember little black court shoes with diamantes on the front and Mum always looking so amazing. She was gorgeous. Dad wasn’t drunk all the time. He would have long periods of abstinence – or it would seem long at least – but when things were good, they were mad about each other. Totally co-dependent but happy.

Someone said to me recently: ‘Oh my God, you are exactly like your mother,’ and I said: ‘Well, you wouldn’t say that if my father was here.’ It’s interesting that I’m told that I look like her. I have her legs and her cheekbones – I’m sure she would like them back. She is the runt of the family – she is only five foot nine and I am six foot one.

We are both really passionate about animal rights, to the point where we think other people are really strange who don’t put their animals first. You know, I would quite often be late home and I’d say: ‘A dog got run over and I had to stay with it till it died,’ and she wouldn’t bat an eyelid. My father was ropeable that we had become the lunatic fringe – going to animal rights protests together – but we didn’t care. It was like we had found this thing that we could do together and we were really heavily involved. We used to go to meetings at the RSPCA and Mum was quite the activist. She taught me about values and about standing up for what you believe is right.

I saw her hit him once. You know, Dad shoved Mum and she shoved him back and I remember thinking: ‘My God.’ He was a very big man – six foot five – and she just shoved him back in the chest and said: ‘Don’t you dare.’ What a brave woman.

I am sure some would say she wasn’t brave at all to put up with it but I saw her step into her power and she was like: ‘How dare you – how dare you treat me like that,’ and that was an eye-opener.

My father hit me – he used to hit me a lot – but he has been the only one. I hit him back because I got sick of it, but it is a horrible thing to hit people. I’ve always been staunchly anti-violence.

I remember being at some seminar once and someone saying: ‘The only reason we hit children is because they are small enough – you wouldn’t go up and do something to an actual colleague just because they pissed you off but we do it to little kids because we can.’

Another thing Mum taught me was, no matter what, you just keep on keeping on. I remember on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, they had a fight and Dad didn’t end up going. It was at The Village Green in Mount Waverley and it was quite ritzy. I was working there as a barmaid and I’d booked a table out the back in the nice bit. Before they had the fight, I’d worded up the band and halfway through the dinner, they called out Mr and Mrs Bartram to dance. Mum had to dance with my friend Robbie – who was, like, nineteen – because Dad didn’t show up, but she kept smiling and she had her frock and she was going to go out and have a lovely time. And she did. I remember that was pretty gutsy because we did have a good time without him. I think at that point she was used to Dad not showing up to things. She probably just thought: ‘Bugger it – I am still going to go.’ She could be very tough.

My mother became an orphan at fourteen. She was an only child and her father had suicided, a fact she didn’t find out until she was seventeen. She was at someone else’s funeral and a family member said something like: ‘Well at least he didn’t top himself like your dad.’ That was the first she knew about it because her parents had separated when she was little and she hadn’t seen him again.

When she was eleven, she contracted polio. She went to hospital and after a year they told her she could go home. She said: ‘Will I have to wear those callipers on my legs?’ and they said that yes, she would. And then she said: ‘Then I am not going home until I can walk out of here.’ I don’t know a twelve-year-old now who would say that. She stayed in hospital for another two years – three years in total – and when she was fourteen she walked out of there with no callipers. If you saw my mother’s legs even now you would have no idea that she’d had polio. She’s got great pins. So there she was – she’d fought this amazing battle and she was finally back home and her mother died six months later from a cerebral haemorrhage.

Her mother had come from quite a big family, and so my mum was given the choice of living with either her mum’s favou­rite brother, who was a lorry driver, or rich uncle-so-and-so.

Mum chose her mum’s favourite brother, and so she went there to live with him and his two children. In those days you had to crank the lorries to start them, and one day he was cranking the lorry on the side of the motorway and someone fell asleep at the wheel and he was killed. My mum went through enormous trauma.

Unfortunately, her uncle’s wife was quite the tyrant and was brutal towards my mum. Real Cinderella stuff – scrubbing the floors and all. She married Dad pretty much as soon as she met him. She was desperate to get away.

When we came out from England we lived in a migrant hostel. I was three. I don’t remember all the stories of my mum’s life being laid out in front of me but I know I would have asked my mother about that sort of stuff because I was one of the only kids I knew who didn’t have grandparents – they were all dead.

I was always asking Mum things about her life – I liked trying to piece the stories together. Once I met Mum for lunch and said: ‘How come you talked about doing the catechism and the stations of the cross but I wasn’t raised Catholic?’ And she said it was because after the war, the Catholic school education was the best education and I said: ‘Okay,’ but she went a little bit pink and I knew I was onto something.

So I asked her if her mother was Catholic and she said no, and she went a little bit more pink. I said: ‘Was anyone Catholic? If you’re not Catholic, and my grandmother wasn’t, was my great-grandmother Catholic?’ Mum said: ‘No – she was Jewish.’ I went on: ‘That means I’m Jewish and you’re Jewish,’ and she said: ‘Hmmmmm, we don’t talk about that.’ We have never talked about it since.

I rang all my Jewish friends and said: ‘Guess what, I’m Jewish!’ and they were like: ‘Gevalt! You live in East St Kilda and you eat cheese blintzes for breakfast and you’re doing stand-up comedy – we knew you must have been one of us.’

I decided that I wanted to go to the shul, and so my friend took me to what was meant to be a liberal shul. I got there and all the women were on one side and all the men were on the other. The rabbi came up to us and when I went to shake his hand he recoiled, as if I had a serpent in my hand, and said: ‘You don’t touch the hand of a Rabbi.’ When I asked why not he said: ‘You could be menstruating,’ and I went: ‘You won’t shake my hand because I could be menstruating? Well, fuck you, Rabbi!’ Everyone went ‘Ooohhhhh’ and I just walked out. That was my entry into Judaism.

When I married my second husband, we smashed the glass and I wanted to own that – but I did put it in a plastic bag because I didn’t want to leave glass under the rotunda. It actually felt really good to do that sort of ritual thing, but that’s about where I left it – although the bloodline makes my son Jewish, there was no way I was going to circumcise him.

I identify myself as a metaphysician. I just happened to be born Jewish. I am a Pom who grew up in Dandenong and I teach metaphysics, so really it doesn’t mean anything to me.

Mum is a very vivacious woman – even at nearly eighty years old. She is still really beautiful, too. At one point, she wanted to join the local bowls club but they wouldn’t let her wear dangling earrings so she didn’t join. She always was quite the conscientious objector. She bowls at a place where she doesn’t have to dress in whites and observe all the strict rules. I think white should be banned, anyway. It makes everyone’s arse look big.

I’m not sure what her ambitions were before becoming a mother. She was twenty-three when she had me. When she was in her mid-fifties, and I had started my career in comedy, she decided she wanted to try acting.

I was having breakfast with a bunch of performers this one time – some really great people – and I said: ‘Oh, I am going to go and see my mum in this play today, she is doing this female version of The Odd Couple.’

I was worried that she would be terrible, but my actor friend said: ‘Don’t worry, she will be.’ I said: ‘Well, what am I going to do?’ and he said: ‘It’s really simple – when you see her, you just say, “Hey Mum, what about you!” You might have to say it a couple of times but that is all you have to say.’

So, off I went to see my mum on stage. It was probably the worst thing I have ever seen – it was torturous. It was directed by a friend I have known since I was five, and my mother was there smoking because she was playing the Oscar character and I was watching my mother smoking on stage and it was just – awful. Then, afterwards, I was standing in the foyer and Mum came out and I said: ‘Mum, what about you!’ and she said: ‘Thank you, darling.’ Again I said: ‘What about you!’ and that is all I said. She was so happy.

I grew up watching Lucille Ball and my mother was very physically similar to Lucy – you know, very tall, very slim, used to wear the pencil skirt and flats and all that stuff. Mum has got the klutz gene – seriously, if she could bump into it, or fall over it, she would. One time she was cleaning the toilet with Harpic and it wouldn’t come out of the bottle, and when it finally did come out it went into her eyes and I had to take her to hospital. Dad was there anyway – he’d had some minor operation for, I don’t know, a charisma bypass or something – so I thought, well, while we’re there, we’ll see him too.

I rang for an ambulance – ‘My Mum’s squirted Harpic in her eyes’ – but in the end I rang a taxi and all the way there I was thinking that she was going blind. Then, when we got to the hospital, I wheeled her around to see Dad and he burst his stitches because he was so angry that my mother had ended up in hospital with Harpic in her eyes. That pretty much sums it up right there.

Another time, she was up in the roof rescuing baby birds and her foot came through the ceiling. Bang. It was just hanging there, like a scene out of Arrested Development, you know. It’s like the blind leading the blind. This ridiculous house with a clumsy mother staggering around breaking things, and a raving lunatic Basil Fawlty-type character that happened to be my dad.

Mum and I have always had periods where we lose contact with each other – I move away or one of us has upset the other. I’m in therapy because I deal with the fact that I have come from a family that’s been affected by alcoholism. Alcoholism is a family disease and it affects everybody and I remember one therapist saying to me years ago that when you grow up, there is no glue to keep you together as an adult. That aspect of my childhood was very painful for me and I left home when I was seventeen. Looking back, I am not sure what Mum thought about that but I wanted to go. We are both mothers now and my son left home at twenty – I thought he wasn’t ready, but it was a different world then. I think we were much braver and we didn’t have the internet and all that stuff to scare the shit out of us. We were fearless and we had great music and the only real drugs around were alcohol and pot – it was a different time.

If I really have to examine it, I think that because my mother didn’t have her mother from the age of fourteen, she wasn’t given the guidance or the tools to learn how to deal with the uncomfortable things and so, like many of her generation, the easiest thing to do was to not deal with it. I’ve spent a career laughing about it on radio or in shows but it has broken my heart more than I care to talk about, really.

We go years without talking to each other – she just cuts me out and won’t talk and I won’t know why. A couple of days after my last birthday I decided to just turn up on her doorstep. So I went with some flowers and some chocolates and some hand cream. I went knock, knock, knock on her door and she said: ‘Oh, hello darling,’ as if I had never been gone. We watched a movie on the telly together, had a few laughs, a bit of a chat, then I left. Who knows what happens next? That’s what it’s like.

I have a picture of me when I was five, holding my little baby sister – she’s probably nine months old and all chubby like a doll – and I’m just beside myself. You can see it on my face. I remember looking at that photo and thinking: ‘I’m going to have my own baby one day and I’m going to be a really good mum.’

I wanted to be a mother from the time I was five, but when I was nineteen I was told by a doctor: ‘Look you’ll never have children and you should have a hysterectomy.’ At that point I’d already had three years of treatment for problems with my fallopian tubes, but I just said: ‘I don’t believe that.’ I remember thinking: ‘Okay, I will have my baby when I’m thirty-five,’ and I just stored that away and got on with other things. From the ages of nineteen to thirty-four I saw naturopaths and read books and learned lots of things about natural health and how to look after my body. And I had my baby, Max, when I was thirty-five.

I feel like I’m a natural mother. I love being Max’s mum and I miss him terribly in the sense that I am not there with him in the way I was when he was little – he is twenty-one now and independent, off at uni and doing his own thing.

I had my own problems with alcohol but I believe in that philosophy – ‘Give me a child at seven and I will show you the man.’ I remember thinking, I have got to stop drinking before Max gets to seven because I will have broken him. He’s turned out brilliantly – although, being my son, he’ll probably end up in therapy, too. He’s six foot four and such a spunk – an amazing man. Being his mum has been the best thing I’ve ever done.

I would love to be one of those women who have an amazing relationship with their mother but I don’t have that. My mum knows that I love her – I think that probably she just finds me really confronting. I remind her of my dad. It’s been challenging but I know in my gut, the same way I knew with my father, that everything will be reconciled on her deathbed. Whatever needs to be done will be done. It’s my karma, you know?