Jacqueline Pascarl

Pictured: Jacqueline Pascarl with her godmother Constance Coverdale

Many Australians remember her as Jacqueline Gillespie – the former television newsreader and radio host, who was caught in a dramatic international battle for her children, when they were taken, seven years after the couple’s divorce, to live with their father. Jacqueline eventually reunited with her adult children and is now an author, columnist, National Vice Chair of the Australian Defence Reserves and sits on many medical and charitable boards.

If you ask me what I learned from my mother, it’s that it is possible for a person to be a biological parent yet relinquish all affection and all care. I really had an absence of both mother and father growing up.

My mother was mentally unstable, probably from the time I was born, if not earlier. Compounding that, when I was two, my mother had a cerebral embolism from using prescribed medication and she was clinically dead for eight minutes. It left her with temporal lobe epilepsy and scarring on her brain, so that just compounded the mental illness.

My mother was more of a shadowy figure in the background of my childhood. She was there but she wasn’t mothering. I divided my time between my godmother and my grandmother. My godmother, especially, was the closest thing I had to a traditional mum.

My godmother and my godfather – Auntie Connie and Uncle Kevin – are amazing, salt of the earth, fantastic people who didn’t have any other children until I was eight. We lived an amazing life up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. I got all my good sense and my warped sense of humour and unflappability from my godmother.

I was living with my grandmother during school time and my godmother during holiday time. There was no school near her up in the country because they were miles out of town.

Day one of prep, I knew I was different.

I went to an Anglo-Catholic school in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne and I looked like the Vietcong. I was half-Chinese, and my grandmother was titian-haired with green eyes – a diminutive Jewish lady. She would nurture me with music and dance and cultural things. She was a milliner and she loved fabrics and so we sewed and we did some embroidery together.

In prep I got an idea that I was different when the other children were being moved away from the coloured girl, which was me, apparently. The parents had complained. I had mud and sticks and stones and plums and gravel from the street thrown at me. They were singing ching, chong, ning, nong all the way home.

I was four years old – how should a child process that?

I had a couple of friends, sporadically, thoughout primary school, but I read and I read and I wrote and I wrote. I read and I wrote. I wrote and I read. That was it.

I went to two birthday parties in the entirety of my primary school life. One was for a girl with a harelip and I was very grateful – she was lovely. But the other one who invited me, the entire party was tormenting me – it made the movie Mean Girls look like amateur hour.

What made it worse was that I was a gun at English and great at social studies. I was quite clever, so I got the double whammy. I’ve got slanty eyes and I’m being brought up with no reference to Asia at all, you know. I was watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies and, ironically, all of my grandmother’s family fought on the Kokoda Trail.

Because of both my godparents and my grandmother, I had a very Anglo background. It was just my packaging that was different. Australia wasn’t this multicultural society back then. The only new Australians, really, were Italians and Greeks and Maltese, mainly. There was no intermarriage between Australians and Asians. My parents were spat at on the street when my mother was pregnant with me – and my father was a highly educated university graduate.

In the olden days, as I tell my kids, godparents were meant to have been chosen to step into the breach, should anything happen to the biological parents.

Auntie Connie and Uncle Kevin were incredible. They said: ‘They just don’t understand – your name is Jacqueline and that’s it. This is your home, everything is fine. People terrorise those who are different out of ignorance.’

My mum wasn’t around much during those early years, but then she came back into my life and I went to live with her. She had been an in-patient at a psychiatric hospital and came out with a man she’d met across a crowded group therapy session, and they both sexually abused me from the age of ten.

I didn’t tell my godmother because I knew that if I told anyone and Mum found out, I’d be stopped from seeing Auntie Connie. I’d already been cut off from my grandmother very abruptly when my mother took custody of me.

I danced ballet. That was it for me – and books. I withdrew to survive. My grandmother had introduced me to dance. For me, it was the perfect form of escape.

My mother had several nervous breakdowns while I was living with her. I became her primary carer and she isolated herself – her relationship broke up temporarily. I did all the banking, I did all the washing, I had to learn to cook. I had to take her to the doctor and I’d medicate her too. She fell in a heap when the boyfriend walked out for a while. I had to become an adult at ten years old. Their relationship was on and off for a year and then my mother’s boyfriend came back into our lives and the abuse began again.

They threatened that if I told anyone what was going on, they would withdraw ballet, so I kept quiet. I stopped writing and I just toed the line to survive, waiting for the time when I would be legally allowed to leave home and earn a living. I read all the time. Music and literature are ways of connecting with humanity and learning – knowledge is power.

You realise that one has to work at being a good human being and that’s what I decided I would do – and work at being a good parent when I became a mum. I wanted to create a functional, working family where I would be a parent and I would love a child unconditionally – I suppose that’s the phrase, isn’t it? I don’t think we love anyone unconditionally. I think we love with a depth and breadth of commitment. I know I felt that all through my parenting years. It sounds such a terrible wank to say this but I really truly believe that when you have a child and you look into that baby’s eyes for the first time, you create a covenant with that child that’s unbreakable. You have a duty to remain steadfast and love deeply and support and nurture – and distance and time and separation don’t negate that covenant.

I understand that, possibly, my mother had postnatal depres­sion, compounded by mental illness and ill health – and the ‘mother’s little helpers’ that the doctors were prescribing in the sixties. But I don’t think anything excuses abuse of a child. I don’t think that past life experiences negate the moral commitment you have to have towards a child.

There’s a point in everyone’s life where you just make a decision: ‘Am I going to inflict the same treatment on someone else, or am I going to move forward and change what is supposedly my statistical destiny?’

You have to take responsibility for your life.

I made a conscious decision to talk to my children as though they weren’t idiots because my godmother always spoke to me like I was an intelligent, but smaller person.

She is a natural educator. She’s a great gesticulator with her hands and she lights up any room when she talks. She has a wry sense of humour, so I learned dry humour from her and I learned to parent from her and if ever I needed a role model to think about how I would tackle a situation, I would say: ‘What would my Auntie Connie say?’

She never tried to formally adopt me and become my mother legally. Connie is correct in everything that she does. She is very respectful of other people’s boundaries and she would never presume to put words in anyone’s mouth.

I have always muttered under my breath: ‘Hey, Auntie Connie – Mum’, ‘Uncle Kevin – Dad’. Always.

My mother subjugated my needs for her wants and her desires and I am very bitter about it. I make no bones about it. But I took a deep breath and moved on – it’s not something I revisit every day. I went to therapy in my late twenties after my own children were kidnapped and I dealt with a lot of stuff. I don’t use her name publicly – she is entitled to her privacy. I am entitled to mine, in that respect, too. It just doesn’t need airing. I don’t need my day in court. She will never have anything to do with my children. She never has and she never will. I think of both her and my step-father as an infection.

I just accepted it – that that was the way my life was. I had different compartments and one was utterly full of soft cushions and farm life and that was my godmother. The other was my mother.

Both my godparents are phenomenal. It was never a sexist relationship between them. She does the cooking because she is better at it but they have such an equal relationship that it is quite inspiring – and well before women’s lib. It was my touchstone of how things should be.

I was seventeen years old when I married first. I didn’t have enough intellectual maturity to look at the onion-like layers of a relationship. I didn’t understand that beyond the romance you should be looking for parity on all levels.

I think my godmother sat back and just let me. I was a bit of a steam engine. She is not one to lay down the law. I wish now, with the maturity I have now, that people would have said to me: ‘Hey, this is not such a great idea.’ But, you know, marrying at seventeen – I wasn’t listening to anyone. I was in love with the idea of being in love and I wasn’t seeing my godmother very often by then anyway because I had developed a life in the city.

It is wonderful, the relationship that we have now. I feel that I can still go up and ask for a cuddle – even at my age and with her in her eighties. We have a woman-to-woman relationship now, which is quite a revelation, but then I see her dealing with my children and she is back to the sort of mothering she gave me.

I think the relationship I have with Auntie Connie is similar on many levels to mother-daughter relationships that I see amongst my friends – but there are also gaps, I think, possibly, because she felt that she could never fully, legally lay down the law to me or guide me or forbid me to do certain things, other than when I was little. There is also the tyranny of distance – she lives a two- or three-hour drive from where I live. Still, I know I can pick up the phone and just discuss everything with her. She is a good conversationalist. I can spend a couple of hours on the phone, backwards and forwards, asking for advice and talking to her about things.

She was amazing during the years of the kidnap. She was someone I could go to and cry with, or just sit with. She’s whip-smart, so she would follow all of the nuances of things – both from what she was told by me and what was coming out of the press.

It has been very important to me that my children view both Auntie Connie and Uncle Kevin as the closest thing that they have got to grandparents.

They only see her infrequently but when she sees them, she’s interested. She’s always present. I’ve seen a lot of other people grandparent and they ask the standard: ‘How’s school? Got any friends? That’s nice, would you like something to eat?’

She talks to them, she engages, she remembers facts, she remembers the names of their friends, she knows their scholastic shining moments and the things that they need help in. She’s like a Rolodex of their likes, dislikes – and their foibles.

She has never – throughout my entire life – forgotten me on my birthday or Christmas. She is a great card and letter writer. She would always write to me once a week and she is still trying to do that with my children.

She is strict. She loves to say: ‘Eat those vegetables.’ She will give a smaller portion to my youngest but she expects him to eat. She is big on feeding kids up and feeding me up. She still considers me too slim – even today – but she considered me positively emaciated when I was 47 kilograms in the middle of a crisis. She’s the sort of person who will always call a spade a spade.

I bake – she taught me that. She’s a sterling baker. A Country Women’s Association amazing baker – all the recipes are in her head, more or less. Pastry, shortbreads, plum puddings, Christmas cakes – everything. Her Christmas cakes are legendary. The most confronting thing she has recently said to me is: ‘No, I am not baking them any more – I am just buying Lions Club ones, so here’s the recipe.’

For years, I tried to get the family shortbread, plum pudding and Christmas cake recipes from her and she wouldn’t hand them over. She would sometimes give one to me but I suspect one of the ingredients was always left out. It was never right. But she recently sat me down and dictated all the family recipes to me as I wrote them out on my laptop – all the family recipes. Really, I wanted to weep. I wanted the recipes all my life but now that I’ve got them, I don’t want them any more. It’s what it represents. She has an underlying medical condition, which means that I could speak to her on the phone today or she could sit in her chair this afternoon and not be with us tomorrow. She knows she is living with a ticking time bomb and yet she continues to bake and make jams and chutneys – I forgot to mention them before, fabulous jams and chutneys – plus she’s captain of her croquet team.

Every winter they drive to Alice Springs to see their other daughter, Judith, who is a teacher up there, so Auntie Connie spends a couple of months a year with her. She gardens every day and she grows her own vegetables and I have adopted that habit now too. I’m growing things and they are giving me seeds and instructions.

I feel like I can never thank her enough. She made me the resilient person I am now and gave me the foundation that made me able to turn into a decent person – and to parent properly – and able to grow into someone she is proud of.

I should really be shooting up in a corner, self-harming, abusing my children, selling my kids on the street for sex or be long since dead. I could have been one of those people and the only reason I am not is because of her.

As of next week, my eldest daughter, Shah, will be living here full-time. She is moving back to Australia with her husband and her little daughter – and I’ve got a new grandchild on the way. After everything we went through, we are really close now. Really close. She insisted that I call her and be on the phone for twenty-seven hours during her first labour, so, even though I was still in Melbourne, I was present in the room with her too.

She asks me all sorts of nuts and bolts parenting questions, although I do worry that Google has replaced the grandparents – Grandma Google.

I breastfed Shah for twenty months and I think she has breastfed her own child for that long, if not longer. She was not with me from when she was seven years old and two days, until she was twenty-and-a-half years old.

So she was gone fourteen years with no contact.

When she was growing up it was torturous for me knowing that she was going through puberty without me and her teenage years of revolt without me – without me as a point of reference to vilify and castigate and learn from and love.

We have both reconciled to the fact that we can’t claw those years back and now we talk all the time. We have two- or three-hour conversations on Skype and I could be doing something in the kitchen and shooting the breeze while she is doing something else at the other end.

We just talk as if we are in the same room together, with parallel activities, and she has made that a big part of my granddaughter’s life. I am called ‘Gug’ – not Grandma or Grandmamma or Nanna. It just evolved and I really like the concept of having your own unique grandmotherly name.

I mustn’t underplay the role my own nanna played in my life – in raising me. She was incredible but she was so much older than me. She died in her nineties and I was twenty- eight – she was a very elderly grandmother. She didn’t have her own child until she was in her forties.

I never saw her without clothes on. Ever. She had this voluminous flannelette nightie that she used to put on. When I was living with her, during all the school terms, we were in single beds, separated by a dressing table. She would put hair rollers in at night, she would say her rosary, she even had a chamber pot underneath her bed because the loo was outside. She was a classic Scarlett O’Hara – she would sew my clothes from curtains that she found in the op shop or remnants of clothes that she would pick apart and resew into fabric. I had the worst clothes growing up – they were just utterly inappropriate for my age. I wore different clothes on the farm than I did down in town but my grandmother was always immaculately presented – she’d have a hat, gloves and high heels. Her shoes all had a heel on them.

One thing I always remember about her is that every night the light would go off in the bedroom we shared, and then you would hear ‘clink’ and she would be taking her dentures out and putting them in a glass beside the bed.

I am quite a strict parent. As parents we are there to raise them, to teach them, to nurture them, to be their sounding board and also be there to help with the heartbreak when they are going to make a bad decision.

Friendship with our children, as I have learned, comes later. You are not your children’s friend until they are an adult, and you shouldn’t be. I really feel quite nauseous when I see the magazine articles where women in their mid- to late-thirties are saying: ‘My eight-year-old daughter is my best friend we have manicures together.’ My message to women like that is this: You have got a problem if you think that your seven-year-old is your friend – you really need to get out more because that is just not the way that life is meant to be.

I had ovarian cancer and I was told in no uncertain terms by the cancer specialists – this was in September – that I would be lucky to make it to December.

Shah came home, and my son Iddin, so all four kids were together and the eldest two were absolutely horrified. All they could say was: ‘No, the little ones need you – they need you.’ They were emphatic.

They missed me and needed me when they were growing up and I wasn’t there, through no fault of ours, but because outside forces separated us. I knew that they needed me. Now, here were my older children who had been separated from me for fourteen years throughout their formative teenage years, begging me to fight and to stay alive. It was as though they were caught in some sort of cyclone and they were screaming at me from a distance: ‘You have to stay because Verity and Zane need you – you cannot die, you cannot die.’

It was devastating because we had talked about it in intellectual terms. There had been tears and all those sorts of things but when faced with losing me again, their thoughts were for themselves, yes, but they were primarily for their younger siblings – that no one else in our family should have to do without me, that mum is so important. I can’t comment from personal experience because I had a very strange childhood, but I know that my children who were without me for all those years didn’t want their younger brother and sister to be without me as they had been.

My hands, I hate them. I don’t like to look down at my hands because they are so similar to hers, and those hands did terrible things to me. I know I don’t have her body, her voice – she was blonde with blue eyes, so I don’t look like her.

Nature versus nurture? Nurture for me. And it is not me just rejecting my mother because of the tough time I had with the abuse, it’s that I made a decision to adopt the characteristics of my godmother and I made a decision to adopt the best parts of my grandmother – and the rest I made up myself.