Name Dropping: The Life & Loves of Kate Fitzpatrick An Incomplete Memoir

Preface

‘Always remember that everything in the universe—meteorites, diamonds, even you—is basically carbon…’

BRIAN FITZPATRICK (GEOLOGIST AND MY DAD) TO AN EIGHT-YEAR-OLD ME.

This is a collection of stories about my life and people I’m either related to, surrounded by, have stumbled across, or (less frequently) over, during the first forty-odd years of my life. These are my memories of people and events written the way I have recounted them endlessly over the years. My friends can relax at last. They’ll never have to hear them again.

There have been great storytellers in my family for generations. My father was a great spinner of yarns, based on fact and his experiences. In a way this book is the eulogy I was too shocked to deliver at his funeral. The 190 million tonnes of nickel, phosphate, uranium and coal he found; the gigantic chunk of Australia he mapped; the oil he looked for and the diamonds he discovered are all here somewhere. My mother’s stories about her childhood and forebears are equally fascinating and I’ve included quite a few in this book.

There are a lot of people I would like to thank for all sorts of different reasons. One way and another they have encouraged, or enabled me to write this.

‘For God’s sake, why don’t you write it down and shut-up,’ has been a fairly constant cry. As soon as I was contracted to write this I fiddled, procrastinated, read, daydreamed, did crosswords, gardened, walked around Albert Park Lake and frantically cleaned our small house; anything rather than write. The patience of my publishers was sorely tested, but somehow I managed to meet my, slightly delayed, deadline.

Once I started writing I really enjoyed it and couldn’t stop. It was much more fun than talking. This is in spite of being constantly irritated by the slowness of my typing and the fact that I still have to search for every key. A story would be charging along in my head and yet on paper I’d only be halfway through the first line. It felt like whatever I was trying to describe was over before it began.

Quite a few stories concern people that are no longer with us, in particular Patrick White and Rex Cramphorn, whom I miss every day.

In no particular order of importance all of the following people and places in one way or another are in some way responsible for this little book:

Fred and Elizabeth Brenchley; Miles Stitchbury and Rosie Barnes; Peter Collins, who employed me as his speech writer (in spite of me confessing at the interview I’d never voted for the Liberal Party) and then spent the next four years encouraging me to write my stories down; Diana, Kate and Amy Baillieu for Christmas dinners; John Garnsey, QC; Bruce Connell; Michael Delaney; Julie Singleton; Phillip Beazley; Jake Allan; Kate Collard; Aubrey Mellor; Terry Clarke; Middle Park Post Office; Loke Ching Wong; Greg Daniel; Michael McHugh, J; Dr John Boots; Kerrie McNamara; the Bayswater Brasserie, where Joe learnt to climb stairs; the two Rogers, Simpson and Le Mesurier; Allan Hardy; Richard Woods; Peg Jones; Jonathan Shiff; Daniel Scharf; Anthony Darcy; Ian Loughnan; Joanne McWilliams; La Catalana; Valerie Lawson and Vic Carroll; the Hutchings family, especially Emilia, John, Richard, Christian and Fiona; Nadine Hibberd; Ulli Birve; Danielle Carter and Roger Oakley; Denise Brett; Wendy Lapointe; Kristin Otto and The Avenue Bookstore; Sue Badham and John Quirk; Jeff Virgona and Troy Price; Phillip, Yvonne, Alia, Marissa, Kim and Cookie Knightley; Paul and Jenni Mowle; Kaylene McKay and Kate James; Richard Meyers; Alex Craig; Toby Creswell; Jeanette Davidson; Victoria Hatchman; Jean-Louis, Beata and Le Petit Café; Janet Kellett; Dr James Bricknell and his Middle Park colleagues; Rowan and Joanne Slatter; Alison and Rob Youl; Julian Smith; Margaret Gee; Bryce Courtney; John and Jo-Anne Diedrich; Fran Haarsma and Maree McEvoy; Steven Duffield; Tony Walker; my agent, Pam Seaborn; Richard Potter; everyone at HarperCollins, especially Shona Martyn, Alison Urquhart, Helen Beard (the world’s most patient and perfect typesetter), designer Gayna Murphy, Jo Jarrah, Lucy Tumanow-West, Vanessa Radnidge (my gentle, long-suffering, enthusiastic, talented, diplomatic go-between and editor), Sophie Hamley; all my brilliant, hard-working, sometimes unrecognised and unrewarded colleagues who don’t get asked to write books about themselves; Uncle Jock and Auntie Eileen Fitzpatrick; my sister, Sally, Kirk, Dimitri and Pascal Dickinson in the US; Felix Fitzpatrick; my family for putting up with me, especially Justin, Stella and Joe; and finally, Mum, who has nagged me to write a book at least once a day for twenty-five years, and has written three books herself in the meantime.

Here it is.

Chapter 1

I was born one dark and stormy midnight, which will come as no surprise to several witches of my acquaintance. My arrival in Nedlands, Western Australia, coincided with the bloody riots that accompanied the partition of India and the birth of Pakistan. Luck, in the form of geographical distance, meant I was safe; tucked up in a tiny flat on St Georges Terrace, Perth, the inky-dark Indian Ocean between me and the mayhem.

To be born during the same period as Rushdie’s ‘Midnight’s Children’ was of very little interest to anyone for a long time.

In fact, I was thirty-odd before my infantile debut on the world stage along with that of a sizable chunk of the subcontinent assumed some importance and exposed a flaw in my previously spotless character.

At that time I found myself employed by Sydney’s Channel Nine as the world’s first female cricket commentator, for an Australian Test series against Pakistan. It was an experiment Nine chose never to repeat; a potential window of equal opportunity I managed to nail shut for all women, for all time.

If that wasn’t bad enough, at the same time I was too vain and besotted to tell Imran Khan about my connection with his much-loved homeland. It was the one personal detail he may have found vaguely interesting. He would, however, have immediately realised I was a couple of years older than he, rather than the decade younger I had encouraged him to presume.

In a rare instance of not playing a personal ball on its merits, I padded up and let that one go through to the keeper.

On any view, my cricketing sin of omission was far too little and way too late to make an appreciable difference to life, potential romance or career. Alarmingly different versions of my birthdate have been on Australian public record since I was twenty. Why add to the confusion?

As with all problems concerning vanity, the truth got harder to reveal as time batted on and has, indeed, lain dormant until the moment of this writing.

LIKE PAKISTAN, MY birth was a long time coming, difficult and even a little violent. It was found later that the menopausal nurse on duty that night had developed a small sadistic streak after decades spent delivering other women’s babies. She shouted abusive instructions, ordering Mum to ‘get a bloody move on and stop wasting everyone’s time’. She tried digging in with her elbows and shoving. When that failed, she enlisted the aid of another nurse and together they tried punching me out of my first home.

With no basis for comparison, my mother stoically thought these tortures normal methods of delivery and gritted her pearly little teeth. Earlier she had been appalled by the bloodcurdling screams of a few less inhibited girls in her antenatal ward. She knew then it was going to be rough, but no matter how terrible, was determined not to make a sound when her time came. And she didn’t. God knows how.

I’ve often wondered if being born in silence makes me an honorary Scientologist and Mum its first practitioner. Come to think of it, my arrival preceded a couple of Commodore L Ron’s wackier ideas (including silent birth) by several years. In a parallel universe Mum could have written bad tax-free science fiction on a yacht in the Bahamas; a spirit-lamp guru, with Mr Hubbard her devoted disciple. Was there ever an ‘old Mother…’ I wonder?

I am fairly certain that mental walks on the dark side didn’t figure in Mum’s staunchly Catholic philosophy at that time, or since. Whatever ‘midnight’ thoughts she may have been having were banished by the simultaneous arrival of her obstetrician and yours truly.

Pale with rage, the doctor grabbed the nurse and flung her to the other side of the room. It was rather dramatic, apparently. I’m sorry I wasn’t compos enough to have been a better audience. I was far too busy engaging interested spectators of my own for the first time.

Mum and I have been competing for attention ever since.

THE DOCTOR WAS amazed I hadn’t been badly damaged; there was concern I could have been born spastic. He sacked the nurse on the spot and told Mum he seriously doubted she would be able to have more children.

She put paid to that theory. I am the eldest of five.

Apparently, I accepted my role as first baby to the manner born and never looked back. I was completely unfazed by the speedy arrival of new brothers and a sister at fairly regular intervals.

At one stage Mum had four children aged just five and under. There was a gap of a few years before the fifth—Justin—arrived: she’d miscarried after falling off an Adelaide tram and the pattern had been interrupted.

Her first four children—me, Ben, Sally and Matthew—are almost exactly eighteen months apart. Family whisperers explained this phenomenon as the consequence of my geologist father’s homecomings after his usual nine-month stints in the bush. Mum says it was Dad who wanted me and it was my birth that started the baby ball rolling.

Ah! I was to blame. Everything is much clearer now.

In the early years of their marriage, Dad was still at university in Perth and parenthood was not on the agenda. For the first three years it was just the two of them. Mum says she was very happy and not sure she wanted children at all. Maybe she was afraid she would turn out as unmaternal as her birth mother. Worried she had somehow inherited the ‘bad mother’ gene and would abandon her children the way her mother had dispatched her.

ANYTHING TO DO with my maternal grandmother has always been a taboo subject. As a result I don’t know much about her.

According to various underground family sources she married four or five times, was beautiful, blonde and just a baby bit shallow. On the evidence she must have been, at least initially, considered an interesting marital proposition. She managed to find at least four suckers more than willing to march down the aisle and clutch her to their collective bosom.

In an effort to redress the balance and break with tradition, I have turned down proposals of marriage from eight different men. This number is as accurate as I can remember. It does not include frivolous or ridiculous offers, and counts as a single unit a charming and exceedingly rich young man who asked me six times over a period of five years.

In the past I tried hard to imagine myself gliding down an aisle, covered in orange blossom and pearly silk tulle, but these daydreams always ended in panic attacks. Twice I’ve had identical nightmares about weddings starring me as the bride. On both occasions they took the form of a bad home movie: black clouds roll in, candles blow out and I appear. Shackled, chained and not very happy. The ceremony a humiliating parade, followed by a public sacrifice. However, instead of the release of death at the altar, I am ‘rescued’ by Prince Charming and turned into an indentured slave. A situation apparently destined to drag on until the grisly bridegroom with the scythe came to claim me.

One of my problems in the relationship area is an overactive and fast-moving imagination. I can meet someone for the first time and, during the course of a short conversation, fall in love, get married, have a few kids, break up and divorce. Over before it starts. Why bother when you know it’s not going to work?

My grandmother clearly had no such qualms and didn’t need help in the getting-married department. However, as far as being a mother was concerned, she was probably a little on the slack side.

Her name was Eileen and her first wedding a large, very fancy affair.

It was held in St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney, which was packed with the doting friends and relations of both parties. A nuptial Mass was conducted by the groom’s uncle, the reigning Catholic Archbishop of Sydney. (Some time after his death, a larger-than-life-size bronze statue of ‘His Grace’ was commissioned and still stands at the top of the stone stairs leading to the cathedral’s front door.)

According to family legend, the bridal party had just reached the bottom of the cathedral’s stairs, their first steps as man and wife, when the groom noticed an old woman selling violets. Onlookers sighed and burst into spontaneous applause as he bought a bunch and, like a lovesick puppy, presented them to his brand-new bride.

Eileen, who may (or may not) have been yawning behind a white kid-gloved hand, accepted them gracefully, smiled sweetly, said goodbye and walked off. Forever. The marriage was annulled, quickly.

And some people think I’ve got a commitment problem.

MUCH TO THE horror of her family, Eileen decided to go on the stage next. After a little theatrical dabbling of the Tivoli variety she was sent overseas to pull herself together. She ended up in the London Follies performing with Billie Burke, who became a great friend. Billie wanted Eileen to accompany her to New York and have a crack at the ‘big time’. But she didn’t.

It’s interesting to note that both these dolls seem to have considered the London stage ‘small time’. Shakespeare and the great English theatre tradition clearly appear to have held little interest. That sort of acting was not, apparently, their bag. They seem to have been girls with short attention spans and incredibly low boredom thresholds.

Eileen was considered by some (especially in our family) to have been better-looking and more talented than Billie (who went on to marry Ziegfeld). However, according to the same sources, unlike her friend, my gran lacked any vestige of foresight, initiative or ambition.

Think how easy life might have been for me if Eileen had persevered, at least as far as New York. She could have hooked one of the Warner brothers, for example, and I…It’s probably best not to go there.

To put it in a nutshell, she was beautiful and amusing, but diffident to the point of somnambulism and as hard to handle as a cat having a bath.

On the P & O (I suppose) boat coming home she fell in love with a handsome, older, fellow passenger, George Baillieu, whom she promptly married. Within five years they had three children: Redmond, George and Elizabeth Mary, my mother, known as Dawn.

Mum was born on 18 January 1922 in the upstairs front room of a large terrace house on the corner of Adelaide Parade in Sydney’s Woollahra. It’s in a row still perched on a sandstone escarpment overlooking Cooper Park. Eileen’s parents owned the house next door and a small clutch of her aunts and uncles occupied a third house two doors down. Most of them were on hand to welcome my mother, the first girl in the family since her mother.

Unusual for the period, my grandfather witnessed Mum’s birth and called her Dawn. The moment of her emergence coincided with the sun edging over the treetops in the park below.

According to legend, George walked out onto the balcony just as the canopy of jacaranda and flame trees started to blaze lilac and scarlet with rosy licks of light, and announced, ‘She shall be called Dawn.’ That’s when Mum says she started to scream.

With that kind of precedent I suppose I should count myself lucky I wasn’t called Midnight.

As soon as his children were born George would check their ears to make certain they were his. The left ear had to be pointed at the top, like a pixie, the right rounded. Both had to lie flat against the head. Mum not only inherited his pale blue eyes, but her ears are a perfect, undeniable fit. Although my eyes are green, of her five children I’m the only one with the correct set of asymmetrical ears. My siblings have either two round tops or a pair of pointy ones and would never have passed George’s test.

My son Joe was born with my mother’s blue eyes, blond hair, bone structure and the correct set of ears. He also has his French father’s cleft chin, triangular torso, very long legs and curly hair. It’s a bit spooky, to be honest. As if Mum and José got together, bypassing me. I am pleased to report that Joe seems to have at least inherited my sense of humour. I hope this will be an asset in the future. It’s certainly a relief at the moment. Anyway, it’s not something you can do much about. You can’t alter a funny bone the way you can a nose.

MUM ALWAYS TOLD us her father’s name was George. For thirty-nine years we presumed it to be true. On her fiftieth birthday I bought her a Victorian ‘name’ brooch with ‘George’ written as a signature in diamonds. She has worn it daily ever since.

It wasn’t until 1986, when I was living in England and trying to get a permanent resident’s visa through patriality, that George’s actual name was revealed.

In the London summer of 1986, St Catherine’s House in The Strand held the records of every birth, marriage and death in England, Wales and Scotland since God was a boy.

To qualify for a visa, which would enable me to work in England and maintain Australian nationality, I had to present evidence of at least one grandparent born in the Old Dart. I had two.

Nanny, my father’s mother, had been born in England of English, French and Mongolian Chinese descent. To prove eligibility through my father I had to produce seven pieces of paper: Nan’s birth and marriage certificates, Dad’s birth and marriage certificates, Mum’s birth and marriage certificates and, finally, my own record of birth.

It was a much simpler process to go through the maternal line. In that instance I only needed four pieces of paper: my grandfather’s birth and marriage certificates, Mum’s birth certificate, and my own. (I suppose this system evolved from the ancient form of logic that declares you Jewish if your mother is, regardless of your father’s persuasion. As the rabbi uncle of one of my friends explained, ‘We all see where the baby comes from. But who put it there?’)

That summer I advanced on St Catherine’s House armed with very little information: ‘George Baillieu, born in Cardiff, Wales, some time in the nineteenth century.’ The date was difficult to pinpoint as he lied about his age. (Perhaps being less than truthful about age is a genetic tendency.)

George died when Mum, his youngest child, was four. The ages on his marriage certificate (supplied by him) and the version on his death certificate (supplied by Eileen) are remarkably different. To cover all bases I decided to start looking as far back as 1820. That would have made him 102 when Mum was conceived and Picasso, who apparently fathered his last child at eighty, a bit of a slacker.

St Catherine’s ancient leather-bound books containing everyone’s relevant information were gigantic. I have to be exaggerating but I remember them being a metre long by half a metre wide. Revealing a new page required the turning circle of a station wagon and considerable biceps.

The names and dates were listed alphabetically and handwritten in black ink, using perfect copperplate.

Baillieu is not a common name. However it may as well have been Smith. I spent three endless days fruitlessly searching before admitting defeat and ringing my mother in Sydney.

‘There has been no George Baillieu born in England, Scotland or Wales from 1820 to the present day. I can’t be bothered explaining why I’m not going back before that!

‘In 1860, in Haverford West on the Welsh border (not exactly Cardiff, by the way), a Frederick Joseph was born, and the following year his brother, Lambert Pascal. But no George, ever.’

‘His real name was Frederick,’ Mum replied.

‘Excuse me?’

‘His marriage, my birth and his death certificates all say his name was Frederick. George was his nickname.’

If I could have wrung her scrawny neck down the phone I would have.

‘George’ died aged sixty-two when Mum was so young no one remembers much about him. We have photos. He was pale-eyed (sky blue they say, like Mum) and wonderful looking; a boxing promoter who staged Australia’s first world heavyweight title fights in Melbourne. One version of legend has it that he gave ringside seats to the Melbourne Baillieu men (to whom he was somehow related) and then refused to meet them.

In most of the photographs we have he is in the company of boxers and sporting types. Many were taken in Sydney. Others are clearly in New York and other parts of America. The English photos are different. He is often in a shooting party with someone’s ancestral pile as a backdrop; George smiling in a flat cap, surrounded by guns, dogs and pale, tweedy members of the gentry.

Family legend has it that he accompanied Les Darcy to America to escape the World War I draft. When I was at drama school I saw a documentary on ABC TV during which that tidbit was mentioned as fact. On the same programme he was named as one of the original owners of the old Sydney Stadium, a circular, wooden performance palace with a revolving stage which stood on land opposite Rushcutters Bay Park. These days the elevated train from Kings Cross to Edgecliff bisects the land on which the stadium once stood, rattles over the small sandstone terrace house that Sam Neill once shared with Mel Gibson, and finally disappears under the shopping centre.

MY FATHER OBVIOUSLY never met my grandfather, but forty-odd years after George’s death Dad was in New York for the first time, by himself on business, and made an extraordinary connection.

When his daily meetings were over Dad was frequently left to his own devices. Not being a man of the theatre (as you will discover) he was occasionally at a loss for something to do. One Friday night he decided to check out Jack Dempsey’s famous bar and grill. A steak, a beer or two and a smoke or three in the company of convivial, sports-loving blokes was as near to a perfect situation as my father could imagine.

He was on a stool at the bar having ‘a couple of glasses of Yank personality’ when a small, white-haired man perched alongside asked where he was from. This fellow had visited a few countries over the years and couldn’t decide if Dad was an American educated in England, a pom who’d lived in America, a European who’d done both, or all of the above. On hearing Dad was an Aussie, the old man said one of his great friends, ‘a wonderful man, dead many years’, had been a sort of Australian.

He introduced himself as Lew McFarland, his friend’s name had been George Baillieu and they’d both been boxing promoters. Dad told him George was the father-in-law he’d never met, and he and Lew forged an immediate bond. There is a wonderful series of photos taken straight after their discovery, Dad with Lew and Jack Dempsey (Lew’s longtime best friend and former world heavyweight champion). Others with Dad, Lew, Jack and an Adonis/Colossus world heavyweight contender. This young boxer was Jack’s unofficial bodyguard (a necessary precaution because the odd delusional drunk still tried to pick a fight with the almost undefeated world champ, in spite of his advanced years). The ‘almost’ in the previous sentence refers to Jack Dempsey’s defeat on points by Gene Tunney; the occasion on which Jack was famously quoted as saying to his wife, ‘Honey, I forgot to duck.’

Dad ended up spending the weekend at Jack Dempsey’s place (on Long Island, I think) with his new-found friends. He had a wonderful time but what impressed him most were the kitchen taps. Alongside the normal hot and cold faucets was a special spout delivering icy draught beer, just like a pub. Dad said as soon as he made his first million that particular feature was going to be installed in our home.

He and Lew continued to see each other whenever Dad was in New York and they corresponded regularly until Lew’s death.

FORTY YEARS AFTER my grandfather departed upstairs (from Bright’s disease), about the same time Dad met Lew in NY and not long before the old Sydney Stadium fell, or was torn down, I went to the Stadium to see Bob Dylan perform. The first half of the concert, which featured his famous acoustic guitar protests and urban calls to arms, was brilliant. He was a living legend, only a few years older than most of his devotees. His songs were anthems and his poetry spoke for my mumbling, fumbling generation. Everything we had ever wished we’d said or thought or felt about our lives, politics or society was in the words of his songs. At the same time he opened our hearts and minds to ideas and issues we’d never experienced, nor contemplated. ‘Don’t think twice, it’s all right’—‘The times they are a-changin"—‘A hard rain’s a-gonna fall’.

I didn’t quite understand drugs at the time but in retrospect Bob must have been pretty out of it at the gig. He looked small and fragile. So pale he was almost transparent. So skinny, when he turned sideways he seemed to disappear. In relation to his hair, his head appeared the size of a pin; weighed down by an enormous, teased, afro-halo ball of frizz that was bleached pale brown by fierce white back-lighting; a dandelion clock swaying on a very slender stem. One puff and he’d fall, without ever managing to reveal the time. This somewhat precarious situation was exacerbated by the raised stage revolving every couple of songs so that all four sections of the audience got to see Bob front-on at least twice. To help him keep balanced as the stage turned, two roadies stood beneath him on ground level and held an arm each. As soon as the stage stopped turning, a guitar roadie would come up behind Bob and place his hands back in playing position. His guitar looked too big for him. It was slung over one shoulder and across his body by a thick leather strap; a bandolier without bullets, for a cowboy who looked like he shot blanks.

In the second half Bob tried out his new folk/rock set. I loved it: louder, fiercer, more driven, but at the same time as plaintive and nasal-wailing as ever. If indeed I did instantly love his new sound (as I now claim), I was part of an overwhelming minority. Almost everyone else booed, whistled, heckled and catcalled. It was mortifying to be surrounded by such a mob of hillbilly hicks. Any minute I expected them to roll on the floor and kiss the rattlesnakes they’d smuggled into the venue. God knows what Bob thought.

The majority of this audience was convinced he’d either lost his mind or, worse still, sold out. A hopeless junkie who’d alienated his fans and ruined his career. Their reaction was so extreme I remember starting to waver a little, cravenly thinking maybe I’d got it wrong: Bob had indeed lost whatever it was he’d once had.

Eventually I discovered this kind of audience reaction was not confined to Sydney. The first time New Yorkers heard Bob’s stuff rocked up a bit, they too had blown off some of the greatest songs ever written as complete crap.

The next time I saw Bob was years later in Bleecker Street, New York. It was so weirdly mystical it could have been an acid flashback. There I was, in the very street featured on the cover of the great album of the same name. Just as I started to recall that famous image of a young, slouching, leather-jacketed Bob with a burning fag hanging from his bottom lip, a small, identically dressed, curly-haired bloke materialised from a basement and walked quickly across the road, straight towards me. Without so much as a backward glance he got into a black limo with tinted windows and was zoomed off.

Bob Dylan as if I’d conjured him, in the famous person’s ‘don’t look at, touch or talk to me’ zone; in another world behind impenetrable sunglasses, but close enough to touch. I was rendered slack-jawed with fan-shock. I could not have been more excited if I’d been offered a Broadway play. On second thoughts, that’s probably more of a stretch than Bob’s hire car.

Chapter 2

Mum doesn’t remember much about early life with her parents. However there are great photographs filling in some of the gaps. In one George appears to be sporting a five-carat diamond as a cravat pin. Sadly, this gem is long gone, never seen or mentioned again from that photograph to this day. In another Mum is standing on a street corner in Woollahra holding hands with her father.

My favourite features a famous North American Indian chief in full regalia, his gigantic hand completely engulfing her two- to three-year-old paw. The chief looks like a movie extra from the days of cowboy and ‘red’ Indian flicks. In his case, the fringed and beaded buckskin suit, moccasins, jewellery and floor-length feathered war bonnet were genuine. He was a real chief from one of the great Indian nations; if not Sitting Bull, one of his contemporaries. He was part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, which my grandfather had something to do with bringing to Sydney around 1924; they performed at the stadium.

MUM VIVIDLY REMEMBERS her great-aunts Cis (Cecilia) and Nan (Kathleen), who were sisters, and their husbands, Bert and Boydie (Oscar). She spent most of the first four years of her life in Adelaide Parade with them. Cis and Bert, and Nan and Boydie lived one and two doors down from the corner house.

This family quartet continued to hold a central position in Mum’s life for years after the death of George and the subsequent disappearance of her serial-marrying mother. Stories about them continued to be told into my adolescence. I was named Kathleen after Auntie Nan.

BOYDIE’S REAL NAME was Oscar Hagenaese. By every account he was a kind, gentle and highly educated man who loved Nan as much as she loved him. He was a stockbroker who had been born a Protestant in Prussia. He became a Catholic in order to marry Auntie Nan. Acutely aware of the growing anti-German sentiment he dropped the ‘aese’ off his surname some time before the beginning of World War I.

As Oscar Hagen he lived happily with his bride. They didn’t have children of their own, just the semi-permanent presence of Mum. And when Mum went to live in Adelaide, Boydie proved to be a prodigious correspondent, teaching her to spell by returning her letters corrected in red ink.

Boydie was also almost solely responsible for the wonderful stamp collection my mother amassed as a child. Her other major stamp provider was an old family friend, a priest who lived in the Vatican. Her books of the world’s stamps going back to the nineteenth century survived intact into my twenties. At that time they were appropriated by a slimy man who took her collection (with Mum’s permission) to ‘assess’ it. The stamps were never returned.

I discovered years later that Mum had been too embarrassed to demand their return because of my continuing friendship with the family. Every time she brought up the matter she was fobbed off. Eventually she stopped mentioning them and, as she has done many times in her life, walked away.

The stamp collection was her only possession of any value and one of few connected to her early childhood. I feel guilty about their theft to this day and loathe the man responsible.

CIS AND BERT were also childless and equally besotted with my mother. Apparently the South Australian branch of Cis and Nan’s family wasn’t too keen on Bert. He was a Jew for a start, owned a dry-cleaning shop in the Cross for a second, and was just a tad ‘ordinary’ to boot. There was talk of him having been seen in his shirtsleeves at the dining table. Uncorroborated hearsay about that particular faux pas was enough to turn the somewhat snooty Irish connections in South Australia into Bert’s lifelong, if thinly disguised, opponents.

Not that he gave a monkey’s. He was successful, happy and vastly entertaining, a natural comedian who did magic tricks and told extravagant, apparently true, stories about his days in the shop.

He spent much of his working day spot-cleaning almost-indelible red lipstick from the shirt collars of married lawyers and miscellaneous adulterers. Surreptitious collar cleaning was apparently necessary as these men were invariably married to women of a religious bent, with mouths like mackerels, who thought ‘lip-rouge’ vulgar—something applied by fat-lipped floozies. How right they seemed to have been.

Bert sponged the bloodstained clothing of Sydney’s razor gang members after messy nights doing what they did best and carefully removed gunpowder residue from the suits of local mobsters after they’d settled outstanding accounts in their uniquely permanent fashion.

Although devoted to Aunt Cis, Bert frequently went on sporting weekends, described as ‘two days playing tennis or golf with a group of mates’. These manly pursuits were regarded with a measure of suspicion by the South Australian contingent. However none of them came close to discovering the truth.

It wasn’t until Aunt Cissy died, and Bert was put under the Holy Catholic Inquisitional Blowtorch at her wake, that he came clean. One version of the conversation went something like this:

‘Such a sad day, Bert, dear Cissy was as close as you could get to a saint. What will you do with yourself now that she’s gone?’

‘Yes, yes, a very sad day, very sad. I’ll be lost without her. But at least I’ll be able to move my family here, as I should have done many years ago.’

According to this version Bert was a bigamist and his ‘sporting weekends’, in fact, conjugal sabbaticals. An unsuspecting, still nameless, young woman in the Blue Mountains, northwest of Sydney, thought the kind father of her son was a very hard-working, endlessly travelling salesman. A kind of home-grown Willy Loman whom she’d married years after Bert’s wedding to Mum’s childless great-aunt.

Another version of this story (the one favoured by my mother and endorsed by her brother Robert) says that Bert was not a bigamist’s bootlace. He was merely a man with a mistress in the mountains who in the course of time had become an undisclosed father.

At Cissy’s funeral, surrounded by family, Bert introduced a young man as his son and versions of the truth were born.

ACCORDING TO MUM, the first people to be laid off during the Great Depression were Catholics and Jews. Bert survived because he had his own business, but Boydie lost his job. Even though he was merely a convert and had not started life with the dark mark of Catholicism, his stockbroking firm retrenched him. As a result he and Nan were able to take my mother to South Australia following the sudden death of her father.

Unexpectedly widowed Eileen found herself incapable of dealing with three children on her own. Perhaps arbitrarily, she decided to keep the two boys and give my mother away. Dawn was taken to South Australia by Boydie and Nan and handed over to Eileen’s first cousin Glen and her husband, Ray, as a sister for their son, Robert.

It was a terrible decision, unbelievably mean and selfish. Understandably Mum has never forgiven, or forgotten, and won’t discuss the matter.

When we were young we’d overhear whispers: Eileen had married a few times after George’s death, always reverting to the use of his surname on the occasion of a divorce; that she had a little drinking problem; or, according to the more forthright, was a falling-down drunk. The severity of her problem depended on the jaundiced, or otherwise, view of the gossiping party.

I presume she died many years ago. No one seems to know when, how or where, for that matter. I never met her and don’t really have much interest in discovering any more than I know already. My brothers, sister and I never thought of her as our grandmother. As far as I am concerned she was a weak, spoilt, silly woman who left a hole in my mother’s heart that incredibly even the ‘incredible we’ have never been able to fill. It makes me angry that she made my beautiful little mother feel unwanted.

In the long run, I think she did us all a favour, especially Mum. As a result of being handed over she had a fascinating, very happy, much-loved childhood with her new family in Adelaide.

THE SOUTH AUSTRALIA of Mum’s childhood was ruled with the kid-gloved iron fist of the woman I call my great-grandmother. Marguerite Mary Rose Bradley, known as Maggie, was a matriarch of the very old school. She was the sister of my real great-grandmother, Lizzy (Elizabeth, Eileen’s mother), and of Mum’s great-aunts Cis and Nan, and her great-uncles, Charles and Willy.

Their mother Monica (McCormack) was a Scottish Protestant whose father had been some kind of well-off official in Glasgow. She had been promised in marriage to one of his acquaintances (a local politician) but she’d managed to meet and fall in love with an Irish Catholic man called Charles Bradley. While still in boarding school she secretly married him.

The first the family heard about it was when Mr Bradley was told to move on because they had other plans for their daughter. He informed them of the marriage, saying she was in fact going to Australia with him: ‘I’ll take my wife with me’. From that moment on the family had nothing to do with her, pretending she had never been born.

Her mother apparently secretly relented and tried to give them money. Mr and Mrs Bradley refused to take anything.

As the newlyweds were boarding a sailing ship bound for Australia via the Cape of Good Hope, Monica’s aunt arrived on the dock with a Saratoga trunk of family silver and china, which they did accept. That was the last contact she had with any member of her family. The chest and its contents were the only reminders of a very different life to the one she was about to embrace.

I’ve always wanted to know more about this story. What happened to the aunt when she returned? Were the chest and its contents another attempt at contact by her mother using the aunt as a courier? No one knows the answers.

At first the Bradleys lived in Nhill, in Victoria, eventually settling in Balhannah, in South Australia. Monica’s first two sons, called Charles and Willy, died as infants. Subsequently she gave birth to four girls—Lizzy, Maggie, Cis and Nan—and two more boys. She named them Charles and Willy in memory of their dead baby brothers.

Life on the farm was hard, especially for someone of her background. Except for her husband and children, Monica was completely alone. One terrible day in the middle of summer, when her husband was away, an enormous bushfire raged towards them. She made sure the children were safe and then ran back to the burning house to save her trunk. It was very difficult for her to drag it to the dam, but she managed. They all sat in the water with the trunk and watched the fire burn around them. It was some time later that she realised she had saved the wrong trunk. Her family treasures had been destroyed along with everything else.

In spite of, or maybe because of, running away from school, Monica made sure all of her children, including the girls, were properly educated. Life must have improved, because they ended up in Adelaide.

In a period where everyone could ride a horse, Maggie and Lizzy must have been exceptional. No one remembers hearing how it came about, but they used to exercise the Wirth’s Circus horses by jumping them side-saddle over the one-and-a-half-metre spiked iron railing that once surrounded Adelaide’s Victoria Square.

MAGGIE MARRIED MR Austin Hewitt and they lived in relative splendour in a beautiful Georgian house called Highfield, on the hill of Glen Osmond, overlooking Adelaide. They had four children: Glen, Sue, Cecil and Mary-Drew. The house was big and full of servants. It had two long, tree-shaded driveways. One, flanked by peppercorn trees, was the main entrance. The other, called ‘the baker’s drive’, was only for tradesmen. The grounds were large, with stables, a coach house, a tennis court and a nine-hole golf course that meandered up towards the hills as far as the Passionist Monastery.

Typical for its day, Highfield had themed rooms: the White Room, the Blue Room, the Rose Room and the Chinese Room. In my childhood the Chinese Room still had a pair of cloisonné urns taller than I was flanking its entrance. My favourite curiosities were a wall-hung, wind-up, operator-connected telephone and a long bell rack in the back hall on the landing of a narrow servants’ staircase located conveniently near the kitchen and their quarters. The rack featured eight bells that graduated in size from very big to tiny, on individual coiled springs. Each bell was identified by a small enamel plaque (for example, ‘White Room’) and mysteriously attached to a ceramic ‘pull’ found beside fireplaces in the appropriate rooms.

Like most large houses of the time the first floor was virtually reproduced underground. The set of basement rooms included a library and was used to escape the desiccating heat of an Adelaide summer.

I remember Maggie clearly. I was ten when she died at the age of ninety-four. I’ve always thought she’d still be alive today if she hadn’t fallen and broken her hip. When I was young she had snow-white hair scraped into a tight little bun at the nape of her neck, had great cheekbones, smelled of roses and was reed thin.

Somewhat eccentrically, in the 1950s she was still wearing whalebone corsets, ankle-length, vaguely Edwardian dresses and a black velvet band around her throat. She seems to have had absolutely no interest in clothing manufactured after her favourite period. Discipline was her middle name. Aged ninety she could still buckle a mastiff’s collar around her waist.

Irritatingly, my mother seems to have inherited Maggie’s control in relation to her figure. Aged eighty-one, Mum is the same tiny size she was at eighteen. ‘In spite of five children.’ Frankly, it’s enough to make you hurl.

Maggie’s newspapers were ironed before she opened them. And she used only brand-new bank notes, so crisp they crackled. If forced to deal with used paper money, she would have her maid wash it. After which she would peg the notes on a tiny line she kept in her dressing room for just that purpose.

In my childhood she still occasionally shopped at Bourke’s, where David Jones now stands. Before she embarked on one of these expeditions the store’s manager would be rung. He would not only meet her at the door, but escort her to whichever department she’d chosen and supervise the transaction. This was incredible service when you take into account that most of her shopping was for relatively insignificant items such as handkerchiefs. But that’s the way it went.

Maggie was one of the first justices of the peace and was awarded an OBE for charity work, specifically, services to mental health. She was very enlightened for her day, visiting patients weekly in the Parkside mental hospital, when it was little more than a primitive, high-walled Bedlam.

Highfield was one of the first private houses in South Australia to get electric light and had a huge, circular globe of white glass over the front door. Although the Parkside hospital was a couple of kilometres away down the hill, patients could see the light at night and thought the moon was coming to get them. It’s terrible to think that Maggie may have been inadvertently responsible for many of them serving even longer terms.

However I’m sure she brought them solace. If that was not on the cards she was definitely capable of forcing them to pull themselves together.

When Mum arrived in South Australia, Highfield had gone to the pack a bit; still fabulous but a little faded and overgrown. Austin, Maggie’s husband, was dead and three of her children had married and moved out.

Glen had toyed with the idea