I Knew You'd Have Brown Eyes (6 page)

‘Mum didn’t want her to but she thought it would be wrong to keep the baby, because she is so young herself. She was crying on the phone, because the nurses in the labour ward wouldn’t let her see or hold her baby.’

My thoughts were a mixture of wanting to reach out and tell her my story and wanting to protect my secret.

‘They don’t let mothers see the baby when they know they are adopting, in case they change their mind,’ I ventured.

‘How do you know that?’

‘Because it happened to me.’

On Christopher’s first birthday I bought a small cake and put one candle on it. I asked Suzie if she could come to my room. When I told her about whose birthday it was, we both cried. She told me that she herself had been adopted.

We blew out the single candle together. It was the start of our lifelong friendship.

8

My father had a stroke when he was twenty-nine. Charlie was six, Teresa four, I was two and Mum was pregnant with my brother Ken. Dad lost his speech, could not walk and was expected to die. He was transferred to a ward at the Princess Alexandra Hospital, 250 kilometres away from where my parents were living in Wandai. That was in 1959 and there was no such thing as rehabilitation – patients were referred to as having a chronic illness. There was no treatment. They were incapacitated and needed twenty-four-hour nursing care. The object was to keep them comfortable till they died. Most of them did.

One evening after I had been on a late shift, Dad picked me up from work and recognised the ward where he had been all those years before. He told me a little about his time there and said that he knew when another patient in the ward had died because the nurses drew the curtains around the bed. It was a terrifying time for him.

Mum took the news of Dad’s stroke very badly. She was four months into her pregnancy and after she heard the news she felt no movement from her baby for seven days. When she went into labour with Ken, she had to walk a mile to the hospital; she had no car. The Country Women’s Association employed Peggy, a young English lady, to look after us older children. After Ken was born we moved to Brisbane, to be close to Dad’s hospital. Mum applied for a Housing Commission house. Some of Mum’s family came to help us move to Brisbane. They helped us financially until Mum could apply for government assistance.

Mum would catch a bus and train with us kids in tow to visit Dad. At the hospital, he could not communicate with her and sat in his chair staring. At two years old, I was told later, I was not afraid of his appearance and would climb into his lap and talk to him just as I had before the stroke. Perhaps that was where our strong bond originated.

The night he picked me up from work, he told me he’d at least been able to see us, even if he couldn’t communicate. He said the sight of us had confused and hurt him. It was almost unbearable. He was responsible for us. He began a conversation with God. He asked Him if He could help him recover for long enough to take care of his young family.

After that Dad taught himself to eat using a spoon and worked on his speech, which improved. There were no physiotherapists or speech therapists. It was his sheer will and faith that got him through. When he was well enough to go home he still couldn’t live with us. He was in a wheelchair and needed nursing care. He went to Sydney to live with his parents, and we didn’t see him for six months. Mum struggled alone. She had to be frugal on her small government allowance.

When he could walk, Dad got a job in Sydney pumping petrol at a Golden Fleece service station. He recovered fully physically, a miracle in itself, and returned to live in Brisbane where he found a job cleaning in a warehouse. But the effort to get back to work was difficult. He suffered mentally. One day he came home crying. Someone at work had disagreed with his advice.

‘What would you know?’ his work colleague said. ‘If you were any sort of tradesman you wouldn’t be working here.’ Dad was, in fact, a qualified fitter and turner.

In time he got a job with a company that sold Caterpillar tractors and trucks. This job was a technical one and he was on track to getting back to the work he was familiar with. But the downside was that the work was in Dalby, 200 kilometres northwest of Brisbane. He was away from home for four to six weeks at a time. Mum struggled on with us children. Soon after he went to Dalby on his first rotation, the government Child Endowment money came through (five shillings a week for each child under sixteen. Mum bought Dad a shirt, which she posted to him. He wrote to thank her, saying he’d run out of clean ones.

Dad was very loyal to the company because of the new start it gave him. He also loved his job. Alexis was born soon after he took on the job and Mum complained that it took him away from us for long periods of time. She thought his bosses demanded too much of him but he always responded to their requests.

By the time I had Christopher, Dad was on the management team of the Brisbane office and our family had left the poor days well and truly behind. His marriage to the company meant he had to travel for work, much of it to Papua New Guinea, where he and Mum had lived for a year when I was at boarding school. Mum hated it there but Dad had found his niche.

He was determined to get training for his Papua New Guinean employees and arranged for a few to come to Brisbane. They stayed in our home, and Mum was concerned that they would frighten the neighbours because they were so dark-skinned.

I had my disagreements with Dad too. He and I disagreed passionately when I was in my twenties. We argued about capitalism, class and communism politics – he was a member of the Democratic Labour Party.

I once said to him, ‘I can’t help my middle-class upbringing.’

He responded angrily that it was because of his hard work and wanting a better life for us that we had been given a good education and lived comfortably.

Despite our close relationship, there were limits. My pregnancy with Christopher might have happened to the girl next door. He never once talked to me about it.

I finished my training in September 1978. Christopher would have been three. He was never far from my thoughts. I began to fantasise that we would meet some day. Whenever I saw a young boy in the street I tried to guess his age and observe his development. I mapped them out in my head, imagining him. I maintained my vigil each year on 16 June and secretly wished him a happy birthday. I began to confide in close friends. And, although it was against the law, I began to believe that we would meet in the future. I desperately wanted to explain my decision and to know that he was being well looked after. I imagined telling him why I had relinquished him and him telling me about the happy life he’d had with his adoptive family.

It’s hard to believe it in these times, but when I graduated from nursing there were no jobs for trained nurses in Brisbane at any of the major hospitals. Not wanting to be idle, I applied to work as a volunteer in Bourke, New South Wales. When they accepted me, I set out in my little blue Ford Escort.

Bourke is a small town 1000 kilometres southwest of Brisbane. It took me two days to get there, making it the longest drive I had ever taken alone. The last few hundred kilometres were on an unsealed road – not something I was familiar with. My radio was blaring, the window wound down. It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen a car for a long time. That’s when I saw the goanna on the road. I swerved to avoid it and my car did a 360-degree spin, ending up in a ditch on the other side of the road.

‘Shit, what do I do now!’ I glanced at the road ahead and then in the rear-view mirror. Nothing. At first I tried to drive it out of the ditch, but the wheels kept spinning, and the car didn’t move. I got out to inspect the situation, and knew there was no way I was getting out of there without help. A cloud of dust approached on the horizon. At first I thought, ‘Great, help is on the way!’ Then I thought, ‘Young girl, car in trouble, no one else for miles’, and I got scared. I jumped back into the car and decided to wait until they approached, hoping there would be a woman in the other vehicle.

The old beat-up car pulled up and I looked with horror in my rear-view mirror as three Aboriginal men, about my age, approached my car from behind. They were blacker than the men from PNG that Dad had bought home. Apart from the occasional Aboriginal patient I had nursed and the drunks I had seen who lived in parks near the Brisbane River, I had had little contact with Aboriginal people. I wasn’t even sure if they spoke English. I was terrified and then panic-stricken when one approached my window and, without a word, put his hand on the steering wheel and turned it, to straighten the wheels.

‘I swerved to avoid a goanna.’ I smiled at him.

He pointed to the ignition keys and when I glanced in my rear-view mirror I saw the other two men standing behind the car getting ready to push. I started up the car and the man by the window joined his friends to push me out of the ditch. My car was back on the road. They jumped in their car and, without saying a word, they were gone as quickly as they had appeared.

I sat for several minutes, not wanting to go anywhere, wondering what I was doing out here, so far from my home, my friends. I was lost, not only on the road but in my life. What was I thinking coming here? My car was now facing Brisbane. Was this a sign? Go home, you don’t belong here, my head was screaming at me. But I slowly turned my car around on the dirt road in the middle of nowhere and headed to Bourke.

The Sisters of Charity were Indian nuns from an order of Mother Teresa’s. Australia had been giving aid to India since the 1950s, when it was coming out of colonial rule, and yet here in Bourke was a group of Indian women giving aid to Australian Aboriginal people.

These nuns were like nothing I had ever experienced. They had very little money. Once a week a group of them walked into town. There they stood outside the butcher’s with their hands extended, begging for food. They believed that everything came from God, and He provided.

‘How did you find out about Bourke?’ I asked one of the young nuns one day.

‘Our holy Mother – Mother Teresa – heard about these people,’ she said.

‘But couldn’t you do work in India with the poor people there?’

‘It is not for me to say. If Mother tells us to come, then we come.’

‘I see. What about your family? What did your mother say when you told her you were coming to Australia?’

‘She was surprised that Australia had poor people. We expect that in India but not in Australia. But she is very proud of me, because I am doing God’s work.’

I soon fell into a routine with the nuns who sent me daily to a group of old Aboriginal men who lived in a tin shed on the outskirts of town. The heat and dust were unbearable. At one end of their dormitory was a bathroom where I helped them to shower. The nuns brought food at meal times; the car was provided by the local priest. Once dressed, the men liked to sit outside in the morning sun to share a cup of billy tea and a biscuit. I felt very comfortable with them. They accepted my care and were grateful for it. They didn’t ask anything of me other than what I gave. These men were not big talkers. They were content in each other’s company. I was happy with that too.

In the afternoons the nuns looked after a group of Aboriginal kids. We used to play together in a garden near the convent. They were adventurous, climbing trees, jumping the fence and pretending to run away, coaxing us to run after them. When their mothers came to pick them up I noted the love they showered on their children.

Before I left Brisbane I had applied to all the hospitals and nursing agencies. A month into my stay in Bourke I received a letter telling me of a temporary position available over the Christmas–New Year period in Longreach, central Queensland. I was pleased to be offered the opportunity to go back to work in a hospital. Bidding the nuns who had taught me about Indigenous people in my own country goodbye, I drove carefully back to Brisbane and was relieved to learn that the Longreach hospital had provided me with a bus ticket – no more long lone drives.

As a relief nurse I was allocated to different wards, from medical to surgical, theatre and occasionally the nursery. I didn’t feel ready to be back in a maternity ward, so I avoided it if I could. The nurses living in the hospital quarters were, like me, on temporary contracts and we were invited to the homes and parties of other nurses working in the hospital. Many of them lived on cattle stations so I went horse-riding, played tennis and went to dances. Whatever was going, I was in.

After three months in Longreach I took up a position as a junior sister on a geriatric ward, in a Brisbane hospital. Most of the patients had dementia. We had a hard time keeping them inside the ward. If a door was open they would take it.

We had seventy patients, and the hierarchy among the nurses was like nothing I had seen. As a junior sister, I dispensed medications and attended to dressings. The senior sister was a Scottish nurse, Sister Thomson. She saw her role as accompanying the doctors on their rounds and to make the morning coffee. The nurses’ aides got the difficult tasks of showering patients, dishing out bedpans and cleaning up after accidents. I couldn’t get used to seeing them working with difficult patients while we sisters had our morning coffee in the office. I started sneaking away to the showers to help. One day Sister Thomson found me there.

‘Sister Capra!’ she yelled. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

‘Showering patients,’ I said. ‘I’m a nurse and this is what I’m trained to do.’

She ordered me out of the showers and, humiliated, I had no option but to return to the nurses’ office. After that our relationship was strained.

During my afternoon shifts, when Sister Thomson had gone home, I mucked in and helped the aides. This gave me a good understanding of the patients and what it was to have dementia. Most were confused – they forgot their names, where they were and why they were there. Some had unsocial behaviour. One old man would pee in his water jug by his bed. Many walked aimlessly up and down the long corridor all day long, muttering to themselves. Others would physically fight with us when we tried to feed them or give them medication. It was sad when families came to visit and they didn’t recognise their loved ones.

One day I was at our weekly ward meeting when Sister Thomson made an announcement.

‘I’m going to shift the beds around so that the patients are in their friendship groups,’ she said.

The next day I was on late shift and walked into mayhem. The patients were more confused than ever. One man was jumping into bed with a woman because the day before it had been his bed. Another patient was shouting that someone had stolen his jacket, but he was in his old room and his jacket was by his new bed. Multiply this by seventy patients – it was bedlam. I was appalled.

No-one was game to tell Sister Thomson that her friendship groups weren’t working. She was so far removed from the daily caregiving that she seemed not to notice. Then she went on holidays. At our weekly meeting, with all the staff gathered, I stood up.