TRAUMA TOWN PART 5: Dad’s preferred transport was water. The family were bad drivers. His aunt was run over on the pedestrian crossing on Old South Head Road at Rose Bay. Every time we drove past the spot, Dad pointed that out. He was an early sustainable transport leader, or just good at passing anxiety on.
Coming home from school, my father sent the Twin and I to one afternoon. I think I was in year 9; a fellow school child stepped off the gutter on Military Road in the clearway and was mowed down by a speeding executive off to the Northern Beaches. My bus went past just as someone put a space blanket over her, and I saw the shudder of death on her. A glimpse of that stays with you.
When the Twin was in Canberra, he lived in Kingston with an old friend who died in a plane crash.
When I visited the Twin in Canberra, he reinforced that fear of driving the possibilities for the kinetic when he would say, “let’s go for a drive in the Australian Alps”. You only ever did that once with the Twin.
Water always has been associated with safety for me, compared to brittle concrete and asphalt.
Mum copped a lot of “learn to drive you crazy wog” as she tried to back the VW out of the Killarney Heights shopping centre car park in the 1970s. To the Twin and I, we found that comforting, not racist, to know others saw the risk. Later, when her hair greyed off, and social attitudes changed a bit (there was less racism in the Mosman car park), the taunts became less frequent. People move to the inner city to avoid having random stuff screamed at them in car parks; it’s what really drives house prices in Sydney, and proximity to salt water.
The traditional way my people got here was on a boat. We have lost that now, but everything in this town used to be about what boat you came on; the earlier, the better.
So many of us in this town let them beat that out of us. Years later, now working in planning, I remember going to a Leichhardt Council meeting in the late 1990s, and one of the items was about open space and development. I was there to support a friend pleading for a bedroom. An endless queue of Balmain residents came forward to the council microphone and stated that Balmain had the least open space of anywhere! It’s like Newtown and aircraft noise, unliveable. It was the old NIMBY trick of running your own place down to keep it to yourself. I knew they were liars in my soggy bones because Balmain sits on the biggest park in Sydney – the harbour.
The harbour has so many functions; it’s a port, a park, full of creatures, salty and a measure of your worth in this town. Our family myths about wealth and status are often connected to the harbour.
There is the classic theory of family wealth and success. One generation makes it, one spends it, and then the third deals with the debt and trauma, feelings of who you are not really matching reality.
Trauma hides in plain sight. The psychoanalyst father swore off shock therapy and medication as the solution to mental illness; he liked the longer talking therapies and trusting people. He had a theory, plenty of books and lived experience. He saw his own father have shock therapy and be cured, in a way. But when loneliness and the old mental demons drew near, he medicated with a wine club membership and died of bowel cancer too early.
My mother was not dissimilar; she loved to watch SBS in her place in Paddington for an afternoon, bitch about politics, smoke Kents, and complain to me about having no friends. I heard later they were often knocking on the door, and all they smelt and could hear was smoke and complaining. Whether we want to or not, we end up doing it all in plain sight. She died of lung cancer a bit early too. It all dribbles back to water. It’s Sydney’s great blessing.
Next week, it gets worse before it gets better.
