TRAUMA TOWN PART 3: The projects got more numerous. I remember Dad draining a bottle of Jacobs Creek (in the early 80s it was posh) and telling me over the top of the ABC news, “well if it’s public domain, why can’t you put your stuff there?”
Mum was much happier when we moved to Mosman, there were more European people around, the stone was comforting, and she finally made her first Sydney real estate decision/threat that we all realised was an improvement on Dad’s previous efforts. The yin is moving the yang. She was getting out from the kids, musically moving away from Tom Jones and Nana Mouskouri albums (the one with Harry Belfonete is still a favourite) and a little Helen Reddy started to drift through the vapour.
Mum decided to go to university and enrolled at Macquarie University soon after they took the TAFE sign down. When she took the Twin and I to that barren campus, part of me wondered, surely this town has a proper university somewhere? Once Mum crossed the invisible line, which was where my father wanted her to be. Nothing really happened; he followed her. Companionship, not control, was the real driver in their relationship. And the landscaping grew at Macquarie; it’s a proper University now.
The 70s and 80s were a good time for the family. Time to face your demons of the 20s and 30s.
Dad’s father Cecil, who was also a doctor and manic depressive who gambled when manic. They had the indignity of being considered wealthy with no money in Sydney in the 1920s and 30s. Dad was born in Bellingen in 1925 while Cecil was hiding out from Randwick bookmakers doing a locum. They moved around without that feeling of stability. Or was it just middle-class angst, having seen the good side, knowing the other side is always waiting for you.
I think those experiences influenced my father. He wanted mental stability, some financial security, and he realised there were lots of interesting women out there. Mum wanted all that too, but she had seen real chaos as a child, not just felt the fear of it. She would have been settled with a decent stone terrace in Paddington or Balmain (we didn’t know there were also lots of terraces in the inner west at the time). She needed that sense of enclosure to settle her trauma; Dad needed to work his out a bit more.
Dad had retrained as a psychiatrist by the 1960s and was getting interested in analysis. I saw Mum reading a Herman Hesse novel. There was something furtive about their intellectual life. I think that was a good thing because they seemed to enjoy their world of ideas and that makes those around you curious. They were not scrolling rubbish on a browser.
The big opportunity, Dad’s marlin, was the $94 an hour Medicare rebate introduced by Gough Whitlam for psychoanalysts in 1974.
I was so impressed with how Dad milked that. He threw his harpoon at that rebate. We toured around for leasable rooms. In Willoughby, there was rising damp.
His mother opened the door at Killarney Heights with my mother; she gave me an overly confused “which Twin are you look” sat down on the nearest bed, which was my Twin’s, looked out the window in a really blank way, lied down and had a massive cerebral haemorrhage. I sensed confusion and no pain. To date, the most elegant death I have witnessed.
When Grandma died, Dad got half a blond bricker in Avalon in cash and my Uncle the other half. The Twin and I were dirty, no more KFC or overnighters at the beach. Dad moved us on to the great aunts in Darling Point before probate. They would come into the room the Twin and I shared and turn the electric blanket on in the middle of the night, and I would wake up sweating. That feeling of being cooked is still a fear. They were well meaning, but three floors up in an old Art-deco block. It was dank compared to Grandma’s place at the beach.
Dad wanted to be somewhere central but not too bogan for the house of rebate. He targeted Lane Cove because he thought all the neurotic people in Balmain could get there and that was about as close as he needed to be to what he saw as the emerging market for family therapy coming out of the west of Sydney. A sea of Medicare cards looking for the rebate. Dad was a spirit guide with a clicky-clack dual Visa and Medicare card swiper. He went a bit Jungian sometimes.
You could get people in up to three times a week, Dad said four times was best. And they did all the talking; it was a self-transforming therapy, it’s better if they stumble onto the answer themselves. Shouldn’t you help them a bit more, Dad? The Twin and I knew it was funny, but we tried not to laugh.
This was a serious topic for us; we had been to the buffet and now wanted a la carte. What was funny was how seriously Dad took this stuff. Was he the cult leader who believed his own hype or on the make? At $94 an hour in the 1970s, adjust that rate for inflation, I would have taken it seriously too. Money like that creates a club or a cult.
The psycho analytical framework that Dad worked in was that most of his patients were essentially narcissists and they needed to make a material contribution to their therapist to climb out of the narcissistic pond they lived in. A narcissist serving narcissists, surely nothing could go wrong.
First things first, the house of rebate needed a home; Dad’s harpoon landed on an old cottage in Lane Cove.
Next week, cracks emerge in my father’s empire.
