Ghosts in the nursery

‘How many times have people used the pen and paint brush because they couldn’t pull the trigger.’ Virginia Woolf.

In the autumn of 2026, my family met for a tenth family reunion. This time in Healesville. Family reunions can be a tense time depending on the family, when past and present come together in an unholy alliance between those who want to remember and those who prefer to forget. As if you could. 

My family is no exception and given there are eight of us left and four of the eight came with partners, we were a hefty load of souls vying for attention. Each in our own way. The most silent among us, paradoxically the loudest. Seated on the sidelines seemingly observing the antics of those among us who speak out and occasionally brawl.

For such is the word we chose in our postmortem email discussion on the fracas that erupted when one in our midst decried a former prime minister for collecting millions of dollars on his watch. Seemingly confusing the Australian Prime Minister of yesteryear with the American president. 

There’s no actual evidence for his assertion beyond some outlet like Sky News reporting as much, but after he spoke the furies ran wild in a post Covid stoush. We’ve seen it before, families ripped apart when some members refused the vaccine in the belief it might harm them, rather than save their lives, and some began to resent government intervention more than ever before, especially in our state of Victoria where ‘Dictator Dan’ became the prime minister’s title because he ordered a lockdown longer than elsewhere. To save lives.

And while it’s clear, to some at least, our state suffered the lowest death rate through Covid during this time, statistics like this do not alter the emotions of those who felt their rights were assaulted when the government issued edicts against those who refused to wear masks, those who refused to honour the evening curfew or travel further than five kilometres from their homes.

It was indeed a tough time for all communities and likewise for my family members, some of whom found the restrictions onerous but necessary, others who felt they impacted on their rights as sovereign citizens.

This polarisation hit our group and although the evening panned out well enough after my husband and one brother left the pack early – he’d had enough – the morning, like so many mornings after some type of abusive behaviour had hit was one of superficial agreeableness.

We never addressed the elephant in the room. And when I raised that possibility the evening before during the stoush in a bid to get away from the endless cycle of political discourse that tends to get you nowhere, I was challenged to name it.

I could not in that moment there then and wouldn’t have had much chance even if I tried. In a large group we tend to talk over one another, and people are lucky to finish their sentences.

So, I write about it here.

It’s a worn-out cliché this elephant, this sense that something huge sits in our midst but we refuse to address it, conspiracies of silence. As Eviatar Zerubaval writes about in his book on the subject, open secrets we embrace to spare ourselves embarrassment among other things. We do it out of a level of expedience. For instance in restaurants, we pay no attention to the staff beyond asking them to meet our wishes for food and drink and whatever other attention our table guests might need. Beyond this wait staff are intended to be largely invisible. 

The way the world is travelling at present through AI and technology it won’t be long before robots attend to us in restaurants, but for now we use people like invisible servants to serve us our food and we pay for the privilege.

In families, especially families with a history of transgenerational sexual abuse towards children and I’d include women generally, the pain is almost too much to mention. Even though in my family of eight remaining siblings we have acknowledged this truth and my elder sister the one seemingly most directly impacted, as she was the chosen one, beyond our mother for our father’s unwanted sexual advances, my sister as a child, my mother throughout much of her married life. 

There are those who might argue fair enough. She married him, but we have advanced far enough now as a society to recognise that rape, even in marriage, is not okay. My mother endured many pregnancies because of my father’s sexual appetite and her Catholicism, which dictated no contraception could pass between them.

All these things are acknowledged in my family so you might say the elephant has been well and truly explored. But not so. Not in the large group. Made more difficult by the fact my eldest brother experienced a different version of our parents, especially of our father compared to the rest of us. And he, as the eldest and a person who values his intellect and opinion, can find it hard to acknowledge the degree to which others among us have suffered in ways unfathomable to him.

Soon we will all be dead and our children and their children will carry the legacy of our lives, ghosts in the nursery as Selma Freiburg writes. Crowded rooms in anyone’s life.

Faithless companions

‘Who knows the dreams that lie buried here.’ Epitaph in a graveyard, William Michaelian

When I was a child, before I turned fourteen and decided on the life of social work to help others from families like mine, my dreams featured one of two alternatives. I could be like my mother. Marry a Dutch man with blond hair and blue eyes and have at least nine children. Or alternatively, I could enter the convent to join my favourite nun and dedicate my life to prayer and Jesus. The only appeal of this life was proximity to Sister Sheila whose presence in my early adolescence and well into my final years of school thrilled me in ways that many people describe as being in love.

But love is fickle when you’re young and as soon as I moved out of the convent and entered the university with its diverse peoples, most young like me, and tasted the presence of folks on a broader horizon, my love faded like a wilting flower.

My elder sister visited the convent during the months my younger sister and I boarded there when I was fifteen and one day responded to my gushing praise of Sister Shelia by warming me away from her. ‘She’s a lesbian,’ my sister said as if she was dangerous, like a contagious disease I might catch. I scoffed.

Turns out Sheila was a lesbian, or so I’ve been told, but who cares now. At least she escaped the convent before it was too late for her and before I ever allowed myself to join her so all is well, there.

She might well have managed to fulfill some of her dreams, but I shall never know.

When I shared the same school grounds we wrote letters to one another. Mine must have been syrupy sweet, though I doubt I ever declared my love, while I often questioned hers.

One day she wrote a letter including the words of some Catholic dignitary on the nature of love, the pure celibate type which she claimed to possess in contrast to the love between a man and woman in marriage. 

Relationships were restricted in those days and anything that veered away from the hegemony of the heterosexual bond was banned, especially in the church. Here she was a nun surrounded by hosts of other women and none of them were allowed to get to close to one another for fear of the passions that might get aroused and yet they were also required to travel everywhere in twos. She sometimes paired up with some ancient crone whose temperament might have appalled her. But perhaps this was the strategy, keep those who with similar inclinations apart so as not to infuse too much ardour among these women who had married one man only. They gold ring on their wedding finger to prove it. 

The Faithful Companions of Jesus. They covered their heads in black veils and walked the streets like their foundress from the mid 1800s Marie Madelein De Bonnault D’Houet, a woman who had once been married in France. She even had a child. But after her husband died and she was left widowed and appalled by conditions for the poor in her country she decided to set up a group of women to carry on God’s work in education their children.

It was a noble enterprise and although my occasional dreams of entering the convent including prayer to God and getting closer to my favourite nun I did not see myself as a teacher.

If I could live my life again, I imagine two other appealing careers. One to become a journalist, though when I took part in a Professional Writing and Editing course at the CAE many years ago and Barry Watts took a unit on journalism, I disliked the rule bound nature of the enterprise. The way we had to gather so-called facts and express them in order of significance. 

It seemed far too ordered for my creative impulses which was to dive in anywhere and go who knows where.

Teaching might come next on my list of skills to learn. Teachers have ways of commanding a class, of ordering the curriculum, of presenting work and ideas that hold the attention of their students.

On those rare occasions, in later years when I have been tasked with teaching creative writing and autobiography at the university, my skills felt lacking, to me at least. I do not have the patience needed to teach.

So, I settle for the life I chose as a fourteen-year-old. The life of a helper without the religious trimmings of the convent. A secular life that follows in the footsteps of Freud and his cohort, steeped in notions of the unconscious and the human mind’s ability to survive in face of trauma and all the ordinary small trials that await us all before we too lie buried in a grave.  Or reduced to ashes.