Tag: child sexual abuse

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.

The incest taboo serves perpetrators

2023, the year of the rabbit, of jumping over obstacles and coming into luck.

None so far from what I see. Or so says the miserable me. While every day is a day of luck, says the optimist.

Be grateful you’re still alive. These words have a church-like quality, as of straight from my mother’s mouth.

I’ve been thinking about her lately. The anniversary of her death on 10 August, nine years ago. The way she cried in her 92nd year when she heard about the death of her six years younger sister far away in Holland.

My mother did not grieve so visibly over her three brothers. They went before their sister, even the youngest, the first to die when he was only eighty. 

My mother and her siblings. In 1982 before they hit advanced old age.

My mother had expected it, given her youngest brother’s years of ill health with leukemia. And expectation of the worst outcome is a good way to foreclose the feeling when it happens.

It’s no surprise then.

You’ve grieved ahead of time in tiny increments and never fully experience the full rush of sorrow that comes on you unexpectedly when someone drops dead out of the blue.

Out of the blue. Out of nowhere, only it’s never quite like this. There are hints of its arrival beforehand, however much we ignore the red flags of the future. 

I went to an all-day seminar on the perversity of child sexual abuse where three women speakers filled the day with their words at the Wheeler Centre. They organised this event themselves. No one else had wanted to put on such an event. And because of the sensitive content, they restricted numbers.

The first speaker opened the session to say nothing in the room should leave it. One of those events when we’re urged to secrecy. This is strange when I think on it because the whole time during the discussion – still seeping into my bones – they encouraged us to speak out about our truths.

The incest taboo only serves the perpetrators and one way to counter it is to talk about it. Yet here we were, a group of some forty people, encouraged to speak and to listen while also urged to wrap ourselves inside a bubble. 

Now writing about it here, I find myself perplexed.

Funny the way incest begets more secrecy. It happens in secret and then you’re urged not to speak about it. When you do, shame washes over you yet again. As if you hold a terrible secret that no one else can know and it becomes so powerful it’s almost overwhelming.

For me there was an additional load. The ghosts of the analysts were there in the form of one speaker, an analyst whose paper was most harrowing of all because she talked about the sexual abuse of infants and young children. The whole time she spoke I wanted to vomit. The room was electric, and everyone sat silent, mesmerised. 

As much as these talks left me reeling, the day itself was an adventure. Into the city on the tram, then out on a train towards Brighton – my first ever journey on the Sandringham line – in drizzling rain, for an early birthday dinner for a friend who also joked about keeping her age of seventy a secret. 

I told her there was nothing to be ashamed of. But she worries about the prejudice of publishers who won’t touch a writer past a certain age for fear we will not produce more. 

In the middle of this sumptuous and generous dinner with nine people, including the birthday person’s friends and family, we listened on and off to the gruelling game between the determined French soccer team and the wonderful Matildas. 

I’m not given to paying much attention to sport of any ilk, but this game had me hankering for success. Mostly on behalf of my youngest daughter who was out with friends in Brunswick to watch the game.

She was desperate for the Matilda’s success. A soccer team emblematic of change. Women playing a traditionally male game. 

We might say there’s one obstacle leapt over in the year of the Rabbit. But still one woman a year is killed in Australia through intimate partner violence. An underestimated fact that sticks in my throat.

My mother could once have been such a statistic. And we in turn. 

The bus trip I took as a child in my memory, seated beside my mother. A yellow bus that travelled along Canterbury Road and took you into the heart of the Camberwell shops. It dropped us at the top of the hill near the railway station.

My mother wanted to visit Dickory Dock, an underwear specialist, still standing today. She needed a new girdle.

In those days women were fitted out, not trusting their own ability to match their body size with the underwear needed. The cost of a girdle was an investment, like buying a new overcoat. Maybe almost as expensive. 

There was a picture theatre nearby on the corner of Broadway Boulevard and Bourke Road that’s since closed. Could it be I worked there as an usher when a teenager?

I have memories of doing this but no evidence beyond a faded memory of wandering through the Hoyts’ theatre aisles, torch in hand with an open flat box of ice-creams held by a cord around my neck and protruding from my chest. 

If I held this job, it was not for long. I was fourteen when we left Camberwell, so it must be the sight of myself as usher blended within my imagination and memory that has turned me into this young girl, purposeful and strong as she carries her goods to sell. And for the first time earning money of her own. 

Dickory Dock was nestled alongside other non-prepossessing shops near the Palace Hotel with its stench of beer and stale cigarettes. This was where my father must have bought his alcohol in the days we lived nearby. 

My mother in the fitting rooms of Dickory Dock and my father flashes bright in my mind. Like a shadow.

Through the gap under the curtain, my mother’s pink feet splay alongside the neat black heels of the assistant who was prodding and poking at her thick form to get the fitting just so. 

I watched my mother’s toes, a bunion on either side. The bunions had grown so big all her shoes were misshapen. I dreaded the thought the same might happen to me. Those deformed feet, nails poorly clipped as if it had been too hard for my mother to bend over and tend to them.

My sister often sat on the floor in front of my father’s chair to clip his toenails. He liked her to cut them short, and she, young person of many talents, obliged. 

My father will kill us all one day I thought waiting outside that cubicle. My mother first, then my useful sister, then me and my younger sisters and finally my brothers. 

And we would all lie there in pools of blood, our bodies piled high like the bodies I had seen in books on the Holocaust, only those bodies were naked, and my father would not have taken off our clothes beforehand.

At least, I hoped he would not. 

We took the yellow bus home again that day, back through the leafy streets of Camberwell and when we arrived home, my father was seated in his chair by the fireside, blue soldiers of flame standing in formation along the gas heater. My mother timid as a mouse.

All this in 1966, the year of the horse in the Chinese calendar. People born that year have good instincts and powers observation. They can think for themselves, despite their enthusiasm and friendly impulses. And they’re good at jumping over hurdles.