Haunted By My Father’s Ghost

Two classic Aussie movies have haunted me lately: Last Days of Chez Nous and Last Cab to Darwin.

Both reminded me of my late father.

A few days before I embarked on a road trip to Broken Hill (Wilyakali) and the Outback, I happened upon Rex Dupain’s book Bondi to Broken Hill at my local library, an elegiac photographic journey from Sydney to the bush.

It was art critic John McDonald’s mention of Last Days of Chez Nous in the introduction to Dupain’s book which led me to track it down and to read Helen Garner’s original script for the film.
As for many who fled Australia to live in London during the mid-late 20th century,
McDonald wrote of how he’d once longed for the superior cultural attractions of London’s museums, concerts and bookshops.

“In a flash, with those first few frames of Chez Nous, I realised my folly. 
“Australia, and especially Sydney, was suddenly revealed as a wellspring of promise and possibility and unquenchable optimism…In London while people dart through the cold streets, rushing from point A to point B, in Sydney, the inhabitants spend much of their lives out-of-doors.”

I was intrigued by his admission but Chez Nous revealed something else for me, not just about the stark beauty of the Aussie landscape but about complex family relationships especially those between a husband and wife and a father and daughter.

In her efforts to get to know her father better, the protagonist Beth (Lisa Harrow) goes on a road trip with her father (Bill Hunter) from Sydney to Broken Hill (Wilyakali).
After they’ve pulled into a petrol station, described by Garner as “a dismal dump on the endless plain,” her father takes over the driving.
They’ve already had a spat about the way she yanked the hand brake on to avoid hitting a cow and it’s not long before they start arguing.

Beth starts to cry and says:

“It can’t be all my fault. Why is it all my fault? Is it because I’m the oldest? Is that why you’ve always been tougher on me?”
He responds:

“I can’t see any point in thrashing around talking things through. Everybody makes mistakes, but Gawd! You’re as bad as your mother. She always wants to talk about things. What’s there to say? Everybody talks too much.”
Later, on a walk they take together along a dirt road in the desert at night, she attempts to get to know him better. He’s out of breath because he’s unused to extended speech.

“And what about dying?” Beth asks.
“What about it?” he asks warily.
“Are you afraid of it?”

He gives an odd smile and a shrug and looks down at his feet as they walk.

There’s a long silence.
“Are you?” she persists.
“Fair go”, he says after a long pause.

They keep walking and she takes his arm, “an action, so unprecedented between them that he almost jumps before accepting it, and can’t look at her.

“They walk, arm in arm.  The sky is absolutely swimming with stars. The silence is tremendous.”

I wouldn’t describe my father, who spent eighty years of his life talking on the radio, as a man of few words, yet when it came to talk of death and dying, I realised I hardly knew him.
During his last years at Radio 2CH in Sydney, I would often drive him into the station, which would take 30-40 minutes depending on morning traffic over the Harbour Bridge. 

He’d be listening to the radio and taking notes in preparation for the morning show and chastise me if I abruptly changed lanes or took a different route from the one he was accustomed to.
“What’d you do that for!” he’d exclaim, exasperated.

A decade before his death he asked if I could help him find a copy of The Peaceful Pill on the internet, a controversial book by Phillip Nitschke and Fiona Stewart about voluntary euthanasia and assisted dying.

He was having trouble walking after years of suffering from a slipped disc and serious back pain.

And he was deeply unhappy.
And troubled.
And would talk about neither.

Walking down Garnet Street in Broken Hill (Wilyakali) on my first day in the town, I was astonished to see a building which looked like an old-fashioned wireless. It turned out to be the local radio station 2BH, built in the shape of an antique Phillips radio. Four round windows, two on either side of a glass door each have words beneath them. They read On-Off, Tone, Tuning and Volume. A Tuning dial in the top of the curved façade is tuned to 2BH.

He often spoke of how excited he’d been when it arrived and even climbed up two of the sugar gum trees near their weatherboard house (which he always referred to as a slab house) to attach some fencing wire to serve as a temporary aerial.  

Powered by a large dry battery and six volt car battery, both of which needed regular recharging, its arrival changed their lives.
It meant they could now tune in to 3WV, the ABC’s western Victorian regional station and 3LK at Lubeck which relayed broadcasts from Melbourne commercial station 3DB.

My father’s brother John writes in his family history that one of the first items my father heard was the announcement of the death of King George V and his own clear recollection of hearing Prime Minister Menzies announcing at 9pm on Sunday 3 September 1939 that Australia was at war with Germany.
“Bob and I were occasionally allowed to stay up late to listen to Allan McGilvray’s simulated descriptions of Ashes tests being played in England.  Our regular evening listening included Dad and Dave, the serial on 3LK at 6 o’clock each weeknight.”

Prior to that the only diversions his parents, Winifred and Freddie, could enjoy on their farm near Donald in north-west Victoria, were reading and playing records on a wind-up gramophone. A few neighbours had a piano or a player piano but these were beyond their means.
Perhaps that wireless had subconsciously given his mother Winifred the idea to steer him towards a career in radio?

It was she who took him into 3XY in Melbourne in 1942 after a neighbour had mentioned the station was looking for lads to work as record boys. He was just 14 at the time, his school days already behind him.
In her memoir, my grandmother Winifred speaks of the train trip she and Freddie took from Melbourne to Donald soon after their marriage in 1919.

“The train journey was long and uninteresting with the journey becoming uglier and drier the further north we travelled.”
On arrival at their allotted 340 acre Soldier Settlement farm she was astounded by how desolate the land was and of “the hard, sun-baked ground which was the colour of clay set like concrete.”

Her impressions reverberated in me as we drove from Broken Hill over the border into South Australia on our way to the Flinders Ranges (Ikara-Flinders Ranges).
This region of Australia is presently in drought and the land is severely parched and wracked by dust storms. Seeing it like this helped me realise why my father never wanted to take us camping or spend time in the Outback.

On this trip, we were heading to Marree, a tiny town at the southern end of Lake Eyre (Kati Thanda) stopping off at Wilpena Pound, an extraordinary bowl-shaped amphitheatre in the Ikara-Flinders Ranges National Park.
Here I was reminded of my grandfather’s struggles to grow wheat on that small Soldier Settlement farm at Donald.

In 1899 the Hill family took out a lease over the whole of the Pound, cleared the land and started wheat farming where no-one had ever farmed before.

This extraordinary 800 million year old landscape is also the traditional home of the Adnyamathanha (Rock people) who moved north and south with the seasons and lived in balance with the land for thousands of years relying on their intimate knowledge of this country to provide them with water and food.

Signs along the walk to the homestead titled ‘If the walls could talk’ tell the story of the Hill family.
“We came here from Hawker with the intention of growing wheat because the Pound’s rainfall is higher than the surrounding country,” says Jessie Hill, daughter of the first pioneer family.

 “To everyone’s surprise our venture was successful – at the beginning anyway, even though we had to cart everything in and out through the narrow gorge at the entrance to the Pound. The cleared patches where we grew our wheat are visible today.”
Two slab huts on the property stopped me in my tracks .

As I walked slowly around them, I felt the ghost of my father hovering around me.
One of his recurrent stories was of how he’d grown up in a slab hut with a dirt floor, though I often wondered if he told that story to pull at our heart strings about the impoverished circumstances of his childhood.

I lingered a while, trying to peer inside, imagining how it must have felt to grow up in such a desolate place.

Breathing in
I see my father in every cell of my body
My father is not just outside
He is inside
I invite my father to breathe in with me

    – Connecting to Our Roots Meditation, Thich Nhat Hanh

Next day we were off to Marree (Mari), a tiny town at the junction of the Oodnadatta Track and Birdsville Track, following the route taken by Broken Hill cab driver Rex  McRae in the film Last Cab to Darwin.
I hadn’t seen this film before embarking on my Outback trip. Sitting in the bar one night at the Marree pub, I overheard a couple of grey nomads reminiscing about it. One of the scenes in the movie was shot in that very same bar.

My ears pricked up when I heard them mention cab driver Rex who drove from Broken Hill to Darwin (Garramilla) on a journey in search of euthanasia.
When I returned to Sydney, I found the movie online and was astonished to see many parallels with my father’s last years including his determination to work until he dropped.
Rex (Michael Caton) has stomach cancer and can no longer keep his food down.
When the doctors in Broken Hill tell him they didn’t get it all, he asks how long he’s got.
“Three months,” they reply.
“There you go then,” says Rex in his laconic way. “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Dad used to say that.”

He refuses to go to hospital.

“I’m a cab driver so I’m gonna drive my cab until I can’t drive it any more. That’s it.”

He then pleads:
“You can help me out, can’t you.  Put me down when the time comes.”

Later, when driving a passenger to the airport, he hears an announcer on the radio talking to euthanasia advocate Dr Nicole Farmer (Jacki Weaver) about the new euthanasia laws being introduced to the Northern Territory.
Dr Farmer is modelled on Phillip Nitschke, founder of Exit International and campaigner for euthanasia rights.

“Surely the big question is not whether we’ll die, but how we die,” she says.

“Well, let’s see if our listeners agree,” says the announcer.
“Time to take some calls.
“1800-500-260.”
He calls the station and says he wants to volunteer.

“You’re looking for a volunteer, aren’t you? To be first, right? he says.
“Rex, I’d need to know so much more about your situation.” cautions Dr Farmer.

“I’ll come to you…” he says.

Their exchange is cut off because it’s News time.
She hears from him again when he’s two hours out of Darwin and asks for her address.

“You’re really driving, Rex?” she asks incredulously. 
“Rex… keep your fluids up.”
He buys a carton of beer and keeps driving, circling around Farina, an abandoned town, and stopping at the Marree Pub where he sees Dr Farmer on TV explaining how the lethal injection will be administered.

He exits the pub and gazes at the sunset.

Just out of Marree a loose stone hits his windscreen. A cheeky young Aboriginal called Tilly repairs it for him and begs for a lift to Alice Springs.

“They say if you see the Todd flow, means you’ll come back some day,” says Tilly.
“I’m not coming back,” says Rex.

“Maybe you’ll come back as a ghost gum. Sit down by that riverbank all day long. I’d like that.”

 

A few days before my father died, I read these words to him from the 10th century Indian Buddhist mahasiddha, Tilopa:

Let go of what has passed.
Let go of what may come.
Let go of what is happening now.
Don’t try to figure anything out.
Don’t try to make anything happen.
Relax, right now, and rest.