Labor and extra marital affairs !, page-3

Pukesville Arizona ...

"Pud! Pud!” My father’s anxious cry from the top of the far creek bank reached through the rustling of the gum leaves and into my dreams. As I lay on the underfelt we had used to make the second floor of our treehouse homely, I was jarred from my sleep, knowing something terrible had happened to bring Dad three kilometres out of town in the dead of night.
“What?” I bellowed back, startled by the emergency but angry at the reason I’d had to sleep away from our house, perched high in the sprawling gum tree. The treehouse was a scary refuge for a 15-year-old, but safer than the torment of life at home. “Mum’s tried to knock herself off!” Dad shouted. “They’ve taken her to the hospital and they’re pumping her stomach out. You’d better come.”
As a self-conscious adolescent, I had to contemplate, yet again, the prospect of my mother dying from an overdose of sleeping pills. My reservoir of concern for her wellbeing had long been depleted. I thought only of the embarrassment, in such a small country town as Baradine, of being a kid whose mother had killed herself. Servicing wheat farms and forestry operations in the Pilliga Scrub of northwest NSW, Baradine was a rumour mill, like any other small country town. Gossip spread faster than the summer bushfires.
Ours was a small, yellow-painted fibro house. Dad, who worked at department store Permewans as hardware department manager, had planted roses along the garden path connecting the house and the front fence. On the nature strip grew four kurrajong trees, one large enough to conceal me when hiding from my brother, Lance, who was four years my elder. While our house was small, it was neat and well presented; the lawns were regularly mown and watered with town bore water, offering the struggling grass some resilience against the relentless summer heat. To the outside world, it was a modest and peaceful home; inside, it was the scene of random acts of violence.
For as long as I could remember, Dad called me“Pud”, “Pudden”, or “Puddenhead”, for I was a chubby baby. Later, as I grew into a skinny child, he added “Muscles” and “Mussiguts”, but more often reverted to “Pud”. Dad was considered handsome, his curly greying hair, kind facial lines, and well-proportioned build affording him a distinguished look.
Only later in life could Lance and I speculate as to why Dad was so unwilling to intervene to protect us from Mum’s violence. Lance blamed Dad, but I wasn’t so sure. As a child, he had most of his self-confidence beaten out of him; his father, a policeman at Cabramatta in Sydney’s west, was a cruel man. Spending several years as a World War II prisoner of war in Italy and Germany didn’t help Dad regain his confidence.
Compared with the fathers of my classmates, Dad was older, his enlistment at age 24 and the passage of time during the war years deferring his fatherhood, in my case until he reached the age of 39. As Lance, tears dripping from his nose, remarked to me many years later, Dad began dying in his 40s. He often said to us that he wouldn’t be around for much longer. This beautiful writer, a shy and intelligent man, was defeated and exhausted by the constant fights with Mum, coupled with his own sense of underachievement.
Mum was a dark woman in many ways. Of Celtic heritage, she retained her strong Welsh accent and temper. Photographs of her as a teenager and into her early 20s confirm she had been a stunningly beautiful young woman. But she adopted her mother’s habit and became a chain smoker. Each morning she woke with a hacking cough. Her face was heavily lined and in her later years, Mum’s body shrank as emphysema tightened its grip on her breathing.
On that shadowy, frightening night at the treehouse, I scrambled down the ladder and groped my way across the creek bed to my sad, disconsolate father. We drove to Baradine District Hospital, where the nurses advised us that Mum had been transferred, unconscious, to Coonabarabran Base Hospital, 45km away.

Mum’s overdose was the unsurprising culmination of a row that had been going on all weekend. As always, its cause was not obvious. Any minor event could have set it off. Whatever the spark for this latest blue, Mum had gone into the bedroom, advising me she was going to knock herself off. After a few hours of fretting, I prised open the sliding bedroom door, against whose edge she’d moved a dressing table. As usual, Mum had pulled the venetian blinds closed to block out the daylight, but the afternoon sun that seeped through provided enough light for me to scan the room. I knelt on the floor to check under the bed. Mum laughed, embarrassed at my discovery, and I laughed, too, momentarily allowing myself the emotional relief that we might be able to end the weekend farce with shared humour. But before I could entertain that hope, Mum shouted: “Get out! Get out! This time I’m going to knock myself off. I’ll take the whole bottle of pills!” Distraught that my distress would be ongoing, I screamed: “Go on! Do it! I don’t care anymore”, and headed tearfully for the sanity of the treehouse, knowing I might never again see Mum alive.
There we were, in the middle of the night, being told to get some sleep and drive to Coonabarabran the next day when notified by the doctors. From this I concluded that Mum had lived, her latest suicide attempt would be the talk of the town and nothing would change. I was right; it never did.
In our early years, while the other kids were out playing, weekends for Lance and me consisted of buying the order of meat from the butchers on Saturday, building a fire under the copper in the laundry to boil the water by the time Mum got home from work after midday, doing the washing with her in the afternoon, and cleaning the house on Sunday morning after Mass. Many weekends, a row erupted and raged, leaving no time to play.
On a hot summer’s Saturday, when I was 10 years old, Lance and I decided to give Mum and Dad a treat, using the shopping money to buy some devon, corned beef, tomatoes, cucumber and lettuce for a cold meat and salad lunch. Holding up one edge of the meat tray in the fridge on the back veranda was a can of beetroot in place of a small metal post that had long been lost. Excited about our careful arrangement of food on the plates, I removed the beetroot from the fridge and added a couple of slices to each plate to make the display even more colourful.
Mum and Dad arrived home from work, and we kids proudly took them into the kitchen to show them our surprise. Our cool lunch was ready for the family to sit down and enjoy. Dad complimented and thanked us. Mum looked at the arrangements, noted the beetroot, and asked where we got it. She went to the fridge to observe that the meat tray was hanging, unsupported, at one edge. Mum returned to the kitchen, raised each plate above her head, and smashed it to the floor. She ordered Lance and me to clean up the mess, and locked herself in the bedroom for the weekend.
Another day, for no obvious reason, Mum ordered Lance and me to the garden bed adjacent to the back of the house. Maybe she was unhappy with our housework. She instructed both of us to gather a handful of dirt and eat it. I started crying but she wouldn’t relent. “Eat it!” she shouted. So I put the handful of dirt in my mouth and ate it. Lance did the same. He didn’t cry; he just got angrier. He was always angry.
When Mum went back inside, I ran into the next-door neighbours’ yard, spitting out as much of the dirt as I could. Joy Meyers, mother to my best friend Kimmy, rushed out of the house to find out what the hullabaloo was all about. When I told her that Mum had made me eat dirt, she walked to the main street and bought me two musk sticks, a type of pink candy, to remove the taste. To this day, I do not know what prompted Mum to make us eat dirt. It was no big deal. It didn’t taste too good, but nor did it make me sick.
Though much bigger and older than me, Lance was small and short for his age. Like Mum, he had a fiery temper, prone to rages if I didn’t behave in accordance with his wishes. Lance, too, became a chronic smoker. In adulthood, his forehead was lined with worry and despondency. He married three times and entered into several serious relationships, but none lasted. The loss of his only son, Joshua, through cot death seemed to define in Lance’s mind his destiny for unhappiness on Earth. Lance candidly and courageously confided in me that if he’d had surviving children it was likely that he would have been a violent father, so incapable was he of controlling the rage within him from his childhood.
At home, Lance copped it worse than I did, but after he left for Hurlstone Agricultural College southwest of Sydney in 1967, when I was 12 years old, I endured the conflict in our house and Mum’s suicide attempts alone. By that time, Lance had been lifted off the ground by his hair, ordered to shoot his cat, kept back from school so often that he failed arithmetic — the first class of the day — while topping all other subjects, and made to miss the school bus to the regional athletics carnivals for failing to whiten his sandshoes correctly.
Mum hit me with a feather duster so often that it eventually split and splintered along the length of its cane handle. Finally, she realised she had a problem when, as a teenager, I walked past her in the kitchen. Nothing seemed awry. Mum wasn’t even complaining about me. But she picked up the feather duster and laid into me, cutting and bruising my arms, and causing a large lump to form on my elbow as I tried to defend myself. “What have I done wrong?” I demanded. “Oh, Ern!” she said to Dad in shock. “I’ve just hit Pud for nothing!’ ” Mum had now abandoned any effort at a flimsy pretext, exposing her inclination to strike out at me with no provocation. From that day, the physical violence against me stopped. But the emotional trauma continued.
At no time did I feel Mum didn’t love me. My sense was that she couldn’t control the anger within her; that it burst out without warning over nothing at all. Although I knew it to be futile, I spent most of my childhood making her home life as comfortable as I could, bringing her a cup of tea in bed each morning, polishing ornaments and floors, chopping the wood and hanging out the washing. Yet she flew into a rage at the tiniest transgression, real or perceived. When I reflect on it now, Mum was profoundly depressed, and may have been addicted to sleeping pills. She was constantly searching for a pretext to have an argument with me so that she could go to the bedroom with her pills.
More than a decade later, after the family moved to Sydney, Lance was driving taxis. He had a fare that took him through our home suburb of Croydon Park, and decided to stop by and say hello to Mum. He found her unconscious, with her head slumped in the kitchen oven. The house was filled with gas. The paramedics advised Lance that, had he not come by, she definitely would have died.
From Mum’s wild, unpredictable mood swings I learnt never to allow myself to become too happy. Happiness was vulnerability. The happier I allowed myself to be, the sharper was the descent into despair as Mum flew into a rage and hit me or threatened to kill herself. All my romantic partnerships with women have suffered from my reflexive resolve to shield myself from the risks associated with true happiness. Several beautiful partners have declared their love for me, only for me to ask, in an unintentionally hurtful reply: “What is love?”
As a parliamentarian I found enough time to be a good father but I found none to be a good husband to my wife Cathy. Our lives increasingly grew apart. In Canberra I formed a close relationship with Julia Gillard that, over time, developed into a romantic relationship. Cathy asked me to leave the family home; we agreed to separate but that we would spare our three children any rancour. We continued to raise our children as loving parents. Julia and I bought a house in Canberra and stayed together for three years. We shared good times and hard times.

The joy of being Dad, Pa and Dadda to our three children, Ben, Tom, and Laura brings unprotected happiness. Every day, I celebrate the miracle of their birth and the delight of their love for me and of mine for them. Every day when I wake up, I think, It’s my lucky day. Every time I look around me at the astonishingly beautiful natural world I am filled with joy and wonder. But the journey continues, and, when blessed with such happiness, my impulse remains to protect myself from a plunge into despair that so quickly followed it as a child.
In truth, we had many good times as a family and as kids playing with our mates. Through all their misery and anguish, despite the arguments, shouting and abuse, Mum and Dad were dedicated to giving Lance and me the best possible education. Our parents worked hard on their modest incomes to put us through school, and me through university. This was the gift of love to their two boys. Sadly, all three — Mum, Dad and Lance — died in their early 60s, their stressful, traumatic existence taking a heavy toll on their health and wellbeing.

Craig Emerson was a minister in the Rudd and Gillard governments and now runs his own economics consultancy. Edited extract from The Boy from Baradine by Craig Emerson (Scribe, $35), published Monday.