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Cabaret, and Helen Reddy.
Mum had married Dad when she was nineteen. (She only
had one boyfriend before Dad—Michael. They probably
didn’t even have sex. Amazing.) She struggled with a going-
crazy feeling when she was full-time with us four kids, until
she realised it was just because she was smart and creative,
and she needed stimulation. Dad was busy studying medicine
and then working as a radiologist. When their intellectual
neighbour, who talked and drank with friends late into the
evenings, asked Mum, ‘Why do you keep having them?’,
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she was thrown. She was raised by Catholic nuns, and she
told me she just didn’t know she had other choices. Dad
used to come home and practise classical guitar and ‘The
Old Grey Goose is Dead’, and Mum wanted to kill him
because she was so desperate for adult company.
In photos of them travelling around Europe with three
of us kids in a van in the 1970s, Mum and Dad are hip and
good-looking. Mum was beautiful when she was young, but
didn’t know it. She still is, and she still doesn’t. (The artist
Mirka Mora said that not knowing she was beautiful when
she was young was one of her regrets. I tell myself to believe
I’m beautiful now in case I am, so I won’t be sorry later.)
Mum didn’t get to art school until she was thirty. First,
she had to go to school at nights to get her HSC; when she
did that, she was the first to arrive and the last to leave. She
would have a celebratory gin and tonic with her best friend,
Kathy Golski, before she got there. School, for mum, was
heaven. Art school was Utopia.
Mum still has to do the sign of the cross to work out
which hand is her right one. If you’re in the car with her
and you say, ‘Turn right here, Mum’, she takes her hand off
the steering wheel to whip it into an abbreviated crucifix.
And she still can’t tell the time on a clock with hands, and if
you use twenty-four-hour time, she counts backwards with
her fingers to work out what you mean. She does have a
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brilliant mind and she’s super intuitive; she’s just not great
with telling the time, or telling left from right.
In 1952, Mum’s mum and dad, Oma and Opa (that’s
Dutch for grandmother and grandfather), had taken five
days to fly from Holland to Australia with their three kids.
They never looked back. They left Holland because it was
a mess after five years under German occupation, and they
thought the Russians were coming to take over where the
Germans had left off. They stopped over in Cairo, Calcutta,
Penang (an emergency landing), Singapore, Darwin and
finally Sydney. Their house—walls, ceiling, everything—
was dismantled and came over in a wooden crate by boat
a few months later. Opa later attached that crate to the side
of the house itself for Oma’s mum, Poet (pronounced like
the word ‘put’), to live in. The whole set-up was elegant
and Dutch, with Persian rugs, lamps and antiques.
‘They were middle-class Dutch,’ says Mum when I ask
her about it. ‘Not your average kaaskop . . .’ ( Kaaskop is
Dutch for ‘ cheesehead’.)
Oma had grown up in a small Dutch village, but she
wasn’t fazed by the move. That’s Oma—cool. Mum was
five and she was very fazed—she screamed with bad ear pain
throughout the journey, and when she started school she was
taunted because of her accent. Mum had never seen nuns
before and, to her, they were menacing in their head-to-toe
black and white habits. When they tried to tear her from
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her little brother Robert on their first day in a new school,
she was protective and terrified and tried hard to hang on.
Opa’s mum had fifteen kids. (Fifteen! I would rather
be shot!) She wore big black dresses down to the ground
and was nicknamed ‘Zwarte Gevaar’, which means ‘Black
Danger’. The neighbours thought the kids had numbers for
names because they ate meals in shifts and were called inside
like this: ‘One to seven—your lunch is ready!’
Opa worked as a director for YKK Zippers, and Mum
and Dad’s friend Zoran named him ‘Lord of the Flies’. He
was musical, and played jazz piano by ear, so Oma says
I get my musicality from him. By the time he was my
grandfather, he had thinning slicked-back hair, and wore
glasses and smoked a pipe. He tickled us kids hard, digging
his fingers into our ribs until we said grenade (pronounced
‘henada’ and meaning ‘have mercy’—a Dutch tradition from
my mum’s side), and even then he only stopped sometimes.
I didn’t like it.
Some of Opa’s relatives came to Australia too. Opa’s
cousin got a job selling fridges and his siblings teased him
because he couldn’t say ‘refrigerator’.
‘Hey, Yon,’ they said. ‘What are you selling?’ Just to
hear him try.
They adapted the local lingo: ‘Pass me the fucking salt,’
they said, thinking it was the normal way to talk at the
dinner table.
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Oma is tall and elegant. She buys clothes in op shops
and finds stuff that looks great on her—leopard-skin tops and
dark blue fitted jeans. She has long legs, a sharp nose and,
when she picks something up from the f loor, she bends
forward from her hips. She’s eighty-three and she still plays
tennis. Oma didn’t want to be alone after Opa died. Baden
is her boyfriend now, and they go on expensive cruises
around the world. ‘ Hy is een australier maar hy is heel aardig,’
she says shamelessly, which means: ‘He’s a real Australian
but he’s nice.’ She says ‘cruise’ with a throaty Dutch ‘r’
sound, which Mum imitates antagonistically.
‘Om’s blowing my inheritance, dammit!’ says Mum. ‘My
friends’ mums are quietly nearing the ends of their lives in
hospital beds, but the only thing that’s going to take my
mum out is a pirate!’
‘I would like a pirate,’ was Oma’s wistful response.
When I was eleven, we moved from affluent Mosman
to Exeter in the Southern Highlands and I was made school
captain of the tiny local public school. There were fewer
rules than at the posh city school; there were no uniforms
and no one fitted in, so we all did. I relaxed and hung upside
down on the monkey bars as I nursed my secret crush on
our bow-legged Yugoslavian school principal.
Miss Watson, who drove the school bus, had a very
pursed mouth and straight, shoulder-length grey hair. I
appreciated her calm and caring ways, and took it upon
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myself to acknowledge her good work. We were in the
middle of school assembly when I raised my hand into the
air and asked if I could s
ay something. My heart pounded
as I stood up from the sea of cross-legged boys and girls,
their faces all turned towards me, and said, ‘I just wanted
to thank Miss Watson for doing such a good job and for all
her concern.’ Afterwards, sitting back down and pummelling
my hands together under my jumper, I felt I had done an
important thing.
Dad set up a radiology practice in Bowral and employed
a farm manager, Martin, who rarely spoke, giving grunts
for answers. He had white hair and looked a bit like his
pink-eyed bull terrier, though I couldn’t say why. His wife
was warm and pretty, with a frizz of long hair and a clean
house. Sometimes they’d babysit us at their place. ‘Tea’s
ready!’ Rita would say, resting slices of white bread beside
peas and carrots. White bread—what a treat!
Before school I’d round up the cows to check which ones
were ovulating, so they could be artificially inseminated.
It was called ‘checking the cyclers’. They were the ones
jumping up on the bums of other cows. Standing on the
pedals of my motorbike, with messy-bed hair, wearing a
fake-fur coat, my nightie and gumboots, I hooned around
them. ‘Heeeet op! Moooove it op! C’mon! C’mon! C’mon!’
Sometimes, on a weekend, Sarah and I would innocently
whip nearly hatching eggs out from under chooks’ bums
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to sell them, along with bags of cow poo, at a stall beside
the main road, doing handstands while we waited for cars
to come.
I had a short, round horse called Pabby, who had a thick
white mane that stuck up all the way down his neck. His
previous owners were Italian, and claimed to have brought
him up on spaghetti and meatballs; looking at his barrel-
shaped girth, you could believe it. He had to trot fast to
keep up with other horses because he didn’t like to canter.
It wasn’t a gracious or sexy look—I couldn’t rise in the
saddle to a trot that fast—but we covered a lot of ground
and he never threw me off.
When I finished primary school, I was sent to another
exclusive girls’ school. (While I was at Frensham, I won
a Latin competition and I will never forget it—my friend
came out crimson before me; when the panel of sober,
scholarly judges had offered her the option of standing
or sitting on the chair to read to them in Latin she had
misunderstood and opted to stand on the chair. I still feel
for her and it still makes me laugh.) Then, while Dad
was taking Stefan on a BMW motorbike road trip across
Germany, Mum took Sofie and me away from Frensham’s
predictable world—‘Where the Moët ends, the chardonnay
begins,’ says Benny—to explore Rajasthan, in the north
of India, and ride camels across the Thar Desert for two
weeks. I was thirteen. India is Mum’s idea of heaven. We
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rode side saddle, and loosened our hips to move with the
camels’ lollopy walk and the clompy three-pointer way
they got up and got down. Somehow I rode alone while
the rest of the group shared double saddles with our camel
drivers, with whom I fell deeply and hotly in love, as did
other women on the trek—for their handsome faces and
smooth brown skin beneath stunning orange turbans, their
sexy moustaches and their silence, and the irresistible way
they ignored us completely.
Mum says everyone else in the group was up at the crack
of dawn each morning, cleaning up and packing away their
tents, but Sofie and I, absorbed in ourselves and our messy
adolescent thoughts and feelings, lay curled in our sleeping
bags until the very last minute.
I remember looking into a piece of cracked mirror after
ten days in the desert and liking my face. I’m real y pretty!
I thought.
But in our family there was a warped dynamic and its
effects were poison. To me, it seemed that Dad did not
distribute his attention equally between us kids, which left
me feeling achingly small and inadequate.
I blamed myself entirely, vowing to rise up and be
great somehow, whatever that meant. I went days at a
time without food, and then binged until it hurt. I studied
stupidly hard at school for short stints, and then threw it in
each time I realised that getting it perfect would still not
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be enough—not big enough, not impressive enough. The
pressure, the pressure. My school reports said: ‘Ingrid is not
making the most of her great potential.’
Mum and Dad split for real when I was fourteen, and it
was every man for himself. Stefan and Sofie had left home
by then, but Alex and I went to Canberra with Mum, and
moved in next door to Mum’s friend Kathy. I went to an
alternative college, where I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t
like my clothes and I didn’t fit in anywhere. I had a bad
perm and braces, and I was still mad at myself. At home
Alex was shattered and Mum was depressed—so lost that
she was spinning in circles in her head.
Six months later, I wanted to leave home. ‘Over my
dead body!’ said Mum. ‘You’re not sixteen yet!’ But I was
determined, so I heaved a suitcase onto a Sydney-bound
train and ran away.
I moved into a small apartment in Surry Hills, with
an old lift that creaked and jolted as it rode up and down
through the night. Dad paid my rent. I waitressed. I took
speed and ecstasy and smoked joints. The first night I
dropped acid, a prostitute threw herself off the roof of my
apartment block. As the sun came up, I could not take
my eyes off the wide bloodstain on the concrete below my
kitchen window, and was overwhelmed by a bleak feeling
of futility.
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I rang Sofie, who came over to rescue and chastise me:
‘You shouldn’t take drugs, Ingrid!’ I shielded my eyes from
the bright sun as she gripped my upper arm and dragged
me across the road to her place. She tucked me into her
bed and made me melted cheese on toast—I hallucinated
that it was rising and falling, rising and falling. That night
I returned to my apartment and sat with my knees up in its
stained floral armchair, staring at the silent phone handset
on the coffee table beside me, wishing Mum or Dad would
call and insist I come home. But they didn’t. Fuckit. Fuckit,
I thought. I wandered into the kitchen, surprised by how
many dirty dishes one person could create.
For three years my clothesline was draped solely in
black, and chunks of plaster fell from the walls of my
rented rooms in share houses up and down Bourke Street
in inner-city Sydney. When I lived opposite a refuge for
homeless alcoholic men in Woolloomooloo, Mum helped
me hang my red silk sheets over my bedroom window for
curtains
, and drape 1950s dresses on coat hangers on my
walls for atmosphere. I liked it that way. Mum’s boyfriend
at the time refused to leave his red Porsche parked out the
front. Mum laughed and said, Bugger him.
When I was eighteen, I went to East Sydney Tech to
finish studying for my Higher School Certificate. I was
still lost and stoned but, when the time came, I caught a
bus to Randwick High School and managed to sit through
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my exams, desperately out of place amid rows of uniformed
school students. I passed. Just.
Hooking up with other musicians while Ben was working
was a way for me to settle in to life in Alice.
After hearing about my music background at our so-called
Songwriters’ Gathering, Karlie invited me to work with
her on a music program for kids on a community in the
Pitjantjatjara Lands in South Australia. After hours on the
road, we arrived at the foot of a mountain. Looking for the
address we had been given, we drove down streets strewn
with rubbish and a scattering of skinny strung-out dogs
under a blaring sun. A guy with a wild wasted look in his
bloodshot eyes pointed out directions, holding a petrol can
over his nose and mouth with his free hand.
The door to our house was ajar. As we walked in, petrol
fumes hit us hard and I pulled the neck of my t-shirt up over
my nose. Young voices called to each other—‘Whitefella!
Whitefella!’—as they ran into the furthest room of the
house. Taps were running and the fridge door hung wide
open. There was spilt paint on the floors and food mashed
into the bench tops. My heart pounded as we turned and left.
We were given somewhere else to stay, and sat with
doors and curtains closed while I battered Karlie with my
rambling thoughts and wrangled with culture shock.
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‘They’re just kids! I mean . . . they’re sniffing petrol!’ I
sat forward with my head in my hands. This place felt so
foreign—I might as well have been in another country. We
were committed to being here for two weeks and my head
spun. ‘Their voices . . . they sounded so young . . .’
‘It’s okay, you’ll get used to it,’ said Karlie. ‘We’ve got
this house now. This place is good.’
‘That house was so . . . I mean, it was trashed! And that
guy . . . just holding a can of petrol over his nose while he