Book: Redemption - Part XI - Chapter 9

CHAPTER NINE

Trouble in Paradise

1975 - 1978

When Gough Whitlam broke the Coalition’s twenty-three year stranglehold on power in 1972, he compounded the dismal economic situation he inherited by refusing to increase taxes in the ’73 Budget to pay for his government’s spending bonanza. He had gone to the people promising no tax increases during his first term and he would stand by that promise. His decision proved fatal because it made an already large Budget deficit even larger, thereby setting the scene for disastrously high unemployment and inflation levels.

In its desperation to get out of debt his government sought to borrow vast sums from unconventional sources. Not only did this result in a scandalous loans affair, it ultimately led to a constitutional crisis of the like never before seen in this country. The conservatives, with their born-to-rule mentality, sought to destabilise the government by blocking supply in the Senate, thus starving it of the funds needed to put its policies into operation. This intolerable situation led to the double dissolution election of 1974 which Labor won. The coalition’s resolve to once more ignore the people’s decision resulted in the untenable: a deadlocked senate. But then Bert Millner, a Labor senator, unexpectedly died.

As the deceased senator was a Queenslander, convention dictated that a Queensland ALP member would take his place. Conventional was one thing Queensland Premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen was not. Cunning and manipulative, it didn’t take him long to realise he could accomplish a great deal by appointing someone other than the man nominated by the ALP. Such a man’s vote could block supply and create the necessary environment for a second dissolution of both Houses of Parliament.

I will never know for sure if Johannes Bjelke-Petersen would have been Premier of Queensland in 1975 had not the Labor Party imploded two decades earlier, but the vote of his rogue senator was all that was needed to block supply. With the Government once more incapable of implementing its expenditure bills and Whitlam refusing to force yet another election on a weary electorate the Governor-General intervened. For the first time in 200 years of British rule, the Queen’s representative in Australia dismissed an elected Prime Minister and appointed the opposition as caretaker administration. The date was November 11^th 1975. Thoroughly fed up with elections, the people punished Labor and rewarded the Malcolm Fraser-led coalition with a record majority of seats in Parliament. A bitter Whitlam blamed Sir John Kerr, the Governor-General, but that was too simplistic a view. Labor had grand ideas and high hopes, but its enthusiasm, inexperience and naïveté let them and the nation down.

It was all people talked about, especially when they were confined to hospital beds awaiting delivery as I was with my second child. The events of November 11^th did nothing to alleviate the reason I was there and on November 26^th, just two days before my due date, the decision was made to induce me. At 5.15pm, after spending hours walking up and down corridors to “get things moving” I delivered a healthy baby girl without further assistance. My elation soon turned to anguish when, on being returned to my bed in the maternity ward, I felt the tremendous gush I had felt the night my water broke with Kristen only it wasn’t water; it was blood.

I was immediately returned to the labour ward and given plasma transfusions while my stomach was vigorously massaged throughout the night. My uterus had not contracted, the nurses explained, so it was vital they keep up the massage no matter how painful it was. I found myself wishing Aunty Marie was with me even though I knew she was oblivious to my predicament. She was as close as I could get to my mother at a time when I needed a mother as never before. Of course, I know now Mum was with me through it all, just as she had been when she ‘arranged’ my transfer to the intermediate ward at the Mater Mothers’ nearly four years earlier.

By morning, with the bleeding stabilised, I was returned to the maternity ward and all was right with the world. I had no trouble naming my second child because I didn’t look beyond a promotional advertisement for a Cleopatra Jones film. Something about the lead actress, Tamara Dobson, instantly attracted my attention. Not only was she tall, black and beautiful, she epitomised the strong, independent ‘Amazonian’ superwoman of the 1970s. I had no way of knowing then that my child would exhibit such traits so early in life. After leaving hospital with Tamara Lee – who I decided could just as easily be known as Tammy Lee, Tara Lee or Mara Lee – I regretted my decision. When people asked my baby’s name they invariably blurted out: “Oh how quaint! You named her after Tammy Fraser!” (Malcolm Fraser’s wife) Like Hell I did!

During my weeks in hospital Steve brought Kristen in to see me every day, sometimes twice a day, and our poor old car never let us down in spite of its many problems. Unfortunately, it had sustained so much damage that after getting Tamara and I home safely, it gave up the fight. We were in no position to buy another car. In the months to come, with Kristen suffering recurring bouts of tonsillitis, I had no end of trouble boarding and disembarking buses with a sick child, baby and pram in tow. All too rarely was I offered assistance from a driver or fellow passenger so I solved the problem by making a sturdy baby carrier and shoulder bag out of denim. While now an accepted form of infant transport, at that time people, especially older women gave me the strangest looks. I was even be berated at times for “forcing my baby into such an unnatural position”. Perhaps they sensed Tamara’s discomfort in being so close to me.

Kristen couldn’t get enough kisses and cuddles, but Tamara stiffened every time I picked her up. Feeding time was fraught with problems and as soon as her little fingers could grasp the bottle she was determined to feed herself. When a baby screams in agony from colic yet will not or cannot accept comfort for her mother it is difficult to take. Steve made up a rocking frame for her bassinet out of scrap metal and I sat up night after night rocking her to sleep with my foot, wondering why she couldn’t accept me. With Kristen, we had the luxury of circumnavigating the verandah or taking her for drives in the car, but neither was an option for Tamara.

Less than a month after Tamara’s birth, life as I knew it changed when Steve brought his father home with him. He had run into him in the city, destitute and homeless, but as he appeared to be lucid, Steve felt it would be alright if he stayed a few weeks while looking for a place to live. By that time, the Federal Government had resumed properties at Cribb Island to make way for the airport runway and refused to spend money on buildings earmarked for demolition. The Australia Day flood may not have had the same impact on Cribb Island as it had on other parts of southeast Queensland, but it took its toll on houses facing the sea. Our little place had always been draughty and leaked copiously when it rained, but after Cyclone Wanda it would shake with such ferocity I feared it would disintegrate. That and a screaming baby should have been sufficient incentive for the man to find accommodation elsewhere, but he chose not to. He wasn’t likely to either after our pleas to be moved were finally heard. In early 1976, after damage sustained from yet another cyclone, we were transferred to a much nicer house down the road.

Tamara c. 1977

When I fell pregnant for the third time Steve’s father was still living with us. 1977 was three-quarters gone yet he had made no attempt to find his own lodgings. In fact, he made no attempt to do much of anything except emerge from his room, which smelled abominable, for meals and the occasional trip to his doctors. It was as though a shroud had been thrown over the house and its occupants were slowly suffocating.

One month into my pregnancy a tear formed in the amniotic sac meaning a rushed trip to the hospital and a month’s bed rest. At three months, I woke from a dream in which I saw three babies crammed together in a womb. As I was unusually big for the first trimester I was convinced I was having triplets. Even my doctor believed I was having more than one so he ordered an ultrasound. I wasn’t. My lone child was just big, he said. Towards the end of my second trimester, I was woken from a fitful sleep by a strange scraping noise coming from the girls’ room. When I couldn’t rouse Steve I went to investigate but found nothing untoward. The lock on that window was broken, had been since we moved in. Steve was supposed to make a security grill from scrap metal lying around at work, but never seemed to get around to it. The incident prompted him to attend to it the following Friday. In the interim I broke a wooden peg in half and used one side as a wedge so the window could not be pushed up more than an inch or two.

The very next night I heard that exact same sound again, only this time it wasn’t a false alarm. Someone’s hands were trying to force the window up from the outside. The sound I heard was the wedged peg grating on the wood of the upper window frame as the lower window was being forced upwards. Steve ran outside to give chase, but whoever it was got away. A few years earlier a little girl had been snatched from her house just a few hundred yards up the road. She was only three but she had been brutally raped and murdered. Had I been given a peek into the future through the use of some hitherto unknown ability within my own mind or had I been warned by a supernatural presence to take steps to protect my children?

By the eighth month I would happily have surrendered myself to any hospital, but in spite everything my blood pressure was normal, had been all the way through. This, plus the fact that the thought of smoking didn’t make me violently ill as it had with the girls, convinced me I was having a boy. The ‘ring thing’ also confirmed this. The ‘ring thing’ was really a pendulum, but instead of a crystal on a chain, it was a ring on a strand of hair or a length of cotton. If it went one way it signalled a girl and if another, it signalled a boy. So it was that I knew I had better get used to having a son called Che. I wasn’t happy about it because it made me think of the Johnny Cash hit A Boy Named Sue and I didn’t want my son subjected to schoolyard bullying. I also couldn’t understand Steve’s insistence on the name. By 1978, Foco was a distant memory, as was Che Guevera, but he was adamant. I could give our son one or two other names if I liked as he would most likely be known by one of them. He only wanted the name on his son’s birth certificate. I chose Adam, after Adam West of Batman fame and Paul, not after Paul McCartney, but simply because I liked the way Adam Paul Bird rolled off my tongue.

Che Guevara became the figurehead of the '60s youth revolution because of one photograph. He may have played a key role in the overthrow of the Batista regime in Cuba in 1959, but if not for that photograph he may well have been relegated to nothing more than a footnote in history. Born into an aristocratic Argentinean family in 1928, Guevara studied medicine after finishing school in the hope of one day solving the riddle of asthma, a condition that had plagued him since childhood. During his motorcycle travels throughout South America, he witnessed extreme poverty and disease due to malnutrition and poor sanitation. This he blamed on capitalistic regimes. In 1955, while working as a doctor in Mexico City, he met Raul Castro, brother of Fidel, and later, Castro himself. The die was cast.

After the revolution Guevara served as Cuba’s minister of industry (1961-1965) and wrote several articles and books advocating peasant-based revolutionary movements in developing countries. Che was a revolutionary, not a bureaucrat, and after fleeing his desk job in Cuba he was killed in Bolivia in 1967 while attempting to instigate a revolution there. Perhaps it was the Irish blood that flowed though his veins, courtesy of his grandmother who had fled her homeland during the Great Famine, which caused him to fight so fervently for what he believed in.

The famous photograph of Guevara staring into the distance at a memorial service in 1960 was taken by Alberto ‘Korda’  Dias Gutierrez. Although his picture was rejected by the revolution’s newspaper in favour of a shot of Fidel Castro with two French writers, Korda recognised its greatness. There is some confusion as to when the photograph was first used as a poster but after Guevara's death it became one of the most recognisable images of the rebellious ‘sixties. It has since been reproduced on everything from T-shirts, banners and posters to coffee mugs, plates and even underwear. Korda kept the negative and the camera he had used, but he never received any royalties for the picture the Maryland Institute of Art called “the most famous photograph in the world and a symbol of the 20th century.” Towards the end of his life Korda sued a vodka company for using his iconic image in an advertisement. He received an out-of-court settlement of $50,000.00, which he donated to the Cuban medical system because he believed that is what Dr. Guevara would have wanted.

Stylized version of Korda's famous photograph of Che Guevara

At my ante-natal check-up on the morning of June 2^nd 1978, four days before my due date, a decision was made that, due to my previous history, I should submit myself for induction. This began a nightmarish twenty-eight hour labour. My son was reluctantly dragged into this world with forceps at 8.18am on June 3^rd 1978 weighing in at 9lbs 13½ozs. His birth was so traumatic that for the first twenty-four hours he was given oxygen and put on what was termed “cot rest”. I was to have no contact with him. The next day I was permitted to "look, but not touch". A chest of drawers blocked the nurse’s efforts to get his cot closer to me and as I unable to move, due to my part in the ordeal, I could only see his mass of long dark hair. I told him I wished could see his face and, without a word of a lie, he pushed his head back and looked directly at me. I was so surprised I called out to the nurse who said, ever so matter-of-factly: “Don’t be silly. Newborn babies can’t do that.” But I knew what I saw.

Steve had sat with me through the long harrowing ordeal until a decision was made to prepare me for a caesarean which, thankfully, was not necessary in the end. When he later told me three babies were enough and that I should consider the prospect of his getting a vasectomy, I recalled the “triplet” dream and knew he was right. There would be no more babies for me.