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“Don't be sorry, Mum,” Carole said as she touched her mother's hand, knowing how much courage such a secret, subversive act would take. “Thank you.”

“Let me make a cup of tea,” her mother replied, rising and releasing herself from Carole's touch.

Carole never did discover what transpired in the meeting with Aunt Beatrice to make her father change his mind. She would forever wonder what words were used, what argument presented, that could make him budge from his bullish stance. She marvelled that there might have been magic words or phrases that could have prevented straps across thighs and arms. She would never know that it wasn't the power of language but the power of money that had secured her freedom.

Saying farewell to her mother and father on the docks as she set sail for Victoria, Carole watched as other girls, making the same trip as her, said tearful and loving goodbyes to their families. Her father's parting words, loud enough to cause others to turn and stare, were, “You'll be back in six months, pregnant.” Her mother wept for the freedom her daughter had found and with something that bordered on envy.

Carole had scored so highly on her entrance examination that she was to be trained for intelligence work. She was sent to Melbourne where she shared a large house with twelve other girls. Her gentleness made others instantly feel comfortable with her, but her shyness and inexperience in social situations meant she kept aloof and apart from the others and from their jealousies and intrigues. She preferred to read on the nights she did not go out to the pictures.

While other girls struggled with the strict regime of the Navy, Carole found the discipline more relaxed and lacking in the night-time terror of her previous home life. She relished the stimulation, challenge and responsibility of her work, and a financial independence she had never imagined. With a good salary and with the Navy taking care of many of her expenses — accommodation, clothing and food — Carole was able to save most of her pay cheque. She sent money to her mother, but her mother's letters revealed that her father confiscated it; she then reverted to sending gifts, things that her mother could never afford for herself—a velvet coat, French perfume, a floral scarf, leather gloves.

Her mother's fate with an unloving husband remained a warning to Carole and she continued to avoid the attentions of the men around her. She had expected to be constantly repelling the attractions of men in such a male-dominated quarter of a male-dominated world. Instead, she found that her work kept her mainly in the company of other women. They informed her which of her superiors had wandering hands and she felt fortunate that she had been able to avoid any 'incidents'.

In Melbourne, and later in Canberra, Carole still defined men by her experiences with her father. She feared that, underneath the exteriors of the men who took her to dinner and the movies, there lay someone brutal. Each date presented the threat of the trap that had closed around her mother. That was, until the bus trip with Bob Brecht.

There was something in the dark aspect of this Bob Brecht — she had noticed it as soon as her eyes rested on his face — that reminded her of the unassuming gallantry and gentlemanly softness of her matinee idol. He was the kind of man she felt she would be safe with, a man so unlike her father.

As Bob Brecht walked along the edge of the road that threaded through the naval base, he reflected on the woman he had just met, the woman who had agreed, against his expectation, to meet him on Sunday. Her soft, crisp “Quite”, her educated accent and tender, gorgeous face had melted him. He felt an exhilaration and anticipation he had not felt since he was a young child in the Boy's Home and was about to kiss Annabel Stewart behind the chicken coop.

16

1943

T
HE STRONGEST MEMORY Bob Brecht had of his mother was a citrus scent, crisp and tart. Their family home had two large lemon trees in its back yard and his mother had used the fruit for cooking and the juice to clean bench tops and clothes. The odour from the fruit had clung to his mother, lingering in her soft recesses.

Even after she passed away, Elizabeth's lemon scent remained in the air, ghosting her, and through the aroma, her second youngest could sense her close, as though she were about to re-enter the room.

Bob was five when his mother died. His eldest sister, Patricia, then seventeen, was working as a seamstress in a nearby shop. Thomas had left long ago to join the war and not been heard from since. At the funeral, Patricia had clutched Bob, a quiet bundle of a child, pliable in his numbness and confusion at the changes occurring around him. Danny, then four years old, clung to Daisy, a precocious eight, who was trying hard to act as guarded as the older children. William stood aloof, strangely quiet. In the thawing early spring of 1943, all around seemed lifeless and empty.

A large-boned, dark-skinned boy, William started to gather up his shirts, trousers, winter coat and boots. The other children watched him pack and leave; the determined look on his face was enough to keep them silent. They knew this mood of bottled anger all too well. His decision to leave left Patricia an acute sense of abandonment and also a feeling of betrayal. She would now be the eldest child, left to care for the three youngest. She constantly tried but was never able to reach out and connect with William, had been unable to free him from the thoughts that spiralled him into sullen moods. She had seen his tenderness, how docile he could be when he was released, but only Daisy with her smile, her cajoling and her teasing, could bring him back from his thoughts. He would lift her up to carry her on his shoulders or tickle her until she begged him to stop, and his spirits would rise.

“Don't leave us,” Daisy pleaded with him as he zipped up his bag with finality.

“Princess, I have to go. I'm no good to you here. I need to do this,” he said, pausing to look at her. “I'll do this and then I'll come and get you.”

“No. No. You're wrong.” She tried again. “I need you.”

William hesitated for the shortest moment.

“No,” he asserted again. “I must. One day, you'll understand.”

William's large frame assisted him in appearing a supposed eighteen years rather than his bare seventeen, and he enrolled to fight in the war. His brothers and sisters could not know that their mother's funeral was a final farewell to their troubled brother too.

To Grigor, the children were a reminder of Elizabeth; their distant murmuring began to grow louder. They haunted his house and formed part of the modest collection of personal belongings his wife had left behind.

He dealt with the loss of his wife the best he could, grieving in his own way. He threw her clothes into the hearth fire. He destroyed her trinkets — cheap glass vases, a polished brown seashell and an imitation ivory brush and mirror set; he threw other possessions away — a jade brooch, a silver hair-clip and a piece of emerald-green and gold Chinese cloth. His anger gave way to the bitterness of losing the focus of his affection and love, the centre of his tenderness. It hardened him against a world that he had already believed to be riddled with callousness and unfairness. He reached for the one thing that he could find solace in: the slow-warming comfort of liquor.

Grigor continued to cast an ominous shadow over the house, crushing everything lemon and light. He would arrive home late at night smelling of the sugary pungency of strong spirits, yelling at any child who was the cause of discomfort or a reminder of his loss. When things were not done as Elizabeth had done them, it was a reminder to him that she was gone. Through his shouting and raging he did not notice his children's terror, did not sense that they grieved as he did nor understand that they too had lost something that intricately and crucially made up their lives.

Patricia, now eighteen, was determined to look after Daisy, Bob and Danny, to make sure they didn't lose anyone else. She juggled the work she did mending and altering clothes for the nearby laundry and the increased domestic duties to try and replace their mother in some small way. She did so until, one day, Mrs Crawford from the Aborigines Protection Board knocked curtly on the front door. The agency had been alerted about the Brecht family by a neighbour who had been concerned about the violent sounds of arguing that came from the house in the late hours of the night. Mrs Crawford would normally have retreated from a family where a white father was in charge, but Grigor, in a sombre hangover of grog, grief and spent rage, stared distractedly at the fire as she spoke.

When she finished, he continued to look at the fire, watching as the logs turned into blackened charcoal. “I cannot look after them. Take them.”

“Your eldest daughter is too old …”

“But you can take the other three.”

It was arranged that they would be put in a church-run orphanage.

From the next room, Patricia strained to hear, listening as her father, inert and indifferent, destroyed their family, giving her brothers and sister up without a fight. She clung to the wooden door frame as she heard his words, “I cannot look after them. Take them.”

Grigor withdrew into himself, his alcohol and his frayed ideals, becoming obsessed with the propaganda to arouse fears amongst Australians through scare-mongering about socialism. He predicted the upcoming attempts to ban his Party. It was simply history repeating itself, he concluded, seeing himself re-entering a period laced with those same sentiments that had seen Marx's ostracism, vilification and persecution. Grigor had fevered meetings with his comrades at the Lithgow branch of the Communist Party where political discussion focused on the surging tide of hysteria directed toward organised workers. They saw the rise of Robert Menzies as a bad omen. In seeking to hold back the wave of anti-Communist fervour, Grigor found a crusade to distract him from his memories of Elizabeth.

The departure of her family extinguished life in the house for Patricia. She harboured a deep resentment against her father who had given them away so easily and who had made no attempt to prevent her move to the city. She had written in response to advertisements in the Sydney papers and found herself a job as a seamstress.

As she packed her suitcase, she recalled William packing his bags and herself tearfully having to pack bags for Bob and Danny while Daisy chose the dresses and toys that she wanted. Now it was her turn to take what she wanted from this old life and leave her mother's house.

The fury in her brewed and she intended to tell her father how he had abandoned them, how despicable he was to have allowed three of his children to grow up in an institution. But as she faced him sitting in his armchair, her packed case in one hand, the other cradling the jade brooch that she had retrieved from the trash after one of his tantrums had seen it tossed away. Instead of shouting what she felt struggling within her, she could only utter stonily, “Mother told me once that nothing matters more than family. It will be too late when you realise she was right.”

17

1943

B
OB DID NOT BELIEVE, when he first entered the children's home, that he and Danny would be there for long. At times he thought it was just like in one of his dreams when something bad happened, like a tooth falling out. It felt real, but then he would wake up and realise that it was just imaginary and feel a flood of relief as his tongue touched the teeth firmly planted in his mouth. That, he thought, was what this ward, these sobbing boys, was going to turn out to be. It would disappear when he awoke and be replaced by something strong and reliable, like teeth.

Bob was only six when he was taken from his father's house in Lithgow and placed into the children's home with his younger brother and sister. Although freed from the fear of their volatile father, the younger children missed the attentions of their older siblings, especially Patricia's devotion and her ability to comfort and organise.

Bob and Danny were placed in a large ward that, even with almost thirty boys crowded together, seemed cold. The night air was filled with the sound of muffled sobs. During their first nights in the new surroundings, Bob had crept into Danny's bed when he heard his younger brother sobbing. Danny would cling to him and Bob would wait until he heard Danny's light snoring before slipping out of the warm sheets to cross the cold stone floor to his own bed. As he held his younger brother close, he experienced the gratification that comes with the ability to reassure someone helpless and in need. It eased his own suffering to know that he had to be strong for Danny, who was more frightened and fragile than he.

The adjustment to a new life was hardest for Daisy, placed in the girl's home across the road from Bob and Danny. She had a strict routine like the boys: dress, check beds, help younger ones dress, inspection for school, prayers, church services, meals, duties, lessons, dinner, bed. All announced by the ringing of a bell. No one explained to Daisy what the routine was and she was scolded and ridiculed until she learned the rules and procedures. This was vastly different from the family freedom she had known, from the adoration of her brothers, especially William, who would bounce her on his knee and bring her presents of paper dolls and paste jewellery. He called her “Princess”. Daisy saw her father as the lesser evil for when she was living with him at least there were times when she was beyond his gaze and, with her brothers and sister, she could do as she pleased.

Bob and Danny would see Daisy at the nearby school each day. At first, the three huddled in the playground, clinging to the familiarity of each other. But slowly, Daisy, drifted off into her own social circles.

Bob found, over time, that other boys welcomed his good-natured camaraderie. A small group — Thomas Riley, Frank Phillips, Charles Wainwright and Benny Miller — gathered around him. Danny found it hardest to make friends and tagged quietly along after his older brother. He dreaded leaving for class when he would be separated from Bob, and was looking forward to the hour when he would see his brother again.

Bob, always bright, attacked his studies and began to excel at school, but was never more than mediocre with sport. Clumsy at cricket, he never dropped a catch nor hit a century. Playing football, he could score a try as easily as miss a tackle or fumble a pass. He was small-framed and fast, but this was neither asset nor liability. His average ability ensured a stable popularity. Despite their strictness, the discipline of rules appealed to Bob. He felt secure knowing what was good and what was bad, and he developed a dislike for unreliability and irregularity. Against these standards, his father became a disappointment.

Every Sunday, after the church service, all the children would sit on the stone wall that surrounded the orphanage and wait for visitors. It was a way of passing time, time that was slipping away in weeks and months. At first their father came to visit every second weekend, but as the year stretched out his visits became sporadic. As the winter chill arrived, only Danny remained atop the wall waiting as parents or relatives plucked off the luckier children. He was convinced that if he went off to play like Bob and Daisy did, his father would turn up and, unable to find them, leave.

Bob preferred to have no expectations and to just respond to good things when they happened. He thought that Danny set himself up to have his feelings crushed, especially now the weekends of dashed hopes were becoming more and more frequent. He tried to encourage Danny to join him in a game of cards or cricket, but the younger brother was determined to watch for their father. With this new toughness, Bob finally surrendered his dream that his mother would return, walk into his classroom, claiming him as her own for all his classmates to see. He understood; he was not going to wake up to the solid reassurance of teeth. It had been hard to abandon any hope of her return. There was far less to lose if his father never came back — giving up on him was easier.

As their father's visits came further and further apart, their eldest sister, Patricia, began to visit on the odd weekend, rewarding Danny's patience. She would arrive in her neat, fashionable hand-made clothes, bringing small treats of penny candy and sometimes books —
Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe
and
Frankenstein.
Coming from Sydney, it would take her all morning to ride the train and walk from the station. She would have two hours with her family before having to return. Bob loved the smell of her perfume, and her gentleness. He was infatuated with her dark eyes and soft mouth. She gave the whispered promise of a warmth that he thought had died with his mother. Danny would chatter excitedly when she arrived. But as the first hour stretched to the second, he would grow silent and glum. When Patricia would announce it was time to leave, he would cling to her, pleading, “Don't leave me.” With Danny's small hands clutching her, Patricia would be reminded of Daisy's last plea to William. She longed to be able to take Danny, Bob and Daisy with her, to have had the money to give them a home again.

During these visits, Daisy remained aloof. Sometimes she only spent an hour with Patricia. She would eye her older sister's clothes accusingly and under her gaze Patricia would feel a flood of guilt. Daisy would make demands — for new shoes, leather gloves, a silk scarf — items Patricia could not afford. And when the elder sister toiled to make or buy something to satisfy Daisy's wishes, her gift would be met with criticism or indifference.

Daisy's anger towards her stung Patricia as much as Danny's pleas. And she could not help but be reminded again of William when she felt the wrath of her sister. Patricia decided that, unlike her missing brother whom she could never reach, she would succeed at getting Daisy to love her, she would lift Daisy's anger and allow her to be happy again.

Bob always knew he was different, that there was a mysterious ingredient he shared with his siblings and mother; he remembered his mother's dark skin and even darker eyes. At first this being different was an instinct. Then it started to take form in teasing words — gentle from friends, harsh from others — and names that made him wince, even when said playfully.

On one of his increasingly rare weekend visits, Bob asked his father why he and his brothers and sisters were dark. His father's face clouded at the question and he was silent as he thought about an answer until asserting firmly, “As far as I am concerned, your mother was as white as everyone else.”

Bob never mentioned the subject again to his father and from that moment on he knew there was no easy escape from his ancestry. To those jibes made to his face he would respond, with the same terseness his father had used, “I am as white as you are.”

The nagging intuition consolidated into something nameable. His Grade Six teacher had been talking about the bravery of the men who had discovered the Blue Mountains. Lawson, Wentworth, Blaxland were names that still dotted the area in which he lived. It was “the natives” who had tried to stop them. All eyes turned to Bob Brecht. He felt their stares boring into his brown skin with hatred. It was he who had tried to prevent the explorers from crossing the mountains. It was he who had killed white settlers. Bob reddened, he willed himself to disappear, wishing himself as white as thick smoke. He wished that “the natives” had not been troublesome, that they had been helpful, or just disappeared, rather than causing him this public shame.

He came to dread history classes. He would scan through the assigned texts to see what nasty revelations might be made, to find what accusations might be levelled at him: “the natives”, “the blacks” and “the Aborigines”. When, in Grade Eight, he was issued F.L.W. Wood's A
Concise History of Australia,
he was relieved that it began with the way the Greeks and Romans hypothesised about the existence of a southern land. The text then told of the Dutch who, upon arriving on its shores, declared that there was “no sign of gold or spices or civilized inhabitants” in Australia.

The Aborigines were not mentioned until the landing of the First Fleet. But, Bob noted with relief, they quickly vanished.

The
Endeavour
anchored about 2 p.m., and the Englishmen watched the natives cook their fish for dinner. Then a party of 30 or 40 rowed off towards the land. As they drew near, two natives seized their spears and prepared to resist the landing party. After a quarter of an hours fruitless parley, the natives threw their spears at the boats, and the Englishmen fired muskets loaded with small shot. The natives ran away, and the party landed in peace.

Bob found only one other reference in his book to Aborigines, and that was in relation to something called the Tasmanian Black War. Here, too, Aborigines showed their propensity to disappear:

In 1830, therefor, [Governor Arthur] made an effort to round up the natives, but they slipped through the fingers of soldiers and settlers. The white men complained that a native could run like a dog, and, if he chose, look just like a tree stump. Arthur's black drive cost £30,000, and 3,000 men took part in it. But they caught only a woman and a small boy, who had been asleep under a log. The Governor therefore very sensibly gave the work to men who really understood the natives, in particular George A. Robinson and John Batman. These men collected the remnants of the natives — fewer than 200 — and settled them on Flinders Island. There they rapidly died off, and Tasmania was left to the white men.

His class would not study this “Black War”, but the knowledge of it left Bob with one nagging question: if the Aborigines all disappeared, why were his brothers and sisters here? Since his father was white with a German surname, Bob figured, he was only half-Aboriginal. But when the children in his class had stared at him accusingly, the white part of him seemed to have vanished from their view, as though Europeans could disappear like Aborigines were supposed to.

Bob decided that he just needed to make the European part more prominent, make it reappear, and then he would no longer feel guilty or ashamed. He needed to embrace, he thought, the things that white people seemed to admire so much. Bob found these virtues in the story that had been the source of his embarrassment and ridicule — the crossing of the Blue Mountains. Bob reread the story that his history book told:

They kept to the right ridge until almost at the end of their journey, and so found a way through the mountain barrier. It was desperately hard work. They had to fight their way through the undergrowth and over rough, dry country … On the 28th day they were on Mount York. Here they had lost the main ridge, but fortunately, at this particular point, there was a way down into the valley … They had crossed the region of barren sandstone and found the fertile, well-watered country which lay beyond … So the little party turned and tramped back towards Sydney. They were tired and ill from hardship, but triumphant, for they had overcome an obstacle which for more than twenty years had defied the bravest and most skilful explorers in the country.

W.C. Wentworth, Bob would learn, had done other things to bring civilisation to Australia. He had advocated trial by jury, established the
Australian
in 1824, promoted freedom of the press, and insisted on self-government. Born in the colony, he was a cattle farmer by the age of eighteen, later a successful lawyer, an orator who could often carry an audience with him and convince them almost against their own will. By 1836, Wentworth was one of the richest squatters in the colony and, to protect the rights of those, like him, who were trying to make the country prosper, had attempted to draw up a “Squatters Constitution”, a version of which became law in 1855.

These achievements seemed to be the sorts of deeds that spelt success for white people, for people not stained with black like him. If he'd been the heir of an explorer or a squatter, a descendant of W.C. Wentworth, his classmates would have looked at him admiringly, perhaps enviously.

The recent war, the one that was ending when the Brecht children entered the orphanage, had renewed the hatred of Germans that had been simmering since the Great War. “Brecht” gave Bob the added shame of association with another loathed presence, but irritated him more because the German name meant nothing to him. His father had an accent but never spoke a word of German or talked about his homeland. Bob knew no German other than “Kraut”, which he thought was the German word for “German”. And although he could not find Germany on a map, he had two brothers who had disappeared to fight the Germans and never returned.

People never noticed Bob's whiteness unless it meant something bad, like Germans. However, his name could be easily forgiven. Thomas, Frank, Charles or Benny would jump to his defence if anyone tried to make an issue or a joke of it. “Leave off, Bob's alright.” But they were silent when mention was made of explorers impeded by Aborigines.

At night, however, amongst the sounds of the other boys breathing and snoring, Bob's sense of abandonment would surface. Bob's life, though missing many pieces, was filled with the intrigues of the daily lives of the boys, and eventually the girls, within the home. He even looked forward to the outdoor chores, when it wasn't cold, to tending the vegetables and feeding the chickens. A monthly roster dictated his turns for cleaning toilets, bathrooms or dormitories, or tidying up the yards. Even the cleaning, with the lemon smell of the disinfectant, was tolerable. Bob revelled in the hard work. Vigorously scrubbing, he would breathe in deeply, the citrus fumes permeating his dreams.