From the railway station at Anna Paulowna I looked across the stretches of upturned polders on which farmers grew potatoes and pined for home. The watercolour grey of the sky flecked by the faintest of white clouds hit me with an aching sense of distance and a longing so deep I hugged my green leather coat over my chest and wondered where I’d left my gloves.
I dug my frozen fingers into my pockets and pulled out my cigarettes, still firm in their cardboard casing despite being pushed against my hips on our many walks through the streets of Amsterdam.
We were headed there again although I was reluctant to go given the cold even when they had promised us spring weather. What is it with weather, the way it reflects your mood, the way it leaves you with a feeling that someone else is pulling the strings and painting those skies grey purely as a lesson to you?
A punishment, or so it seemed to me that bleak morning at the railway station as we waited for a train. I hugged my loneliness under my coat and dragged out the first puffs of smoke from a cigarette that came in bright colours from a French manufacturer in the days when even though we knew smoking was bad for you we had still not convinced ourselves it could kill. That knowledge would not have mattered to me then, still wrapped in the flare of my youthful certainty that I could self-destruct with cigarettes as often as imaginable and still not explode. Only my heavy heart told me otherwise.
My heavy heart told me at that moment that I might burst with sorrow to be here in my mother’s homeland so far from my own country and standing in her shoes.
I had imagined I might make this trip for her. She had not yet been able to come back to Holland, not in twenty-five years and so I imagined I would revisit all the old places for her and bring back news. I had not bargained on the depth of my rebellion almost the moment I stepped off the plane at Schiphol.
THERE WERE SEATS enough for all the passengers travelling to Amsterdam on the mid-morning express even in the smoking carriage and I took my place alongside my husband and welcomed the warmth of the carriage enough to untie the belt on my coat and pull off my hat.
I hated this need to wear so many clothes. I hated the constriction of belts and layers and stockings under my jeans, and boots that needed to be made of good leather in order to keep out the rain that fell relentlessly from the grey skies. I hated this place; which my mother had promised me all my childhood I would love.
This place of polders and flat land, no flowers in sight and the windmills on the horizon dotted along the outskirts of the many farms seemed to mock me like the scarecrows in movies that took on lives of their own. Sinister figures in empty fields, which intended to breathe harm over the main characters in any story even if they appeared only as images.
‘What would you like to do today?’ my husband asked, and I did not have the heart to tell him once more I wanted to go back home, where it was warm and familiar and certain. Not this place where every day meant a search for what to do next, where to go, how to fill each waking moment; a life made up of survival and nothing more as if we had re-entered the war-torn time of my mother’s youth and were surrounded on all sides by the possibility of ambush.
THERE WAS ONE item I needed to buy though, a gift for my mother. A reminder for my mother of the land she had left all those years ago, a land, throughout my childhood for which she wept. As the years passed, she had grown distant from Holland, like a woman who has split from her lover and despite the initial grief finds herself forgetting what he once looked like.
So, my mother began to forget the country that was once her home. She remembered it from her childhood, but it stood still in her imagination and even as she continued to read newspaper accounts of the happenings at home, the death of Queen Juliana, the wedding of Princess Beatrix, the politics of the place, she found herself growing more attached to her adoptive country. Besides she could no longer tolerate the idea of those long cold winters, especially as she aged when ice-skating, the joy of her childhood, became an increasing impossibility.
THE TRIPS THROUGH the streets of Amsterdam once we had decided on a gift for my mother improved my outlook. There was something about shopping while abroad that began to appeal. When the shopping was limited and purposeful. I decided to buy my mother something I knew she would treasure forever. Glas in lodt, a round piece of glass, hand painted and held firm by a ring of lead to hang from a chain at a window so that light could shine through and reflect the image.
There were many shops in Amsterdam that specialised in these treasures and we found the prefect one in a small enterprise outside the market place, a picture of the Cathedral of St Bavo, my mother’s favourite church, centuries old, with blue stones steps and worn out sandstone pavers shaved smooth over time from the footsteps of millions of worshippers.
I carried the lead light, wrapped in tissue paper and nestled in strips of cardboard to protect the glass from cracking, back to my aunt’s.
‘Your mother will love it,’ my aunt told me when I unwrapped it carefully before returning it back to its safe place in the middle of the clothes in my suitcase.
All the way home on the plane, I worried about the rough handling of the baggage handlers. I worried about the possibility of damage to this precious gift. I imagined my mother’s delight at this tiny piece of Holland I had brought back for her. But through the fog of my jet lag on that first day home after we had mustered enough strength to make the trip to my mother’s house, when she opened the tissue paper below the shredded cardboard, her eyes showed none of the lustre of delight I had expected.
She looked at it, muttered enthusiastic words about the beauty of the cathedral and went to find a place at the window from which she might hang her treasure. Something in her response reminded me and not for the first time that the pleasure I longed to see in her eyes had long gone. And would never return again except when she was in church imagining herself in heaven.
Months before our trip, my husband had managed to buy our tickets dirt-cheap and we therefore imagined we’d travel in economy at the lowest standard. We did not bargain on free drinks whenever we asked. The stewardess was obliging and brought us small bottles of tonic water to accompany the slashings of gin she poured over ice in regulation aeroplane plastic glasses.
It helped get us through the long-haul return flight from Schiphol through to Frankfurt and then on with one stopover in Singapore before we landed in Melbourne. We barely slept and smoked cigarettes instead in the days when smoking areas were allocated on planes to the diehards and the trip included a small section that lifted up in your seat rest in which to shake off the ash from your cigarette and get rid of the butts once finished. In those days I smoked menthol cigarettes slim lined with a thin gold band that separated the tobacco from the filter.
The stewardesses cleaned out our ash trays several times during the flight and it never occurred to me then as I look back in horror at that most filthy of habits that there was anything strange about polluting the inner workings of an aeroplane with cigarette smoke.
My husband read newspapers, the ones he’d collected at the airport in English only, the English and American newspapers, while I read Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds and managed to stave off any terror I might have felt about the plane dropping out of the air by my imaginings of those birds coming down to land on earth in England below and proceeding to peck out people’s eyes. I could not sleep but floated through a sea of horrified imaginings longing for home.
At five am on a Saturday morning when the plane finally bunny hopped its way onto the tarmac with all the screeching and moaning you associate with a plane hitting the ground, I told myself it would be a long time before I would ever leave Australia again. Tired beyond sleep we staggered out of the quarantine area to collect our bags and then went through those sliding doors in the arrivals section where my youngest brother was waiting. He was bright and shining despite having to get up at a ridiculous hour to meet us, but he had missed us.
There’d been a break in at our house he told us. The thief whoever it was had tried to jemmy open a front window but had succeeded only in breaking the glass just as my brother arrived home. The would-be thief ran away into the darkness. There had also been a run of petrol rationing while we were away and only now had the tanker drivers agreed to return to work. We were lucky we would not need to queue up for our ten-dollar ration of petrol on odd days depending on our number plate as my brother had dome.
‘You two smell like a brewery,’ my brother said as he wound down his car windows on the last stretch of the ride home. ‘You smell as though you’ve been drinking all night.’ He offered us breakfast of toast and tea but all I wanted was sleep, a sleep so deep I thought I might never awake out of it.
It was rare for me to want to visit my parents but even though my deep sleep and even after waking all I wanted was my chance to take our own car down the highway to visit them and to bring the taste of Holland to their door before the smell of it was gone forever.
THE TASTE OF HOLLAND recedes, as I grow older. It once held a central place in my consciousness. The taste as strong as the almond infused marzipan that I came across whenever someone had a wedding and layered their fruit cake with a thick undercoat of marzipan before the pristine white layer of sugar icing. I peeled off the topmost layer, not because it was too sweet. In those days’ sweetness at its most intense appealed but because it lacked flavour. I liked my sweetness to come with other hints of vanilla or chocolate or hazelnut but not straight sugar. This appealed to me too in my sense of Dutchness that arrived once a year in early December when my Opa sent all the families living in Australia a silver tin, the size of a small fat suitcase, filled with Dutch delectable: salted liquorice, Speculaas, Hagel, and best of all the marzipan.
I left the liquorice to my older sister and brothers, those who had acquired a taste for the raw saltiness of the sweets that came usually in the form of cats, small black cats that you chewed on until your teeth were black. More than the individual items themselves it was the reminder of that place my mother called home. That place where she had once been happy. That place where she had been able to lead the life she had once expected for herself, surrounded by friends and family.
In her memoir, she wrote about a day early after her arrival in Australia when she stood at the back door, perhaps the only door of the chook shed which they had converted into their first home, and swept the step clear of the dust that piled high from the unmade road in front. Beyond the road she could see long stretches of green fields where cows grazed as contentedly as she would have liked. But she could not graze. She had six children under ten by then, with four at home and two at school and another one on the way. She was trapped in this brave new world that she had moved to in order to give her husband the satisfaction he craved, off on a new adventure with a chance to get away from the shame he left behind in the form of his parents.
She had left behind her own most beloved parents and although three of her brothers had joined her with their families on this other side of the world, far from the ravages of the second world war, she looked across the fields up to the sky and held back tears. A car flashed by, a black sedan smeared in dust and through the front window she recognised the driver. Her new parish priest, Father Ashe, off on a call to some other parishioner further afield.
She put down her broom to wave to the priest from the shade of her front door, but his eyes were ahead, and he did not see her. Nor did he see her through the rear-view mirror as he drove on up the hill after she had stepped away from the shed and out onto the street in the wake of his dust. Or if he saw her, he did not stop. He did not wind down his window and wave to her from his position of retreat.
That would have been some comfort, but he offered nothing. And she felt the tears splash down her cheeks remembering her life in the parish of Haarlem where not only would the priest not stop, any visit in the direction of her parents’ home on the Marnixplein would be his first stop.
In Haarlem, my mother wrote, ‘I was a somebody, the member of a respected family. Here in Australia I am nobody, of no consequence,’ and she went back inside picked up her broom and dusted off the last leaf that had landed there.
I HAVE LONG ASSOCIATED Holland with longing, that feeling you get when your mind is plunged into a well of absence. As if there is nothing to which you can look forward, nothing that adds colour to your senses. Your taste buds retreat. Your hearing subsides, and everything around loses its lustre.
I watched my mother trudge through my childhood house on her way to the kitchen to prepare yet another pot of tea, to peel and put potatoes on the stove, to slice up onions for the next meal and she dragged her legs as if she had no desire to be where she was. Back in Holland she would have led a different life, free from all these children. All these money worries. This husband and the way he turned out.
Back in Holland my father had his moments. There were times when he would not talk to her for days. Days when she could not understand what had so enraged him that he should shut her out as if he had turned to stone, a brick wall of refusal. But other times he was still the same handsome and commanding man in whom she had fallen in love. He was in his uniform by then; handsome in that way that uniforms enhance, and he was ambitious to make a name for himself. Her parents could not object as they first insisted, he was too old for her, too unsuitable from a not so respectable family but when he agreed to convert to her Catholic religion that was the end of it, and they married.
Ten years later when she agreed to follow him to Australia, pregnant with her fifth child with another four small children in her care and having lost her first daughter during the war, my mother hoped for something better.
But it never came. She blamed it on the Australian lack of culture. And even though she tried hard to make the most of her marriage, she could not get away from the sense that none of this would have happened had we lived in Holland, her homeland, the home of her parents, the place where her father still lived in his grand house on the Marnixplein, the house in which my mother grew up, the oldest of seven children.
‘Australians lack culture,’ my mother told me. She missed the outdoor cafes that lined the streets of Haarlem, the art galleries and the sense of history she attached to Europe.
In those days, the idea of culture troubled me. I could not imagine what my mother was talking about. Culture seemed to be attached to the people themselves. Europeans were steeped in culture. Australians were boorish, uneducated people who liked to drink beer, watch football and gossip over the back fence. My mother liked none of these things. Australians did not read books, nor were they interested in art or beauty or, so it seemed to my mother.
The men who worked on building sites around our neighbourhood by the time I was fourteen were largely foreign, mainly from Italy and Greece, and so I decided, despite their Mediterranean complexions, different from our fair skin, that these two groups were some of the people to whom my mother referred, the men at building sites who whistled at women as they walked past.
These migrants from Europe appreciated beauty in a way I imagined the Australian men did not. Was this then culture? This extra dimension that rippled throughout our household in my father’s appreciation of the womanly form, those naked breasts on the front pages of The Truth newspaper, the way he designed and cut out dresses for my mother which he later sewed together to make the most of her waist and cleavage, except when she was pregnant.
When my husband and I decided to go on this trip to Holland, even though he was Australian, and I feared my mother’s disapproval, he wanted to see as much of Europe as possible. He wanted to take me home, or at least to my parents’ home. He wanted to share with me the richness of those foreign places and I went along with a certain hopefulness that disappeared the minute we stepped off the plane.
IN HER LATER YEARS, my mother lived in a retirement village in Keysborough and by her bedside she kept a book of images, photos of significant spots in Haarlem from years gone by. On every second page there was an accompanying picture of the same place today. Photos of the Keukenhof, St Bavo Cathedral, the central marketplace, the Grote Markt among others. All places I visited with my husband forty years ago and near to where my mother once lived.
In the months before she died, she liked to flick through the pages of this book to compare those places past and present and remind me of what her life was like then, compared to now.
Since she died, it’s my turn to reminisce over images of Melbourne, under the clocks at Flinders Street, the Yarra River near the shrine, the Botanical gardens, these places I once visited as a child. And although, I could never escape my mother’s longing for her home in Holland, I have stayed put in Australia and in so doing avoided the pain of migration that marked the bulk of my mother’s life.
Still my children now long to travel, to try life on the other side of the world and so my longing must shift again from here to there.
A never-ending cycle of love and loss.
We were headed there again although I was reluctant to go given the cold even when they had promised us spring weather. What is it with weather, the way it reflects your mood, the way it leaves you with a feeling that someone else is pulling the strings and painting those skies grey purely as a lesson to you?
A punishment, or so it seemed to me that bleak morning at the railway station as we waited for a train. I hugged my loneliness under my coat and dragged out the first puffs of smoke from a cigarette that came in bright colours from a French manufacturer in the days when even though we knew smoking was bad for you we had still not convinced ourselves it could kill. That knowledge would not have mattered to me then, still wrapped in the flare of my youthful certainty that I could self-destruct with cigarettes as often as imaginable and still not explode. Only my heavy heart told me otherwise.
My heavy heart told me at that moment that I might burst with sorrow to be here in my mother’s homeland so far from my own country and standing in her shoes.
I had imagined I might make this trip for her. She had not yet been able to come back to Holland, not in twenty-five years and so I imagined I would revisit all the old places for her and bring back news. I had not bargained on the depth of my rebellion almost the moment I stepped off the plane at Schiphol.
THERE WERE SEATS enough for all the passengers travelling to Amsterdam on the mid-morning express even in the smoking carriage and I took my place alongside my husband and welcomed the warmth of the carriage enough to untie the belt on my coat and pull off my hat.
I hated this need to wear so many clothes. I hated the constriction of belts and layers and stockings under my jeans, and boots that needed to be made of good leather in order to keep out the rain that fell relentlessly from the grey skies. I hated this place; which my mother had promised me all my childhood I would love.
This place of polders and flat land, no flowers in sight and the windmills on the horizon dotted along the outskirts of the many farms seemed to mock me like the scarecrows in movies that took on lives of their own. Sinister figures in empty fields, which intended to breathe harm over the main characters in any story even if they appeared only as images.
‘What would you like to do today?’ my husband asked, and I did not have the heart to tell him once more I wanted to go back home, where it was warm and familiar and certain. Not this place where every day meant a search for what to do next, where to go, how to fill each waking moment; a life made up of survival and nothing more as if we had re-entered the war-torn time of my mother’s youth and were surrounded on all sides by the possibility of ambush.
THERE WAS ONE item I needed to buy though, a gift for my mother. A reminder for my mother of the land she had left all those years ago, a land, throughout my childhood for which she wept. As the years passed, she had grown distant from Holland, like a woman who has split from her lover and despite the initial grief finds herself forgetting what he once looked like.
So, my mother began to forget the country that was once her home. She remembered it from her childhood, but it stood still in her imagination and even as she continued to read newspaper accounts of the happenings at home, the death of Queen Juliana, the wedding of Princess Beatrix, the politics of the place, she found herself growing more attached to her adoptive country. Besides she could no longer tolerate the idea of those long cold winters, especially as she aged when ice-skating, the joy of her childhood, became an increasing impossibility.
THE TRIPS THROUGH the streets of Amsterdam once we had decided on a gift for my mother improved my outlook. There was something about shopping while abroad that began to appeal. When the shopping was limited and purposeful. I decided to buy my mother something I knew she would treasure forever. Glas in lodt, a round piece of glass, hand painted and held firm by a ring of lead to hang from a chain at a window so that light could shine through and reflect the image.
There were many shops in Amsterdam that specialised in these treasures and we found the prefect one in a small enterprise outside the market place, a picture of the Cathedral of St Bavo, my mother’s favourite church, centuries old, with blue stones steps and worn out sandstone pavers shaved smooth over time from the footsteps of millions of worshippers.
I carried the lead light, wrapped in tissue paper and nestled in strips of cardboard to protect the glass from cracking, back to my aunt’s.
‘Your mother will love it,’ my aunt told me when I unwrapped it carefully before returning it back to its safe place in the middle of the clothes in my suitcase.
All the way home on the plane, I worried about the rough handling of the baggage handlers. I worried about the possibility of damage to this precious gift. I imagined my mother’s delight at this tiny piece of Holland I had brought back for her. But through the fog of my jet lag on that first day home after we had mustered enough strength to make the trip to my mother’s house, when she opened the tissue paper below the shredded cardboard, her eyes showed none of the lustre of delight I had expected.
She looked at it, muttered enthusiastic words about the beauty of the cathedral and went to find a place at the window from which she might hang her treasure. Something in her response reminded me and not for the first time that the pleasure I longed to see in her eyes had long gone. And would never return again except when she was in church imagining herself in heaven.
Months before our trip, my husband had managed to buy our tickets dirt-cheap and we therefore imagined we’d travel in economy at the lowest standard. We did not bargain on free drinks whenever we asked. The stewardess was obliging and brought us small bottles of tonic water to accompany the slashings of gin she poured over ice in regulation aeroplane plastic glasses.
It helped get us through the long-haul return flight from Schiphol through to Frankfurt and then on with one stopover in Singapore before we landed in Melbourne. We barely slept and smoked cigarettes instead in the days when smoking areas were allocated on planes to the diehards and the trip included a small section that lifted up in your seat rest in which to shake off the ash from your cigarette and get rid of the butts once finished. In those days I smoked menthol cigarettes slim lined with a thin gold band that separated the tobacco from the filter.
The stewardesses cleaned out our ash trays several times during the flight and it never occurred to me then as I look back in horror at that most filthy of habits that there was anything strange about polluting the inner workings of an aeroplane with cigarette smoke.
My husband read newspapers, the ones he’d collected at the airport in English only, the English and American newspapers, while I read Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds and managed to stave off any terror I might have felt about the plane dropping out of the air by my imaginings of those birds coming down to land on earth in England below and proceeding to peck out people’s eyes. I could not sleep but floated through a sea of horrified imaginings longing for home.
At five am on a Saturday morning when the plane finally bunny hopped its way onto the tarmac with all the screeching and moaning you associate with a plane hitting the ground, I told myself it would be a long time before I would ever leave Australia again. Tired beyond sleep we staggered out of the quarantine area to collect our bags and then went through those sliding doors in the arrivals section where my youngest brother was waiting. He was bright and shining despite having to get up at a ridiculous hour to meet us, but he had missed us.
There’d been a break in at our house he told us. The thief whoever it was had tried to jemmy open a front window but had succeeded only in breaking the glass just as my brother arrived home. The would-be thief ran away into the darkness. There had also been a run of petrol rationing while we were away and only now had the tanker drivers agreed to return to work. We were lucky we would not need to queue up for our ten-dollar ration of petrol on odd days depending on our number plate as my brother had dome.
‘You two smell like a brewery,’ my brother said as he wound down his car windows on the last stretch of the ride home. ‘You smell as though you’ve been drinking all night.’ He offered us breakfast of toast and tea but all I wanted was sleep, a sleep so deep I thought I might never awake out of it.
It was rare for me to want to visit my parents but even though my deep sleep and even after waking all I wanted was my chance to take our own car down the highway to visit them and to bring the taste of Holland to their door before the smell of it was gone forever.
THE TASTE OF HOLLAND recedes, as I grow older. It once held a central place in my consciousness. The taste as strong as the almond infused marzipan that I came across whenever someone had a wedding and layered their fruit cake with a thick undercoat of marzipan before the pristine white layer of sugar icing. I peeled off the topmost layer, not because it was too sweet. In those days’ sweetness at its most intense appealed but because it lacked flavour. I liked my sweetness to come with other hints of vanilla or chocolate or hazelnut but not straight sugar. This appealed to me too in my sense of Dutchness that arrived once a year in early December when my Opa sent all the families living in Australia a silver tin, the size of a small fat suitcase, filled with Dutch delectable: salted liquorice, Speculaas, Hagel, and best of all the marzipan.
I left the liquorice to my older sister and brothers, those who had acquired a taste for the raw saltiness of the sweets that came usually in the form of cats, small black cats that you chewed on until your teeth were black. More than the individual items themselves it was the reminder of that place my mother called home. That place where she had once been happy. That place where she had been able to lead the life she had once expected for herself, surrounded by friends and family.
In her memoir, she wrote about a day early after her arrival in Australia when she stood at the back door, perhaps the only door of the chook shed which they had converted into their first home, and swept the step clear of the dust that piled high from the unmade road in front. Beyond the road she could see long stretches of green fields where cows grazed as contentedly as she would have liked. But she could not graze. She had six children under ten by then, with four at home and two at school and another one on the way. She was trapped in this brave new world that she had moved to in order to give her husband the satisfaction he craved, off on a new adventure with a chance to get away from the shame he left behind in the form of his parents.
She had left behind her own most beloved parents and although three of her brothers had joined her with their families on this other side of the world, far from the ravages of the second world war, she looked across the fields up to the sky and held back tears. A car flashed by, a black sedan smeared in dust and through the front window she recognised the driver. Her new parish priest, Father Ashe, off on a call to some other parishioner further afield.
She put down her broom to wave to the priest from the shade of her front door, but his eyes were ahead, and he did not see her. Nor did he see her through the rear-view mirror as he drove on up the hill after she had stepped away from the shed and out onto the street in the wake of his dust. Or if he saw her, he did not stop. He did not wind down his window and wave to her from his position of retreat.
That would have been some comfort, but he offered nothing. And she felt the tears splash down her cheeks remembering her life in the parish of Haarlem where not only would the priest not stop, any visit in the direction of her parents’ home on the Marnixplein would be his first stop.
In Haarlem, my mother wrote, ‘I was a somebody, the member of a respected family. Here in Australia I am nobody, of no consequence,’ and she went back inside picked up her broom and dusted off the last leaf that had landed there.
I HAVE LONG ASSOCIATED Holland with longing, that feeling you get when your mind is plunged into a well of absence. As if there is nothing to which you can look forward, nothing that adds colour to your senses. Your taste buds retreat. Your hearing subsides, and everything around loses its lustre.
I watched my mother trudge through my childhood house on her way to the kitchen to prepare yet another pot of tea, to peel and put potatoes on the stove, to slice up onions for the next meal and she dragged her legs as if she had no desire to be where she was. Back in Holland she would have led a different life, free from all these children. All these money worries. This husband and the way he turned out.
Back in Holland my father had his moments. There were times when he would not talk to her for days. Days when she could not understand what had so enraged him that he should shut her out as if he had turned to stone, a brick wall of refusal. But other times he was still the same handsome and commanding man in whom she had fallen in love. He was in his uniform by then; handsome in that way that uniforms enhance, and he was ambitious to make a name for himself. Her parents could not object as they first insisted, he was too old for her, too unsuitable from a not so respectable family but when he agreed to convert to her Catholic religion that was the end of it, and they married.
Ten years later when she agreed to follow him to Australia, pregnant with her fifth child with another four small children in her care and having lost her first daughter during the war, my mother hoped for something better.
But it never came. She blamed it on the Australian lack of culture. And even though she tried hard to make the most of her marriage, she could not get away from the sense that none of this would have happened had we lived in Holland, her homeland, the home of her parents, the place where her father still lived in his grand house on the Marnixplein, the house in which my mother grew up, the oldest of seven children.
‘Australians lack culture,’ my mother told me. She missed the outdoor cafes that lined the streets of Haarlem, the art galleries and the sense of history she attached to Europe.
In those days, the idea of culture troubled me. I could not imagine what my mother was talking about. Culture seemed to be attached to the people themselves. Europeans were steeped in culture. Australians were boorish, uneducated people who liked to drink beer, watch football and gossip over the back fence. My mother liked none of these things. Australians did not read books, nor were they interested in art or beauty or, so it seemed to my mother.
The men who worked on building sites around our neighbourhood by the time I was fourteen were largely foreign, mainly from Italy and Greece, and so I decided, despite their Mediterranean complexions, different from our fair skin, that these two groups were some of the people to whom my mother referred, the men at building sites who whistled at women as they walked past.
These migrants from Europe appreciated beauty in a way I imagined the Australian men did not. Was this then culture? This extra dimension that rippled throughout our household in my father’s appreciation of the womanly form, those naked breasts on the front pages of The Truth newspaper, the way he designed and cut out dresses for my mother which he later sewed together to make the most of her waist and cleavage, except when she was pregnant.
When my husband and I decided to go on this trip to Holland, even though he was Australian, and I feared my mother’s disapproval, he wanted to see as much of Europe as possible. He wanted to take me home, or at least to my parents’ home. He wanted to share with me the richness of those foreign places and I went along with a certain hopefulness that disappeared the minute we stepped off the plane.
IN HER LATER YEARS, my mother lived in a retirement village in Keysborough and by her bedside she kept a book of images, photos of significant spots in Haarlem from years gone by. On every second page there was an accompanying picture of the same place today. Photos of the Keukenhof, St Bavo Cathedral, the central marketplace, the Grote Markt among others. All places I visited with my husband forty years ago and near to where my mother once lived.
In the months before she died, she liked to flick through the pages of this book to compare those places past and present and remind me of what her life was like then, compared to now.
Since she died, it’s my turn to reminisce over images of Melbourne, under the clocks at Flinders Street, the Yarra River near the shrine, the Botanical gardens, these places I once visited as a child. And although, I could never escape my mother’s longing for her home in Holland, I have stayed put in Australia and in so doing avoided the pain of migration that marked the bulk of my mother’s life.
Still my children now long to travel, to try life on the other side of the world and so my longing must shift again from here to there.
A never-ending cycle of love and loss.
Elisabeth Hanscombe is a psychologist and writer who explores autobiography, psychoanalysis, testimony, trauma and creative non-fiction in her writing. Her childhood memoir, The Art of Disappearing, was published in 2017. She blogs at https://www.sixthinline.com
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