AustLit
You are my sunshine, my only sunshine
You make me happy, when skies are grey
You’ll never know dear, how much I love you
Please don’t take my sunshine away.
This was the song Mum used to sing to me. This was my song—I was sunshine, only me, not my sister or my dad; only I could bring happiness and joy to the most important person in the universe. This song gave me power and I wore my responsibility like a sheriff with a really big, shiny badge.
“She’s got dogs, three of them.” Apart from a baby brother, all I’d ever wanted was a dog.
I remember Dad driving, Mum in the passenger seat, and my sister and me in the back. I remember staring out my window as though it was a TV, watching how the walls of gumtrees with their fern filler closed in on the upward twist of the road. The longer we sat, the colder the car got.
I imagined a matronly woman like Peggy next door, with big cushion-like breasts, and how I’d press my head into them for big warm hugs like Mum’s. I imagined the woman would buy me bags of mixed lollies like Grandma did the time I met her, and I imagined she’d talk to me with a gentle yet stern voice, and she’d tell me things, explain them to me.
I pictured playing with the dogs, they’d love me the most.
And then I remember arriving at the wooden pub in the centre of the dry dirt clearing, and the sounds of four car doors slamming. Then someone is standing over me, maybe doing up my jacket, and saying something, probably about being good. I’d seen this scenario in Shirley Temple movies, so there was no way I was going to do anything other than cling adoringly to Mum’s skirt. No-one separates the perfect pair. Next, I remember my arms spreading out like wings to balance my stretching legs as I climbed the wide wooden stair planks. But after that, there’s nothing, I don’t remember reaching the top, and I don’t remember meeting the woman, or her dogs.
I was six months old the first time I was taken away. Mum was scheduled to get her tubes tied, but after a night of fasting she’d fainted holding the just-boiled kettle. She was hospitalised with third-degree burns. Dad was at work up in the mountains, leaving doctors to shave slices of skin from her legs to graft them onto her arm. Then, while she was inside the numbness of the painkiller, her brother appeared from interstate and signed a consent form allowing the doctors to perform a hysterectomy. Mum didn’t want one and got angry. When she told me this thirty years later, through the permanent haze of the long-term medicated, her clenched hands made white knuckles: “After they operated I was transferred to the psych hospital.”
Decades later I had an ‘ah-ha’ moment. My Uncle, the Rolf-Harris-like raconteur, had told me his version of that story pretty much every time I saw him. Never mentioning Mum, or how I came to be in his charge, he started with: “I was flying you by plane back to Melbourne. You were wrapped in a blanket but you wouldn’t stop screaming.” Raising his brow he’d look from me and nod invitingly to his broader audience, “She was screaming and screaming and screaming.” Then he’d chuckle, “But gee the hostesses looked after you, kept coming over to see how you were doing.” He’d wink to let us know that they were really visiting him. I imagined him holding me like a trophy, the nectar to the hostess bees. “They wet a face cloth for your forehead but that didn’t stop you either.” I’d see my red, swollen baby face soaked with tears and exhaustion. “Finally, there was nothing else I could do, so I slapped you, and you stopped.” He’d look at me with a cocky smile and repeat “so I slapped you, and you stopped. Then you slept like a baby.” He’d chuckle at his ingenuity and move on to his next story, something about his volunteer work for the scouts, or scoring runs at cricket, or winning an overseas trip for breaking sales records, or more ladies in a fluster.
I want to feel sorry for him because he, too, grew up in an orphanage renowned for paedophiles, but... but… besides authorising Mum’s hysterectomy, she said he was having an affair with her best mate. For me, the worst bit is that after all the years of insisting that it was Grandma’s fault her kids were put in orphanages, he now admits that Grandad was violent. Worse still, the last time I saw him, he told me he’s on so much medication he couldn’t do anything even if he wanted to. We were at a family BBQ, the first ‘family’ event I’d been invited to in years. I wanted to scream, grab the bare flabby arm of my cousin and dig my nails in till I drew blood. I fantasised about looking into her eyes and growling like a wolf, showing her the depth of my anger, the anger we share. “Something happened to me to,” She’d whispered. What did she want me to say to that? It’s her dad who led the charge.
The skies are grey...
There were lots of grey sky days. Mum would decide she needed to take control of her own destiny—the medication was making her fat, or foggy, or it was too expensive. In her first prescription-free days, she seemed to count each moment in anxious concentration: her tortured eyes showing a strength that wrenched her body rigid and made her hands twist with constant fidgeting. Manic force, maniacal motions, electric connections—going off, on a tangent, on a string, like a puppet.
From there, the grey days blurred into weeks and the darkness took over. And no matter how hard I tried, Mum closed in on herself and wouldn’t let even me in. An inner storm—everything cloudy with distrust. She fretted about what those people were planning. She had intense dialogues with the invisible (non) people behind her or inanimate objects, like the Hills hoist or fence. Sometimes, frenzied like a cyclone, she’d dart out into the neighbourhood to question people, or take photos of streets signs, random cats and cars. At the shops she’d stutter ‘umms’ and ‘ahhs’, sometimes she’d just stand next to a shopkeeper keeping a watchful, mumbling presence.
I hated the photo taking the most. Money was always a stress, and there she was getting double prints of nothing. I imagined being responsible for the budget, and only buying peanut butter—‘cause even though I loved Vegemite, it couldn’t be had without butter, but peanut butter could. At home with her latest prints, she’d stay up all night sitting on the lounge room floor studying and comparing them with photos in our albums. Picking up individual photos, her soliloquies alternated between sadness and bitter anger—somehow trying to connect past, with present, with future. Her gloom released with tears. Occasionally, eyes closed, her hands would hover over the photos as though over a ouija board. Shaking, she’d murmur disjointed sentences into the unknown. Sometimes I’d raise my voice and ask her what she was doing, and she’d look at me as though she was surprised that I was there. If I tried to ask the question again, she’d hunch over and inward, and dismiss me with a fear about who was listening.
Eventually, someone would call the police. When the divvy van pulled up out the front of our house, I’d take cover behind the curtains. Near enough to the door to hear snippets, but far enough away that the police might not know I was there—my stomach tight with a mixture of grief, relief and anxiety. I hated having the divvy van parked outside our house for all the world to see. I hated the message that its bold blue and white colours sent from the concreted greens of our suburban court. I hated the two uniforms standing at my front door interviewing Mum, and the likelihood that they’d eventually manhandle her struggling buxom body into the van. I hated that there was no sense in it, that I had no control, that I was on my own, that I didn’t have a mother who could look after me, that... I had so much anger, disappointment, embarrassment, frustration, and no understanding.
Mum said that her sadness came from being brought up in a kids’ home. I imagined her childhood as dark and cold surrounded by bluestone brick walls: a ‘home’ with dank air that echoed a steady distant wail—where hundreds of kids gripped their bedsheets with clenched jaws and the deafening silence of Edvard Munch’s painting, The Scream. ‘Ten Tonne Tesse’ the kids teased her, until the morning of her fourteenth birthday when she was sent to a doctor’s house to be their maid—to pay back her education: “I wasn’t even allowed to take my books, or say goodbye to the teachers”.
You’ll never know dear, how much I love you...
I learnt I was Aboriginal when I was twenty-one, at a cousin’s wedding. Mum denied it, lied flat out. But seeing her and her siblings together, it was obvious. A medley of childhood memories danced through my mind. When I was called ‘boong’ at primary school I’d assumed the kid with the platinum blonde hair and ‘I hate school t-shirt’ was talking about Dad. But Dad was a ‘wog’ and I barely ever saw him so why would I care about connections with him. And Mum had insisted we didn’t learn his native language so we wouldn’t be marked as ‘different’. I’d dismissed the kid as an ignorant twat. Then, when I was at highschool ‘Mon is a kaffa’ was written on the back of my yellow Spicer jacket in giant letters like the number on a footyjumper. I had to look it up in the dictionary: a skinny black person. I took it as a compliment—didn’t every girl want to be skinny and tanned? Now I know my history, my blood, that message makes me sad. The guy who wrote it was my first teen crush. I loved the way he played with words, performed ‘perturbed’ as poetry—as onomatopoeia.
I went in search of my maternal links and accessed the Freedom of Information files:
68224
CHILDREN’S WELFARE DEPARTMENT
District: Balaclava
Date: 20/2/42
REGARDING: Wendy McFeeters eight and a half months
Father Joseph Leslie McFeeters called this morning saying the Salvation Army had taken their five children to the following…
Wendy McFeeters placed in the Haven...
The answers are in the questions: Why had Grandad called? Probably because Grandma was Aboriginal and the Department had to be reported to; maybe she was covered with bruises; maybe she had postnatal depression. Grandma was also State ‘orphaned’ at six months old. Three generations of us. I was the lucky one, because my mum came back. Not sure what Grandma was doing at fourteen, but she was married at sixteen; Mum was working as a maid, and me...
And me, when I fourteen, Mum, Michelle and I had finally left Dad. All the sunshine in the world couldn’t keep the grey away in our first year in Highett, an outer Melbourne suburb. I’d got the black-eye badge that marked the last time Michelle ever hit me. There were questions at school, she moved out of home, and I left school. With a job and boyfriend, there was a fire in Mum’s car boot. “The only way to access the boot is with a key,” my boyfriend whispered.
Mum was off her tablets again and pretty soon a women from her work was sitting in a car by the tennis courts, telling me through the window “She’s lost her job.” Mostly Mum cried, but sometimes when I was watching tellie, she’d stare at me. “What are you looking at?” A mute, blank stare in response. “WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT?” I’d scream in frustration. Once, I put my hands around her neck and had to use all of my restraint not to squeeze. With no one around to blame but me, I tried begging, encouraging, loving, hating, screaming, and bullying. But nothing worked, and the blame I’d aimed at everyone else backfired to me. I couldn’t work out what I’d done, why Mum wouldn’t go back on her tablets—why my love was not enough.
When I finally called the police she flicked on some magic switch and stood at the door speaking to them with matronly eloquence. Where had this woman been all my life? A week later, she was picked up in a city car park and taken to Larundel, the mental asylum in Bundoora. Before they released her, I was sent to speak with a counsellor—the first time ever. In a tiny, cluttered office at a hospital in the Melbourne suburb of Hampton, a young, brown haired woman cleared her throat and sat me down. “Your mother is schizophrenic”, she said. It was the first time anyone had mentioned anything other than manic depression. Schizophrenia seemed somehow more tangible. “You have a co-dependent relationship and it would be best for both of you if you left”, the counsellor said. Not long after Mum came home I quit my job in the shoe shop and, with a Cadbury’s family size block of chocolate from my boyfriend, took the bus to Sydney. By the time I came back a year or so later, she’d been back to Larundel, lost her flat and moved into a commission unit.
Please don’t take my sunshine away...
My very first story was in answer to a question. Me, Dot and Dot’s nearly grown up kids were lying on the ground under the giant oak tree in their front yard. Dot was my warm, kind foster mum, and in her gentle way she asked me what I thought happened when a person died. I didn’t answer straight away, I just looked up at the tree’s sparse leaves and knobbly branches, through to the sky. When I did speak, the words came out calmly and smoothly, and they kept coming. I told the story of a spirit leaving a body, floating up through the branches of the tree and up, up, up into the sky—to god, because Dot believed in God. Telling the story, everything disappeared until there was only me and the spirit journeying up to heaven.
I knew it wasn’t just me who was moved by the story, because after the story we all stayed under the tree looking up to the sky for ages—deep in the silence of the tree, the breeze, light, and the sky. Then later, as Dot opened the back door for us to go inside, she insisted we go straight to Ernie, my foster father, so I could tell him. But looking up and seeing his readiness, I opened my mouth and the words weren’t there—none of them. I tried, but that special person with all the magical words had left me. Shame, that tight chest feeling of missed opportunity.
When I read that story in my Masters’ class, as a forty year old, I cried. I didn’t know I would, and I certainly didn’t want to, but I couldn’t stop myself. I wasn’t crying for the story that I told, I was crying for the stories that weren’t told... I was a few drafts into ‘My First Story’, our class writing assignment, when I realised that the story wasn’t about the first time I’d held power as a storyteller. Of course it wasn’t, the scene was too idyllic for the working class household; it had to have been staged: tranquil surrounds, the unspoken support of two teenagers, and Dot’s calm prodding. Thirty-odd years later, I had finally realised that this story was really about Dot preparing me—just in case Mum didn’t come home this time. I cried for days thinking about all the years I’d naively treasured that memory as a time when someone had cared about what I said, when what I’d said had meaning—that I was special, important, and could be admired and heard—that my words could make sense. I still cry now thinking about just how rootless that little girl’s tree of life was. Cry for all those years of asking Mum questions—trying, metaphorically, to get some roots so I could grow tall and strong, but Mum’s shame was just too strong, so her secrets were silenced.
Before computers, when we used pens, I had a boil-like bump on my fuck-you finger from pressing the pen too hard. That was even before I wrote my first piece of fiction: a runaway story where I took shelter in a Brotherhood charity bin. Squeezing through the heavy metal opening, I fell into darkness and onto a pile of clothes. Dark, silent, safe. But there was something metal pressing into my hip. I jiggled about trying to free myself and heard a metallic squeak—I had landed on the unoiled keys of an old fashioned typewriter. I jiggled and squirmed but it wouldn’t let me go. In the bigger picture of being safe in the soft, dry warmth of the bin, a little bit of pain didn’t matter. In fact, a little bit of pain felt kinda okay—like a reminder that I was alive. And from that story, the little bit of pain worked like a little ray of sunshine sneaking through a dark, nasty sky. And that little ray of sunshine told me that if I loved writing like life, it could keep me safe and bring me light.
Secrets—nothing good ever comes from hiding. Sure having a safe secret place can help you heal but if you wanna grow, find something that makes you wiggle and squirm and love it like light—like a flower stretching for sunshine.
Monique Grbec is a proud Wiradjuri woman living in Melbourne. A child of the stolen generation, she is interested in the generational effects of institutionalisation, and the White Australia Policy. Her lifework is fundamentally text based and addressed through the lens of Indigenous Standpoint Theory. Her current work includes audio and 3D installation.
This story won the Melbourne Lord Mayor's prize for creative writing in 2017.
This story is a part of the Growing Up Indigenous in Australia collection, published by AustLit in 2018.
You are my sunshine, my only sunshine
You make me happy, when skies are grey
You’ll never know dear, how much I love you
Please don’t take my sunshine away.
You are my sunshine, my only sunshine
You make me happy, when skies are grey
You’ll never know dear, how much I love you
Please don’t take my sunshine away.
This was the song Mum used to sing to me. This was my song—I was sunshine, only me, not my sister or my dad; only I could bring happiness and joy to the most important person in the universe. This song gave me power and I wore my responsibility like a sheriff with a really big, shiny badge.
“She’s got dogs, three of them.” Apart from a baby brother, all I’d ever wanted was a dog.
I remember Dad driving, Mum in the passenger seat, and my sister and me in the back. I remember staring out my window as though it was a TV, watching how the walls of gumtrees with their fern filler closed in on the upward twist of the road. The longer we sat, the colder the car got.
I imagined a matronly woman like Peggy next door, with big cushion-like breasts, and how I’d press my head into them for big warm hugs like Mum’s. I imagined the woman would buy me bags of mixed lollies like Grandma did the time I met her, and I imagined she’d talk to me with a gentle yet stern voice, and she’d tell me things, explain them to me.
I pictured playing with the dogs, they’d love me the most.
And then I remember arriving at the wooden pub in the centre of the dry dirt clearing, and the sounds of four car doors slamming. Then someone is standing over me, maybe doing up my jacket, and saying something, probably about being good. I’d seen this scenario in Shirley Temple movies, so there was no way I was going to do anything other than cling adoringly to Mum’s skirt. No-one separates the perfect pair. Next, I remember my arms spreading out like wings to balance my stretching legs as I climbed the wide wooden stair planks. But after that, there’s nothing, I don’t remember reaching the top, and I don’t remember meeting the woman, or her dogs.
I was six months old the first time I was taken away. Mum was scheduled to get her tubes tied, but after a night of fasting she’d fainted holding the just-boiled kettle. She was hospitalised with third-degree burns. Dad was at work up in the mountains, leaving doctors to shave slices of skin from her legs to graft them onto her arm. Then, while she was inside the numbness of the painkiller, her brother appeared from interstate and signed a consent form allowing the doctors to perform a hysterectomy. Mum didn’t want one and got angry. When she told me this thirty years later, through the permanent haze of the long-term medicated, her clenched hands made white knuckles: “After they operated I was transferred to the psych hospital.”
Decades later I had an ‘ah-ha’ moment. My Uncle, the Rolf-Harris-like raconteur, had told me his version of that story pretty much every time I saw him. Never mentioning Mum, or how I came to be in his charge, he started with: “I was flying you by plane back to Melbourne. You were wrapped in a blanket but you wouldn’t stop screaming.” Raising his brow he’d look from me and nod invitingly to his broader audience, “She was screaming and screaming and screaming.” Then he’d chuckle, “But gee the hostesses looked after you, kept coming over to see how you were doing.” He’d wink to let us know that they were really visiting him. I imagined him holding me like a trophy, the nectar to the hostess bees. “They wet a face cloth for your forehead but that didn’t stop you either.” I’d see my red, swollen baby face soaked with tears and exhaustion. “Finally, there was nothing else I could do, so I slapped you, and you stopped.” He’d look at me with a cocky smile and repeat “so I slapped you, and you stopped. Then you slept like a baby.” He’d chuckle at his ingenuity and move on to his next story, something about his volunteer work for the scouts, or scoring runs at cricket, or winning an overseas trip for breaking sales records, or more ladies in a fluster.
I want to feel sorry for him because he, too, grew up in an orphanage renowned for pedophiles, but... but… besides authorising Mum’s hysterectomy, she said he was having an affair with her best mate. For me, the worst bit is that after all the years of insisting that it was Grandma’s fault her kids were put in orphanages, he now admits that Grandad was violent. Worse still, the last time I saw him, he told me he’s on so much medication he couldn’t do anything even if he wanted to. We were at a family BBQ, the first ‘family’ event I’d been invited to in years. I wanted to scream, grab the bare flabby arm of my cousin and dig my nails in till I drew blood. I fantasised about looking into her eyes and growling like a wolf, showing her the depth of my anger, the anger we share. “Something happened to me to,” She’d whispered. What did she want me to say to that? It’s her dad who led the charge.
The skies are grey
There were lots of grey sky days. Mum would decide she needed to take control of her own destiny—the medication was making her fat, or foggy, or it was too expensive. In her first prescription-free days, she seemed to count each moment in anxious concentration: her tortured eyes showing a strength that wrenched her body rigid and made her hands twist with constant fidgeting. Manic force, maniacal motions, electric connections—going off, on a tangent, on a string, like a puppet.
From there, the grey days blurred into weeks and the darkness took over. And no matter how hard I tried, Mum closed in on herself and wouldn’t let even me in. An inner storm—everything cloudy with distrust. She fretted about what those people were planning. She had intense dialogues with the invisible (non) people behind her or inanimate objects, like the Hills hoist or fence. Sometimes, frenzied like a cyclone, she’d dart out into the neighbourhood to question people, or take photos of streets signs, random cats and cars. At the shops she’d stutter ‘umms’ and ‘ahhs’, sometimes she’d just stand next to a shopkeeper keeping a watchful, mumbling presence.
I hated the photo taking the most. Money was always a stress, and there she was getting double prints of nothing. I imagined being responsible for the budget, and only buying peanut butter—‘cause even though I loved Vegemite, it couldn’t be had without butter, but peanut butter could. At home with her latest prints, she’d stay up all night sitting on the lounge room floor studying and comparing them with photos in our albums. Picking up individual photos, her soliloquies alternated between sadness and bitter anger—somehow trying to connect past, with present, with future. Her gloom released with tears. Occasionally, eyes closed, her hands would hover over the photos as though over a ouija board. Shaking, she’d murmur disjointed sentences into the unknown. Sometimes I’d raise my voice and ask her what she was doing, and she’d look at me as though she was surprised that I was there. If I tried to ask the question again, she’d hunch over and inward, and dismiss me with a fear about who was listening.
Eventually, someone would call the police. When the divvy van pulled up out the front of our house, I’d take cover behind the curtains. Near enough to the door to hear snippets, but far enough away that the police might not know I was there—my stomach tight with a mixture of grief, relief and anxiety. I hated having the divvy van parked outside our house for all the world to see. I hated the message that its bold blue and white colours sent from the concreted greens of our suburban court. I hated the two uniforms standing at my front door interviewing Mum, and the likelihood that they’d eventually manhandle her struggling buxom body into the van. I hated that there was no sense in it, that I had no control, that I was on my own, that I didn’t have a mother who could look after me, that... I had so much anger, disappointment, embarrassment, frustration, and no understanding.
Mum said that her sadness came from being brought up in a kids’ home. I imagined her childhood as dark and cold surrounded by bluestone brick walls: a ‘home’ with dank air that echoed a steady distant wail—where hundreds of kids gripped their bedsheets with clenched jaws and the deafening silence of Edvard Munch’s painting, The Scream. ‘Ten Tonne Tesse’ the kids teased her, until the morning of her fourteenth birthday when she was sent to a doctor’s house to be their maid—to pay back her education: “I wasn’t even allowed to take my books, or say goodbye to the teachers”.
You’ll never know dear, how much I love you
I learnt I was Aboriginal when I was twenty-one, at a cousin’s wedding. Mum denied it, lied flat out. But seeing her and her siblings together, it was obvious. A medley of childhood memories danced through my mind. When I was called ‘boong’ at primary school I’d assumed the kid with the platinum blonde hair and ‘I hate school t-shirt’ was talking about Dad. But Dad was a ‘wog’ and I barely ever saw him, so why would I care about connections with him. And Mum had insisted we didn’t learn his native language so we wouldn’t be marked as ‘different’. I’d dismissed the kid as an ignorant twat. Then, when I was at high school ‘Mon is a kaffa’ was written on the back of my yellow Spicer jacket in giant letters like the number on a footy jumper. I had to look it up in the dictionary: a skinny black person. I took it as a compliment—didn’t every girl want to be skinny and tanned? Now I know my history, my blood, that message makes me sad. The guy who wrote it was my first teen crush. I loved the way he played with words, performed ‘perturbed’ as poetry—as onomatopoeia.
I went in search of my maternal links and accessed the Freedom of Information files:
68224
CHILDREN’S WELFARE DEPARTMENT
District: Balaclava
Date: 20/2/42
REGARDING: Wendy McFeeters eight and a half months
Father Joseph Leslie McFeeters called this morning saying the Salvation Army had taken their five children to the following…
Wendy McFeeters placed in the Haven...
The answers are in the questions: Why had Grandad called? Probably because Grandma was Aboriginal and the Department had to be reported to; maybe she was covered with bruises; maybe she had postnatal depression. Grandma was also State ‘orphaned’ at six months old. Three generations of us. I was the lucky one, because my Mum came back. Not sure what Grandma was doing at fourteen, but she was married at sixteen; Mum was working as a maid, and me...
And me, when I fourteen, Mum, Michelle and I had finally left Dad. All the sunshine in the world couldn’t keep the grey away in our first year in Highett, an outer Melbourne suburb. I’d got the black-eye badge that marked the last time Michelle ever hit me. There were questions at school, she moved out of home, and I left school. With a job and boyfriend, there was a fire in Mum’s car boot. “The only way to access the boot is with a key,” my boyfriend whispered.
Mum was off her tablets again and pretty soon a women from her work was sitting in a car by the tennis courts, telling me through the window “She’s lost her job.” Mostly Mum cried, but sometimes when I was watching telly, she’d stare at me. “What are you looking at?” A mute, blank stare in response. “WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT?” I’d scream in frustration. Once, I put my hands around her neck and had to use all of my restraint not to squeeze. With no one around to blame but me, I tried begging, encouraging, loving, hating, screaming, and bullying. But nothing worked, and the blame I’d aimed at everyone else backfired to me. I couldn’t work out what I’d done, why Mum wouldn’t go back on her tablets—why my love was not enough.
When I finally called the police she flicked on some magic switch and stood at the door speaking to them with matronly eloquence. Where had this woman been all my life? A week later, she was picked up in a city car park and taken to Larundel, the mental asylum in Bundoora. Before they released her, I was sent to speak with a counsellor—the first time ever. In a tiny, cluttered office at a hospital in the Melbourne suburb of Hampton, a young, brown haired woman cleared her throat and sat me down. “Your mother is schizophrenic”, she said. It was the first time anyone had mentioned anything other than manic depression. Schizophrenia seemed somehow more tangible. “You have a co-dependent relationship and it would be best for both of you if you left”, the counsellor said. Not long after Mum came home I quit my job in the shoe shop and, with a Cadbury’s family size block of chocolate from my boyfriend, took the bus to Sydney. By the time I came back a year or so later, she’d been back to Larundel, lost her flat and moved into a commission unit.
Please don’t take my sunshine away
My very first story was in answer to a question. Me, Dot and Dot’s nearly grown up kids were lying on the ground under the giant oak tree in their front yard. Dot was my warm, kind foster mum, and in her gentle way she asked me what I thought happened when a person died. I didn’t answer straight away, I just looked up at the tree’s sparse leaves and knobbly branches, through to the sky. When I did speak, the words came out calmly and smoothly, and they kept coming. I told the story of a spirit leaving a body, floating up through the branches of the tree and up, up, up into the sky—to god, because Dot believed in God. Telling the story, everything disappeared until there was only me and the spirit journeying up to heaven.
I knew it wasn’t just me who was moved by the story, because after the story we all stayed under the tree looking up to the sky for ages—deep in the silence of the tree, the breeze, light, and the sky. Then later, as Dot opened the back door for us to go inside, she insisted we go straight to Ernie, my foster father, so I could tell him. But looking up and seeing his readiness, I opened my mouth and the words weren’t there—none of them. I tried, but that special person with all the magical words had left me. Shame, that tight chest feeling of missed opportunity.
When I read that story in my Masters’ class, as a forty year old, I cried. I didn’t know I would, and I certainly didn’t want to, but I couldn’t stop myself. I wasn’t crying for the story that I told, I was crying for the stories that weren’t told... I was a few drafts into ‘My First Story’, our class writing assignment, when I realised that the story wasn’t about the first time I’d held power as a storyteller. Of course it wasn’t, the scene was too idyllic for the working class household; it had to have been staged: tranquil surrounds, the unspoken support of two teenagers, and Dot’s calm prodding. Thirty-odd years later, I had finally realised that this story was really about Dot preparing me—just in case Mum didn’t come home this time. I cried for days thinking about all the years I’d naively treasured that memory as a time when someone had cared about what I said, when what I’d said had meaning—that I was special, important, and could be admired and heard—that my words could make sense. I still cry now thinking about just how rootless that little girl’s tree of life was. Cry for all those years of asking Mum questions—trying, metaphorically, to get some roots so I could grow tall and strong, but Mum’s shame was just too strong, so her secrets were silenced.
Before computers, when we used pens, I had a boil-like bump on my fuck-you finger from pressing the pen too hard. That was even before I wrote my first piece of fiction: a runaway story where I took shelter in a Brotherhood charity bin. Squeezing through the heavy metal opening, I fell into darkness and onto a pile of clothes. Dark, silent, safe. But there was something metal pressing into my hip. I jiggled about trying to free myself and heard a metallic squeak—I had landed on the unoiled keys of an old fashioned typewriter. I jiggled and squirmed but it wouldn’t let me go. In the bigger picture of being safe in the soft, dry warmth of the bin, a little bit of pain didn’t matter. In fact, a little bit of pain felt kinda okay—like a reminder that I was alive. And from that story, the little bit of pain worked like a little ray of sunshine sneaking through a dark, nasty sky. And that little ray of sunshine told me that if I loved writing like life, it could keep me safe and bring me light.
Secrets—nothing good ever comes from hiding. Sure having a safe secret place can help you heal but if you wanna grow, find something that makes you wiggle and squirm and love it like light—like a flower stretching for sunshine.
Monique Grbec is a proud Wiradjuri woman living in Melbourne. A child of the stolen generation, she is interested in the generational effects of institutionalisation, and the White Australia Policy. Her lifework is fundamentally text based and addressed through the lens of Indigenous Standpoint Theory. Her current work includes audio and 3D installation.