I want to tell you a bit about my family.

The details are easy enough, what I know of them.

My father is 70 this year. Before he retired he was the senior partner of one of the largest law firms in the state.

My mother is from Europe and she emmigrated to Australia just after the Second World War. She was born in Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland. I don’t know a lot about her experiences during the war. Even at the best of times she never spoke much about it, and when she was at her best I wasn’t son enough to be interested. She once told me not to complain about the taste of some food, as it was better than the taste of dog. And I also found out only a year ago that she never knew who her father was. She has 3 sisters and apparently the man I knew as my “grandfather in Germany” was their father but not hers. She said it made no difference.

My mother was a beautiful woman in her youth. The pictures prove it. Our daughter looks a lot like her and I’m happy about that, although I hope that our daughter has a better life. My mother must have been pretty brave, too, because after having been re-located several times during and after the war, she came out alone to Australia. I hate to think what she must have had to put up with at times due to her accent. For some she would have been a Hun.

I don’t even know how my parents really met. I will have to find out. As far as I know my mother was working for my father’s family as a domestic help. My father had been some years in the seminary but had left.

In any case they married and I came along 9 months, just, after the wedding. Apparently I was conceived during the honeymoon at Palm Beach. My brother came along 18 months later.

By the time I was in grade 8 the four of us had flown first class around the world. We lived in a house with a pool and a full-sized antique billiard table. We had a lot of things but only things. Things are not the same as family.

My mother was mentally ill for a long time and back then the treatment was new and inhumane. She went to hospital several times, received shock treatment and had pills which she didn’t take. I don’t blame her because there were side effects and she must have felt like shit. It was a pretty black period for years. Her behaviour was erratic and she would wander off periodically. She forgot all sorts of things, rarely remembered to pick us up from school on time, and although she could be a brilliant cook more often than not she let food burn on the stove and then blamed “ the satellites” or “Queen Elizabeth” or sometimes “Mary Kostakides”. Sometimes I thought she was suffering so much that it would be better for her if she were dead – I certainly thought that the day I helped carry her out of the house on a stretcher in a strait-jacket. The men in the white coats really did come that day.

In some sense I think my father made a choice. He once said to me something like “ We could have had it all … good house, holidays overseas every year … only your mother wouldn’t co-operate”. I can remember thinking at the time that she was ill and wasn’t capable of bloody well co-operating and what about love and that all those things didn’t count for shit if you didn’t have love and a family. I suppose he was just hurting in some way, too. Perhaps it was just beyond his emotional ability – he had been in boarding schools since he was 5 years old and then went to the seminary for 7 years I think. He had an institutional emotionality.

And he probably had all he could handle in making his way to the top. Maybe there wasn’t enough left over at the end of the day to cope with what was happening at home. Anyway, he didn’t choose to reduce his ambitions, he choose to spend less time at home and then one day he chose not to come home. I was fourteen.

I spoke to him for the first time about it last year. You get a lot of courage, and fear, when you have a child of your own. Courage to sort things out because you fear you will make the same mistakes as your parents did if you don’t. I told him that on the day he walked out I had asked him not to, begged him not to and cried for him to take me with him as I hung onto him. He didn’t. I was amazed at the emotion still within me, previously unreleased, when I spoke to him. I cried then like I cried all those years ago … and I had my baby in my arms.

What hurt me most then was the total abandonment. I couldn’t understand how he could leave someone he loved in a situation that he couldn’t stand himself. How could he expect 2 kids to cope with what he couldn’t? Lawyers are very good at rationalising. He told me that he didn’t think my mother would attack us children the way she attacked him. Did he think that her illness discriminated? I went to boarding school as soon as I could. And I tried to be the best boy I could, because if I was then perhaps my father would love me enough to take me with him.