Love In a Sunburnt Country (18 page)

Sometimes that map is so very exact and so absolutely mutual, each person so transparent, so necessary to the other, that the map makers fall in love straightaway. Even from the outside, if an observer knows enough of each person, such instant commitment can make sense, and this is the case here.

Steve grew up in a family where none of what he calls ‘fluff'—being seen doing the ‘right' thing, being part of the mob, keeping up appearances—mattered. This attitude was rooted in the family's history and most particularly in the legacies left by war service, of long engagement with the land and of the family practice of art.

‘My grandfather Lin and his brother fought in World War I. Both men returned damaged, physically and mentally, by their war experience. They were allocated a block in the Mallee under the Soldier Settlement scheme and confronted hard times.'

Many of these soldiers survived war but not the Mallee, as they didn't have the skills to work the land. Without a farming background, contracted to pay rent on their land to the government, living with battle nerves and the old bodies that war bequeaths young men, many suicided. Steve's grandfather and great-uncle had fought in and witnessed the carnage of the war; now they were seeing a second tragedy where people's lives were again overturned by the demands of society and dictates of government. And while the Baird brothers did have farming skills having grown up on the family farm at Ballarat, they did not do well in the Mallee.

‘It was a battle with the rabbits and the markets and drought, and in the end they abandoned the farm and the debt. My grandfather started a new life with eight kids, but that battle and country remained entrenched in his psyche.' This was true not just of Steve's grandfather, but of his children, who witnessed the struggle and losses, one of whom was Steve's father, Bob.

‘My dad was six years old before he saw rain. He saw it when they moved from the Mallee into the north-east High Country. And so Bob always understood and taught us about the rarity of water in the Australian landscape—he became a water-treatment engineer, ensuring safe water supplies for the little country towns,' says Steve.

Looking for water is the constant adventure offered to those exploring Australia. On weekend trips, through all kinds of landscapes, Bob laid bare for his children the working together of man, water and time. Steve was taught to see the fall of the land, to trace in his mind's eye where rain would run as it gathered momentum on slopes, to imagine water greedily lifting topsoil, leaf litter and seeds, to recognise the places stripped of their living wealth first by poor management and then by fast-moving water. He also learned how to look further down catchment to find where the water had gone, and to see the beneficiaries of all those nutrients, compost and seed bounty—lakes edged with sediment and grasses, rivers at the heart of valleys, springs, rock pools defying the fall of the land and the magic of river meeting sea. Where water hid beneath the earth fascinated his father, too—the guessed-at caverns and sandy beds, the basins and channels, the chanciness of finding a supply enough for a town, or for a bore to water stock.

Steve's mother, Pat, had been an only child at a time when this was unusual. Her family home was a quieter one than those of many of her friends. In her own family she wanted something different: more people, more passion. On meeting and loving Bob Baird she also valued the whole boisterous Baird clan. She set about creating a family life that focused on sharing, including and celebrating. In her home there would always be people to play with, to help with the load, to cook with, to talk to and to build alongside. Steve's parents also valued art. They kept materials for children's art available, and made time for the children to create. Steve still remembers his excitement at the prospect of drawing. Among the family friends were professional artists (such as Leonard French and Fred Williams). Childhoods show children what is possible or not possible, and alongside his belief that adventures come if you set out, Steve came to see art as everyday, as valuable, as something he could do.

Art had become a habit with him before he left childhood, and on his travels he carried notebooks in which he documented particulars of what he discovered about the natural world and the history of each place.

With the advent of the Vietnam War, Steve experienced for the first time acute pressure to comply with wider society's values and to ‘do as he was told'. His birthdate was one of those selected in the conscription ballot for Vietnam. But Steve believed he was a brother to all of humanity. Supported by the same tide of thought among family and friends, he successfully objected on conscientious grounds as a pacifist. To do so he had to appear in court. The entire experience left him more determined than ever to lead a life in keeping with his identity and values.

At an even younger age Kath, like Steve, had concluded that the dictates of society must be resisted and that the only discipline is to act with love. Again, like Steve, she came to understand this as a result of living under acute societal pressure. Being a child during the Vietnam War (known as the ‘television war' as it was the first war to come into people's lounge rooms) was traumatising for her, as for many children. However, what happened to Kath was a result of the era she grew up in and the malignance of a particular teacher.

‘When my dad came home from World War II all he wanted to do was go to university. And he put himself through, paid for his education himself. That was the Menzies era, you had to work bloody hard to get through uni. Education was so important to him,' she says.

Kath's father wanted a good education for his children, too, and felt the best security lay in high academic achievement. Kath understands her father now, and the fact that at all times he was only trying to protect and help his children, to make them ‘safe', and perhaps particularly protect Kath herself, with her sensitive and creative nature. Sadly, his determination that Kath succeed academically only served to make her more vulnerable at school, and the price she paid for that was a high one.

‘Dad was very tough on us, especially when it came to learning. He had a very busy life, and a busy political life. I actually dreaded him coming home because he was just so strict. He'd come in and say, “Right, what homework have you got?”'

Kath started school very young. She was bright but she was also a child who was passionate and intense. This aspect of Kath meant she was not emotionally ready for the swamping demands of playground politics or the need to please teachers. The idea that starting formal learning earlier creates higher academic achievement in most children is a seductive one. But when a child is not ready it instead teaches them that they are ‘dumb' and that school is ‘too hard'. With the best motivations in the world Kath's parents put her into school when she was four and a half.

‘Dad made me go for a scholarship at Mentone Girls' Grammar. I just didn't want to go for the scholarship, I knew I wasn't going to get one! He kept saying to me, “Of course you can get a scholarship.” His expectations of us were just so high. And I didn't get one, I actually failed the exam and ended up being kept down a grade. I was made to repeat Year Six in the Girls' Grammar Primary. It crushed me.'

It is known now that keeping children ‘down a grade' puts them on track for worse educational outcomes and mental health problems—their confidence rarely recovers from this affront and educational outcomes are poorer as a result. Teachers are now advised never to propose it. In Kath's case it did more than disadvantage her. We speak a great deal of the power of teachers to play a big role in improving a child's mental health. Of course, the converse is also true. Teachers can also harm a child's sense of self.

‘On the first day the teacher said: “I'm going to read the roll out, and anyone doing the second year of sixth grade must stand up.” And I thought, “Oh” and then I thought, “There must be someone else going to stand up, because it wouldn't just be me, she wouldn't make just me stand up, surely?” My last name was Viney so there were lots of other names first. And of course no-one else stood up, no-one. Just me. So I had to stand up and say, “This is my second year of sixth grade.” And then she made me move, and come and sit behind her daughter, because she had her daughter in the same class as me. So her daughter was in the front row, and I had to sit behind her, that was my place for the whole year.' Throughout the year the teacher continued to victimise Kath.

‘I was a good swimmer. It was sports day, and I swam a little harder this year for my house and I was in lots of events, and Mum said, “Do you want some barley sugar?” and I said, “No, Mum, no-one is allowed to go to the kiosk.” Mum said, “Oh, what a lot of rubbish” and bought some barley sugar for me. The next day was the day that man landed on the moon. I was sitting with all the other kids in the television room and I was so excited to see this happen. Well, this horrible teacher told me to come outside. She said to me that she had seen me with barley sugar and that I'd been deliberately disobedient. She said, “You must go and write out:
I must not be deliberately disobedient
a hundred times,” and I missed seeing man walking on the moon. I cried all day. And that year I started what is called trichotillomania.'

Trichotillomania, or hair-pulling disorder, is one of the most common ways stress overflows into self-harm in children and young people. Like every type of self-harm, it briefly soothes but then quickly leads to a feeling of shame and alienation. While this is a very common disorder, the accompanying humiliation means that sufferers don't ask for help, and never learn how many people who feel just like them are in the world.

‘The way I started pulling my hair out was by biting the ends. I had beautiful long wavy blonde hair—I was quite an attractive child—and then I couldn't reach anymore, the bits were too short to reach in my mouth. So then I started plucking it out. I ended up with these massive bald patches right through my teenage years. I struggled with that for a long time, because I thought, “I'm nutty, there's something wrong with me.” I had no idea other people did this, too. Eventually, I went to see a psychologist and he was lovely. He said, “Kath, you know why she sat her daughter in front of you, and why she treated you like that?” and I said, “No.” I didn't understand, I'd never understood. And he said, “It was because she was taking the attention from her daughter, she was making you the scapegoat, so that her own child wouldn't get bullied by the classroom for being the teacher's daughter.” But she turned me into quite a rebel, that teacher.'

With nothing left to lose in the way of approval or appreciation, Kath became anti-authoritarian. She'd been bullied and stung into masking her sensitivity and creativity, into hardening her outside and stopping her growth on the inside. To protect herself she became another kind of person. She wore coloured underwear (which was considered terrible at the time) and started smoking. She was cheeky, rebellious and hard to reach.

One of the hardest things about being a parent is doing your very best and finding you've had the opposite result to what you intended. Kath understands how parenting her through this unhappy time would have felt for her parents. She also sees the impact of social mores on their parenting decisions, and, keeping that in mind, can find the people they really were despite the shackles of their era.

‘I don't blame Mum and Dad, it was that era, that generation—they weren't good at saying “I love you”. They just wanted to bring me up, give me a good education and get me qualified in something, that's what was most important. I know Dad made mistakes as a parent, but I now know what pressure he was under financially and politically. He was a really amazing person, a visionary, my dad.'

Kath's parents, Bill and Eleanor, were builders who had a dairy farm on the side, but they were also politically active. They campaigned against capital punishment and conscription. Even when they were doing it tough financially they advocated for and assisted those who were doing it tougher. Later in his political career Bill supported the development of a new educational facility and was elected to the board of directors. Wonderfully, this new facility was to make good a great deal of the damage done to Kath by other schools.

Huntingdale Technical School was a democratic or ‘free' school. Even now, this type of education is considered radical. In these school communities each child's voice and vote is treated as equivalent to that of an adult. Children experiment in creating the community, negotiating, planning and doing the work. They see then what happens as a consequence of their actions for themselves. Everything is put to the children's vote: rules, consequences, innovations, contribution and staffing. And when it comes to the children themselves, each child has full control. They choose what and how many subjects they will do, or if, indeed, they will do any study at all. It can sound like a recipe for disaster, but study after study has shown the opposite: graduates of such schools go on to contribute outstandingly to society.

At Huntingdale Kath could be in charge of herself. She discovered herself anew, what healed her and began the journey of finding what she had to give to the world. To her parents' delight the hard, rebellious, cheeky mask (so painfully worn) began to lift and underneath they could see again the bright-eyed, spontaneous, lover of life they'd lost years before.

‘Huntingdale saved my life,' Kath says, ‘I did drama, I did pottery, I did film and television, I put on plays, I did everything I loved. I never finished at Huntingdale Tech, but I was able to tap into that creative part of myself.'

Putting on plays let Kath for the first time understand her rather peculiar creative gift of turning a group of separate people into a team focused on sharing. Her optimism, her understanding of the costs of creative endeavour, her belief that society needs to empathise more, better, deeper and her ability to help people relate to each other, became (and remains to this day) an anchor and a haven allowing others to shine, contribute and learn. Her canvas is place and time, and her media is mixed but always includes other people.