15 years ago today...

[Shaun Hately]

Fifteen years ago today, my father died. I was fifteen years old at 
the time so as I write this, I have been without his physical 
presence for roughly half my own life. It seems to me appropriate 
somehow to put a few things down on paper. When I decided to do this, 
earlier today all sorts of eloquent phrases came to mind, but as I 
come to write this, I am finding it incredibly difficult to find the 
words to say what I wish to day. But I shall do my best.

My father was born into a country which didn't acknowledge him as 
fully human. You see, his mother, my Nanna, was Koorie - Australian 
Aboriginal - and, back then, Australia's constitution specifically 
excluded the Koorie from the ranks of human beings. My grandmother 
had been separated from her family at a very young age, taken away to 
be educated as promising young blacks and half castes were. The 
Australian genocide was intended to be a gentle and a merciful one. 
The abos were to be allowed to die out in their own time, with the 
few who persisted assimilated into white society through education in 
the ways of civilization. My Nanna was one of the lucky chosen ones - 
she got an education that allowed her to pretend to be white. She 
married a white man and that completed the illusion. But the illusion 
had to be complete - and so Nanna didn't tell her children of their 
heritage.

It's hard to find out things about my father growing up. He told me a 
little, but what he told me was rather heavily edited. From what I 
have been able to work out though, he didn't have an easy childhood. 
He was born into relative poverty during the Second World War and 
while he wasn't quite malnourished, he wasn't that far from it. His 
mother was a nurse, who had to take what jobs she could where people 
wouldn't ask about the colour of her skin. And his father was a petty 
criminal. Dad was the oldest of four children - two younger brothers 
and a younger sister - and it seems that he took on, over time, more 
and more of the paternal role to his two youngest siblings. He got a 
basic education - a perfectly adequate one by working class standards 
of the time but he knew he'd never get more than that from a very 
early age. He valued the education he could get. But knew that he 
would never receive a full formal education. And he accepted that.

He didn't have an easy time growing up. That's all I'm saying. And 
his fathers health was poor, so he had to take on more and more 
responsibility for the family. And then when his father died when he 
was seventeen, he became the breadwinner. Highly intelligent, semi-
educated - he took what jobs he could find. Labouring. Apprentice to 
a butcher. Not bad jobs really - but nothing like what he could have 
done if he'd had better opportunities. Opportunities he made sure his 
younger siblings had. He sought to educate himself from books 
borrowed from libraries, and decided he wanted more out of life. He 
wanted a real career.

So, finally he decided to join the Navy. Now, this was at a time when 
Australia was involved in two separate wars - the Confrontation in 
Borneo, and the war in Vietnam. So joining the military was quite a 
decision to make (and, ultimately, Dad did serve in both these wars). 
But the Navy was his one chance as a career - and it had the added 
bonus that though Aborigines weren't legally supposed to serve in the 
military (not being citizens) those who managed it never had to worry 
about their citizenship again. This was a path to unchallenged 
citizenship. And so he joined the Navy.

He served for twenty years with distinction and honour. His lack of 
formal education didn't matter that much in the Navy - he served in a 
wide variety of roles, both in peace and in war, and he rose through 
the ranks to finish his career as one of the Royal Australian Navy's 
most senior instructors. He also met my mother in the Navy - which is 
rather a lucky thing for me, personally, and I think was very lucky 
for both of them as well. He fathered me and my younger brother - and 
from the moment we were born he began saving money for our education -
 because he intended to make sure that whatever education we needed 
would be possible. The nation had changed a lot in the decade before 
I was born, his first decade in the Navy. An Australian government 
had finally put the issue of Aboriginal citizenship to the people and 
the people had overwhelmingly voted in favour of it. I'm the oldest 
of all my cousins - and I was the first child born into my family 
with full human rights. And it's really hard for me to understand 
what that means because it's always been that way for me - but my 
father understood it. And he was going to make sure that nothing in 
his power to change would ever hold me back. Education had changed as 
well - schools had improved and it was now normal and economically 
possible for working class kids to go to university if they wanted 
it. There really wasn't an obvious need to be saving for an 
education. But Dad did it anyway.

I say Dad did it - because this is being written in tribute to him - 
but make no mistake, my mother was at least equally responsible. I 
would never ignore what she has done for me as well, but, Thank God, 
I don't have a need to write any type of memorial to her.

I was born half way through my Dad's military service - at a time 
when he was already a Senior Sailor. So while I saw him working hard, 
I never really saw him working hard to become successful. I saw him 
working hard at a time where he had already achieved success.

And, when there were problems - like the time when he was swept up in 
the Cairns' police "nigger patrol" one evening - when they went 
through the town and arrested blacks to lock them up for the night - 
well, he never told me about those things.

I just saw a man who worked hard, and who was respected by all of 
those around him. A man who was called 'Chief' by all those he worked 
with, except for his closest friends - who called him 'Pop'. He was 
my father and I worshipped him. And I never saw him show any sign of 
fear or hatred, nor any sign that there was a reason that he might 
have either of those feelings.

Actually I did see fear once. We were at the beach, and I was three 
years old, or thereabouts. He was standing on the beach talking to 
someone and I wandered off into the water. I liked the beach. We used 
to spend a lot of time there - and I was walking out into the water, 
letting it get deeper and deeper - and then I stepped off a ledge 
into water too deep for me. Over my head.

And I sank - and I hit the bottom - and I pushed myself back up. Then 
I sank again - and I hit the bottom - and I pushed myself back up.

I tried to call for help - but everytime I opened my mouth I sank and 
swallowed water. I managed to turn myself - I must have - because I 
could see my Dad on the beach, looking away from me and talking. And 
I tried to call for help - and I just swallowed water again.

Then I saw the man he was talking to point and Dad's head snap 
around. And he began to run.

And I swear, I am not sure he ran through that water - it seemed to 
me like he ran across the top of it. And the look on his face 
terrified me. I was a bright kid. I knew I was in danger - and the 
look on his face terrified me, because the only reason I could 
imagine fear like that on my fathers face was if I was certain to 
die. But he reached me, and he grabbed me, and he took me ashore. And 
made sure I hadn't swallowed too much water. And when I'd established 
I was all right, he smacked my bottom because I was supposed to stay 
out of the water. But - well, the look I'd seen on his face had 
taught me that lesson already.

When I was old enough, I started school, of course - and went to four 
schools in my first three years of schooling. Dad was Navy, and we 
moved where he was posted. Dad had faith in education - he assumed 
that just about any school would provide the basic education I (and 
later my brother) needed. He chose Catholic schools - because we were 
Catholic and he also felt the discipline was a bit better in Catholic 
schools - but basically we went to the nearest Catholic school to 
where we were living, when he was posted. And to begin with, this 
worked quite well. At least it did as far as he or my mother knew. Or 
I knew for that matter.

Dad assumed that he was average. Mum assumed that she was average. 
And they assumed that my brother and I were average as well. We were 
an average working class family, and so they chose the normal primary 
schools in our area secure in the knowledge that these schools seemed 
to do a decent job.

And, in all honesty, they did in many ways. Looking back on things I 
can see the problems. I started primary school already able to do 
everything they planned to teach me over the next seven years, and 
consequently I spent a lot of my time at school being very bored and 
I certainly didn't learn anything - but I had good and kind and 
caring teachers, and while I was bullied a bit because I was 
different and that hurt, it wasn't anything incredibly bad.

But what I didn't know, or understand, was what was going on in my 
father's life.

Dad's health had never been very good. Problems didn't become 
apparent until he was older, but by the time he was in his late 
thirties, they started to emerge. It was partly related to his war 
service - he had served on a ship called HMAS Duchess during the 
Confrontation and the Duchess had been loaned to the Royal Australian 
Navy by the Royal Navy to replace an Australian destroyer sunk in an 
accident. It was a rush job and an imperfectly cleaned fuel tank was 
used to store drinking water on Duchess - and quite a lot of the 
sailors who served on her later developed health problems, that they 
believed were linked to that. He'd also become a heavy smoker during 
the Vietnam War, and together he started to have various circulatory 
problems. They weren't exceptionally serious - he had to have a 
vascular bypass, and give up smoking, but with care he could expect 
to live a fairly normal life.

He finished out his twenty years service - and then the plan was to 
settle down and take things reasonably easy until he was old enough 
to retire - basically fifteen years - his war service meant he could 
retire at 60 onto his full pension.

While he had a great deal of experience in the Navy, back then this 
didn't transfer well to civilian life in Australia. Today, someone 
discharging with my fathers experience and training would have 
civilian qualifications - probably a Masters degree or two Bachelors 
degrees. But this predated that - and so Dad found himself without 
any greater education than he'd had when he joined the Navy as far as 
the outside world was concerned. He found a job - a decent, fairly 
well paid job with good benefits and good job security - working as a 
Security Guard for a state utility.

I think he was fairly happy with this. It was a responsible job but 
one without major stress which he was supposed to avoid. It paid 
enough money that his family had all that it needed - especially 
coupled with the cheap home loan that his military service entitled 
him to. I suspect that he was annoyed that his education acquired in 
the military counted for so little in civilian life, because as I 
say, he valued education. But we had what we needed.

And then, two years after he left the Navy - well, that is when my 
problems started.

As I mentioned before my primary schooling seemed all right at the 
time, its deficits only become clearly apparent in hindsight. And if 
my secondary schooling had been the same, things might have been the 
same there. At age 12, I passed on from my primary school to the 
local Catholic secondary school. I'd been at this primary school for 
nearly five years (from the middle of Grade Two to the end of Grade 
Six) and I was fairly happy there. Bored. Never learned anything. But 
I liked my teachers, and while I was teased a lot to begin with, over 
time that had pretty much gone away. In my final year, I was one of 
the leaders of the school, in fact, I was relatively popular. Life 
was pretty good, really.

But this secondary school was another matter entirely. This school 
was a horrible place for me - hell on earth, in fact. The school was 
a very modern, very permissive education environment - it prided 
itself on being so. It embraced with a passion all of the state 
governments' new educational ideology which was quite radical in many 
ways, but it also had its own ideas.

In practice - at this school - students were not allowed to be 
anything but equal. It was not acceptable for some students to be 
smarter than others. If a student was doing better than their 
classmates, they had to be pulled back into line. My main teacher - 
my homeroom teacher, the teacher supposedly most responsible for my 
welfare - was a disaster as far as I was concerned. I'd come to 
secondary school craving educational stimulation which I'd been 
denied for at least four and a half years. I somehow though that at 
secondary school I might actually learn something. Well, this woman 
taught me more subjects than any other - and she didn't like me. I 
honestly think she saw me as a threat. I knew her subjects better 
than she did, and I didn't fit her image of what a student should be. 
She used to penalise me in her classes because I didn't like 
colouring in pictures. I was twelve years old and I felt I was beyond 
having to colour all the time. I hadn't much liked it when I was six -
 but it seemed ridiculous at age 12 to be losing marks on history 
homework because I hadn't coloured in a picture of a pyramid. I 
wouldn't have minded as much if we'd actually learned anything - I 
would have paid the price of colouring things in, if she'd actually 
taught me anything I didn't know. But she didn't. And when I tried to 
learn for myself, she penalised and punished me for getting ahead of 
the other children.

And another feature of this school was that it didn't believe in 
punishment, or in restricting students behaviour in any significant 
way. Children should be allowed to do what they like and teachers 
should not interfere.

Unfortunately what some children liked doing was bullying others. And 
people from my old school let other people know that I was a perfect 
target. And so the bullying began. Often in clear view of teachers. 
It was verbal, emotional, and physical. Eventually I was being bashed 
by groups of a dozen boys every day. And on wet days when we were 
confined to a covered area of the playground where it was virtually 
standing room only, I was sometimes attacked by groups of over 100. 
Maybe 200.

The teachers saw it, and did nothing. The teacher who was supposed to 
be looking out for me was the worst of all. I assumed that I must be 
the problem - because surely people would have helped me if I wasn't 
doing something wrong - I was being punished for working too hard. 
Obviously I was the problem. And so I didn't tell my parents what was 
going on.

Eventually they found out, thank God. And Dad spoke to the school and 
was told I was retarded - this school couldn't comprehend that its 
methods and ideas might be faulty. It had to me who had the problems.

My parents took me to be tested by the state's top educational 
psychologist - like I say, my parents valued education and they 
wanted to know what they were dealing with. He told them that I 
wasn't retarded. And he told them that given our states educational 
climate, the only real option for me were certain extremely expensive 
elite private schools.

We had enough money coming in from Dad's job that we wanted for 
nothing - but we certainly didn't have money for luxuries.

And, though, he never talked about it - I suspect my father could 
remember his own childhood where the only kids who got decent 
education were those whose parents could afford to send them to 
expensive schools - and I suspect he didn't much care for the idea of 
his own son going to such a school.

But it was necessary. The experts told him it was necessary. And so 
they did it. My parents knocked on doors and made phonecalls and did 
whatever it took to get me into such a school. These schools have 
waiting lists years long in many cases. And my parents had about 
three months to make it happen - to get me into such a school at a 
year level where such schools didn't normally take students.

They managed it. But it must have been stressful. And Dad was 
supposed to avoid stress.

Financially - it was just barely possible. With the money they'd been 
saving for university education which they were able to pull out of 
the fund it was in (although it was being pulled out five years 
before maturity, they lost a lot of what it should have been), it was 
possible. But only barely. My parents went from financial security to 
financial stress.

And it wasn't just financial stress. After my year of hell, I was 
emotionally damaged. I was suicidal, and deeply clinically depressed. 
I'd also lost all interest in learning, and I'd never really had a 
chance to develop study skills because I'd never had to study. Now I 
found myself in an exclusive, highly academic school - and I wasn't 
willing to work. My self discipline about study was non existent.

I'll be blunt. My parents were making immense sacrifices for me - and 
I wasn't taking advantage of them. I know there were reasons - and my 
parents did too, and they did their best not to push me too hard. But 
to start with, I was working so poorly that there was a good chance 
that this school they'd had to work so hard to get me into wasn't all 
that likely to keep me - the school was willing to make some 
allowances for me as well, and to give me time to adapt. But I sorely 
tried their patience and probably took things right to the limit 
before I finally toed the line. Really, it was probably six months 
before I was doing even the basics expected of me - and two and a 
half years before I was really out of the woods. And that whole time 
my father was exposed to the stress he was supposed to avoid. And his 
health started to suffer.

And he concealed that from us.

It wasn't just my schooling. I needed weekly psychological counseling 
for quite a while and he made sure I got that. And he also got 
involved with advocacy for gifted children - because he could see 
that this issue was far wider than just us.

He should have quit his job. That's what the doctors told him to do. 
His health had deteriorated to the extent that he could have got his 
pension. But there was no way my school fees could be paid on that 
pension - and though I am fairly sure the school would have allowed 
me to stay for nothing in such a situation (a war veteran succumbing 
to illness from war service) my father wasn't the type to even ask 
for that.

And where he worked - well, one of the senior management there was an 
ex-military officer and he met Dad and realised the type of 
experience Dad had - this man understood the education my father had 
and the jobs he'd had and what they meant and this man moved Dad into 
a management position. Higher pay. Higher stress. Dad might have 
taken it anyway - maybe - but I really do think that a large part of 
the reason he took it was to try and get back some financial 
security.

His health went downhill quite rapidly. He saw Doctors and they told 
him to quit. Instead, he quietly made arrangements to ensure we would 
all be looked after if something happened to him. He spoke to my 
school to check my progress (and, I am so glad that this happened 
just after I had really got myself under control, so for the first 
time he was actually able to be given a generally good report about 
me and know that I was all right.)

Then, a week after I finished Year Ten, on the 7th December 1990 as 
he disembarked from a train for work, my father suffered a massive 
stroke.

He died early on the morning of 10th December 1990 at the age of 47 
years.

My father gave his life for me and for my education.

That's a solid thing to know.

He knew the state of his health. He knew the risks he was running 
with it.

And he made a judgement that those risks were worthwhile.

He'd left me a legacy as well - something he told me in that last 
year, which I didn't understand the significance of at the time. He 
had lost his father at seventeen - a little older than me, but not 
all that much - and had had to change his plans for his entire life. 
He made it clear to me that if anything ever happened to him, my duty 
and my obligation was not to change my plans for my life - but to 
live it as if he was still there.

I was to have no responsibility to his memory, except to be the 
person I would be if he was there for me. I was to live for myself. I 
was to put myself first.

Nice try, Dad.

But it doesn't work that way.

Yes, I'll live the life I'd live if you were still with me.

But you can't ask me to always put myself first because the two 
things aren't compatible.

With your example, alive or dead, that really isn't an option.

I don't know who is reading this - but considering where I plan to 
post it, I think I can be sure that there are at least some parents 
out there who are sacrificing for their children and who are fighting 
for what their children need educationally.

You people are heroes. And I hope your kids understand that. Or at 
least I hope they do someday, if they don't at the moment.

**********

This tribute (with some images added to it) can be seen at:

http://www.alphalink.com.au/~drednort/fifteenyears.html

Yours Without Wax, Dreadnought
Shaun Hately | www.alphalink.com.au/~drednort/thelab.html
(ISTJ)       | drednort at alphalink.com.au | ICQ: 6898200 
"You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one
thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the 
facts. They alter the facts to fit the views. Which can be 
uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that 
need altering." The Doctor - Doctor Who: The Face of Evil
Where am I: Frankston, Victoria, Australia