Liturgies

Birth and death are the two most momentous events in anyone’s life, yet we don’t consciously remember either of them. Both are for others to remember.

Like most mothers, my mother remembered everything about my birth. How easy I was to carry, that I went full term, how long the contractions lasted, the exact time of my arrival, my precise weight. She remembered what a good baby I was (I think that meant I didn’t cry a lot).

Some things Mum remembered about my early years with such vividness, they became my memories. A memory of a memory. Like my paternal Grandmother’s death when I was just out of infancy.

I was holding my mother’s hand. We were walking together down Grandma's street.

“Where’s Grandma gone?” I asked.

“To Grandma Heaven,” said Mum.

I heard my mother’s soft sobs and I began to cry too. So much so, my little boy’s torso started to heave and there seemed no space left inside of me in which to breathe.

During my childhood, Mum often told this story. “You loved your Grandma,” she'd say. Then, she’d tell the story. Although I have no conscious memory of my grandmother, I don’t doubt I loved her. But I also think Mum needed me never to forget how much I loved her. Next to her children, my father’s mother, Florence Gibbins, was the person Mum loved most in the world. They had much in common.

Florence Gibbins was born in Maryborough in 1876.

She was two when her grandmother, Sarah, took her grandfather, John Gibbins, to court over a domestic violence issue. In her statement, Sarah said:

“I have been residing with the defendant for 27 years. We have 9 children … On Friday afternoon he came into the bedroom and asked where I was on New Year’s Eve. He called me a bloody whore and a bloody bitch. He assaulted me and struck me on the side of the head with a basket and then in the face with his hand. He then went to the water closet and emptied the bucket of human excrement upon me.”

John Gibbins was found guilty of threatening language. Words being more egregious, it seems, than hitting his wife in the face or pouring a bucket of excrement over her head. The court ordered Gibbins keep the peace for three months.

In her teens, Florence met my grandfather, William. He was a travelling impresario who built a popular entertainment around the precocious talents of his four-year-old daughter. A couple of years earlier he had abandoned the child’s mother and another child of theirs in Melbourne. By the time Florence joined the troupe William was promoting the then six-year-old as The Child Genius.

Florence wrote scripts, designed costumes and sets, performed and produced. Their crowning glory was a Lilliputian opera they wrote and produced for Auckland’s Opera House. They were unmarried, but had children together. In 1901, William ran off with a pianist leaving Florence with their two surviving children. When he refused to send money to support them, Florence sent one of the children to him, with a note.

"I have had to work very hard to keep my little ones, I find I can’t do so any longer. … In your last letter you almost told me I was on the town. You know very well in your own heart that that is a lie. … I have not forgotten you gave me the bad disorder in Wanganui. I got rid of it in Christchurch by going into the hospital, so I am free of such a misfortune, thank God. PS. Though you treated me the way you have, I always cared for you and always will."

Against Florence’s wishes, William adopted the child out. During the process, he married the pianist. In 1904, Florence also married. Fifteen months later her new husband was found guilty of “persistent cruelty to his wife”. The Magistrate, ordered Florence “be no longer bound” to co-habit with him.

In 1906, Florence visited her step-mother and sister in Queensland. Whilst there, her father was thrown out of home because of his persistent drunkenness and self-confessed “grievous wrongs” and “transgressions” against members of his family. Two weeks later he was found dead in the stables of the local hotel. He had taken cyanide—fast poison compared to the slow poison already killing him.

By design or fate, William was also in in the vicinity. Having deserted his pianist wife and their child, he was on the run under an assumed name. Florence and he got together again, during which my father George was conceived. As was his want, William abandoned mother and son soon after George was born.

In 1915, Florence married officially for a second time. The following month her husband sailed for the Great War. So great was the slaughter in that particular man’s war, it took poppy fields the size of a country to bury its dead. Florence’s husband survived the war, but not the suffering. That, he brought home. For twenty years until his death, medical reports described him as “a very tremulous man, nervous, abrupt in manner, extremely neurotic and liable to break down at any time”.

It can’t have been an easy life for Grandma or George. For his part, archival material suggests my father was a troubled youth. But I don’t need archives to tell you about my father. This is my first conscious memory:

I was four. My mother was sitting at the kitchen table. I was on the floor next to her. From behind, my father gripped my mother’s hair and pulled back her head. In his right hand he had a butcher’s knife.  He placed the blunt edge against her throat. He made some threat, then ran the steel, deliberate and slow, across my mother’s neck.

Bookending this memory is one of my last before leaving home.

I was fourteen. Watching TV. My back was to the hallway door. I heard nothing before the impact. I knew it was my head because that’s where I felt the hit. I knew it was a bottle because I heard the glass smash and the shards fall around me. I knew it was my father, because I heard his obscenities as he scurried back down the hallway. I felt the blood, warm against my skin, before I saw it. It was dripping from a cut in my head and running down my right arm from a flap of skin hanging off my bicep.

In my family, I was the youngest and assaulted considerably less than my two brothers or Mum who received the worst beatings of all. Punches to the head. Haymakers to the stomach. And verbal abuse—among them whore and prostitute—the same language used by Florence’s grandfather in 1878 and implied by William in a letter to Florence at the beginning of the 20^th Century.

When I look at Florence’s life what do I see? I see a gifted woman whose promise and endeavour was wasted by male degradation, neglect, abandonment and assault. Grandfathers, fathers, partners, sons.

Of course, not all men are like this. But many are. Far too many. And there is a reason for it. Abuse is always perpetuated by those with power over those without it.

The primacy of male authority and entitlement is the foundational idea of most religious traditions and therefore society. Our social systems have been created over millennia by men with no existential interest in challenging the madness of this idea.

Women are the heart of all society because they carry and bear the future. We men do not have that power because we don’t have wombs. Yet, in designing our economic system, where money is power, no man has ever seen fit to put significant monetary value upon the work of mothers. Not only that, but, in order to be mothers, women have had to endure economic dependence, disadvantage and marginalisation.

Today’s employment policies are designed to “incentivise” mothers back into the so-called productive workforce. As if producing children and growing and emotionally educating them is not.

However, once back in the workforce, a second level of discrimination greets the average woman. There is not a single industry in Australia where women on average are paid more than men. Not even in the industries women numerically dominate. Primarily the average woman will be employed part-time or casually, she will receive 17% less pay and 40% less superannuation on retirement.

Let’s follow her into the legal system. In determining compensation for accident victims, loss of earnings is a quantifiable injury. In exactly the same accident, a man, on average, will receive more compensation than a woman. Pity the “unproductive” mother whose work, economically, is deemed worthless.

In domestic violence or custody disputes, most women will enter the legal system (if they can afford to at all) with significantly less financial resources than a man. Often, they lose because they can’t afford the expensive lawyers or are financially bullied out of pursuing their rightful claims.

Where is the equity or equality in any of this?  Or the justice?

These days when we talk of gender equality, it is primarily in terms of levels of participation or quotas. I’m not criticising quotas. Having more than 2.5 women to every one hundred men heading up Australia’s richest 500 companies has got to be better than not having it. But what do we propose women participate in?

Our economic, legal and political systems, our religious structures and dominant cultural practices are primarily adversarial, built around male notions of conquest. But equality is more than enabling women to participate in a man’s company, courtroom or parliament, to speak from a man’s pulpit or to take up arms in a man’s war. If there is to be real equality, women should have equal opportunity to build social systems that come out of their needs, interests and sensibilities.

If my gender is serious about equality, we need to become much less defensive about losing our sense of historical entitlement. That’s difficult, of course, because those with power tend not to want to give it up.

But let’s play hypotheticals. If women had the power to create our social systems, what kind of society would it be like?

For sure, it would not be a perfect world. But, in such a society, perhaps, at the very least, much more would be able to be expressed in terms of human promise, endeavour and accomplishment than victory or defeat. Who knows, in such a world, the lives of many men might be improved. More so than the tens of millions whose bodies are laid to waste on war’s killing fields. And certainly more so than the fate suffered by the men in Florence’s life. They all died defeated.

Florence’s grandfather John Gibbins left a last will and testament full of hate and resentment. Her father Thomas Gibbins died alone on a bundle of hay in a hotel stable. Her son, my father George, died alone in a boarding house on Kingsford Smith Drive. Her partner, William, died of tertiary syphilis in a Melbourne hospital under his pseudonym. The records said: “the deceased was not visited while in hospital and had no known relatives or friends”. He was 49.

Unlike the men in her life, for all her trials and tribulations, Grandma Florence wasn’t ultimately defeated because she was deeply loved. By my mother, certainly, and, according to Mum, by me.

Florence was in her late seventies when she died. I was three years old.

I have no conscious memory of her, but I have a memory of a memory. I was holding my mother’s hand walking down Grandma’s Street.

“Where’s Grandma gone?” I said.

“To Grandma Heaven,” said Mum.