Her family and her community judge
her; she has crossed over into the realm of bad behaviour, the moral certainties
and codes once and forever smashed.By her.
She has had sex with a man and the
result will be a baby. She is not yet married.
It is 1929 in Perth, Western Australia.
Still, in many ways, a small British colony. Parochial, not sophisticated;
it doesn't need to be. There is a ruling class, in place since settlement
one hundred years ago, and then there are people more or less under their
thrall.
Magisterial observance paid to Centenary
celebrations. It has been a painful birth to become a modern city. It is
hoped that the King will attend our anniversary.
The pure silence around that baby.
Folding into itself. Providing an example for women further down the line.
Propriety. If you cannot do the right thing, then don't reveal it in public,
don't share the shame around.
Ena Krakouer was pregnant at nineteen.
She had the baby and then took her home. A little girl she named Merle.
They lived in Palmerston Street in the inner-city in a house owned by someone
in the family. Details are sketchy. Do you know why? Because she never
told anyone about this experience of hers. Her sisters and her mother knew
at the time, but then it appeared to be dropped as a fact of life from
the family.
When Ena's children from her married
life, her official, legitimate children, began to have their own children,
some of them could not conceive and instead adopted their children. This
might have been a perfect time to be able to tell her five children, or
even one of them, that there was another sibling, another child of hers
to account for. Ena's childbearing span lasted twenty years : from 1929
to 1949. But she didn't tell any of them about her first-born. She had
buried her experience deep down and she left it there.
What might have happened if she had
lived for another year and had met her fifty year old daughter? This one
who found us, too late, and entered into the terrain of our family. She
was another sister, previously unknown, but unmistakeable and distinctive;
those resemblances: the same features as all of us. Remarkable to meet
a middle aged woman for the first time who was so alike, as if she had
rehearsed this entry all of her life. When it came, she fitted perfectly.
She had always known she had a mother somewhere; always wanted to find
her. What she found were the traces of her mother in the large family she
left behind.
Ena and baby Merle in Palmerston Street
Perth. In the year that Wall Street crashed and a world depression officially
commenced. Tins of food in the cupboard, baby blankets borrowed from friends.
The shame of the single mother walking along the street with her baby in
a pram. She had fallen.
She kept her baby for nine months before
she gave her away, before she had her adopted out.
There are these type of transgressions
you can find in most families. If I'd known about it when I knew Ena as
a grandmother, would I have been more sympathetic, more caring? I am taking
my cues about her anguish from the accounts of relinquishing mothers I
have read, but I might have it all wrong. It might not have been the trauma
I am building. I must always be very careful when it comes to babies because
I am too sentimental about the act of birth and the role of mothering.
I am not a mother. Neither was J