13. THE EIGHTIES: NEW HOPES AND NEW CHALLENGES

 

The Eighties began with a volcanic eruption on Mt St Helens and ended with an earthquake in San Francisco. These signs in the earth were reflections of the upheavals in the world's political and social maps. In Poland, workers at Gdansk went on strike, demanding the right to join unions not under Communist control. By the end of the decade, the Berlin Wall was torn down, the Brandenburg Gate opened, Communist rule in many Eastern European countries overthrown, and Communism in the USSR was near its end. New words and threats were introduced into the language and their ideas would dominate world discussions for the remainder of Olive's lifetime. The AIDS virus was identified. The hole in the ozone layer and the threat of global warming fuelled debates about the future of industrialisation and the need to attend to matters of conservation of the world's resources. In Adelaide in the early Eighties, bushfires twice ravaged the Adelaide hills and country areas with loss of life and property.

            In Vancouver, the painful task of mending broken relationships was proceeding. After an early stumble, Bob regained sobriety. He formed a relationship with Betty Brannan that enriched his life; found productive work at the University of British Columbia's Biomedical Communications Unit; and began to explore reconciliation with his children. This latter task was not easy and, if it had not been for Olive's trail-blazing visit and constant commitment, may not have been accomplished at all.

Stacey, Kirstie, Bob and Olive at Montague Harbour, Galiano Island, 1982.

            The photograph shows Olive, Bob, Stacey and Kirstie at Montague Harbour on Galiano Island during a visit from Olive in 1982. As ever, her hair is permed and she is impeccably attired in a sensible pantsuit. Here are representatives of the four generations of her family. Bob has found peace with himself and his family. His relationship with Betty Brannan has bought stability and love back into his life and the quiet beauty of the Gulf Islands has restored his spirit. Olive walks at a slight distance from the family group. Perhaps, at some level, she knows that her task of bringing the family together is now complete and that the future belongs to the next generations. By 1983, matters were firm enough to make a visit from Charmian, Frai (and her then boyfriend, Russell), Ricki and me a happy and exciting event, and paved the way for many subsequent travels to Canada for Charmian and me.

Steve, Olive and Burk 1985.

Burk, Sue, Bob, Olive and Steve—Olive's last visit to Canada, 1987

In 1985, Olive turned 80 and we celebrated her birthday on a hot March day at Hawthorndene with her friends and relatives. Bob and Betty had flown to Adelaide and we dined at the restaurant at Windy Point overlooking the lights of Adelaide.

 

Olive, Betty and Bob at Windy Point Restaurant. Olive's 80^th birthday, March 8, 1985.

The remaining years of the decade were, however, to bring sadnesses to Olive. Both her dearly loved brothers, Arnie and Cyril, died and, in the year before Bob's visit in 1985, cancer cells had been discovered in his throat, cancer which would within four years end his life.

However, there were also significant satisfactions for Olive. With the birth of Kirstie Leigh, in 1980, and Fergus, in 1982, she became a great-grandmother. This was followed by Carys Charmian in 1984, Aaron Leonard in 1985, Dylan Neil in 1986, Andrew Mark in 1987, and Alicia Lorene, in 1988. Within the space of eight years, Olive was a great—grandmother seven times over[1]. She was always at birthdays and Christmas celebrations and we continue the tradition she began of providing the chickens for Christmas dinner. She took a lively interest in her grandchildren. In preparing this tribute, I listened to a tape she and I had prepared as I interviewed her about some of the incidents that are reported under her childhood. Ricki would have been aged about 3 at the time and, from time to time, interrupts Olive's narrative to ask a question. Olive handles the interruption calmly, turning her attention from the story to satisfy Ricki's needs without irritation. A later memory of Ricki's is being made to be quiet while Olive watched 'Days of our Lives' on TV! One of my favourite photos of this period shows Ricki and Olive examining shells that Ricki had collected at Silver Sands.

  Olive and Ricki at Silver Sands Beach, 1982.

Lorene, Ricki, Charmian, Frai and Chalien wearing T-shirts hand-painted by Olive, Christmas 1986

Olive's enjoyment of craft, that had been one of her sustaining activities during her Canada visit in 1975, was not yet finished. Victor Doray recalls a visit from Olive (probably the 1987 visit when Olive was 82) in which she unselfconsciously tried her hand at a new painting technique at which, Victor reported, she showed considerable skill. She continued her love of china painting and for Christmas 1986, she hand-painted T—shirts for the girls and sewed casual shirts for the boys.

As the decade drew to its end, Olive suffered one of the greatest tragedies to befall a parent, having one of their children pre-decease them. She made two further trips to Canada in 1985 and 1987. As she farewelled Bob and Betty on the second visit, she could not know that she would not see Bob again. In January 1988, while I was at a conference in New Zealand, I received the fateful news that Bob's cancer had now metastasised and that he had only a matter of months to live. I record my visit to Vancouver in February 1988 and Bob's death, less than a week after my arrival, in A gathering of stones[2]. In this semi-fictional narrative, (which I have edited for the purpose of its inclusion here), I recall having to phone Olive to tell her that Bob had died

 

I sat for a long time in front of the phone, persuading myself that I was waiting to be sure my mother was awake. I fussily rang the operator to check that I had the time difference precisely right. I saw her small figure, still spritely in her eighties, busying herself with breakfast. The morning sun would have broken clear of the low screen of trees across the creek and would be shining on the East window of her lounge room, the curtains already drawn against the heat. She would have risen early, as was her custom in the summer, watered her pot plants and ferns, and fed the tame ducks that lived in the creek. I imagined her bending over and scattering the pieces of bread she had saved and soaked for them the night before, clucking and talking to them as familiar pets. If she had seen the stray cats that also frequented the creek, she would have sprayed the hose at them and shooed them away. By now she would have made her toast and tea, and settled down in her chair to do battle with the crossword from the daily newspaper. A widow now for over fifteen years, she had become a self—sufficient person, able to both enjoy her own company and embrace the company of others with delight. She laughed easily and maintained a remarkably positive attitude to life despite widowhood, arthritis, and declining mobility and eyesight. Never a large woman, she had become increasingly diminutive with the passing years as her arthritis ground down her hips and spine. The family joke went that Grannie Q. would never die, she would become smaller and smaller and just disappear, leaving her sparkling laughter echoing around the room.

            She had always been the central fact of my life. My early asthma had made me dependent on her. In the absence of my father, I had striven to please her, unconsciously aware that my very life may depend on her and that I could not afford to lose her. My father's absences at the war meant that he had been a shadowy existence for me until I was eight or nine. Bob had departed overseas when I was fourteen, and our father had died over fifteen years ago. But our mother had always been there. It was she who remembered every birthday of every family member. It was she who maintained the correspondence, and from whom all the postcards came when she and our father had travelled overseas. It was she who provided the useful and thoughtful household gifts during the first few years of Charmian's and my marriage when money was tight and we were establishing a home.

            'And now I must tell her that her son has died.'

I picked up the phone and dialled the Adelaide number.

 

Grief was a private matter to Olive. I had remained in almost daily phone contact while I was in Vancouver, and we had spoken freely about what was happening and our feelings. I had tape recordings of Bob's funeral service made and brought her photographs taken of the people who had attended. When I returned to Adelaide, I gave her the tape and photos. She put them aside.

            'I'll listen to that later,' she said, typically delaying dealing with a difficult issue until a time and place of her own choosing. She told me later that she spent all one afternoon listening to the tape several times and poring over the photos. I imagine that she wept as she grieved for her dead son and for the lost opportunities. I hope that she also wept in gladness for the reconciliation he had achieved with his children, and for her contribution to it. By the end of the Eighties, Olive was about to turn 85 and the signs of significant aging were beginning to appear. With the reappearance of Halley's Comet in 1990, I wonder if she recognised that the circle of her own life was beginning to close.

 

14. A LIFE DRAWS TO ITS CLOSE

 

By the early 1990s, Olive was beginning to struggle with health problems that largely kept her housebound. In typical fashion, she began to arrange her life to accommodate her limitations. Charmian's parents took her shopping for her weekly needs. The family doctor continued to call on her regularly and the pharmacy delivered her medicines. 'Meals on Wheels' provided her weekday food needs and she squirreled away left overs to get her through the weekend on the occasions when we were unable to provide for her. She accepted the suggestion of employing a house-cleaner, and persuaded the bank across the road to bring her cash each fortnight when her pension was deposited. I had taken over her financial affairs and we regularly took her and Marge Milkins out for drives on weekends. There were deaths of significant others in this period. Her sisters Lily and Alice, her aunts Maudie and May Dickson[3], and her half-brother Jack[4] all died, leaving Olive the last surviving member of her immediate family.

            By 1992, it was obvious that it was becoming difficult for her to remain in her own home. We began a weekly charade in which she would phone me on Friday—before my regular Saturday morning visit—and say that she had lost her purse. We would spend an hour or more looking under, over and in things before her purse came to light—never hidden in the same place twice![5] Once she nearly set fire to her unit when using a faulty firelighter and, on another occasion, fell and struck her head badly, having to call to the next-door neighbour for help.

            I put in train the necessary steps to have her move into a hostel unit in an aged care home at Belair, only a couple of kilometres from our home. In July 1993, she moved from her own home at Hawthorn into the Kalyra Aged Care Facility. Although she accepted the change with reasonable grace, it was some time before she stopped saying, 'I don't know why I came here. I used to be able to …', and she would string off a list of things she could do from Hawthorn—catch the bus, go around to the shops, go across to the bank – none of which she had been able to do for some years. It was soon apparent that her short-term memory was becoming significantly compromised. She could still bluff her way through a conversation and make a quick quip, but she started to forget the names of her grandchildren, and to be confused about relationships. On March 8^th, 1995, we celebrated Olive's 90^th birthday with a few relatives and friends and I made the short speech that I referred to her in her funeral eulogy.

In 1996, she was admitted to hospital with what was diagnosed as a perforated bowel. I sat with her at Flinders Medical Centre and talked through the meaning of this with her. She was faced with the 'devil's alternative' —without surgery this condition was fatal, but she was unlikely to survive major surgery at her age. She understood and accepted this reality philosophically. 'I've had a good life,' she said, 'and we all have to go sometime.'  I told her how much we loved and admired her, thanked her for being the mother and grandmother she had been, and reminded her of her contribution to the Canadian family. I kissed her tenderly and left. The next day, Charmian, Chalien, Lorene, Frai, Ricki and I stood at the end of her hospital bed looking at the small figure sleeping in the hospital bed. We cried, said our farewells, and told her unconscious figure what a wonderful mother and Grannie she had been.

            However, Olive was not finished yet! The 'perforated bowel' was actually a bleeding ulcer, and two days later she was sitting up eating breakfast! She lived another year, although clearly in declining health and increasing confusion. We celebrated Christmas 1996 in the private dining room at Kalyra, and she was able to make a joke and join in the fun of having her Australian family around her.

  Neil, Olive and Charmian at Olive's 90^th birthday, March 1995.

            On September 15^th, 1997, Charmian and I and our four daughters celebrated my 60^th birthday at The Grand hotel at Glenelg. At dinner, I told my daughters that Olive would not last the night. We regularly had family jokes about the 'meaning of life' (which I held to be represented in baseball!) and I said something to them like, 'The most important thing in life for me is the relationships we make and hold throughout our lives.' This, of course, I had learned from my mother's steadfast commitment to family, her ability to nurture relationships, and her capacity for fun. The next day, without fuss or fanfare, Olive died. At her wish, her ashes are scattered with those of my father, in the rose garden at Centennial Park and, somewhere in an Adelaide park, a tree has been planted in her memory.

 

 

16. POSTSCRIPT: "C'ARN THE BLOODS!"[6]

 

Richmond Oval, September 2003:

'C'arn the Bloods!'

Players pile on top of the ball and a knee, elbow, or boot makes accidental contact with soft tissue.

'Blood rule!' A player jogs from the field, a trainer holding an ice pack to the bloodied nose, knee or scalp. He is stitched, patched or bandaged and returns to the field to rejoin the game. The player, bloodied but unbowed, plays on.

Richmond Oval, September 1953.

'C'arn the Bloods!'

Players pile on top of the ball and a knee, elbow or boot makes accidental contact with soft tissue. HIV/AIDS is still nearly 30 years away so, blood streaming from nose, knee or scalp a player disengages himself from the pack and with the blood streaming from the cut a symbol of his courage and determination, plays on.

Richmond Oval, September 1903.

The space where Richmond Oval will stand is an open field on which sheep, pigs and chickens feed in their pens, unaware of the fate that awaits them. The animals are owned by the Pearce brothers and the Langs (Caroline Lang is the wife of Edwin Pearce) provide the fodder that fattens the animals for slaughter. Edwin Pearce and his brothers will slaughter the animals and sell their meat in their butcher shop on Fisher Terrace (now South Road), offering passing lads sixpence to stand and keep the flies off the newly slaughtered carcases.

Edwin is

the father of Lily, who was

the mother of Olive, who was

the mother of Neil, who is

the father of Chalien, who is

the mother of Aaron, who

  on the field stained with blood spilt by ancestors and legends, plays on.

Neil Quintrell

11 Sept 2003.

  Olive Quintrell: genealogy