I was born in January 1962 at the Royal Children's Hospital, Brisbane.
My parents had been married 5 years. They were married on 14 September, 1957.
They had met at a dance and dad was originally going out with one of mum's friends but she dumped him. Once this friend of mum's got engaged, apparently dad said "well I supposed we might as well get married too". So they were not off to a great start.

Mum found out that dad was an alcoholic 3 weeks after they were married when he started coming home after closing time at the pub. And then this continued for years. They bought a block of land at Aspley and built a house. Dad was a builder. They had no phone, no washing machine, the walls inside were unfinished. They had a car and Mum worked in the city and came home as far as Chermside on the tram. Dad would leave her there until after closing time at the pub, so about four hours and then pick her up.
When Mum complained about Dad going to the pub every night he said that there was nothing to come home for "its not like we have kids or anything".

So thats how I came to be. After I was born, nothing changed. When Mum reminded Dad that he said he would come home instead of going to the pub if they had children, he said "yeah but its a girl, it would be different if I had a son". My brother Brett was born in January 1964 and nothing changed. Dad was an alcoholic and a very self centred person. He did not have empathy for another human being in this world. He was jealous of everyone.

So our family life began. My earliest memory was when I was 2 years old. Keeping in mind that Dad drank every night of the week either at the pub or at home from long before I was born, our home life was a very stressful and scary place. My first memory was on 19 April 1964. Mum told me the date.

On 19th April 1964, when I was 2, I remember walking under the house, and Dad, turning to face me with an aqua coloured power saw in his hands. It was noisy and I got a huge fright and then couldn't breathe. I can still picture seeing him standing there with that saw in his hands. I was scared of my Dad and had seen him be violent to Mum and Brett so I thought that he was going to hurt me.

The next thing I remember about that day is not being able to breathe. I was admitted to hospital with an acute asthma attack. Apparently it was a windy day and Mum always thought it was the wind that caused my asthma. I remember her telling people that years later.

Over the next 3 years, I was admitted to hospital with serious asthma 19 times.
I can just remember flashes of things that happened to me during those years.
At that time parents weren't allowed to stay with their children in hospital.
Not that mine would have. They always had too many problems of their own.

As Dad was drunk every night he would often drive me to the hospital when he was drunk. I can still picture lying in the back seat of the car on my own and trying to breathe. I would concentrate on watching the power lines all the way to the hospital.

Hospital was scary and I was usually all alone there. I used to keep on pulling out my drip when I was lying in bed. The nurses solved this problem by tying my arms at the elbows to boards so that I couldn't bend my arms and get to the drip.

One day my Uncle Ron saw me at home having an asthma attack. He mentioned that day in his speech at our wedding, saying that he was so shocked to see this tiny person struggling for breath and turning blue. After he had seen that, he never expected me to live long enough to have a wedding day.

One day when I was well enough to be up and around a nurse came to me and said that my bath was next. I misunderstood and thought that she wanted me to go take a bath. So I walked to the bathroom and hopped into a bath that was drawn. When the nurse came in she yelled at me for getting into a bath that she had made ready for someone else.

On one of the occasions I came into the hospital a trainee doctor was trying to give me a needle and the needle broke off in my arm and I started screaming.

Three times during these years, my parents were called up to see me for the last time as the medical staff thought that I wouldn't make it through the night. I was always accutely aware that everyone thought that I would die from asthma - so much so that on my thirteenth birthday I was amazed to find that I was a teenager as I always expected to die as a child.

From my bed in the children's ward I could see the stairs where visitors came up and a lot of nights no-one came up those stairs to see me. One time that both my parents came,
Dad was so drunk that the hospital staff threw him out.

I went to the Royal Children's Hospital school. You would walk up some very steep stairs to get to the tiny building that was the school. About ten kids would be there, all of varying ages. I didn't like it as I had a lot of trouble making friends with other kids.

During these years I developed a taste for hospital food and would crave it for years to come.

It was January 1967 and a couple of days before starting school I had just turned 5. On my first day of school when the bell rang for little lunch I walked home. I had asked Mum when I could come home and she had said "when the bell rings". We lived in Helena Street, Aspley and the primary school was just at the end of our street.

I used to cry every morning for the first 2 years of school as I didn't want to go so Mum arranged for Robyn (girl the same age as me who lived 2 doors up)to come and walk me to school every day. I always had good grades in school. Socially though, school was a nightmare for me. I had no self confidence and had no idea how to make friends with other kids.

Dad was still getting very drunk everynight. There were always fights and a lot of violence and abuse between my parents.

I never really had any friends at Primary School. I was painfully shy and always felt really ugly and insecure. I just walked around on my own at lunch time not knowing how to make friends with anyone. I felt a bit more comfortable in class where everything was structured and I knew what to do.

Because of Dads drinking, we never had any money so had second hand clothes.
To save money Mum would always get my hair cut really short and let it grow quite long so that she got her monies worth. One time in grade 5, the day after one of these crew cuts, I walked into the classroom late and the whole room burst out laughing at me.

In the early grades I would sometimes wet my pants in class as I was too scared to put my hand up and ask to go to the toilet. The person sitting on the bench seat with me always knew about it and jumped up and told the teacher and the class laughed at me again. In the early years at Primary School my nickname was lunchbox (I still don't know why) and then in years 6 and 7 my nickname was hairy legs for more obvious reasons.

In one class in Year 4 I was assigned to sit next to a boy called Gray. He was the class clown and loved making people laugh. He used to make me laugh in class with lots of funny antics that I can't remember now.
I remember he had a pencil with a big rubber on it and it was called blobby.
He was nice and I actually liked going to school for a while so that I could sit next to him.

I think this was the first time I had a friend and ever since I have always had more success being friends with boys rather than girls.

In the sixties, there was a program where every child in primary school was given a small carton of plain milk to drink. It was given out at the start of little lunch and we had to drink it. It was usually warm as it was stacked in a crate outside the classroom until it was time to drink. It wasn't refrigerated and tasted gastly. I have never been able to drink plain milk since. I think a lot of people in my age group would remember this and they all probably hate milk too.

Mum would give me 5 cents some days to buy lollies at the little shop in the grounds of the school. One day I selected what I thought was a lolly and the lady told me it was a cigar. I was embarassed to say I didn't know that so said it was for my Dad and she let me buy it.

Near the shop there was a boy whose name I can't remember now who would always sit there on his own and sing. One day he sang "When the Carnival is Over" and I sat near him to listen and made believe that he was singing it to me.

In year 7 I would go down to the oval and play touch football with the boys.
I was caught one day and dragged into the Principal's office and threatened with the cane if I played again, so that was the end of that.

Every afternoon I would walk out the gate of the school and start walking to my house and would think, "oh no its nearly nighttime again". A good night was when Dad was too hammered to stay awake for long. We never had any friends over to house because Mum didn't want anyone to know about our life. I did have a friend called Debbie for a while and a few times I went to her house after school. Her mum would talk to me (I think now that she was sensing that there were problems at home).
Once she got it out of me what was happening, she got really angry and was going to walk to our house and confront my parents. This terrified me so I cried and said I had been lying so that she wouldn't talk to them.
Debbie stopped being my friend after that.

On weekends most of the kids in the street would ride bikes over in the shopping centre carpark. My Mum's Dad fixed up Mum's old bike for me.
It was a really heavy bike as it was so old. This same grandad made Brett and I the "Marks Mobile" which was a metal car he made himself that had bicylce tyres for wheels. We used to take it to the shopping centre carpark and ride it down the "big hill" which was at the entrance.

Once Robyn and I made our own gocart. It had curtains and everything and we used to ride it down the Helena Street hill. It was the slowest gocart going down that hill but I loved it.

I vividly remember, when I was about 3 or 4, Dad was home and really drunk. My parents got into a fight and
Mum had some water boiling in a saucepan in the kitchen. I saw Dad pick up the saucepan of boiling water and threaten to pour it over Mum. He was backing her into a corner in the Kitchen so I ran over and stood in front of her. He put the water back on the stove. I have no memory of any physical abuse being done to me by Dad. But I witnessed him hurting both Mum and Brett many times over the years.

I was the person who tried to protect them both and I felt that I always had to be there or something bad would happen to them. I felt this way for a really long time. So much so that when Roger asked me to marry him my first response was that I couldn't leave home as if I wasn't there Dad would kill Mum and Brett.


Every night in the sixties, Dad would go straight to work from the Pub.
At first he drove home drunk afterwards. But eventually, after he had written off a couple of utes, we would have to go and pick him up at closing time which used to be 10 o'clock. When he would write off a car he would get out and walk home so that the Police couldn't find him. One night he had split is lip right through and I remember that he was so drunk that he had put his cigarette in through the hole under his lip and he didn't even realise what he was doing.

Once we were in the picking up after the pub stage, he would call up at about 9 o'clock every night and tell Mum to come and pick him up from either the Aspley, Bald Hills or Strathpine pubs. Mum would get us up out of bed and put us in the back of the car and we would drive to the pub in question. He rarely came out when we arrived, so we would often sit in the pub carpark waiting for him. I remember seeing Dad and other men roll out of the pub fighting quite often. Dad was always an aggresive drunk.

One day Brett hit Dad's smoking table with his toy hammer. The table had a glass top and the glass cracked. Dad was so angry that he picked Brett up (he would have been about 4 or 5 at the time) and kicked him across the loungeroom like he was a football.

The neighbours at Aspley could hear the fights and drunkenness going on at our place and we were well known for it. The police were called often and only a couple years ago one of our old neighbours (Dad's age group) said to Brett that they never had to call the police when we lived in the street because they were usually at our place anyway. This same man also said that he thought Brett and I would end up in gaol or something after the childhood we had had.

Next door to us at Aspley was the Collins family.
The Dad was a drunk as well and my Dad and him would fight often. After one night I remember seeing Dad take our hose and put it in through their laundry window and turn it on. The hose ran all night. Their fighting escalated after that.

At one stage we believe now that Dad was taking drugs as well. He started halucinating. I remember him sitting at the kitchen table talking to his imaginary friend called "darky". One other nights he would tell me he was an alien from Mars and it wasn't a joke he really meant it.

It was around this time that a woman called Suzanne started calling our house.
She was a barmaid at the local pub and we are all fairly sure now that there was an affair going on.

On many many occasions, Mum would leave Dad and go to her parents. I remember living there at Wooloowin quite often. Dad would always convice her he would change and back we would go. Divorce was not as acceptable then and I think Mum just had no idea what to do.

Dads parents and his youngest Sister would come over sometimes to try to talk to him about his drinking. This just made him angrier. He hated everyone.

One night a truck came down a hill opposite the shopping centre that we lived and was out of control and smashed in through the window of the Coles supermarket. Everyone from the street heard it and rushed over. The driver was unhurt and climbed out of the trunk obviously drunk. The mans last name was Guppy and he spotted Dad straight away. A drinking partner at the Aspley pub. After that we always called that road Guppy's Hill.

Dad spent a vast amount of money of alcohol and cigarettes every week.
So there was very little money left over for food. He would still demand a dinner of good steak, potatoes and veges every night. He believed this was his right as we was earning most of the money. We would always have different less expensive meals. One way Mum used to get more money for food was to go to a place at Strathpine where she could return the empty beer bottles for money to buy food.

She remembers one week when she had 60c left to feed the brett, me and herself for a week.

Dad would also loan money to his mates at the pub. Later when he was dying in 1991 he had life insurance polices that you could cash in for money. He cashed them in for $3000 because he said the policies were no use to him when he was dead.