Goodbye Lullaby

Jan Murray

Description

A little boy lost. A country at war. A promise made long ago that cannot be forgotten. As a sixteen-year-old in the Fifties, Miki Patrick is forced to surrender her baby son. It's now 1971 and the anti-war activist with a price on her head risks her freedom to find her somewhere child and keep him out of an unrighteous war. The drama played over two decades revolves around the feud between Miki and her best friend since childhood, the whip-smart, potty-mouthed Jude Brenner. The troubled teenagers made a pact. Each believes the other broke it. It will take Vietnam to bring them together again.

Sujets

• Military
• War
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Tablo Pty Ltd
• Date de parution: 19 août 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781922309372
• Langue: English

Extrait

FOREWORD
On conscription
“I am no saint or would-be martyr and I live as I have to live. Yet I am convinced that life is not worth living if one is not, at least on the important issues, the master of one’s own decisions. If others can make me kill and maim against conscience, I am less a man, a beast to be used and manipulated. Thus, I could fight in Vietnam only if I considered it a just cause ..."
From a letter written by a conscript, Geoff Mullen, addressed to the Australian Government in 1967 and published in his Sydney Morning Herald article of March 30, 1969
* * *
On the stolen children
“At the age of four, I was taken away from my family and placed in [a] Home – where I was kept as a ward of the state until I was eighteen years old. I was forbidden to see any of my family or know of their whereabouts…”
“While I was walking through the bush the police and Welfare were going out to the camp which they had found in the bush. I was so upset that I didn't walk along the Highway. That way the Welfare would have seen me.  The next day I knew that the Welfare had taken my brothers and sisters… “
From the Australian Government’s Bringing Them Home Report , The Report of the National Inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families.
* * *
On forced adoptions
“I believe that a good environment will make a better job of bad genes … It is [a bad] environment which pushes the sinfulness into these babies. Adoption brings joy to the adopting parents and the prospect of a better life to the child …. The last thing the obstetrician should concern himself with is the law in regard to adoption.”  D.F. Lawson M.B. F.R.C.S., F.R.C.O.G.  Medical Society Hall East Melbourne August 19, 1958 in Overview of Adoption in Australia       
 
“Upon the adoption order being finalized … the original Birth certificate was sealed away forever and was never to be released. The mother and child were forbidden by law to ever know each other’s names ….” Dian Welfare, Adoption Rights Campaigner (1951-2008)in Overview of Adoption in Australia       
Between the 1950s and 1970s, approximately 150,000 Australian unwed mothers had their babies taken against their will by churches and adoption agencies. The report by a Senate inquiry investigating the Commonwealth government's involvement in past forced adoption practices was tabled in the upper house on the 29th February 2012.
PROLOGUE
Goodna (Brisbane) 1950
‘I should never have told you!’ Miki wailed.
‘So you actually did it?’ said Jude. 
They were sitting together on the wooden bench, which wrapped around the big peppercorn tree down at the far end of the schoolyard. All through their lunch hour she had been begging Jude to act sensibly, forget about what she told her and pose for the camera. All she needed was for the idiot to stand under the tree––with their school building in the background––and then go down to the big gates and stand in front of them looking outwards. Jude beneath the fancy iron gates of St Benedicts Catholic College for Girls staring out at their future was the picture she needed most, her main shot, her metaphor. 
'You let him put it in?' 
'Quit it!'
Jude, the lunatic. She hadn't expected her dearest, closest friend to make fun of her, she thought as she watched Jude laying on her back writhing around, touching herself down there through her tunic and staring up at the sky as if Clark Gable were about to fall into her arms.  Her long hair trailed in the dust. Too bad. Even if ants crawled into it and ate her brains out, she wasn’t going to tell her. At this moment, she didn’t even like Jude. She liked herself even less.
‘Did it hurt?’ said Jude, springing up, alert and ready to be shocked. ‘Was there blood, Mik? What did you do while he was doing it, that’s what I want to know, that’s the bit I can never work out. What did you actually do ? Did you just lie there and let him put it in? Did you scream or anything? Do you talk when it’s in there? Come on, spill the beans! You have to tell! You have to. It’s me, remember!’
Words tumbling over themselves, Jude making her feel awful. Not meaning to.
‘God! I can’t believe this!’ said Jude. ‘Miss Goody-Two-Shoes! You’ve actually gone and done it! And I haven’t! You actually beat me to it, you know what it feels like to have it in there, have a boy inside you!’ Jude leapt off the bench and threw out her arms, spinning herself around in a full circle. ‘World, I don’t believe it!’ she called out.
Neither did she, thought Miki, and if her mother hadn’t sent her over to the Manning’s after school to collect the pay envelope Mrs Manning had forgotten to leave on the sideboard that afternoon it would never have happened. Her mother’s wages. Doctor Leonard T. Manning’s house.
‘Was it huge, Mik?’
‘Shut up!’ A rush of blood to her cheeks.
‘Like a palace inside, I bet.’
She had to admit, she had been impressed by the Manning’s house. It was bigger than any house she had ever been in before, overflowing with furniture and stuffed cushions, vases and china things that looked as though they were sitting around waiting for someone to tell them why they were there, someone to do something with them other than just pass by them in the hall. The house felt like a museum, so big and only him and his parents living in it. So much furniture for her poor mother to polish every week. That had been her biggest impression of the Manning mansion. Fancy mirrors everywhere. She was struck by why people would need so many mirrors unless it was to make it look as if there were really more people in there than just the three of them rattling around in the big place.
‘So no one was home when you went around there, right? Except, of course, young Donald.’ Jude skipped backwards, dancing in a circle around Miki. ‘Donny, Oh Donny, Donny,’ she teased, pressing both hands to her heart and tossing her head back, her eyes rolling to heaven.
‘Come on, Jude, stand still for me, please? For the tenth time?’ Miki pleaded, waving her Box Brownie in the air. ‘You said you’d do this.’ 
‘Everyone knows you’ve had a mad crush on Donald Manning. Ever since the sports carnival.’ She turned to Miki, grinning. ‘That’s it, isn’t it? It’s those big hairy legs, those muscles. Oh, Donny, Donny, hold me in your arms and never let me go.’  
Miki felt her lunch come up into her throat and for an instant, imagined she might vomit or pass out. She gave Jude a shove. 
‘Before the bell goes. Come on.’ She had Drama with Miss Batson after lunch and wanted to clean up before class went in. They were performing the first two scenes from Act iii of Romeo and Juliet and it was her turn to give the talk. At least Romeo and Juliet was something she wanted to talk about. There was nothing she wanted to say about Donald Manning. She hated him. From the bottom of her heart.
‘Okay,’ said Jude. ‘How about this for a good shot, Miss World’s Greatest Photographer? How’s this? This do?’ With a vacant look on her face, her tongue lolling out and the bent knuckle of her little finger jammed at her nostril, Jude faced the camera.
‘Idiot! When you’ve finished pretending to excavate the roof of your antrum maybe you’ll act sensibly for me, huh?’  
As well as being sex crazed, Jude was also the most frustrating best friend anyone ever had, thought Miki. Always the clown. The bell would go soon and she really wanted to complete her portfolio for Family, Friends and Interesting Things  by Caroline Patrick, and it would not be complete without the gate shot, their school years. 
She brushed the flies from her face and tried not to get herself into too much of a lather about the album but it was important to capture her subject under St Bren’s gates looking outward to the world beyond their college. She wanted her pictures to tell stories. The gate one would be about her and Jude and their future, about school and the big wide world outside that would be all theirs, one day. When they were both school teachers and had saved enough money, they were going to Tahiti. That was their big life plan. The Moon and Sixpence was one of their favourite novels. They were taking turns to read it to each other. Whoever had a daughter first was going to call her Tiaré.
She could feel the sun scorching her back and the sweat trickling down her legs. And the flies; she could do without the flies, she thought, flicking at them repeatedly. The flies were making it hard to keep her camera steady on the subject. All she needed was for Jude to stop clowning around long enough so she could click the shutter and then go down to the gates for the last shot, then to the bubblers and wash up.
‘Was it romantic? I bet it was.' Jude spun around, her arm hugging her waist as she looked up to the sky. 'Oh God, Mik, I bet it was so romantic!’ 
‘Please? Jude? Be a sport!’ 
She held the Box Brownie against her midriff, her feet apart, her head bent over the camera and her right eye focusing down the lens. The school building stayed where it was, but not Jude, the flibbertigibbet.
It was hard, however, not to love your best friend, frustrating as she was, thought Miki. Jude. Her sister. Almost. In everything but blood, they were sisters. She couldn't remember a time when Jude wasn't in her life. But she was also the most annoying creature on the face to the earth. Just look at her! 
She tried to control her giggles watching Jude skipping around the peppercorn tree and trailing her lunch paper behind her like some Chinese dancer. If Jude caught her laughing, she would be encouraged to keep clowning.
She let the camera drop to her side, her hand through the diagonal strap keeping it against her leg as she looked away from Jude’s antics to a vanishing point, something stationary she could concentrate on while she composed herself. 
'Donny, Donny, my darling. Make love to me, Donny,'  Jude crooned.
Flicking her plaits back over her shoulder, Miki