All posts by Michael Burge

Journalist, author, artist
Writers

The children of Coorah

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BRAVE FACES The children and staff at Coorah c.1942. Yvonne is first on the right in the girls' row.
BRAVE FACES The children and staff at Coorah c.1942. Yvonne is first on the right in the girls’ row.

Two Writers collaborate on a hidden story.

THE years of research I’d undertaken on the historic home Coorah in Wentworth Falls took an interesting turn in 1995 when I was contacted by the current owner of the house, the Blue Mountains Grammar School, about a visitor who’d returned to Coorah after fifty years.

Yvonne Waters lived at Coorah during WWII, after it was gifted to the Bush Church Aid Society by the estate of the home’s original owner, Robert Pitt. In these years, Coorah served as a children’s home, a period of the building’s history only previously recorded in Bush Church Aid Society records, which related rather saccharine stories about the ‘happy days’ of the residents.

Because of its personal nature, it took many years of ruminating to bring Yvonne’s story to a wider audience. Inspired by the journey to justice started by the national apologies to the Stolen Generations and the Forgotten Australians, Yvonne’s account of her time at Coorah, as told to me during a searching interview, was published in Blue Mountains Life magazine in 2011, and related a very different story to the church records.

It is published here with Yvonne’s permission, inspired by the honesty of those who are beginning to tell their stories to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

Family, Interrupted

Yvonne Waters on her time at a Blue Mountains childrens’ home.

During World War Two many of Sydney’s children were evacuated to the Blue Mountains in the wake of the 1942 Japanese attack, but writer Yvonne Waters and her brothers found themselves in a Wentworth Falls children’s home in the winter of 1942 in the midst of a different kind of war.

“As we set out to walk to school – I was eleven, my brothers eight and five – suddenly our dad, whom we hadn’t seen since he’d left home five months previously, darted from behind a corner,” Yvonne recalls.

“Herded into the back of dad’s car, we were driven to our paternal nana’s house. Later that afternoon mum arrived. She had been to work, and on finding us not at home with our great aunt she had guessed what had happened. After numerous court cases, the court had cowardly decreed that if dad could manage to take us from our mother, he could keep us. I will never forget my last glimpse of our mother crying, after being told she would never see us again.”

Yvonne’s parents had separated at a time when public interest in divorce resulted in a family’s trauma being played out in the tabloid media, and since both had settled with new partners, neither was granted custody of the children.

After being moved between the Central Coast and western Sydney, Yvonne says, “Dad informed us he had found vacancies in a children’s home. With tremendous relief he pointed out how lucky we were, as all the other homes were full.”

Recalling their arrival soon after, she says, “The pines in rows like soldiers guarded the red gravel driveway which curved suddenly, revealing a Victorian two-storey building. Dad pulled over to the entrance, and motioned for us to get out”.

CHILDRENS' HOME Coorah, an historic home in Wentworth Falls, once a private home, a childrens' home, and now part of Blue Mountains Grammar School.
CHILDRENS’ HOME Coorah, an historic home in Wentworth Falls.

“He urged us up the nine stone steps to the verandah of the forbidding, silent building. Rattling the brass knocker on the huge oak door, he then turned to avoid seeing our stricken faces.

“Heavy footsteps on the other side signaled time was running out. A key turned in the lock. The door swung open to reveal a large, severe, grey-haired woman, dressed completely in black. She smiled, but the smile didn’t reach her eyes.

“‘Kiss your father goodbye!’ the woman we later knew as Matron ordered. The door was shut swiftly behind us and we were locked away from those we loved.”

The young trio had arrived at Coorah, an imposing home by the highway at Wentworth Falls. Once home to the Pitt family, the property was held by the Union Trustee Company after the death of Robert Pitt in 1935, with a stipulation that it be charitably gifted for the benefit of children.

The house was eventually given to the Bush Church Aid Society, an Anglican organisation which ran a number of children’s hostels, with a remit to provide accommodation for children living away from home for their education.

Just how three children in custody limbo (whose mother had no idea of their whereabouts) ended up at Coorah remains a mystery. Whatever the case, the shutting of the door changed Yvonne and her sibling’s lives forever.

Separated from her brothers on arrival, and forbidden to speak to them, even at meal times, Yvonne remembers, “We girls were allotted the job of kitchen chores and washing up after twenty-four children. The dining room floor would have to be scrubbed on hands and knees, and no girl would ever finish that mighty chore without reddened and bruised knees”.

“Twenty-four lunches had to be made before breakfast and Matron would stand behind me when it was my turn. Woe betide you if you tried giving anyone any extra.

“I think the teachers at the local school were aware of the conditions we lived in, as the headmaster asked me privately if we had enough food to eat.

“He’d witnessed one of our boys eating scraps from the school rubbish bin.”

Power struggles amongst resident children routinely resulted in abuse. “One frightening incident will never be erased from my mind,” Yvonne recalls. “An older boy in the home attempted to molest me. When I appealed to Matron for help, her answer shocked and hurt me.”

“‘You are a child of sin. You come from divorced parents. I would never believe your wicked lies!’ Today, I can still smell that boy’s dirty hands pressed against my mouth to stifle my screams. Only for the protection of a sympathetic older boy, I shudder to think what would have happened to me.

“I remember one boy was whipped with the buckle end of the strap, accused of laughing when saying grace. We were all still kneeling and I was opposite one of my brothers. Matron stood behind him and her temper seemed to be out of control. My look must have deterred her, so she moved on to the next victim.

“The feeling was high that evening. We all inspected the boy’s welted back. We were hurt and so angry.

“One girl and I retaliated to the cruelty by going on ‘strike’ and not doing the washing up. I’m amazed that we had the courage, for we were very afraid of the woman who controlled our lives. Arm-in-arm we ambled through the long grass to the edge of the paddock near the train line. We talked about the unfairness of everything and how we couldn’t wait to grow up and tell everyone about the treatment. Before we knew it, dusk was upon us! When we arrived at the back door, Matron had locked us out.

“Matron baffled and hurt us when she accused us of being with the boys. Her face was contorted with fury, and she was not at all interested in the truth.”

Yvonne believes the issue of boys and girls being housed together led to her eventual release from Coorah after eighteen months, when sent to an all-girl home in the Southern Highlands. Despite trying to write to them at Coorah, she lost touch with her brothers.

“I finally met them again before I was sixteen,” Yvonne recalls. “We smiled shyly at one another, but had nothing to say. It was a meeting between strangers.”

Fifty years after leaving Coorah, Yvonne was on a day trip to the Blue Mountains with her writing teacher, who encouraged her to pay a visit. The property had been owned by the Blue Mountains Grammar School since the 1950s.

“Not wanting to repeat the horrors recalled at that front door, I found a side door. A pleasant lady called Sandra answered my tentative knock. I suddenly couldn’t wait to look through my old dormitory window. The stairs were carpeted now and at the top we entered a room with computers and some workers.

“Everyone moved aside as I walked to where my bed had been. Standing in front of that window, I was eleven years old again, waiting for the sight of an occasional train and praying for my mother to find me. Those brightly lit carriages appeared to carry toy figures to their homes, and conjured up mine being a little closer to me.

“My thoughts raced back to a freezing day when a girl called up the stairs, ‘Yvonne, your Mother is here.’ I’d thought how cruel she was to joke.

FAMILY REUNION Yvonne, her mother, and one of her brothers the day their mother found them at Coorah.
FAMILY REUNION Yvonne, her mother, and one of her brothers after their mother found them at Coorah.

“The ground was heavily carpeted with snow. There, at the side of the building, was my Mother. She smiled and held out her arms to me. I tried to reach her, but my feet sank in the mush and I collapsed. My frozen body was lifted, and she held me close inside her warm coat.

“Nearly blinded by tears, I turned to face the people in my room of memories. They were gathered silently in a corner, some wiping their eyes. I felt as though I had been released from a lifelong jail sentence.”

At a distance of seventeen years since she first revisited Coorah, Yvonne is philosophical about what happened to her family. Writing about the journey has helped lay some ghosts to rest, and also the recent acknowledgement of similar separations wrought on the Stolen Generations and Forgotten Australians. “I can really feel their hurt,” she explains.

“My story is not to seek anyone’s sympathy,” she adds, “only to tell the truth of what actually happened under the cloak of religion. Today we live in a more enlightened age. Thanks to the Family Law Act, no blame is attached to either party in a divorce case”.

“I believe I had to go through so much to learn, and I have been able to help people when they’ve been unable to talk about bad things that have happened in their lives.

“Returning to the ‘scene of the crime’ helped to release my pain,” Yvonne adds.

Yvonne’s recollection of her time at Coorah has links to other elements of the property’s story, particularly the acres of daffodils around the house, planted by the original owner Robert Matcham Pitt (1849-1935).

© Michael Burge, all rights reserved.

Write regardless!

The ‘sh%t, click’ moment

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WRITERS' ENEMY The remote control.
WRITERS’ ENEMY The remote control.

IF I don’t manage to write a brilliant novel, there is no telling what I might do.

Got your attention? Good, that was my aim. Have no fear, despite dwelling in my fair share of writer’s angst, I am not about to throw myself in front of a bus, I am only imparting more of what I am discovering about how to tell good stories, and, if you’re still reading, my first line seems to have snagged you.

Many years ago while at ARTTS International media college, television producer John Sichel sat and imparted some basics about writing, tips he’d picked-up working in the trenches of the BBC.

The one thing I recall vividly was John’s demonstration of what he called the ‘shit, click’ moment.

Leaning back in his chair, he mimed a remote control in one hand, turned on an imaginary television, and made us feel we were in the living room with him, about to sit down in front of the ‘next big thing’ on the box.

Only the opening scene of the program wasn’t that great, and John said “shit” as he “clicked” over to another channel.

His improvisation imagined a writer failing to engage their audience.

In storytelling parlance, the antidote to the ‘shit, click’ moment is called a narrative hook. Good use of the classic five-part dramatic structure is all very well, but whether writing a novel, a short story, a screenplay, a play, or telling a ghost story around a campfire, your story needs to avoid the ‘shit, click’ moment.

There are endless ways of writing hooks. One of the most often cited is Jane Austen’s opener for Pride and Prejudice – “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

PROUD OPENER Jane Austen's greatest work starts with one of the best narrative hooks.
PROUD OPENER Jane Austen’s greatest work starts with one of the best narrative hooks.

In only 23 words, Austen distills for her reader the energy behind every plot point of her best-known and best-loved novel, which continues to engage readers two centuries after its publication. Love her or hate her, Austen knew how to engage readers.

Austen does this by making an assertion which might be interpreted as both a joke and as deadly serious – she buries opposing forces deep within her hook. You might continue to read because you completely disagree with her, or because you’re nodding your head in assent.

In a screenplay, the narrative hook need not be dialogue, in fact in film and television they work far better as a purely visual moment, and can unfold across the entire opening scene.

Action movies and thrillers make great use of the narrative hook, indeed the example we were shown at college was the 1987 film Robocop (screenplay by Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner), the opening scene of which shows a semi-futuristic board meeting at which a prototype robot designed to police the streets is shown to a group of unwitting execs in suits (warning: the scene contains graphic violence).

GOOD SHIT, CLICK The opening scene of Paul Verhoeven's Robocop.
GOOD SHIT, CLICK The opening scene of Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop.

The unit is revealed as both aggressive and docile when it is ordered to be, but when the confident designer hands one of the execs a gun and asks him to wield it at the robot to demonstrate its police skills, things go horribly wrong and the exec is slain mercilessly by the prototype in moments of sheer terror.

I was instantly hooked, because I needed to know where that story went after such a scene of corporate horror.

Another excellent reason for having a great narrative hook is when submitting work for consideration. So often a publisher will want to see only the first few chapters, or an agent requests the first ten pages of a script for consideration.

If there is no narrative hook in those brief pages, the publisher or agent may not find what they are looking for, which is access to an entertained readership or audience. They need to make sales, not friends. Even if your novel or script has great material in part three of its narrative structure, they’ll probably only see your idea as a dud.

WRITE REGARDLESSSo, while “It was a dark and stormy night” might not cut it, and “once upon a time” has been done to death, writers need to seek great narrative hooks for our work.

© Michael Burge, all rights reserved.

An extract from Write, Regardless!

My Story, Stage

Frocking-up for Fight Club

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MAX FACTOR Jamie Farr as Klinger in M*A*S*H.

AT the point when rejection of my writing was getting too much, I foolishly turned to another element of the performing arts and took up an even worse pastime if rejection was not my thing – I went back to school and studied acting.

Five years on the stage opened my eyes wider to the inner workings of the performing arts industry, yet I learnt no more about how to get ahead in showbiz.

But the experience gave me some of the most exciting days of my life up to that point, and one production in particular sums up the wacky life led by the actor.

After securing an audition with an independent theatre company in Sydney – we’ll call it Slash Theatre – I was cast in a paid gig (tick), performing Shakespeare’s King Lear (tick), for an established company with a loyal audience (tick), at a real theatre (tick, and don’t laugh, often you’re expected to perform in pub cellars with sewerage pipes at nose level).

The first week saw everyone co-opted into detailed sessions of transposing the text, during which the director made no secret of her willingness to be open to ideas from the actors (tick, and great fodder for a writer).

Then I had an idea …

My character, Kent, is a loyal friend to the King, and spends the bulk of the play in disguise. Casting all Shakespeare’s male characters as female, the director had interestingly changed the power structure of the play, but there was one thing she didn’t do – my role was male in Shakespeare’s original, and remained male in this new vision. Why?

That’s where my idea came in – if being female meant access to power and security in this director’s vision, then surely, I thought, Kent should disguise himself as a woman in this production?

It would add to the comic possibilities, but, like Max Klinger in M*A*S*H, the cross dressing could also be for a purpose that wasn’t entirely funny.

Far from being dismissed, the idea was pondered, and eventually approved. I hasten to add it scared me shitless – I am not a man who would ever pass convincingly as a woman, and so, my courageous offer would need some rationale, some device from within this interesting world, to support my disguise, which was an unchangeable plot point of Shakespeare’s play. It would certainly need an effective costume.

But I completely placed my trust in this director, donned a rehearsal skirt, and experimented with my voice and my character’s journey.

BIG FIGHT Learning stage fighting sorts the men from the boys.
FIGHT CLUB Learning stage fighting sorts the men from the boys.

Concurrently, we were put through our paces by a fight director, daily, to achieve complicated sword fighting sequences. Seeing empowered women wielding swords in pivotal Shakespearean roles was an amazing experience.

Conversely, seeing Lear’s daughters – sketchily drawn as bitchy and evil – played by men, was fascinating.

Many of the cast had been selected for their stage fighting skills and experience. A few of us were totally new to the discipline, so we trained from the ground up. Nevertheless, the cast quickly fell into two groups: the ‘Fight Club’, and the rest of us who were learning to execute the moves.

At last came the moment when the costume designer was coordinating fittings, and his vision for this female-dominated world would surely include a costume to assist in making my idea work within the world of the play.

My excitement quickly turned to dread when he produced a dress which I could tell immediately I was never going to fit into. Vainly, I tried, and it ripped, but by that time the designer had walked away, seemingly uninterested in what I would be wearing for 90 per cent of the play.

But production stresses were kicking-in and the director became unapproachable. Having been a director, I decided that what she’d appreciate the most was a proactive actor who’d sort out his own costume issues for himself.

Being a trained costume designer in addition, I simply replicated what the designer had created for the female characters in the production, so well in fact that even he would have to admit it fitted-into the world of the play seamlessly – forget that he wasn’t really doing his job until he’d adequately costumed me.

Before the great theatrical sin I’d committed was voiced, I also spent time ensuring that a few dangerous backstage conditions were sorted-out, not by complaining at notes sessions, but by proactively recruiting fellow cast members into helping me move the sharp metal spiked stair treads dumped across the main backstage exit, waiting to impale someone’s knee in the dark, like other nasty traps overlooked by the stage managers.

I also tried to bridge the growing gap between the cast (who were expected to assemble bleacher seating before dress runs) and the crew (who were under great stress as a difficult set elements were wrangled). I knew that whinging actors were no help to this scenario.

But when the producer (who’d recently given birth and had her attentions split so many ways she was hardly there) spat at the cast saying we should be thankful we were being paid, I responded … by asserting that it wasn’t helpful to put things that way.

A kind of calm descended on the company at that point – we had a schools’ matinee to perform, and the auditorium filled with hundreds of raucous students, hungry for entertainment.

The show opened, I executed my disguise scene in good time, and we went into the first major fight sequence, in which Kent makes a desperate attempt to escape capture.

SWORD SWING It's just like golf!
SWORD SWING It’s just like golf!

I had one move to execute which the fight director encouraged me to compare to teeing off on a golf course – a 360-degree swing which was Kent’s attempt to slit the throat of his opponent who was prone on the ground. If it was golf, the way this move was choreographed would have seen the ball fly off into the audience …

And that’s exactly what my sword did, after the tip clipped the floor and the choreographed force of the swing behind it sent the weapon right out of my sweaty hands.

In dread, I watched as the silver spike glinted in the light high above the heads of the amazed school boys, who were surely thinking: This is supposed to happen, right?

I had immediate visions of being arrested for impaling children through the temples, as all eyes in the room watched the sword descend, and a small boy – the hero of the day – stood and simply caught the blade as it flew towards his head, just like in footy.

Speechless, I led a standing ovation for the kid who’d saved my ass, and called him to the stage to return the sword to my hand – all in character, I hasten to add – and then returned to the fight, which was only half over.

When I stumbled off the stage minutes later, some of my non-Fight Club comrades were desperate to know what had happened. I implored them to just soldier on.

We went through the Q&A session with students and teachers afterwards, at which the amazing stunts the gathered crowd had participated in were congratulated. I left it to the director and the fight director to explain. They declined, poe-faced.

The schools left, and we started de-mobbing the show, when I got a call to meet the director in the upper foyer.

As I approached I could hear her speaking. Thinking someone was being seen before me, I slowed down, only to see her rehearsing something to an imaginary other. Then it dawned on me – I was the imaginary other.

I cleared my throat, and gently knocked.

WHITLAM'S WAY I got the sack too.
WHITLAM’S WAY I got the sack too.

I don’t know whether it was my courageous act of completing my own costume, to make sense of what I was doing in the confusing world the director was struggling to birth, or whether it was the impromptu thrills of my sword throwing, but I was summarily sacked.

I was quite calm, just asked her to explain how the costume she wanted me to wear fit into the world of the play, let alone across my torso?

She was incapable of speaking, from anger, from fatigue and confusion. This was a useless moment that would never find an answer, because the director had lost touch with the fundamental questions which were part and parcel of her role, and I’d unwittingly opened the doorway to the kind of shame and negative attention endured by cross-dressers for centuries.

I heard later they’d changed the golf-swing move so that if the sword slipped from my replacement’s hands, it would fly into the wings and not at the audience’s heads. Common practice, I would have thought, on reflection.

I will always remember that day fondly as a wildly creative one, because electrifying experiences can happen onstage, even when they are completely unrehearsed.

 

I know I engaged the audience far more in those minutes than the production possibly did over two seasons. Getting the sack for it smarted, but call it synchronicity or coincidence, less than a week later I read that even the great Katharine Hepburn (who I in no way compare myself to) got the sack when she was an emerging actor – it can be a measure of creative fitness.

And I gave one young audience member a day he’ll never forget!

© Michael Burge, all rights reserved. 

An extract from Merely Players.