All posts by Michael Burge

Journalist, author, artist
Day Jobs, My Story

Overdosing on community spirit

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WHERE NOW? Life after the death of a loved one does not always go as planned.

A Writer’s send-off.

THE morning of Mum’s death dawned like a new world, or at least a world in which the gloss that Pat Burge put on things was now gone.

Our home, which had been a hospice bustling with carers and visitors, became, almost overnight, a wasteland. Jen and I now lived in a museum, dedicated to our Mother.

It was to be open barely three months – I was booked on a flight to England to take up my one-year directing course, and Jen was to move around the corner to live with friends who’d generously agreed to Mum’s request to accommodate her.

The night before her funeral, one of our school teachers telephoned, as the light of the day was disappearing. Shocked that Jen and I were home alone, he decided to come over, indignant that we were facing that evening by ourselves. It was a generous action of support that prefaced a series of shocks that the world now held for us.

Because the gloss that Mum put on things had softened the realities of money and the shortcomings of people, and it was fading fast.

Money hit me across the face when I went to the school which had been an integral part of our lives for a decade, to get Mum’s funeral program photocopied. Naively, I didn’t ask anyone’s permission, and subsequently got the kind man who completed the job for us in trouble.

Remembering Mum’s upfront approach, I duly arrived at the Bursar’s office to ensure that the photocopying staff member was only acting on my request. Perhaps this man didn’t realise the hundreds of voluntary hours Pat Burge had given to the school?

With an awkward curtness, he informed me that the copying would have to be paid for. I looked him in the eye, and said: “Fine … send me the bill,” before politely excusing myself. It never came.

It is understandable that people rarely know what to do for the grieving, but amongst our community there were a few risk-takers who broke through their own grief to help us.

Sometimes it’s just the small things – the couple who told me to call, even in the small hours of the morning, if we needed them, and who arrived within 15 minutes when we did; the friend who sat with us and folded those funeral programs, not trying to ‘fix’ anything, but joining us in our quiet grief; and the florist who created glorious bouquets for Mum’s funeral at cost.

A common theme emerged amongst those that went into action for us – these were people who’d been touched by death and loss, and understood that there was almost nothing to say, but plenty to be done.

Another family friend really pulled out the stops for me in particular. Knowing that I didn’t really have enough money to get through the whole year of my course, since I’d been running our ‘home hospice’ for two months and not been able to work, Mary rallied our community to a fundraiser.

DINNER THEATRE The Clarendon Guest House Katoomba, donated for one night to raise funds for a local theatre practitioner.

Our local dinner theatre hosted the event, local chefs fed everyone sumptuously, and almost 100 people came along for a night to raise money for me.

It was quite overwhelming for a young man who really knew himself very little, and who still avoided the spotlight if he could. The issue of having enough money had been a burning little secret for me. The course notes underlined that nobody was going to have time to work during the year – it was going to be intensive.

My community certainly ensured I didn’t have to work for money that year. They gave me the chance to tilt at a dream, and I became determined to eventually find a way to pay them back for their generosity.

But the event also gave people a focus for their grief at losing one of their foundations. I recognised this right in the midst of proceedings, as a ‘celebrity auction’ added to the funds raised – people were having fun, letting off steam, and sending off one of their own in the best way they knew how.

Considering the way that year went, for Jen in particular, I would have given all the money back in exchange for just staying at home and keeping the home fires burning for another 12 months. I think we all needed that.

But things didn’t go that way. I packed-away the museum and said my goodbyes, staving off the inevitable moment when Jen was moved out of her home.

Turns out Mum had asked some of her friends to ensure I got on the plane, so I was assisted in leaving my sister in the hands of our community, and used my one way ticket to London. Our family was scattered to the four winds across two hemispheres. Nobody discussed how any of us were going to cope, we just went through with it.

On the other side of the departure gate, a wall of loneliness hit me. The numbing reality of being on my own, really on my own, for the first time ever.

© Michael Burge, all rights reserved.

My Story, Rural Childhood

Patricia Burge – the carer who laughed

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CAREER CARER Patricia Crawford as a new trainee in 1956 at RPA Hospital, Sydney.

Patricia Burge (1937-1992).

WORDS cannot really describe the shock and grief that made its way into our family when we knew that our dear Mum, Pat, was going to die.

It was one of the very few times I have been moved to prayer… night seeping into our little home, Mum noticeably absent in hospital, and my sister, just a teenager, waiting for my return. I put my arms around Jen and prayed that we would be okay. I don’t have any firm religious beliefs, but that night, we needed to be heard by something.

Pat Burge was a nurse, an excellent old school carer who knew her stuff. Born at the tail end of the generation of Australian women who were encouraged into teaching, secretarial work, or nursing (and little else), Patricia Crawford (as she was born) did the unthinkable for a North Shore girl and got herself enrolled to train at Royal Prince Alfred (RPA) Hospital in Camperdown.

She described nursing school as the making of her since it gave her female leadership in the form of matrons and older nurses who taught well and cared deeply for their profession. It transformed Mum from a directionless girl into the practical, approachable woman that she was.

When she married, she thought it was high time. Most of her friends were already having kids and she was pushing 30. Like most women of her era, she gave up work completely when she had children in quick succession.

‘The Dream’ of pastoralists to marry city girls and create dynasties to work the land was at its peak, and Mum willingly bought into the myth, relocating to a farm outside Delungra in the Northern Tablelands of NSW and making it into a family home after years of standing derelict.

But ‘The Dream’ lasted only five years, until the death of my younger brother Nicholas.

For the next six years Mum struggled to ‘get on with her life’. She gave birth to Jen, and watched her like a hawk until turning one meant the new baby was past the risk period for SIDS.

Approaching 40, she tried her hand at academia, beginning distance education in English literature. But when her first results didn’t match her promise, she gave up. Being part of the group who needed her, I was unaware of the pain that surfaced, the hopes that were dashed, and the disappointment she brought to those around her as a result of not living ‘The Dream’ to its fullest.

Nobody who hadn’t promised to stick by her ‘for better or for worse’ was affected, but when Pat Burge tested ‘The Dream’, it blew up in her face.

The moment she decided to leave Inverell was one of the turning points of Mum’s short life. No longer was she towing the line for others. She became a self-actualised person, probably for the first time. She sat her kids down and asked us if we wanted to come. I said “yes” without hesitation. What we left that Spring of 1979 was an already broken home. Dad had left, and Inverell held nothing for mum anymore. ‘The Dream’ was over.

The night we drove away, Mum turned the radio up in shock at the news that Lord Mountbatten had been killed by an IRA bomb. Mum was very ‘old school’ North Shore – the Royal Family meant something to her – and his death was like a watershed. She entered a time when there were no more heroes, only herself.

OH, PAT! Sleeves rolled-up for a school working bee, but funny bone always ready!

For the next 13 years she created a world for her children. She surrounded herself with great friends. She returned to nursing and achieved in that field in ways that she never envisaged. She taught us to believe we could do, and be, anything, and encouraged us towards a much broader set of dreams. In doing all this, Pat Burge became a heroine.

It was a bright, brief time, and we all shone.

By the time her cancer was picked-up through exploratory surgery, treatments were all too late.

Mum told me that as she woke from the anaesthetic, she felt for the post-operative tubes and knew her prognosis by virtue of her training, thinking “oh, damn!” for a moment.

Then, true to this heroine, she stayed positive for all our sakes. There was simply no other choice, and she achieved a year of denial with a funny grace – laughing about being pushed around in wheelchairs, caring for the recovering ladies who shared her hospital room, and eschewing chemotherapy until she could almost count the days left to her.

A good friend of Mum’s who was on duty at the local hospital broke the news to me that her death was imminent. He and I told her together and she just accepted it, simply because she already knew. Entering new emotional territory, we decided in a matter of minutes that we would be bringing her home to die.

During those last weeks we talked about the moments in her life that had meant something to her. These talks enabled me to write all but the last paragraph of her obituary.

What happened after that was so profound that I could only describe it as “a powerful death, after a powerful life”.

Surrounded by her nursing friends, who held her, monitored her, and comforted her, Pat Burge died in her own bed after a series of exhilarated breaths, like she could see something great coming. She had farewelled everyone, made peace with her journey, showed no more than a hint of despair and an abundance of humour.

Without her, most of us who had relied on her heroism came to absolutely nothing, and we needed to rebuild from deep within.

But hers was an inspiring death, which in its own time saw my prayer answered. We have been okay, since she had to leave us. We’ve had to grow the seeds she planted, the germ of which is the emotional intelligence that was Mum’s key attribute. When taken care of, they proved to bear wonderful fruit, and still do.

© Michael Burge, all rights reserved.

My Story, Stage

Drama School Dream Factory – Act 3

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LESS IS MORE Jennifer Kent in Lindy Davies’ production of ‘Miss Sarah Sampson’ (Photograph by Marco Bok).

A Writer’s first lesson in the odds.

Theory was left swiftly behind during my third year at NIDA, and we were on show in a series of productions, the budgets for which were so high I have never worked on any theatre so richly supported since.

I got to work with a great director – Lindy Davies – on a production of Gotthold Lessing’s Miss Sara Sampson, a story akin to Dangerous Liaisons, and set in the same period.

Lindy encouraged me in a ‘less is more’ approach, and we co-created a very simple design which evoked the period through costume, but didn’t belt the audience over the head in terms of the set.

This was mainly achieved through the use of fabric, rope, and shadows, sketching a sense of the beams and walls of an English coastal town in the late 18th Century.

I will forever remember Lindy fondly for being the first person to break through my reserve, by demanding, assertively, yet with respect, that I not shut-down and internalise my thought process when we encountered an issue during the technical rehearsal.

It was a refreshing shock, prefacing the kind of collaborator I would eventually become. In some ways it was the greatest lesson I got at NIDA, and it took about 30 seconds to impart.

I was then designated the set design for Stephen Sondheim’s rarely-staged Merrily We Roll Along, with the late Tom Lingwood mentoring me through what was a massive undertaking.

Tom was originally from Britain, designer of the first production at the Sydney Opera House. One of the first things I ever learnt about him was how he survived the bombing of his home during The Blitz. When describing the worst moment of fear he’d ever experienced, Tom recalled having to leap an entire flight of steps in one go, bursting with adrenalin.

Not surprisingly, there was something very grounded about Tom. He championed my ideas, helped get my head around a massive list of scenes, and guided me in taking a positive approach to mopping up the mess made of our work after the director put his stamp on the show’s design.

Tom also responded when my mother started chemotherapy in the midst of that production, not with commiserations, but with action. He covered for me when I needed to get on the train and go home, by painting the entire theatre floor with a detailed texture for me, and saying I’d done it!

MORE IS MORE Poster from the original Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim’s complex musical.

In the end I didn’t hit the mark with this show, as a ‘less is more’ designer. I was criticised because the expected level of detail was not there. I suppose it takes passion to reach that level. It also takes emotional involvement, and probably a greater sense of security than I had at the time.

I caused frustration, because I was not open to creative whims at the ‘right’ time, or in the ‘right’ way. I just wanted to cover all the bases. If they wanted icing on the cake, they needed to look elsewhere.

But Tom was always an ally – he’d been in the trenches with me, after all.

My last NIDA production saw me tackling the design of costumes for Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind, a truly wonderful play which I should have paid more attention to at the time, since it spoke of the kind of experiences I was going through in my life.

By that time I just hid myself away in the wardrobe department and just put it all together as best I could, counting down the days until I could leave and see to my family.

I also had my eyes on another option. I think working with Lindy was the catalyst – surely there was a way to be creative like her, but perhaps not in Australia? I was about to graduate as a designer, and that was all that was expected of me. The NIDA ‘brand’ was fairly limiting in that regard. Being only 21 I wanted to explore more options, so I looked to England, found a course at a place called ARTTS International, and applied for a scholarship to get myself over there.

Thinking about it now, I can’t believe I had my head together to make such a big plan at that time. Mum was getting sicker, and yet none of us were really talking about it. There may be a kind of ‘future instinct’ when the death of a loved-one is imminent, where you leap-frog, in your imagination, past the death and start creating a new life.

I was successful in getting into ARTTS, and secured a scholarship to get me there. I finished my NIDA course by working in the art department of a feature film as my secondment, and then went home. What I found was about as real as it gets.

NIDA graduate Jeremy Sims once described the Australian Theatre as a ‘cottage industry’, which I thought was very apt. It doesn’t disparage us, but it puts our industriousness into the correct commercial context.

At the time I was at NIDA, we must have been amongst the most funded students in the country, yet we graduated into a world in which the scope did not match the numbers of qualified workers, not by a very, very long shot.

Yes, they tell you that 99% of you will be out of work 99% of the time. Where, in a dream factory like NIDA, did they think they were going to find anyone to listen to odds like that?

© Michael Burge, all rights reserved.