I was the eldest of a family of 8 children. My parents married soon after turning 20. When I look back now at what I knew when I was 20 and what I now know, I can only admire them for the task they undertook to raise a family. They chose to have children with little education, hardly any experience of what it meant to be parents (my father was orphaned at the age of 14), and hardly two pennies to rub together. Although, despite this, later in life having discovered the value of living sustainably, I was delighted to find out that my first bed as a baby was a wooden fruit box. However, one of the consequences of a large family and being the eldest child and female, it fell to myself, and my sister who was born less than a year after me, to share the family responsibilities.
It took me years to appreciate the gift of this responsibility and to understand my great love of reading and writing. As children, my parents lived in country communities in Australia and, like many others, after enduring the hardships at the height of the Great Depression in 1932 they had little access to education, training, and worldly goods. Even though I knew things like my mother having owned only the 2 or 3 dresses she had made for herself throughout my early years and my father holding down 2 or 3 jobs at a time to keep us fed, sheltered, and clothed — I had no real appreciation of the sacrifices they had made on our behalf and resented being a girl and having to “do” things and be responsible for household chores and taking care of the younger children. It was a time when the boys were going to be the breadwinners in the family and so it was seen as important for them to be educated and have a trade. However, the girls were only going to get married so what was the point of an education. As early as 9 years of age, I distinctly remember my father admonishing me for reading because “Haven’t you got something to do, put that book down?” —not that we had many books at the time—there was a battered old copy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, a copy of Forever Amber which we were repeatedly warned not to touch, and a copy of May Gibbs, The Gumnut Fairies which eventually fell apart. These books were kept in a closed cupboard: there was no bookshelf.
Understandably, I grew up driven to “do” things and felt guilty sitting down to read or write or think. But as soon as I discovered the school library I couldn’t keep away from the books and the new world I discovered in them. I finally escaped home at the age of 16, still not valuing what I had learned from such a large family and still resenting being a “girl”. I can still remember walking down Swanston Street on my way to enrol in my first year of a Photography course at RMIT. The air was stifling hot and heavily polluted by the leaded petrol of many cars but I was “free”, and jubilantly walking anonymously among the crowds, finally allowed to be just myself, responsible for myself, liberated from all of the projections and expectations of who my small country community thought I should be, and consequently of who I was.
I soon discovered that this freedom had come at a cost, but one I had placed upon myself. I spent many years blaming other people in my life or complaining about the way my life was unfolding before I realized I was responsible for the way I lived. It was my choice as to what I “did”, what I “thought”, and in the end, what I “became”. My real freedom arrived when I finally realized that I was responsible for my happiness. It was who I chose to be that governed how I felt, and it had little to do with what other people thought about me or how they treated me. I didn’t have to be “good” and “nice” to be accepted by others. They were responsible for their actions as I was responsible for mine. Although I lived life with curiosity and a great deal of joy, it wasn’t until I took responsibility for my thoughts and acted with integrity and authenticity that I experienced a greater sense of happiness, contentment, and confidence in my newfound freedom. If I felt sad, it was ok, it was because I chose to feel this natural feeling, not because someone else was making me feel sad. No person can “make” another person feel either sad or happy, it is us who chooses to feel that way in response to another’s actions. It is we who choose to feel the feeling, whatever that feeling may be. Just because life doesn’t work out the way we expect it to or just because someone doesn’t give us what we expect to get, it doesn’t mean that such life experiences or such people’s actions are the reason for our happiness or unhappiness. It is always us; ourselves who are responsible for who we are being. I have found a great deal of happiness in being responsible for my happiness.
