Avon Lea

I was recently re-reading an essay about an interesting part of Australia's queer history. Historian Ruth Ford has written in some detail about Annie Payne, a British migrant who came to New South Wales at some time around the turn of the 20th century (Ford 44). According to the electoral rolls from 1903, 1906, and 1908, Annie Payne worked as a domestic in Newcastle. In about 1908, she met Harriet Brown. Harriet was also a domestic, and she lived across the road from Annie on Watt Street in Newcastle (Ford 45). At some point in the next three years, Annie Payne disappeared entirely and Harry Payne appeared. Payne dressed, and passed, as a man. On 30 August 1911, Harry Payne and Harriet Brown wed in East Maitland (Ford 45). It was the beginning of a marriage that lasted over fifteen years, until Harriet’s death in 1927. The couple moved to Sydney and Harry worked in a variety of jobs, including work as a tram conductor, tram driver, commercial traveller, and rate collector, while Harriet was a homemaker (45).

Did Harry and Harriet consider themselves both female? Or was Harry what we would now call transgendered? These are just two of an infinite array of possibilities. It is impossible to say how the Paynes saw themselves. But I do like to imagine them.

I like to imagine the Paynes in the house they shared in the outer suburbs of Sydney, the house they named “Avon Lea”. Harry coming home, loosening his tie and talking about his day. Drinking tea or beer with Harriet over their kitchen table in their working-class suburb. Feeling proud of the life they had built together. Forgetting their secret, and just living. Mowing the lawn, hanging pictures, going for Sunday drives. I like to imagine this because I know that what Heather and I have is not as new, or as threatening, as some people imagine. I also like to imagine this for Harry and Harriet. Apart from historians, it seems that there is no-one left to remember them, and historians must mainly remember facts. I like to try to imagine the things that got lost behind the facts, small trinkets lost like dropped change.

In 1928, after Harriet’s death, Harry married again, under the name of Harcourt Payne. He married a widow by the name of Louisa Maria Adams. It is unclear if Louisa knew of Harcourt’s biological sex, but given Louisa’s strong, lifelong involvement with the Salvation Army Church, this seems unlikely. Ten years after they married, Louisa Payne also passed away.

I do not like to imagine what happened next. Harcourt was in deep mourning, and his physical health deteriorated. Eight months after Louisa’s death, Harcourt “collapsed in the street” (Ford 47). His doctor organised his admittance to the Lidcombe Old Men’s Home/State Hospital. Harcourt was now 64 years old. Upon admission, he was bathed, and found to be a woman. He was immediately sent to a women’s hospital, examined by doctors, and questioned by police. The story was picked up and publicised widely in the newspapers. Harcourt was deemed to be insane and was held in a mental hospital, where he died a year later. He was buried in an unmarked grave.


Works cited:

Ford, Ruth. “They ‘were wed, and merrily rang the bells’: Gender-crossing and same-sex marriage in Australia , 1900-1940” in Graham Willet and David Phillips, eds., Australian Gay and Lesbian Perspectives 5, Australian Centre for Lesbian and Gay Research, 2000, pp.41-66.

Ideas of home

I've been thinking lately about ideas of home and family. In particular, I've been thinking about the differences between institutional ideas of home and family, and the real act of family, the act of making a home.

As I've been writing the story of Heather and me, it's become clear to me that I need to think further about my own past. In order to understand where I am now, I need to better understand my past. I especially need to understand my mother's background. She and I have had a troubled relationship at times, and I have not been as sympathetic or understanding of her as I could have been. By writing about her now, I hope to reclaim some of what has been lost to anger and misunderstanding.

When my mother was eight years old, her father went to work one day and never came home. Many years later, my grandmother, Thelma, told me that her husband had a gambling problem, and large debts. His disappearance had an immediate and catastrophic effect on the family. There simply was not enough money to support my grandmother and her seven children. The three eldest girls, who were in their early to middle teens, quit school and began to work. The four youngest—two boys and two girls—were placed in State-run Homes—orphanages, effectively. My mother and her two-year-old sister, S., were placed in a girls’ institution, and their brothers in a boys’ institution.

Within a couple of years, S. was adopted, which was probably for the best. At the Home, the children were beaten, slapped, and fed rotten food on a regular basis. They endured all sorts of horrendous punishments, often for no reason. Like many of the institutions of the time, it was a hellish; 40 years later it would be just one of scores of institutions to be investigated in a State Government’s Forde Inquiry. The Inquiry found that abuse and neglect were commonplace in these institutions, institutions which purported to care for these homeless children of the poor.

Mum was in the Home until she was fifteen, when she was permitted to leave to find work. She returned to live with her mother and one of her sisters. The family never saw Sunny again. When they managed to locate her years later, she didn’t want any contact with her biological family.

Mum was only two years out of the Home when she married my father at seventeen. She had her first child a year later. I think she wanted to have a perfect little family, a perfect marriage, but she had nothing on which to model her ideas of perfection. She and Dad didn’t do too badly, but there have been some bumpy patches. As she’s grown older, many things have come to haunt her, and I think her childhood has a large part to play in this. Never terribly comfortable in social situations, she’s grown increasingly reclusive over the past ten or fifteen years. She avoids leaving the house because she sometimes has panic attacks when she goes to do the shopping. She’ll find herself standing by the laundry powder or the baked beans with the world crumbling around her, her heart pounding, and an absolute certainty that she’s going to die.

She doesn’t travel any more. She came to Brisbane a few years back to see a specialist when her health started to fail. It’s the only trip she’s made in the twelve years since I left home. I thought she would make an exception for the wedding party, but she didn’t. She talked about it a little, said she’d like to, but “who would look after the pets?” I told her she could arrange for someone to feed them, surely; or she could leave enough food for a day, fly down just for the party and return the next day. But she couldn’t.

It’s a pointless task to speculate on how Mum might have been different if my grandfather never left, or if the Home provided a nurturing environment. But I do speculate, sometimes. I wonder how our family might have been different. Some people say that you shouldn’t wish things were different, because otherwise you wouldn’t be the person you are. I do wish things had been different, though. How could I not? If things were different, my mother might have had a chance to be happy. I don’t write those words lightly. I don’t mean she might have thrown dinner parties and gone out dancing. I mean that she might have had a chance to be happy.

A Senate report from 2004 estimates that 500 000 or more Australians were in some form of "care" in the past century. The report contains submissions from hundreds of care-leavers and details the abuse they suffered and the ongoing effects of their time in the institution. The report states: "Submissions refer frequently to a range of legacies including low self-esteem, lack of confidence, depression, fear and distrust, anger, shame, guilt, obsessiveness, social anxieties, phobias, recurring nightmares, tension, migraines, and speech difficulties" (145-46). Apart from the last two, I would say my mother has suffered all of these symptoms at some point, and most of them quite regularly, for all of my life.

In ways that I don't fully understand yet, my mother's experience influences me as well. I want to understand it better. I write; it's what I do to try to understand. And so I will write about my mother.