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Lunch With Jennifer Byrne |
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Page 3 of 4
And what nature didn’t bestow, she trained into her grain. Did that young girl never whinge? I ask. “Well, if she did I’d have taken her round the back of the shed and given her a solid whack across the chops.”
Yates grew up some 15km from the Brisbane GPO on a market garden cleared from scrub by her grandfather. Sandra of Sunnybrook Farm, riding her bike to school, plenty of room to play. A brief brush with fame came at five, when the CSIRO came to Sunnybrook to make a film on carrots – “and growing carrots is about as exciting as watching paint dry so they came up and set up the tripod and the camera and they’re looking at this great row of bloody carrots. Carrots don’t do anything. So they looked around and said, ‘We need something to happen in this landscape – there’s a kid.’ I marched down this row of carrots peering earnestly at them wearing a maroon pinafore, nothing else; no shoes, no blouse under it, just this pinafore thing.”
She married at 18, had her first child at 20, left Queensland for the first time when she was 27. Her strongest memory of the time and place is the obsession with illegitimacy and the stream of unmarried girls who simply disappeared before returning home alone a year later, having given up the child they were carrying. There’s a point here. Her second child, Matthew, was born out of wedlock. Michael raised him from the age of seven, yet one of the moments of her life, she says, came a few years back when Matthew, then in his late 20s, asked what she thought of the idea of asking Michael to adopt him, officially.
Immediate response? “Oh, huge lump in the throat. Because I understood the context for it, that it was a big endorsement ... the fact that Matthew wanted it said to me that he acknowledged Michael had done a good job, and recognised that Michael loved him and had been a good father.”
It cost between $5000 and $7000; they were fingerprinted by police for criminal records; a DOCS worker interviewed them to establish they weren’t child molesters. Strangest of all, because they were acting as a couple, she had to adopt her own son. “It took a year and when it was over, we had a little party and, yeah, it was special and it has changed things between them. They’re calmer with each other, more relaxed. Funny, isn’t it? It matters in ways you couldn’t begin to define, but it matters.”
I ask if, as a feminist, it was harder to raise a daughter – her name’s Anne – than a son, and she agrees. What was the worst thing she ever did to you? “She asked Michael to give her away. I mean, how can you give someone away? It’s so ideologically incorrect I was mortified. Mortified! We always talked about it, that you are not a chattel, you can’t possibly be given away when you get married. Someone will represent the family and it’ll probably be me, but that’s what we’ll be doing. Little trollop, she’d only been engaged a nanosecond and she came crashing in straight up to Michael – ‘Will you give me away?’ And he said, ‘Yes, of course I will’, because he was feeling all preeny. I” – she says in her best Lady Bracknell voice – “I was just astonished.”
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