I intend this story to accompany articles in the November issue of Subud Voice. It has two themes. First, the Irish diapsora in Australia…a sideshow to Ilaina Lennard’s story of Bapak’s last visit to Ireland…And second, it is the story of my mother’s death and resonates I hope with the stories by Rachman Mitchell and Levi Lemberger about the deaths of parents…

In that period of mass starvation, disease and emigration between 1845 and 1852, commonly known as the Great Potato Famine, many of the Irish came to Australia, and greatly shaped the development of our nation. Perhaps the most famous of all Australians, the outlaw Ned Kelly, was, of course, of Irish stock. And I myself am partly of Irish descent.

My father died when I was very young and my mother did not remarry for many years. But then when she was in her late fifties, she moved to a little country town in Queensland called Coominya. It is about 70 kms due west of Brisbane. It is an area mostly settled by Germans and Irish from the great Irish diaspora. And my mother married a farmer from the area.

 

Then a few years later my mother fell ill with cancer and I went to spend the last few weeks of her life with her in Coominya. My mother was in the hospital in a town called Esk and I would visit her every day, but then after that there was not much to do so I used to wander around talking to the local people.

I used to visit an old Irishman called Ned Hanrahan, a friend of my mother’s. He lived just outside Coominya in the house his father had built when he first came here, and where Ned was born in 1913. The kitchen was built separate from the house with a passage between the two, as was the custom up there, so that if a fire broke out in the kitchen at least the whole house wouldn’t burn down.

 

Ned’s father came from County Cork. Ned showed me the steamship ticket. It cost £7 and stated that he had to provide his own bedding and mess utensils.

Ned told me a lot about the history of the district. Occasionally around Coominya you’d come upon the foundations of where there’d once been a farmhouse, and Ned told me these were all that remained of 900 soldier settlements that had been tried around Coominya after the First World War.

 

 “They were given a thirty acre plot, a grubber, a hand plough and a horse and cart and told ‘go for it boy’. They were all English. It was hopeless. They knew nothing of farming. None of them left now. By the time they got the ground cleared, they’d had enough of it.”

He talked about how it had been in Coominya in “the good old days”. “It was a good living in those days. You always had something coming in. There wasn’t a fortune in it, but you had a cream cheque regular, and then you’d sell a batch of pigs every few months. You ate well, were clothed well, and had all the fun in the world. Go to Coominya on a pig day. The pub did well.

“Now it’s changed. Nobody wants to sit under a cow twice a day seven days a week. You’d be hard put to find a pig in Coominya these days. People left, sold to developers, old people died out, young people went to jobs in the city.”

During the war there had been an aerodrome near Coominya and a lot of Americans had been stationed there. “I don’t know how many thousand they had out there. The Yanks came in and the poor Aussies had to get out. You’d hear their planes, they came in like a mob of bees when they came. They had two dances a week. Every Saturday and Wednesday, playing the hillbilly records until they wore out. Girls from the farms, they’d come in from miles around. Especially when there was soldiers around. The Air Force ran trucks to pick them up.”

***

There was an old lady called Miss Flynn who lived by herself in a house beside one of the general stores.

“My people came here in 1908,” she told me. “They were all railway people. My dad was a ganger on the railways. During World War One, there was a big sawmill here and it was a great dairying district. They built a hall, then churches and a school. Miss Thomson was the teacher. I never had another teacher and I was there until I was sixteen. There’s 240 children go to the school now, but I don’t know anyone now. All the oldies are dying out. I’ve been offered good money for my place, but I don’t like to part with it. Sentimental, I suppose.

“My father lived to be eighty four. He lost his eyes in an accident, poor man. We nursed him. We didn’t want to put him in a home or anything. He was a handsome old chap with his white moustache. My brothers used to come up on the train and they’d trim his whiskers for him and shave him and they’d say: ‘Now, Dad you look like a prince!’ And he’d laugh like anything, and then we’d have afternoon tea for them. I’d go and buy them some lollies. They didn’t smoke but they were great old sweet eaters.

“But they’re all gone now. I’m all left on my own. Last of the generation. I’m safe here anyhow. In the city so many dreadful things happen. I always looked after our church, sixty years or more. I should go to heaven. Well, I don’t know so much about that! But it was always my pleasure to do so, to look after the church.

“During The Depression there were always bagmen at the back door and they camped over there by the cricket oval. Oh yes, very prevalent, they were. Always around then.

 

 “Some of them used to drink in the old days. The women, too, they were just as bad as the men. My mum came in one day, she was terribly tickled. An old lady, Granny O’Neil just came away from the hotel and she was in an old cart. Mr. Muckett, the blacksmith, made all the carts. Anyway, poor old Granny O’Neil fell out of the cart, right out there in front of our house, and Mr. Cameron came along on his beautiful horse like a racehorse, and he picked her up and put her back in her cart. ‘May the curse of Ireland fly over your head,’ she called out after him. Mum thought it was the funniest thing she’d ever heard.”

***

For three weeks I went to visit my mother every day in the hospital. One day I asked the doctor how much longer she would live and he said: “She could go on for another three weeks, or another three months, or she could go tomorrow.”

I thought I’d take a break from visiting my mother. I’d been to visit her every day and I wanted to go to latihan in Brisbane, so I asked her: “Would you mind if I don’t come to see you tomorrow. I’d like to go and visit some people in Brisbane.”

“Oh no, love, you go. Don’t think you have to come in and see me every day. You go to Brisbane and see your friends.”

It seemed like she meant it and so the next day I went to Brisbane. When I cam back from Brisbane about eight o’ clock at night, I was surprised to see that all the lights were on in my stepfather’s house. He met me at the door and said: “She’s gone.”

For a moment I didn’t understand what he meant. Who’s gone? Where?

Later we were talking and I said to him: “Isn’t that a strange thing. I go to see her every day for three weeks, and then the one day I don’t go to see her is the day she dies.”

“But isn’t that just like your mother,’ he said. “No fuss. Never wanted to be any trouble to anyone. She didn’t want you or anyone else to see her go.”

 ***

The Presbyterian minister who came to do the funeral service was a friendly man in his sixties with silvery hair. My mother wasn’t a churchgoer, but he had met her once or twice. We gathered around the grave and he said some prayers and read from Bible.

When it came to the eulogy he said: “I’m not going to make a big speech. Dorothy wouldn’t have wanted that. I’m just going to let each one of you remember Dorothy in your own way for a few moments in silence.”

I thought, Oh well, fair enough. What can you expect? He didn’t know her after all. You couldn’t really expect him to have anything to say.

But while we were standing there in silence he said: “You know I was looking at us all outside the cemetery, and we’d all arranged ourselves in a very orderly way, and then we came into the cemetery in a nice orderly way, and I thought, Dorothy would have been proud of us because she was a very neat and orderly person.’

He’d struck on something about my mother that was true. She was always a well-organised person. The minister looked pleased with himself, amazed really, like a magician who has just pulled a rabbit out of a hat when he didn’t even know he had one in there.

***

I had to dispose of my mother’s things.

Of course she’d left everything in a neat and orderly way with precise written instructions about what was to be done with it all.

There were some books she wanted distributed to various people. I kept some tapestries she’d done, a Venetian scene at sunset, a portrait of an old Cornish fisherman, a boy on a pony who reminded her of her grandson. There was a lot of fine needlework that she’d done for her trousseau: tablecloths and napkins embroidered with little flowers.

There were all the patterns from her dressmaking. It seemed a shame to throw them out, but what else could you do with them?

There was the family photo album. Here is my mother as a girl on a trip to the Blue Mountains with her parents and brother and sister. Here is my father posing beside a shark that someone had caught at a beach. Here is a photo of my mother and father with me as a baby in my mother’s arms.

It’s during the war, and my father, home on leave, is wearing his Air Force uniform. My mother is smiling at the cameras and in her eyes there is no hint of the sorrows to come. She has everything she ever wanted in life, a good husband, children. The future, she assumes, once this war is over, will proceed in its pleasant and predictable way. She has no sense that it will all be ripped away from her.

Here’s a photograph of my sister and I. She is aged two. She is toothless, but smiling, full of hope, innocence. How could it have come to pass that she would kill herself? That was the hardest thing I ever had to do, to ring my mother and tell her my sister had committed suicide.

These photographs seemed like clean sheets of paper on which terrible messages had been written in black ink.

When I had finished sorting it all out, everything of my mother’s that was to be kept fitted into a small suitcase.

Listen to Lament

As we know, aging comes in waves.  One day we feel as good as we ever did, better.  We are full of vim and youthful vigour.  We are still 18 years old.  The next day we are so exhausted we can barely drag our useless carcase around.

I was recently teaching creative writing at BCU school in Central Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo.  One of my students, Iga,  a Dayak, the indigenous people of Borneo, told me that she wanted to write about “exploring my Dayak heritage”.

One of the things she wrote was a biography of the modern Dayak hero Tjilik Riwut. He achieved legendary status because of his heroic exploits during Indonesia’s struggle for independence after the WW2 when the Dutch returned and try to reimpose colonialism.

He achieved so much prestige and had so much clout that he was able to negotiate a deal with Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno, that the Dayak people should be given a homeland.  This led directly to the creation of Central Kalimantan and Tjilik Riwut also founded its capital, Palankaraya.  So when you come to Palankaraya, you find many things named after Tjilik Riwut.  The airport is named after him and the main highway, which runs north from Palankaraya,  is also named after him.

He was also responsible for having the traditional religion of the Dayaks recognised as an official religion in Indonesia.  This required a certain sleight of hand. One of the five principles upon which the Indonesian constitution is founded is  tolerance for the major world religions such as Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism.

The Dayak religion is really shamanistic and animistic, but by a little sleight of hand, Tjilik Riwut had it renamed, Hindu Kaharingan. While I am not an expert, it seems to me to have almost no common features with Hinduism .(Whereas in Bali, of course, the religion is recognisably Hindu.) But by renaming it as such, he hoped to give it equal prestige with the other religions and thus ensure its survival.

As with other animistic religions (as with the Australian aborigines for example), the Dayaks believe that certain places are imbued with sacred power and often incorporate legends about ancestors and the spirit world. Conspicuous outcrops of rocks are often held to be sacred.

Just a few kilometres up Tjilik Riwut Highway from where BCU school is situated, there is a collection of rocks known as Bukit Batu.  These rocks were very important to young Tjilik Riwut who lived nearby.  He often went to visit these rocks to meditate and gain strength and wisdom.

After having read Iga’s account of the sacred rocks, I was very eager to see them, and more, to experience them. Was there some sacred power there that I would feel? Would I have some dramatic and transformative experience?

The Expedition

So, one Sunday, an expedition was arranged.  I was accompanied by Iga and her friend Fenny, students at the school, and by Hestu (from Java) and Emilie (from France), teachers at the school. We drove up Tjilik Riwut Highway for an hour to Bukit Batu.

The rocks were quite a busy place.  Obviously it is a popular Sunday spot for people from roundabout and there were lots of people picnicking as well as clambering about on the rocks.

Bule (foreigners, white eyes) are common enough in this part of Borneo and I generally do not attract too much attention, but the sight of a decrepit old man accompanied by four vibrant and attractive young women was a cause of curiosity and we soon had a crowd of enthusiastic observers following us about.

We went around the rocks and visited the various sacred spots, accompanied by a young guide.  At this particular place you could gather wisdom.  At another place you could gather strength.  Then we came to perhaps the most famous and important place in the whole collection of rocks, a cleft between two rocks, which you are supposed to squeeze between. You make a wish and if you get through, your wish will be granted.

The guide went first and got through quite easily.  Then Iga and Emilie got through.  Wisely, Hestu and Fenny did not essay the ordeal. Now, the gathered crowd, numbering several hundred, waited with bated breath.  Would the aged bule, no longer as slim as he once was, also try to squeeze though the cleft? I felt it would be a severe loss of face if I did not.  I felt I could not let down my nation and my people and so I tried to squeeze between the rocks.

To the great excitement and amusement of the crowd I was soon stuck fast.  I could not go forward and I could not go back.  Then ensued a scene of great, hilarity, if you were not the one in the centre of it.  One young woman pushing from behind, another young woman pulling from in front, the guide shouting out instructions (to pull in my stomach, lower my bum)  and Emilie exhorting me to pray. Probably it was the prayer that did it, and I squeezed through and popped out the other side like toothpaste out of a tube.

I was shaken.  I was exhausted. I was trembling, embarrassed and humiliated.  I felt I had lost all face.  I had no more face. I was faceless.  On top of everything else, I realised I had forgotten to make a wish before entering the cleft and my ordeal had been in vain, totally pointless.

But there was worse to follow.  You now had to scramble around a ridge of rock to continue your journey.  The ridge of rock ran around a cliff face.  Sure, it was only a drop of about five or six meters, but it looked to me that if you fell the wrong way you could easily break your leg, or even your neck.

The guide and the young ladies scrambled gracefully around, but I could not do it.  I just did not have the strength in my arms anymore, or the agility in my limbs, to get myself around this ridge.  And I could not go back. The guide said it was impossible to get back through the cleft. But once again with some people pulling, and some people pushing, and instructions called out, and prayers to God prayed, I did somehow clamber around the ridge and with trembling limbs came down from the rocks.

The Pool of Eternal Youth

The young ladies were very kind to me, but I could tell they had been embarrassed at having been part of these spectacles.  I had not been cool.  The coolest of these four young ladies is Fenny who is very slim and looks like a fashion model and always conducts itself with extraordinary natural cool.  She is just incapable  of any movement that is not elegant and charming.

We climbed down off the rocks and photographs were taken.  I was so drained, so exhausted, feeling so stupid, that I was incapable of posing nicely in a photograph.  I was aware of myself standing there like a lump with dangling hands, while the young women arranged themselves in fetching attitudes.  At one point, Fenny turned to me, and said quite kindly, “Could you please do something cool with your hands?”

 

The last place to visit on our tour of the rocks was a hollow in a rock filled with greenish water.  This is said to be  filled by a spring which never dries out, not even in times of severest drought.

You approach the rock, and ask permission to take water from it.  You kneel by the little bowl of water and splash some on your face.  It is supposed to be the Spring of Eternal Youth.  I splashed some on my face.  Later I saw the photographs the girls had taken of this white-haired old man crouching by the pool splashing water on himself. Who was it? That was not me! Surely not!  I am still young! Barely eighteen!

We were all rather subdued on the drive back to BCU School.  I knew I had lost face with the young women.  I had been an embarrassment.  Of course, they were much too nice to say anything, but it seemed they had trouble looking at me or speaking to me; I knew some damage had been done to my prestige in their eyes.

Why do I do these adventurous things? I could have just been an onlooker. I didn’t have to do it. What was I trying to prove? What was the point of these exertions? Did I feel I had to make up for some ancestral or karmic misdemeanour? Was I labouring under a curse? Why did I ever feel I had to leave the safety of my home and the comfort of my couch?

Unlike Tjilik Riwut, my visit to the rocks had not been a gathering of strength and wisdom, but just the opposite.  It had been a revelation of weakness and stupidity accompanying the descent into old age.

Still, I saw I had had a very real experience at the rocks and that was what they were all about.  I had been confronted by a truth, a reality.  It had been an ordeal, a rite of passage between a rock and a hard place. And isn’t that life? Sometimes we get stuck and it takes a lot of energy to get unstuck and to move on?

Sometimes there’s a ridge we have to cross, and there is danger, but somehow we have to cross over, given all our inadequacies, even though it looks more like a mad, desperate scramble than the essence of “cool”. Perhaps to experience your weakness and inadequacy is an essential prelude to the gaining of strength and wisdom.

Of course within a day or two the whole thing had been forgotten.  My relationship with the young women was just as secure as it had ever been.  Like an anvil dropped in the sea, the incident disappeared without trace, leaving no mark, no sign.  Probably it is I alone who now recall it ever happened.  And within a day or two I was right back to feeling like an 18-year-old again.

I have traveled the world for 30 years interviewing many Subud members, but I have never interviewed the person closest to me, my wife.

We were sitting together this morning and she asked, “What did you discuss at the helpers’ meeting last night?”

I said, “We talked about why people leave Subud and whether there is anything that we can do about it. Why do people who have been in Subud for a long time drift away? And why do those who’ve only just been opened stop coming? Why do you think that is?”Harris Smart writes…

 I have traveled the world for 30 years interviewing many Subud members, but I have never interviewed the person closest to me, my wife.

 We were sitting together this morning and she asked, “What did you discuss at the helpers’ meeting last night?”

 I said, “We talked about why people leave Subud and whether there is anything that we can do about it. Why do people who have been in Subud for a long time drift away? And why do those who’ve only just been opened stop coming? Why do you think that is?”

 “Well, Subud requires a lot of patience,” she replied. “There are no instant fixes. Perhaps people come in with the wrong expectation that everything in their lives is suddenly going to be lovely. And then, you can go on for a long time, for years, feeling nothing and you have to have the patience to go through that.”

It was then that it occurred to me that I should interview my wife about her Subud story. She told me…

 I was opened 27 years ago. It grew out of my friendship with Simone Melder. She was someone I knew in the community of Sri Lankan people in Melbourne. There was something special about her. She had a goodness about her. I thought, what this person is following must be good. I tried to get the secret out of her but she was quite elusive. She only told me that she went to church and also that she did some “meditation”.

Subud is such a subtle thing that the person you tell about it must be in the right receptive state of mind. She probably felt that she had to wait until the right moment to tell me about it. Perhaps, if she had told me about it too quickly, I would’ve rejected it as some sort of cult. But finally she did tell me about Subud.

So I began my three month probation… It was very difficult for me because I was not patient at that time, but some helpers were very kind to me. Halimah Armytage and Absiah Bakir were two who helped me.

Then, after I had been coming for about six weeks, there was a special experience. I went with Simone and her mother-in-law, who was also in Subud, to a lake in a park. I suddenly felt this huge vibration and a sense of oneness with myself and with God. The three of us stood quietly together and then after about 20 minutes the experience stopped. Simone said, “Gosh, you’ve been opened.”

What was I looking for when I joined Subud? Well, I had been brought up in the conventional Anglican church in Sri Lanka. I had gone the traditional path of Sunday school, youth group and regular attendance at church. But it was all rather formal and conventional and on a deeper level I was looking for a closer relationship with God. This is what I hoped to find in Subud.

Life Changes

My life at that time was comfortable and happy. I had a good relationship with my husband and we had two small daughters. We had two shops, businesses that were going extremely well. My husband also joined Subud. But then, after I had been in Subud for about five or six years, everything collapsed. I lost  everything.

I had been brought up in a very privileged environment in Sri Lanka. I am a Burgher, which means the intermarriage of the native Sinhalese with the colonial powers such as the Portuguese, Dutch and English who once ruled Sri Lanka. We Burghers became a sort of buffer zone between the colonials and the native people. We were the professionals, the teachers, doctors, lawyers and judges. My family was extremely wealthy and the extended family all lived together in a residential compound.

My life was not unmarked by sorrow. When I was eight years old, my beloved mother died. My father was away in Zambia at the time and could not break his contract to come back. The next two years were a time of great sadness and loneliness for me. I was cared for by my older sister and my grandparents, but it was still very difficult.

I enjoyed school and was very good at athletics. (I get this from my mother’s side of the family: one of my uncles won a gold medal for boxing at the Commonwealth games, a big thing for Sri Lanka in those days.) But in some ways I was quite solitary. Recently, I went to a Sri Lankan function and met someone I had known at school and she said to me, “Oh yes, we called you ‘poor little rich girl’.”

 My father, sister and older brother and I went to live in Zambia. I felt very close to the African people. I was not supposed to mix with the servants but I was always sneaking off to their quarters to share their food and learn about their traditions and culture. I still have the happiest memories of sharing their communal food of mealy-meal where everyone sits around together and dips in the communal bowl.

Then, when we came back to Sri Lanka, there was a lot of political turmoil which affected us directly. Colonialism had ended, the Sinhalese majority had taken power, and the Burghers, once so privileged, were now discriminated against. There was a mass emigration of the Burghers to England, Canada and Australia. We were not allowed to take our money out, and we had to leave our wealth and comfort and start life all over again in Melbourne with nothing. I was 17.

My father found work as a teacher, and I also started work. Perhaps because he had lost my mother, my father was obsessively protective of me. I was experiencing this new Australian culture of freedom and independence, and I increasingly felt stifled by my father who never let me go out. One weekend I took a stand. I told him I was going out whether he liked it or not. He told me that if I went out, not to come back.

So I went out and then went to live with my brother and his girlfriend, but after three months my father came to me and said, “I miss you too much, come back.” So I did, but after that my father respected my wish to have some freedom. Looking back, I see that this was the first step in my journey to becoming an independent woman.

More Involved in Subud

As I saId, at the time I joined Subud, life was good. And then five or six years after I came into Subud, it all changed. It began when my father died. Although we had had our difficulties, he was the most important person in my life, along with my husband and children.

I was 37. For some reason that I cannot fully explain, after my father died I felt I had to leave my husband. At the same time, our businesses collapsed and we lost everything materially. I had always led a secure and protected existence, protected first by my father and then by my husband, and now I had to fend for myself. I had two young daughters and my ex-husband and I have shared their upbringing. They are now in their twenties and doing well in life.

But all of this turmoil challenged me to take up the Subud more seriously. My husband had joined Subud and we used to go once a week and socialize with some people, but it was all rather superficial. We used to judge the people in Subud, who often seemed not to be very successful, and felt ourselves to be apart.

But after the death of my father and the breakup of my marriage, I became more dedicated to Subud. It was a very difficult time for me. I felt lost, angry, isolated, confused and afraid. But at the same time I felt a quiet inner strength that everything would be OK. I also felt I had a new freedom. I had felt stifled by the secure life I had enjoyed before. The loss of all my comforts seems to have be the doorway through which I had to pass to begin my true journey. In a way it was a relief to get rid of all that stuff. Worries left me and I felt quite happy on one level.

The Fateful Congress

I had never been to a Subud Congress but now my new close friends in Subud were urging me to go. There was a national congress in Wollongong and there I I became involved with this man, Harris Smart.

There had been an incident a few months before when I had been in the Subud hall after latihan and I had seen this man I did not know. I asked Simone who we was and she said, “That is Harris Smart and he is a writer and wonderful person.” (If only she knew!)

At that moment, out of nowhere came the thought, “You will that marry that man and travel together”. It was strange – it came from some place outside me because I was not attracted to him at all.

Then at that Congress I met him again – or he searched me out because that night in the hall he had had a similar experience, that he would marry me. It was one of those, “Some enchanted evening, across a crowded room” type experiences.

We had a whirlwind Congress romance and then nine months later we were married. I saw him as an older man (ten years older than me!) who had many of the traits of my father, quiet, intellectual, rather solitary. My father was exactly the same. I read somewhere that Bapak says that you should have a feeling about your husband that you had for your father, and for a man, the feeling for a wife that you had for your mother. In the big picture of things, I believe that people are put in our paths for our growth.

Harris and I are very different people, not only in upbringing and background, but in our natures. They say that opposites attract, and perhaps we are an example of that. I am a more conventional person, and he is a bit of a bohemian. He has told me that he saw in me as a source of stability in his life, while perhaps I was attracted to his freedom loving (sometimes rather wayward!) personality

There were many challenges to come. Marriage is never easy, but somehow we have stuck it out through thick and thin for 20 years.

A Change of Name

A few months after the Congress I asked to change my name. I had never understood before why anyone would want to do this and I scorned the notion. But now I wanted a new name, and I was given the name Piata.

There have been times when I felt disappointed in Subud or people in Subud and have stopped doing the group latihan for a number of years, but now I have returned. For the last three years I have suffered a series of painful and debilitating illnesses – we are all getting older – and perhaps that has taught me something about patience. I have had to accept very slow processes of healing with these illnesses. No quick fixes!

I see that there is a path in life for which we must be grateful. It is not necessarily all about the pursuit of happiness, but about growth, often through hardship and suffering. We have to face life and its realities rather than a romantic expectation of how life should be. Through all of these I have learned strength, independence, and patience. And so the journey continues…

 To hear Piata sing, click here ipanema