From the Archive

Last month saw the death of Gabrielle Carey, who shot to fame as the co-author (with Kathy Lette) of the teenage novel Puberty Blues (1979). Carey wrote several works of non-fiction, fiction, and memoir. Among the biographical ones was Waiting Room: A memoir (2009), which followed the diagnosis and treatment of Carey’s mother’s brain tumour. Claudia Hyles’s review, in the May 2009 issue of ABR, considered it an ‘unflinching’ work about the ‘compromised body’ that faces us all.

For Gabrielle Carey, the sight of her mother’s bare feet, soles facing, was almost unbearable. Naked and defenceless, she had never seen them from that angle before. Other parts of a loved one’s anatomy could produce such a feeling – the nape of a beloved neck or an innocent elbow – but on this occasion it was the old feet projecting from the elderly and suddenly compromised body, strapped to a trolley, awaiting a CT scan. The daughter ‘didn’t quite know what to do’, which turns out to be a revealing remark. She wonders if she should stroke her arm or not, but before offering any such support she is asked to leave the cubicle.

Joan Carey, née Ferguson, who believed she was perfectly fine, was to have her brain scanned. She considered the entire procedure a waste of time and money. ‘A wicked waste,’ she called it, a phrase familiar from the author’s Sydney childhood. Joan’s behaviour and reactions, always a combination of good manners and thrift, had recently changed noticeably. In a life filled with intelligent good works and service to others, suddenly she seemed bewildered, puzzled, and doddery. Forgetful, she had started to miss appointments, lose things, and appear vague and distracted. Such manifestations of absent-mindedness are familiar to many with elderly parents; others are well aware of these problems through the media. Dementia and Alzheimer’s disease are facts of modern life.

The scans reveal a brain tumour, benign but requiring urgent removal, and thus begins Carey’s memoir, an uncompromising and unflinching look at herself as well as a moving discovery of her mother, her incomplete family history and life itself. Others have written about unlocking lives. Germaine Greer, in Daddy, We Hardly Knew You (1989), searches for the unknown in her father. By contrast, Peter Godwin’s father, in the wonderful When a Crocodile Eats the Sun (2006), presents his son with his carefully concealed true identity. Carey, during long hours in many waiting rooms, finds a multitude of questions she needs to ask her mother in order to unlock her own story, and realises there may not be enough time.

Her epigraph, from John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), states that the great human illusion about time, comparing its reality with that of a road, is wrong. ‘Time is a room,’ he says, ‘a now so close to us that we regularly fail to see it.’ And what of reality? Carey writes, ‘memory doesn’t completely encompass reality: it selects and modifies certain aspects of it.’ As a writer, her imaginative reconstructions sometimes land her in trouble. That her memories differ from those of others is surely the case in any shared remembrance. Like an artist’s view, the scene is different from every angle.

Without the fore and aft view on the road, time here is constrained in a waiting room, by experience usually a place of delay. Time meant nothing in the neurosurgeon’s waiting room, but Gabrielle, heeding Katherine Mansfield’s words, tries to keep fear away by remaining calm for her mother. One feels immense sympathy for her as she juggles the deep concerns for her mother with the demands of her children, a beautiful, petulant teenager and a science-mad, questioning little boy. Sympathy for her, yes, but also great feeling for these children, who are not often allowed into their mother’s world. Even memories of her own puberty blues fail to mitigate her desperation.

When most people have enormous responsibilities relating to aged parents, they are often also caring for children undergoing the predicaments and confusions that dog one’s steps through life. Friends tell the author that she deliberately creates her recurring crises, which she denies. There are certainly many whose lives seem magnets for drama, and perhaps she is one of them.

Carey admits to being an insistent questioner. Unable to resist the interrogative, she discovers much about her mother’s life which casts light on her own and her children’s characters. Joan, at first refusing surgery, says she would just rather die. She had been a nurse, and medication is something she had always stoutly rejected. This genetic stoicism has been inherited by her granddaughter and the author wonders when stoicism ceases to be ‘heroic and becomes stubbornness’.

Joan eventually agrees to the intervention, but the family worries that somehow she will manage to avoid it as a supporter of voluntary euthanasia. Just days before her scheduled operation, an old friend takes her own life. This actually defuses the tension. The earlier suicide of Joan’s husband had a tragic and lasting effect on the family. Good woman that she is, Joan knows that a repetition would be appalling.

The household that she bound together with the domestic arts of her generation is portrayed beautifully. Her talents as a gardener and creator of glorious afternoon teas and magnificent puddings bring a smile. Her ‘fusty’ homemade, hand-knitted style is endearing, and sweet is the description in one of the waiting rooms of Joan as somewhere between ‘a Carmelite nun or a visiting Amish matron’.

The recent spate of books about death and grief and adult orphans must have a direct connection with baby boomers, now middle-aged and facing their own mortality. Unlike some similar narratives, Waiting Room has a happy ending. Readers, like the author, will find Joan an elusive inspiration. g

1978 Sara Dowse reviews Anne Deveson’s Australians at Risk

1979 John McLaren reviews Patrick White’s The Twyborn Affair

1980 Rosemary Creswell reviews Shirley Hazzard ’ s The Transit of Venus

1981 Veronica Brady reviews David Foster’s Moonlite

1982 Brian Dibble reviews Elizabeth Jolley’s The Newspaper of Claremont Street

1983 Leonie Kramer reviews Ken Inglis’s This Is the ABC

1984 Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews Helen Garner’s The Children’s Bach

1985 Laurie Clancy reviews Peter Carey’s Illywhacker

1986 Judith Brett reviews James Walter’s The Ministers’ Minders

1987 Elizabeth Jolley reviews Glenda Adams’s Dancing on Coral

1988 Manning Clark reviews Kate Grenville’s Joan Makes History

1989 Paul Carter on the speeches of Patrick White

1990 Stuart Macintyre reviews Peter Read’s biography of Charles Perkins

1991 Robert Dessaix on the uses of multiculturalism

1992 Harry Heseltine on the fiction of Thea Astley

1993 Hazel Rowley reviews Ruth Park’s Fishing in the Styx

1994 Cathrine Harboe-Ree reviews Helen Demidenko’s The Hand That Signed the Paper

1995 Bernard Smith reviews Joan Kerr’s Heritage

1996 Peter Steele on Dorothy Porter’s Crete

1997 Geoffrey Blainey reviews Grace Karskens’s The Rocks

1998 Chris Wallace-Crabbe reviews John Forbes’s Damaged Glamour

1999 Peter Craven reviews Peter Porter’s Collected Poems

2000 Chris Wallace-Crabbe – an obituary for A.D. Hope

2001 Martin Duwell reviews Gwen Harwood’s Selected Poems

2002 Neal Blewett reviews Bob Ellis’s Goodbye Babylon

2003 Alan Atkinson reviews Inga Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers

2004 Peter Porter’s essay ‘ The Observed of All Observers’

2005 Mary Eagle on Grace Cossington Smith

2006 Kate McFadyen reviews Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria

2007 Brian Matthews on Manning Clark and Kristallnacht

2008 James Ley reviews Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap

2009 Brenda Niall reviews Peter Conrad’s Islands

2010 Brigitta Olubas on Shirley Hazzard

2011 Margaret Harris on rediscovering Christina Stead

2012 Melinda Harvey reviews Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel

2013 Helen Ennis on Olive Cotton

2014 Lisa Gorton reviews David Malouf’s Earth Hour

2015 Catriona Menzies-Pike reviews Lisa Gorton’s The Life of Houses

2016 Alan Atkinson on the Australian national conscience

2017 Michael Adams’s Calibre Prize winner ‘Salt Blood’

2018 Felicity Plunkett reviews Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains

2019 Peter Rose reviews Helen Garner’s Yellow Notebook

2020 Jenny Hocking on the Palace Letters

2021 Theodore Ell’s Calibre essay on the explosion in Beirut

2022 Kieran Pender on the Bernard Collaery case