Estate, A Cautionary Tale

By Floss The Writer

"The one great principle of the English law is to make business for itself." ~ Charles Dickens

Why is it, in wealthy countries, we have the idea that we are entitled to the money and assets our parents worked their whole lives for? We have been conditioned by the legal fraternity to think that we deserve 'Mummy and Daddy's' money. We have been given the privileges that most of the population of the world can only dream of, yet we have become self-entitled. Some think they deserve more than their siblings. And where there is a complicated family situation such as blended families, people tend to blame and conjure issues that might not be there at all. Past hurts, real or imagined, get reviewed and relived. Things get confused, and people feel that they deserve compensation for that hurt but in doing so, hurt those who love them the most in the process.

In her debut book 'Estate: A Cautionary Tale', Floss the Writer shares her family's experience of fifteen years and millions of dollars in legal fees fighting over an estate which in the end was not there. This cautionary tale is essential reading for anyone with assets or an estate no matter how big or small and shares a number of valuable life lessons

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tablo Publishing
• Release date: Jun 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781649698001

Book preview

Chapter 1: Estate, A Cautionary Tale

99% of estate lawyers give the other1% a bad name.

A death is an emotional time for everyone. Most people think that, when they die, that’s it. What they forget is what happens to those who have been left behind.

This is one story out of millions out there. It is one that has been told before, and one that will be told repeatedly unless we learn from history.

This story is a retelling of the classic novel by Charles Dickens by the name of Bleak House … with one twist. This is real, it is recent, and all the people in this story are still here.

The death of a parent or loved one is hard at any age. Even if it is expected, it is a difficult time, especially when you have to try to carry out their final wishes.

Final wishes cannot always be granted. Some things are easy, such as the type of flowers they want at their funeral or if they want to be buried or cremated, or placed under a tree, or buried at sea. It is an emotional time for the family and often comes down to one or two people organising everything. These are the executors of a person’s last will and testament. They can be anyone the deceased chooses, such as their lawyer, a friend, their thirty-second cousin once removed or, in our case, their partner.

This story is about the trials and issues my family faced after my father’s death, the dealing with various courts in New South Wales, and how a small Family Provision claim turned into a fourteen-year saga.

At this point, I should explain that this is a telling of my family’s struggles through the courts. You see, my family is a little complex. We are what some would call a blended family. However, it wasn’t a usual blend, if there is such a thing.

My father had what is known as a first family. He had been married and had two children before he became my mother’s partner. These are my half-siblings. I have a half-sister and a half-brother.

The difference to most blended families is that my half-siblings are much older than I am. They were both in their twenties when I was born.

Unfortunately, my birth caused friction to the extent that my half-sister refused to visit me or my mother until I was around two years old. My mother and father never held this against her, and I grew up absolutely adoring her. She was my big sister, who is also a classical musician who has preformed all over the world.

Thankfully, my half-brother was more accepting, and I grew up loving him as my brother. He taught me many things that I still use today. I always referred to them as my brother and sister while growing up, and throughout this account, I will refer to them as such.

However, I always felt that my sister was not happy to have a younger sister. I still feel she sees my mother as the evil stepmother. We call it the Cinderella complex.

They often refer to me as their stepsister. I am not. I share half their DNA. They may wish to deny this, but you only have to look at my father and me at the same age. We are identical.

I was seventeen when my father passed away, in my final year at school, which I can assure you is extremely stressful, as most students and parents know. We knew my father was sick, but we didn’t know why. No one could determine the cause, other than he had a low white blood cell count. He died only a few months after he was diagnosed with this blood illness.

My father was born on the 25th of December, Christmas day. Every year, we would have a big celebration. His family and friends would pop in and out all day for food, drinks, and great times. This continued right up until he died.

In the months before he died, he was in the hospital and was still there for his birthday. All his friends would come and see him, even my brother, sister-in-law, and my niece. None of us were sure about how long he was going to live, but we all knew that he probably wouldn’t see another birthday.

Though we didn’t know exactly what my dad had, whatever it was, it was destroying his platelets, which is the clotting agent that controls the body’s ability to clot the blood when you get a cut so you don't bleed out. He was essentially a haemophiliac. Everyone knew this, yet that didn’t mean we couldn’t carry on tradition, so we took in a picnic of his favourite foods, such as oysters, fresh from Sydney fish markets, and celebrated in the hospital. The nurses and doctors were great about this.

My sister announced that she was going up North for the weeks over Christmas and wouldn’t be back until after the New Year. I have never seen our father so sad or disappointed in any of his children as he was with her for leaving him. This, however, wasn’t the only thing that happened with my sister.

I think one of the funnier moments while he was in the hospital occurred while my sister was trying to cure him by performing a toxin removal chant. We walked in one day, only to find my sister, her mother, and her son all holding hands in a circle over my dad’s belly, chanting and saying they were going to remove all the demon toxins from his liver and cleanse his aura, to which my dad responded, Get your hands off my f’ing aura. Suffice to say, my father was not impressed by this aura cleansing idea. He was a committed scientist and didn’t believe in evil toxic spirits dancing on his liver.

I do feel for my sister a little. Nobody knew what was going on with my dad, but possibly trying to extract toxins by chanting and waving her hands around wasn’t really going to help. Not only that, but it also would have stressed him out.

Another incident saw her give him green aloe vera juice to help clean his insides. According to my dad, it certainly did that. He spent two days on the loo. His own words while lying in the hospital were, Darl, that just about killed me. We have since found out that you should not ingest that stuff if you are on medications or have a blood disease. Well, that knocked out my dad twice.

My father died after a short stint in hospital around March, about mid-morning. He died from a haemorrhage bursting in his lungs. His blood could not clot, and so he bled to death.

I will always feel bad that I didn’t get to see him on the day he died. I had decided that I wanted to go to school early so that my mum could go and sit with him. I did phone him and spoke to him on that day and told him I loved him. He said, Look after yourself. It turns out that was the same time the bleeding had started. I did not know that it was going to be the last thing he said to me.

I went into class thinking nothing more of it. After class, a teacher was waiting for me to take me to the headmistress’s office. My mum was waiting for me and told me that my dad had died.

We left to go up to the hospital to say our final goodbyes. I will never forget it. All I can say now is that at least he wasn’t suffering anymore.

In his last months, he had been spacing out. He would see things, such as blue rats. He would ask me to make sure I took out the scones baking under his bed. This was due to the drugs that they were giving him. About this time, he had made his new will in favour of my siblings.

The day after my dad died, I went back to school. I felt that there was nothing else I could do at home. There was no point in crying, and I was in my final year. Also, there was an excursion for history class that I had to go on.

There is a saying that, at the time of a person’s death, whatever you need to do to grieve is the right thing to do.

As I walked into school at 7.30 a.m., my classmate came up to me and said how sorry she was to hear about my father. I found this interesting as I hadn’t told anyone about it except for my best friend, who was off sick. There was a reason for this.

I found out that the school principal had held a meeting with my class, telling them what had happened to my father. I would have preferred her not to have done this until I was ready to tell them myself, as I did not want people to treat me as though I was going to fall apart. It felt as though she was intruding on my grief and that people were talking about me behind my back. Silly, I know.

My father’s brother had died eighteen months earlier. His children had organised his funeral and burial at Bega, the town where they were born. While my dad was in the hospital, he had asked my mum that, if he died, could she organise his burial to be near his brother with the same funeral and headstone as my uncle. It was the funeral that my dad wanted. All his old schoolmates, all his nephews, nieces, and grandchildren all turned up to say goodbye.

The kindest person who turned up to say her goodbyes was my dad’s primary school teacher, June. She was the one who my father had to thank for getting him into University. We would always visit June whenever we went down to the farm. We would turn up at her place with cake or chocolate biscuits in hand, and she would always have the tea ready for us. She managed to outlive my dad by a few years. Her statement to us was, No teacher should outlive their students.

There were some characters that turned up to the funeral. These included my dad’s old sailing crew. His boat was a twenty-eight-foot Compass yacht, which my dad would sail out of of a Bay in Sydney. My father became what we would call Captain Bligh, after one of Australia’s most infamous sailing captains, the one who was mutinied against because of his attitude and temper.

Every time my dad set foot on Bungaree, his beloved yacht, he would become ultra-competitive. My father was so lucky that his crew was so understanding and didn’t take too much notice of him.

There were a couple of memorable moments on that yacht. My personal favourite was the time when my dad and his crew raced around Sydney harbour, and something went wrong up at the bow, so one of his crew went up to fix the problem when the wind suddenly changed. The boom swung, and the crew member was knocked into the harbour.

Naturally, someone threw a line for him to hang on to, at which point my father yelled, Let go! You’re slowing us down. 

They all had a good laugh at that.

Don’t worry; the crew member was dragged back on board and he was okay.

My father was usually an easy-going person, and there was nothing he loved more than chatting and meeting new people. He also loved to keep in touch with his country roots. So, every year, we would head off to the Sydney Royal Easter show. He made sure that we were always members of the Royal Agricultural Society.

One year, while we were at the show, we were walking around the district displays when my dad ran into some of his friends from Bega. His friends, remembering how chatty my father was, invited him to become a member of the district displays.

The district displays are displayed produce from around New South Wales and Southeast Queensland. Months of work are put into them by groups of volunteers, and then they are scored on the quality and presentation of the produce. They are quite spectacular and bring the country to the city folk. They also sell produce, such as apples and, of course because we have Bega cheese in our district, we sell packs of the cheese with crackers.

My father quickly became one of the best salesmen. He would chat with everyone and charm all the old ladies. It didn’t matter where you came from, he wanted to know about you. He would pull jokes all the time. It was a way to get people to come over and talk to him, such as saying, if an apple were fifty cents, he would do a deal and say, if you bought two, he would sell it to you for a dollar. It would take people a moment, but then they would go away smiling. Somehow, he always made the extra sale.

The funniest memory of the show was my father and the pumpkin bowling. My dad never took to regular bowling, but he was really good at pumpkin bowling. The pumpkin bowling is something that the five district courts do on Good Friday every year. This was because the show used to shut down on Good Friday and they couldn’t leave, so they started pumpkin bowling. And today, we still use real pumpkins. It is great fun for everyone involved.

My father got a little competitive. He would get on the floor, facedown, and try to work out which way the floor was tilting. It didn’t work—the pumpkins have a mind of their own—but it did give everyone a really good laugh. And yes, ironically, he did end up winning that year.

These people are the best in the world. They supported me the year my dad died—he died just before the show—and they continue to support me. It is a little family behind the stands, and my dad and I actually have distant cousins working with us, so it really is family.

Unfortunately, when a person dies, people will take sides and fight against each other. The other thing they do is push their agenda or what they think you should do, or they say, Well, that’s what your dad would’ve wanted, when really, they wouldn’t know.

We found that this happened not only with the family, but nonfamily members would tell us what my dad would have wanted. It was mainly men who would tell us what to do. Particularly, so many said that we should sell the house that my mother had bought, as it was too