Do Look Now

By Helen Yeates

War baby Helen Yeates was a latchkey kid from the working-class Brisbane suburb of Annerley, discovering an escape to paradise in a dark cinema. This memoir captures a significant social and cultural history of Brisbane, drawing on her love of film in a highly original, evocative way. She falls in love

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publicious Book Publishing
• Release date: May 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9780645501711

Helen Yeates

Born in 1945, Helen Yeates grew up in Brisbane, daughter of a secretary and an aviation weather forecaster. She taught at various secondary schools, and trained teachers at UQ and beyond. She became an award-winning film academic at the Queensland University of Technology, nurturing some of the brightest young filmmakers of the next generation. For the past ten years, she has been an Adjunct Associate Professor at QUT. Helen is also a filmmaker, a festival judge, who has tangled with celebrities, hosted legendary parties and elegant salons. She lives in New Farm, Binkenba, on the land of the Turbal people.

Book preview

CHAPTERS

1.Wake in Fright

2.Cinema Paradiso

3.Puberty Blues

4.The Getting of Wisdom

5.Love and Other Catastrophes

6.Scenes from a Marriage

7.The Ice Storm

8.Lust, Caution

9.Another Round

10.Almost Famous

11.My Brilliant Career

12.Cocoon

13.The Last Picture Show

14.Stories We Tell

Indexes/References

Credits

1.

WAKE IN FRIGHT

In 2016, after dear friend Susie’s sixtieth birthday party at the Bronte Surf-lifesavers’ Club, old friends and family reconvened in her cosy lounge room. Marge, her flamboyant sister-in-law, proclaimed that she could not see my face properly, calling for bobby pins and other hair accessories, duly delivered. Sweeping my longish hair back behind my ears, she gathered it all up onto the top of my head, complimenting me on how much better I looked.

I felt the exact opposite: semi-naked, embarrassed, even ashamed that everyone would be able to see the jagged old scars on the right side of my face, the imprinted memory of an adult life kept in the shadows, avoiding bright light, hiding the full flush of the disfigurement with concealer makeup and strategically aligned hair cover. I suppose that Marge, an accomplished performing artist, wanted me to perform my untrammelled self, both inside and out.

Decades earlier, I woke in fright, hearing a woman sobbing endlessly, heartbreakingly, in the bed next to mine. I had no idea who she was, or why I was in this public hospital bed, in this busy ward, unable to move. I was dangerously ill, I nearly died in a smash, I remembered nothing. The doctor later called this condition ‘mercy amnesia’. Nobody ever calls it that anymore.

When Jimmy’s dad’s trusty Vauxhall Velox hit the post, at least I didn’t catapult into a space of no return, as car accident victims do in Peter Weir’s film, The Cars That Ate Paris, or in the hyper-crash scenes in George Miller’s epic Mad Max films. While there was nothing filmic about my personal automobile carnage experience, I should have listened much more carefully, a week earlier, to the fortune teller’s prophecies.

Spurred on by several intriguing rumours, my cousin Jan and I decided to book a session with a particular fortune teller, just for fun. Madam X, suitably bedecked in a long, swirling skirt, lacey top and multicoloured silk shawl, practised her mysterious craft in a tiny tea shop cramped into a musty, odd-shaped space, upstairs in the central Brisbane Arcade.

Banned from charging us directly for any psychic service, her fee was included in the inflated price of the tea and cake. She also operated under strict laws not to give her customers upsetting predictions, especially those involving illness or death.

Uncovering nothing at all surprising regarding Jan’s future, Madam X spoke of a happy successful life, and an even more predictable grand marriage to a tall, dark, handsome man along with wealth and multiple children. While Jan certainly did not wish for the latter, she felt satisfied that she could handle the rest.

Then Madam X examined my teacup and my hand lines. Firstly, she delivered a few statements about my family, some off-the-wall, some surprisingly accurate. For instance: ‘You get on well with your brother. You are missing him at present’. Funnily enough, my brother Peter had just moved south to Melbourne, and I was missing him.

Delving further into my psyche, she slowly shook her head, declaring that a male person, whose name began with J (my then boyfriend, Jimmy?) was, in her colourful words, holding a rose under my nose at the time, and, she warned, he was no good for me. Furthermore, I wouldn’t marry him. I would marry someone whose name began with R. Some years later, by a strange coincidence, this turned out to be true, when I married Richard.

Towards the end of this hit-and-miss soothsaying session, Madam X momentarily froze. Trance-like, gently stroking my right cheek with her outstretched hand, she whispered, ‘Such beautiful skin, what a terrible shame’. The tension rose another notch when she added, ‘Be very careful’.

While she was probably not intending to freak me out, Madam X skated very close to doing so, and, on reflection, to breaking the law. Feeling quite shaken, I pulled back and broke the spell, or whatever it was. At that moment, some people entered, babbling on, distracting her, thanking her for some helpful warning she had given them in the past. Jan and I gathered ourselves, stumbling out into the light of day, trying to laugh it off.

Almost a week after this unsettling encounter, the right side of my face was ripped apart in a car accident, her unnerving prediction regarding the ruination of the soft skin on one-half of my face shockingly fulfilled. I had, of course, completely ignored her warning that boyfriend J (Jimmy) was unsuitable for me. Proudly displaying my shiny new jacket, I hopped into Jimmy’s dad’s car that rainy night in early May 1963, relieved that my Friday French class was over. I had just turned eighteen.

At that stage, Jimmy was a fulltime engineering student, while I was determinedly putting myself through a university arts degree by working full-time and studying part-time. That grand plan totally disintegrated after Jimmy, heading along Coronation Drive towards the city, proudly showed me where on the Brisbane River he had rowed that day, representing Queensland in the prestigious Kings Cup. In the act of doing so, he must have become distracted, slamming into a telegraph post by the side of the road, totally writing off his dad’s car.

I was sitting up close beside him in the front passenger seat, which, at the time, was spookily known as the suicide seat. Seatbelts were not mandatory car fittings until the late sixties and, for decades prior to the enactment of that particular safety precaution, many a front seat passenger had met an untimely death.

My head smashed into the windscreen, my whole body was flung forward, entangled in the mess. Blood poured out of the major artery on the right side of my face, splattering all over Jimmy, whose head and chest hit the steering wheel. He suffered bruising and mild concussion.

Later, an extraordinary story came to light. Geoff and Coralie Porter, who had studied medicine with my brother-in-law, Lawrie Hawes, happened upon the chaotic scene of the accident that evening. On their way to a Friday night fancy-dress party, decked out in sailor costumes, these two young doctors initially had trouble convincing the ambulance men that they were qualified medical practitioners.

Somehow, the sailor/doctors (who, naturally, did not recognise me at the time) were able to persuade the ambulance people to rush me to Emergency as, in their expert opinion, my injuries were critical. Having mistakenly decided that Jimmy, drenched in my blood, was in a very bad way, the ambos were hurriedly placing him, alone, in the ambulance. They told my heroic rescuers that the plan was to leave me lying quietly near the gutter, with one of them in attendance, while the other made the mad dash to hospital with Jimmy.

Oddly enough, the official police report of the accident mistakenly labelled this as a two-vehicle collision, when it was actually a single vehicle collision into a telegraph pole. I trust that both police and paramedics are much better trained these days. The next morning, I hit the front page of Brisbane’s The Courier-Mail newspaper, in a small news item, stating that ‘Helen Thompson, 18, of Annerley, is dangerously ill in the Royal Brisbane Hospital after a car accident on Coronation Drive’.

My injuries were manifold: broken ankle, ribs, jaw bone; severe facial wounds, massive blood loss, whiplash, brain damage of the right frontal lobe, and pulmonary oedema thrown in for good measure. Lawrie, a hospital registrar at the time, was invited into the emergency operating theatre to observe the proceedings.

It was a great comfort to discover, subsequently, that a close family member had been present at that touch-and-go time – a rare occurrence for any accident victim. With the rain pelting down on a smashed bloodied car, a broken post, dangerously dangling wires into a gurgling gutter, little did we both know that two friends in their fancy sailor suits had miraculously saved my life, with only twenty minutes to spare.

A highly regarded surgical registrar happened to be rostered on duty that evening. Luckily, my facial nerve was not permanently damaged; otherwise, in the long term, the consequences of those bizarrely predicted slashes to my soft facial skin would have been far worse. That same Friday, the sobbing woman in the bed next to mine was accidentally shot in the back by her husband, a farmer. A mother of two children, she would be paralysed for life.

The merciful amnesiac condition I suffered blocked the accident from my damaged brain, for at least the forty-eight hours straddling this life-changing event. Over many years, I gradually regained small, often irrational memory flashes, along with the occasional, purely imaginary blips.

Many years later, in 1997, I sympathised with Lady Diana’s bodyguard for not recalling what happened in that historic, fatal accident in Paris. Both Trevor Rees-Jones and I suffered savage facial injuries, and he was also knocked unconscious.¹ As I understood from media reports at the time, as well as from his book, he experienced a similar form of ‘anterograde’, or good old ‘mercy’ amnesia. He could remember very little, even though he was under excessive pressure to recall the build-up to the accident in that tunnel, the actual event, the horrific aftermath.

Even now, it seems that Rees-Jones and I have regained only partial memory. For years, his credibility was held under the pitiless gaze of the law, the media, the Royal family, and many others. Naturally, I experienced no such high-stakes pressure. No celebrity died in my accident, when I rode in that car with that boy on that riverside road.

I often wonder if some of those jagged, ill-fitting memory shards are other people’s memories, unwittingly planted into my brain. Alternatively, perhaps, they could also be mere speculations, conjured-up recovery stories, somehow woven into counter-intuitive comfort blankets, forever tinkering with my brain, forever blotting out the shuddering impact.

A week or so after the smash, the minister from the local Yeronga Christ Church of England loomed out of the fog beside my hospital bed, looking for all the world like the grim figure of Death in Ingmar Bergman’s classic film, The Seventh Seal. By the skin of my teeth, I had won my own apocalyptic game of chess with mortality. The Reverend Darke, whose name suited both his garb and his modus operandi, chilled me to the bone.

Several years earlier, he had banned my brother Peter and our cousin Geoffrey from attending all church dances, after they defiantly pasted on the drab walls of the church hall some beatnik posters, just to liven things up. For this transgression, Reverend Darke, shaking with fury, deemed them both to be ‘devils incarnate’.

Time stood still for me when this same minister of religion leaned over, pronouncing that this ‘terrible accident’ and my ‘dreadful injuries’ were ‘all part of God’s special plan’. I turned away from his cruel, blinkered darkness, forever rejecting both him and his God. Pastoral care, be damned.

That night I asked could I be allowed to see my facial injuries in the mirror. Shocking though they were, I wanted the open-eyed truth, with no further hiding, embroidering or myth-making involved.

I remain haunted, yet, ironically, uplifted by the powerful opening scenes of Krzysztof Kieslowkski’s remarkable film, Three Colours: Blue. Having barely survived a horrendous car accident, the character played by Juliette Binoche wakes up in hospital, understanding neither what has happened, nor what is going on around her. Directed by this grand cinematic master, Juliette captures the identifiable hellish, disoriented feelings of fear, pain, grief, dread, memory, loss.

Speaking of loss, I did not see the driver, Jimmy, for quite a while, although his sister June, embarrassed by her brother’s neglect, did visit me. It appeared that he felt guilty, as he had been drinking with his rowing mates at the Regatta Hotel on Coronation Drive, prior to picking me up. Unable to face me or my family, he was, seemingly, too scared to see the extent of my injuries. Whatever it was, these are my remembrances, not his.

A few years ago, in sweeping back my hair, Marge, my friend Susie’s vibrant sister-in-law, inadvertently triggered certain dark, taboo memories lurking just beneath the surface. Through that seemingly impenetrable swirl, special films have always shone their bright, beacon lights, illuminating my thinking, granting me another way of looking, a different, more layered remembering.

I never did follow Marge’s well-intentioned makeover instructions, baring my face to the world. Despite the ‘merciful’ amnesia and those erratic memory loops, the chronicle of those foretold scars remains forever embedded in my flesh, my psyche, my sense of self.

***

1. Trevor Rees-Jones published his memoir in 2005: The Bodyguard’s Story: Diana, the Crash and the Sole Survivor, Little Brown Book Group.

2.

CINEMA PARADISO

My older sister Jocelyn Thompson was born in Darwin in September, 1939, when Dad was working in an essential service as a weather forecaster with the Commonwealth Government. The Ross and Keith Smith aerodrome (Larrakeyah) where he worked was an army and airforce base in Darwin.

As Jocelyn, the family archivist states, ‘We were evacuated following the bombing of Pearl Harbour in December 1941. Mum and I flew back to Brisbane. Dad came later, but before the February bombing of Darwin. On reaching Brisbane we stayed in the crowded Thompson house at Corinda. After that I suspect that Mum, Grandma Browne and I were sent to live in Oakey with Uncle Jack Wright, Grandma’s brother. Those were very dark days’.

In 1942, there was another move, even further south. The women of the family headed to Melbourne, where Peter my brother was born in April, 1942.² In order to reunite with Dad, they returned to Brisbane when the coast appeared to be clear, and the battleground with the Japanese forces had shifted to the Pacific Islands, especially Papua New Guinea.

Jocelyn further elaborates: ‘After Darwin, Dad worked at Archerfield until he was transferred to Rockhampton in 1943. He joined the Royal Australian Air Force, in January, 1943. He was never sent overseas to serve, as his work as a meteorologist was vital to the safety of the aeroplanes. Rockhampton was a strategic city situated on the edge of the Coral Sea’.

The family returned to Brisbane where I was born on 6 March 1945, in a private hospital in the suburb of Sherwood. Around that time, we had settled in with our mother’s mother, Grandma Browne, in Gaba Tepe Street, Moorooka. Post-war, Dad worked for the newly formed Department of Civil Aviation, at Eagle Farm Airport, a job he held until he retired.

Originally from England and Scotland, Dad’s parents, the Thompsons, had a large family, comprising four daughters and seven sons, including twin girls. Arthur was the third youngest son. Grandpa Thompson was the Post Master around Queensland, including in Townsville, and finally in Toowoomba. The family lived at the back of the rather grand post offices in such places.

My mother Margaret was the youngest of eleven girls. Her father, Arthur Browne, worked in his cousins’ store, Cribb and Foote in Ipswich. Marrying Arthur Browne at eighteen, Mary Wright hailed from our great grandparents’ family, Protestants originally from Southern Ireland.

The Wright family owned and developed the coal mines in Tivoli, near Ipswich. Only the surviving sons inherited shares in all the property, including that wealthy mining operation. In the late Nineteenth Century, daughters did not inherit an equitable slice of the family fortune, a profoundly discriminatory custom that would not be tolerated in today’s world.

Mary died in 1951. Her husband had died much earlier, when Margaret was only twelve. Up until the age of five, I spent my life being cuddled, and having my every whim tended to by wonderful Grandma Mary, while Margaret looked after the two older kids. Grandma was an expert cuddler.

After her mother’s death, Margaret was sad and lonely at home. In order to relieve those feelings, and to build up a deposit on a home of our own, she started work at Thiess Brothers engineering firm as a filing clerk, and later as a secretary.

By then, Jocelyn, Peter and I had settled into Yeronga Primary School, and we became ‘latch-key’ kids. I had just turned six. As often as he could, Dad, a shift-worker, would pick us up from school, although we did like the alternative, an adventurous walk or bike ride home, across a creek via a steep bush track called the New Road.

Very few children at school, and no one else in our family had working mothers back in the fifties or even in the sixties. Both our parents’ working became our new normal. I am very proud of her, standing up to criticism from neighbours and other mean-spirited people, who held the strait-laced, patriarchal idea that ‘a woman’s place was in the home’. This view was particularly prevalent after the war.

Living in a modest maisonette in Gaba Tepe Street, Moorooka, was pleasant enough in those early years, although we suffered from having some difficult neighbours. The kids next door on one side were rough, anti-social bullies, while the family on the other side had a dog which the father tied up all day. That poor creature used to howl incessantly, driving dad crazy when he tried to sleep after a nightshift. We despaired of this cruel practice. That neighbour wouldn’t budge.

By contrast, we thought the people over the road were good neighbours, and I loved the two babies of the son, Mervyn and his young wife, Jackie, while they lived with his widowed mother in that old Queensland house. Little did we realise the escalating abuse that was occurring in that home.

Several years after we moved away, Jackie, deliberately isolated by Mervyn in another suburb, far from her supportive family and friends, killed those two young children to protect them from their violent, drunken father. This was, of course, a dreadful domestic violence tragedy, although the media overplayed the ‘bad killer mother’ syndrome, largely ignoring what may have driven her, apart from ‘mental illness’.

Hearing this neighbourhood horror story a while after we had moved into our new home in Annerley, was gut-wrenching for us all. I could not express it then, but somehow I knew, deep down, in a place where my pre-feminist views were starting to stir, that it was dreadfully unfair to blame Jackie alone for what had happened. The abusive Mervyn was never convicted, and the community spurned the woman driven beyond the limit.

We were lucky to have an abundance of cousins on both sides of our family, whom we saw regularly, enjoying their company at special family events and also on most weekends for lush afternoon teas at someone’s place. Several cousins on our father’s side grew up with us on Brisbane’s southside: David and Diana Suter (for a time), and John, Geoff and Jan Hodsdon. All except Jan were war babies; she was born the year afterwards. At one stage, there was a cousin in just about every grade in the Big School at Yeronga Primary School.

Except when Dad was in a bad mood, unable to get his sleep in the daytime, our growing up in suburban Brisbane in the fifties was a happy experience, with a combination of home, school, sport, reading, play, and lots of relatives. Sport comprised mainly tennis and cricket, as well as table tennis. For recreation, we visited the lavish Oasis Gardens in Sunnybank for a swim and a picnic. We also loved going to the pictures.

The popular Italian film Cinema Paradiso explored the coming-of-age of a filmmaker growing up in the late forties and fifties, entranced by movies flickering in the dark. In this film, the boy helped the projectionist at the local cinema, at the same time being part of a squirming horde of young Sicilians, objecting loudly when any romantic, steamy scenes were obviously cut by order of the local clergy.

No such cuts were evident to us back in the fifties. These would have been done more cleanly, more surreptitiously, by order of members of the Australian Censorship Board. Probably these Australians were, in many cases, just as reactionary and puritanical as those Catholic clergy in post-war Sicily.

For much of my life, my passions have been ignited in such darkened places. Recalling the picture theatres I frequented in my childhood, my lifelong love for films was born out of amiable chaos in fifties, sub-tropical suburban Brisbane. Along with a gaggle of cousins, we would head by tram along Ipswich Road for our own form of picture show paradise on most sweltering Saturday afternoons.

We didn’t refer to these places of film worship as cinemas. They were picture shows or picture theatres, and we went along to see ‘the pictures’ on the big screen. Sometimes we would venture further afield, walking or riding our bikes through Yeronga Park, across the trainline to the Ideal Theatre in Yeronga, closer to where our cousins lived. At that stage, the Ideal was