Lani Brennan - Lanis Story (wt)

Scientists are still arguing about what causes alcoholism and how big a role genes might play in it. Well, whether it is genetic or not, it runs through generations on both sides of my family.

My mother, Kathy, is a Maori woman who moved to Sydney from New Zealand when she was nineteen. She met my dad, Rory, in a pub at Bondi, both of them no doubt with a drink in hand. My dad had been through hell as a kid. His mum, my beloved nan, was a lifeline to me over and over again during the bad times, but shed been a desperate alcoholic when he was growing up.

My nan, Maureen, was white and was working as a barmaid at a Sydney pub, a waterside early opener, when she met my dads father, who was a Murri Aboriginal man originally from Cunnamulla in Queensland. He was already married with kids, but that didnt stop him hooking up with Maureen. She got pregnant, and he wanted nothing more to do with her.

My dad is dark-skinned, and given how much casual racism I still face on the streets now, I cant imagine what it would have been like for a white woman to have a son to an Aboriginal man back in the fifties. Pretty soon Maureen was permanently drunk, with periodic visits to Sydneys Callan Park Mental Hospital to receive electroshock treatment. She and Rory lived in a crowded flat along with her mother, Kathleen, and brother Fred. Maureen was drowning in alcohol and was often horrifically violent towards her son.

I guess its no wonder Rory ran off the rails early and stayed off them for many years. By the time he met young Kathy in Bondi in the late 1970s he was already a drunk, too. I still feel resentful about the damage Rorys father, my grandfather in name only, did to him by abandoning his child before birth and doing it again, years later.

(When I was about twelve, Rory called on the services of Link-Up, the great organisation that has helped so many Aboriginal people from the Stolen Generations reunite with their families. Through Link-Up, Dad got hold of his father, and arranged to go and see him. It turned out my grandfather lived in Sydney, just half an hours drive away. Not long after hed made contact, Dad took me and my sister along to meet him. We stayed in the car while Dad went into the club where his father was waiting. Rory told his father he had brought us along and that we wanted to meet him. Our grandfather came out to the car, asked us if we wanted a soft drink, brought us out one, and then told my dad to go away and never contact him again. So as well as rejecting his own son, he rejected his grandchildren too.)

Before they became parents, Rory and Kathy drank and partied hard. In fact, Dad says that Mum used to be able to drink him under the table; she says thats not really the way it was. But when she got pregnant with me, their first child, she just put down the bottle and never picked it up again. Knowing what I know now about how hard it is to stop, I think thats an amazing effort.

Dad was a different matter. He just kept right on drinking, and drinking, and drinking. I came along in January 1981 and just under a year later my sister, Koorine, arrived, but he kept going. I remember seeing a photo of Mum and Dad with either me or Koorine as a toddler: a baby girl up on Dads shoulders, while the pram theyre pushing is full of beer cans.