Keller - Natural born Keller : my life and other palaver

T o me this picture sums up my early childhood. Two nuclear parents, two nuclear children. We were living in Brisbane, and my memories of the time are of sunshine, picnics and stability. They were truly happy days.

I know Im wearing my pants a little high in this pic, but apparently that was my preference. Two years older than me, my brother Cameron is the one lounging rakishly in a Hawaiian shirt next to Dad.

As a kid I thought my mum was the prettiest of all the mums though as I (and she) got older I realised she actually looked a lot like the Queen. My dad, I reckoned, looked like JFK. So handsome. I guess that made me a heady mixture of Caroline Kennedy and Princess Anne.

I love the way my hand is resting on Mums shoulder. She was such a committed mother. She never said, Do it yourself. (She would still peel apples for me well into my thirties.) She folded socks in such a way that they were ready for your toes to slide in. She thought everything could be fixed by either eating a mashed banana or applying a mystery ointment called Borofax.

Mum, my arms fallen off!

Pop some Borofax on it and Ill mash you a banana. Thatll stick to your ribs. She described all food as nourishing, which I think best describes her too.

Other mums (me included) tell their kids to sort out their sibling fights themselves but Mum would always calmly wade in and apply reason. I went through a phase of taunting my brother Cameron with constant rounds of Camerons name is Shirley. Hurtful, I know. Cameron would, naturally enough, react by instantly flying into an apoplectic rage. Instead of dragging us outside and calling us idiots (as I would have done), Mum would merely say in a measured voice, Cameron, ignore your sister. You know your name isnt Shirley.

You can see why it was so tempting to stir him he was an easy get. Still is.

Cameron was always trying to get me back for my sarcastic zingers. We still have old Super 8 movie footage of me skipping along and sitting on the front of his toy car, which he promptly steers into a rose bush.

I loved the red Mini in this photo and thought it was hilarious that Dads head nearly scraped the roof when he drove it. In fact I was so passionate about the Mini that I can still clearly remember flinging my little arms across the bonnet and sobbing on the day Mum and Dad sold it which was probably a bit off-putting for the couple whod come to pick it up.

The picture was taken in the front garden of my grandparents house in Annerley, Brisbane, where we spent a lot of time. The house was a huge old Queenslander with a tennis court out the back that Mums parents rented out to local tennis clubs.

All Mums family played tennis even when Mum was ill with emphysema she could still wing me with a killer backhand and at various family reunions all around the country, the local tennis court was always the place Mums family settled old scores. It was also where prospective partners were put to the test. There was no going easy on any new boyfriends or girlfriends.

Some of my earliest memories are of sitting in the kitchen at Annerley while Mum chatted with Grandma, her much-loved mother. This was towards the end of the era of children being seen and not heard, and while Mum was a soft touch Grandma would sometimes banish Cameron and me to the stairs outside, where wed sit mutely until we were allowed back in. Occasionally wed climb the ladder of the umpires chair, and almost inevitably Cameron would push me off. I can still taste the sand.

One day I was trying to look inconspicuous on Grandmas kitchen floor when she announced, Julies getting married! and showed Mum a letter shed received from my aunty Julie, who was living in America. Not long after this the postman delivered a slice of wedding cake in a tiny silver tin which I immediately decided to take to school for play lunch. So exciting! A wedding on the other side of the world, and here I was in Brisbane taking this international sweet treat to school, handling it like I would the delicate bones of a baby bird.

Within minutes of eating the cake at recess I vomited it into my cupped hands in a spectacular fashion. Slightly less exciting. But a teacher praised my quick thinking, and I felt quite chuffed even as the hot lava seeped out from between my fingers.

This was to be the first of several school spews for me, the most memorable taking place during a school assembly in my final year of primary. We were singing God Save The Queen when I started to get that awful familiar rush of saliva and prickly heat that made my face sweat.

Please God, just get me to the end of the song, I prayed.

I managed to make it to the very last line, the final God save our and then whoosh, people were running for their lives.

Good times.

Mum was the eldest of four sisters and a brother and it seems amazing to me how much womens lives changed between Mum and Julie, given they were only ten years apart.

Mum left school at sixteen she told me it was just assumed you would. Not long after she got a job at a bank, where she met Dad. Then, as per bank policy, she had to leave work when she married. Julie, on the other hand, earned two university degrees and travelled overland across Afghanistan in a Kombi with her husband and baby.

Mums lack of educational opportunities meant she was a real stickler about Cameron and me doing well at school. Get your piece of paper and the world is your oyster, was something she said so often it became a family joke. Who liked oysters anyway?

Mums father was a dentist, yet in her late twenties she had all her teeth taken out and replaced with dentures. It was the era of the denture. Dentures were even given as twenty-first birthday presents. (Remind your kids of that when they ask you for a car for their twenty-first.) Mum claimed her teeth were terrible, but how bad could they be to have them all out? What a dreadful thing for a young woman to go through.

Im not sure if it was the trauma of having her own teeth taken out or her fathers profession, but all her life Mum judged people on their teeth. Someone could be an axe murderer, but Mum would say, He had beautiful teeth. And vice versa, of course. What a shame, shed say regretfully. Wouldnt you think theyd fix that?

Grandpa might have been the dentist in Mums family but it was Grandma who took dentistry into her own hands at our place. God forbid Cameron or I showed her a wobbly baby tooth. In a blink shed have her hanky wrapped around it and be giving it a yank. I think even the tooth fairy was scared of her.

At least this was better than my fathers experience with his grandmother. As Dad tells it, within minutes of her arriving for her yearly visit when he was a kid, shed be giving him an enema! Dad recalls looking fixedly at the spot where the corrugated iron wall joined the floor as he assumed the position for his annual tonic. Initially his grandmother brought her equipment with her on each visit bits of rubber tubing that shed hang on the back of the bathroom door. But eventually she took to leaving it behind between visits a threatening reminder of the power of Grandma Bruce. (That was her surname by the way, not her Christian name, though it does conjure up images of Aunty Jack.)

Dad was an only child, and his father was a labourer on a sugar cane farm outside Cairns in Northern Queensland. Dads mother cooked a hot breakfast, lunch and dinner for the cane cutters. All done on a wood stove in a tiny sweltering kitchen. Take that, MasterChef. After Dad left home, his parents set off again to work on some of the most remote cattle stations in western Queensland, my grandma working as a station cook and my grandfather doing backbreaking physical work which he continued to do well into his sixties. In their later years they moved to Brisbane, and on every single visit my grandmother would serve up a delicious roast dinner and scones with jam and cream. You wouldnt want to eat for a week afterwards.