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Good Reading : June 2012
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good reading june 2012 9 cover story in the community. The family finally broke apart, and the mother was living in the city with Suzanne and some of the other children. It was at this time that the mother subjected Suzanne, then a teenager, to a threesome when she brought a man home for sex. Details of that occasion, along with her father’s worst ravages, are buried deep in Covich’s memory, in blanks she has not been able to plumb. All the names of the author’s siblings have been changed in the book, as have those of other people who are named. In recalling the events of her traumatic childhood, Covich said she had to learn to keep safe while negotiating the silences. ‘Sometimes my siblings remembered things that I didn’t. While I don’t recall the details, I do remember the emotions,’ she said. ‘In my 30s, I had counselling that went on for about 10 years, but even then I didn’t tell everything. I had a psychiatrist, an Anglican priest/psychologist and an elderly woman who just used to hold me and pray for me. They all gave me a chance to finally be parented. When my four children reached their teenage years I realised I was inadequate, as I did not know what good parenting was.’ Her first job was working in the kitchen of a retirement home when only 12, although her mother had assured management that she was older. As a single parent, Covich worked in pubs, factories, hospitals, restaurants and kitchens until she was in her 30s, when she realised she had to change her life. ‘I was sick of standing at an ironing board at home all day, delivering 18 baskets of ironing every week, and cleaning houses,’ she said. She completed her tertiary entrance studies at TAFE with flying colours but when sitting in her first classes at the University of Western Australia, she found she didn’t know what certain words meant. ‘I’d only read four books in 20 years – Roots, Mandingo, Uhuru and Exodus, which were all about oppression – and I couldn’t retain anything when learning. I had to read something over and over until it had sunk in,’ she said. ‘I’m a damn good teacher now and I know it’s because I have so much to share with students who are also struggling.’ Covich was the first Australian teacher to win two National Excellence in Teaching Awards (NEiTA) and is still teaching three days a week at the John Curtin College of the Arts in Fremantle. She had started teaching in 1991 and took time out in 2006 to do her PhD in creative writing at Edith Cowan University in Perth. Her 2009 dissertation consisted of a major work, Silencing Violence in the Family: Making the victim the problem, as well as three essays. One was about Margery Kempe, a mystic who lived in the 15th century and dictated the first memoir in the English language; the second concerned theories around child sexual assault; and the third considered memoir as a powerful voice. ‘When I was doing my PhD, I read so many memoirs that really fitted into the category of misery lit, but mine is not like that. I’m fighting back!’ declared this outspoken child abuse survivor. She campaigns vigorously against the silence surrounding violence towards women and children. Perhaps one of the most controversial parts of the book is that dealing with Covich’s relationship with a Croatian migrant. He was 26, and she was about 12 when they met and only 14 when they first had sex. ‘People flinch at the idea of such a man with such a girl and I have been so offended when people call him a paedophile,’ said Covich. ‘I tell them his tenderness was the most beautiful childhood memory that I have. I see him and his wife whenever I visit my home state and he is still the same lovely man. He gave me a way of escaping a world too painful to be in, and when my mother eventually plucked up the courage to leave my father, it was all I clung on to.’ Covich loathed her father, and in her book she relates with glee how she spotted him behind the wheel of a taxi on the streets of the city where she was living. She called out to pedestrians to listen as she abused him for not supporting his children, for having sex with his daughters and bashing his wife. When she heard he was dying, she telephoned him, wanting him to acknowledge what he had done to her. ‘He justified it by saying that he did it because my mother wouldn’t “cough up”, but at least he did say it had plagued him all his life. That was enough for me,’ she said. Throughout her memoir, Covich paints herself as a bright, competitive girl, the class clown who excelled at sport but who had learned not to talk in public about what was going on at home. A poignant passage describes how she used to imagine being part of a happy, loving family living in the base of mushrooms growing in the paddocks. ‘I could go to places like that in my head any time I wanted, and I did,’ she writes in the book. Just after she had returned to education in her 30s, she dreamed that she was in a cave, reading a book, and that the book was one she had written. That dream has now come true: the book will be launched on 7 June, her 63rd birthday. Now all she wants to do is write while she still can. She wrote about 24 short stories once her memoir was accepted for publication and during the editing process, as well as a sequel to her memoir, dealing with the effect that her abusive childhood had on her adult relationships. But that’s a whole other story and one that may be even trickier to bring to the printed page. When We Remember They Call Us Liars by Suzanne Covich is published by Fremantle Press, rrp $24.95. June 2012 main ‘I’m a damn good teacher now and I know it’s because I have so much to share with students who are also struggling.’ 8_9_cover_b.indd 9 9/5/12 8:04:13 PM
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