Full Transcript for Sue Woolfe

reaction from the mathematicians? Are they saying, oh, that's rubbish or eureka? 00:06:37 Speaker 2: Well, in one of the editions of the book, there's a mathematician in Iowa called Phil Kutzko, and he said, It made me look at mathematics in a new way, which absolutely delighted me. 00:06:51 Speaker 1: When I think of mathematicians at that tertiary level and that elite level, it's all squiggles on a board. Yes, yes. Do you have any idea what those squiggles on a board mean? 00:07:03 Speaker 2: Only very occasionally if someone explains it to me. And I can see that there's certain design beauty in some equations, but that's as far as I get. I'm not a mathematician. I just write about it. 00:07:21 Speaker 1: Are you staggered? Does the book still sell? Because it's 30 years old. 00:07:24 Speaker 2: It's come out again two years ago. It won a Heritage Prize and a small publisher brought it out again. So it's there on bookshelves now again with a new cover. 00:07:37 Speaker 1: Is there a movie in it? Was there ever a movie in it? 00:07:41 Speaker 2: Oh, someone did start talking about a movie. But it was from Hollywood. It's one of those calls that you get and you can't find your phone in your handbag and suddenly you find it's a Hollywood call. But it never came to anything. And I'm told that many ideas come up in Hollywood and you get on a sort of spinning wheel. And if you can stay on the top longer and longer and longer. you might actually get a movie made. 00:08:10 Speaker 1: Well, we've talked about everything but your book and the inspiration from your new book, your inspiration from it. So we'll have a break and we'll come back and talk about the, I've got to get it right, the girl who climbs on roofs or climbs, is it climbs or climbed? 00:08:23 Speaker 2: Yes, you were obviously never a girl who climbed on roofs yourself. 00:08:26 Speaker 1: No, but my father was a roof tiler, so I often climbed on roofs. Sue Wolfe is my guest, folks, back shortly. My guest on Conversation today is acclaimed author Sue Wolfe, and her new book is The Girl Who Climbed on Roofs. And you've been very evasive. The Girl Who Climbed on Roofs is the heroine. Is that your mother? 00:08:50 Speaker 2: That part is true. My mother was a child who was brave and free and wild in her early childhood and climbed on roofs, I think. Something that she said deep in the past made me think that she did in fact climb and stand on a chimney pot. So she must have been such an adventurer. But she was no longer. She was a beaten, cowed, terrified woman. 00:09:21 Speaker 1: This is your mother. You're talking about your mother, not the. 00:09:24 Speaker 2: Yes, my real mother, yes. And I never knew why. Never knew why. I had a sense all my childhood that there was something more to the story. She was getting also tantrums of erratic, mad violence. And we were a very working-class family and couldn't afford to go to the doctor. We went to the chemist instead, that sort of family. And

Dad said all she needs is to be kept calm. So a major thing in our childhood was to keep mum calm but it didn't work and none of us knew why and I was I felt I was the only one who wanted to know why so I gave that to the girl in the book certainly and long long after her death the Royal Commission into Institutional Abuse, Sexual Abuse came. That was in 2017. And I don't know if you remember that year, but every night on our TV sets there were terrible stories of these orphanages. And you see, Mum was not an orphan. Her grandma died when I was 12. So Mum was not an orphan and I'd always thought, She can't have been abused in orphanages because she was not an orphan. And she told us that she'd gone to a very exclusive convent and she used to point it out to us as we went by. There's my convent. It was a beautiful manicured lawns, beautiful portal of the front gateway into a magnificent building. And I was a bit jealous of her for going because I just went to an ordinary private state school. Anyway. As that year progressed, 2017, more and more I heard things that stirred memories. And they were sort of memories I couldn't quite express, but I began to be very suspicious. And it was towards the end that I rang the oldest member of the family, the last one who'd remember. And I said to her, what's the real story about mum? And she said, I don't know. I don't know what you're talking about. But a few months later, she knew she was dying and she rang me and she said, I've got a secret to tell you. I wasn't going to tell anyone because your mum swore me to secrecy, but I've got to tell you now. And she told me that the family had been very wealthy and they'd had properties, seven properties in New South Wales. And my grandfather died in a Spanish flu outbreak epidemic in 1918 and grandma who married very young about when she was 14 i think had five little kids and she sold all the properties because she had always wanted to go to the city be a city girl she was a country girl and she's about 21 and she got to the city and of course the spanish flu was still raging and she had all these little children and she a doctor befriended her and uh She was very grateful for that. And after a year of visiting her and visiting the children and making sure they were well, he said to her the immortal words, you shouldn't be worrying your pretty little head about all that money, darling. Let me look after it. And no sooner had she signed it over to him than he dumped her in an asylum, which could happen in those days. Women were commonly put away. 00:13:09 Speaker 1: He committed her to asylum. 00:13:11 Speaker 2: Yes, and all the children in orphanages and disappeared. And there's one photograph in the photographs in my family of him. It's a man we always called the man with the hat over his eyes because he obviously didn't want to be recognised. And mum came out of that at the age of 12, obviously, as I realised, abused terribly, almost illiterate because I've worked out with someone else who'd gone to that orphanage that she was a kitchen maid No, laundry slave, because she was obsessed about the laundry. And she'd never been educated. And, of course, I should have realised that a convent wouldn't send out children with illiteracy. They'd have to make sure everyone could at least read. So I began to realise that there was much more to the story and Then I did a lot of research and I came across a book by Joanna Penglase called Orphans of the Living. And in that title, Orphans of the Living, that tells the story. So she says in this book that although there are not many records, there's one in 1955 of Queensland where there were 2,100 children in orphanages, one of those only 18, one eighth. were orphans. 00:14:38 Speaker 1: Oh, so these were abandoned kids. 00:14:42 Speaker 2: Well, we forget what it was like in those days, but before we became a much kinder society, there was such discrimination and anger and resentment and ill feeling towards families who were struggling that everybody had to pretend they were in the norm and pretend they were doing okay. But If they were single families, unmarried mums, families struggling, they had no government help. We forget about all that because in the 1970s and on, we provided so much government help. But before that, there was nothing. And it was common in my childhood. I'm old enough to remember people saying when a family was struggling, oh, the nuns will look after the children much better than you can. You know, they'll give them a roof over their head and three square meals a day and all that sort of thing. 00:15:40 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. So they've got so many questions, and I hope you don't mind me delving, but that's your mother coming out of the orphanage when she's 12. What's happened to your grandmother who's in the asylum? Did you ever find out about that? 00:15:52 Speaker 2: She struggled out somehow. And, of course, not being a very worldly woman herself, of course, she somehow managed through life. I think she was a bit of a better, and she bet on the dog than she did. I was quite successful at that. 00:16:08 Speaker 1: Did you know her? 00:16:10 Speaker 2: Yes, yes, she was a great character. She crept into my book, Leaning Towards Infinity. She was in that. I enjoyed her a lot, but I didn't know her well. And I certainly didn't know this past. 00:16:25 Speaker 1: And what about the infamous doctor? Did he ever get his comeuppance? No, no. 00:16:32 Speaker 2: All this I found out way, way later. like 80 years after the event. 00:16:39 Speaker 1: Oh, okay. We would have had family who benefited from his. Oh, yes, yes, yes. I'd be pursuing those, though. Do you know where this important game came from? 00:16:49 Speaker 2: I know no names. No one knows. No one remembers. Everyone's gone. 00:16:55 Speaker 1: Did you ever know anything about your grandfather who passed early in the Spanish flu? Was there any information about him that you?

00:17:03 Speaker 2: Only a family tree, one of my cousins did a family tree and could trace it. And the money originally came from Spanish aristocracy. And so someone came out to Australia related to that. There was a very exciting story about a daughter of this aristocrat who eloped with a great-great-grandfather of mine who was English. And they went and lived in England. And Daddy couldn't forgive them until his deathbed when he gave them all his money. That's all I know. 00:17:41 Speaker 1: Do you feel Spanish in your heritage? Do you feel an alignment with that? 00:17:49 Speaker 2: I'd like to feel I did. I do Argentine tango, if that's in English. 00:17:54 Speaker 1: I see that. 00:17:55 Speaker 2: I've learned bits of Spanish, but I've never actually gone there. I think the family is huge. It's the Castanas family and it's huge and it's sort of spread all over the world. So I'm only one tiny bit of it. 00:18:12 Speaker 1: Oh, well, it's an exotic connection. Sue Wolfe is my guest, folks. Her book is called The Girl Who Climbed on Roofs and you can sense there's a little bit of her life story in it or her family's life story in it. Back after the break. Welcome back, everybody. But if you've just tuned in, I'm chatting with Sue Wolfe, who's a highly regarded author. She's done some amazing things. Her book, Leading Towards Infinity, is 30 years old and it's still being published and republished. But her latest book is called The Girl Who Climbed on Roofs. I keep saying it's based on Sue's life and family experience, but I think you'll probably correct me on that, Sue. But the Your mother appears in it in form. Your grandmother was committed to an asylum by an unscrupulous suitor and the kids, including Sue's mother, five of them end up in an orphanage from which they emerge when Sue's mother was 12. Now, you talk about, well, I've spoken about your Spanish aristocratic background. Tell us about your dad's side of the family. 00:19:27 Speaker 2: Well, I think only in Australia could such a marriage happen. So dad came from the slums in London. I don't think he ever had a home. I think they lived on the street and they could barely survive. And as soon as he left school, which because of the recent edict of the king, boys had to stay till they were 12. And as soon as he was 12, he jumped on a ship and went away to sea. I remember him describing the males on board just as a navvy. He said, I'd never seen butter before, and there was butter, mountains of yellow butter. But on the ship, although he was working hard, he made friends with a sailor who was an artist. And he sailed around the world with the artist in his boat for 10 years. And that was the equivalent of a training in art school. So he left, he jumped ship in Adelaide because he fell in love with the light of Adelaide, he said. And he ran away to the bush. because he was illegal, of course. 00:20:42 Speaker 3: Yeah. 00:20:42 Speaker 2: But I hear from many people that lots of men in

those days jumped ship. So he was always an illegal. So I'm the daughter of an illegal. 00:20:51 Speaker 1: Migrant, I have to tell you. So what was his name? 00:20:57 Speaker 2: Alex Edwards. And all around me are his paintings. 00:21:01 Speaker 1: Oh, I can see. So he acquires this, he must have had an innate artistic sense. 00:21:07 Speaker 2: Yes, he must have, yes. 00:21:09 Speaker 1: So did you, would you ever met your grandfather or grandparents? 00:21:12 Speaker 2: No, no, I didn't. Oh, no, I didn't. I didn't. And I didn't even know about them because he never talked about it, except it came up occasionally in stories when he talked about how wild he was in boyhood. And they were always great adventure stories. But no, I never knew them. And by the time I grew up old enough, he was much older. I was the last childhood. what turned out to be three marriages. And so by the time I grew up, they were long gone. They died in the 30s. 00:21:49 Speaker 1: Oh, my gosh. So he jumps ship in Adelaide and acquires it. So he made a living as an artist? 00:21:57 Speaker 2: No, no. Well, he painted bush skills. And first of all, he was a rabbitoh. If you remember what a rabbit I was. 00:22:07 Speaker 1: I remember that. 00:22:08 Speaker 2: He was amazed at the amount of food you could get in Australia, including just for the taking for rabbits. And when he didn't eat, he sold. And then he got jobs labouring. And eventually he met my mum at a country dance and fell in love with her instantly. You can't tell from me, looking at me, but Mum was a great beauty, a Spanish beauty. And, in fact, many of the line looked Spanish until our generation. And then, I don't know, Dad's English heritage came to the fore. 00:22:45 Speaker 1: Was your dad blonde or fair? Was your dad fair? 00:22:48 Speaker 2: No, he had jet black hair, as did my mum. 00:22:52 Speaker 1: You've got fair hair. 00:22:53 Speaker 3: No, no, no. LAUGHTER Oh, it's not that short. 00:23:05 Speaker 1: So did they meet in Adelaide? Because you grew up, you didn't grow up in Adelaide. 00:23:12 Speaker 2: I have no idea where they met. I just know they met at a dance. And anyway, they settled in Sydney for some reason. Well, actually, they settled in the Blue Mountains. And we always lived on scruffy edges of towns because, you know, We didn't live right in the township itself, but that means I grew up in a bush, which was absolutely a blessing. 00:23:36 Speaker 1: The name Juanita crops up in a couple of your works. Yes. What's the relevance of the name Juanita? 00:23:42 Speaker 2: Well, that's my Spanish heritage that's coming out. See, I claim it sometimes. 00:23:48 Speaker 1: And on the other times you want to claim your dad's from the slums. Did your dad have a distinct Pomi accent? 00:23:56 Speaker 2: No, but he put it on. I don't know. Look, I think he didn't, but people always said when I was a kid that I sounded English, and I think I must have mimicked him without realising it. You can't really tell with your parents what sort of accent they have because you're in that world all the time. 00:24:17 Speaker 1: So this is intriguing. Probably only in Australia that it can happen. So your mum comes out of an orphanage, your dad runs away and joins her. Navy and jump ship in Australia. So it's very much working class background. 00:24:32 Speaker 2: Yes, yes. 00:24:32 Speaker 1: How do you progress through your years of education to reach the point of eminence that you are? How did you do that? 00:24:44 Speaker 2: I think it was the benevolence of the world. At the time, I was a kid at school who just consumed books. I read my way around the school library. I was very pleased when I discovered town libraries and could read my way around that. And then I won a scholarship to university, which my father was appalled at at first because he didn't think girls should be educated because he'd grown up in a world where his mum and his sisters couldn't read. And so he didn't understand why I should want to Be someone in books. 00:25:29 Speaker 1: That character appears in this latest novel. 00:25:32 Speaker 2: Yes, yes, yes. It's a bit, and in Leaning Towards Infinity. 00:25:37 Speaker 1: That's your dad. 00:25:39 Speaker 2: Yes, yes. Look, I begin there, but I go away. Like in Leaning Towards Infinity, he drags a bathtub home and the mother character. 00:25:51 Speaker 1: Okay. So you were the youngest of how many kids? 00:25:55 Speaker 2: Originally five. 00:25:57 Speaker 1: Originally five. And did they all go on to have academic careers? 00:26:01 Speaker 2: Well, two died early. And no, no, I was the only bookworm in the family. 00:26:08 Speaker 1: So that love of books led to a superior intellect, which allowed you to go to. 00:26:15 Speaker 2: Well, that sounds very kind of you. I'm not sure that's true, but anyway. 00:26:19 Speaker 1: You win a scholarship to go to university. 00:26:20 Speaker 2: Yes, yes. But it's a certain sort of intelligence. You know, there's all sorts of... Gaps in, I suppose, in everyone's intelligence. 00:26:28 Speaker 1: Well, you don't know. You can be smart in literature and not in intelligence and mathematics and science, I guess. So what was university like for you? Did you feel you'd come from a working-class family thrust into this new world? 00:26:42 Speaker 2: Yes, yes, absolutely. And in those days, Commonwealth scholarships were very rare for girls. And I was suddenly amongst people who spoke differently. who even used different language, I remember. I listened to their sentences and they used different sorts of words, which just, I didn't know how to copy. I'm not a memory. So I hid most of the time in the library, which I'm very comfortable with. But I found it absolutely wonderful. It turned my life upside down. 00:27:18 Speaker 1: In what regard? 00:27:20 Speaker 2: Well, I think in my family, You won arguments by shouting. And suddenly I was in an environment where you didn't use volume. You used

thinking. And that was just extraordinary to me, quite extraordinary. And I found it enchanting. 00:27:42 Speaker 1: My guest on Conversations is Sue Wolfe. She's the author of her latest book. It's called The Girl Who Climbed on Roofs. There's so much more to talk about. We will run out of time. Back after the break. My guest on Conversations is Sue Wolfe, and it's a great chat. She's been so open about her family background. We were talking initially about her new book called The Girl Who Climbed on Roofs, and there's a bit of Sue and her family in the book, even though she tried to steer me away from that, but a young girl from a working-class family who loves books and wins a scholarship to university thrust into this new world of the academia. Yeah. How was it? What ambitions do you have when this whole new world opens up to you? Where do you see your future? 00:28:29 Speaker 2: Well, I didn't see a future, you know. I just was immersed in reading and arguing and ideas that this was so dramatically different and what I really longed for. So when I finished university, I didn't know what to do. In fact, I went... because I needed to earn money, I went for a job as a barmaid and worked at that for a while until my father came and gave me a lecture and said, this isn't what you got educated for, was it? And I said, well, I don't know. 00:29:02 Speaker 1: Well, this is a father who didn't even want you to know how to read. 00:29:05 Speaker 2: Yes. Well, we all have contradictions. Anyway, yeah, then I finally ended up teaching and I was terrible as the teacher. I couldn't control classrooms. I was just abysmal. I'm not sure that anyone in those two years learned anything. But I realized that teaching in school was not for me. So I got taken on by TAFE, which was great. I really enjoyed that. And I got to lecture to people who were going to do the HSC again. And that was sheer joy. 00:29:44 Speaker 1: So were you talking like general education or did you have a specialty that you taught? 00:29:49 Speaker 2: Oh, I taught special, I specially taught literature and I loved teaching Shakespeare. And I left that after three years. I wanted to be a journalist. And I had six months with Choice magazine. And then I realised one day when I was doing some heavy research that was so enticing, I thought, if I could research just a little bit, if I moved a decimal point, then I'd have a really explosive article. And I thought, Sue, that is not the way to think and you've got to get out of this job. So that was the end of my journalistic career. 00:30:27 Speaker 1: When did you realise you could make, or do you make a living out of it? 00:30:30 Speaker 2: Writing barely you you embrace a a life of poverty but i heard i heard a lovely quote last night i you get wedded to poverty but it's not necessarily a happy marriage like. 00:30:45 Speaker 1: That that is true there's always people who have done have done great things or have who have high levels of achievement, there's always a mentor, somebody who's inspired them or showed them the way or given them opportunities. Was there that person in your life? 00:31:04 Speaker 2: Well, my partner has been my mentor. When I met him, I thought he's a playwright. And when I met him, I thought I need to be in his company because he makes me feel like I could be a writer too. And so we went away to Greece in our first year and on a little mountaintop, not in tourist Greece but way up in the Peloponnese, we lived for nearly a year and I wrote my first novel there. 00:31:36 Speaker 1: On a mountain? 00:31:37 Speaker 2: And that was very exciting. 00:31:39 Speaker 1: You lived on a mountaintop? 00:31:41 Speaker 2: Yes, in a little village. And I described that in the new book, actually. I give that to the composer. So the composer starts off in a village in Greece and it was very much like my village. 00:31:56 Speaker 1: Why did you pick Greece? Why did you pick a mountaintop and not a sea? Hemingway went to the Mediterranean for inspiration. You go to a mountaintop. Why a mountaintop? 00:32:09 Speaker 2: Well, I wanted to find somewhere with green hills with goats jumping. LAUGHTER We passed this beautiful little village on a clifftop with a white river underneath it. And I shouted, let's get off here. So we piled out and somehow found a place to stay. And it was a wonderful place to write. And I could fail and go home and say, oh, I just went on a holiday. But we did learn Greek, got on a truck with goats on it. every morning to the next town where there was someone who'd lived in America and could teach us. 00:32:53 Speaker 1: Do you go back? Do you ever return? 00:32:55 Speaker 2: Yes, I do go back. It's called Karitna and I name my daughter after it and we've gone back every three years to show Kitty Karitna and she's welcomed in Karitna because it's the first time someone's gone with her name, the town's name. 00:33:13 Speaker 1: So you name your daughter after the? The town, is it? Yes. Okay. How many kids have you got? 00:33:19 Speaker 2: Only the one. 00:33:20 Speaker 1: What was her destination in life? What's she pursued? 00:33:24 Speaker 2: Well, she's autistic, so that's a pretty full-time job for some autistic people. 00:33:29 Speaker 1: That's sad. Sad or happy sad? 00:33:33 Speaker 2: Well, happy sad because she's a wonderful person and that's what really matters, I think. 00:33:39 Speaker 1: You spoke before about dancing. How did the dancing come into your life? 00:33:47 Speaker 2: Well, I was a couch potato. And then suddenly I saw someone doing tango, Argentine tango. And I thought, this is so wonderful. And I thought, I had to do it. So I've been doing it now almost 20 years. 00:34:06 Speaker 1: Now, Sue, let's go back to your book, The Girl Who Climbed on Roofs. Can you tell, there's a... There's a theme right throughout. What's the significance of the rifle in the book? 00:34:20 Speaker 2: It provides suspense, I suppose, in the book.

And, you know, it's funny. I do think that when Grandma died, I do think there came a large box. And I do think I remember tunnelling down through all the doilies and I do you think I found a rifle there? I don't know if that's true or not because, you know, childhood is so full of things that you live intensely and moments that you completely forget. But I suspect there was a rifle in that box. And then I thought, well, I can make that really important in this story. 00:35:03 Speaker 1: Can you tell, do we have to buy the book to find out what the importance of it is? 00:35:07 Speaker 2: Yes. 00:35:10 Speaker 1: Yes. 00:35:11 Speaker 2: I don't believe in telling the stories of your books. I'm very happy to talk about the book, but I don't believe in telling the plot. 00:35:18 Speaker 1: No, well, you have to give people a reason to buy the book. There's no doubt about it. I read, either read or heard, you write everything by hand. Yes. 00:35:29 Speaker 2: Yes, I do. 00:35:30 Speaker 1: In this day and age, with computers and Word.programs and all, you write by hand. 00:35:37 Speaker 2: Yes. Yes. Well, as I told you, I'm very interested in the neuroscience of creativity. I sleuth through neuroscience all the time. I'm not a neuroscientist, in the least. But there's coming out to be more and more evidence that shows that handwriting touches more remote memories than typing does. So our mind floods with memories constantly. as we form the letters, as we judge the space they must take, as we judge the shape they must take, all sorts of memories come tumbling back that writers depend on, creators depend on accessing remote memories that seem irrelevant but might just be the key to being able to make something. 00:36:29 Speaker 1: Have you got neat handwriting? I mean, I can't imagine somebody trying to decipher my. 00:36:35 Speaker 2: I'm quite embarrassed when I sign books because I've got this school child's scraggly, wriggly handwriting. It's quite a score. But in a way, that's good for a writer because if anyone else wanted to read my work, I'm sure they couldn't make it up. 00:36:52 Speaker 1: Yeah, but that intrigues me. So you've got this manuscript in handwritten manuscript. 00:36:59 Speaker 2: Eventually I type it up and that's when I start. I've started to know what the book's about because at first I know nothing. I just write about anything at all. And I depend on these memories to come up to steer me. So eventually I type it up. 00:37:16 Speaker 1: I did hear you say once you were saved by writing. 00:37:20 Speaker 3: Yes. 00:37:21 Speaker 1: You were saved. How were you saved and from what were you saved? 00:37:26 Speaker 2: Well, I'll tell you that when I was writing this book, The Girl Who Climbed Down Roots, I came across a book by James Hillman called The Soul's Code. And in it he argues, he was a psychiatrist, and he argues that just as important as having therapy to get out of a mess is the realisation that you have a calling. And if you can find that calling, then that can transfigure your life. And I guess I found that in writing. 00:38:01 Speaker 1: I heard. You talk about that book, The Soul's Code, James Hillman. Yes. So I went looking for it and I find just what's a pricey of it basically. 00:38:11 Speaker 2: Yes. 00:38:12 Speaker 1: It seemed a bit complicated to me. It seemed as though you needed a certain amount of intellect to be able to understand it. 00:38:22 Speaker 2: Well, he does give a lot of examples. I fear that maybe sometimes the idea gets lost in all the examples he excitingly gives. of people who find their calling. Perhaps that's what we will do. 00:38:36 Speaker 1: Maybe I'm just dumb. We're coming to the end. Tell us about the girl who climbed roofs. What do you hope for it? 00:38:49 Speaker 2: Well, the serious thing that kept me going through eight years was the realisation that about half a million children went through these orphanages. between 1920 and 1970 when after that with social help from governments the orphanages largely went out of business but half a million children and most of them were not orphans so they have gone gone out into the community and maybe there'll be a lot like my mother who dare not tell what it was like I met a 96-year-old woman who'd been to mum's orphanage and she had told her first husband that she'd gone to an orphanage and he always threw it at her, she said, when they had rows. So after that she told nobody. And it's a secret. that is unbearable for a human being to take all through their lives without telling someone. And I thought maybe there's many, many people in our community who are wondering about people around them, older people around them who are tight-lipped about their children and behaving erratically, and they don't know that these people are hiding a secret that no human being should bear. 00:40:16 Speaker 1: So it's been delightful. Thank you so much for your time. I hope the book goes really well for you. The Girl Who Climbed on Roofs. Sue Wolfe, thank you so much. 00:40:26 Speaker 2: Thank you. 00:40:27 Speaker 1: And folks, thanks for joining us.