FOR ALLl the fun and freedom of my time at Hawley and Port Sorell, it was also a period which saw the commencement of another, quite different and darker theme in my childhood — regular bashings from my stepfather, or Step as I called him.

I have often reflected on this issue over the years but only in very recent years have I found it easier to talk more openly about it and, even then, infrequently. Besides, I did not think it fair to saddle my wife and daughters with what was a matter of history.

I considered it more appropriate to let them make up their own minds about my family without direct or indirect editorial guidance from me.

First, however, a note on Step’s background. His family had been prominent Hobart business people with a particular involvement in the timber industry in the decades spanning the latter part of the nineteenth century through to the middle of the twentieth century.

Step’s father did not do very much at all apart from collect company shares and dividends, look dapper — complete with pinstripe suit, bow tie and bowler hat — and occupy a seat on the Hobart City Council for many years. However, he did have particular views about education.

Step was born in 1900 and, after primary schooling at Clemes College – subsequently subsumed by The Friends School — his father sent him off to the catholic school St. Virgil’s College to complete his schooling. The family were not Catholics but Step’s father chose the school for the very pragmatic reason that he considered it was where his son would get the best education at that time. From all accounts Step was a competent student and excelled in football, tennis and boxing.

One brief failed marriage

When he completed his schooling towards the end of World War I his father gave him a few pounds and a reference to a businessman in Brisbane and told him to try his luck in Queensland. This he did, spending much of his time in the Toowoomba area where he worked in sales and managerial positions, as well as making a name for himself as a tennis player. He remained in Queensland until the late 1930s, when, with the outbreak of World War II and one brief failed marriage behind him, he enlisted in the army — but did not get beyond Darwin. He returned to Tasmania towards the end of the war to manage a government flax mill near Deloraine, which is where he met Mum.

He was a short man — a couple of inches under six feet tall — with a gingery complexion and a somewhat courtly manner. He was intelligent, shrewd and certainly a competent businessman — he finished up running a substantial operation in Tasmania for many years and oversaw considerable expansion of the business — but there was also a somewhat ominous, brooding reserve behind the mostly quiet and amiable exterior.

I never saw anyone anywhere take any liberties with him, like slapping him on the back or making a joke at his expense. He could be very funny and very entertaining in company — seemingly giving of himself with great charm and generosity of spirit — but, for all that, there was always the distance, the reserve, the sense that the often ebullient Step was a fiction constructed to veil a smouldering insecurity and latent belligerence.

It was in fact a venom and brutality that haunted Mum and I for the next few years, not daily or even weekly but with sufficient frequency to keep us in our respective places. Not infrequently there may have been a valid reason — at least in his mind — to admonish me for a particular recalcitrance or Mum for spending too much money or for some other real or imagined misdemeanour. Looking back I suspect that, apart from an innate aggressiveness and perhaps a disposition towards the application of vicious punishment — which may well have been much more common in the middle of the last century than it is now — he may, at least in part, have been punishing me for being the consequence of a union between my mother and my father. Marrying another man’s wife and inheriting another man’s son may have been a bit too much for his ego to digest.

What characterised his sporadic outbursts was their intensity. He would grab Mum’s riding crop — a solid but flexible whip that was made of strips of interwoven leather over a tapered cane base — and go to work, eyes blazing, face scarlet, teeth clenched and the only noises were the swish and the crack of the crop landing, mostly accompanied by a grunt. He was a very strong man and I am sure he hit with as much strength as he could muster. It certainly looked and felt as if that were the case.

It was agonising

I can remember the first and last occasions with great clarity and one in the middle because of an associated public embarrassment. The first time was at Hawley when I was about seven or eight. I had committed some minor misdemeanour and he took to me with the riding crop with particular venom and I was as shocked by the unpredicted reality of the assault as much as I was by the harshness of it.

It was agonising and remained so for some days. I wept uncontrollably for a long time and did so alone because I am sure he had directed Mum to keep away from me, presumably on the basis that I had misbehaved and, in any event, needed the hiding to remind me to behave in the future. Mum was in the difficult situation of doubtless wanting to console me and yet not wanting to provoke him to further violence by defying him.

The second clearly remembered occasion was after we had moved to Hobart and taken up residence in Red Knights Road, Sandy Bay. I was about twelve at the time and had been the recipient of a particularly brutal thrashing towards the end of the week. My friends were away or doing other things and I decided to walk to Long Beach for a swim. I carried my towel and togs with me and, upon arriving at the beach, went behind a row of pine trees and proceeded to change into my togs under the towel wrapped around my waist. At one point the towel slipped down to my feet and, before I could retrieve it, I heard a boy say “Geez, look at that poor bastard.” Those precise words are embedded in my psyche. I flushed, completed the change of clothes and headed for the water. What he had seen of course were the welts across my backside that extended to the top of my leg. I knew the colours by heart — dark blue, bright red, puce, pink, purple. There wasn’t much left of the spectrum after a glance at my backside after Step had purged his demons. I think that incident at Long Beach was one of the most humiliating experiences of my life. It is certainly one that I shall never forget.

Step’s beatings of me stopped when I was about fourteen, already around six feet tall, very fit, developing as a ruckman and increasingly confident in my ability to defend myself. I think he concluded that the passage of time had dictated that prudence might be the sensible option. We left Red Knights Road at the beginning of 1956, my first year at university, and moved to a new home that Step and Mum had built in Taroona. While Step’s attacks on me had stopped he still brutalised Mum, although much less frequently.

Having acquired the axe

It was in that first year in Taroona that he came home one evening the worst for drink — an occasional rather than persistent problem — and, while I was studying, I heard a row develop in the living room on the other side of the house, including screams from Mum. I thought for a short time and then slipped outside and grabbed the axe from under the house. I pause here to emphasise that there was nothing spontaneous or in any way unconsidered about my actions in this episode. I was quite clear in my mind as to what I wanted to do and achieve. So, having acquired the axe, I entered the house in such a way as to ensure that only Mum saw me with the axe and, as much by accident as design, this is precisely what happened and I made my way quickly to my bedroom, axe in hand, leaving the door slightly ajar. There then followed a brief period of silence in the living room followed by whispered exchanges. Mum subsequently came to my room to ask why I had the axe in my room. I told her what I had done and why and the matter was never discussed again. More importantly, and consistent with my objective, that was the last time Step ever hit Mum or myself. Increasingly, he became a benign old man.

That episode is as clear in my mind now as it was nearly six decades ago when it happened. Why didn’t I act earlier? I don’t know but probably for lack of confidence in my ability to carry it through. Do I continue to harbour, even now, a hatred for Step? No, there is no hatred but I do harbour a certain pity for what he was — a man of his time, a different time, who didn’t have the intellectual and emotional wherewithal to cope with a new and, to him, emotionally threatening domestic situation. He lived for two decades after those years in Red Knights Road and Taroona and they were soft years of warm fires, gentle walks on the nearby beach, whisky and milk in the late afternoon, reading and television. He was a proper bastard in his day but, like all bastards, time got the better of him and he became amiable because he had no option and perhaps because he thought it might irritate those of us who had been his victims! He’s not really in focus for me any more. He’s a tune for which I have forgotten the words; or perhaps I have the words but not the tune. It doesn’t matter much either way. Besides, there have also been a lot of very happy times to recall from those years.

I am relieved to have told that story. I hope too that it is some small comfort to those many thousands of Tasmanians — young and old, then and now — who have also suffered at the hand of those nearest to them to be reminded that they are by no means alone.