belair

Early June 1979. Rock’s partner Kate chucks me out of our communal house at Littlehampton. Marilyn has retreated to Melbourne for the sake of our baby, due 9 or 10 July. We have planned a home birth but have no home.

I am builder’s labouring for Stuart and pregnant Vivienne, their home birth due a month before ours. Marilyn returns and we stay in their barn while Stuart and Vivienne visit family in NSW. When they return we move into an empty tin shed at the top of their 19 acres. Our situation is desperate.

Muni, a Rajneeshi and lab technician at Vivienne’s university, rents us a large downstairs room in his house at Belair, perched on the edge of the Adelaide Hills. A huge window overlooks the city below. Adelaide lights the night sky.

Stuart and Vivienne’s home birth ends in Adelaide’s Flinders Medical Centre after complications. Marilyn and I ferry macrobiotic meals to them in the family unit. First Vivienne then Stuart lose their minds to major psychoses. Vivienne goes home to their barn, throws their possessions into the dam.

Marilyn and I nest in our winter sunlit room. I read Lord of the rings to her and our unborn child. We drive down the hill in the Kombi, buy macrobiotic staples, spend hour after hour in Muni’s kitchen exploring a new way to cook and eat.

Rajneeshis are known as Orange People. Muni’s clothes are orange, his lab coat, washing machine, toilet seat, all orange. His two-storey stone house has a spiral staircase to his upstairs quarters. Weird clay figurines Muni has crafted lurk in the garden under ivy and rambling shrubs.

On the evening of 9 July we entertain a friend of Marilyn’s. They did midwifery together during their nursing studies. As if the baby knows a midwife is in the house, the first contraction happens at ten o’clock. The longest night of my life begins.

Mid-morning on 10 July our real midwife and her apprentice arrive, then our doctor. After a 19-hour labour our son is born in the late afternoon, the cat Mister Id on one windowsill, Grogan the dog peering through the window on the other side. Muni lights a candle in a darkened stairwell.

For six weeks we live in that room in Belair. Marilyn’s mother comes for a week from NSW, then my mother from Melbourne. I finish reading Lord of the rings to Marilyn and the baby. My twenty-eighth birthday passes. A subdued Rock comes to tea one night. He and Kate have split. Mister Id disappears.

Slowly we pack the Kombi with all our possessions ready to quit South Australia after six months. Only one thing good has come of our stay here: a son.

A friend offers us refuge in a spacious old farmhouse at Greta in north-east Victoria. Adieu Adelaide.  

Rock on.