You Are The Miracle!: How being hit by a truck saved my life

By Grada Robertson

Did the accident that almost took Grada Robertson’s life, actually save her life?

Grada Robertson always considered herself to be blessed.

Grada was only seventeen years old when she met her soulmate, Peter. By nineteen she was married and had migrated from Holland to live in Peter’s homeland, Tasmania, Australia.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Publicious Book Publishing
• Release date: Sep 11, 2018
• ISBN: 9780648382010

Grada Robertson

A gifted healer and modern-day muse, Grada Robertson and her husband and fellow practitioner, Peter, live on nine idyllic acres of landscaped gardens, mazes and forest, which they share with a beloved menagerie of animals in Forth, Tasmania. Grada's lifelong interest in health, food and earth medicine has shaped her career and lifestyle. In 2000, Grada and Peter opened the Purple House Wellness Centre, where they specialize in digestive, (wo) men's and children's health, as well as energy medicine. As Grada experienced after she was literally hit by a truck in 2006, it is almost impossible to make a full recovery when your gut health is destroyed by injuries, antibiotics or other lifestyle-induced illnesses. She became inundated by patients who had either become disconnected from food and its role in creating vitality, or who had struggled to overcome food allergies and other chronic conditions. Grada sought to share her views and passion for diverse, wholesome foods with a larger audience through her blog (purplehousenaturaltherapies.com.au/ gradas-blog/) and by opening Alchemy Café, a gluten-free café with an emphasis on ancient food preparations, such as fermented foods, slow cooked meals, and freshly baked food made from local organic produce. Using her home kitchen as a laboratory, Grada experimented with an exotic and often eccentric range of fermented cultures and colonies, as well as bone broth soups, smoothies and utilising healthy oils. She discovered it was easy to create foods that support immunity and restore digestion and wellbeing by returning essential bacteria and enzymes to her family's and client's diets. Alchemy of Love represents Grada's research into a happy life-including a strong immune system, fit and flexible body and a balanced mind.

Book preview

•  YOU ARE THE MIRACLE!  •

6th January 2006

It happens just after 4 pm. I know that for a fact, because one second I am checking my watch, which read one minute after 4 o’clock.

The next second, I am dying.

I am completely caught off guard. For a moment my emotions tumble around frantically inside the space of my head.

I go from shock, to horror, to frozen, as I realise my life is over and there is nothing I can do to stop it.

I feel an overwhelming sense of regret.

This isn’t how it’s supposed to be!

I am only forty-three. I have only just begun my life.

There is still so much love to share!

I will never see this place again.

I will never hold my children close, or feel Peter’s strong arms around me. …will anyone miss me?

Slowly, I lose my grip on the inside handle of the driver’s door of the car. It’s the eeriest feeling. My legs give way because my pelvis and spine have exploded from an enormous impact.

I lose control of the lower part of my body and crumple onto the hot tarmac. Motionless, I lie on the side of the road where I had parked only thirty minutes earlier. Right outside the Purple House. Right in the centre of Forth, the small town in Tasmania where I have spent the last seven years of my life.

I will never forget their screams, or the horror on the faces of the two passengers in my car.

The world around me becomes more surreal by the second. I am frantically clinging to some final errant thoughts that are rushing through my head.

What’s going to happen to Peter and the children now?

They can’t live without me! I couldn’t have died at a worse moment.

Peter will cave in under the strain of our stretched finances and being a single parent to six teenage kids. They need me!

Nobody loves and understands my kids like I do!

What’s going to happen to Tom now?

I feel especially protective of Tom. He is my baby. He is only twelve and has never been all by himself at home for any length of time yet. I feel the worst kind of despair wash over me.

I am dying, that’s for sure. There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever now.

I can’t survive a massive blow to my body like that, nobody can.

My brain is going overtime, trying to get my head around this incredible chain of events.

All I was doing was hopping into my car, wasn’t I? I’d made sure my passengers were safely seated, and the doors closed, before I opened mine to get in the car.

Suddenly there was an enormous flash of light.

I heard Alison scream in the front passenger seat and I froze as something huge crashed into my back. It must have been a hand grenade or something similar.

I am losing my grip on normality.

Hey, what’s happening now? How come I am above the car?

I can see everything in a split second. The truck roaring up the road. The car, with my body collapsed onto the smashed-up car door, which is lying on the road.

I hear the words, This won’t be the last time if you fail to learn something from this… The mysterious voice trails off.

The next moment, I realise something eerie.

I don’t feel any fear or pain! There is only light and stillness. The whole Universe is holding its breath, waiting for me to make a choice…

I am sure I left my body for what seemed like an eternity, but it can’t have been more than a few seconds. I go from feeling shocked and troubled, stuck in my worst nightmare, to being perfectly still. All anxious thoughts leave my mind as time and space come to a halt.

In that moment, I am shown that nothing that ever happens is out of place.

There is perfect order and I feel very safe. Wars and famines don’t even cause a blip here, let alone my own personal struggles. Everything I have ever striven for, beauty, order and happiness, is here, and I am part of it.

This awareness softly permeates and saturates every cell and atom of my being as I am being suspended above my body. I am filled with a deep sense of calm. I exist, and for the first time in my life, there is complete absence of fear. I can feel all of creation inside me, and yet I am only a tiny part of it. I am inextricably connected to it all. I am loved by something far greater than me, something timeless and unchanging.

It is time to let go.

I feel myself expand to take in this new realisation–that there is only unconditional love, peace and calm in the place where I am.

PART ONE

•  CHAPTER 1  •

PREMONITIONS AND FROGS

Until the day of the accident I had lived a life other people would probably call blessed. The best thing that ever happened to me, at the very mature age of seventeen, was meeting Peter in Holland. Peter, twenty- one at the time, had left behind the sugarcane fields of Queensland to surprise his brother, Winston. Winston was getting married to my cousin, who had grown up in the same village as I did.

Fate had it that his brother worked for my dad, so I was introduced to Peter the day after he arrived in Holland. Peter and I became instant soulmates and felt so comfortable with each other that we married not long after. That’s the short version. In case my children, grandchildren or future generations read this book, I will try to describe how we got together.

A month before Peter arrived in Holland I had a highly intuitive experience. I was riding my bike home from high school when I suddenly got the urge to stop and lie in the long grass, next to the bike track. Normally I would take the train to cover the fifteen-kilometre distance from home to school. This day I rode my bike. Instead of taking the most direct route, I had taken a bike track that meandered through the green belts, between the villages I had to pass through.

I loved overlooking the flat landscape of the north of Holland, the contrast of the busy highways in the distance and the utter peacefulness of the cows grazing nearby. I loved listening to the frogs’ songs that came from the canals and small waterways that chopped up the landscape in neat green patches.

Everything in Holland is neat, from the tiny kitchen/living areas, perfectly manicured outdoor areas, to entire towns, farmlands and forests. It’s the Dutch psyche and how we like it. Suddenly I felt such a oneness with my surroundings that I wanted to stay in that moment forever. I hopped off my bike, unstrapped my heavy schoolbag and flopped down into the long grass between the bike track and the canal. I revelled in the illusion that I was completely at one with nature and far removed from the pressures of school and the expectations of home, church and society.

Overwhelming love and gratitude welled up in me as I looked up at the sky. I shut my eyes as the grass prickled and caressed my neck and face. I sensed the universe inviting me to ask anything and I would receive the answer. My heart and mind became one as I realised that if this was all I would ever experience, it was enough. I felt complete. Everything I would ever want for was already there. If I left the world now, everyone and everything I had ever known, I would be utterly fine with that. I felt my heart expand till it felt like it burst and filled my body with bubbles of happiness.

After a long time, I woke up to reality. The sun was losing its strength. Shivering, I strapped my schoolbag, heavy with language, biology, history and geography textbooks, back onto my bike and rode home. I realised that all the knowledge I gained from those books would never buy me any real wisdom, that came from a different source. Stuffing my head with studies every spare moment was only going to take me further from that moment.

I needed a different pathway, one where I could say yes to God/ my heart/the universe every day. Riding home I felt mixed emotions. I knew I had experienced something rare and special. As I got further and further away from that place, I wondered if I would ever be able to feel it again.

In hindsight, I realise this deeply intuitive moment was a premonition that prepared me for the changes to come. Emotions are powerful forces of attraction. Perhaps if I had ignored the impulse to stop and lie down when I did, I would have missed that extraordinary moment of at-one-ness with all that is, and Peter may never have come into my life.

Unbeknown to me, on the other side of the world, the complete stranger who was going to be my husband was working on the sugarcane fields of Queensland. This person, Peter, was planning to move back home to Tasmania after the harvest, when he got an invitation to attend his brother’s wedding in Uitgeest, my hometown.

Peter had no intention of attending the wedding. Yet he kept wondering, what if he left his job in Queensland and did go to Winston’s wedding? The more he pushed the idea away, the more he thought about it. In the end he talked it over with Judy and Ken, the couple he worked for and who had become his close friends. To his surprise, Judy thought it was an excellent idea and encouraged him to throw logic to the wind and follow his hunches.

But I don’t even have a passport! Peter protested.

Well, it’s not very likely you’ll get your passport ready in time, so why don’t you try to obtain one, and if it all works out, that means you are meant to go, Judy suggested.

This sounded reasonable, so Peter contacted the Emigration Office in Brisbane, eight hours drive from Mackay, where he was stationed. Peter would have been willing to drive for a couple of days, but was informed it would take four weeks to process a new passport. The wedding was on the 23rd of November, three weeks away.

See, I don’t think I am meant to go, he said to Judy. Judy replied that he shouldn’t give up so easily and to contact Townsville, only three hours’ drive away. Townsville informed him they could do it in three weeks, which was just enough time for Peter to make it to the wedding.

Peter left for Townsville straight away, but was told when he got there that his forms were insufficient. He needed a signature by two different people who had known him for longer than two years and would vouch for his good character, otherwise he may as well forget the whole idea.

This was long before we had mobile phones, but miraculously Peter managed to contact two old acquaintances and had his forms signed and returned that afternoon.

How soon will my passport be ready? Peter asked the guy behind the desk.

In three weeks’ time, like I told you.

Okay, I will collect them personally in three weeks, so they don’t get lost in the mail, Peter replied.

The officer looked up, Are you sure you want to do a six-hour return trip just to collect your passport? You’re not coming for any other business?

Peter shook his head.

Wait here, the officer said, and disappeared. Peter waited and waited. Finally, the officer returned. With a grin, he told Peter to come back the next day to collect his shiny new passport.

Peter felt a thrill go through his body. This was the confirmation he had been looking for! The next day he collected his passport and returned to Ken and Judy, who were as excited for Peter as he was.

When he said goodbye three weeks later, little did he know this would be the last time he would see Ken and Judy happily together. Ken’s life was cut short when he got hooked by a travelling irrigator a few years later. He couldn’t free himself in time. As the irrigator kept moving forward Ken slowly got strangled. It was an awful way to die and Judy, who was left behind with four young children and a sprawling farm, was beyond heartbroken.

After his farewells, Peter travelled to Sydney, where his plane was very delayed due to strikes. Australia was notorious for strikes in the late 70s and 80s. Whole airports and wharfs would be paralysed, which, combined with Australia’s isolated position in the world, severely hampered the economy.

By the time the plane finally arrived in Singapore, Peter had missed his connection to Amsterdam and had to get the next plane to London. Reaching London many hours later, the fog was so thick it was unsafe to land. They flew to Gatwick instead, where Peter got the bus to London, then the next connection to Amsterdam. When Peter eventually arrived in Holland, he was so tired and freezing he jumped into a taxi and asked to be taken to Uitgeest, to his brother’s girlfriend’s house, forty kilometres north of the airport.

The taxi left Peter at the door of a very old lolly shop. It was closed because it was 8 pm in that ancient part of town. Peter shivered in his summer clothing as he rang and rang the doorbell. He had left the heat of Queensland a few days earlier to arrive in the middle of one of the coldest winters we had experienced in Holland.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, an old lady opened the door. She recognised Peter immediately because he resembled Winston so much, but she couldn’t speak English and was so confused she wouldn’t let him in. After a while Krijntje, his future sister-in-law, appeared and asked him to come in from the cold, dark night. She made him feel welcome.

The following day Winston took Peter in the truck doing his jobs for my dad, collecting stale bread and delivering fresh breadcrumbs. Just when they were driving back to my dad’s factory I was riding home from the train station, my favourite long, bright red winter coat flapping in the wind. I am sure there were dozens of cyclists on the road, but Winston pointed me out to Peter, telling Peter about the family he worked for. This is how we first crossed paths.

I met Peter face to face a few minutes later when I parked my bike next to my dad’s office. I am sure if there was such a thing as the stars smiling down, this was the moment. I felt tingly all over, as if I recognised him from many previous lifetimes. There was an undeniable attraction.

I had been attracted to many boys before, but what I felt now came from the core of my being. I didn’t know if Peter felt the same, but as we kept bumping into each other over the next few days we couldn’t stop looking into each other’s eyes. Before long we went from eye contact to holding hands, which progressed into long talks in a mixture of high school English, Dutch and Australian.

As we got more and more intimate, we realised we had always asked ourselves the same questions about life. Who am I really? What is my role here? What is the meaning of life? We agreed on everything. Even though Peter had grown up in isolated, rural Tasmania and I in Holland, we discovered that we fitted together seamlessly, and we could be completely ourselves with each other without changing anything.

Before long we were inseparable and couldn’t bear to be away from each other’s company for longer than a few hours per day. That feeling has never changed. It became inconceivable to us how we had lived our separate lives before, now that we had found each other. I can’t even remember Peter proposing to me. I certainly didn’t propose to him. We just knew we loved each other and wanted to spend the rest of our lives together, so we got married a year after we met.

We didn’t really want a wedding or marriage certificate, but I needed it to be able to migrate to Australia. It would have disappointed our parents if we didn’t do things in the proper order, and we couldn’t see the point of hurting the feelings of the older generation. The wedding happened on a dreary winter’s day in January 1981. It was time to say goodbye to my high school friends and some of my teachers who had grown fond of me. They all dropped in at the reception. I met Peter’s parents who had flown over for the occasion, and immediately felt the same gentle intelligence and respect for the world that I so loved in Peter. Knowing them made it easier for me to migrate.

A few weeks later I left behind my parents, older sister Jonath, brothers Piet and Maarten, and younger sister Corrie, to move to his home of Tasmania, Australia. I had just turned nineteen and was pregnant with number one.

This is how I said YES to my heart, to the universe, and NO to security. No to the security of studying hard, getting a degree and a well-paid job. This is how I traded my old dreams in for a new one. I turned my back on society as I had known it and went to live on a remote island, surrounded by nature, to become self-sustainable and have twelve children with Peter.

The fact that Peter only wanted three children didn’t deter me. I was in a rush for my life to unfold, so I was very happy when I realised I had conceived our first child not long after we got married.

•  CHAPTER 2  •

CREATING GEZELLIGHEID

It wasn’t long before I found out that migrating and being pregnant was the easiest part of the dream. The actual living, the everyday humdrum, was more difficult.

I had to admit to myself that I was lonely. It’s one thing to know that as a spiritually evolved creature, which is how I liked to think of myself, I got the important things in life right, like living in Tasmania with my soulmate. However, I still had to wake up every day and go through the motions of being a human being, and that is what I found most difficult.

We lived fifteen kilometres away from the nearest town and I couldn’t drive! I missed the buzz of Holland, the ancient history, quaint architecture, culture, my family and village.

I missed studying and the mental stimulation. I missed having a goal. I can see now that I felt very diminished and insecure. I wasn’t used to living with only one other person in my life. While Peter meant the world to me, I yearned for some outside stimulation and I missed my old life, like having coffees and deep and meaningfuls with my girlfriends.

We started looking around for work, but the economy was very flat. This was decades before the internet and the backbone of Tasmanian industry was farming, mining and logging, none of which appealed to us. Before Peter had moved to Queensland he was a Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife officer, but he had left that behind after being involved in a drowning accident. His best friend, Mick, had drowned, having a devastating effect on Peter. It was many years later, decades even, that I realised the full impact losing Mick had had on Peter. All I knew then was that since Peter’s near-drowning experience he preferred very few friends. We lived a very quiet existence that first year in Tasmania!

Jobs were hard to come by, so we had to live very frugally. Our little house didn’t have cosy central heating like the homes in Holland I was used to. Even if I managed to light an open fire from scratch, our fireplace sent all the heat up the chimney to be lost in the vast expanses of the Tasmanian sky, whilst sending great billows of smoke into our tiny living room. I developed chilblains on all toes and fingers and shivered my way through my second winter in twelve months.

The first year in Tasmania felt like the longest year of my life. On one hand I saw the pregnancy as a sacred rite into motherhood and the greatest adventure a human being could ever wish for. I had already bonded with my child’s being from the second of conception and I felt very conscious of the responsibility.

We both thought of our baby as a boy and I couldn’t wait for his little body to be fully grown so I could hold him in my arms. Every day Peter and I would rub my tummy and talk to him. I never felt more content and loved than being cuddled up in Peter’s strong arms all night, with the growing baby safely tucked away under my heart.

On the other hand, my pregnancy hormones made me feel very sensitive to all the changes. I never had a skerrick of morning sickness, but emotionally I felt more fragile than normal. I started to realise Dutch families were much more close-knit than the average Australian family. In Holland, every occasion, it didn’t matter how small, was a reason for celebration. The dark winter months were broken up by the happy anticipation of Christmas.

Christmas in Holland fell in the middle of winter, immediately after the shortest day. The Dutch couldn’t wait that long, so we celebrated Saint Nicolas on December 5th, and gave out presents and spoiled each other. But we couldn’t even wait till early December, so on November 11th, just when winter starts to settle in, we celebrated St Maarten, the Dutch version of Halloween. Little children light their homemade lanterns after dark and go doorknocking for lollies, all the while singing traditional St Maarten songs.

I remember one St Maarten when I was four years old. I was standing in front of the closed door of one of our neighbours, with a lantern in one hand and a bag of lollies around my neck. My mum had sewn cotton bags we could hang around our necks, in order to keep our hands free in case we tripped in snow or ice. Surrounded by a group of neighbouring kids, we were all singing our little hearts out.

We were expecting our friendly neighbour to open the door with a smile and a handful of lollies, but the louder we sang, the more disappointed we became. The lights were on in the house, but there was no response. We were feeling ignored and upset that our neighbours were breaking the centuries-old tradition. One of the boys started to kick the door with his wooden clogs. Suddenly the door opened, and we found ourselves unexpectedly blinking into the bright hallway light.

A dark shape appeared in the form of a very cross midwife, who barked at us and told us to go away. The woman of the house was in the middle of having a baby and we were disrupting her.

Shoo, shoo, she said, waving her hand in the general direction of the road, get going before I get Mr D after you! Mr D was the owner of the house and we were a bit scared of him. Then she shut the door and we heard her footsteps fade as she raced upstairs to be by the bedside of our neighbour. It took us a few moments to get over the shock and then we scuttled to the next house, where we started singing all over again. Our embarrassment was soon forgotten when the door opened and this time a smiling neighbour gave us our expected lollies.

That is how it was. Birth and death were very much the fabric of our home life. If somebody died the wake was held at home, traditionally in the best room of the house. In the old days, farmers or well-to-do people kept that room especially for births and deaths, and the rest of the year the door remained closed. You would feel a sense of reverence upon entering, with the open cask containing the corpse of the deceased family member set up as a centre piece in the room. In Dutch the word for that is ‘op-ge-baard,’ which comes from the same root word as ‘birth’ in English.

So, a long time ago, when language was created, people still realised that death actually meant birth. Perhaps having a wake had started off as a celebration of a new beginning. Today we see death as an ending, something sinister and serious and we hush our voices, which probably doesn’t help the grieving family at all.

In Holland, the majority of babies used to be born at home. I know the exact spot where I was born, under the little window of the house where I spent my early childhood. Normally we had the dining table in that spot, but when it was time for the baby to come out, somehow there was a bed under that window. My mum gave birth there four times, always around 12 pm, just after the baker had done his rounds in his van. The news would ripple from one little house to the next, and soon a steady stream of visitors would arrive to admire the baby and welcome him or her into the community.

The Dutch government would pay for a midwife or nurse to look after the mum, baby, children and visitors for a full week to ten days and she would serve the visitors with coffee and cakes. It all created a sense of belonging and connectedness, which in turn helped to build stronger lives, families and communities.

In Tasmania I fell into a big void. Even though Peter came from a large family with plenty of love, nobody was close. Birthdays went by without anybody paying attention and nobody looked for excuses to celebrate anything. It just didn’t seem to be part of the consciousness of Tasmanians. They clearly didn’t know what they were missing out on.

I did though. They were missing out on ‘gezelligheid,’ and the fact that there isn’t even an English word for it proves my point. The closest I come to translating it would be to say that you live every moment filled with ‘soulfulness.’ Literally translated, ge-zell-ig means soul-ish. You create an environment or lifestyle where your soul feels happy, nurtured and at home.

In Holland that means keeping your home warm and clean, with soft lighting in the afternoon when the sun goes down early. It means taking time to cook nice meals and making sure everyone eats together and you pay attention to each other. It means brewing a fresh pot of coffee, not just pouring a cup of International Roast in a cold, dark and messy house, like most of Peter’s acquaintances did in Tasmania. Some people never bothered to open their curtains here in the winter!

Everywhere I went I got depressed, so in the end we just spent most of our time in our little cottage, where I worked hard to make it ‘gezellig’ every day.

I was determined to pass this core value on to our children.

•  CHAPTER 3  •

CHEEZELS AND TWISTIES

I trundled to the tiny corner store/post office in our little township in the northwest of Tasmania to see if there was any mail from Holland. I lived for long, handwritten letters from my mum, sisters and my high school friends. However, most days the local shop owner would say, Sorry, no mail, in her very broad Australian accent.

To cover my disappointment, I would treat myself to a packet of Twisties or Cheezels from the counter, which I slowly demolished on the short walk home, breaking all my own rules of healthy living in pristine nature. The Twisties were full of artificial colouring, flavouring, MSG and other nasties, and I felt bad about wittingly polluting my bloodstream. I knew my unborn child’s body was growing at a rapid pace and sucking nutrients and toxins alike from my bloodstream, but I just couldn’t help myself. The Twisties and Cheezels dulled the disappointment and isolation and took care of my pregnancy cravings for the next twenty-four hours, when the same thing would happen all over again.

In hindsight, it looks as if I lived from twisty to twisty! I forever craved salty foods during the pregnancy. Now, I realise I was very mineral deficient. If I had consumed at least a teaspoon of broad spectrum salt every day, I would have lost my cravings within a month. I also wouldn’t have felt so dizzy and light-headed. In those days I clung to the mistaken belief that salt was bad, and being a vegetarian only added to the lack of minerals. Now I also know that when you are severely mineral deficient your life becomes a zone of misery, regardless of the circumstances you find yourself in.

This was April 1981, and Peter and I spent all our spare money renovating the little cottage we had bought, not long after we arrived, with the help of Peter’s parents. I think we bought it for $20,000, which seemed a huge sum of money and weighed heavily on my young nervous system. The mortgage payments used up most of our unemployment cheque (called the dole). I hated being on the dole, meagre as it was, but I was grateful it helped us survive that first year in Tasmania.

We had fallen in love with the hundred-year-old weather board cottage as soon as we clapped eyes on it. Called Railway Cottage, it had character and history. At some point there had been a railway line nearby, but it certainly wasn’t there now. All I could see was acres of undisturbed paddocks on one side and three houses on the other. Other than a few farms and dwellings in the vicinity, that was the full extent of the township.

The previous owners, belated hippies, had covered the lounge room from floor to ceiling with sea-grass matting with complete disregard to the character of the century-old cottage. The mats had been attached by hundreds, if not thousands, of staples. They did a lot of damage to the beautiful old Baltic pine ceiling, walls and floors. They also collected dust and providing a breeding ground for insects and spiders. We spent the first few weeks pulling out every single staple by hand.

Once we had stripped the room naked of its seagrass fur, we were faced with decades of dodgy paint jobs. Peter’s dad offered to work on the central chimney and nearly burned the house down. He was more stubborn than the paint, refusing to give up when it came to using the heat gun. He didn’t even notice when the ceiling started to smoke, until Ethel, Peter’s mum, started yelping.

Just doing a few square metres of chimney took us weeks. We started to feel overwhelmed, so we opted for plan B, wallpaper the rest of the room!

I can’t remember where we got the money from, but we found some vintage wallpaper that suited the house and got to work papering the ugly walls. Even the ceiling was ugly, as it had been left with thousands of staple holes. We decided the easiest option would be to cover it. This turned out to be a nightmarish task for Peter and his dad, because they had to keep the wallpaper up there till it was dry enough to stick. With gravity pulling the paper down as fast as they put it up, it became a battle of wills. It wasn’t the first time I silently thanked their Scottish genes for being so stoic, stubborn and persistent.

While Peter and his dad were busy scavenging second-hand building materials, I found some cotton and materials and got to work decorating the house in a style that could only be called half hippy, half traditional Dutch. It was certainly unconventional for Tasmania.

I flourished with the baby growing inside me and soon outgrew my wardrobe. I didn’t believe in consumerism, so my wardrobe only consisted of a few items. I remember I bought one dress for fifty dollars. I had borrowed the money from Jessica, my sister-in-law, and copied the pattern to sew another maternity dress. I was quite pleased with the end-result, but when I see photos now of my tent dresses I shudder! They made me look like a ship sail in gale force winds!

Everybody had to wear maternity dresses in those days, to hide our tummies. Showing off your growing baby was considered immodest. Tasmania seemed very sheltered from the rest of the world. Fashion-wise it was light years behind Amsterdam, where I did my shopping before I migrated. I was trying hard to fit the mould and not upset anybody, so I hid my tummy like all the other pregnant women.

One thing I was not willing to compromise on was the subject of homebirth. Whenever I discussed it I got strange looks. I was met with opposition from midwives and doctors alike. In the end, I found a Dutch GP (General Practitioner) who agreed to drive the fifteen kilometres to attend the birth at my house. I was excited because having twelve homebirths was one of my life’s goals.

I happily washed the few baby items that were handed down to us and crocheted and knitted the last few months away. I also read and reread every birth scenario under the sun. My favourite book was ‘Spiritual Midwifery’ by Ina May Gaskin, but I studied other textbooks as well, just to be one hundred percent prepared.

Other than the Twisties, I never strayed from a strict, almost monastic lifestyle. No alcohol, no parties, and I only ate good, clean food which we mostly produced ourselves. After reading a book on how great cider vinegar and honey was for the unborn child it became our standard drink. Even today, while most people pucker up their noses at it, my children like to drink cider vinegar and honey.

Peter was the youngest of seven kids, six boys and one girl. His parents had sold their dairy farm and retired early on a modest income. They were a lovely couple who never argued or raised their voices and were intelligent and polite. Peter’s mum had been a schoolteacher before she met her husband, Alan, and came to Tasmania to become a farmer’s wife and create a large family. They helped us out where they could, but Peter being number seven meant they had reached the end of their tether as far as finances were concerned. They had never been well off. By the time they sold the farm they had enough to buy a block of land down the road, build a house and have a little bit left over to retire on. Even so, they lent us a deposit of $5,000 to buy the cottage and gave us a very old VW Combi to get around in.

The Combi didn’t offer much in the way of comfort, even though it was lined with long-pile nylon carpet from top to bottom. It had its own itinerant tarantula spider, who, according to the previous owner, used to walk up and down his arm when he drove long distances. In Holland, the largest spider might be two to three centimetres, four if you are really unlucky. To give you an idea of how alien tarantula spiders are to the Dutch, I remember an incident where a live specimen was spotted entering Holland in a box of bananas but got away before the authorities could catch it. It hit the headlines in the newspaper and as the days wore on so did the rumours of where it was last spotted. I can’t remember the ending of the story, but here I was, the hapless owner of my own tarantula. It was hiding in the long nylon carpet somewhere, ready to pounce on me just when I would least expect it.

I came across a huntsman later, as Tasmanians fondly called tarantulas, on our newly installed mantelpiece, and nearly dropped my baby from the shock. Peter kindly killed it, which gave me an opportunity to capture it on camera, next to my spread-out tape measure. It measured ten centimetres, which meant it probably wasn’t fully grown. I proudly had the photos developed and sent to Holland, where I was now classified a hero.

Needless to say, I was paranoid every time we went for a drive. To make matters worse, Peter had to give me driving instructions. Every time it was my turn to drive, the old Combi had a mind of its own. One time I nearly crashed into the front of a busy pub on a street corner in Penguin. I was too busy using the clutch, changing gears with an unyielding gear stick and turning the wheel. I didn’t manage the accelerator so well, so I didn’t change speed.

Peter snatched the steering wheel from me and pulled sharply to the left, saving our lives and those of the pub diners. We had a tense few hours after that. Peter was always personally offended when I got something wrong in our driving lessons, as if he hadn’t been a good enough instructor. He was an excellent driver himself and he just couldn’t work out how an otherwise intelligent, practical Dutch girl could be so daft on the roads.

The trouble with me was that, coming from Holland, I had never been the slightest bit interested in being behind the wheel. There you were independent as soon as you could ride your bike, at around age three. After that you were more or less free to roam the neighbourhood, which used to be pretty safe when we were children. From there you progressed to bigger and better bikes and longer distances. It was a seamless progression. If you couldn’t get anywhere on your bike, you jumped on the bus or train. There was never any dependency on parents or boyfriends. This was completely new to me. After Peter rescued us from the pub incident the Combi always pulled to the left whenever you slammed the brakes on.

When the day came for the Big Driving Test to get my licence I felt far from prepared. Peter thought I would breeze through, but as soon as we hopped into Peter’s parent’s VW Golf car we had borrowed for the occasion, everything fell apart. Not in the car, but in my head. I failed the hand brake start. That wasn’t really my fault, because you don’t have hills in Holland, and Peter had forgotten to take me to the steepest mountain in the district to practice.

So, during the test I failed, after numerous attempts, to start the car on a steep slant. We ended up halfway down the hill with the car pointing the wrong way and the examiner pulling his hair out. One look at Peter’s face, frowning from the back seat, and I knew I was going to be in for another tense few days. I hated to upset or disappoint Peter. Not that he would be aggressive, he would just retreat into his head and become very quiet for a few days. To me that always felt like the end of the world.

It didn’t even bother me when I nearly caused an accident at an intersection a few minutes later. My humiliation was complete. I made several more near-fatal misses and went home with a big ‘F’ for fail written all over my forehead. Even Peter’s parents couldn’t understand how I had failed. Nobody ever failed their driving tests thirty years ago in Tasmania. The road rules were so simple and there was hardly any traffic. But I managed to fail on all fronts.

I gave up trying to impress Peter after that and I passed the next exam with flying colours. Even so, one of the first times I drove back uphill towards our one-horse township I got into the loose gravel. Before I knew it I was flying out of control. I was all over the road and ended up doing a 360-degree turn. By the time I realised what had happened I was driving in the right direction again.

My heart was pounding in my throat. I could have killed my unborn baby! I hadn’t even used a seatbelt because I don’t think our car had one of those. Besides, my belly was quite huge, and I was already firmly squashed between the seat and the steering wheel. I can’t remember whether I told Peter that I had nearly killed myself. Thankfully the roads in Tasmania are very quiet, otherwise there would be a lot more fatalities like this, being windy, hilly and gravelly.

•  CHAPTER 4  •

STIRRUPS AND MAGNESIUM

Close to my baby’s due date, my Dutch GP changed his mind about my homebirth and directed me to book into the maternity hospital instead.

I felt dismayed and betrayed, but there was nothing I could do. On December 12, 1981, I went into labour. I was hoping the baby would pop out so fast that I wouldn’t have time to go to hospital.

But the baby was taking his time. He was very much alive and doing his best to come out, kicking against my ribs day and night. We walked for miles to help the contractions become steady and regular. We went for drives over bumpy back roads, which did bring on contractions, but as soon as I was home they became irregular again.

After four days of walking around, and as many nights timing the contractions, I finally conceded, it was time to go to the hospital. I felt threatened by the idea, but I wanted my baby to come out alive. I arrived at the hospital at 6 pm on 15th December. My GP examined me and told me I was still only five centimetres dilated. He then broke the waters and left me to simmer.

From that moment on the labour intensified, but I was prepared for it. I was happy because I couldn’t wait to hold my baby. I quietly breathed my way through the contractions, being mindful of staying calm and positive, like I had studied and practiced on my own at home. I think it was Sheila Kitzinger who suggested a mantra to take your mind off the pain.

With each contraction, I silently thought to myself, this is an interesting sensation that requires all my attention.

It worked, and helped me to ride the waves of pain as they crashed into my body, whilst also blocking out the cries from the other woman who was labouring by herself in the next room. This was Australia in the early 80s, the men often went to the pub to drink away their anxiety instead of supporting their partners during the birth. Peter was different of course.

Even though we were now in a hospital, I wanted to preserve the sacredness of the birth experience. I believed Peter and I were doing quite well by ourselves in our room, when my concentration was interrupted by a midwife. She told me to stop smiling and ordered me into the delivery room, where she put my legs in stirrups and proceeded to give me a full shave.

I lost my concentration and went into ‘fight and flight’ response. Instantly the pain reached boiling point. Any vestige of sacredness was shattered by the careless attitude of the midwife, the stirrups and the sterile delivery room, which reminded me of the medieval torture chambers of Europe.

By now I had figured out that my baby was probably lying in posterior position, but when I asked about it in-between contractions all I got was blank looks. I gathered I wasn’t supposed to know anything about the birth process, that wasn’t my place.

Before I knew what the midwife was doing, she stuck her hand up my rectum and exclaimed I was fully dilated and I had better get the baby out before her shift finished. She told me to start pushing on the next contraction. I felt the most humiliated and agonised I had ever felt. I was stuck in a nightmare with my legs in stirrups and the baby’s spine was grinding away on mine.

The last thing I wanted to do was push. I didn’t have the energy or urge. The midwife was discussing the latest football match with another nurse near my feet and completely ignored the person who those feet belonged to. I desperately clung to Peter, who was trying to be present for me, but he was even more intimidated than I was and had retreated to a safe place in his brain.

My lower back was on fire. The pain between contractions was so intense I couldn’t even feel the contractions. All I could hear was the midwife screaming at me to push and complaining when