Dad & Dave

Date

September 15, 2012

High plains drifters  ¢â‚¬ ¦ John Button with sons James, at right, and David, on Victoria ¢â‚¬â„¢s Bogong High Plains in 1970.

A respected minister in the Hawke and Keating Labor governments, Senator John Button’s political skills hid a private inner despondency about the death at 19 of his son David. Here, James Button tells of his father’s unavailing attempts to come to terms with his grief.

When I spoke at my father’s funeral in 2008, I ended by telling a story. It was the mid-1980s and Dad, my brother Nick and I had walked to his house in Richmond after watching the last home-and-away game of the year at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. The three of us sat talking football over a whisky in the darkening living room. Geelong had had a typical season of high hopes unfulfilled, but in this last game they had played beautifully, and in a characteristic surge of optimism Dad grabbed a piece of paper, drew an oval on it and filled it with a team that he pronounced would win the flag in three years. “You’re mad,” we said, and we all laughed. (He was close: three years later they lost the AFL grand final to Hawthorn.)

Night was closing in when he walked us to the front gate. We shook hands and half-hugged, in our awkward, warm way. Nick and I walked down the street. I looked back and Dad was standing there, smiling. I waved and he waved back. Then we walked a long way down the street. I looked back again and he was still standing there, looking after us.

Mother and sons  ¢â‚¬ ¦ Marj Button with sons Nick, at left, and David, about three years before the latter ¢â‚¬â„¢s death from a heroin overdose.

People at the funeral seemed to like the story. Perhaps it captured something wordless and tender in my father that they also sensed, even if they didn’t know him well. But a week or so later, I got a message that made me rewrite the eulogy over and over in my head, longing to be able to give it again.

I had sent it to an old journalist friend, Rod Usher, who lived in Spain with his wife, Angela. He wrote back saying he liked it. “But I just wondered why you didn’t say anything about David.”

Rod had lost his stepson, Angela’s son, Damien, who had committed suicide after a disastrous love affair when he was 19, the age David was when he died. His question was not judgmental, but I got a shock when I realised I had left David out. I had given a speech that tried to describe my father’s life, but had said nothing about the loss of his son, my brother.

Button boys  ¢â‚¬ ¦ (left to right) brothers Nick, aged 14, David, 17, and James, 18, in early 1980.

It was only then that I remembered the point of the story of my father standing at the gate. As we walked away from him down the street, I had said to Nick, “Poor Dad. His life is hard.”

He understood. It was just four years since David had died.

In the last weeks of my father’s life, I had wondered whether I should talk to him about Dave. But what could I say? What could be redeemed for a dying man from this awful thing that by now had happened nearly 30 years ago? So I kept quiet, and carried that silence past his death and into his funeral.

What I missed, in keeping quiet, was the chance to help my father recover. I think he felt he had sacrificed his son to politics. Certainly the thrill he once had in his profession never fully returned after Dave’s death. But when a life goes off the rails, there are so many reasons, and I never felt he had a greater responsibility than anyone else. I had my own guilt, too, but I didn’t speak about it with him. If I had done so, we might have been able to help each other by coming to a shared understanding of what went wrong in David’s life.

David was a cheeky, mischievous boy,  with unruly curly hair. fifteen months younger than me, but quite different, he loved to paint, build, make things and get his hands dirty. He drew pirates with parrots and wooden legs and men in hats riding funny motor-powered chariots. Using cuts of white paper stuck onto black, he made a picture of a boatman fishing in a river that still hangs on our wall. He charmed people, he made them laugh.

But from the start, life was difficult. He broke things. He fell into a fish pond at an ALP event at Jim Cairns’s house. “That Crocky [short for Davy Crockett, our family name for him] is going to be trouble,” said a woman, looking on. Riding his scooter, he tripped and tore the side of his face, giving him a lifelong scar on his chin. Even at primary school, he found it hard to focus, and got frustrated when things did not go his way. A doctor said he was hyperactive.

In those years, Dad was in and out of our lives, the warm, flickering flame of our boyhood. When he was in a good mood, as he mostly was, we could not have wished for a more exciting father. “Dad, let’s play Murder in the Dark,” we would yell, and if he agreed we ran around switching off every light in the house, then cowered in rooms in delirious, giggling terror as he thudded down the hall booming his mad poems: “The grip of steel you soon will FEEL. The human vice is made of ICE. It crushes boys to SAVELOYS.”

We loved his wrestling and tickling, his vocabulary of violence. A punch on the leg was a “cork”, a punch on the arm a “bocker”, an old Australian word he might have picked up in Ballarat, where he grew up. Yet there was a mystery to him, linked to his frequent absences, that we boys longed to penetrate. We hungered for his time. When I was nine he told me at a footy game that he was taking Dave with him on a work trip to the Northern Territory, because Dave needed some attention. I was jealous, but a year later I got in compensation a trip to Queensland, and Dad, Dave and I spent days at the Townsville pool, diving for coins, under a blue sky. It remains one of the most uncomplicatedly happy memories of my childhood.

Dad could be moody, though. Often he stared into space during meals, had to be asked a question twice before he blinked and came back to us.

In the dining room of a Townsville motel, he gazed grimly at the prawn cocktail and tropically patterned tablecloth, while Nick, aged nine, played up with a wicked grin to get a rise out of him – and I thought with a touch of anger: “Dad! Why can’t you be here?”

One holiday, while we rode horses and splashed in the river, he sat in the house writing a new ALP constitution. That’s what driven men did in those days. The family of Moss Cass, Gough Whitlam’s environment minister, had some sharp jokes about this life. “Our father, who art in Canberra,” they’d say when he wasn’t home.

The absences of a parent don’t have to damage a family, but only if the marriage is unusually strong. My parents’ marriage was not. They had good times, many laughs, but they were very different from each other, and Dad was a restless person.

Yet the summer of 1976 was probably the happiest time we ever had. Over a long, hot January, while Nick rode his pony and I pulled out fence posts and listened to cricket and Fleetwood Mac on my radio, Dad and Dave rebuilt the kitchen of a derelict farmhouse he’d recently bought. They loved to work with their hands, that was their thing. They were up ladders with nails and tape, no need to talk except about the job at hand. In the evening, while Mum cooked dinner, the men had a cricket match. Dave played, too, which was rare, because he never played sport.

After primary school, he went to a private school, then to a school for slightly unusual or troubled kids. Seeing his skill with his hands and thinking he might get into a trade, my parents sent him to Swinburne Technical School. It was a rough, hard place, and Dave didn’t fit. The other boys got into him in ways he never revealed but that showed in his tumbling confidence. His mate from Swinburne, Spike, said to Mum, “Don’t think Dave’s tough, he’s not. Not at all.”

After a year he left, and it looked as if he might be done with school. But with Mum’s help, patience and pushing, he finished form four by correspondence. He decided to have a go at a new high school in Hawthorn. But he didn’t stay. He started smoking dope with kids from school and alone, sometimes as soon as he got up in the morning. After a while he just stayed home.

Mum and Dad had different approaches as parents.  She was softer, more laissez-faire. Dad was much firmer. Dave needed that firmness, but consistently, not intermittently. Dad would leave on the plane on Monday morning, come home Thursday night. The work was all-absorbing, he was often distracted at home. Mum had the burden of raising Dave.

One night my parents found a mini marijuana plantation under the house. Another time, Dad was called to the pilot’s cabin on a flight because Dave was smoking a joint in the toilet. He moved to pills, then speed, and with every new drug, further away from us. My parents tried to get Dave into a drug rehab facility, but he wouldn’t go. His frustration when things didn’t go right was turning more frequently to violence. He hit Mum and Nick, and a few times showed terrifying rage towards Dad, who later told a journalist that he slept with a cricket bat under his bed, for fear of his son.

Given all this, should my father have gone into politics? He seemed to have been made for it. Years later, I watched him in the Senate, with the Opposition roaring over some supposed outrage. He came to the dispatch box with a devilish smile on his face, his mind preparing a sharp response. Asked once on TV, “Is the government in trouble on this issue?” he said, “Yes”, and said no more. The interviewer, clearly expecting the usual meandering defence, did not have his next question ready and had to fumble for one. At these moments I saw my father at the height of his powers.

Once it was clear, though, that Dave was in trouble, should my father have thrown away the job and come home? I know he later thought about that many times. I have no answer. You never think your son is going to die.

No longer living at home, I missed much of that last year: Dave’s shift to taking heroin; his trouble with police after he broke into our grandfather’s house looking for money; the night in late May when he shot up and fell asleep in his back shed and his heroin companion panicked and disappeared, leaving Mum to find him in the morning, his face strangely peaceful, she said.

Dad heard the news at an airport. He phoned me at my shared house and said he needed to come over. When I opened the door he looked very old. “J, Dave died last night,” he said. We drove home in his Commonwealth car. I sat in the back seat, feeling empty, numb, terrified.

The next morning, unable to sleep, I got up before dawn. I found Dad balled up in a chair. He was taking gulps of air, a hard breathing mixed with tears. I tried to put my arms around him, but he didn’t want my comfort. “I’m not crying for his death, J,” he said. “I’m crying for his life. I got a call from Bill Hayden yesterday. He’s coming to the funeral. And this is the thing. There’ll be all these well-known people at the funeral but none of them will be Dave’s friends – because he had no friends.” That turned out not to be true: I won’t forget the tears on his friend Spike’s face at the funeral, this tough boy with cropped hair that ended in ringlets at the back.

Then, and many times after, I focused on my father’s feelings, not on mine. I did so not out of empathy, but fear. His grief was towering. Mine was puny beside it. I would never be able to measure up to his sorrow, never be able to find words that could help him. A pattern was set between us, one that lasted until his death.

When I saw the box in the church with Dave in it, I understood at last. I began to shake and cry uncontrollably. That night the four of us went to a beach house. We walked on the beach, ate meals, talked about Dave. But we were already moving into our own worlds. From here, we would mostly deal with his death alone.

Somehow, over time, my mother recovered.  She threw herself into Eastern philosophy. She meditated. She wrote a tender chapter in  Outrageous Fortune, an anthology about how people recover from loss. She at least had the consolation of knowing she’d done everything she could have. Dad’s grief, by contrast, could be hard and bitter. Sometimes it shut us out. When Dave’s ashes came home, he walked around the garden with the urn, scattering them alone. I watched from the living room. He had not asked us to take part.

One day, he and I were sitting in the garden when he said, “Dave’s death is different for me. You and Nick will grow older and become men and your relationship with Dave will change. You’ll move away from him. But my relationship with him will stay just as it is now, a father to his boy.”

I often wonder how he got through that time, what resources he had to draw on, what hardness he had to find, simply to survive. It was 1982. A federal election was approaching, and Labor finally stood a good chance to win. Excitement was in the air, the phone was ringing. Bob Hawke was stalking Bill Hayden for the leadership of the ALP.

Hayden was Dad’s friend. Together they had helped to rebuild the party. We boys liked Bill. On his occasional visits for dinner, he talked to us seriously and he listened, which was not true for many political people, who always looked over your shoulder to keep tabs on the main conversation. He, too, had lost a child.

Given all this, to switch his support from Hayden to Hawke was agony for Dad. He did it because he thought it was right for the party. He’d have done it anyway, but Dave’s death might have made it a tiny bit easier. There were shadow cabinet members who thought Hayden should go but would not say so publicly. My father had lost all fear of what others thought. That summer we went on holiday to Fiji, as the media hunted him and he prepared to tell Hayden he had lost his support. “I don’t give a f… about any of it, J,” he said when I found him alone one night. “Dave’s dead.”

March 5, 1983 – election day –  should have been the high point of his working life. Labor was in power and he was a minister at last. I’m sure he was excited. But the next day he had a burst of uncontrolled crying during a meeting with Hawke and other ministers at Canberra’s Lakeside Hotel. He wrote in his memoir that it was about Dave. About the times they had spent together putting leaflets in letterboxes and standing on polling booths while Labor lost. Labor had finally won, and Dave wasn’t here to see it.

Hawke – who later was to break down when talking publicly about his daughter’s heroin addiction – and his wife, Hazel, were very kind, my father wrote. They comforted him in their room. Did he believe the price of success had been his son’s life?

My parents divorced in early 1983, 10 months after Dave died and just as Dad became a minister. The shared project to save their son was over.

Dad remarried, but my parents carried on almost as if nothing had happened. My joke was that he left on a Tuesday or Wednesday and was round for tea as usual on Sunday. They went on with their easy talk; she and we urged him to tell his funny stories over dinner. He moved through Mum’s house as if it were his, and she, who never loved any other man, was happy for him to do so.

At the end of 1983, Nick, Mum and I were in Thailand on holiday when the hotel phone rang. Dad was in Bangkok, not far away. Could we have a meal? Five years later, when I was about to leave to study in New York, Dad suggested we all spend a weekend together in Queenscliff. There is a photo of the four of us in tennis gear, grinning at the camera. How odd that my father, three years after remarrying, was away with his first wife.

I can only explain it by my parents’ stubborn and deep affection for each other, despite their wildly different natures and all that had failed. And also by some need in my father – unspoken yet unrelenting – to put our family back together. In the face of what had happened, we were stupefied, appalled, ashamed. But we were a family.

For many years, I had my own struggles about David.  We had fought a lot. Most brothers do. But I was the older one. I was better than him at school and at sport; I had more friends, more power. Even after I grew old enough to know these things, I baited him about his clumsiness, his curly hair, the fact that my parents took him to see a psychiatrist. When he started to put on weight from the age of 11 or 12, I taunted him about that, too. From the age of 15 or so, I grew kinder, but by then he had begun to falter. When and why did that eccentric, chattery, busy, happy little boy start to change?

I will probably never fully understand my relationship with Dave or my effect on him. And the person who, more than any other, might have helped me understand is gone.

I have some idea of how it might have been different had Dad and I spoken of these things. In 1992, I wrote a long article for  Time  magazine on Australia’s future. It took me four months to prepare; it was the most important piece of journalism I had written. When I showed a draft to my father, who was a minister then, he said, “It’s very long. It’s pretty bleak. And I don’t think you’ve quite caught the spirit of innovation in the economy.” This during the worst recession in 60 years.

I was devastated. Then I was angry. I wrote him a letter saying he had read the piece as a politician, not as a father. When he rang me, his apology was unqualified and full of regret. My anger vanished, never to return.

In 1993 my father left politics and began to write his books. He learnt to cook and would open the door to guests grinning in a chef’s hat and apron. We ate together and went to the football. He began a new relationship with an old friend, Joan Grant.

My brother Nick believes that in his last years, Dad came to terms with Dave’s death. Certainly, he raised it less. But after he died, Joan told me that once or twice a year, he would drink too much and talk about Dave. Always he would cry.

So it never left him, then. How he carried it through his life, and especially a life in politics, I do not know. We are all icebergs, four-fifths of us beneath the surface. The Irish writer Colm T ƒ ³ib ƒ ­n once wrote of “how much sorrow can be held within, and how nothing seems to have any shape or meaning until it is well past and lost and how much, under the weight of pure determination, can be forgotten and left aside, only to return in the night as piercing pain”. Perhaps it was like that for Dad.

I see now that Dave was always with us. We were a tentative, sometimes timid, tender family. Our rare fights frightened us and had to be quickly mended, for fear of where they would lead. We never quite shook off the thought that life could go catastrophically wrong. In my father’s smile, which people liked so much perhaps because it seemed to hide so much, including mischief and sorrow, there was always something of his lost son.

Edited extract from  Speechless: A Year in My Father’s Business, by James Button, published by MUP on Monday, September 17.

Read more:  http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/lifestyle/dad–dave-20120910-25n2z.html#ixzz26l5KUlpg