Kate Legge

Yes, well, it was a very fraught household.

My brother later suspected, we made a posthumous diagnosis that perhaps she had borderline personality disorder, which was why I was interested in looking at her.

And what... Well, the symptoms of that are wild mood swings, inappropriate bursts of intense anger, feelings of chronic emptiness, irrational fears of abandonment and suicidal threats and behaviour, and we would encounter all those regularly in our home.

You know, we would hear her when we were coming home saying,

If we heard her thumping the iron down on the ironing board or sweeping the front veranda, we knew they were the sort of personal air raid sirens.

We knew we had to either brace, go into the brace position, make ourselves scarce or we'd be careening into her abyss.

And was she violent with you?

Well, yes, I suppose it was sort of an emotional abuse with me.

And this was the other thing that really disturbed me about my mother.

And I only learnt this four years ago.

My brother came to me and told me that our uncle, before he died, had said to him that she had thrown me against the wall when I was a child.

And I don't have any memory of that, but it was a very shocking thing to learn.

And that was when I started to look more closely at her behaviour.

So the sort of things that we remember, there's this famous car trip we went on.

We'd been visiting friends of ours, farmers in the Western District in near Warrnambool.

And we were driving home in the car and all of a sudden we heard her fraught sarcasm, which always put us on edge.

And then she turned around, got lipstick out of her bag and just drew this...

face like a clown around her lips and she was sobbing and distraught.

And I mean, none of us remember what she was saying at the time, but it was just that emotional nakedness to seeing her blitzed, which I was too young then to understand the ravens pecking at her.

But she had a very difficult life.