Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Sita Walker grew up in Toowoomba, west of Brisbane. She was the youngest, much-loved member of her family, especially adored by her grandma and her three aunts. Sita's family all belonged to the Baha'i faith, and growing up, Sita prayed to God every morning and every night and did her best to be good.
She got married young to another Baha'i, became a mum to three kids, worked a regular and responsible job teaching high school. But despite following all the rules, life had some big surprises in store for Sita. And going through them, she discovered the exhilaration of making her own choices. Sita had the chance to replace what she had been taught was right with what she wanted.
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Chapter 2: What experiences shaped Sita Walker's childhood in the Baha'i faith?
And so she knows everybody in town and has people coming up to her saying, oh, Mrs Walker, you taught me in 1991 or whatever. And she's, of course, got no idea who they are. But so my grandmother sort of looked after me, looked after the kids and my mum worked, I think.
Was she good in a crisis, your mum, the sort of little domestic crisis that happened in her family all the time?
Well, strangely, as relaxed as the woman is. So she's relaxed about everything to do with the home. So she would never be the type of mother that would tidy up if guests were coming over. You know, if guests were coming, they were coming to see us exactly how we are, which is why my dad insisted on the good lounge. But... Mum was the polar opposite of that.
She was really happy to have anyone there. And if you walk through the door, you know, she'd be sitting on the lounge with a cup of tea and she'd probably throw a grape at you or something. And you're instantly part of the family, part of the team. And that's one of her very special gifts, I think, is to make anybody feel comfortable. like they are close family.
She would treat, you know, she would treat the Queen the same way that she would treat the Ironing Lady and that's in her bones to be like that.
So apart from his focus on the good lounge, what kind of presence was your dad at home? So dad is a very particular man.
He's a very principled man. My father would do all the things that he felt required attention to detail. And that's why we had an ironing lady in the end because he couldn't do all the ironing. He didn't have time and mum doesn't care if your shirt's wrinkled.
So he would hang the clothes out on the line in a very particular fashion with the pegs and he taught us all how to do it so that we wouldn't waste the pegs and so that everything would dry as efficiently as possible. He would alphabetise the bookshelf. He had a very neat and tidy study, which we were not allowed to go into, where his CDs were all lined up in genres. Dad's a big reader.
He loves philosophy. He's an accountant.
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Chapter 3: How did family tragedy impact Sita's relationship with her faith?
So he really liked that idea, the idea of the oneness of religion and the oneness of mankind.
So how did that family background and that connection with the Baha'i religion compare with your mother and her experiences in her family?
Well, my mother was born into a Baha'i family. My mother was born in Iran, but when she was very young, my grandfather died in Iran and my grandmother moved her children back to India because my grandmother had lived in India. And then her son, my uncle, grew up and he met a Baha'i woman in India from Australia called Joan. And he went back to Australia with Joan and they got married.
And that's how my family, my mother's side of the family, ended up coming to Australia because my grandmother wanted to see her son again.
So you grew up then, Sita, in a family that was Baha'i. How much of your life at home centred around the faith?
Baha'is have what's called a 19-day feast, which is our sort of version of going to church. So every 19 days, Baha'is will go and meet. And we don't really have churches. We have temples, but our temples are vast and grand, and so there's only one in Australia. It's in Sydney. But we would just meet at a Baha'i centre, which was a house.
And there would be prayers and then there would sort of be an administrative portion of the meeting. And then we would have, you know, supper, something to eat. So we would do that every 19 days and we would dress up for that like you would dress up to go to church, I suppose.
And on Sundays, we would sort of go for Sunday prayers and I would go to a Sunday school class, which was really like a virtues class, really. And it was called Rose Garden. That's just come back to me now. I haven't thought about Rose Garden for years, but it It was called Rose Garden, which is quite cute. So I would go to Rose Garden. Appropriate for Toowoomba as well. Yes, absolutely.
And what sort of virtues were given priority? Well, there's lots of them. Love, obviously. Justice, peace, mercy.
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Chapter 4: What led Sita to drift away from her nightly prayers and Baha'i practices?
And I would lie down on the floor of the hallway and put my ear to the carpet and try and squint under the gap in the door just to see what... what was going on in there. And I didn't, in my young mind, I never would have thought anything untoward was going on.
I just really wanted to be part of the team, you know, and I would get little bits, balls of paper and flick them under there just to garner some attention until she would come out and rage at me. What happened in the summer of 1989? In the summer of 1989, my sister and her boyfriend, Ashley, who was an angelic boy, and their friends went to a U2 concert in Brisbane.
And when they were driving back from the U2 concert, they were all asleep in the back of the car. Rani was asleep. Ashley was asleep. And the teenager that was driving the car also fell asleep. And the car went off the road and hit a tree. And my sister was taken to the hospital and she was in a coma. And
my mother and father had to make the decision of whether to turn off her life support or not, and they decided to do that. What do you remember of the funeral? I remember the funeral being at the Garden of Remembrance in Toowoomba, which is actually a beautiful cemetery where the plaques are laid into the grass, flat into the grass...
But I remember being close to my aunt, my Auntie Mary, my mother's eldest sister. And I remember her sari, which was a scarlet colour with gold on the edges. And I remember I had a pink dress on and some shoes that were very tight.
I was only eight years old, so I don't remember a lot, but I remember that my shoes were very uncomfortable and I'd said to my Auntie Mary, who had pulled me up onto her lap, I said, my feet are hot. And she said, take your shoes off and put your feet on the grass. And so I took my shoes off and I put my feet on the grass and I remember the grass feeling cold. And
I looked at my aunt and she looked at me and she put her hand like a fist next to her chest and she said, we have to be strong like this. And she held her fist up and I looked into her eyes and I nodded and I thought, okay.
How did your aunts, your mum's three sisters, help support the family in the aftermath of your sister's death?
They showed up, as they always do. So my mother has three older sisters. So my Auntie Mary is very much an older sister, and if anyone listening has an older sister, you'll know what they're like. So she took charge of things. She cleaned the house. She welcomed visitors.
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