6 September 2023, Mornington, Australia
While everyone who knew Mum knew she was a force of nature, few understand how she became that. So I want to tell you a bit about how Mum grew up.
Rosalinda was born in 1948 in Dumaguete, a small city in the central islands of the Philippines. She wasn’t born in a hospital with doctors and midwives, but on a makeshift bed on the dirt floor of a bamboo shack that was her parents’ home. Valeriana, her mother, gave birth to 10 children that same way, including two sets of twins.
When she was four, Valeriana sent Rose to live with her grandparents in the jungle outskirts of Dumaguete. This was so that Valeriana could cope with her other children, and newborn twins one of whom didn’t survive infancy.
Mum loved telling us how she traipsed many miles of perilous mountain landscape to and from elementary school every weekday.
Rosalinda is in the centre of frame
By her own account, Mum was a mischievous little girl. The childhood stories she told had the flavour of a Looney Toons episode set in the Third World. Let me give you an example:
When she was seven years old, Mum was sitting atop a large carabao (water buffalo) in her grandfather’s rice field, by her own account shouting bossily at her cousins from a great height. Eventually one of Mum’s cousins had enough, and kicked the carabao hard on its rear, causing it to bolt. Mum fell off, landed on her head and passed out.
On regaining consciousness, little Rose found herself alone in a vast rice patty, with no way to tell how long she had been unconscious other than the fact of the sun setting where it wasn’t before. In a brain scan Mum had in 2017, an area of damage consistent with this accident was discovered. Still it was a story Mum loved to tell, and it finished as all these stories did, with her rambunctious: ‘HA!’
Though Mum’s early life was one of great poverty, she never said a bad word of it. She didn’t once complain about the starvation, violence and grief that coloured her early years, and that left an indelible mark on her personality. The one thing Mum exaggerated was her good fortune. Despite being sent away from her mother several times in her formative years, or maybe because of this, she thought Valeriana hung the moon.
Mum’s father Daniel was a complicated man who died very young in circumstances shocking enough to justify a memoir. Mum used to recall how he would sing to her when he came home drunk of an afternoon ‘Rosalinda, Rosalinda, you are my darling.’ Mum named her accidental third child after her Dad.
It isn’t fashionable to say this but the religious fervour that has a stranglehold on the poorest parts of the Philippines gave Mum her fortitude, optimism and extremely generous nature. Mum’s Catholic faith shaped her very straightforward worldview. She loved God heaps. All of her life, In any argument, on any subject with any opponent, Mum believed she could establish dominance by citing from memory the books of the Old Testament: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, First and Second Samuel and so on. It was her ‘Checkmate’.
In 1975, Mum was a seamstress altering clothes from the window of a rented dwelling in Davao when she first clapped eyes on a skinny 30-year-old Australian with a motorbike and a guitar and more than a passing resemblance to John Lennon. In Mum’s eyes this guy occupied a category above that of the world’s most famous rockstar: he was a catholic priest.
However complicated their union was from the start, Mum and Dad cared for each other deeply. Their love knew no boundaries and it never went away. The first chapter of this love story was passionate and exciting, but also, because of Dad’s commitment to the church and the gossipy milieu in which they found each other, it was a secret. No one knew could know about Peter and Rose but Peter and Rose.
In 1976 Mum and Dad’s romance was punctured by a pregnancy scare. It was bad timing because Peter had shortly beforehand arranged to return to Australia to convalesce after a stomach bug caused him to lose a huge amount of weight. Before leaving Mum’s side, Dad had asked her to please, when her period came, let him know that she wasn’t pregnant with a Telegram message only the two of them would understand, that wouldn’t give away their illicit love affair. That code was: ‘The Eagle has landed.’
In 1976 Rose’s only way of communicating to Peter across the oceans was via Telegram. A Telegram was a message from one party to another typed out by a third party, that could be read by any number of postal workers. Like a Whatsapp message but with a total absence of privacy and a three-week delay.
Three weeks went by before Peter received the Telegram, much anticipated albeit with an unexpected message: ‘Peter. The Eagle has not landed. I am PREGNANT. Rose.’
Perfect golden-skinned baby Philip Jerome Wearne was born in Cebu in October 1977. Peter and Rose married the following February. In conversations about their future, Peter asked Rose if she would consider relocating permanently to Australia. He had not finished the question before Rose was zipping up her suitcase and marching to the consulate office, Visa application in hand.
Always, Mum was on a forward trajectory that makes Bill Gates look lazy. She was never without a—and this is a word I will forever associate with Mum—‘plan’. Most of her plans were realised because, let’s face it, most involved paving. When we arrived at Gascoyne Court, Frankston in 1990, our new home was a rustic, mid-century cedar-roofed house, embedded in dense native flora and glorious Eucalypts, at the end of a crushed rock driveway. Mum thought it was pangit ka-ayo. Ugly as fuck.
She achieved dominion by paving every square inch of the front and back yard. To this day it is a monument to one woman’s belief in the potential of the humble brick.
To save up for this, and of course to send material financial support to her beloved family in the Philippines, she worked like a trojan. She produced a range of products for her market stall and also incredibly well-made bespoke items. If Betty wanted her husband’s recliner re-upholstered by the following weekend, Mum could deliver. Ironing board cover blown out and needing one to match the living room curtains? Rosalinda to the rescue. At the peak of her career, the whole of Victoria knew who to call for any of their manchester needs. How else to account for Mum’s proudest claim that she once sold six chair cushions to Nick Riewoldt’s brother’s wife.
Mum worked strange hours. Before a weekend craft market she sewed through the night, and at dawn would depart for Shepperton, Dingley, Frankston or Main Street Mornington. On setting up she would put one of her children in charge of serving customers while she slept hidden under decorated card-tables for an hour or two. Occasionally one of her limbs would take the opportunity to flop into public view. A thin brown forearm, or a leg in a parachute tracksuit, a little bare foot with a cracked heel. To be one of Mum’s children was to often feel like Polly or Manuel from Fawlty Towers trying to conceal from a hotel guest something absurd and very funny.
Wednesday evenings after the Main Street Mornington market we’d share a meal of lumpia and fish and rice, Mum excitedly recounting customer orders, her husband and three kids roasting her and each other without mercy, our laughter spilling into the court.
Mum was so proud that she could rise to any sewing-related challenge. We thought there was not enough return on investment, and too little recognition of her excellence. But Mum’s sewing gave her joy and purpose until the end.
Mum endured a lot of racial prejudice over the course of her life. The accent that somehow grew stronger with every passing year made her a target. But she was no one’s fool. Mum thought it was hilarious when a stranger would speak to her slowly and carefully as if she were 5 years old. A true eccentric, one of the weird things Mum used to do in public, at Coles or at the bank, was pretend be (in her words) ‘fresh off the boat’. Why? I don’t know for sure, but it might have to do with the fact that in her later years, more than once, Mum would have a cashier scan all her grocery items before realising she didn’t have her bank card with her. Here, a stranger would step in, offering $30 or to pay for her shopping completely. Mum was awed by the generosity of the average Joe, to people like her.
In 2017 I got a phone call from Mum.
‘Do you want the good news or the bad news?’
‘The good?’ I said.
She said ‘There is no good news, only bad. Vic Roads has cancelled my drivers license.’
From then on, Mum caught the bus into Frankston and home again often. But she didn’t own a Seniors MYKI and never paid for a ticket. One day I said to her, ‘I don’t understand how this works. How do you get away with not paying for public transport?’ That incredible smile widened across her face and she said: ‘The bus drivers think I am a ding-a-ling and can’t speak English.’
Good on you Mum, stickin’ it to the man.
We create the meaning of our lives through the stories we tell. Rosalinda’s life was no walk in the park but the way she told it, it was a triumph. And it was a triumph. We will continue to share stories that celebrate her character and keep her indomitable spirit alive, as long as there is air in our lungs.
Mum, I know you got your licence back and are driving around in a van delivering chair pillows, fried rice and pancit. I know you’re beaming with pride about the obstacles you overcame; all your many successes; and what Dad, Phil, Dan and I could only achieve because of the person you were.