John and Nina were married in Germany in 1948, ‘a ghastly mistake’. The plan was for the couple, already both well travelled, to see the world together, but at the age of forty-two Nina found herself pregnant with her first and only child, a daughter who would be born back home in Sydney in 1949 and christened Nadia. This is  the moment upon which this memoir turns.

John did not want her to have the child … If the pregnancy caused Neen to see a new side to the man she had just married, it also made her rethink her plans. Having a child would mean  leaving her work unfinished, breaking her commitments to her colleagues and to the refugees in her care. A child would also dash her long-held dream  of travel and adventure.

Losing her mother, Isabella, to pneumonia when still only a child herself, Nina had grown up with an assortment of siblings and a much-loved  father, in a family awash with complications when it came to business, money, and property; these would cause more problems down through the next generations. In this sombre, sometimes tragic book, Wheatley provides flashes of lightness, such as the tale of Isabella’s hapless brothers-in-law Samuel and Lincoln, briefly entrusted with the family business. ‘One of my cousins summed up the problem to me: “Sam was too entrepreneurial, and Lin wasn’t entrepreneurial enough. Or to put it bluntly, Sam was a crook and Lin was a dill.”’

Nina grew up independent and competent, achieving – with some delay through resistance from parts of her family – a treasured independence through professional training:

The scarlet cape, the gossamer-fine white veils, the flick of her wrist as she checked a thermometer … this cumulative evidence about my mother’s identity as a nurse was so familiar to me when I was a child that I always assumed she began her training the moment she left school. In fact, Neen was forced to wait six years before she could start to become herself.

From her first day of training in 1929 until the day she married John Wheatley almost twenty years later, Nina Watkin was an adventurous, fulfilled, and independent woman. She could not have known on her wedding day that she had only another ten years to live, or that the rest of her life would be such a struggle – first, as she came to terms with her husband’s true nature, and then as she fought to convince male doctors that the persistent chest pain she had begun to feel was indeed in her chest and not in her mind, and that what had been dismissed as ‘Nervous Depression’ was belatedly diagnosed as the lung cancer that would leave her nine-year-old daughter motherless.

This book is essentially the tale of one woman’s life, with its relentless unspooling of cause and effect, but Wheatley’s storytelling technique is far more complex than this might suggest. The chronology is straightforward, but the story of Nina’s life is told with intermittently explicit hindsight. Facts and knowledge gained only while Wheatley was researching for the book are used  to shed light on events that took place decades earlier. The last nine years of Nina’s life are recalled largely through Nadia’s remembered conversations with her:

Neen with Mother and Nadia on her christening day in 1950.If I cannot see her, I can at least always hear her distinctive freeform whistling, which flows in and out between bird-like warbles and snatches of recognisable  tunes. (So different from Daddy’s monotone hiss.)

Following the thread of melody like one of the children bewitched by the Pied Piper, I track her down at last.

‘What are you doing, Mummy?’

‘Just pottering.’  The whistling starts up again.

When she is in the garden, Neen often seems to be miles away in her thoughts.

Sometimes the narrative voice is that of Nina herself, a lively and articulate writer of the letters home that Wheatley quotes to show her mother’s personality and experience.  Sometimes it’s the voice of the adult Nadia, freighted with emotion, imagining what her mother’s life must have been like. Sometimes it’s the precise, sophisticated voice of the scholarly historian and biographer Dr N. Wheatley. Sometimes it’s the voice of Nadia the child, using the immediacy of the present tense to invoke the intense feeling of the moment, to recall an unhappy and traumatic childhood, and to suggest a vast, bleak hinterland of unspoken family life and history. And sometimes the chronological gap between the child and the adult is closed altogether in the strange alchemy of remembering:

I run up the path, through the front door, and into the lounge room, where the sudden change from sunlight to darkness causes me to see bright needles of light.

Memory drifts at this point, like a barely remembered dream. There is a dark shape lying on the floor, but perhaps  I have imagined that. Sometimes there is screaming or screeching – perhaps the sound of an ambulance.

Nadia Wheatley (credit: Text Publishing)Wheatley is a prolific and award-winning writer across a number of genres and subjects. With illustrator Donna Rawlins, she is the author of the Australian children’s classic My Place (1988). Her work is infused with the significance of history, the importance of Indigenous issues, and multicultural cooperation and peace in Australian society. She is also the author of one of Australia’s best literary biographies, The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift (2001). There is much in this new memoir  to make the reader look back over Wheatley’s career, its highlights including a major biography of another exuberant, ambitious, adventurous woman caught up in a tumultuous marriage, and a lifetime of writing books to give pleasure to children.