So it was a choice between exhaustion or humiliation. I chose humiliation. I talked myself into letting strangers see the squalor, but I couldn’t stomach them seeing, figuratively, the interior of my father’s head. I cleared out all his stuff. It took four months. What was left was a filthy, unfamiliar, haunted house. I hid in my car during the inspections. I watched my father’s neighbours, some I had known all my life, go inside and come out again, covering their noses with the backs of their hands.

Some weeks before, I made the long drive to the hospital to see Dad. I planned to watch him for a bit, to see what I was dealing with, but he clocked me in the doorway. He looked very thin, hollow-eyed and sunken-cheeked, but he was tucking into a hot lunch. He shook his head in disbelief. ‘The food in this joint,’ he spluttered. ‘Sensational! ’

This was a new development. He had forgotten to be outraged by me. Our last encounter had ended in a walk-off; now I seemed to be someone he had taken a shine to. He agreed enthusiastically with the paramedic’s report that the house was unlivable. He acted like he wanted to be rid of it. Emboldened, I brought up the subject of aged care, but he cut me off, saying he thought he might go back to his home town, the one he’d left sixty years ago, five hundred kilometres away. ‘I know for a fact they’re building a beautiful retirement village in the area. For all I know they could be naming it after me! I’m a local hero up there!’

I knew what he was referring to. He had done something heroic once. Perhaps ‘heroic’ is gilding the lily. Certainly remarkable.

It was the 1950s. My father was in his early twenties at the time, newly arrived in Melbourne to take up a position as a clerk at the State Savings Bank. His looks were striking; he could have passed for an actor in one of the Italian films of the era. Thick brown hair, high cheekbones, patrician nose. It was an aristocratic face, at odds with his origins in a remote Sunraysia town, a working-class boy from a strict Methodist family.

The first thing Dad did in Melbourne was take a room at the YMCA on the corner of City Road. The Y offered cheap rent and a wholesome, collegiate atmosphere. It also offered Keep Fit and Gymnastic classes in the evenings, and my father took advantage of these. Muscular and flexible and unusually self-motivated, he began to excel at gymnastics. The Y’s equipment was almost entirely sub-standard, and the hard, wooden floors made for bone-jarring dismounts and painful forward rolls. But he persisted. He built up his strength by practising conditioning exercises in his room at night, in the narrow space between his bed and the wall. He learnt what he could from books, and pasted newspaper articles about European gymnastics into a scrapbook.

His subsequent success was as much a feat of character as of athleticism. By the time he was twenty-four, he was Victorian champion on the parallel bars, floor exercises, pommel horse, vault, and rings. When he was twenty-five, he was selected for Australia’s first Olympic gymnastics team, one of only six men and three women.

The Australian gymnasts expected no medals at the 1956 Games. They trained in their coach’s backyard, still on the shonky equipment, and most had full-time jobs. They understood that they were rank amateurs compared to the Russians or the Hungarians. Nevertheless, Dad got to march into the MCG in front of a hundred thousand people, sign the autograph books of breathless children, and shake Prince Philip’s hand. It was the time of his life.

The author’s father training as a gymnast in Melbourne, 1950s

After that, nothing.

But that’s not quite true: he coached gymnastics for a while, travelled a little, studied ballet. He married a ballet dancer, my mother. They had me. But his life seemed to cleave into two halves, and throughout the second half, all his gymnastic medals and trophies, his Olympic memorabilia, indeed any record of his past achievements, were packed away in boxes under the house. They were rarely referred to, and never taken out and admired.

This second-half father kept to himself. His personality seemed entirely unsuited to his job as a salesman for an electrical supplies company. He often came home furious, and he never made a friend at work. He prevaricated if required to attend social events. He cut his own hair and rejected the doctor, preferring to diagnose himself with a copy of The Reader’s Digest Family Medical Adviser.

It was clear to my mother and me that he had set himself impossible personal goals. He strove to master the most difficult piano pieces, frenetic ragtime two-steps that required his fingers to swarm all over the keys. He stood in front of his easel for hours, agonising over the details in his oil paintings, never satisfied with his efforts. Only high art was good enough. Instead of family photos on our mantlepiece, we had miniature busts of Brahms and Beethoven and a featherlight plaster copy of The Discus Thrower of Myron.

When the Games returned to Australia in 2000, Dad was invited to carry the Olympic torch for a stint as it made its way across Melbourne. Nearly seventy, he trained hard for the run. I joined Mum at the side of the road to watch him go past, expecting him to look serious and uncomfortable, eyes riveted to the bitumen in front of him. But when he appeared on the crest of the hill, he was smiling and laughing and waving, not just to us but to all the other bystanders cheering him on.

When he finished the run, he was put in an official minivan and driven to the local park, where the torch-bearers were being honoured with a formal presentation. Mum and I made our own way. We made sure we had film in our cameras. We worried about getting a good spot in the crowd.

Somewhere between getting off the minivan and entering the marquee, Dad disappeared. The official at the microphone called his name and everyone waited, but he didn’t show up, embarrassing us and confusing the organisers. When we finally got home, he was watching television like nothing had happened, and was annoyed that we were upset.

The nurse caught my arm as I was leaving the ward. Could I bring in my father’s keys, wallet, glasses, and teeth tomorrow, she said, as if this were the easiest thing in the world. He had nothing but the clothes on his back when he climbed into the ambulance, she said.

‘I’ll give it a red hot go,’ I told the nurse. She gave me a withering look, as if she’d met arseholes like me before. She didn’t have time for me to explain Dad to her, and I didn’t know how to do it anyway.

I hadn’t set foot in my childhood home for five years, not since Dad had marched me to the door and said that (a) possession was nine-tenths of the law, (b) he was changing the locks and (c) he knew what I was playing at. We were supposed to be going through Mum’s things together. I had brought the list of instructions she had written for me before she died, detailing what was to go to whom. Dad took forever to read the list, then said I had forged Mum’s handwriting. I pointed out her distinctive, loopy lettering, but his mind was made up.

My childhood home had what we called a sunroom. Nothing flash, just a room at the back of the house with a wall of windows facing north, where Mum would sit reading her book, still and serene, her hair sparkling in the sunlight.

Now the sunroom looked like the set of one of the never-ending Theatre of the Absurd plays I had acted in at university. All the blinds were down as far as they could go: broken, from being tugged too hard. A hole in the ceiling, two-metres wide, was fringed with tufts of pink ceiling batts, like bedraggled fairy floss. Below, a disordered grid of twenty-three plastic tubs filled to the brim with brown water. The sound of dripping. A deadlocked door. A missing key. A chair and a single saucepan next to the only open window, where the old man had been throwing out the fetid water onto the garden below.

[A phone rings. THE OLD MAN stands and moves stage right.]

THE OLD MAN: Yep.

The last time I rang him, a few weeks before he called for the ambulance, he had sounded the same as always: magisterial, mocking, utterly credible.

DAUGHTER: How are you, Dad?

THE OLD MAN: You tell me. How should I be?

Beat.

DAUGHTER: Anything I can do to help?

THE OLD MAN: What if I don’t want your help?

He said he didn’t want anything from me. He had everything under control.

I realised I was still pinching my old house key between my thumb and forefinger. All that talk about changing the locks had been bluster. I stood between the kitchen and the sunroom, looking all around. The only thing I could see that showed any semblance of order was the fridge door. Using little button-shaped magnets, my father had created a collage of cut-out newspaper headings, a kind of motivational ransom note to himself.

It took four hours to find his wallet. His teeth would take six weeks.

I drove back to the hospital with the wallet, and, sensing I was still in his good books, asked him how the house had got into such a state. He said that a pair of shady Irish builders had climbed in a window, drugged him, and hobbled his ankles as he lay in bed. ‘I had to walk on two smashed ankles all the way to the hospital!’ he said. ‘They would have waited until I was gone, then backed up their truck and pumped the house full of all that stuff.’

Conveniently, they had pumped the house full of all the stuff Dad was into: cheap classical music compilation CDs and heavily discounted art books and copies of New Dawn magazine (‘The #1 magazine for people who think for themselves’) and all his half-finished paintings that used to be in the garage.

Then his giddy mood subsided. He looked me straight in the eye, unblinking. His voice went down an octave. ‘You don’t throw anything out. Not a single thing.’

‘I won’t.’

‘Because I’ll know.’

Then his mood flipped again, and he launched into a story I would hear several times over the next few months, as if he had been stewing over it, or reliving it. It seemed to take place in the early 1970s, when he still caught the train to work. He was walking home one night, he said, up the steep incline of Tower Street. Something was wrong with the footpath. He went over, hard. ‘I hit my head!’ he shouted at me, as if affronted, as if he couldn’t believe how unreasonable life could be.

For my second visit to the house, I had a plan. First, take photos of every room. I wanted evidence, something tangible I could show the doctors in case Dad managed to persuade them he could take care of himself. Although they had already told me there was no way he’d be allowed back home, that he suffered from ‘lack of insight’, I knew the power of his authoritative voice. To be fair, it was far more likely that he’d convince me, so the photos would also serve as a reminder, an insurance policy against doubt and vacillation. Afterwards, I showed them to some friends and watched for their reactions. ‘That’s not normal is it?’ I asked. ‘Er, no?’ they said, using the sort of upward inflection that suggested I was losing my mind.

They also thought I was mad for not scooping up everything in the house and taking it to the tip. But the plastic tubs in every room that seemed to be filled with rubbish also included, on closer investigation, items like watches, wads of cash, and Olympic memorabilia. I didn’t want to miss anything important. And I didn’t want to be in a situation where Dad might ask me for something and I’d be unable to produce it. That scared the pants off me.

But my most pressing motivation for going through everything methodically was to find something amid the chaos that might explain him to me, some item that would make all the pieces fit together, absolve me of guilt, maybe even make me feel some compassion for him. I was going to need it if I was to be his advocate and power of attorney. Otherwise, we had a long haul ahead of us.

If I was looking for compassion, I felt a stab of it when I came across all the unopened flatpacks of shelves, plastic filing trays, and expandable files. He was clearly desperate to get organised, and at some point had been motivated enough to do something about it. This explained all the cream-coloured manila folders I kept finding, neatly labelled with titles like Electricity and House Insurance. Except there were five separate Electricity folders, all with a single notice in them, all in different rooms. Other folders were harder to explain. One was labelled Eyes. When I opened it, a shower of cut-out newspaper eyes fluttered onto my shoes. Another was labelled with a single letter: H. All it contained was an article about the 2013 child abuse Royal Commission.

Once I’d taken the photos, I tried to stick to the plan but became distracted almost immediately. I started picking up all the scribbled notepapers that confettied every room in the house. I was trying to construct a narrative out of them. Many were dictionary definitions (Debase: to lower in character and to degrade); others were advertising slogans he had copied down (Clean out your insides for a flatter tummy). Some were records of phone conversations I remembered: unwieldy, semantic affairs that went for hours, during which he implied that I was a villain, a con artist, a potential housebreaker.

One note simply read: my daughter’s superior attitude.

I threw myself back into the plan, starting with the books. I noticed a row of familiar-looking paperbacks on a low shelf. Despite the thousands of books he had amassed, Dad was not what you’d call a reader. He liked books you could dip into; he rarely read one from cover to cover. But these paperbacks had certainly been read; their spines were thoroughly cracked. One title rang a bell: Chariots of the Gods by Erich von Däniken. Others included Return to the Stars, The Flying Saucer Vision, The UFO Enigma. I laughed out loud. What the hell were these? We are Not the First. Science fiction? Dad was never into that.

I pulled out my phone and googled. All the books were published in the late 1960s and early 1970s and seemed to be based around a theory called the Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis. The idea was that in ancient times, intelligent extraterrestrials visited the earth and got busy doing everything from exterminating the dinosaurs to building the pyramids. I googled a bit more and clicked on a Smithsonian magazine article that called it ‘evidence-free idiocy’.

I had a flashback to the 1980s, of Dad watching television documentaries about the pyramids, marvelling at the miracle of their existence. ‘Mind-blowing!’ he’d exclaim. ‘Unbelievable!’ In response, my mother would murmur politely and my child’s mind would be spinning, trying to work out if Dad’s silent-movie frown and dramatic head-shaking and tsk-tsking meant he was pleased or displeased. It was the same kind of thunderstruck reaction he’d have when he’d watch the ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov or listen to Luciano Pavarotti – or when he couldn’t believe what had just come out of my mouth. Unbelievable! Tsk-tsk-tsk.

I was aware that Dad had visited the pyramids once, but I wouldn’t know any details, or see any photos, until many years later. In 1960, he took the SS Orcades, an ocean liner that had been an accommodation ship during the Melbourne Olympics, to Naples, stopping in Cairo on the way. It was his first time overseas. After travelling through Western Europe and the UK, he took one of the first ever tourist buses through Russia, ending up back in Italy in time to watch the opening ceremony of the Rome Olympics.

I put all the ancient astronaut books in a plastic tub bound for the storage facility. But I kept thinking about them, the incongruity of their long life in our house. How could my intelligent father, who liked facts and evidence – indeed, who demanded facts and evidence from me with our every interaction – take seriously the ideas in those books? It was not as if he had bought one just to see what all the fuss was about. He had kept buying them. I tried to remember what he was like in the early 1970s, when I was a toddler and he still thought I was wonderful, but of course that was impossible.

The author’s father in Cairo, 1960

By now, most of the people around me assumed that my father was living with dementia. But it didn’t seem like dementia to me. To me, it was just a magnification of his everyday behaviour, only devoid of its former subtlety and strategy. I figured that the trauma of losing my mother, his umbilical cord to the world, had opened the floodgates. Or maybe it was simply because he didn’t have to behave himself in front of her any more. He could finally let rip.

It never occurred to me that he might have a mental illness. All my life, Mum and I and our extended family and friends acted as though everything was normal with Dad, the only concession being that he was an ex-Olympian and not like other people and we should all respect that. So, whenever he pointed a finger in my face and told me that he knew what my game was, or demanded I define every second word in the remark I just made, I saw it only as an exercise of his power, letting me know once again how intelligent and perceptive he was. It just sounded like he had a very low opinion of me, and somewhere along the line I must have forgotten something terrible that I had done to him.

Now I was beginning to come around to the idea that something was seriously amiss. I was forty years old.

I found a nursing home that would let him set up his easel so he could paint in his room, but he refused. ‘I’m not a performing monkey,’ he said. For a while he had a girlfriend, another resident, who seemed almost as angry as him. There was no relaxing of tensions between us, no reconciliation, not even a workable coexistence. The day I told him the house had finally been sold, his anger boiled over into undisguised hatred, and stayed that way. ‘You tricked me!’ he screamed at me. I heard a nurse start running down the corridor. ‘You duped me!’

The two and a half years in aged care were the worst of my life. And his, no doubt.

After he died, and his story had an ending, I made an appointment with a psychologist. Talking about him seemed more manageable then. I brought with me all my preoccupations and suppositions from the last three years, but mainly I wanted to talk about narcissistic personality disorder. It was the only thing that made sense to me, and I gave the psychologist examples that I thought proved my theory. I told her how Mum had always said that Dad had adored me until I was about three years old, and I had hundreds and hundreds of professional-looking baby photos to prove her theory: 8x10s Dad had taken himself. Mum said, ‘It was when you began to really talk, and it was clear you had a mind of your own … well, I think he got a bit of a shock. You weren’t afraid to disagree with him. He didn’t like that.’

The psychologist nodded. ‘That certainly fits with a narcissistic diagnosis. A narcissist doesn’t like to be challenged. How old would he have been then?’

‘About forty-one.’

‘That’s interesting. Early forties is often the age for late-onset schizophrenia.’

That shut me up.

‘What?’ I croaked. And then, ‘Oh!’

I remembered something. I remembered that first time I saw him at the hospital, when he was tucking into his hot lunch, and a young doctor had pulled me aside and asked me if Dad had been diagnosed with schizophrenia.

I was still staring at the psychologist. ‘I can’t believe I forgot about that.’

The young doctor had asked me if Dad had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and I had laughed. Laughed at the idea that Dad had been diagnosed with anything, because Dad never thought there was anything wrong with him. It was everyone else who had the problem.

And then I had forgotten about it.

But that was not the only time, because now I remembered a carer at the nursing home saying that word again and I must have looked confused, so she took me to the nurses’ station and opened his bulging file and there was the word, written down in the notes, staring back at me. I had forgotten that too.

‘What the hell is wrong with me?’ I said out loud.

Why had I forgotten that word, and instead obsessed over books about ancient astronauts, stories about falling over in the street, a manila folder containing a single article about a child abuse royal commission, and a condition I first heard about while watching daytime television?

‘Well, people often have a very narrow idea about what it is,’ said the psychologist. ‘But when you first described your dad – the social isolation, the disordered behaviour, the aggression, the sense of superiority – I did wonder whether we were talking about schizophrenia.’

Again I reeled at the mention of that word and instinctively pushed back on it. The psychologist asked me what I was feeling right now. I didn’t know. I just knew that one word was too feeble to describe him. I felt compelled to speak in his defence. Yes, he had been awful to grow up with, but he had also been biblical and operatic, a suburban King Lear, pushing the lawnmower around in his Stubbies, bare-chested, stopping to do a handstand on the grass, then going to his easel, grinding his teeth over his brushstrokes, angry at the world, angry at us. He was proud and self-aggrandising and flawed and self-sabotaging and sometimes too scared to ask a stranger for directions, scared of all sorts of things.

I couldn’t help asking: ‘Do you think he did fall over and hit his head and that triggered a kind of psychic break that brought on the … It would have been around the same time, early forties.’

‘Who knows,’ she said. ‘There could be any number of scenarios.’

She changed the subject. She wanted to talk about me.

Three years after his death, I still have Dad’s paintings, his Olympic memorabilia, two boxes of Kodak slides, and a sheaf of old, mixed-up letters. These are all dated 1960 and written in Dad’s hand. They are addressed to a Mr Moodie, the secretary-general of the Melbourne YMCA. One includes a notation at the top of the first page: Another excellent letter received. I imagine Mr Moodie pinning them to a noticeboard in the old Melbourne Y for all the residents to read.

I start with the second page of a letter in which Dad is in the middle of describing his trip to Moscow. These were the five days that would feed his lifelong obsession with Russia and its culture. I was fortunate enough to get a close-up photo of Mr Khrushchev as he was walking through the Kremlin, he writes to Mr Moodie. The Kremlin houses the museum of the tzars, and it is amazing to see the wealth those fellows accumulated.

I chuckle at ‘those fellows’. I remember that the Kodak slides are carefully labelled and organised, so I can easily find the images that correspond to Dad’s descriptions. I have kept his battery-operated Hanimex Super Hanorama slide viewer, so I drop the slide labelled Khrushchev into the slot. I lean into the viewer, shutting out all the light around me, and I am tunnelled into an alternate present, where Mr Khrushchev is walking purposefully across Red Square right in front of me, a woman in a peach-coloured coat only slightly spoiling my view.

I swirl the letters around and find the first page of the Russia letter.

We flew over to Belgium on a Bristol freighter, and then by a brand-new bus to Moscow … On the way, we had stops at Brussels, Helmstedt, Berlin, Poznan, Brest, Minsk and Smolensk. There were 45 people on our bus made up of eleven nationalities. Amongst these people were a variety of beliefs and occupations, so the trip was of such interest.

I read on, but I’m starting to feel profoundly uncomfortable. Maybe this is because I’ve been sitting cross-legged for too long, or because of the unfamiliar sound of my father’s happy voice. He is coming across as a nice guy. Rather formal, a little unworldly, but unmistakably open to life. His descriptions of people are generous and good-natured; they are ‘wonderful fellows’ and ‘chums’. He is having fun and enjoying getting to know people. Everywhere one finds somebody who knows somebody and it is a wonderful and surprising thing how much good relationship between individuals from different countries exists.

The more I read, the more I feel undone. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to find any explanations or revelations in these letters, which, due to some kink in my personality, I still seem to be looking for. But I do feel as though I’ve found something – a sense of what he was like in the first half of his life, and of what he might have been like if things had been different.

In Moscow I saw the May Day parade, and I would not feel I was exaggerating if I said there were 5 million people in the Parade. The Red Square was fed from five different streets. Five million people, like five great rivers pouring into a lake. 

May Day, Moscow, 1960 (photograph supplied by author)

I put more slides in the slot, one after another. Some I put to one side: too blurry, too nondescript. But many of them are astonishing. I’m breathless at how good they are, how immediate they feel. I can almost hear people speaking Russian, a muffled announcement over a tinny public address system, the far-off rumbling of an approaching tank. I have to prise myself from the viewer, take a breath, and dive back in for more.

Is it too much to say that Dad was a very good photographer? He had an eye for composition, that was clear, but he was perceptive enough to realise that there was more to capture than just the staggering enormity of the occasion. There were also small and very human moments.

Like his trophies and medals, these images have remained unseen for the best part of fifty years. I think of all that time he spent struggling with his painting and piano playing, and meanwhile these photos, with their effortless artistry, were hidden away, unable to be admired. Maybe he had not seen the merit in them. Maybe he was scared of being judged. Maybe he thought they were too easy, that proper art needed suffering, anguish.

I drop another slide in the slot. A river of people surging forward, green flags, red armbands and multicoloured balloons. In the centre of the frame, an old man in a black coat and flat cap, clutches a battered suitcase with both hands. He has a similar face shape to my father, the same rounded, high-set cheeks. But why is he carrying a suitcase? Perhaps he’s not from Moscow. Perhaps he has just arrived, just in time to join the parade. The suitcase looks strangely empty, as if it would sound hollow if you tapped it. But he clutches it anyway. This old man has noticed my father in the crowd, a young, handsome man in a Western suit, holding a 35mm camera pointed in his direction.

May Day, Moscow, 1960 (photograph supplied by author)