I lost my mother at age four, but these women were always there for me

“Ya mum.” It’s the most common joke in Australia, especially in the western suburbs of Sydney, where I was raised. “Ya mum” is derivative of the African-American jest, “Yo’ momma”.

Author Winnie Dunn’s mother died when she was only four, but she was never short of maternal figures in her life.Credit: Christopher Pearce

The children of Whalan Public School, where I was educated from kindy to year 6, were exceptional at reciting these witticisms in the playground:

“Ya mum is so poor, ducks throw bread at her.”

“Ya mum is so dumb, she put lipstick on her forehead to make up her mind.”

“Ya mum is so ugly, she threw a boomerang and it refused to come back.”

Each time a student said these jokes in the playground, I’d scratch the nits in my hair. Hmmm, my mum? The joke always got me thinking about my complicated culture and family history.

In her late teens, my grandmother boarded a ship to Aotearoa at the request of her aunt, who cited the benefits of living in a first-world country, such as a liveable wage. During Nana’s short stay in the land of the long white cloud, she met an Englishman named Brian. My grandmother was planting roses on the nature strip in front of her aunt’s house. Apparently, Brian bent down on one knee then and there.

In her early 20s, my grandmother and Brian moved to Australia for even better wage opportunities. In 1972, the White Australia Policy was still in place and the only reason my grandmother was allowed into the country was because she was married to a White man. A starch-uniformed pilot spat at Nana’s afro as soon as she arrived at Sydney airport. When Nana raised her melon-like fists and started yelling in Tongan at her aggressor, Brian tugged her away. He begged his wife in a thick English accent, “Do not create a scene for me.”

Brian dug graves at Rookwood Cemetery in Lidcombe while Nana caught several buses to the Arnott’s Biscuit Factory in North Strathfield. And when my grandparents went to bed at the end of each day, Nana couldn’t help but think of how sore her knuckles were while trying not to gag at the smell of dirt and decay emanating from her husband.

My father, John Dunn, was born in 1975, which was two years after the White Australia Policy ended. He was followed by my aunts, Winnie and Margaret. In the early ’80s, my grandmother became one of the few Tongan women to not only marry a White man but to divorce one as well.

The final incident that ended their union was simple. Brian kept turning up the television while my grandmother tried to hold church services with the extended family she was finally able to bring over from Tonga. In front of her five sisters, Nana yelled at Brian that she didn’t need him any more. Brian turned up the cricket to full volume and shouted back, “Charity cases!” Soon after, Brian went back to England. He left an empty bank account and a no return address. My father and aunts never saw their biological father again.

In the Tongan language, there is no word for “grandmother”, “aunt” or “step-parent”. All the women in our blended and extended families are described as a type of mother.

A few years later, my nana went on to marry the darkest-skinned Tongan she could find. A man who could be a husband to her and a father to her three children. Tupou came from a village known to produce offspring immune to shark attacks (or so an old myth said). Nana went on to have two more children with this man, my younger aunts, Lavender and Jane, who were two shades darker than their older half-White half-siblings. They moved into a housing commission in Miller, the poorest suburb in Sydney.

By the early ’90s, Sydney was fast filling with the children of islanders from across the South Pacific. It was a rarity in those days to be hafekasi (half-caste) and even rarer still that two hafekasis would marry each other. But that’s exactly what my father did when he met Mafile’o Theresa Helen Tuitavake at Mounties RSL. She was standing in front of a painted mural of a jungle, looking like a swan. Dad went up to her immediately, bouncing on his Nike TNs and asking for her number.

Dad found out the following: Mafile’o was 21 while he was just 19. Also, Mafile’o was born to an estranged Australian father and a Tongan mother of noble status. Apparently, Dad apologised for asking, thinking himself too lowly for an older and regal woman. Le’o just giggled, keyed in her number on my dad’s brick Nokia and asked if they could share a cigarette. Mummy liked Dad’s humility. Dad liked Mummy’s laugh, which ended in a snort.

My birth mum went on to have me in July 1995, my sister Elizabeth in December 1997 and my brother John in February 1999. We were living in a rundown rented two-bedroom unit in Campsie. The only memory I have is hearing my baby-lings crying while I watched Mummy Le’o puke into a toilet bowl. She’d look down at me with watery brown eyes, one of her irises slightly off-centre, as she whispered, “Sorry, Little Bib.”

When the doctors diagnosed Mummy Le’o with cancer, the spiteful cells had already spread throughout her body. She was only in hospital for two weeks while my father, barely 23, bent over her bedside whispering, “Don’t leave us, Bib.” I was four, and my two siblings just two and six months old respectively when Le’o passed away at the age of 27.

Widowed and overwhelmed with toddlers, my father moved us to Miller, right next door to his mother’s and sisters’ housing commission home on Guernsey Road.

For the next year, me, Elizabeth and John were raised by my grandmother and aunties. Especially Winnie. Being the eldest daughter, I was named after my first paternal aunt and we referred to each other as “Lahi”, meaning senior, and “Si’i”, meaning junior. This is customary in Tongan culture.

That time in my childhood exists in small fragments of memories: a nagtu (a type of Tongan mat) laid out over the front yard and onto the public sidewalk. Plastic leis (garlands of flowers) hanging over every framed photo of a blond-haired and blue-eyed Jesus. My aunts, Lahi and Margaret, crying when they found a small bald patch (caused by chronic stress) within my lice-ridden hair. Laughing as I scribbled incomprehensible stories all over the year 7 homework of my youngest aunty, Jane.

By the summer of 2001, my father had proposed to a Tongan-born woman named Ramona Johansson (her last name passed down from some distant Swedish explorer). Ramona had a son from a previous marriage, my stepbrother William Young, who was also hafeaski. Ramona had grown up in Aotearoa, so she always had a slight posh inflection in her voice whenever she said words like “fish and chups” and “chocka”. Apparently, Ramona had known my mummy Le’o from way back in the day.

“Your mummy was beautiful then and now … I like to think she left you kids for me,” Ramona confessed to me one night as we walked around Wonderland amusement park (the place where Dad proposed). “Can I be your mum, too?” she asked, brushing a strand of loose hair behind my ear. In that small gesture I felt my chest expand and realised that Ramona already was my mother.

Shortly after, Ramona fell pregnant with my half-sister, Margaret. She was followed by my half-sisters Lavender-Jayne and Rose. In that time, we moved from our Miller housing commission and bought a brick one-storey home in Mount Druitt. Back then, it was rare for Islanders to own property. Dad was able to do so because he worked night shifts at Westpac, overlooking international bank transfers. Our new home was Dad’s way of cementing his patchwork family into reality.

As the years went by, I began to doubt I’d ever had a real mother. “I belong to no woman,” I’d told my grandmother.

Shaking her afro and pulling me into a hug, Nana said in a thunderous clash of broken English: “No. Me mum. Winnie Lahi mum. Margaret mum. Lavender mum. Jane mum. Ramona mum. No forget.”

In the Tongan language, there is no word for “grandmother”, “aunt” or “step-parent”. All the women in our blended and extended families are described as a type of mother.

In the case of my father’s sisters, they also held the title of “mehekitanga” and “fahu”, the names for sisters of a paternal parent. However, the titles have power only for the eldest sister as she is the family leader who holds naming and care rights over all her brother’s children. Winnie, who I am named after, is my mehekitanga and fahu.

In All About Love, African-American feminist and scholar bell hooks argues that raising children is the responsibility of an entire community, rather than just a “mother” and “father”. “We are all born into the world of community,” hooks writes. “Rarely if ever does a child come into this world in isolation, with only one or two onlookers. Children are born into a world surrounded by the possibility of community. Family, doctors, nurses, midwives and even admiring strangers comprise this field of connections, some more intimate than others.”

The words of bell hooks resonate strongly with my own familial sense of community. As a young widower in a welfare class family, there was no way my dad could have raised me and two siblings to any functional degree without utilising the mehekitanga/fahu structure enmeshed in Tongan tradition. This cultural foundation allowed my nana and aunts to take care of us as their own. At the same time, Ramona could be mother to me and my two full siblings, my one step-sibling and my three half-siblings without me ever forgetting that Mummy Le’o gave birth to me and held me close until her dying breath.

Many years later, in the playground of Whalan Public School, whenever somebody said, “Ya mum,” I’d always smile to myself.

“Which one are you talking about?” I would ask them. “I have many incredible mothers.”

Dirt Poor Islanders (Hachette) by Winnie Dunn is out now.

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