The images from my childhood Christmases play like a super-8 film. They are grainy and disjointed. A sad child with a crooked fringe is in the corner of the frame. She pokes a stick in an ant hole and watches them scramble. She doesn’t make friends easily. She is quiet and remote. Her inner life is vast. She dances with a mop in the front yard. She pretends she’s a single mother and she’s run away to join the circus with her baby tossing act…
I was a weird kid. It’s hard sometimes to recognise that child as me. But at Christmas, lurking behind the happy memories that came later, there is always this. Like a stone in my heart. When I think of this child, I think of children who have lives like mine then.
I was a child of violence. Christmas was a time of hope. It was this moment in my childhood when I believed a kind, fat man in a red suit gave gifts to good children. I always wondered if I was good. My little life was hard, and in my child’s brain it was impossible not to think it was because of me.
In the rural Queensland town where I lived Christmas Eve was magical. A local farmer would dress as Santa and take children on a bullock-drawn dray around the town. We’d sit perched on hay bales looking at the stars, laughing, seeing our town in a whole new light. The adults drank beer in the park and tried their luck at winning hams on the carnival wheel spinner.
I have two distinct memories of Christmas at this time. One is of putting out my teddy to meet Santa. I dressed him and propped him up on a chair on our verandah. When I awoke to see what a good girl I had been, it was carnage. A dog had taken my teddy and torn it to pieces in the front yard. It was like a Tarantino film. Bits of my beloved bear lay scattered like teddy confetti. His fluffy innards a kind of rolling snow blowing in the dust. Of course, I didn’t think it was a dog, I thought Santa had done it – like it was a sign of my unworthiness. I not only lived with a violent father, Santa was a psychopath as well. Perhaps this is where my feminism first took root.
The last Christmas before my father was killed, was perhaps the most poignant of all. I awoke to no presents under the tree. My father said ‘go outside’. And tied to the fence was a brown and white pony. A pony that also turned out to be a psychopath, but a pony nonetheless. I will never forget that moment. It was a signpost to me of better things to come. It wasn’t just a pony, it was an escape vehicle. A gift for my little girl agency to be able to escape. Perhaps it was more magical for me because of the despair and sadness that I lived with. The fact that I loved and feared the same man who was my father. Who was also my Santa.
I don’t mean this to be depressing, because it is Christmas and all that. But I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge the children living in domestic violence. To think about their powerlessness, their fear and their hope.
For me, things got better. The quiet girl with a crooked fringe became loud and brassy and confident. She was safe and loved. It was the best gift of all; me.
I hope, one day very soon, other children living in violence receive that gift too.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
