ALANNAH HILL
on motherly love and disdain
From her dirt-poor upbringing in Tasmania, Alannah Hill climbed to fashion fame in Melbourne and New York, but all the time she was hiding dark family secrets. In a raw and emotional interview, she tells Juliet Rieden about her confounding love for her cruel mother and why in an explosive memoir she has decided to release the shame of her past.
Alannah Hill teases her hair into its trademark beehive coif, a nest of black curls, and puts the final touches to her dark smoky eyes, thick with kohl. “I’ve been writing this book in my head since I was nine years old,” she says. You’ll never see Alannah au naturel – this is her armour, her game face to greet the world and safeguard her heart. And as we talk in her velvet clad, casually baroque St Kilda apartment, casting back to the grisly poverty-stricken childhood and adolescence revealed in her courageous new memoir Butterfly on a Pin, it becomes painfully apparent why Alannah, 55, needs that protection.
Her life story is an extraordinary journey of triumph over impossibly sad sufferance; of love conquering, despite the deep scars it has left behind. “I wrote three different versions of Butterfly 30 years ago with pseudonyms – I called myself Daisy Chain. I always dreamt about publishing my story, but I knew it would be forbidden. I wasn’t ready to face my past. I didn’t want anyone to truly know what my background was,” Alannah explains, speaking publicly for the first time about what really went on in her hometown of Penguin, where her parents ran a milk bar and she and her siblings were kept in a two-metre by two-metre wooden box and branded “no good mongrel bastards” by her drunken abusive father.
“I thought if I can be truly honest and try to make a connection with the reader, this would help me reconnect with the little girl that I was, the little girl I’d buried years ago,” she adds.
The book is like a multi-layered blanket of stream of consciousness, enveloping you in its vivid tales and gallery of characters. At times it feels as if you’re in a scene from Charles Dickens with urchins aplenty and unspeakable mendacity behind every door; only this is not fiction, it’s incredibly real.
Alannah is seasoned at masking trauma with humour; as she talks, especially about her mother, whom I soon realise she loves very dearly, she breaks into brilliant and hilarious acts of mimicry, but every time she is holding back the tears and often throughout our conversation she has to stop and compose herself. In the memoir she has had to cloak identities for legal reasons and tone down some of the circumstances she depicts to protect the guilty and the innocent, which makes what actually made it to the page all the more shocking.
“I think we all carry secrets, we all shudder with shame about things that have happened, things we cannot bear to talk about from times gone by,” says Alannah. “My original idea for the book was very different. Originally, I wanted compact dynamite chapters with my mum’s apocalyptic put downs as the chapter titles. Chapters like, ‘You’ll never amount to anything, dear’ and, ‘Girls like YOU can NOT have a baby, Lannaaarh’. The chapters would include humorous advice on how to overcome such extreme negativity.” But in the end Alannah decided not to hide and bravely opted to dig deep.
“I realise now that my glossy airyfairy coffee table book idea would have just been me once again glossing over my childhood darkness, and only flashing a light here and there on the pain I was carrying. I used to joke about my childhood like I did with my mum to cope with her moods. I turned Mum into a caricature so I could manage my hurt. The things that I couldn’t bear or face, the shadows and whispers from my past, these were the painful memories I had to remember and return to in an attempt to uncover the truth of who I really was.”
DAILY TERROR
Alannah was the fourth of five siblings born to staunch Catholic Aileen and her “lying, cheating husband” Jimmy Hill. Jimmy was a huge figure in Alannah’s life but not one she connected with. “The relationship with my father held terror and mistrust. I would hide and try to be invisible. I felt he disliked me and preferred my sister.”
In her early childhood Jimmy moved the family from pillar to post until they ended up in the small beachside community of Penguin to run a business he had purchased – a dingy, lacklustre milk bar, where her mum worked all hours and her dad was barely to be seen. The three boys and the two girls in the Hill brood were kept distinctly separate and Alannah says she had no real sibling bond with her brothers.
“The milk bar was only two bedrooms for seven people. The boys’ bedroom was part of the laundry but it was sectioned off with a thin curtain,” explains Alannah. “It could only fit a bunk bed with a single bed against the other wall. My parents did not encourage any grandiose ideas like winning a trophy, appearing in the school play, listening to music, or playing basketball. There was only negativity.”
LOSING MY DREAMS
Creativity, passion, talent, ambition – these were dirty words in the Hill household. “It was always, ‘You don’t rise above your station, don’t have dreams, don’t go down the street, you’re good for nothing, you’re all just nobodies. You’re poor mongrels.’ It was so confusing. And the boys didn’t really like us girls,” explains Alannah. “The two older brothers were angry and
Dad was very violent towards them.”
One of them, Joseph, had a difficult start in life. He was born in what the doctors said was a “shocked condition” and age three suffered burns to 60 per cent of his body when a pot of boiling water fell on him. Brother and sister had never really spoken and harboured a mutual dislike of each other.
Alannah says he was “perverse and unpredictable”, and she avoided him at all costs her whole childhood.
There is a deeply shocking chapter early in the book in which Alannah describes the day her mother – a manic depressive whose “negativity was almost award-winning” – explodes in
“I turned Mum into a caricature so I could manage my hurt.”
hysterical rage when Alannah and her sister fight over a doll Alannah had found earlier in a dirty puddle. “We didn’t have toys so the doll was special to me,” she recalls. The two girls grab at the doll “like Tasmanian devils”, eventually pulling it apart, and when their father comes in and bellows abuse, Aileen sees red and literally tosses both daughters against the wall.
“My sister’s arm cracked,” writes Alannah. “Her little wrist flopped and her arm stopped moving. I saw her pain so clearly, her face tight with an indescribable look of fear.”
Even at these dark tempestuous times, Alannah finds empathy for the woman who deep down she couldn’t help loving. “I sensed that Mum felt guilty ... I could feel Mum’s confusion and chaos – the realisation that she had thrown Bernadette against the wall, snapping her arm in two,” she writes.
It wasn’t the only time the children were hurt but back in the 1970s, Alannah says, the idea of social services intervening was unheard of and the Hill family limped on, a cauldron of abuse.
The most pivotal moment of Alannah’s childhood occurred on an eight-hour train journey from Penguin to Hobart when she was 12. She was going to stay with her Nan, Aileen’s mum, on a one-week holiday and was feeling very “special and privileged”. On the train journey Alannah was sexually abused by a close relative. The attack was devious and malicious and is described in vivid detail in her memoir. It scarred Alannah for life. “The guilt and the shame that followed this event shattered my faith and trust in people,” she tells me. “I became disillusioned with life and whatever was left of my childhood disappeared.”
Alannah felt dirty and broken. She told no one until 15 years later when she confided in her sister-in-law, who in turn told Alannah’s mum. This could and should have been a moment of epiphany for mother and daughter, a time to bond and heal. But Aileen refused to believe it ever happened and scolded her daughter for spreading gossip. “For me, to not be believed was worse than what happened on the train,” writes Alannah. From early on her parents had castigated her for “the look in my eye, the untoward look, a wayward look”. They intimated that she was to blame for any unwanted attention she received. “And I did think it was my fault. That’s the terrible thing about abuse,” Alannah says. Her history with men from this moment was very troubled, until she met her first real boyfriend some years later.
At 15 she ran away from home, moving to Hobart. There she battled more abuse and was horrifically raped by a local policeman with help from another officer. The men, she says, are still around and I ask her if she now feels able to take action and prosecute. “It was Hobart in the 1970s and a lot has changed since then for women. We still have a long way to go but I feel there is more awareness now, especially with the #MeToo movement, which has been incredible to be part of,” she says. “I had no idea how the #MeToo was going to hopefully change the world ... no idea. If you haven’t been abused
Clockwise from above: The only known photograph of the Hill family; Alannah (with lookalike mannequins in a shop window) in 1983; son Edward with Aileen; baby Edward with Alannah