91 Josephine Wood (Hankin) Continues Her Descent into Hell - Part 1: 10 November 2024

Josephine Hankin finally died on 20 March 2012.  She died in a nursing home, having suffered a stroke 15 months earlier; the stroke meant she was no longer able to manage even the easiest tasks of daily living unaided.

This is a copy of the front page of the booklet produced for her funeral.

The photo of mum on the front of the funeral booklet has an image of Josey from when she was decades younger than the 87 years and 10 months at the time she died.  This photo shows her as she was at a time when her descent into mental illness had certainly begun, but when most of her suffering was still in the future.

We arrived at Fisherman’s Bend Migrant Hostel in December 1952 after spending 2 weeks in Bonegilla Migrant Hostel.  The family finances were non existent when we arrived at Fisherman’s Bend.  To use an old Australian expression that has now disappeared, neither mum or dad had a brass razoo.  The family had zero, zilch, nada, nothing, by way of money - not even a threepenny bit.  The threepenny coin (the bit) was known as a “trey”.  Dad told me he borrowed £10/-/- to enable us to get by after we got to Fisherman's Bend.

When we arrived at Fisherman’s Bend, both mum and dad were nominally Catholics, but in reality they were agnostics.  Then something happened and mum became a Catholic religious lunatic.  The trigger for mum’s sudden interest in Catholicism was simple.  She became pregnant in 1954 and she had an abortion.  

As I write this in 2024, this is not seen as a big deal, but in the 1950s, having an abortion was a crime for both the mother and for the abortionist.  The crime of having an abortion meant – if you were caught – several years in jail.

Bill remembers mum was physically ill (vomiting), then she was absent from our Nissen hut for a few days, and when she returned to the Nissen hut, she was no longer ill – or at least she was no longer physically ill.  Instead of being physically ill, mum was noticeably mentally ill.  My guess is that mum was put in touch with the abortionist by a friend called Margaret Smith.  Mum met Margaret Smith while working at General Motors Holden.  I always liked Mrs Smith.  Mrs Smith lived in a rented workman’s cottage in Little Bay Street Port Melbourne.  The house Mrs Smith once lived in, has now been replaced by a shopping centre and no one earning the wages of a process worker could now ever afford to live in Port Melbourne – not in Little Bay Street or in any other street in Port Melbourne.

Once mum returned to our hut after her absence, she became a crazy God bothering Catholic.  From that point on, we were all forced to go to the Port Melbourne Catholic Church (Saint Joseph).  From that point on, if the priest told mum to jump, she simply asked how high she was required to jump.

I think two separate factors were at work after the abortion in 1954.  Mum had already “sinned” and had a child before she ever met dad.  This “sin” had caused her to lose her child; she had committed a crime and she had been “punished” by God – most importantly, she had been punished by the Catholic version of God.  In her mind, this was crime and punishment at work.  The second factor was mum having the abortion.  She thought she had to atone for the gigantic sin of her baby aborted.

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When we finally left Fisherman’s Bend Hostel in December 1956 – four years after we arrived – we did so in circumstances which were - to say the least - extremely peculiar.

Bill and I were at school at Saint Joseph’s Catholic Primary School in Port Melbourne on the day we left.  There had been no hint we were moving when we went to school that morning.

Earlier in 1956, mum and dad had bought a block of land at Parsons Road Research, about 2 miles from Eltham.  In 1956, Eltham was a small country town.  We used to get two trains to reach Eltham railway station and then walk the two miles to Parsons Road so we could check the progress of the building of our small wooden house.  

On the Sunday before we left Fisherman’s Bend, the house had no electricity, no running water, it had holes in the walls where the windows and chimney were going to be installed and there was no toilet.  As well as all these items that needed to be finished, the house was completely unpainted. 

The house at Lot 8 Parsons Road Research was unfit for human habitation.  It was nowhere near finished apart from the existence of the walls, roof and floor.  In retrospect, we were very lucky that the house did have walls, a roof and a floor.  

I am certain that no matter what condition the house had been in, dad would have insisted that we move in anyway.

Dad arrived at the school while we were in the schoolyard for afternoon playtime.  He found us and told us we were moving to the new house that very day and that we were leaving the school immediately.

He bundled us into a car (driven by a friend from the hostel ) and we were driven back to the hostel.  Dad didn’t bother telling the nuns we were leaving school.  He just ordered us into the car and that was our final day at Saint Joseph School Port Melbourne. We arrived in the unfinished house that night.  It was pitch black and there was nowhere to sleep.  It was months before we had electricity or running water.  We never did have a flush toilet.  We shat and peed into a tin can which we buried in a hole we dug when the can got full.

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It took me decades to work out what had happened.

Mum gave birth to my brother Patrick on 17 March1957  There was a connection between the birth of Patrick and our rushed departure from the hostel.