Eulogy for my Mother, Marlene Banki

delivered at her Funeral at Eastern Suburbs Memorial Park, 27th July 2021

In his book The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully, Frank Ostaseski advises us to “welcome everything, push away nothing” and “don’t wait”.

My mother had a very difficult childhood. For the first ten years of her life, she lived in orphanages, first in Ashfield and then at Burnside Presbyterian Orphan Home in Parramatta. Her mother, Dorothy Pryor Wilson, had died three weeks after she was born from septicaemia (blood poisoning) because the midwife arrived from another birth and had not washed her hands.

Her half sister, Joan, who had the same mother was taken in by one her aunts. However, none of my mother’s six aunts were prepared to do the same for her. To the very end of her life she remained outraged by this. She said: “It it were me, I would have taken her in.” And it’s true, she would not have let a member of her family go to an orphanage, despite it being during the Depression in the 1930’s. In the orphanage all the children had numbers, she was number 8. While she said they were not cruel there, everything was regimented.

My mother met her father, John Wilson, for the first time when she was 14 years old in 1946, when he returned as a squadron leader in the RAF as part of the war effort in Egypt. Prior to that, he had married Ivy Mendelssohn, a schoolteacher and mathematician, a relative of the composer Felix Mendelssohn. He had asked Ivy to take her out of the orphanage and to live with her and her Jewish family during the war. Later in life, my mother asked him why he had never visited her during the 10 years she was in the orphanage. He said that seeing her would have been too painful because it would have reminded him of the wife he had lost.

So there was great trauma in this family - my family. When Felicity, who is here today, asked my mother about the effect of the orphanage on her, she said: “It made me strong.” Spending time with my mother this week at Liferites, helping to dress her and put her in her coffin, I was struck that even in death she seemed to me to be so strong. Touching her hands and feeling through my body to the earth, it felt as if she were giving me energy and strength.

My mother’s own childhood experiences made her resolute that she would provide a better childhood for her own children, much more loving and protected than the one she had had. She said: “I knew what I lacked, so I made sure my children didn’t.” she said.

As an infant she was baptised Catholic on the insistence of her mother before she died and later Presbyterian at the request of her Scottish father. As a child she also had exposure to Jewish life and culture due to living with Ivy Mendelssohn and her family during the war. These experiences may have led to her to seeing herself as not belonging simply to one tribe, maybe not having a tribe. She used to say that her religion was her family.

She met my father while working at Cross TV in the late 1950, when television was introduced in Australia. She took a job in a business that was run by Hungarian Jewish immigrants, which obviously didn’t seem to bother her. She married my father in 1964 and they celebrated together in the Menzies Hotel in the city. On the way home from the celebration, she noticed that she had a ladder in one of her stockings. My father insisted that they stop to buy her three pairs of stockings and said: “You won’t have to worry about this anymore.” She responded by saying: “I was in doubt about getting married and now I’m sure I did well.”

Prior to marrying my father, she had been married once before to a man with whom she had my sister, Dallis. She left him because he did not treat her well and was an alcoholic. When my father married my mother, he accepted Dallis as his own daughter.

After marrying my father and my mother went into business together and complemented one another very well. He was very good with money and she was excellent with people. They were fashion retailers and had shops in Blacktown, Miranda, Hurstville, Australia Square in the city, Randwick and Rose Bay: 10 shops in all over a period of 40 years. The shops were called names such as “Bobby Loray”, “Marlene Fashions” and “Girl Talk”.

With their success they travelled. During the 70’s, a period when it was highly unusual for people to travel with their children because it was so expensive, my parents took me and my sister on a six month world trip to Europe, the US and Israel. That was in 1974-75. Two years later we went to Brazil, Peru and Argentina. And later to Hawaii. This made the object of quite a significant amount of jealousy from the boys in school.

My father now says that my mother loved him and stayed with him because she thought he was very caring. They were married together for 57 years. Both my father and my mother had very traumatic childhoods, and I think that they may have also been part of the attraction and the bond that they shared together. Gabor Mate says that we are deeply attracted to people who remind us of unresolved issues in our childhoods.

Throughout my parents’ life together they travelled. My mother’s favourite places were Capri, Venise and Lake Como. While they were in Sydney, very often they went to very good restaurants for lunch: Bistro Moncur, the Mixing Pot, Pruniers, Doyles, Beppis. They were almost always known by name by the people who ran these restaurants. This was even true in Europe. I very much admired the very graceful way they grew old together, going out and doing things they wanted to do and still traveling. They were always very independent.

I also admired how organised they were both as business people and in life. Everything was always put away neatly in the right place and everything that was necessary was always there. The last five or so years were very difficult for my mother with chronic pain in her hips and legs and arthritis and also living with my father’s deafness and frailty.

My mother wanted me to become a barrister. I took such a different path in life to the one they had taken and that they admittedly had some difficulty understanding. But then I have realised that I have received a kind of legacy of business. I kind of just know how to do it. Because I grew up with it. I find it much easier than academic work.

I remember taking my mother’s side over my fathers side in arguments. Maybe this was my earliest appreciation of feminism in witnessing my mother’s resistance to my father. My mother was not a feminist. She chose not to be part of the feminist movement in Australia, the evolution of which she no doubt witnessed from the 70’s onwards. But she had a kind of visceral resistance against behaviour she thought was unjust and self- protection.

As a teenager, I remember the way she used to scratch my back as I sat on her bed, lulling me into a feeling of deep safety and relaxation. There’s a pose in yoga called Svangasana, Shoulder stand. Even though it’s quite a difficult pose, once you get inside it it is profound for the effects on your nervous system. It’s called sometimes the queen, and other times the mother - because of this deep and reassuring effect on the nervous system. Some teachers call it the most important pose in the system.

Close to the end of her life, my mother recounted a story about how one one day she was in the Hakoah club in Bondi Beach with my father. Apparently she seemed a bit of a fish out of water, looking like, as my father said, a high class English woman among all these typical Jewish people. A woman came up to her and very provocatively asked her why she was with my father and she responded: “Because I find him interesting.” And the woman said: “That I can accept.”

I think you learn what love is from your parents, you learn how to love from your parents - for better or for worse. I have felt the benefits of this education in my life, especially in my relationship with my partner, Natalia. Just a way of being generous and loving.

Peter Banki, Ph.D