Melissa Lucashenko: 'If I live to be 100, I’ll never forget the first day I visited my daughter on that ward'

In 2004 a real estate agent drove me, my husband Bill, and our young daughter Ruby down a winding country road. The road was near Mullumbimby in northern New South Wales, and on either side horses and cattle grazed. The hills that surrounded this valley were cloaked in lush rainforest, home to king parrots and pademelons, and just on the other side of those hills we could hear the booming of the great Pacific Ocean on the coast at New Brighton.

It was a paradise in miniature. And for all that real estate agent knew, we were just another cashed up couple trying to make the sea change that all of Australia was dreaming of. But in truth, there was something else going on. Because this was Bundjalung jagun, this was Bundjalung country, my ancestral land, land that my grandmothers had been forced off.

And I was determined that my daughter was going to grow up on that ancestral land. I wanted her to swim in Bundjalung creeks and rivers. I wanted her to walk with us barefoot on those long north New South Wales beaches. After almost a decade of following Bill’s foreign aid career around Australia and the world, I’d put my foot down; it was time, I said, for our daughter to learn how to be not just Aboriginal, but how to be Bundjalung on our own country.

And so after some argument, debate and discussion, Bill relented. We bought 30 acres in that same valley with an old wooden farmhouse on it. We settled in, I built connections amongst my grandmother’s people, wrote novels and bred Arabian horses. It was a sweet life there on that sacred land.

And Ruby thrived. She did swim in Bundjalung waters, and she did hear kurumburuhn, the magpie, singing her talga in the morning as the sun came up. Bill was less content, though, and as time went on his trips overseas grew longer and more frequent. A month in the Philippines, three months in Laos, nine months in East Timor, until finally in 2007 our marriage began to crack and then crumble.

By the time he came to me and said, “I’ve rented a room in a friend’s house, and I’m moving out tomorrow,” what I mainly felt was relief.

Now divorce hits everybody hard, but it hit 14-year-old Ruby the hardest.

I sat at my desk one morning in 2007, and I looked out on those green pastures, and I looked at those Bundjalung hills, and I knew that they were going to be lost to us again.

I thought, “What’s going to become of us? What’s my life with my daughter going to be like?” ‘Cause I knew there was no way in hell I could afford as a single parent to stay on that land. “What am I gonna do with all these horses?” I thought. “Will I be a bag lady?”

And as I was pondering these unhappy questions, the phone rang. It was Bill. “I’m on my way to Tweed Heads Hospital,” he told me, “And you’d better get in a car and head up too, because Ruby has been taken to hospital after throwing up most of a bottle of Panadol on the floor of a school bus.”

I put the phone down, reeling, and burst into hot tears. Life quickly became a blur of psychologists and guilt and deep recrimination between Bill and myself. Six months later Bill had relocated to Sydney, and Ruby and I found ourselves living in Logan City, just south of Brisbane, officially one of Australia’s poorest urban areas.

To me this move wasn’t terrifying. It was unwelcome, but I knew how to do it. I had the skillset, because I’d grown up as one of seven children in a working-class Brisbane family. And having spent a lot of my childhood in Logan, I knew how not to make eye contact with strangers in the street, lest you be asked that unanswerable question, “What the fuck you lookin’ at?”

And I knew what life was like in a suburb where the majority of people were ordinary, decent Australians, but a significant minority were prepared to sell their children’s Ritalin in order to fund a heroin habit.

I remember the first week we moved in, and pulled up to what was going to become our corner store, and for someone with a deep depressive illness, Ruby could still muster an occasional wisecrack. As we pulled up to this dingy establishment, she turned to me in the car and said, “Mum” – she quoted from the BBC comedy A League of Gentlemen – “This is a local shop.”

And I turned to her and said, “Yes, it is our local shop, and we’re locals, so we should go in,” and we were just about to do so, but were interrupted by a junkie hurtling out of the doorway to projectile vomit on the concrete footpath not three meters away. We fell about, snorting and leaking with laughter.

So it wasn’t all bad. I mean make no mistake, I wanted out of there, because I had tasted that good life in Mullumbimby, and it tasted mighty sweet. I didn’t expect to live in Logan City for very long. In fact, in a moment of crazed optimism, I even filled out an online application form for Millionaire Hot Seat. Yes, I thought, I’ll win back that big dollar, and that will send us back to Bundjalung country.

But you have to understand, jokes aside, I was living a life where, as a single parent, I’d given away every extension cord I owned; I’d thrown out every rope. My job every morning was to get up and make a long and frightening journey downstairs to see if Ruby had hung herself during the night.

So geographic location was not my biggest priority. I drew on a lifelong study of Buddhism and I said to myself, “you’re poor again, so what? Suck it up”. “It is what it is” became my mantra. I dusted off my CV, and I started working with women in prison for the first time in 20 years.

We took in a homeless girl who contributed a bit of board, and I started shopping at those cheap Asian supermarkets. We lived on rice and vegetables, bread, occasionally meat, never takeaways, and I just kept putting one foot in front of the other, saying, your job is simply to keep your daughter alive.

And I told myself I could do it. But deep down, I could feel something beginning to unravel, because the truth is I wasn’t sure I could do it, but at the same time I couldn’t allow myself to believe that. One day not long before her 15^th birthday, Ruby asked if she could get a mohawk haircut, and I was so happy that she’d asked for something underpinned by life – something that implied that she was willing to be around for more than another day or two – that I scraped the money together, and I took her to the hairdresser myself.

She came out an hour later with a sculpture on her head in red and green and purple and yellow. And I smiled to see my daughter. I thought, maybe she’ll make it after all.

It was the next day that Ruby told me that she was really happy with the haircut, but that the bug inside her head was bothering her with its efforts to get out.

She scratched at her head as she told me this. And I looked at her and my heart sank, because I knew this was the beginning of a journey into another level of mental illness altogether – a journey that would take us to an extended stay in the adolescent psychiatric wing of the Logan Hospital.

And if I live to be 100, I’ll never forget the first day I visited Ruby on that ward. I went to those big glass doors that hospitals have and waited to be let in, because it was a locked ward, and I went into that antiseptic smell that hospitals have. Ruby was nowhere in sight at this point, but another Aboriginal girl was there, and ignoring the warning sounds from the staff, this girl got up and ran at me. And before I had time to move, she had flung her arms around me, and she had told the ward, “my mother’s here, she’s come to take me home.”

And as I put my arms around this unknown girl, I felt like I was teetering on the brink of a precipice, a precipice that Ruby was in danger of falling over. It was then that I decided that whatever it took, I would stop my daughter from becoming someone who had to hug strangers in hospital wards because there was no one else to hug.

With some pretty tightrope parenting over the next few weeks from me and from Bill, who visited periodically from Sydney, and the help of a very good young psychologist in the public health system, Ruby slowly began to improve – marginally. Her psychosis ended, and I thought, maybe we can make it after all; maybe the unraveling won’t become any worse.

And then I got another phone call which left me reeling.

Was I available the next week to go on Millionaire Hot Seat in Melbourne?

The following Tuesday I was sitting opposite Eddie McGuire on national TV, Ruby in the audience, foot-high mohawk and all. I answered five or six questions correctly, took a pass on one, and then came back to the hot seat, to the final question.

“What is the scientific unit for the measurement of light?” What is the scientific unit for the measurement of light ... But you see, all those months earlier when I’d filled out the application form, they’d asked for areas of strength and areas of weakness, and if I had learned anything growing up in Logan, it is you don’t telegraph your punches.

Under strengths I put literature; under weaknesses I put science, but I know science. There were four multiple choice questions.

I answered “candela.”

And that night in the hotel room Ruby and I danced and hugged and laughed and sang, because on the table in front of us was a check signed by Eddie McGuire for $50,000.

Ruby picked it up and turned to me; her curls bounced and her eyes shone, and she said, “Mum, you did it, it’s our ticket home. Can you believe it?” And I looked at her, I looked at that shining face, and I thought, I would rip that check up and throw it in the bin if it would guarantee that smile.

But I didn’t have the words to explain that to her, so I just took the check off her, and I took a deep breath, and I said, “Ruby, you know what? It is what it is.”

The international bestselling book, The Moth: This is a True Story is available in bookstores. This Moth story was originally told on 18 March 2014 in Melbourne as part of the Melbourne Writer’s Festival (directed by Sarah Austin Jenness)