Conversations: Peter's long goodbye

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Right at the start of Peter Goers' memoir, there's that famous funny line that was written by Oscar Wilde.

It's that line from The Importance of Being Ernest, where one of the characters is explaining that he

has lost both his parents and Lady Bracknell quips, to lose one parents may be regarded

as a misfortune to lose two looks like carelessness. Well, it always gets a laugh on the night,

but it is a line that skirts around the reality of what it must be like to suffer the sudden death

of both parents at the same time. And in Peter Goers' case, to lose them in a Pan Am air crash

outside of New Orleans in the United States. At the time, Peter Goers was 25 years old.

He lived with or very close by his mum and dad all his life. And suddenly Peter was required to

drop everything to fly to America on a request to identify their bodies.

Today, four decades later, Peter is one of Adelaide's most well-loved figures.

He's been a theatre director, an author, a reviewer for the Adelaide Advertiser,

and he's been the presenter of ABC Adelaide's evenings program for many years. And it's taken

him all this time to understand and truly come to terms with that strange and terrible moment,

way back in 1982 when the sky fell in. Peter's beautifully written memoir of that time is called

in the air of an afternoon almost past. Hello, Peter. Hello, Richard. Now, you launched this book

in the old childhood home in Woodville. Was that still in the family at the time?

No, no. It's, I think, had several owners. And the current owners, Mike and Sue O'Kelly,

he's a Vietnam veteran, live there with two daughters and two granddaughters. And yet it's

not a big house. It's just an ordinary L-shaped suburban house in Woodville.

I had a contact, a neighbour we've remained friends with who's still there. And she put

me in contact with these people and I went to visit them and said, I had actually returned to

the house years before, 20 years before. A listener rang my show one night and said,

I think I'm living in a house you once lived in. I said, how did you know? She said,

your library stamp is on a wardrobe door. And so I had the rare experience of going back to a

house that you've grown up in, which is extraordinary. You always think it's so much smaller than you

remember because you were small. And everywhere you look, there are memories. There's a sort of

palimpest of memories in a house that you've once lived in. What pictures do you have in

your head of that house, Peter? Jarrah floors. There had been a wedding present from Relies in

Western Australia. The memory I have is love. You know, my sister and I were raised with love,

which is the greatest gift a person can ever have, Richard. It was a place of love,

laughter and occasional tears. And it was a place of some struggle, of course, but it was a place of

comfort and reassurance. Woodville was a classic Adelaide working class suburb between the city

and the ports. And this was the age when Adelaide still had those old institutions like Ambskull

Ice Cream, Woody's Drinks, Balthus Pastries, John Martin's Department Store. That was all part of

the wallpaper of your childhood. And indeed, our house and my grandparents' house in the next street

abutted what became the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. And that had been, people look at me very strangely

when I say this, but it's absolutely true. It had been an estate originally with wheat farms and it

become much smaller and a kind of market garden owned by a family called Connor. And they owned

this property, which became the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. We had the launch of this book in the

family home. The current owners very kindly acceded to that request. And I went down and said, look,

by the way, the governor of South Australia, Frances Adams, is coming to launch the book and,

you know, Will's E with her 19 loggies or MC it and, you know, there'll be about a hundred people.

But don't go to any trouble. And it was, it was an extraordinary launch of this book. I think,

you know, stories are most powerful. And I read that Aboriginal elders said that recently,

stories are most powerful in the place they've come from. And this story had come from this house.

So it was, it was good that it sort of went back there. And it's the revival of this story

should start there where it had all begun. So then we come to your parents that created this

house of love for you and your sister, your dad, Brian Desmond Goers. He sounds like quite an energetic

man. Tell me how he made a living over the years. Well, he began his, his own father who was Barossa

German had worked 47 years on the assembly line at GMH Holdens at Woodville. See, we lived by the

Holdens whistle. We knew, you know, start time, knockoff time, lunch time, all of that. And my

father started work on the assembly line at Phillips at Hendon making transistors and so forth. And

then he branched out for a while and was as commercial traveller for Bosch selling automotive

parts. And then he bought a service station at Seacliff, which failed. But he, this was the period

of when men were hobbyists. You know, you wanted a shed you built it yourself, which he built the

shed before they built the house, that sort of thing. And he, he had a lot of hobbies. One of his

hobbies became taking super eight film and he made all these super eight films that started with

home movies. And then he'd do narrative films and he joined a club and, you know, they became bigger

and better. And then he turned that into a job. He would shoot super eight films of people's weddings.

So it do two weddings a weekend. And this became quite lucrative for him. And from that he, when

it looked as if super eight was coming to an end and video was coming in. This is late 70s, early 80s.

He started as a, as a stills photographer and became quite successful in that role. Again,

doing weddings, portraits, passport photos, that sort of thing. That's why my parents were in America,

they were en route to a photographic convention in Las Vegas. What was he like as a dad with you,

Peter? Well, he was, he was either on or off my father. He had, you know, his mother was from Perth

and everyone from Perth is perverse in my opinion. And his mother, my grandmother was the most perverse

person I ever knew. How so? How so? In every way, you know, perversity. And he was somewhat perverse.

He was, he was a, he could be a clown, my father, but he could also be very doer. He was either on

or off. And he was, of course, in the manner of men of that period, unaffectionate. You know,

never hugged me or, or indeed seemed to value me at all. You know, whatever I did was not good enough.

I knew he loved me, but whatever I did was not good enough. And I was lazy and indolent and so

forth. Even though, you know, I think I had six jobs before I left school, delivering newspapers,

selling newspapers, et cetera, working at John Martin's as a shop assistant, and still he'd say,

you couldn't work in a nine line, you know, that, that sort of thing. And then at the memorial service

for my parents, his friends would come up to me and they'd say, do you know, every time we saw your

father, all he could talk about was you and how proud he was of you. And I was, I was glad to hear

that. But I was also affronted, really, Richard, because I thought, why didn't he tell me?

So that's the perversity right there. That's the perversity. But it was very common with, with a

man, particularly of that generation. But he was still loving in his own way and, and appreciative,

I think. How about your mum, Margaret Leonord Dunstan? I adored my mother. She was, she was a

good woman. She was a strong woman. She was there again. It's generally, generationally sad

that she was an intelligent woman, raised by a country woman, housewife, and her father was

First World War digger, who was a clerk at Elders. You can't get more South Australian

than that to be a clerk at Elders. And she was at Woodville High. She was intelligent enough

to go to university. But of course, in that period, unless you won a Commonwealth scholarship and

they were very hard to get, you couldn't afford to go to university. Her parents just could not afford

to send her. So I think that's, that was a great shame until Whitlam, of course, made that

much more accessible to so many of us. People were denied education. So she was a loving woman,

very loving, a good mother. How much of herself did she surrender to make a lovely life for you?

Lots. Yes, she did everything possible for my sister and I. No, she was a good woman.

How old were you, Peter, when the theatrical instinct gripped you and never let you go?

I was in year five, grade five, at Woodville Primary. I had this wonderful teacher called Mr

Martin, who stood in front of the class for the entire year, drinking Coca-Cola and smoking

Benson and Hedge's cigarettes. Naturally, he became a great role model. And for some reason,

since I'd never been to the theatre, because we were not in any way a theatrical or artistic family,

you know, I'd never been to the theatre. But for some reason, I just decided that I would perform

the trial scene from Toad of Toad Hall, Wind and the Willows.

My mother typed it out and ran it off on a gastetna. I played the main role, the judge,

which is a good part, and also directed it with other members of the grade five class in front

of Mr Martin's class and parents and friends. And so, you know, for one brief shining moment,

I was the Orson Welles of grade five at Woodville Primary. Then I had a wonderful teacher, Mick

Rivers, who was a broken hill man and a South Adelaide footballer, who had the sense not to

exhort me onto the football field, which I would have been hopeless. But he said, you're an actor,

and he put me in a little play and thus, you know, my life turned on that. You see, I was a

disappointment to my parents because they were both sporty. They'd both played different sports for

the state. And along I come completely hopeless at every kind of sport. I have a fear of moving

balls coming towards me, Richard. Contrary to popular belief. So from there, you went on to study

drama at Flinders University. Your dad's business was thriving and you moved to a new house,

still around the corner from where you were. You were living around the corner as well.

And that brings us to the 10th of July, 1982. Now, what state were you in that morning before

you got the phone call, Peter? Probably hung over. And the phone, this was the time, you know, I was

25 when we could all sleep till the crack of noon, Richard. Nowadays, you know, I'm up three times

before dawn. But anyway, the phone kept ringing incessantly at 11 o'clock in the morning. And

eventually I answered it somewhat disgruntledly, looking for the creaming soda and the mercendol

and the black coffee to help with one's hangover. And it was my grandmother, my maternal grandmother,

whom I revered, Ellie, saying, there's been an airplane crash in America and

it corresponds with your parents, itinerate. That moment, I think I knew they were dead.

And of course, then you go into denial. And I immediately tried to reassure her, she was an

85-year-old lady of heaven's sake, Nana, you know, there's thousands of planes coming and going in

America, you know, they may not have even come around, she said, I went round. And then began

the next five hours of, you know, I would call Pan Am in Sydney, Pan Am in Melbourne, Pan Am in New

York. Yes, they'd left their hotel room in New Orleans. No, they hadn't arrived in their hotel

room in Las Vegas, et cetera. The Pan Am people would say, take all my details assiduously,

tell me nothing. And it was a question of waiting.

How was this in the news, this story?

Yes. And we were hearing it on the ABC. And I think even on the television, but they wouldn't

give a flight number for some reason. So that also left us in the dark.

Were you doing all this with that awful sinking feeling, Peter, a rising sense of panic, perhaps?

Although it did something that, you know, you never know what you're capable of. And during all

that, whilst trying to reassure an old lady, I had the presence of mind to compile a list of

all the people that I would need to inform, which turned out to be very helpful.

Eventually, someone from Pan Am, New York rang and asked me to verify my identity.

And then they gave me the news that both my parents, my mother, age 50, my father,

age 52, were dead. The plane had left the runway in a thunderstorm and had got only 100 feet in

the air. And the wind shear had pulled it down and it had hit trees and crashed into a suburb and

burst into flames and killed 145 people on all hands on the plane and eight people on the ground.

Including four children. And they said, we'll ring you back in 20 minutes with arrangements

for you to come to New Orleans immediately to identify the bodies. Then I had to console my

grandmother, who was a very good Baptist. And I held her in my arms and recited the

23rd Psalm. And then I had the duty to tell my sister, who was in denial that this could

ever happen. And then I had the duty, which was the hardest thing I've ever done, Richard, to have

to go around to my other grandmother's house, knowing that she would have, she wasn't listening

to the radio or watching the television. She was completely oblivious. And I had to walk in

and tell her that her only son was no more. That was a very hard thing to do.

So your dad was an only child? Both my parents were only childs.

So what state were both grandmothers in? Well, that's how grief affects you. My

maternal grandmother and I'd been with her. So she was part of the process of waiting. So she was,

I think, expectant. She sort of keened and cried a lot. It was easier for her, I think,

because she had a very strong faith. Faith is important, I think, in these, can be important

in grief. My other grandmother was, from birth, was known as a calithumpian, an agnostic. And

it was much, much harder for her. She really never recovered. And I think it exacerbated her

dementia and agrophobia and so forth. So that morning, you'd woken up with a hangover.

And then sometime late that afternoon, you'd been told your parents had died, confirmed

that your parents had died in this plane crash. And suddenly you had to be put in a plane to go

to New Orleans, the place where your parents had died. Did you even have a passport in those days?

No, I didn't. I didn't. Somebody, a friend of my father, came around to our house where

there was a studio and took a passport photograph. I then had friends at my own house in the next

street come around. They couldn't get through my head. And I was in this sort of fog of grief,

naturally. And I was drinking brandy, but couldn't get drunk. Somebody had given me a

valium the first time I'd ever taken a valium. So that was sort of adding to the fog, I suppose.

They couldn't get into my head that I was going to, I was leaving a very cold Adelaide winter and

going to New Orleans, which would be very hot and humid in the height of summer.

I think in these moments, I think you answer, people often answer into the world of magical

thinking. I'm trying to put myself in your shoes, which I don't think is entirely possible,

Peter. But nonetheless, I think if I'd been told all this and seen it on the news,

part of me, there might have been part of me thinking, this is all fictional.

Can this even really be true? I haven't seen anything here. I don't, I haven't seen my parents

die. Was part of you thinking that this couldn't possibly have happened? And it was also strange

to lose your parents from Adelaide in a plane crash in New Orleans. Must have struck you as

bizarre and maybe even fictional? Yes, indeed. And you don't, I mean, you go years and you think

maybe it was all a mistake. You see someone who looks like them and that's happened a number of

times to me, that sense of disbelief. But it's, yes, it's, you're numb. You're just walking through

motions here. You write that you went to your parents' house where you met your sister, who was,

of course, terribly distressed and upset. But you say, you write that the house was now utterly

changed. Your parents' house was utterly changed in what way? It was, it suddenly, without them, it was,

it was a shell. It almost, you know, it just wasn't the same. You know, the soul had gone out of it.

It was like a corpse then. It was, in a way, yes.

A terrible burden had then fallen on your shoulders. You weren't just a grieving son,

you were having to be, I suppose, the nexus of all that information, passing it on to everyone else.

But you were, you write that you were also overcome with this awful regret. What was that regret for?

That perhaps that I told them to go to New Orleans,

you know, because they'd been to New York first and it was my love of Tennessee Williams and,

you know, that whole Metier that I said, I think I'd said, you know, go there. That's one regret

that you have and some sense of guilt. Had you been able to say goodbye to them before they left?

No, that was a regret that I didn't, it didn't even know they'd gone. And it was some days,

I think I spoke to my sister and she said, oh, you know, you know, we realize they've gone overseas.

I knew they were going, but I had no idea that they had gone and they lived in the next street.

So I never said goodbye. And that I never said, thank you. I never said, thank you for all you've

given me. Thank you for all this love. Thank you for all this opportunity of my life and goodbye.

So the book is essentially a delayed, a much delayed and a long goodbye, I suppose.

You couldn't have known what was going to happen. Why are you feeling guilty?

Well, you always feel guilt, don't you, with death? I should have done this. I should have

said that. Why didn't I? Dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. I've had more guilt from other deaths, I think,

than this, because, you know, what could I have done?

So now you had to quickly pack that night to go to America by plane, which is,

I wonder if the irony of that struck you at the time and whether that frightened you?

Terrified. I mean, imagine you've just lost two parents at the height of their lives in a plane

crash. So now you have to get on a plane or many planes and fly all around the world.

And it was terrifying. And, you know, a friend of my father, who was an executor of this

state, met me at the airport where I had to make a will. Friends had taken me there,

went round to the two news agents at the Adelaide Airport and turned over all the Sunday mail,

copies of Sunday Milk, as my parents' picture was on the front page,

which I never saw at that point. And then you get on a plane. It was years later writing this

book that I finally realized that, you know, they'd block off rows, because naturally, because,

you know, you don't want to, you're flying from Adelaide to Melbourne, you don't want to sit with

someone who's just grieving and just lost two people in a plane crash. And the hosties, as we

called them then, were marvellous. They put on, I think, a special senior host who just sat with

me the entire flight. And that happened pretty well all the way to America. And how did she

comfort you? She just held my hand. You know, nothing was said, but it was terrifying.

Are you grateful for that? Oh, very, very. Yes, very. And leaving from Hawaii to Los Angeles,

they found a man who was a movie producer. I've forgotten his name, but that obviously,

I don't know, must have known. I was, you know, I loved movies and they put him next to me. And

so we were able to sort of chat about movies all the way. You know, that was a help.

Was the flight from Los Angeles any easier? Terrifying. That was the worst of it. They put

me in a hotel. I had something like eight hours between flights. And the flight from Los Angeles

to Houston left oddly at two o'clock in the morning. And they put me in a hotel room where

I kind of collapsed. I cried for the first time. And I became immobile. I couldn't move. I had to

ring down to the desk and a bellboy came up with someone from Pan Am. And they had to literally

carry me out of the airport hotel and to the cafe near the departure desk

in the middle of the night, where again, I sat and again, this immobility took over. And then I

was on a terrible flight. It must have been the oldest plane in the Pan Am fleet, leaving at

two o'clock in the morning. I subsequently understand that must have been a ghost flight.

They'd put it on for me. And there was one other passenger who refused to sit with me,

and I flew through the night in a terrible lightning storm with the plane with shocking

turbulence. It was terrifying. As all this was happening, were you getting a growing sense of

the wider catastrophe too? Because of course, it wasn't just your parents killed in that crash.

Yes. All you can focus on is your loss, your immediate loss of the two people you love.

You're not so aware of the wider catastrophe. I felt that later, of course. But I mean,

that sounds selfish, but there's only so much loss you can bear at any given moment. Naturally,

you're most concerned for your own loss, I suppose.

You're listening to Conversations with Richard Feidler.

So, after you arrived in New Orleans, after a terrifying flight through a thunderstorm,

they checked you into a hotel. Who else was in that hotel? Were there other

relays of the plane crash victims in that hotel with you?

It was the Sheraton Airport Hotel. It was only a couple of kilometers from the crash site.

Yes, in the hotel, and immediately I'm summoned to meet lawyers, and this began the process of

dealing with corporate America. Tell me about walking into that room. What

you saw when they summoned you to that room? A couch, a couple of lawyers, a coffee table.

There was no corporate apology but sort of regret, and I was told immediately that I was not to

leave the hotel under any circumstances. I was not to talk to anybody who wasn't a Pan Am official

in the hotel. Why? I said because they said lawyers, ambulance chasing lawyers,

coming from all over America and they want your business. Who were they to be giving

orders like that to you at that time, Peter? Did that thought occur to you as well? Who are these

people to be giving me orders? Yes, it did. I wanted to talk to other grieving families. Some

of them I'd seen in the corridors and that was disallowed. The next thing they presented me with

a piece of paper and said that if I signed this, they would give me $10,000 and I could return

home immediately. I said, well, A, I'm not signing anything that I'd had that legal advice before

I left Australia. Just don't sign anything. And secondly, I said, I'm here. You've called me here

to identify the bodies. How do I do that and when? And they said, no, that's impossible. There's no

personal identification. It's all forensic. We've brought you here to settle. And I said,

well, that's pointless. I'm not signing anything. Did they then make another offer? Yes. The next

day I was called to another meeting and with different lawyers. It was always different

lawyers because then they had plausible deniability. No, we didn't say that. They may have said that.

We're not saying that. And they offered me $20,000 and I declined again. The next day it went back

to 10. And they were taping me. We subsequently found out. They were taping you. They were

recording your conversations with them? Yes. I was entirely monitored.

What did they say when you knocked it back this offer? They were regretful and I thought it was

in my best interest and very proudly said that other families had already settled and left.

I don't know whether that was true or not. Peter, does it make you wonder what kind of

a person chooses to become that kind of lawyer? Yes, it does, actually. It does, rather. I mean,

their parents must be so proud that they do things like that. Exactly. So they hadn't brought you.

They brought you over on false premises. They told you you've been brought over to identify the

bodies, which were completely unidentifiable after an explosive plane crash. And really,

it was to get you into a room and pressure you then. What they wanted, of course, was information

about my parents' health. And then the questions started at subsequent meetings. They were demanding

medical and dental records, which were coming from Australia. But when I was thinking that it

would aid the investigation, the identification, I was forthcoming with details. So the moment

they found out my mother had varicose veins, ah, therefore she would have had a heart condition,

therefore she was probably, she probably would have been dead in 10 years. My father had a cataract,

therefore he was probably diabetic, therefore he would have been, and he smoked, so therefore

he would have been dead in five years anyway. So it was that sort of merciless interrogation.

And the fact that they surmised these spurious conclusions about your parents' life expectancy,

was that affecting the dollar figure of what they were? Of course, because compensation

is on earning value for the rest of your life, basically. So they were trying to diminish that

value. It was awful. Presumably you have to put something on top of that for the

personal inconvenience of being blown up in a plane as well, Peter, on the board.

Yes, indeed. With all of that, did you have a lawyer present with you in that room?

No, no. No, and that was never offered. No. And not only that, the frustration was, you see,

people who have lost anyone in a crash of any kind will identify with this. What you want to see is,

I wanted to see the crash site. It wasn't real to me until I could see the plane.

And what did they say when you asked to see the crash site?

Impossible. You cannot leave this hotel. And there were guards at the front desk.

And a friend of mine, Rob Cascenza, who was on a delayed honeymoon in Europe, came over.

He was there after a couple of days and stayed for two days. And he said,

well, this is ridiculous. Of course we can go. And we could see where the crash site was from

the windows. And my photograph and a brief description of me and my interest had been

published in The Times, Picayune, because that newspaper was onto the fact that most of the

next of Kins were staying in this Sheraton airport hotel. And the phone rang and a man said,

would you take a call from the Archbishop of New Orleans? And I said, yes. And while I was waiting,

I thought, you know, I'm a reformed Methodist. What do I call an Archbishop? I remembered from

a player, I think, your grace. So he came on and he expressed great condolence. And he said,

how can I help you? And I said, I'm not a Catholic, your grace. And he said, I didn't ask you that.

What can we do for you? And I said, well, Pan Am, virtually holding me prisoner here

in this hotel and won't let me go to the crash site. He said, what? You need to go there. You need

to see the good work of all the emergency service workers and what's happened there. He said,

I can't understand that. He said, just a minute. I'll call you back. Ten minutes later, he called

me back and he said, Pan Am is sending a car for you and will take you and your friend to the

crash site. I said, how did you achieve that? He said, easy. He said, I rang my Pan Am contact

and I said, a grieving young man from Australia who's lost both his parents. He wants to go to

the crash site. Unless you send a car, my next call will be to NBC, ABC, CBS and The Times,

PKU. And they loved this story. You know, you're holding next of kin prisoner. And that made it

real, Richard. It was shocking, the devastation, because whole houses had been raised and other

houses partly raised. And this was a sort of epicenter, ground zero of extraordinary grief

and cataclysm. And I mean, you could still smell roasting flesh in this suburb of Kenner.

How would the rescue workers and emergency workers fearing when you were there?

Well, you know, this had been some days and they were, you know, they were exhausted and tired,

but they were, you know, wonderful volunteers and professionals. And they couldn't have been

more courteous to me. And for the first time, I was united in the suffering. I wasn't doing it on

my own. And I had a sense of the disaster. And it was hard, but healing in a way.

In the midst of all this, there was a miracle baby that was found. Can you tell me that story,

please? Yes, I think her name was Michelle Trahan. Yes, she was just a little baby. And

once the plane hit, her cop turned over. So she was protected from the fire by the mattress.

And she was found, I think, a day or two later. And that gave enormous hope to the rescue workers.

What happened to the rest of her family, though? I think, no, she lost, I think,

parents, I think. A lot of people lost, a lot of people. I knew someone who lost both parents

and an uncle and aunt on that plane. There was, you know, citywide grief. It was a terrible grief

throughout the entire city, of course. It was a shocking, shocking disaster.

So the Archbishop had called you. And there seemed to be an awareness of the fact that there was

this man from Adelaide in New Orleans to attend to the sight of the death of his parents. Was

there a sense that the community there in New Orleans was rallying to support you and the other

relatives? Yes. It's said in the paper that I worked in the theater. And every single theatrical

and cinema management in New Orleans rang the hotel and offered me tickets at any time to come.

And I did because I couldn't bring home at that time of the night. And I would go every night

to the theater or to the cinema because I felt safe there, Richard. You know, sitting,

sitting on the, on plush seats watching something, I felt safe in a theater. And I was welcomed by

my own there. And I was so valued that it was remarkable. Pan Am had someone following me around

and they subsequently reported, so much for the grieving son. He was at the theater and the

cinema every night, you know, this sort of thing, which was awful. Like you say, you were a big

Tennessee Williams fan, the auto streetcar named Desire and many other great places. Well,

famously from New Orleans, what did you do when you were told that Tennessee Williams,

who was still alive then, was living right around the corner, Peter? Yes. Someone in

a theater told us where he lived in Royal Street opposite the laundromat that he owned.

And I'd done the Glassman Ashery with this friend of mine, Rob Cassenza, who was with me.

We found the house, which was on a corner and the windows and the front door were on the street.

And we knocked on the door and somewhat nervously. And I think it's fair to say the

nearest young man I have ever, ever met in my life came to the door and said, yes, it's sort of

a person who could put an S in the word banana.

He said, yes. And we said, oh, we're from Australia and we're huge fans of Mr. Williams.

And was there any chance that we could meet him? And he looked us up and down and, you know,

we were young men. And he said, never heard of him and slammed the door in our faces. And we

walked around the corner and the windows were on the street. And we stood by the window thinking,

well, we've lost nothing there. And then suddenly Venetian Blinds parted. And Williams was a small

man. And at about his height, dark eyes looked out at us. And I'm convinced it was Tennessee

Williams himself. But nothing happened. I said to my friends, if you'd been prettier, we'd have been

in there. And also how ironic, given that you were forced to rely on the kindness of strangers

while you were there in New Orleans. So meanwhile, you're still meeting with the Panham lawyers.

They'd had your parents' medical data. They'd extrapolated from the varicose veins and this

and that that they'd be dead in five years anyway. And they put these dodgy figures in front of you.

What did you tell them when they put those things to you? I didn't know. You see, I didn't know what,

I wasn't wise to what they wanted because they told me they needed this medical information for

identification purposes, which was a lie. Though my parents were eventually identified from dental

records. Simple as that. So I was unwittingly helping their case. So it was corporate deception.

So given that you were saying no to everything, what did they do with you then?

Well, I kept pestering as to the identification, you know, how long it would take. And eventually,

it took about 10 days, I think, sitting around. Eventually, there was a positive identification

and they said, would you like these bodies in coffins or cremated? And I said, I'd like them

in coffins. So they arranged my return itinerary. And I was to pick up the coffins, you know,

the coffins would be there to go on the plane with me. And when I arrived at the airport,

they'd been cremated. Against your wishes, against your express wishes?

Yes, against my express wishes. And I was given my parents in cask, small,

cremated, the cremains in containers in a plastic shopping bag, which I took on to the plane as

carry on luggage. Can we assume that I was so dastardly to do that just to simply save them

the expense of the coffins? I don't know what that was. It was a final sort of rudeness. And there

was no, you know, the way home, you know, there was no none of the attention that I'd been given on

the way over. So it was a hard, hard trip home. And what did you do when you plane landed on the

ground? I kissed the ground. I kissed the ground. And it left me, of course, for many, many years

with a terrible fear of flying, I think, understandably, which was cured by bungee jumping in surface

paradise. It cured me of my fear of flying, which was a great mercy.

That, but it worked? It worked. Yes, it worked, because I bungee jumped twice. And I was about to

get on. Two hours later, I was on a plane to come back to Adelaide, and I was about to take a cocktail

of sedatives. And I thought, I've just leapt out of thin air with a rubber band. And it cured my fear

of flying. So back home, you now had a companion, your parents dog, Snowy. Snowy, the wonder dog.

Did Snowy intuit that something was wrong? Of course, because dogs, dogs always know death,

don't they? And I adored that dog, my mother's dog. Did Snowy grieve as well? Of course,

for quite a while until Snowy, you know, finally realized that she was living with me,

and we became inseparable. You grieved together? We grieved together. And losing that dog some

years later of cancer was, in a way, even harder than losing two parents. Extraordinary, because I

think it was, that dog was the last of them. It was the last contact with them. And I associated

that dog very much with them. Tell me how Snowy saved your life one night. I was waiting for

the same friend to return from the same honeymoon. And I was sitting in my house and I'd put a huge

mally log on the fire, an open fire. And I fell asleep waiting for my friend. And suddenly I'm

being woken up by Snowy, the wonder dog, barking and pulling, jumping on me. And the log had fallen

out of the fireplace and was burning on the hearth rug. So I quickly gathered it up on the rug and

threw it out on the front lawn and put the hose on it just as my friend arrived. So Snowy saved

my life. Peter, if I'd been your friend at that time, I don't think I would have known what to

say to you. I mean, how do you say to someone, I'm so sorry your parents died in a bizarre plane

crash in New Orleans. Was it hard for people to talk to you about it? Or I'm sure everyone got it

wrong. And I don't know, what was that like? We're dealing with friends and them trying to

either come to you and help you with your grief or avoid you because people worry such

things are contagious, bad luck is contagious. What was that like? Well, I think all of that.

But I think people were very understanding and they had to be. You know, my friends had to be

because it put me into a period of the next five years of self-destructive behaviour. I could see

no point to life. So I was doing my level best to really just diminish my own life.

How were you doing that? Drinking. I was not an alcoholic, but I was a binge drinker,

shocking binge drinker until I stopped that in 1987 and never looked back.

But yes, I was, I was very, because what's the point? You've just lost two people in the prime

of their lives. You know, what's the point of life? You know, I could go tomorrow too. So,

you know, why not have another drink? You know, I was, I was compulsive and

and self-destructive. How hard was it for you to give up the drink entirely?

I was easy. You know, I just, I just stopped. You know, I'd reached a crisis point with it and

only two of my friends, of all of my friends, only two of them had the courage to say,

stop this Peter, this is, this is a big problem for you. And I resented them at the time.

But looking back, you know, I'm very grateful to those people because a lot of you, one's other

friends are not honest about this because, you know, alcohol loves company. So, you know,

they were enjoying drinking with me. And I was, I was very lucky that I just stopped

drinking and never missed it. Did the lawyers ever arrive at a settlement

between Hanam and you and your sister? They did. And the extraordinary thing when I was

writing this book, neither my sister nor I nor the lawyer, our Adelaide lawyer,

can remember what the fee was. It was, we just can't, we can't remember. It was blood money.

And it kind of soon went, it went, we ended up with, I think a couple of houses,

which soon went in one way or another, you know, that it was, you know, blood money.

It sounds like, it sounds like the money wasn't in the long run any good for you.

No, of course it wasn't. Of course it wasn't. And you feel guilty about that money, too.

You know, that's part of the guilt, I think. And it doesn't mean anything.

Was it more trouble than what it was worth? In a way, yes. In a way, yes. It didn't. I don't

know that it's created much opportunity. You know, all you want is them.

All you see, the problem with grief, too, is, and it's a terrible issue with grief. And we live

in a time of grief. I don't know why, but we do. And problem with grief is not the immediate

grief because you're surrounded by well, well-meaning people. The problem with grief is 25

years, 30 years later, 40 years later, you suddenly think, I can't remember them.

What did they smell like? What did they sound like? What did it feel like when they hugged you or

kissed you on the cheek and you can't remember? And they've gone into this sort of vapor and

that's the worst of grief, the disappearance. How about your grandmothers, your father's

mother, your mother's mother, who had lost their only children? How were they

faring in the years after the disaster? Well, my Baptist grandmother remained strong

in her faith and was a remarkable woman. I was very close to her. And she weathered it well.

She lasted another 10 years and died at 95. And my other grandmother really was never the same.

And she developed agrophobia and dementia and it was very hard for her, very hard. I mean,

to lose a child, to lose a parent is one thing, but to lose a child is the worst thing that can

happen to a person, of course. People always want you to just get over it. And very clever

person of my show once said, I don't see why you have to get over anything. Do you feel like that?

The worst thing is, as I'm now much older and I'm surrounded by friends, and I found other

mothers, other fathers, of course, in my life, senior artists in the theatre mainly,

to whom I've been devoted forever. But you watch as your contemporaries, parents who are now in

their nineties, as my parents would have been, and they're sick, and they have dementia or

Alzheimer's and so forth. And they say to you, ridiculously, they say, in many ways, you are

lucky, Peter. You don't have to go through this. And I say, well, get stuffed, because that's not

the point at all, is it? And that's ridiculous. Your dad had shot plenty of family, separate films,

like you said, that were later lost in a flooding, in a household flooding. And as you said,

the physical memory fades over time. You can't remember what it was like to be held by them,

to smell them, to hear that particular tone of voice. And then the movies were lost too.

So what remains after all of those things have faded? Love and the memory of laughter,

and the memory of fondness, and a few pictures. And it was all much harder for my sister who

raised children without her own mother, without a grandmother or without grandparents. It's much,

much harder for them. But what remains is my mother's smiling face and her love for me. And

what remains, Richard, is my father loved movies. He loved, particularly the Marx Brothers.

And I was, one night, I was in my bed, in the middle of what seemed like the middle of the night,

and he got me out of bed in my little pajamas and my hush puppy slippers and my little long

copper ring dressing gown, probably age seven or eight. And he propped me up in front of a

black and white Chrysler television. And we watched duck soup, the Marx Brothers duck soup.

And he and I sat there with tears of laughter rolling down our faces. And that is the most

precious moment I've ever shared, I think, with anybody. It was an extraordinary moment of love

and laughter. And that's what remains, gratitude, I suppose.

You called your book in the air of an afternoon almost past. Almost past. Why almost?

Well, because I don't think that sort of loss ever completely passes, does it? I was going to call

it carelessness after that Oscar Wilde quote, you know, to lose one parent is a misfortune to lose

two looks like carelessness. But I went for the more Tennessee Williams title, I think, you know,

because that's perhaps more New Orleans. But no, it doesn't. And that, you know, they remain in

the air over that city, don't they? I suppose. Peter, what a lovely, amazing and moving story.

Thank you so much. And as I say in the book, citing George M. Cohan, whose curtain call sign-off was

always my father thanks you, my mother thanks you, my sister thanks you, and I thank you.

You've been listening to a podcast of Conversations with Richard Fidler.

For more Conversations interviews, please go to the website abc.net.au slash conversations.

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