It may be a requisite for a writer to have had a challenging childhood. It’s not just that it’s good material, but that you’ve been forced to an unusual degree to hone a certain kind of curiosity. Unlike the budding scientist who will one day try to penetrate and codify the physical world, a writer becomes unusually sensitive to people, intrigued to discover what makes even those who love us do the cruel, inexplicable things they do.
If this is so, Mandy Sayer undoubtedly qualifies. Her prize-winning Dreamtime Alice, published in 1998, plumbed the relationship she had with her father, a lovable jazz musician whose bewildering comings and goings marked her childhood years, and created a longing that only a final reprise of those careless evaporations could dispel. While her mother plays a small part in that book, in Velocity she’s the focus: for most of Sayer’s teens a dangerous alcoholic, a woman driven by her passions, drowning herself in booze when those passions disappointed, as they invariably did. That one was Sayer’s father makes the situation all the more poignant, and completes the chain of beauty and pain embarked on in the earlier book.
Did I say beauty? Yes, it was beautiful too. The early years were something of a paradise, if, like so many of its kind, never to be regained. And the parents, ‘those two great boozing nature-lovers’, were none the less quite special human beings.
The story begins in a Federation bungalow in Stanmore, not in the gentrified state where such a house would find itself today, but roomy and homely enough to evoke a sense of bohemian comfort and delight. The author’s memories are of Sydney beer gardens, musician picnics and the ramshackle tippling in the Stanmore backyard.
The only thing to distinguish this perhaps from other family idylls of the time is the amount of boozing that went on. At the age of three Sayer herself was given a glass of a strangely bitter fizzy drink that soon had the sky at a tilt. No more, one could say, than a Frenchman giving a kid his first glass of wine, but a prophetic gesture. There were other drugs—it was Gerry’s proud boast that Mandy was conceived on a high brought on by the finest Lebanese Gold—but it was in alcohol that the dream eventually dissolved.
Since the conflict at the core of her parents’