EPISODE 39
January 4, 2023
Introduction
Rosemary Gillan grew up in India in the 1960s. A child of mixed-race parents, she was called “Anglo-Indian.” At 13, her family immigrated to Australia where she was called “small and dark.” In her late 20s, Rosemary’s international relocations began when she married. Over a 16-year period she moved 12 countries with her then hotel-manager husband. Along the way they had two children. But when her marriage ended, and her children had launched, with her IT work, she moved two more countries. Rosemary has documented the highs and lows of her peripatetic life in her writing, including contributions to a number of expat anthologies. In this episode we talk about her heritage, the discrimination her family encountered in India and the discrimination her family then encountered in Australia in the 1970s, and how feeling different, like an outsider, was somewhat diminished as a result of finding her tribe and a sense of belonging as an expat.
TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] Louise: Welcome to Women Who WaIk. I’m Louise Ross, writer and author of Women Who Walk the book, the inspiration for this podcast. And just as I did for the book here, I’ll be interviewing and unpacking the journeys of impressive, intrepid women who’ve made multiple international moves for work, for adventure, for love, for freedom – reminding us that women can do extraordinary things. You can find a transcript, with pictures, to each episode, and my books on my website, LouiseRoss.com.
[00:00:47] Louise: Hello, listeners. It’s January, 2023. Welcome to the New Year, Season 3 and Episode 39 of Women Who Walk.
[00:00:58] Louise: To start the year, my guest is Rosemary Gillan.
[00:01:02] Louise: Rosemary grew up in India in the 1960s. A child of mixed-race parents: Indian, British, Portuguese, Scottish, German, and Irish, she was called, “Anglo-Indian.”
[00:01:19] Louise: At 13, her family immigrated to Australia where she was called, “small and dark,” which is the title she gave to a verse she wrote and which was published just a couple of months ago in an anthology of short stories and poems.
[00:01:37] Louise: In her late twenties, Rosemary’s international relocations began. Over a 16-year period she moved 12 countries with her then hotel-manager husband. And along the way they had two children.
[00:01:54] Louise: But when her marriage ended, and her children launched, with her IT work, she moved two more countries independently.
[00:02:05] Louise: Rosemary has documented the highs and lows of her peripatetic life in her writing, including her contributions to a number of expat anthologies.
[00:02:16] Louise: Her first published work, “Yes, Me Too,” appeared in Once Upon an Expat. That same year, 2016, her story, “My Turkish Delight”, was published in Knocked Up Abroad Again: Baby Bumps, Twists and Turns Around the Globe.
[00:02:37] Louise: And her latest three works, one of which is the verse I mentioned, “Small and Dark,” was published in November, 2022 in Undefeated, a collection of short stories and poems written by professional migrant women about the challenges they faced moving to Australia.
[00:02:59] Louise: In our conversation today, we talk about the origins of Rosemary’s mixed heritage. The discrimination her family encountered in India and the discrimination her family then encountered in Australia in the 1970s, and how feeling different, like an outsider, was somewhat diminished as a result of finding her tribe and a sense of belonging as an expat.
[00:03:38] Louise: Welcome, Rosemary. Thanks for being a guest on the podcast today. And now you’re in Melbourne, in Australia. And uh, your background is intriguing though. You were born in India to parents who were mixed race: not fully Indian and not fully British. Can you tell us about your parents, their backgrounds, and your childhood in India?
[00:04:01] Rosemary: Thank you Louise for having me on your podcast. I really appreciate this opportunity. Oh goodness, my background, well, the story on my dad’s side was that his father was Scottish and his mum was Portuguese. But after he died, we discovered that his mum was actually his dad’s Indian servant, which accounts for the fact that when his dad left India to return to his home and his family, by the way, in Scotland, my dad’s mum placed my dad in a British boy’s home in the Nilgiri Hills, um, and that’s the Center of India somewhere. And I’m guessing there were many such homes in those days for the unwanted offspring of the British.
[00:04:38] Louise: I just wanted to reflect on that, right there in that little story is an enormous amount of information. So your mum was …
[00:04:47] Rosemary: No, my dad’s mum was his father’s Indian servant. He was born as a result of a British engineer, I believe, who had come to Australia in the war and, uh, impregnated an Indian woman who happened to be his servant. Dad was their offspring. And then my dad’s father, whose name was Peter, he had to return home to Scotland and to his family. I think three daughters somewhere in Dundee, and my dad’s mum, an Indian servant, obviously could not afford to look after my dad, so she placed him in a British boy’s home. And there were many of these homes, to my understanding, in India at the time.
[00:05:28] Louise: That’s, uh, ooh, that’s an interesting and challenging background. I know that there is a connection between the, the Scottish and the Portuguese. Do you know much about that?
[00:05:39] Rosemary: Not really. There is a Portuguese element in India. Oh, I’m trying to think if it was …
[00:05:45] Louise: It’s Goa.
[00:05:46] Rosemary: Goa. Yeah. So that’s where they would’ve met. So she did have Portuguese in her.
[00:05:50] Louise: Mm-hmm.
[00:05:51] Rosemary: But certainly she was, uh, a servant. She was not equal to him. Not that anybody was equal to the English in colonial occupied India at the time. Um, but certainly there are stories that he apparently loved her very much and had to return home. So I, I hope they’re true.
[00:06:10] Louise: Hmm.
[00:06:11] Rosemary: Meanwhile, my mum’s side wasn’t quite so exciting. Her father was part German, part Indian, and her mum was part Irish, part Indian. And so I believe that’s a total of five different blood types, which I always say is a bit of a mongrel race, and we were called Anglo-Indians and I guess it covered everything. A multitude of sins.
[00:06:31] Rosemary: Being such a mixed race people, we stood out in a very class conscious India. And worse, we were a constant reminder to the Indian people of the British empire’s, ‘We like it, we’re gonna take it,’ attitude, so not a terribly positive race to be part of in a country like India.
[00:06:52] Rosemary: How did I feel about that? Maybe it was a middle-child syndrome because I come from a very large family, four brothers and three sisters, and I was right smack bang in the middle. I don’t believe my siblings felt terribly bad about it. Somehow I did. I, I struggled to see which category I fit in. I didn’t identify and still don’t with being Indian, but neither was I British. I felt a bit of a loose cannon really, and longed for a sense of belonging for an identity I could call my own.
[00:07:23] Louise: Hmm. Yeah. And so when you were 13, there was a huge transition in your life. Your family immigrated to Australia and to Brisbane no less, which is the northern part of Australia and, um, pretty unsophisticated back in the 1970s.
[00:07:40] Rosemary: It was. My dad was an aeronautics engineer. He used to travel a bit and he’d come home with these glossy magazines and in it would be pictures of New York City skylines and, uh , so I kind of expected that, and I was a bit shocked when I arrived in Brisbane.
[00:07:55] Louise: Certainly not New York.
[00:07:59] Rosemary: Not even Brooklyn.
[00:08:01] Louise: Well, in the introduction to this episode, I mentioned the anthology of stories and, um, poems that you contributed to, uh, called Undefeated.
[00:08:11] Rosemary: Mm-hmm.
[00:08:12] Louise: And these are written by migrant women living in Australia. One of your contributions titled Small and Dark is a short verse, and now that you’ve given us that very powerful introduction about your family background, I was wondering if you read this equally powerful verse for us, and this will give us a little bit more information about you and your experience moving to Australia as a young teenager.
[00:08:40] Rosemary: Thank you so much. I’d love to read it. It’s a piece called Small and Dark.
[00:08:46] Rosemary:
An in-between child of mixed-race parents, Not fully Indian, Not fully British, orbiting a severance of Them and Us. My family, rowdy, bustling voices, laughing, crying, shouting, happy. A haven of belonging. An Us and Them.
From India we come to Brisbane, shedding the caste system of the Former, we enter what remains of the white Australia policy. Piercing the dreams of 13-year-old innocence. Shirking, shaming, shunning the small, dark migrant girl. That’s what he calls me, the bureaucrat who puts me down a grade ,”Because you are small and dark,” he says.
Stepping out of my comfort zone, painfully shy, heart thudding, wretchedly aware of being the outlier. Desperate to seek connection, feeling the pain of rejection, stupidly grinning anyway. Smile splitting apart my lips, masking the pain splitting apart my heart ,valiantly determined to belong. But it’s still Us and Them.
Moving to Sydney, hope lights the way to a wary acceptance. I grow up. I marry an Australian. I begin to belong. Us entwined with Them. We move. A lot. The We of Us. Navigating the Career of His. Transporting us a dozen times in Sydney and Melbourne. We have a baby. And then we move in continents. Europe, South America, North America, Asia. A baby is lost. A baby is born. A marriage is over.
With my two kids, I return now to Melbourne, just us. Stronger, confident, self-assured. Doing it alone, this grown-up thing. No Longer His and We. No Longer Us and Them. Migrant Woman Adulting. Still small. Still dark. But illuminated.
[00:10:59] Louise: Absolutely beautiful.
[00:11:01] Rosemary: Thank you.
[00:11:04] Louise: And emotional too.
[00:11:06] Rosemary: Mm-hmm.
[00:11:06] Louise: I mean, incredibly profound.
[00:11:08] Rosemary: Thanks. It was hard to write.
[00:11:11] Louise: I bet. All the answers to my questions about you and who you are and where you’ve been in that three-minute verse. You’ve packed in a lot, so the questions I have will come back to that verse as we go through the interview, but firstly, can you talk us through your experience of the caste system you left behind in India?
[00:11:34] Rosemary: Well, I was a young child when I left, but even then I was very aware of the caste system. It was a sort of social hierarchy, which divided Hindus into four different classes, starting with the highest, the Brahmans, who are the priests, the teachers, intellectuals, and ending with the Sudras who were the servant class. There was actually another class, a fifth class one that it didn’t even figure in the system in fact, the lowest of them all, the Unmentionable Dalit caste, otherwise known as the Untouchables. And people may know about them because they were featured in the 2017 film, Lion, which was very hard to watch. As a child, I went to a private school founded by British Missionaries back in, I think, 1914 with children, with students who came from everywhere.
[00:12:21] Rosemary: They were not only Indians and Anglo-Indians, but missionary children as well. And I longed to be one of those foreign kids because at least they had an identity, whether they were Australian or American, Canadian, German. I guess most of them didn’t come from India. They weren’t part Indian, they weren’t part British. They were wholly who they were. And I envied that, which was why I guess I was hugely excited when Dad announced one day that we were immigrating to Australia. I wondered if at last I’d had the chance to belong then.
[00:12:52] Louise: Mm-hmm. It’s interesting having you talk us through the caste system because one of the very early podcast episodes is with a woman that I know well here living in Portugal, Sandhya. Her family is from Gujarat and then they migrated to Mozambique and they are Brahman. And she entered an arranged marriage as a young woman, once the family moved here to Portugal, and despite being a significant family in the caste system and despite, I suppose, coming from that place of privilege, the arranged marriage dealt her a series of very difficult experiences, so to contrast that with what you’ve just explained in your story, uh, you know, it doesn’t really matter where we are from or I guess, privilege or non-privilege, we all have our struggles, I think is what I, I wanted to say.
[00:13:52] Rosemary: We do, we all have our struggles and we all have our worth. And being in a caste or a country or a skin color is not gonna change any of that.
[00:14:02] Louise: No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t. And so then coming from that caste system, and then you enter Australia, how did the experience compare to the xenophobic policy to keep Australia European white, which you alluded to, the White Australia policy that was dismantled only in the early 1970s.
[00:14:26] Rosemary: Mm. I know. It was just quite a shock because the Australians I’d met in India, the missionary kids, they were all really nice people and I expected more of the same, but what a shock it was to discover the segregation, if you can call it that, that happened in India was even worse in Australia, that racism existed. I have to say that Brisbane in the seventies was rather rednecked. My little brothers and sisters, particularly were spat on. They were yelled at. Just because they had brown skin, and spoke English with an interesting accent. I’d not heard about the White Australia policy. The fact that it was actually called White Australia policy completely astounds me. But the origins traced way back to the late 1850s. Though it officially, um, I looked into this, started with the infamous Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, which limited non-white, particularly Asian immigration to Australia, to help keep Australia British. And I put that in, in quotes because I think it was just anyone is welcome, as long as you’re white.
[00:15:31] Rosemary: Later, thank God Australia’s Prime Minister Harold Holt, I think 65 years later introduced some sort of reforms to try to change that. But it wasn’t until Goff Whitlam won the 1972 federal election that truly awful policy was finally killed off. It still stays emotionally in a lot of people I believe.
[00:15:51] Louise: It does because in our little pre-show chat we talked about the dark side of Australia. For so many years, particularly when I was growing up, Australia was considered the lucky country for, uh, immigrants. And yet the dark side, I think is the xenophobia in Australia and there is division or this divisiveness as a result.
[00:16:11] Rosemary: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I remember being at school and we had, um, recess and we were getting out of our sports uniform to put our school uniform back and they all crowded around me and said, oh my gosh, you’re white underneath! Well, it wasn’t true. I wasn’t white. I was kind of brownie-grey, but I tanned really well and they examined me like I was a piece of meat . And then they decided then that because, um, I spoke English, I couldn’t possibly have come from India, that people in India didn’t speak English. So I think that was a general consensus that I was Native American because they’d watched the Cowboy movies and the Native American spoke in, uh, English, so therefore it must have been that. Yeah, it was quite funny.
[00:16:53] Louise: Wow, that story speaks to a level of ignorance.
[00:16:57] Rosemary: Yes.
[00:16:58] Louise: Which, I’m embarrassed to talk about because it is, I mean, it’s the truth. There are pockets of Australia where there’s a dreadful sort of ignorance about the rest of the world, and yet in contrast to that, Australians are incredibly well-traveled and there’s also a level of sophistication in terms of our understanding of others and the rest of the world.
[00:17:19] Rosemary: Absolutely, absolutely. And I must point out that was the seventies and Brisbane has since changed dramatically, um
[00:17:28] Louise: Yes, it has. Well look, I’m gonna go back to Small and Dark and in the second verse, you say that you move to Sydney, grow up and marry an Australian, which lights the way to you feeling that you belong, and here in Portugal, I know women in bicultural marriages and those women do seem to be more integrated by virtue of belonging to an extended Portuguese family. Is that how you felt when you married an Australian?
[00:17:57] Rosemary: Uh, I guess it, it happened a little bit before that because moving to Sydney was a huge difference. Sydney was far more progressive and far more multicultural and modern than Brisbane. And I began to meet people from other cultures, which made me feel I wasn’t alone, that there were other foreign misfits like me. And then when I began to work in the hotel industry, Australia had its first international hotel in Sydney, and a lot of the staff came from other countries. So all of a sudden I was listening to different voices, different accents, different people like me. And of course the hotel guests were from all over the world. So I was starting to feel okay, I, I found my niche. I have to be in hotels. Not only that, but then I married, uh, one of the management staff and so it was a double whammy. I belonged somewhere and to someone.
[00:18:44] Rosemary: About integrating into his extended family, not sure if that happened. They were a little bit restrained, I, I felt a little bit on the outside there. But I guess I really felt like I could belong somewhere was when I became an expatriate, when I finally found my tribe, because every, everybody was different like me. And for the first time, I didn’t have to explain …
[00:19:09] Louise: Mm-hmm
[00:19:09] Rosemary: my accent, my, my color of my skin. I was just accepted. I was just one of them, I had several countries under my belt. I had a birth country, a passport country, and my current country of residence. That was a wonderful thing. I finally felt okay. I found my tribe.
[00:19:27] Louise: Mm-hmm. Your husband was, was his background mixed race or was he British?
[00:19:33] Rosemary: Well, I think most people in Australia have British background, they all came from there as a convict perhaps, but yeah, he’d worked for an international hotel but hadn’t left Sydney. In fact, uh, his first plane ride was on our honeymoon when we went to the very exciting city of Melbourne from Sydney. He was, uh, he came from the privileged northern suburbs of, of Sydney.
[00:19:53] Louise: And did his family accept you or did they have doubts about you …
[00:19:58] Rosemary: Well, it was a little bit awkward, because his mum left his dad. The two had separated and weren’t talking to each other. And then here’s me arriving on the scene, so our wedding was the first time they got to see each other. There was a little bit of a coldness there because it was awkward. His dad was adorable. I loved his dad. He was very warm and welcoming me. His mum may not have been quite so. I don’t know, I probably was seen as a rather exotic addition to the family, I would say, quite honestly.
[00:20:26] Rosemary: But even though I, I did find my tribe as an expat, I still had to work really hard to belong, and perhaps a lot of expats feel the same way. You’re always a stranger, you’re always needing to start over in a new environment and either you can melt in unobtrusively or put yourself out there more boldly.
[00:20:44] Rosemary: I remember watching a video by Michelle Phoenix about the challenge of belonging. She explained how expats go about straddling cultures. We are unable to fit into either side. We go out of our way to be completely different from either culture. And we do this as a way of taking control of our circumstances, of forging our own identity wherever we are, of being the architect of our differences rather than the victim of our differences. And I think I’ve tried to do that throughout my life, going with the changes, trying really hard and never to play the victim. It was actually always a huge adventure to me. I loved the expat life.
[00:21:21] Louise: That’s a wonderful attitude because it sounds like when you take on being the architect rather than the victim, it’s very empowering and, and a really creative opportunity, in fact.
[00:21:33] Rosemary: Absolutely. You could forge your path. It requires a great deal of fearlessness, which you acquire being an expat, I think.
[00:21:41] Louise: Yes. In moving countries, I think I’ve found that you can just recreate yourself.
[00:21:45] Rosemary: Yes.
[00:21:45] Louise: You can be the master of your own destiny and the master of your own identity as well.
[00:21:50] Rosemary: Absolutely, I reinvent yourself each time. it’s wonderful.
[00:21:54] Louise: So you, you moved a lot with your husband’s work though, you both were in the hotel industry, but presumably because he was management, uh, the opportunities to move came to him or?
[00:22:04] Rosemary: The thing was, that hotel had a policy that they did not like married people working together. As my job was not quite as important as his, in fact, not at all as important as his, because this was the seventies and men ruled, um, I had to leave.
[00:22:20] Louise: Mm-hmm.
[00:22:20] Rosemary: So I, I backed out and he continued in the hotel industry and I just lived it vicariously, I guess, by being the trailing spouse.
Rosemary with her first child, daughter Zac, who was born 6 months before the young families first expat move, which was to the UK where her husband’s company was building a hotel in Birmingham.
[00:22:31] Louise: Right. So then you were a trailing spouse as you moved to Europe and South and North America, and Asia. And then I think you mentioned that you ultimately lived in 14 different countries. Is is that right?
Rosemary and her family in Tibet enjoying butter tea with Jigme Dorje Palbar Bista, the last official King of the Tibet Kingdom of Mustang at his palace in Lo Manthang.
[00:23:02] Louise: I’m, I’m gonna go back to the verse again, and that same stanza, because the last three lines are so profound: “A baby is lost, a baby is born, a marriage is over.” Are you comfortable talking through this period of your life in a little more detail?
[00:23:20] Rosemary: It was a really difficult period. I’ve written a lot about it so that was therapeutic. We were in Turkey and my marriage was deteriorating at an incredibly powerful rate. From having a baby and losing a baby, or rather, I lost a baby first, and then had the next baby. Virtually my entire time in Turkey, I was either pregnant or had just given birth. So my hormones were all over the place. I was very scared. I was very emotional. I was very much alone. But that wasn’t the worst, I think our, our next posting, Mexico was the hardest. It’s when our marriage hit it’s rock-bottom worst.
[00:23:56] Rosemary: It took a few more countries after that to end completely. I stuck around longer than most others would’ve, I suppose, I guess I was hoping that things would get better in the next country, but we simply entered each new country with optimism and then left that country with optimism for the next country. In between there were vast and lengthening swaths of despair. I think that’s when I started writing poetry. Poetry seems to lend itself far better than prose to writing about trauma, I guess.
[00:24:27] Rosemary: There’s an amazing American poet, Sarah Kay, who writes and delivers fabulous spoken word poetry, which really says it all. There was one where she said, ‘I write poems to figure things out. I write poetry to work through what I don’t understand, but I show up to each new poem with a backpack full of everywhere else that I’ve been.’ And oh gosh, I felt that with every poem I wrote back then.
[00:24:52] Louise: I feel that. It seems to me you were working through all the trauma of your life, but with such beauty and grace, I think.
[00:24:59] Rosemary: Mm-hmm. Thank you.
[00:25:00] Louise: And then in 2006 you came back to Australia with your two kids to start over. What was that like to return to Australia and repatriate as a single mum and after so many country moves?
Rosemary with her son Asher at the Forbidden city in Beijing, the final expat posting before she left her marriage and returned to Australia with her two children.
[00:25:13] Rosemary: Oh gosh. It was hard. I actually didn’t want to, I could have kept being an expatriate all my life, but it was just too hard. The marriage was deteriorating, and my kids desperately needed some stability, so it had to be done, and I, I did it with nothing. I had nothing. I had no corporate entity behind me, no husband to support me, no finances of my own, because my husband was rather controlling, and had full control over everything.
[00:25:37] Rosemary: So it was just me and my kids starting from scratch. We had no furniture in her house, no car. There were schools to enrol in, books and stationary to buy and we had one month to do it. I sometimes think, I really dunno how I did it, but I guess you just do. And, and where to live. When I originally told my kids we were going to be coming home to Australia, I use that word ‘home’ loosely because none of them had lived there, um, I gave them the option. I said, all your lives we’ve been moving you around to countries, so now you get to choose which city. So I’m gonna fly to Melbourne. I’m gonna fly to Sydney and then you choose which city you’d like to live in. They unanimously chose Melbourne. I’m guessing possibly because Melbourne has a more multicultural feel to it than Sydney. And so there I was in Melbourne knowing no one, all my family were in Sydney. Knowing no one apart from an old friend I had lost touch with over the years and an aging aunt whom I hadn’t seen in decades.
[00:26:36] Rosemary: I remember sitting in my hotel apartment that first night, endlessly scrolling through pages of the internet, being completely overwhelmed with everything I had to do while my kids lay sleeping in the next room. I just remember bearing my head in my hands and weeping, dear God, what have I done?
[00:26:55] Rosemary: Even now when I drive past that hotel, which I do frequently, it just brings back all those emotions and I think, gosh. I’m glad I didn’t think. That I just did. Because if I’d thought about it, I probably wouldn’t have done it.
[00:27:08] Louise: That leap of faith, once you actually settle into it, you do think, God, what have I done? How am I gonna cope? And repatriation it’s fascinating because it’s a very difficult move. Sometimes I think folks feel like they’re moving to a whole new country that they don’t fully understand, so then the, the challenge of reintegrating is just like the challenges of moving to a foreign country.
[00:27:36] Rosemary: Absolutely. I remember there were two instances that cemented for me, two things. One was I, just felt I don’t belong here, my own countrymen don’t know me, but I am here, so where do I belong? And I remember the third Culture kids organization, so I contacted them and said, ‘Somebody help me! I don’t know what to do.’ And the wonderful Bryce, uh, he had a Skype call with me and he taught me one thing that I used, and it worked brilliantly, he said, ‘you just have to find the new where you are.’ He said, because there’s something new everywhere. Do something new. Try to live here as a tourist, as a foreigner. Don’t live here as a resident.
[00:28:17] Rosemary: I joined a newcomers network and uh, it was filled with expats. And I remember sitting there thinking, yeah, I’m in my tribe. But then one day, when I’d gone to my 10th meeting, and we were sitting in a bar and I looked around and everybody were expats, I was not, and I suddenly thought, I don’t belong here. I’m a resident. That was really profound and sad at the same time.
[00:28:42] Louise: Hmm hmm. Yes. But you had to enter that community before you could exit that community.
[00:28:49] Rosemary: Absolutely. Yeah.
[00:28:52] Louise: And before we move on, I just want to alert listeners, if you’re not familiar with the term TCK, that’s Third Culture Kids, Episode 30 is a discussion with another Australian woman actually who is a TCK, and she goes into an in-depth discussion about the definition of a Third Culture Kid? So if you’re curious look up episode 30 and have a listen to Tanya talk us through Third Culture Kids.
[00:29:20] Rosemary: Yeah, it’s a brilliant book. I’ve got a very well thumbed copy in my library. In fact, I met David Pollock when we were living in Vietnam.
Rosemary on a trek in the Lao Cai region in the Vietnam Highlands north of Sapa, surrounded by the colourful women of the Hmong Tribe
[00:29:28] Louise: Oh, okay.
[00:29:29] Rosemary: He came to speak in our international community and it was the first time I’d heard TCK.
[00:29:34] Louise: Mm-hmm.
[00:29:35] Rosemary: And he delivered this talk and after I went to him and I really wanted to hug him, but I thought it wasn’t appropriate, so I said, you talked about me. I finally know who I am. You won’t believe it at the time.
[00:29:44] Louise: Mm-hmm.
[00:29:45] Rosemary: I lived in 11 countries, so I said to him, I’ve lived in 11 countries. And he looked at me and said, ah, so have a lot of people, so it’s okay.
[00:29:53] Louise: Yes. You’re one of many. Actually I belong to an organization, it’s mostly online, called Families in Global Transitions or figt.org and David Pollock’s work is held up as the Bible and so there’s a lot of discussion in that community about the experience of moving countries and the experience, like yours, of moving family. So speaking of family, when the kids grew up, you had your own independent move to Malaysia with your job. So having moved so many times with your ex-husband’s work, it must have felt empowering to relocate independently or with your work. So what was the work you were doing? And I know you’re no longer in Malaysia, what happened? Why did that end? Why did you repatriate?
[00:30:40] Rosemary: I loved being out there this time on my own steam. It was fabulous. I was doing this expat thing all alone. My kids had grown up and were independent so I could be totally selfish from being a single mum for so long. And I was a single mum even while I was married, by the way. I could be totally selfish and only look after me, which was a novelty and I was working for a Perth IT company who had successfully opened their new markets in the US and the UK and asked me to open their Southeast Asian regional office.
[00:31:09] Rosemary: I remember them asking me, you can live in KL or you can live in Singapore. And I said, ah, I’ve lived in Singapore. Let’s try KL.
[00:31:16] Louise: KL is?
[00:31:17] Rosemary: I’m sorry. Kuala Lumpur, yeah. Kuala Lumpur. I’d never been there. I was excited about going somewhere different. I think that’s another hallmark of an expat, we talked about the fearlessness, I was, and still am pretty fearless about new experiences and there was so much to do before the move. There was booking the serviced apartments, organizing the visas, and then renting my house out and then packing up a shipment, and I was so excited about going there. I was convinced I was gonna go there forever, so I gave away everything I owned because I’m not coming back. I got in that plane with such a smile on my face. I had no idea what lay ahead. I just had a piece of printed letterhead, which was an official document from the Malaysian government authorizing us to set up our regional office.
[00:32:01] Rosemary: Thank God my daughter had given me a copy of The Lonely Planet, which I hadn’t read through, but she gave it to me about a day before I left. As the plane touched down in KL, I suddenly realized, oh my gosh, I haven’t researched what to do about transport, how I’m going to get to my serviced apartment. I was so busy fixing everything else for everybody else, so I was thumbing through the pages of Lonely Planet to see what the advice was on airport taxis, just flying by the seat of my pants.
[00:32:27] Rosemary: Malaysia, oh gosh, I loved it. I loved the country. I loved the people, the food, the vibrancy, everything. I just fell in love with that country and I loved my job. I loved our products. So easy to sell because it was just superior products. And I was so excited about getting our company brand out because I had a marketing background, so it was like, yay, I’ll go out there and promote the heck out of it. Our target market was an education space. It was heaps of international schools to see.
[00:32:55] Louise: Mm-hmm.
[00:32:56] Rosemary: I was just super proud of my work there, but, um, setting up the foundations of a brand new company, particularly in Asia where it’s all based on trust and reputation. In the US and the UK it’s a far easier market. But in the Asia our competitors had been there for decades and were very well known. And here we were a sassy newcomer and they weren’t too sure about us. So I had to work hard at building relationships and something I believe I’m fairly good at, and I was given a handful of contacts when I arrived, and then when I left two years later, I had built them to 700. Sadly the company decided to pull out Asia for reasons I never fully understand. And so I found myself heading back to Australia, starting all over again. Tail between the legs sort of thing, but I seem to be very good at starting over.
[00:33:49] Louise: And heading back to Australia, are you settled there now or is there another, do you imagine another country move at some point?
[00:33:56] Rosemary: Gosh, I’m always thinking about the next place. I did not want to come back. I had no choice. Being in the IT sector was so dominated by males anyway. It was great In Asia, but here in Australia was another thing altogether. So I decided that’s it. I’ve had enough of the IT world, what can I do next? A New Zealand friend of mine suggested, ‘Hey, why don’t you try real estate?’ And I thought, I have no idea. And he said, ‘look, you’ve moved often enough, you should know it well.’ By the way, I’ve moved 61 times so far. So I did, I got into the industry and, my favorite part was the open homes because I got to look at lots of homes and sort of vicariously move.
[00:34:35] Louise: I just wanna clarify, Rosemary, you said you’d moved 61 times, that’s not 61 countries.
[00:34:40] Rosemary: No, that’s houses. 61 houses, 61 houses. My dad was a bit of a gypsy, so that’s where I got it from. We moved a lot when we were children and then I moved a lot, um, within Australia and in those other countries.
[00:34:54] Louise: Yeah. Yeah. So I could understand selling real estate makes sense, actually.
[00:34:59] Rosemary: Yes. I know I can. I can do it for other people. As for whether I feel settled now. Um, no, I don’t. It’s just the bane of my existence, this homelessness that I feel. I can’t explain it to anybody, that I am constantly looking to new horizons. I don’t think I would feel settled anywhere. Speaking to my brother when I was quite young, when we were in Brisbane, and I kept wanting to leave and go somewhere and he said, ‘Rosemary, you’d never be happy. You could go to Timbuktu and you’d never be happy.’ And he was right.
[00:35:30] Rosemary: The hard thing now is my heart and my head are here in Melbourne because I guess since the Covid pandemic, it brought home the stark reality of what would’ve happened had I been an expat and my kids were not in the same country. Just that excitement of expat life is wonderful. The draw of having a new adventure somewhere else and rising to a new challenge, all of that is fabulous. But when it comes down to difficult times where there’s so much uncertainty, that’s when I was really glad to be here in Melbourne, living in the same city as my kids.
[00:36:10] Rosemary: I don’t know how that has colored how I feel about moving elsewhere. I certainly wouldn’t knock back the chance. Maybe I just simply have to travel a lot.
[00:36:20] Louise: Mm, in order to satiate that restlessness.
[00:36:22] Rosemary: Mm-hmm.
[00:36:23] Louise: And yet I think you’ve alluded to something that many people will identify with, and that is that the pandemic shifted our attitudes, individual attitudes on so many levels. And one of the things that shifted for you is you set up an online business as a proofreader and editor because you’re at home and Australia had one of the severest lockdowns. You are a writer. You’ve had many stories published in Expatriate Anthologies. And I believe you’re now working on a memoir, which I can totally understand, cause your stories are vast and rich. Can you tell us a little about what the focus of that memoir is?
[00:37:00] Rosemary: Well, I came up with the title while we were in a hotel apartment in Beijing. It was a particularly bad occasion, and I remember thinking, I’m gonna write a book about this and I know what the title is, and I ripped up a piece of paper from the hotel compendium on the desk and I wrote Tales of Hotel Life and Other Stories from Hell. And I folded it up and I stuck it in the pocket of my jeans.
[00:37:26] Rosemary: And many years later I started writing that book. It’s basically written around the premise that extremely unhappy marriages generate obscene quantities of jewelry. And I had a lot, I had a lot of jewelry.
[00:37:40] Louise: What do you mean by that?
[00:37:41] Rosemary: It’s to placate someone. So whenever he did anything awful, he would buy me a gift to, um, to not really say I’m sorry, but here, you know, that’ll make you happy. In fact, there were times where I actually said I feel a bit of a prostitute receiving presents for bad stuff, if that makes sense. Just to shut me up. But later on with the marriage getting worse and unhappier, I got on the bandwagon too. And especially when we lived in Dubai, which was the gold capital, I would just be frequenting the Dubai gold souk and by earrings and rings and lots of jewelry. So I, I got it given to me, but towards the end I started buying it as well. It was a little sparkle that made a miserable existence a little bit better.
[00:38:31] Louise: Maybe filled a sense of emptiness.
[00:38:33] Rosemary: Yes. Yes. I guess when people go shopping, excessively, you feel that it fills something, but it’s just empty. It’s just a placeholder really. So this book that I, I decided, how can I, um, bring the jewelry into these tales? I came up with an idea that each tale would be about an adventure in that particular city, in that particular country and the piece of jewelry I got there. And the story revolved around the history of the country, but of the culture, the everyday life, the relationship, and where that piece of jewelry fitted in. I think it’ll make some good reading.
[00:39:08] Louise: So are you still working on it? What’s the,
[00:39:10] Rosemary: Well, I spent 12 years writing it. Right now it’s in its final editing stage, so I’m hoping it’s gonna be ready or I’m aiming for it to be ready for publication next year, 2023.
[00:39:22] Louise: I’ve dipped into Undefeated, that’s the anthology that, uh, I mentioned earlier, which features your verse, Small and Dark, so I’ll look forward to this latest work.
[00:39:32] Rosemary: Thank you.
[00:39:32] Louise: So now if listeners would like to learn more about you, your work and your writing, including Undefeated and the other anthologies that you’ve contributed to, where can they find you online, your website and social media?
[00:39:45] Rosemary: Thank you. My, my branding is WriteSaidRose.com.au I have a website that’s the copywriting side of it, but I also have a Facebook writer’s page, which is under Write.SaidRose and also you can find me on Instagram at Click.SaidRose.
[00:40:00] Louise: Terrific. The links will be in the transcript to this episode on my website.
[00:40:04] Rosemary: Thank you. I’m developing a new website, which is going to cover my other two Rs apart from writing, relocation and real estate and tourism thrown in. I’m putting that all under the banner of WholeLottaRose, running by well, definitely running by the middle of 2023, hopefully in early 23.
[00:40:23] Louise: That’s a really fun and clever spin on words, WholeLottaRose.
[00:40:28] Rosemary: Thank you. It’s gonna be fun to develop that for sure.
[00:40:31] Louise: Well, thank you so much, Rosemary. Thank you for participating as a guest on Women Who Walk.
[00:40:37] Rosemary: Thank you so much for having me. I just hope what I have said resonates with some of your listeners and hope they can relate. Thank you Louise.
[00:40:43] Louise: Thank you for listening today. So you don’t miss future episodes, subscribe on your favorite podcast provider or on my YouTube channel @WomenWhoWalkPodcast. Also, feel free to connect with comments on Instagram @LouiseRossWriter or Writer & Podcaster, Louise Ross on Facebook, or find me on LinkedIn. And finally, if you enjoyed this episode, spread the word and tell your friends.