Who Was My Mother..?

For years I’ve been circling a particular urban legend if only to make sense of its many tendrils and tangents. As babies and toddlers we messed about on a rather worn tiger skin that was laid out in front of a cumbersome sideboard in the living room of our family home in Corrimal. There are countless photos of tiny babies on their stomachs craning their little necks over the top of a rather shmushed tiger’s head. I recall the warp and weft of the tiger’s hair and how it prickled and itched your skin no matter what way you stroked it. Its claws were in tact along with the indentation of its ears and of course the now worn stripes of its fur.

It had been professionally skinned with a backing of some kind of black lining but despite its genuine exotic touch in our suburban home, for many years we didn’t question why we’d even have such a relic in the house. Young children are total egoists and the idea that one’s mother had a life beyond our mewling selves was unthinkable. I don’t recall when it started to swim into our consciousness as something more intriguing but by my teens it was enough of a topic conversation to pique my curiosity.

The urban legend was this: before my mother was married to Dad, she spent considerable time overseas on trips. Along with stints in Winnipeg as a teacher, she also travelled to Iran (Persia back in the day), Afghanistan, and India. My mother was particularly drawn to India, a country I’ve yet to visit much to my chagrin. According to some of the accounts I’ve heard over the years, my mother met up with wealthy Americans—a father and son—while travelling around the country back in the early 60s. On this particular trip she was invited to go tiger hunting. And yes, take that literally. It wasn’t a conservation safari, it was a tiger shoot - with guns. As it was sometimes told to me, my mother was on an elephant and it was she who fired the killing shot while sitting on top of the world’s largest land mammal.

I can’t remember if I initially believed this eyebrow raising tale or if, from the get-go, I found it a tad improbable. Could this really be my mother, the woman who spent hours saving rinsing water from the washing machine for her garden and was into conservation and recycling l-o-n-g before influencers made it a thing for their money-spinning platforms? I would circle round this story from different angles, I’d ask her friends, I’d ask my mother again and again, I’d quiz my father and over the years there were broadly three buckets that the story fell into. First, it was a stitch up job and Mum had bought the rug at some bazaar in India and had it shipped home. Second, she may have been on a tiger shoot but it was the American guy who shot the tiger and gave it to her as a gift of appreciation (would like to know the details with that story). And thirdly, she did indeed kill the tiger when she was indulging in all manner of eye popping adventures.

Here it is in all its technicolour glory. Both of them.

This is the classic tale of not paying attention to your parents’ lives before their married and mothered/fathered-up selves. With both my parents now dead, I’m left with the what-ifs and the regret of not being curious enough to find out more about them when they were alive. This story perfectly illustrates this laziness.

In the research I’ve done, the timeline when my mother may have had the opportunity to participate in a tiger hunt is plausible. After The Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, tiger hunting became even more prevalent than the late 19th and 20th centuries. With the political upheaval between these two countries, shooting Bengali tigers was not policed in anyway shape or form. It was only from the mid sixties onwards that Indira Gandhi and others realised the destruction that was taking place and started to put measures around the slaughter to stave off the increasing likelihood of the animal’s extinction. My mother was in India around 1962 and 1963. Perhaps she was the tail end (excuse me) of this particular form of safari.

Setting aside the obvious that Mum may have killed one of the most magnificent beasts of the natural world, there’s an originality to the story that has always captured my imagination and admiration. It’s my mother’s chutzpah and moxie that gets me when I think about these ventures; not the plight of the tiger. This post is not the moment to delve into the ethics of big game hunting and obvious moral minefield of such acts. These posts are an effort to uncover a woman I never knew.

Even if Ma didn’t actually kill the animal, the mystery about how the rug ended up in Wollongong has kept me enthralled over the years. Who goes off to India as a young woman, probably has a romance with a big game hunting American and somehow ends up in a jungle on the back of an elephant aiming at beasts in the long grass? The romance and otherworldliness of this story has been a constant source of doubt but also wonder. Its shape, its lack of facts and evidence now lives in this unknowing and unknowable space.

An indisputable piece of evidence.

When we were cleaning out Cliff Road and deciding what to keep and what to discard; amongst the mountain of documents, furniture, paintings, photos, crockery etc of their full and busy lives, by sheer luck, I hung onto a bundle of personal correspondence from those years. Amongst the haul was a letter from Rowland Ward who writes about sending the tiger skin on to Australia. This company were the largest and most prominent taxidermists in the world. They were synonymous with the white hunters of yesteryear and according the letter, Mum’s tiger was a beast of enormous proportions that could have ended up in their Records of Big Game. But the letter too feeds further questions. It doesn’t provide proof or provenance about the animal and its undoubtedly terrible end but equally it gives weight to stories half told but never proven. For instance: who the heck is D G Watson Esq..?

It provides a tantalising window into a family legend that continues to keep us guessing. Between the letter, the rug, which is now in the possession of my sister in Tasmania, and a journey taken by a young woman a lifetime ago, the truth of it all remains out of reach.