How does it feel to watch your ordinary, knockabout dad become the leader of the country − and then watch him torn down? Author Jessica Rudd, 26, felt every wound as her father, former prime minister Kevin Rudd, was ousted from the leadership in June. Here, she tells madison about what it was like growing up with the man who was once the most powerful person in Australia.
People often ask me what it’s like to have Kevin Rudd as a dad. It’s a difficult question to answer because I’ve never had another dad, so there’s no basis for comparison. But I know that’s an annoying answer, so I’m going to try and come up with a better one.
Mum tells the story of when Dad first met me. She tells it at least once a year, usually to new dads. It was a hot December day in Canberra in 1983 and I was presented to Mum having arrived about two weeks late − punctuality still isn’t my forte. After a cuddle, the midwife passed me to Dad. Mum gets teary at this point in the story. “And then he held you.” Her voice breaks and she waves her hands in front of her eyes to dry them. This device never works. “And he fell in love with you. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. My husband holding our child. He was smitten.”
Twelve days later, we moved to China. Dad was working at the Australian embassy. He used to come home for lunch during the day and at night he gave me a bath. People see it as a negative that he doesn’t need much sleep, but Mum reckons she struck gold in the co-parent department. When we were babies, Dad could do the night shift and not be shattered in the morning. When I would scream my lungs out of an evening (I was a colicky baby), Dad would hold me close and run my fingers along the book spines on the shelves to calm me down. Even now, when I’m stressed out, that’s how I self-soothe. I find the quiet corner of a bookshop, somewhere where people can’t see that I’m touching up the merchandise, and run my fingertips along the spines and inhale that great new-book smell.
Back in Canberra, when I was four, we had a mint-green VW Beetle. Dad used to drive me to preschool in it and teach me how to count. We’d count the things around us − cars, umbrellas, traffic lights. “Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, twenty-ten… ”
“Almost, Jessie. Twenty-eight, twenty-nine,thirty.”“Thirty. Thirty-ten, thirty-eleven… ”
And when I gave up on counting, we would sing Play School songs. Mum knew all the words. Dad knew some of them and when he didn’t, he made them up, which was equally entertaining. Dad’s favourite was One Grey Elephant, also a counting song. Alas, I’m still innumerate.
When I was nine, I decided I was going to be on my school cricket team. There was just one problem: I couldn’t play cricket. The tryouts were in just three days when I told Dad. He knew my baseball-like approach to batting from beach cricket. With that in mind, he told me to set my alarm for 6.30 the next morning.We went down to the nets for two hours before school, three days in a row. We batted on the first day, bowled on the second day, fielded on the third. I got in − the 12th woman. Luckily there was an 11th, Katie, who was an excellent batswoman and salvaged the reputation of female under-10s on Brisbane’s south side while I handed out the oranges.
When I was 17 and learning to drive, Dad was reluctant to get in the car with me. I found this mildly insulting. Mum was my instructor until she too gave up and outsourced it to a professional. One night, on our way to dinner, Dad surprised me. “Why don’t I go with Jess and you guys go in the other car?” I was super-excited to show off my driving prowess to ease my father’s anxiety. The slight hitch was that when I got behind the wheel, there wasn’t enough room for him to get in the car, so he told me to back out of the garage before he got in. In hindsight, this would have been a good moment to confess that I hadn’t yet learned to reverse, let alone in the dark. “But hey,” I thought, “reversing must just be the same as driving forwards, just backwards.”
I swung out of the driveway to the left. I could hear Dad saying something, but it wasn’t clear. If I hadn’t been going so fast, I would have heard him say, “Slow down, slow down, slow down,” in an urgent crescendo. When I hit the neighbour’s car with a loud bang, he came to help me out of my seat. I shook with shock and humiliation. “Don’t worry, darling,” he said with a smile. He went next door to explain it to the neighbours and never mentioned it again.
On my wedding day, Dad and I shared a car to the church. Just him, me and a driver. He held my hand and prayed for me. It was a prayer for my happiness. When we got to the church and the trumpet voluntary played, he walked me slowly down the aisle − one, step together, two, step together − all the way to the end. At the rehearsal, we had practised the giving away. “Who gives this woman to be married to this man?” the priest would say. “I do,” Dad would say. Then I was supposed to give him a kiss goodbye and go to hold my husband-to-be, Albert’s hand. The thing is, when we got to the end of that aisle, I didn’t want to be given away. Don’t get me wrong − I couldn’t wait to be married to my wonderful husband − but I didn’t want to lose my dad, so I didn’t kiss him goodbye.
In May this year, when I had finished writing my first novel, I was sent copies of my bound proof. This is when the book is printed early without the finished cover for booksellers to read before they decide how many they want to buy. Just a plain cover and the title Campaign Ruby by Jessica Rudd. The bound proof arrived and I skipped downstairs to show my dad, beaming. “Smell it,” I told him. “It smells like a book.” He closed his eyes and inhaled. He ran his finger along the spine. He read my name on the cover. “I’m so proud of you, darling.”
As I stood beside him when he did his final press conference as prime minister, I was proud of him, too. Never prouder, in fact. He stood at the lectern as he did on his first day in the job: a compassionate statesman. I wanted to hold it together for him. Mum said I wouldn’t cry if I used the tip of my tongue to tickle the roof of my mouth, which was good in theory. She was strong, propelling him forward. I lost it. Mascara streamed down my face like diluted squid ink. Waterproof, my arse, I thought.
I looked out towards the assembled throng of journalists − there was scarcely a dry eye in that frozen Canberra courtyard.
Read the entire interview in the September 2010 issue of madison
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