‘Yes, Deborah agreed. We just have to find another forty-six dancers within a year,’ he laughed. I could hear the excitement in his voice.
‘God, you’re crazy, Li,’ I said. ‘How did you convince her?’
‘Well, I promised her, on my life, that I would have enough people to do justice to Kenneth’s work. I also told her that Queenslanders need something special to lift their spirits and help them recover from the devastating 2010 floods. Don’t forget she was born in Queensland, so of course she wants to help.’
Excitement aside, I genuinely had no idea just how Li was going to pull this off. Thankfully the company managed to get a grant from the Queensland Government to invite three international superstars – Carlos Acosta, Steven McRae and Tamara Rojo – to guest. The Queensland Performing Arts Centre also came on board as a partner. It seemed that Li’s powers of persuasion were impossible to resist. What a coup!
We ended up with twenty-seven company dancers, six Jette Parker Young Artists, thirty pre-professional students, and some final-year students from the drama department of Queensland University of Technology to play guards and other walk-on roles. Li also threw Queensland Ballet artistic staff – including me – into the mix in character roles. I’d been put down tentatively as Juliet’s nurse, but I was nervous about getting back on stage – it was an important acting role and I knew that doing both my coaching and that role would take a lot of energy. We would just have to work very hard and put it all together. It would be our pièce de résistance for the year, and I could hardly wait.
I was anxious about the first show – not only personally, but for the whole company. It was a huge occasion, with Li’s and Queensland Ballet’s reputations riding on it. After that first nerve-racking performance I loved it, and often cried with emotion at the end when I lost my beloved Juliet. Li told me, ‘You even made me cry.’
But the most important thing for me was that Sophie flew in to see me perform. Afterwards, backstage, she was quite overcome.
‘I have never seen you on stage, Mum, and you gave up your career for me,’ she said, tears in her eyes and giving me a big hug. It was a moment I shall keep in my heart forever.
By the season’s end, Romeo and Juliet had wildly exceeded expectations and broken an all-time box office record. It was a glass-ceiling-shattering event for Queensland Ballet and for Li. The only way for the company now was forwards and upward. As he said to me more than once, ‘Life is made up of journeys, and this is a special one. How lucky we are to be doing it together!’
Three months later, we took Cinderella on tour through regional Queensland. I was especially looking forward to returning to my home town – to perform at my father’s Pilbeam Theatre, no less.
Memories were everywhere. We drove past our old street in Rocky, past the hospital Neil George had designed and where we’d walk to see Mum with the latest baby, past the swimming pool to the river, and there was Dad’s theatre. I could see the town had changed very little, although some of the older colonial buildings had been charmingly restored. The Pilbeam Theatre still stood proudly, situated so beautifully among tall palm trees on the banks of the broad Fitzroy River. I marvelled at the architecture: Neil George had always designed buildings to last. Over the years it had become an iconic civic centre in Central Queensland. I felt enormously proud.
I’d always dreamed of performing for my family at the Pilbeam. Well, having Queensland Ballet perform, with dancers I’d coached myself, was close enough. How I wished Dad could have been there, though. Perhaps he was . . . I could certainly feel his presence. I had a rush of emotion then, thinking of my wonderful dad, the belief he’d had in me that helped shape who I became. He was always his own man, setting his own standards and valuing freedom of thought, and he had put the women in our family on a pedestal, starting with Coralie.
19
Sophie was happy in her Melbourne apartment with two new flatmates, who were also close friends, Alice and Kat. Alice was deaf and together they created a deaf-friendly environment, using captions to watch television, flicking lights on and off to get the attention of someone in the bathroom, and signing in Auslan when their implants were off.
‘It’s so awesome, Mum!’ Sophie gushed in one of our weekly calls. ‘Amazingly, it’s Alice’s and my first time living with another deaf person under the same roof.’
I could see they’d been learning from one another, which was obviously a good thing. I could also see Sophie becoming happier as she moved further into the deaf world, and found myself wondering about my dogged determination to bring her up the way I had. But when I raised these doubts with Sophie, she reassured me.
‘Don’t worry, Mum. Alice and I have learned that our struggles were similar at the end of the day. It’s good to know that I’m not alone. By living together, we’re sharing the experience of being deaf. You’ll see. It’s good, and I’m all right.’
I was encouraged by that.
In the middle of the year, Sophie had landed a new job at Vicdeaf as their social media person, selected from more than thirty applicants. This was a step up from her previous job, requiring more responsibility and being part of a bigger team. Sophie’s job was to manage online content and edit the quarterly magazine, Communicate. It seemed the perfect role for her. She felt she belonged, and was mixing with more signing people and using her writing skills. Unlike Hear For You, which had focused solely on deaf teenagers, Sophie was learning a lot about support for deaf people of all ages and from all walks of life.
‘My life is so much easier now that I can sign,’ she would say. ‘I can sign at work and with my deaf friends at the beach, in the pool, at night-time at clubs and restaurants. I don’t miss out anymore. It’s amazing.’
After parting ways with Patrick a year earlier, Sophie had started seeing a new man named Matthew, who was a social worker at Deaf Children Australia. She had met him at a party with deaf friends. He was handsome and very keen on Sophie. He sometimes wore hearing aids but had no implants, could speak a little and was a good lip-reader. I hoped that meant Sophie would continue talking. I was pleased that she had a serious boyfriend. Now she had both work and a social life, and was crossing between the hearing and deaf worlds. I sensed she was beginning to question where she belonged. Although I was happy for her, I had my reservations.
When I told Li my concerns about Sophie, he said, ‘You know, Mary, we’ve given her a hearing world, but it is ultimately up to her to choose. She may choose to be in the deaf world completely – it just might be too difficult for her to navigate the hearing world.’
Li was always more practical about our reality, whereas I was more emotionally invested in Sophie’s future. I thought to myself that if she did choose the deaf world over the hearing world, I’d be deeply disappointed, as it would definitely limit her options. I even worried she might one day have a hearing baby – how would they communicate? I hoped that she would see the strength of our bond and we would come through this stage of her development as strong as ever.
At this time Professor Clark asked Li if he and Sophie would write the foreword for a new book called Graeme Clark: The Man Who Invented the Bionic Ear, by Mark Worthing. Li happily agreed, but was surprised upon receiving an email from Sophie that said, ‘Dad, you should leave my story out of this. I’m sick of being in the public eye. I want my life to be private. Enough is enough.’