If I had to describe my mother Margaret Spackman in one word, I would choose ‘intrepid’. It’s an overused term for Girl Reporters who, by their nature, are regarded as adventurous and unafraid. But it is the only word to describe Mum’s seemingly endless supply of fearlessness and relentless optimism in the face of adversity.
I can think of no better tribute to her than to take you on a little tour of my childhood, spent trailing around Asia with this remarkable woman.
Intrepid Girl Reporter Margaret Spackman with, from left, Alin, me and Jack, who rarely joined us on these jaunts. The Spackman Collection.
For most of the year, she was a hard-working Girl Reporter for the South China Morning Post, as well as founding secretary for the Hong Kong Journalists Association, itself a monumentally time-consuming position. And all the while she would be saving – a little here, a little there – towards a holiday with her kids.
Mum’s travel plan was simple – she would budget how much she could afford to spend each day of the trip, pick a direction, and take us as far as she could by the cheapest means possible.
We would rattle along unformed roads in buses and jeepneys jammed with overwhelmingly cheerful people all going nuts over my youngest sister Sophia, and plying us with sweets. I think Sophia, looking so doll-like, got pinched a bit at times to make sure she was in fact real.
My youngest sister Sophia. The Philippines 1970. From the Spackman Files.
Most nights of these holidays we dined on tins of sausages and a loaf of cheap bread in our room, finished off for breakfast before we hit the road again, after a night curled up on a foldout cot, a tatami or a thin wicker mattress under a whirring fan with the night sounds drifting in through old wooden shutters.
When Mum’s budget reached a halfway point we would start heading back in the same manner, by a different route if possible.
Our pocket money for these holidays was a Hong Kong dollar a week for each year we’d been around, converted and suitably rounded to a local currency.
In Taiwan that bought a lot of knock-off books. Alin’s impressive Charlie Brown collection, and my Nancy Drews, were our souvenirs that year – when I believe each of our dollars bought seven bucks in local money. As far as our route goes, I can only say with certainty that we visited Sun Moon Lake, which still shines for me in its beauty.
The only pictures in my collection from our visit to Taiwan. My sister Alin and friend.
Language didn’t seem to be a barrier for my mother and, wherever we went, she never seemed short of someone to take us under their wing and guide her to a cheap place to stay.
Sometimes real friendships were formed and my mother still gives me updates on the Paglingayan family, who welcomed us into their hearts and their home in Manila in the early 1970s.
We were in Luneta Park with Mrs Paglingayan and her daughters Belen and Julieta when Sophia had a terrible accident. A gardener was walking along swinging a pair of shears, which Sophia ran straight into from behind, the blade just missing her eye.
The doctors refused to sew up the wound until the thread had been paid for
Mrs P grabbed my bleeding, screaming sister and ran towards the park gates, followed by my mother, while Belen and Julieta took charge of Alin and I – and the gardener, who was as traumatised as we were. Belen and Julieta were only kids themselves, a little older than us, but they got us back to our hotel and waited with us.
There was nothing to do but wait, all of us fearing the worst. We had seen the gaping wound in Sophia’s cheek.
Later, my mother told how the doctors had refused to sew up the wound until she’d paid for the thread, but she had only taken money with her for ice-creams in the park, which had been duly spent. If not for Mrs Paglingayan that day, Mum said, she didn’t know how Sophia would have survived.
We travelled most often to the Philippines after that, packing up every couple of years for a return to Manila to see the Paglingayans before setting off for another part of the country.
Spackman girls and Julieta Paglingayan. The Philippines 1972. From the Spackman Collection.
At least once we stayed with them. I wondered where we were going to sleep because their home was just one room but at night thin mattresses were spread over the matting and mosquito nets untied from the ceiling, creating gauze walls which disappeared overhead come morning.
In the northern province of Albay we stayed in a beach hut at Santo Domingo where the sands were a glittering black from the volcanic ash of Mount Mayon. And in the south, at Zamboanga, we spent a magical few nights in the tree house at Pasonanca Park.
The gun in his hand was not a metaphor
At the southern edge of the archipelago, in Sulu province’s Jolo city, our hotel was a cut above our usual accommodation and Mum left us in our room while she spent an evening in the bar. There, she ended up in a group which included the local chief of police who kept calling her Miss America.
He turned up, drunk and persistent, at our room after she retired and only went away when she opened the door wide enough for him to see her three sleeping children within. I believe he had his hand on his gun at the time and no, gentle reader, that’s not a metaphor.
On our return to Manila, Mum took up an offer from a friend who was working at the Hilton and we were installed in rare high style for a night’s free accommodation. Unfortunately, our stay coincided with the arrival of a hefty typhoon which delayed our flight and shut down the city.
We were stuck, in the lap of luxury, with Mum screaming at us every time we opened the fridge for one of those gleaming little bottles of Coke from the minibar. Apart from that heart-stopping moment in Luneta Park, it was the only time I saw her actually rattled by any of our adventures.
Captain David Moodie shows the ropes to the newest member of his crew, my sister Sophia, aged 6. The Spackman Collection.
In 1976 the peace ship Fri moored in the harbour at Cheung Chau, one of Hong Kong’s outlying islands. The Fri was a New Zealand flagged oak sailing vessel which had led a flotilla of yachts in an international protest against French nuclear testing at Moruroa in 1973.
Its latest mission, coordinated by Greenpeace New Zealand, was to carry peace messages to all the world’s nuclear powers in a three-year voyage. Captain David Moodie and his crew were waiting for permission to visit China and in those weeks we became regular visitors to the ship.
When their wait proved fruitless, the Fri set sail for Vietnam with Mum and my two sisters on board for perhaps their most notable adventure.
Was it a vagary of the prevailing winds or a misreading of a chart? Only Captain Moodie would know for sure but, somehow, the ship drifted off course into Chinese waters and was duly picked up by the authorities.
The peace ship Fri sets sail with my mother Margaret Spackman and sisters Alin and Sophia. Hong Kong 1976. The Spackman Collection.
Back home in Hong Kong the assorted China watchers were bemused at the news that my mother and her two little girls were getting a rare view of the country that was still largely closed to foreigners.
Their detention was more comfortable than that enjoyed by other transgressors and lasted only about a week before the Fri was allowed to continue her journey while Mum, Alin and Sophia returned to Hong Kong where much celebration awaited them.
Mum turned 80 in October 2019, but if you think she spent the intervening years with her feet up, basking in past glories, you haven’t been paying attention.
She was out there, just weeks before her birthday, fighting for the environment, as part of the global climate strike It’s a fight she fought most days since she returned to Australia.
And, just a few weeks after her 80th, Mum went into a nursing home where she continues to keep a keen eye on the news. She always asks me about the safety of Hong Kong’s reporters – their welfare has been a prime concern since 1967, when the Hong Kong Journalists Association was conceived.
It’s a good time to say thank you, Mum, for taking me on that incredible journey and for showing me the meaning of “intrepid”. It’s a woman setting out with her kids, a rough map and a few dollars to see what’s out there.
© Maria Spackman 2021
You can read more about my Extraordinary Mum here:
Re:Maggie now resides in a nursing home with early stages of dementia