Susan Gaye Bloomfield
7th February, 1967 – December 2014
Elizabeth told me Sue had died. She had been dead in her Ashfield flat for 18 days before she was found. The heater was on. I don’t want to think about how she was when she was found. I don’t know how she died. There is talk of ice.
Sue had been just below the surface of my consciousness for weeks, just this unease. She had rung and asked me to ring her. She didn’t think to give me her number. Street people change their mobile numbers all the time and the one I had had the familiar: 'Optus advises that the number you have rung has been disconnected.' I rang Elma at the Wayside and they hadn’t seen her or knew her number. I thought of going to her flat.
Sue was a giver and it used to bring her undone, especially with men. They would take and take and finally they would turn on her, violently, because no one likes to receive all the time. They would bash her, stab her and the cycle went on with someone else. She gave because she had no capacity to affirm herself, she had no sense of her own value or worth.
On 19th January, 1969, in the Saleyards Camping Area, Griffith, Margaret Bloomfield was shot by her husband, Hector Bloomfield. Margaret was 26, they had 8 children. Susan was the youngest, 11 months. She was found under a couch. She had hid there when she heard the bangs. As an adult, a loud bang would send her ducking for cover. A total of three people were killed by Hector that day, two other relatives. Her adult family was wiped out. Sue and another sibling were separated from her other siblings and brought up in institutions in Waitara and Goulburn. She was on the streets at 12 and I met her at St Canice’s.
I remember her saying to me she once went to the library in Griffith to look up reports of that day in the papers. She found plenty of photos of her father but none of her mother. She was looking for one, she never found one photo of her mother.
'I wanted a family,' she once said to me. She did have one, she had six children. But she didn’t know how to be a parent, she had never been parented herself. She didn’t know how to make a home. 'I find community on the streets,' she told me. When her children visited her they would live on the steps of the church with her. You could tell she had lived in an institution. Her bed was always the neatest and most well made on the steps. She liked the corner spot.
I can’t remember if she could read. She had that directness and eye contact that people who can’t read have, who need to take their cues on what to do from others. Her mail came to the church. Mostly it was warrants for not turning up in court. She asked me to safe-keep her records. That’s how I know the details about her mother, she gave me her mother’s death certificate: 'Shock and severed spinal cord in the neck as a result of bullet wounds.'
Sue had a mouth she could use when needed. I was shocked and amused at the same time when I first heard her on the steps late one night having a piece of someone. They were going hammer and tongs at one another, then it would die down, and then Sue would have the last word, and it would begin again. She had to have the last insult.
There was a lot of fight in her. I suppose she didn’t know any other way. But she had the most direct, warm, generous nature you could imagine. I used to think that God took a direct hand in her life, seeing that we had failed her. How else could she have had such a beautiful nature? She never sought pity, she never complained about her lot. She never thought that others had a better life than she had. She worried about her children, about others, about me: 'You used to smile a lot,' she said to me once. I knew then that I had been at St Canice’s for too long and it was time to go.
Sue lived in the present, with a cheeky grin and laugh. She was embarrassed she had no teeth. That’s why her mouth is closed in the photo. She had her jaw broken by surgeons so they could fit her with new teeth. She felt better about herself with teeth. I preferred her no teeth smile but I loved how proud she was of her new look.
Her father spent a long time in Long Bay. He turned to painting the walls of the exercise yard there. When he came out in 1987 he asked to see Sue. 'There is only one thing I regret,' he said to her, 'and that is that I didn’t kill all of you.' He then went and shot himself in the pavilion of a Rockhampton oval.
The late Greg Dening once wrote that his task as an historian was to rescue from anonymity just some of the vast numbers of people who have gone before us and are now names on war memorials, in death records and the like. Sue will always be for me flesh and blood, her trust I will forever cherish. Hers was a wretched life from the beginning to the end. But for some reason I feel impelled to lift her name out of that narrative. It is not one she would recognise. She once told me that she was 'one of the lucky ones'. For me she is a bright star shining in our darkness.
Steve Sinn SJ is the long time former parish priest of St Canice's, King's Cross, and now works in retreat ministry in rural NSW.