Olivia Read Online Free

Olivia felt was compounded by the realisation that her father was moving not to somewhere close by but to a new home many hundreds of miles away and in another state in Australia. He was to take a new post as a university vice-chancellor in Newcastle, a coastal town some two hours’ drive north of Sydney in New South Wales. ‘After that I saw my father maybe once or twice a year during vacations,’ Olivia remembers sadly.
    Olivia’s outwardly sunny nature hid her true feelings, as inside she felt wounded, hurt and insecure. She tried to blank out the ensuing upheaval in her family life. ‘I was always the happy child trying to keep everyone else happy,’ she said.
    Divorce in the mid-1950s in Australia was viewed in a very different way from how it’s regarded today. In some sections of Australian society it was still frowned upon as not the done thing, scandalous even, and Brin’s high-ranking university position unfortunately made his separation and divorce from Irene more of a talking point locally than most.
    The large majority of Olivia’s friends had happily married parents and it made her feel she was the odd one out. ‘I kept hoping they would get back together again,’ Olivia says.
    Following the divorce, Irene stayed put in Melbourne and moved with her children into a small flat. ‘I had to go with my mother but didn’t want to leave my father,’ Olivia would later explain. ‘But I had to cope with my feelings quietly. I kept things to myself. I didn’t want my mother to know that I was disappointed. I guess it must have shown because teachers used to take me out. One of my English teachers used to take me to the zoo so that I would not have to go home to an empty house. My mum couldn’t help it. She had to be out at work all day.’
    In an era when it was far from usual for women to work by choice, Irene was forced to take a job as a public relations consultant. She was by now over forty and was having to go out and work for the first time since her marriage. It was a financial necessity if she was to pay the bills, but she resented the fact that her job meant her youngest child was often forced to let herself into an empty flat with her own key when she came home from school. She hated the very idea of Olivia as a latchkey kid but it was case of needs must.
    Although Olivia has written some fine songs in her time, it is only comparatively recently that she has become a prolific songwriter. But some twenty years after being hit so hard by her parents’ separation, she was moved to put her feelings about divorce into words in the song ‘Changes’, which she wrote for her album If You Love Me Let Me Know . She wrote of weekly outings, gifts and picture shows which could not make up for the absence of a father, his voice, his touch, his manly sound. Olivia actually wrote the song for a friend but the sentiments she expressed in ‘Changes’ welled up from her own memories.
    When Olivia’s brother Hugh went off to university and Rona dropped out of school early at fifteen to follow her dream of becoming an actress and then soon got married, Olivia felt her father’s absence ever more keenly. ‘Being alone is hard to cope with,’ she noted. ‘Maybe that’s why I channelled all my energies into music. It helped me not to feel so alone and to accept what had happened.’
     
     
    With her keen ear for music, Olivia enjoyed tuning in to the radio in Australia to listen out for her favourite singers, who included Joan Baez, Dionne Warwick, Ray Charles and Nina Simone. ‘More than anyone else they were the people I listened to in Australia. I listened to the radio and I knew every pop song. I sang all the time for my family and friends, but if they asked me at school to get up and sing, I was always too shy.’
    Olivia’s reluctance to push herself forward was partly due to her embarrassment over having a double-barrelled surname. It made her feel self-conscious and it automatically set her apart