As much as he was enjoying working in construction, David also had a hankering to see more of the world. When he and Carol learned that Dale and Eric Nyback, whom they had befriended at church, were returning to their native Canada, they decided to travel with them. David and Carol decided that if they liked Canada, they might settle there, and to that end Carol applied for a teaching job in Prince Rupert, British Columbia.
In mid-1967, the two couples set sail from Sydney aboard the liner Marconi bound for Naples, Italy. The trip would take two weeks to complete via the Suez Canal, but when the ship reached the Suez Canal, fighting had broken out between Egypt and Israel, and the canal was closed to shipping. The ship was forced to spend the next month making its way around the tip of Africa and then up the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea to reach its destination.
The voyage was tedious for David. The extra four weeks it took to reach their destination was almost too much for him to bear. He tried his best to fill in the time, and he admired the way Carol could sit calmly on deck and while away the hours reading books. To help break the monotony, in the mornings he and Carol attended Italian lessons on board, and to David’s surprise he had a natural ability for learning languages. By the time they reached Naples, David was able to make himself understood quite well in Italian to the locals.
The two couples bought a car together in Naples and set out to see Italy and then made their way across Europe. When they reached Amsterdam, the Nybacks flew on to Canada while David and Carol traveled on to England. When they reached London, the Bussaus realized that their finances were running low. David took a job working in a bread factory at night and on construction sites during the day while Carol worked in a chocolate factory hand-wrapping Easter eggs and other chocolate confections.
Finally, after earning some money in London, David and Carol made it to Vancouver, Canada, where the Nybacks lived. By now Carol had heard that the teaching job in Prince Rupert was hers if she wanted it, and they did some research on Prince Rupert to check the city out. Tucked just below Canada’s border with Alaska, it was a cold and isolated place, and both David and Carol had doubts about whether it was the place for them.
David and Carol moved on, first to Japan and then to the Philippines. David had observed small pockets of poverty in some of the ports of call the Marconi had made on the way to Naples, but in Manila, the Philippines’ sprawling, overcrowded capital, he saw firsthand poverty on a scale that he had never seen before. He wished that he could do something about it, but he was just one man passing through on a visit, and what difference could one man make anyway to such an overwhelming problem?
A year after setting out from Australia, David and Carol arrived back in Sydney, where they rented another flat in Rose Bay. David went back to working with Jack Ginnery at the construction company while Carol took a job at Dymocks, a large bookstore. It felt good to be back in Australia. The couple resumed regular attendance at Waverly Methodist Mission and were quickly absorbed in various church activities.
Carol worked at Dymocks for over a year before she told David that she felt strong enough to take on the challenge of teaching again. David encouraged and supported her as she took a job at Rose Bay Elementary School. The class she taught was challenging. The children were hard to control, and Carol fought hard to focus on their schoolwork. When Carol learned that the teacher she had replaced had left with a breakdown, she quipped to David one day, “The teacher I replaced left with a breakdown, and here I am recovering from one.” David smiled, amazed at how his wife was handling the difficult teaching assignment.
During this time Carol struck up a friendship with Jack Ginnery’s sister, Ruth Moss. Ruth and her husband Alf and daughter Elizabeth lived in an old turn-of-the-century home on Darley Road in Randwick, across from Centennial Park. During the weekends the park was a haven for Sydney’s residents who flocked there to walk or ride their bikes along its trails, ride horses, feed the ducks bobbing about on the many ponds that dotted the park, or just wander across the vast areas of grassed parkland. The location was wonderful, and Carol loved going to the house to visit Ruth.
Soon after New Year 1969, David and Carol received some wonderful news. Carol was pregnant. David was elated at the thought of becoming a father, yet both he and Carol were concerned about the effects that the drugs Carol took might have on the child. Still, it was time to think about their future as a family. As they thought about it, David and Carol came to the conclusion that the future for them was in Australia, not in returning to New Zealand. In fact, they had not been back to New Zealand in over three years. They liked the life they had created for themselves in Sydney and so decided to stay.
David was not content to just keep on renting a flat to live in, especially not with their first child on the way. If Sydney was to be their home, he wanted to own his own house there. When Alf Moss announced to David and Carol during lunch at the Moss home one Sunday that the house two doors down was for sale, David was immediately interested. He gulped down the rest of his meal, and then he and Alf went off to see the place. It was an old, rambling, two-story house that needed a lot of repairs, but it sat right across from Centennial Park on a large block of land. When David finally returned with Alf to the Mosses’ home several hours later, he had a broad grin on his face and announced to Carol that he had arranged to buy the house for twenty-six thousand dollars.
David had to take out three mortgages to purchase the property, but he had a plan to pay the loans back as fast as he could. Once he and Carol took possession of the huge house, they got to work painting and repairing damaged floorboards and walls. The house was so big that David divided it into three apartments. He and Carol would live in the front apartment, and he would rent out the other two apartments, using the money he received to pay off his mortgages.
Now that they had a place of their own in which to live, David looked forward to the birth of their first child. At the same time, he threw his energies into developing the construction business.
Chapter 8
Booming Business
With each passing month of her pregnancy, Carol grew more tired, and David found himself doing most of the domestic chores around the house. He didn’t mind, though. He was happy to think that he would soon be a father, and since he ran the construction company from home, he could work the chores around his business activities.
Business was booming at Carness Constructions, the company David and Jack Ginnery co-owned. Sydney was undergoing a building boom, and builders were in high demand. David and Jack’s company specialized in renovating expensive houses in the exclusive Double Bay and Vaucluse areas of Sydney, and its services were in high demand.
When Jack decided that it was time for him to retire, David bought out his share of the business. Soon afterward he formed two more companies, Bussau Constructions and Crowder Constructions. David managed the three companies, and each company took on separate building contracts. David had set things up this way so that in case one of the companies got into financial difficulty and was forced into bankruptcy, that company would not drag the other two companies down with it. David also set up a separate joinery business at the back of his property on Darley Road. There, Ari Neves, a French joiner, kept busy making the stairs, doors, and window frames needed for the various renovation projects the three construction companies were undertaking.
Between his construction business and taking care of Carol, David was kept very busy, but he didn’t mind. He liked to work hard, and besides, he would have a baby to support any day now. That day arrived on October 29, 1969, when Carol delivered a baby daughter, whom they named Natasha. At twenty-eight years of age, David Bussau was finally a father. He and Carol were delighted when they learned that Natasha was a normal, healthy baby and had not suffered any effects from the medications Carol was taking.
From the start, David enjoyed his role as a dad. He spent hours playing with and cooing over Natasha.
At Christmas, Norm and Phyl Crowder, Carol’s parents, arrived in Sydney to visit their daughter and see their new granddaughter. David could see that his father-in-law was particularly proud of Natasha and played up the role of doting grandpa to the hilt. After ten days in Sydney the Crowders headed back to New Zealand. Phyl would like to have stayed longer, but Norm felt the need to get back to his shoe factory.
Six months after the Crowders had visited, David and Carol received the news that Norm had died of a heart attack. As sad as they were at learning of his death, they were also glad that he’d had the opportunity to see his granddaughter.
Between his duties as a father, David kept busy with the construction business. Then in April 1971, he and Carol received more good news. Carol was pregnant once again. On December 24, 1971, Carol gave birth to their second child, another girl, whom they named Rachel. Now David was the proud father of two girls. He could not have been happier.
Having one child to look after had been a challenge for Carol. This was not because she wasn’t a good mother—indeed David was deeply impressed with her mothering skills—but because of the nagging tiredness she felt as a result of the medication she took for her condition. With two small children to take care of, things now became unbearable for Carol. She would become so tired and desperate for a nap that she would lay out toys for the children to play with and collapse onto the sofa to sleep, hoping the girls would wake her if they needed her.
David was not happy about the situation. He was concerned about what could happen to the girls while Carol slept. They might find a way out of the house, choke on something, or burn themselves on the radiators that warmed the house during the winter. Carol wasn’t happy about the situation either. She was taking five different prescription drugs three times a day. One day she decided that she’d had enough. That night she told David that she had decided to stop taking all of her medications. “Those girls are depending on me. I have to pull myself together. I have to get out of myself,” she explained.
David listened patiently. What Carol was planning to do was risky. But then so was leaving the girls alone while she slept. David had no idea what kind of journey they had set themselves on, but he was committed to Carol. If she thought she should do it, he would stand behind her 100 percent.
Carol was ready, and before David knew it, she had flushed her prescription drugs down the toilet. Without the medication, her body went numb as David tried to comfort her and take care of the children. He could see that withdrawing from the drugs was taking a toll on his wife, but she was determined. Carol refused to even consider going back on the medication. That was a quality David so admired in her. Once she set her mind to something, she never looked back, never second-guessed her decision.
It took two weeks, but Carol was finally able to confess to David that she felt remarkably better without the medication in her system. She felt more alert than she had felt in years. She also had more energy and effortlessly gave up her nap times. David was delighted, but like Carol, he was vigilant in case any of the symptoms of her illness returned. But none did. There were no more seizures, no more phobias, no more obsessions. Without these things that had dominated her life for so long, David watched as Carol’s confidence and sense of self-worth began to grow with each passing day. To him she seemed alive once again, as though she had been set free from a cell in which she’d been imprisoned for years.
