TIRIEL MORA Tiriel Mora grew up surrounded by iconic fi gures of the Australian art scene, due to the connections of his parents Mirka and Georges Mora. Tiriel forged his own successful career as an actor in some of Australia’s best-loved fi lms and TV shows, such as Th e Castle and Frontline. Life with his artist mother has been one surrounded by books, paintings and plenty of conversations. And in between? Th ere have been a few food fi ghts. cannot tell you how many times it has been said to me: ‘It I must’ve been absolutely fantastic to have Mirka Mora as your mother.’ I say: ‘Yes, but it was also challenging – sometimes, more challenging.’ It’s possible that Mirka related to people in a diff erent way, so they saw a very diff erent side of Mirka than I did. As a kid, you had to see the side of her that was your mother – a mother with a reputation for being diff erent. A lot of people use the word ‘eccentric’ but I don’t buy into that. I think there’s a lot more to it and I don’t think that’s on the money at all. 83 THINGS MY MOTHER TAUGHT ME Mirka was – and still is – just an extraordinary individual. Th ere’s no one else like her and that should be celebrated. It just took me a while to understand that. My mother was at a birthday party for one of my friends once and she picked up some food and threw it at someone else. Th en it was on. Food fi ght. Cake fl ying everywhere. I went through stages in my childhood, and certainly in my teenage years, of being embarrassed by some of those antics but, at the same time, I could see why she why she would be doing that. I could see past it because, let’s face it, food fi ghts are fun. I’ve started the odd one myself, on set. Th at’s Mirka’s infl uence. Georges couldn’t help but have a certain etiquette and correctness about him – ethics and morality and all that more conservative stuff . He was a huge contrast to Mirka in that way. I got a little bit of both of them. Being outrageously creative – and just outrageous – was just normal behaviour from my mother when I was growing up. Lots of fascinating, very bohemian stuff happened down at the beach house, which seemed normal to me. We’d see Charles Blackman painting a nude, but he was actually painting a nude – he was painting on a naked woman in the living room. Th ere’s a lovely photo in Mirka’s memoir, taken at the house on the beach at Aspendale in what would’ve been the early or mid-sixties. It’s of Mirka and Mary Perceval and I’m there with Alice Perceval, who was my childhood sweetheart. Both women have dropped their clothes and they’re showing their bums to the camera as a kind of joke, but if you look at the two kids, we’re just completely oblivious. Th at was my childhood. Mirka liked to shake things up a bit and shatter that staid, 84 TIRIEL MORA conservative kind of mindset. She liked to rebel against that, expose it and challenge it. I’ve got Mirka’s sense of absurdity and I like to think that I am capable of spontaneity. Mirka’s extroverted in many ways, and likes to be the centre of attention, so I’ve got a little bit of that but that’s also tempered by shyness. I’m not so self- conscious – I mean, you can’t be an actor and be too self- conscious. Th at freedom to express myself is very strongly infl uenced by Mirka. She also instilled in me the importance of belief in oneself. I think if you give a child belief in themselves that’s really, really a signifi cant thing. Th ere’s a fl uidity about what constitutes ego and what constitutes belief in oneself. It’s a fi ne line. It needs to be a healthy belief in oneself, as opposed to a delusional kind of thing. Being an artist and choosing to express that the way you want to does require great belief in yourself. It’s very similar thing with acting too. You get rejected so many times but you have to be resilient. Th at’s another thing I think I got from Mirka – her resilience. If you look back on what she went through in her childhood and what she was able to achieve – it’s amazing. After escaping the Nazis in France – escaping the death camps – she bounced back. When they got to Australia after the war, it must have been like an opportunity to remake yourself, in some ways, or to really be yourself. I think there was an incredible freedom in that. But that was in the context of a very conservative Melbourne in the early 1950s, so she had to rebel against that too. When it came to the way she mothered us, she wasn’t following any set rules on what she meant to be like. An artist will often sacrifi ce certain aspects of their other life to concentrate and focus and be devoted to what they’re 85 THINGS MY MOTHER TAUGHT ME doing. If she analyses her own approach, she’ll say that her art comes fi rst and the kids come second, but she’ll also say: ‘Oh, I was always painting with you in my arm.’ As for the stories of her childhood, she didn’t talk about them a lot. I think much of it was very painful for her. Th at’s often the case when people have something traumatic in their family history and it makes it diffi cult to share. It’s not much fun to go over those experiences and try to relate them in a way that doesn’t terrify your child. It’s not so much about family mythology, it’s more about the fact that these are the experiences we come from and this explains why we are the way we are and why we take this positive and constructive approach to being in this society. Georges was very reluctant to talk about his experience in the French Resistance and maybe he didn’t want to make it sound more adventurous than the hell war actually is. I’ve used the word ‘resilient’ about Mirka before and she is – there’s a stoicism, a survivor element there, that was in both of them. Th at’s a pretty important thing to hand down to a child. You can’t force a child to have empathy but you can expose them to ideas and thoughts and other people’s situations, where empathy is the primary response and the default position – those were things that were handed down through the experiences of both Georges and Mirka from their lives during the war. I’ve never understood the term ‘tolerance’ when you talk about people coming from diff erent cultures to Australia. I think the word should be more like ‘acceptance’. My feelings of Mirka were always really aff ectionate and she spoiled me rotten. Th ere was always classical music playing and she would explain the stories behind the pieces – embellishing 86 TIRIEL MORA with more details about what the composers were doing and why there was a focus on this particular instrument or that one. I couldn’t help but have an enormous respect and love of art. I never felt that I was worse off because Mirka was an artist – there were many more positives to that than negatives. I can’t think of any negatives at the moment but when I was younger I know there were times I did. I wouldn’t let Mirka walk to school with me because of the clothes she wore – space boots and crazy stuff like that in the sixties. I had a conservative desire not to stand out. I didn’t want to be ridiculed because my mum dressed funny, or just because those kids up the street wouldn’t understand a bohemian artist. Th e idea of being yourself would’ve been a big shock for those kids. But even though there were those times when I didn’t want to draw attention to myself, thanks to Mirka I did have the capacity to be myself in primary school. It was a wonderfully positive thing – a reinforcement in that belief in yourself and that concept that no idea is unworthy of contemplation. Mirka would always come out with some left-fi eld view on a problem. So, as a teenager, if I asked her about girls or relationships, she’d come out with something absolutely not useable. What was great about it was that she came up with stuff you just wouldn’t expect. But then I’d go to Georges and get a more sensible opinion. I had a kind of independent existence, growing up. Mirka lived up the road when I was about eleven and we lived with Georges in a hotel in St Kilda. Th e waitresses were like our big sisters – Georges was overseas a lot. I would go to visit Mum just to hang out in her environment because her environment 87 THINGS MY MOTHER TAUGHT ME was fantastic – but part of the joy in being part of it was that I could then leave it and come somewhere that was calmer and less chaotic.