How his mother’s Alzheimer’s reshaped Mark Seymour’s view of love
Mark writes about his mother Paula’s journey with Alzheimer’s Disease.
Author: Mark Seymour, The Australian.
Date: 15 September 2025.
Article Text
How his mother’s Alzheimer’s reshaped Hunters and Collectors frontman Mark Seymour’s view of love
The cruel reality of Alzheimer’s disease forced Hunters and Collectors’ Mark Seymour to confront his past, leading to an unexpected discovery in his mother Paula’s final years.
Singer-songwriter and former Hunters & Collectors frontman Mark Seymour who performed his song, Classrooms and Kitchens, for The Australian. Aaron Francis / The Australian
We like to think our lives are a sum of choices, good and bad. We set goals constantly, believing that one day we’ll get it right. “It’s up to you, mate.” You hear that all the time. Or, “don’t dwell on the past”, as if looking back is a trap, a retreat from responsibility. But the truth is, childhood events set us up for life.
Childhood memory is like a labyrinth of images that can erupt years later and suddenly change the way we see the world.
Family is the foundation of who we are regardless of what comes later, for the simple reason that siblings and parents were right there when you first burned your hand on the stove or came unstuck on your first pushbike or got a fishbone caught in your throat at the kitchen table on a Friday night and screamed the house down. Or that time you belted your brother – and paid for it.
Mark Seymour performs a heartfelt song he wrote for his late mother, Paula, who passed away after living with dementia.
You learned not from your mistakes but from how they reacted, your mum and your dad and your siblings, from that time in your life when you knew nothing about human nature or how complicated it would prove to be. Loved ones either reached out and supported you or clocked you for “getting it wrong”.
So when a family member faces a crisis, no matter where you are, you will feel the pull and arrive with grace or guilt, or maybe a mix of both. Either way, the bonds of early life are unbreakable. I left home at 20, determined to sever them forever. My suburban adolescence, my parents, my faith and the trap I thought I was escaping, only to be confronted by the truth of my childhood some 40 years later when I held my mother’s hand in the last months of her life, her mind long hidden in the fog of advanced dementia.
Alzheimer’s is a cruel disease. I know very little about it but, like most Australians, the one thing I’m of sure of is that once you’ve got it there’s no way back. You will see your loved one drift inexorably into coma, organ failure and, finally, death. That’s it. The unvarnished truth. There’s no point in softening the blow here. Better forewarned, I believe.
We’re all understandably afraid of it but in the midst of those years of hardness something strangely beautiful burst forth for me in my relationship with Paula.
There are hundreds of care facilities in the suburbs of every town and city. Dementia is huge, let me tell you. But once you’ve got the bed, the right care and the right people, things settle into a routine, and routine is crucial, especially for the sufferer. And intuition counts for a lot as well, so you just turn up and feel your way forward. Sit and talk quietly. We sang, a lot. Her room turned campfire. Voices mattered. The voices of her children came around her and no matter how lost she seemed at times, as the doctor said: “She knows you’re there. Don’t worry. She knows so you don’t have to push it.”
And you can’t. Not really. You become gentle.
I’d drop in on the way home from the airport and end up staying with her for hours, unintentionally at first; then found myself intoning prayers and I wondered why I felt the need. Catholic prayers, of course. Under my breath I’d rattle off the Nicene Creed, which is a hell of a mouthful at best, and she’d join in, intoning words that ran deep into our shared past.
Was this my best shot at caring? Whatever the answer, my mother’s suffering swept all my conceit aside and then, after witnessing her decline into silence, eventually I just sat in silence myself and the memories crept in, so distant I wasn’t even sure they were real at first.
But there was one that came with blinding clarity.
Paula Seymour was a schoolteacher, historian and mother of Mark, Hilary, Helen and Nick. Paula died in 2015. Picture: Supplied by Mark Seymour
Paula was inspiration for Mark Seymour’s song Classrooms and Kitchens. Picture: supplied by Mark Seymour
I was three and we were living in Corryong, the little alpine town nestled on the high plains of northeastern Victoria in a two-bedroom cottage out on the Nariel Creek Road. I was sitting at the kitchen table, my face covered with egg. My sisters, Hilary and Helen, were already at school and baby brother Nick was sleeping in the cot. Paula had whipped out in the break to pick blackberries from down along the creek. She came back with two briquette bags full, her fingers scored by the thorns, then spent the afternoon stewing them in a massive iron pot on the slow combustion stove.
“Blackberry jam,” she said with relish, glancing across at me grinning, perhaps, or to see how much egg was landing on the floor while she slowly turned the stewing berries and gazed out the window to the mountains not far away. I remember the radio was on. It was the ABC; Blue Hills, by Gwen Meredith. Paula hummed the tune, her voice sweet and warm. She was in command of her domain or maybe it was seeing her in that way: the sound of her singing, the comfort of food, the thick aroma of blackberry rising in the steam. Alone with Mum.
The Seymour Family singers outside the Beaufort Shire Hall in regional Victoria, in 1967. From left: Nick, Helen, Mark and Paula Seymour. Picture: Supplied by Mark Seymour
Maybe that’s why the memory came back … and maybe it defined me even then. The idea of singing as a life journey.
In 2014 the memory became a song, Classrooms and Kitchens, and I became a servant of a deeper truth out on that long road I took with her, as the airport drop-ins turned into whole afternoons of song and prayer, holding her hand, listening to the birds singing in the garden outside her window, feeding her lamb and three veg with a plastic spoon as the sun set and the dark clouds closed in.
I was scared of Alzheimer’s at first, as most of us are, but once you surrender to the facts, knowing that she must as well, the hardness in you will soften as it did in me. Tenderness and affection took over. I felt for her and she was transformed by “love”. I use that word cautiously of course, schooled as I was in the dogma of the church. In my youth I could only see all the moral urgings leading one way, and how that very word was used to conceal dark things.
But the truth is simple as well. However you were raised, when you are confronted by the suffering of someone so close, you step up, as your parents did for you when you were a little child. It was a question of respect at first but Alzheimer’s changed me, irrevocably.
There was no choice.
Is that love?
Paula died in 2015. She was a very intelligent woman. X
Mark Seymour is a singer, songwriter and was the frontman and founding member of legendary Australian band Hunters & Collectors.
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