A First Place

by David Malouf

  Like each of the states, Queensland had its own, quite peculiar education system.

  Before it became the most backward place in Australia, Queensland was, for a time, the most progressive. In the last years of the nineteenth century a scholarship system was set up. Somewhere between twelve and fourteen every child in Queensland did an exam called the Scholarship. If you passed, the government paid half your secondary-school fees. The catch was that having offered half payment of fees the government felt it could leave the establishment of the schools themselves to some other authority. Most secondary schools in Queensland were private, the majority of them run by a church. (Brisbane, for example, had only one state high school, plus a commercial and industrial college, till 1957 – and this for a city of half a million.) The result was that only about 7 per cent of Queensland children were educated beyond primary level. The rest, among them some of the brightest, went straight to work, and, self-educated and aggressively proud of it, became some of the top men in industry, the public service and even ministers in the government.

  Some of my contemporaries have asserted that the education they got contained nothing ‘distinctively Australian’. This may be true of other parts of Australia, but was not our case.

  The intention, clearly, of what appeared in the Queensland School Readers, for example, was to introduce young people whose formal education might go no further to as much of their cultural inheritance as could be crammed into seven short volumes, and it was taken for granted that a good proportion of that shared culture would be local. So short stories and poems by Lawson, Kendall, Adam Lindsay Gordon, Mary Hannay Foott, Roderick Quinn, Victor Daley and Dorothea Mackellar (to mention only those whose names are still known) appear in these readers alongside the Greek myths, Aesop’s fables, tales from The Arabian Nights and later tales by Perrault and Hans Andersen, excerpts from twenty or more novelists from Bunyan and Defoe to Robert Louis Stevenson, and the whole range of English poetry, including a dozen or more excerpts from Shakespeare, several poems from Childe Harold, the whole of ‘The Ancient Mariner’, and rather more than one might have wished of Longfellow. Some of the material was European rather than British – French, German, Scandinavian, Russian (there were short pieces by both Tolstoy and Turgenev) – and some of it was American, including Emerson’s essay on Lincoln. There were also inspirational essays on artists (Dante, Beethoven, Millet and the Renaissance potter, Bernard Palissy) and another set on scientists (Newton, Jenner, Pasteur and the Curies).

  As for the Australian material, the tone of that was aggressively national, full of the spirit of achievement, of Australian independence and mateship and triumph over the odds.

  Life in Australia, we were told, was grim – I am thinking now of pieces like ‘Out Where the Dead Men Lie’ and George Essex Evans’ ‘The Women of the West’, which might account for the insistence, throughout the readers, on hard work, obedience, moral fortitude and mutual dependence; but some of the poems, notably Kendall’s ‘The Bellbirds’, do respond to the beauty of the place, and there is at least one suggestion, in Kendall’s ‘The Last of His Tribe’, that not all suffering in Australia was white. There was, especially in later books, a good deal about social justice, and some recognition that the love of freedom was not exclusively British (Mazeppa appears as a prototype national hero, along with Boadicea and Hereward the Wake) and the seventh-grade reader, put together in 1927, is strongly internationalist and anti-war.

  The set novel in my Scholarship year, 1946, was also Australian, We of the Never Never, a book, for all its being a local classic, that was as remote from my experience then as The Hunchback of Notre Dame or Wuthering Heights or Barnaby Rudge, except that these novels, which I read at much the same time, told me something I wanted to know about, which was how passionate and cruel and irrational life could be, and what it was, behind all their concern for cleanliness and godliness, that the adults of my world might actually be up to. These non-Australian works went deeper into my imagination, into my nature too, than anything Mrs Aeneas Gunn had to tell. Like most youthful readers I wanted something that would feed my sense of possibilities, show me how rich and excessive life could be, how dangerous, how glorious too. With Wuthering Heights, Barnaby Rudge, The Hunchback of Notre Dame I was embarking on those dangerous seas of ‘fiction’. There would be time later to come to the mature conclusion that it was not to be confused with ‘life’, and then to see that it was life too, just as our lives could be the matter of fiction.

  What I mean to illustrate in all this is the different periods and places a little mind may be simultaneously at large in; without stress and without feeling it as anything other than normal. It is of the essence of minds that they are capable of existing in contrary states. The process that made me is a typical one and a typically Australian one. How typical an Australian it made me is another matter.

  The migrant background – the double one, Lebanese and English – gave me, I think, a particular sense of how accidental, how contingent the facts of a life may be. For many migrants who came to Australia, as my mother did, in late childhood, when their lives had already begun to assume an expected shape, translation to the new place was never quite complete; the old one continued in a ghostly way as an alternative life unlived, a promise broken.

  For all its being daily and real, life in the new place had an accidental or provisional quality. I sensed this quite strongly in my mother and felt it again later in others. Closely related to this was the accidental quality of what I felt I was.

  All children are fascinated by the long-shots and chances that made them what they are, the fatality, for example, that brought their parents together. There is a moving poem of Thomas Hardy, ‘A Church Romance (Mellstock: circa 1835)’, in which he reaches back to his own moment of beginning, when his mother

  Turned in the high pew, until her sight

  Swept the west gallery, and caught its row

  Of music-men with viol, book, and bow

  And recorded

  A message from his string to her below,

  Which said: ‘I claim thee as my own forthright!’

  Hardy is recognising how he came to be from the meeting of two glances in a small community in Dorset. But the space my parents had to cross, the unlikeliness of their having come together at all, was extraordinary. It too was an especially Australian eventuality. I have always been impressed by the degree to which accident may be fate.

  Australia is often seen as a special case because we are trying to make a life of the mind, as well as a daily life, in a place that was not originally ours. This may be of special interest to Australians but it is not unique. Human history everywhere is about the movement of people, about migration and settlement. The classical world knows this well enough to make it the subject of all foundational myths. To occupy new land – to take its flora and fauna into your consciousness and spiritualise it and make it your own – is an activity that is essentially human, part of the great work of culture. It takes time.

  In Australia that has already been done once, in their own way and over forty thousand years, by the Aborigines. We are doing it again, in ours. But the English, to take just one example – I could take the Hungarians, the Turks, the French – are not the aboriginal inhabitants of their land either. They too were settlers, latecomers. We just happen to be two, rather than fifteen, hundred years along the way.

  As for how you do this, we are sometimes told that a real culture can only be made in specifically local terms and with local means; that there is something inauthentic about living through what is taken up from elsewhere; and it is true that some great literatures have been made in this purely native way, or some parts of them. But what are we to say of how the Elizabethans used Renaissance Italy, appropriating Italian forms, and tropes and ideas, and a vocabulary too that was in no way native, to discover a richer sense of what it was to be English? Or the way German writers of Lessing and Goethe’s generation discovered the fullness of their Ge
rmanness in the Classical world.

  What these examples speak of is the imaginative possibilities of living in and through other cultures to find your own, misreading sometimes, and mis-adapting as you translate into your own terms, but getting it wrong in the right – that is, the most useful – way. Such local adaption is not just translation or appropriation but a critical dialogue with what it takes up that is itself a work of culture.

  The truth is that nations, like individuals, can live simultaneously in different places in the same place, and are no less complex and resourceful than minds are in using diverse, paradoxical and sometimes contrary influences to make something that will be entirely their own.

  Campagnatico 1984 – address to Australian

  Literature Conference, Milan, November 1984

  AS HAPPY AS THIS

  1

  I GREW UP WITH ONLY one set of grandparents. My mother’s mother died in 1929 and for four years afterwards my mother, the youngest of her family, kept house for her father in rooms full of ceiling-high Edwardian wardrobes above a shop in the Valley. She and my father had been ‘going together’ since she was a girl of eighteen. They were held back from marriage by a difference in religion that in those days was very nearly insuperable, but also, after my grandmother died, by her attachment to her father. After fourteen years they must have decided to force the issue. They married in October 1933 and I was born in the following March. My grandfather died three months later.

  So I knew my mother’s parents only through the stories she told, but she told them so often, and with so many vivid appeals to what she knew would impress and excite us, that these middle-class English grandparents, who had left a five-storeyed house in New Cross with servants’ bells in every room for a tent on the goldfields at Mount Morgan, though I had never seen them in the flesh, were more real to me than my father’s people, who lived two doors away and whom I saw every day of the week. More real because – unencumbered by the actualities of sweat-circles under the arms, a torn buttonhole – they came with the clarity and far-off glow of figures I knew only through my mother’s anxious devotion to them, and my own eagerness as a child to be caught up and enveloped in what she felt.

  My mother, the youngest of seven, had left England when she was ten. One of the things she kept all her life was a coloured postcard of the ship they came out on, the Orsova, thirteen thousand tons, and the year 1913 – a whole string of unlucky numbers. Another was a pair of miniatures out of a locket: my grandfather in his thirties, looking princely in a stiff shirt-front, waxed moustaches, a Van Dyck beard; my grandmother, round-chinned and pampered, in satin leg-o’-mutton sleeves. How could my father’s people compete?

  Our grandmother kept a corner shop. Though fine boned and doll like, she had worked hard all her life and when I knew her wore always the same floral apron over a frock of some dark, silky material. Her stockings were rolled above the knee, and sometimes, when she came in tired from the shop and sat to rest her feet, or lifted her skirt very delicately between thumb and forefinger and shook it to make a breeze, you saw the shocking white of her thighs above the rolled wad. My grandfather, fuzzy with stubble, was most often in the saggy pants and collarless striped shirt in which he gardened at the bottom of our yard. As for servants, all they had was Della, a big slummocky girl of forty with thinning hair who was always half asleep on her feet.

  My father’s parents were foreign. They ate outside, at a pinewood table in a courtyard behind the shop, with forms instead of chairs and no cloth; they smelled of garlic. But they were not exotic like my English grandparents. If we asked no questions about them it was because none occurred to us – they were there and visible – but also because we knew the sort of answers we would get. Our father was silent by temperament, but also, I think, because, unlike our mother, words did not suit him, he was uneasy with them. Perhaps this came from a sense he had of their treacherous power. As a child he had been his parents’ interpreter and had seen them shamefully stripped of their authority while he stepped in, very bright and winning as he must have been, to deal between them and a baffling and sometimes hostile world.

  Like all his brothers and sisters he was born in Australia and spoke only English. If he still had some understanding of Arabic by the time I knew him, he gave no indication of it. And the truth is that however painful it must have been to my grandmother to lose contact with her children in this way, she herself had set them on the path. Since there was no Melkite church in the place, she had insisted on their going to mass each day at St Mary’s, Boundary Street, where the form of Catholicism they got and the values and culture they took on were Irish. After a time, they might just as well, for all the difference it made, have been O’Dwyers or Flynns. My father especially, who was the most outgoing of his family, as well as the eldest, was soon as unambiguously Australian as any other member of the rough Rugby pushes that in the years before the Great War made up the mixed and lively world of South Brisbane. When the time came there can have been no question of his pleasing his parents by choosing some nice girl out of the ten or twelve families of their close-knit, islanded community. He acted like a local and chose for himself.

  2

  They met in 1920. It was my mother’s father who introduced them.

  A descendant of Daniel Mendoza, the creator of modern boxing, and himself a keen follower of the game, he had taken a fancy to my father, who was in those days a promising featherweight, and had brought him home, perhaps out of a wish to help this attractive young working man in his more ordinary career as a carter – one of my mother’s brothers, Bert, who also lived at home, owned a section at the Markets. My father, who had left school at twelve to become a postboy with Cobb and Co., then a storeman and delivery boy for a local grocer, was in business for himself by the time my grandfather met him, with his own horse and cart. He was twenty-three and my mother eighteen.

  That she was immediately interested is proved by the box of newspaper cuttings she kept, the earliest of which dates from the same year: ‘George Malouf’s brilliant victory over Soldier Ernie Andrews has started the popular Railway League footballer on a campaign for the highest in the game … Malouf has got the punch and the fighting temperament to carry him far, and as he is an exemplary liver, nothing should be beyond him.’

  My grandfather, no doubt, in his role as patron, found these qualities entirely admirable, but he can hardly have seen this clean-living young footballer, for all the talent he showed in the ring, as a prospective son-in-law. My mother did, and must have been determined, well beyond her experience and her years, that this gentle, fine-looking fellow, even if he was the wrong religion, was to be her addition to the family, not her father’s. Quite soon they were seeing each other virtually every day. He would call in at the Valley shop on his rounds. On Friday nights they went to the pictures, at the weekend on picnics down the Bay to Cribb Island or Amity. At Christmas they exchanged cards. When my mother went to Coolangatta for a week – but this was five years later, in 1925 – they corresponded, he rushing home from work each day to write his three or four pages to catch the post. These letters my mother also kept.

  He had little education. The phrases he falls back on are often conventional. But there are moments when, under the pressure of emotion, he manages an old-fashioned gracefulness of expression that is all his own. ‘Dear,’ he writes, ‘I was not far away when you left this morning but could not come close enough to let you see me or I would of broken up. As a matter of fact I did when I was on my own … Fancy having to wait another six days to see you!’ They were to be separated only twice more in the following forty years. Once married, they never again spent a night apart.

  In January 1927, my mother and brother Bert took my grandmother, who was already ailing, to Stanthorpe, where he had friends among the apple and pear growers. Perhaps they were getting their mother away from Brisbane’s fierce summer heat. Once again, my parents wrote daily and each night she rang him.

  (I see h
im seated in the shop in the swelter of a January night. Flying ants are wreathing the lights under the high ceiling, which is of beaten tin with a fleur-de-lys pattern, painted cream. A ceiling fan clicks and stirs the soupy air. The refrigerator hums and shudders. He is figuring in his near hand the area of various rooms in the block of flats he is planning for the site of some dirty tumbledown shops in Melbourne Street, and which he will build nine years later after a fire. When a child comes in for a pound of sugar or two slices of Windsor sausage, he gets up to spare his mother, keeping the figures, and the rooms, in his head, while the child, all eyes for the black jelly-beans in a lolly jar, waits on one foot for his note to be deciphered. At last the phone rings. He lifts the receiver down from its hook, leans in to the flower-like black trumpet, torn between his wish to talk up and bring himself close to her and the need to be low and intimate.)

  While she was away he kept himself busy building what he calls a ‘humpy’ – presumably the little half-open shed in his parents’ yard where my grandfather kept sacks of rice for cabbage rolls, wheat for kibbeh, his rake, shovel, wheelbarrow and the sieve with which, in my clearest memory of him, he is standing out in the sunny expanse of the yard winnowing grain.

  ‘Dear,’ my father writes, ‘what’s the use of going out. I could not enjoy it myself. I am quite contented, or at least, I have made myself contented, doing that little work on the humpy. By the time you come home it will be nearly finished, or at least, I hope so.’ He asks after her mother, envies them the cool nights and mornings up there, is glad she has put on a few pounds, and hopes her brother will do the same.