The Road from Coorain

by Jill Ker Conway

  Another thunderbolt struck one afternoon when I turned idly to look at the shelves behind me, my preparation for the upcoming lecture in psychology finished, and fifteen minutes remaining till the class began. I lifted from the shelves a volume of Jung’s Collected Works. Flipping through the pages, I began to read an essay entitled “The Positive and Negative Aspects of the Mother Archetype.” It was astounding. There I was, described to a T. There was my mother sitting on the page before me, as though Jung had known her every mood. I never went to the lecture on abnormal psychology, but instead read like one possessed. I needed no convincing that we were Demeter and Persephone, and that my mother would indeed turn the world about her into a desert of grief if she were to lose me. It was a comfort to see my life situation so well described, but it was also alarming to realize that it was even more elemental than I had supposed. The next time I was at a bookstore, I bought the Collected Works of Jung and set it on my bookshelves to go back to again and again. My psychology course was strictly behavioral in approach, and psychiatry in the Sydney of my day was the recourse of weaklings and emotional cripples. Yet there was no getting away from the fact that my mother’s emotional need for me went far beyond normal limits. Whenever my mind went down this path, I braced myself, gritted my teeth, and told myself not to complain. She had suffered a great deal and her care was my responsibility.

  My afternoons in the Fisher Library were solitary after the first term because early in the year Toni was dispatched on the standard Australian trip to Europe, a family stratagem to divert her from unacceptable romantic attachments. It was sad to see her walking, bright-eyed and elegant, out to the Qantas Constellation, shortly to depart in a flurry of propellers for Singapore, Karachi, and farther points en route for London. I knew I would miss her merry and intelligent laughter, and her sense of life as an unending human comedy. She had been wonderful company during my year of playful discovery of the University, and her good example had taught me that I need not be as compulsive about working as was my natural disposition.

  Not long after Toni’s departure, coming early to a lecture in Romantic poetry, I sat down beside a fair-haired young woman who, like me, always sat close to the front of the class. She stood out in the group for the melodiousness of her voice and her silvery peal of laughter, heard whenever the lecturer said something witty. We fell to chatting about the subject of the day’s lecture, and progressed quickly to introducing ourselves. Nina Morris was a few years my junior, and also in her second year at the University. Our paths had not crossed before because she had been educated at Catholic convent schools, whereas Abbotsleigh was Anglican. So great was the social chasm dividing Catholics and non-Catholics in Australian culture that schools did not compete in athletics across denominational lines, and the two groups kept pretty much to themselves during the first year of University. After the lecture, in which the instructor had inspired us all by describing Keats’s sense of the creative imagination as the capacity to pass through the house of life, never resting before a closed door, but instead opening the doors to one new experience after another through the power of empathy, we wandered off for coffee to prolong the excitement created by the skillful lecture and its wonderful subject.

  Nina became a daily companion. I was fascinated by her zest for life, her inexhaustible sociability, her curiosity about people, her religious sensibility. She was the first well-educated Catholic I had met, and her interest in sacred music, in contemporary painting and modern theater, opened a range of aesthetic interests to me which had not entered my life before. She was also the center of a lively group of friends who quickly also became mine. Cam McKinney, the child of an American father and Australian mother, looked at our world from the perspective of someone whose high school education had been in the United States. His vibrant, musical voice was never silent, and was regularly to be heard expounding on matters of taste and modern aesthetics with unconscious but well-informed authority. His quizzical gaze took in one’s appearance at a glance, and we all became accustomed to receiving his exacting grades for stodginess or style in our appearance. He was critical of the Australian female tendency to flowery emulation of the Royal Family, and mocked us into awareness of New York and Paris as the source of style and elegance. He studied anthropology and was forever explaining the social symbolism of our comings and goings, or of significant events in Australian life. His creative energy was so infectious it was impossible to be dull in his company.

  Vanessa Schneider, the most dazzling beauty of the group, shared Nina’s religious concerns; Patty O’Connel, vivacious, red-haired, bubbling with Irish wit, had the same talent for wicked social commentary that was so amusing in Cam McKinney; Ken Hosking and Hugh Gore, good-humored and hospitable neighbors in residence at St. Paul’s, the Anglican men’s college, shared Nina’s love of music and theater. All congregated in a circle held together by Nina’s zest for life and gift for entertainment. She was the hostess whose parties in her parents’ spacious flat in Mosman kept us all in lively contact. It was she who organized the delectable picnics we took to the beach at Newport or Palm Beach to celebrate the end of the examinations and the arrival of summer. A beach picnic under Nina’s supervision involved the provision of plentiful beach umbrellas for the morning to avoid sunburn for people with skin like mine; at least three courses of magically cooled food, eaten in the early afternoon on some tree-shaded rock above the beach where ants and flies never appeared; and an evening party at someone’s nearby house where we could shed the day’s sand, cool our sunburn, eat ravenously again, and talk late under the stars.

  I always enjoyed wandering into the dining room at the Women’s Union on days when Nina was about because I knew I would find her at the center of a lively group, eager to introduce me to interesting new people she had met, to tell the newest story, or offer a knowledgeable commentary on the orchestra’s performance at last night’s symphony concert.

  One afternoon, in the second term of our second year, I came in to find her with several newcomers in the group, including a newcomer I took for an Englishman because of his accent and manners. The general conversation was about Australian theater, and a new play which treated the experience of cane cutters in northern Queensland as though they were the stuff of Greek epic. My curiosity was piqued by our new companion’s comments. It was clear that he knew the London stage well, but little about Australia’s new and vibrant theatrical world. I was excited by the play and immediately dived into the conversation to defend it. It was the first I’d seen to treat real Australian types, and to make their experience universal. Seeing the world that way on the stage helped to undo a lifetime of lessons in geography. On our way to our three o’clock English class, Nina told me her friend was the heir to one of Australia’s great mining fortunes, but had been educated since early childhood in England and Europe. He was back in Australia to get to know his native country and to sample its culture for a year or two of university education.

  Peter Stone quickly became a member of our group, and soon my frequent escort. I liked hearing his downright views about Australian society announced with the self-confidence of an old Harrovian. They were a mixture of love for the natural world and its scenery, and impatience with Sydney’s provinciality. To my astonishment and delight he liked clever women and didn’t seem to think my reputation for learning detracted from my attractiveness. I was used to concealing how well I did academically when in male company, and to feigning interest in explications of subjects about which I knew a great deal more than the speaker. This was required conduct for women in Australia. It didn’t do to question male superiority in anything. One learned early not to correct mistakes in a male companion’s logic, and to accept the most patent misinformation as received truth. Peter would start to tell me something, watch my face assume the required expression of rapt interest, and burst out laughing. “But why am I telling you something you know all about anyway?” It was intoxicating not to have to set a watch on my tongue, to be ac
tually found more interesting because of my mind. In his company I enjoyed the experience an intellectual woman needs most if she has lived in a world set on undermining female intelligence: I was loved for what I was rather than the lesser mind I pretended to be. Our deep attraction for one another was mutual. He needed the affection of someone with a sense of purpose in life. I was totally unlike any debutante of the season, and bored by trendy small talk. I scarcely comprehended the international world in which he had been reared and on which he needed to gain perspective. Our lives and our interests were bound to diverge, because I was, without really knowing it, a genuine intellectual. He was intent on a career in business or government, something in my current phase of life I did not value. While we both teetered on the brink of adulthood, we were one another’s ideal companion, providing exactly the emotional energy needed to meet life and rise to its challenges.

  Peter’s mother and her friends were a window on another world. She had made several fashionable marriages and it seemed to me that she clearly intended to make another. Her friends were world-weary international travelers who talked about money and political scandals and told risqué jokes. They were amused by our intense affair and ever ready with worldly advice. “Why are you wasting time on Peter,” one remarked to me as the ladies took coffee apart from the gentlemen after a dinner party. “Why don’t you go off to London for a season. With your brains and your looks you could make a really splendid marriage.” It was comforting to be accorded such impressive sexual powers, and endlessly amusing to see how the world looked to such people, even as I was encouraging Peter to set course for a more purposeful and creative life. The thought of an imaginary London season could always divert and reassure me when I felt my afternoons working painstakingly in the library at my history research papers were unexciting.

  By forming my first deep attachment with Peter, I had complicated my life enormously. At home I made no secret of the depth of my attraction. Immediately I had to juggle a new set of conflicts. My mother waged undeclared war on the relationship, using every weapon in a formidable arsenal, and showing a brilliant tactical sense. If Peter’s Harrovian ways could be made to look foolish or superficial, she found the way to do it. If I could be embarrassed in front of him, she managed it with artistry worthy of Mrs. Siddons. Never an inspired cook, she contrived the most numbing combinations of backcountry food to give him “a taste of Australia.” Yet in another dimension of herself, she enjoyed watching me come into my own. Her lingering sense of adventure made her favor exploring new worlds. It reminded her of her own youth, and some of my stories made her recall her own growing up laughingly. It was when I spoke of forming a permanent attachment that her mood darkened and she insisted that I must finish my degree before I could consider any such commitment. After some painful discussions I learned not to raise the subject, because I encountered her in a new persona, a sardonic woman who mocked my emotional life as though it were the stupidest farce. I was startled and troubled by the destructiveness she revealed and tried to explain it away as the result of ill health.

  Peter’s lively sense of the absurd made him more than equal to tests of his digestion or mockery of his manners, but he was less tolerant of the time I needed for my work. I hadn’t experienced this conflict before, and dealt with it badly. I let tomorrow take care of itself, spent long golden afternoons wandering in rapt conversation through Sydney’s beautiful parks or along its shining white beaches, and let the hours needed for everything but the term’s required written work slide by. Then, when the last possible moment came for preparation for examinations, I simply disappeared to study and refused all invitations. This incomprehensible conduct produced many storms which left me feeling guilty about studying, a new and startling experience. Doing one’s best work was sacred in my family, and pressing though my mother’s demands for my company had been, she always yielded to my claim that I needed to be alone to study. When presented with the conflict, there was no question on which side I would finally come down. Studying history was more important to me than the strongest infatuation. I knew this was not the way women were supposed to be, but I couldn’t change my deepest motivations. I wondered what it would be like to be loved for one’s working self. In the Sydney of my day that didn’t happen to a woman.

  As my third year unfolded, my work became daily more intensely interesting. The third year was devoted to the study of the development of European imperialism, the history of the British Empire and Commonwealth, the history of the United States, and the emergence of the modern Dominions—Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and India. As we studied European imperialism the French, British, and Dutch empires were collapsing: the French army facing defeat at Dien Bien Phu; client states like Chiang Kai-shek’s China yielding to Mao Tse-tung’s Communist Chinese army; the new state of Indonesia, literally next door to Australia, was consolidating under an authoritarian regime following bitter ethnic and ideological strife; Australian troops fought beside the British in the campaign to suppress the Communist uprising in Malaya. It was logical to ask, Could Australia remain a white island in the South Pacific? In the postcolonial era, should it even try? To ask was to question the White Australia Policy, a racist article of faith which united every spectrum of political opinion in Australia, except the Communist Party.

  The study of imperialism could lead to comfortable identification with the metropolitan society and its values, something which had happened for many of my teachers, who were products of graduate study at Oxford or Cambridge, people who took Oxbridge to be the intellectual center of the globe and eagerly awaited their return there on sabbatical leave. Or it could open up profoundly subversive questions, even about contemporary Australia. If one looked at the baneful effects of cultural imperialism in India, what were they in Australia? My schooling had been supposed to be training an elite for leadership, but it had really been training me to imitate the ways and manners of the English upper class. To talk of Australian elites was to realize that the people I and my brothers had known in school were working not on Australia’s social and political problems, but on gaining recognition from an external British world. My male peers at the University of Sydney strove for a Rhodes scholarship, not so they could come back to tackle Australia’s problems, but to settle down happily to the life of an Oxford or Cambridge don, and forget about Australian culture as soon as possible. My friends on the left were no different. They were hostages to the worldview of the British working class, and the history of the nineteenth-century industrial revolution. Australia was different. Its class conflicts were real but they needed analysis on their own terms, not automatic redefinition in terms of received British Labour views. Study of the American Revolution raised the question of why Australia remained under the British monarchy, especially as Australia’s defense was now guaranteed not by Great Britain, but by the ANZUS Pact. Why did the crowds go into such an undignified frenzy whenever George Ill’s hardworking but intellectually undistinguished descendants paid a ceremonial visit to Australia? What was wrong with us? My generation knew it was the United States which had rescued Australia from occupation by the Japanese in the 1939–1945 War. Moreover, talk of the establishment of a postwar European Economic Community made us aware that Australia’s economic links with Great Britain were eroding. It was time to give up the pretenses of the old British Empire, recognize that we were a Southern Pacific nation, and begin to study and understand the peoples and countries of our part of the globe. I read Southeast Asian history and began to learn as much as I could about the politics and geography of the part of the world where I really lived.

  This change of worldview made for difficult relations with the older generation, and even with one’s peers who were not students of history and politics. When I told my mother that the White Australia Policy was wrong, a racist heritage from British colonialism, she burst into tears, claiming that she never expected to hear such heresy from a child of hers. From my new perspective, the ANZAC Day
we celebrated with such respect, remembering the courage of Australian troops at Gallipoli, had a different symbolic meaning. Colonial troops had been sent on an ill-conceived and bungled mission by a callous British government, which could afford to run the risk with troops whose parents, wives, and children were not voters at home. I saw Australia’s proud military history differently: the troops raised for the expedition to the Sudan, for the Boer War, for 1914–1918, for 1939–1945, were cherished for their valor and military prowess, but they could also be sent on the most dangerous and foolhardy expeditions (like the Canadians sent to certain death at Dieppe) without too serious political repercussions in Britain.

  As these political perceptions shattered most of the ideas I’d been brought up to take as the bedrock of moral and political values, my course in English literature had an equally profound impact. It was an extraordinary year. In English poetry, we studied Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, but Professor Wilkes, one of the most brilliant intellects of the Faculty of Arts, concluded the course with the poetry of Christopher Brennan, an Australian-Irish poet of great power. We had in our instructor someone who took Eliot’s conversion seriously, and whose own learning made it seem easy to comprehend the range of symbolism in Eliot’s poetry. He read poetry beautifully, so that one could hear people lay down their pens to listen to him recite “Ash Wednesday” or “Little Gidding.” I had never thought it possible to entertain religious belief, accepting, before I knew how to state it, Marx’s view of religion as the opiate of the masses. Now I listened while the intellectual and spiritual progression of one of the twentieth century’s great poetic geniuses was analyzed with great sensitivity. The verse became as much a part of the inner landscape of my mind as Shakespeare’s sonnets, and its language made it possible for me to examine my own religious feelings. To do so was unfashionable in the extreme. Australia’s academic culture was one of conformity to shallow rationalism and positivism. To think about taking Catholicism seriously was to begin to enter my father’s religious experience, and also to challenge my mother’s fierce belief that Catholicism was Popish nonsense aimed at the suppression of women. Nonetheless, I started reading other Catholic writers, Hopkins, Waugh, Graham Greene.