I was angry with myself for being so upset by receiving the treatment I ought to have expected anyway. I took myself to task for my feelings of sadness that there seemed nothing intellectually challenging that I could usefully do. I was a privileged young woman in a privileged society, and my small injuries were nothing beside the whole weight of human misery that weighed down the twentieth century. Beside the Holocaust or the genocide taking place at that very moment in Indonesia, where millions of men, women, and children, members of ethnic minorities, were being killed, my affronts were trivial. They were nothing beside the handicaps my aboriginal friend Ron, who had been such a loyal worker at Coorain, faced every day. Yet try as I might, I couldn’t choke back a sense of grief for my lost self.
My new ability to empathize with other women made me see my mother differently. My perceptions were so painful I could hardly bear them. As I sat listening to her railing against life, her language growing more extreme as she progressed through several of the brandy and sodas she liked in the evening, I would place beside her in my mind’s eye the young competent woman, proud, courageous, and generous, I’d known as a child. I was living with a tragic deterioration brought about because there was now no creative expression for this woman’s talents. Lacking a power for good, she sought power through manipulating her children. The mind that once was engaged in reading every major writer of the day now settled for cheap romances, murder mysteries, and a comfortable fuzz of tranquilizers and brandy at the end of the day. No one had directly willed her decline. It was the outcome of many impersonal forces, which had combined to emphasize her vulnerabilities. The medical fashion of the day decreed that troubled middle-aged women be given tranquilizers and sedatives. She, once a rebel, had acquiesced in settling down to live the life of an affluent woman. Society encouraged a woman to think her life finished after her husband’s death and encouraged a woman’s emotional dependence on her children. I forgave her neurotic illnesses and her long, angry tirades against the doctor of the moment. I heard them now as expressions of her own frustrations at having no chance at professional training in medicine. She, who would have been a great healer, was now busily contriving her own ill health. I often needed several very stiff Scotches to get myself through an evening with this inner monologue proceeding while I feigned attention to the subject of the moment.
I found it hard to go through all the celebrations of graduation that marked the end of our college years. After several stiff drinks I could genuinely congratulate my men friends on their plans for careers in the professions or public service, and listen affably to my women friends’ plans for marriage. I didn’t plan to attend my own graduation or to be present to receive my University Medal. It would have been a bizarre charade to me then, for I thought I had learned all too quickly what its real value was. Instead, I agreed to accompany my mother on her long-dreamed-about journey to England and Europe. I was too depressed to care whether we managed the journey in harmony, and whether her obsessive need to eat and sleep at exactly the same moment each day would become unbearable. I knew that my education had been made possible by her efforts, and that I owed her the travel she would be too shy and too dependent to undertake alone. What I would do after that I didn’t know. I couldn’t see myself settling down to become a professional scholar. The year of my graduation was notable for a series of petty wrangles between Australian historians on subjects of only minor antiquarian interest. I feared becoming similarly pedantic, and at a deeper level I feared choosing a career that was universally seen as unfeminine. I feared the only sensible choice for me, the life of a scholar, because I was too uncertain of my identity as a woman to risk the cultural dissonance the choice involved. My moods swung all around the compass. Sometimes I thought I should just settle down, marry, and get on with the expected pattern of an Australian woman’s life. Sometimes I thought I might simply stay in England after my mother’s journey of discovery was over. Despite my criticisms of Oxbridge and my impatience with Australian deference to England, my view of academic life outside Australia was still conventionally colonial. Study abroad meant study in England. Just before we left on our travels, I met a brilliant young medical researcher, recently returned from doctoral work in the United States. His attitudes to life were just what I needed to hear. He wasn’t troubled by the restrictions of Australian academic life, he told me. One could be a scholar with an international group of colleagues anywhere in the world. One didn’t necessarily have to accept the Australian definition of the role. He set me thinking about the future less parochially, and encouraged me to think about creating new styles of scholarly life if I didn’t find the current ones congenial. He was an inspiration at a low point in my life, a new model of a professional scholar, very much to my liking.
Traveling in England and Europe with my mother proved as trying as I had expected it to be, but it was filled with sudden wonderful moments of illumination, and with recognitions of things hitherto only half-understood. When we sailed on the P. and O. liner Orsova, in early January 1958, I thought I knew my sixty-year-old mother well. After we’d unpacked and settled into our comfortable flat off the King’s Road in Chelsea, I discovered a new person.
My mother’s reactions to new sights and new mores were strong and spontaneous. On our first necessary pilgrimage to Stratford-on-Avon, she announced that she didn’t care for the English cottage gardens she’d always admired when seen on chocolate boxes in Australia. “Too flowery and fussy,” she said definitively. But when I took her to Syon House, for a Sunday afternoon expedition from London, she was as excited as a child by the flawless Inigo Jones facade and the Adam interiors. Capability Brown’s garden at Syon House barely rated comment. No matter how I expounded on the notion of garden merging imperceptibly into landscape she was unimpressed. It was untidy. Her obsessions with regularity in time took on a new meaning for me, and I wondered whether she could have been relaxed and spontaneous in a world of eighteenth-century balance.
After we had made all the routine tourist visits to the sights of London, she asked to go back to St. Paul’s. Thinking her interest related to its symbolism for the distant Empire during the war, I suggested that we take the time to study Wren’s plans, climb to the galleries, and look out over the city to imagine the way Wren had planned the relation of his great monument to the eighteenth-century city. We had the luck to come upon a pleasant and well-informed guide, so that even though the climb was agonizingly slow because of my mother’s worries about her blood pressure and her rheumatism, we eventually made the 627 steps up to the golden gallery; we lingered there while the guide described Wren’s plans for the great square and colonnades surrounding the cathedral, and pointed out the eighteenth-century buildings which could help one imagine London as he saw it. When we descended hours later and made our way to our car parked in Paternoster Square, my mother suddenly dissolved into tears. Thinking her exhausted after hours of climbing and gazing at great heights, I began to make soothing noises and to hurry her home to our comfortable Chelsea flat. “You fool,” she finally got out through clenched teeth, “I’m only crying because it is so beautiful. Why have they destroyed it now with all this clutter of buildings?” From then on I knew the day would be a success if it included a great eighteenth-century building, or a manicured garden in the classical style.
For me, schooled as I was in English literature, my mental habits formed by the relationship to nature expressed in Renaissance and Romantic poetry, actually seeing the landscape was a disappointment. The light was too misty, the air too filled with water. The Cotswold hills, the deer grazing in the park at Knole, even the great heath that inspired Hardy’s Egdon Heath in Tess of the D’Urbervilles seemed on the wrong scale. I had imagined it on a larger scale, and kept wanting to get a longer perspective on things. It took a visit to England for me to understand how the Australian landscape actually formed the ground of my consciousness, shaped what I saw, and influenced the way a scene was organized in my mental imagery. I could
teach myself through literature and painting to enjoy this landscape in England, but it would be the schooled response of the connoisseur, not the passionate response one has for the earth where one is born. My landscape was sparer, more brilliant in color, stronger in its contrasts, majestic in its scale, and bathed in shimmering light.
The powerful visual images which took hold of my imagination were architectural. Medieval history was not taught in my university because the library collections were inadequate for serious research. Although the cities of my childhood Australia were vast, they were modern creations of the railway and automobile, without the spaces and buildings which expressed a coherent urban community and culture. The conventional tourist visit to Bath, made early in our stay, was unforgettable. Here was the Roman city clearly preserved; growing organically within it was the great medieval town which had supported the building of Bath Abbey, with its spare graceful windows and entrancing facade, decorated with a sprightly Jacob’s ladder of angels going to and fro from heaven, an image commemorating a dream of its founder, Bishop Oliver King; flourishing beside it was the great eighteenth-century city, yet another coherent urban expression, each of the three more powerful on its own terms than anything I’d seen before. Thereafter, I planned an itinerary which wound through the great cathedral cities, the sites of Roman remains, and the shattered reminders of the dissolution of the monasteries. We made the obligatory visit to the Lake Country to inspect the landscape which had inspired the Romantic movement, but it remained picture-postcard-ish in my memory, whereas Ely Cathedral, first seen at sunset and then viewed through the deepening dusk while the rooks wheeled to settle on its facade, stayed detailed and three-dimensional.
Hungry for sun after a misty English spring, we set out in early April for southern France, Spain, and Portugal. New facets of my mother’s character emerged as soon as she encountered Latin culture. She loved to sit sipping tea in an open-air café, watching the life of the square, getting into conversation with strangers by means of signs, broken English, and her few words of French or Spanish. I marveled at the sight of this woman, totally solitary at home, in animated conversation with strangers. Hitherto an adherent of the meat-and-three-vegetable school of English cooking, she cast caution to the winds and ate whatever was the dish of the region. She was less curious about seeing buildings and museums than she was about people. I could leave her happily ensconced at some bar or café, and wander through the buildings she thought too cold and damp for her rheumatic joints.
When we arrived at Santiago de Compostela I left her, promising to be gone only an hour or so, to see the cathedral. I knew it was one of the three most important places of pilgrimage in the Middle Ages, but was unprepared for my first encounter with one of Europe’s great holy cities. On the way in, I stopped to study the map showing the routes followed by the pilgrims, often as many as two million a year, traveling down a series of old Roman roads through France and across northern Spain, to make their prayers where their faith taught that the bones of St. James rested. The cathedral literally took my breath away. The vastness of its scale, the beauty of the proportions, the stone carving so powerful one felt one was meeting the whole kaleidoscope of a society etched in the walls, adorning the arches, shown in every pose of walking, striving, and reaching up to heaven. Hours later I wandered out into the great square, was stunned by the scale of the palaces and university buildings which lined it, and then noticing the sun, guiltily returned to my abandoned mother, who reminded me with some asperity that my tardiness would make her late for her next meal. I was glad of her frosty silence as we drove to our evening’s resting place. I had more time to reflect on the marvel of the day’s startling discovery. Was it true, I wondered, as the guide had told me, that St. Francis of Assisi had made the pilgrimage and himself founded the monastery, not far from the great plaza, which bore his name? I ran through the list of famous pilgrims, imagined the sights and smells of the city they had found as the ninth-century shrine took shape. It was clear that I had to learn more about medieval Christianity because it had produced a world more beautiful than any I had ever seen.
My mother was blind to this beauty, so blind that there was a comic divergence between our states of mind whenever we went together to a great monument of Catholic culture. When we arrived in Seville, the Spanish city she found most entrancing of any on our travels, I told her that the cathedral, where it was claimed that Columbus lay buried, was one of Europe’s great monuments, and that the square surrounding it, vast in scale, fragrant with the blossoms of its hundreds of orange trees, was something she should see. We happened to reach it on Friday afternoon, in the season before Easter, when it was the custom for the people from the surrounding countryside to fall to their knees on entering the square and progress across it kneeling while reciting the innumerable rosaries it took to traverse the vast space and progress up the steps of the cathedral’s grand entrance. I was struck by the faces of the penitents, their dignity and austere beauty, but my mother’s tirade about the exploitation of the peasantry by the Church was an obbligato to my exploration of the building which, more than any other, expressed the high point of Spanish culture after the discovery of the New World.
We could each enjoy standing on the spot on the banks of the Guadalquivir River from which Columbus set out to discover the Indies, and we were each entranced by the gardens which were Spain’s heritage from the Moors. In this dry, hot climate, the Moorish influence shaped the use of water and dictated the pattern of walled courtyards where cascades of greenery and the ever-present sound of water banished all sense of heat. “If only I had seen this when I was making my garden at Coorain, I could have made us all feel much cooler,” my mother remarked. “I was trying to copy English gardens when this should have been the model.” For each of us, in our separate ways, the journey involved the redefinition of our relationship to the past and reconfiguring our sense of geography. Just as we know ourselves in relation to others, so I knew how beautiful Australia was only after encountering the real rather than the imagined landscape of England and Europe. So also, I could not comprehend the blank spaces in Australian urban culture except by seeing the physical expressions of other notions of urban community. The square, the cathedral, the university, and the palace, all grouped around a public space made for theater and processions, yet all on a human scale, made me aware that the heart of our cities was deader than any arid part of the continent, and that our civic and community life was starved of ritual.
In the late 1950s, the Spanish Mediterranean coast north of Barcelona was yet to be discovered by organized tourism. English visitors had been coming there in high summer since before the Spanish civil war, but they stayed in one or two small resort towns, leaving the small fishing villages which dotted the rugged and beautiful coast untouched. If one did not mind rutted roads, negotiating one’s car across the fords which were the only ways of crossing many shallow streams, it was possible to find one’s way into small fishing communities where, because of Spain’s poverty, the way of life of Catalonia was relatively untouched. Every English person is supposed to shed inhibitions when exposed to Latin culture, and my mother was surely the archetypal one. She didn’t make her customary complaints about the plumbing of the simple inn in the small village where we stayed, and she never tired of walking the beach to see the colorful boats of the sardine fleet drawn up after the catch was brought in. The smell of the pines in the hot afternoons, or the shade of the cork woods which alternated with vineyards during our walks along the high jagged coastline, conveyed a strong, definitive sense of place, juxtaposed as they were with one dazzling view of the dark blue ocean after another. At night when the village was filled with the sound of guitars and people could be found dancing the sardana in every small bistro, she abandoned her iron rule about her hour of retiring and stayed happily watching for hours, entranced by a kind of spontaneity and grace she had never seen before. When I told her that legend claimed that the Holy Grail was housed a
t the monastery of Montserrat, high in the jagged mountains behind the coast, she did not give her usual snort of derision, but said that perhaps we had better make an expedition to Montserrat because she could believe anything possible here. She liked the simple economy of the region, based on harvesting sardines from the sea, wine from the sweet grapes produced along the sunny coast, and cork from the forests. “You may stay in England, or wherever you like,” she said, “but I think I may sell Coorain and settle down here, in one of these stone cottages with geraniums tumbling out the window.”
Our days in Catalonia were the most relaxed and pleasure-filled of any in our months of traveling together. We had no news from Australia for months, and it seemed foolish here in this world of long siestas and moonlit dancing for me to be fretting about the future. Our visit to Montserrat, laughingly undertaken, proved another moment of cultural revelation. I had been taught about the romantic notion of the sublime, the sense of the grandeur and terror of nature, in contrast to the more domestic and social quality of beauty. Two sites in Europe, Montserrat and the Grande Chartreuse, appeared and reappeared in discussions of the power of nature so revered in romanticism. So it was with my mind filled with Edmund Burke’s phrases on the sublime and the beautiful, and Wagner’s imagery in Parsifal that I drove up the steep and narrow road to the monastery. It was true that from this high point in the mountains one could see the ocean and the expanse of the eastern range of the Pyrenees. It was a grand extended view on a scale I was used to, but I felt nothing here akin to the mystical sense of oneness with nature I felt alone on the plains of New South Wales. On the other hand, when we went into the chapel at Montserrat and heard the boys’ choir singing at the end of mass, the same chants such a choir had been singing for seven hundred years, I was transported by the beauty of the first Gregorian chant I had ever heard. I realized that the English romanticism I had taken for a universal was a cultural category in which I did not participate. Nothing made it clearer to me that I was from another world and would have to arrive at my cultural values for myself. Sacred music and ecclesiastical architecture expressed real universals which spoke to me wherever I met them. I hadn’t expected to be moved by the imagery and sounds of Catholic Europe, but I was.
The Road from Coorain Page 21
