The Road from Coorain

by Jill Ker Conway

  After we left Spain, my mother’s good spirits vanished. Reading the mail that caught up with us in Toulouse changed her mood. It seemed clear from the bulky packet of letters that my brother was close to marrying the sweetheart of the moment and that the manager of Coorain was taking advantage of my mother’s absence to undertake many much-needed maintenance projects and replacements of equipment. With these events in the forefront of her mind, she scarcely noticed where she was. Our travels took us from Toulouse to Geneva, along the route across which Hannibal had marched his elephants to mount his campaign in Italy. As the scenery of Provence unfolded, and we began our climb through fertile valleys overlooked by hill villages of great antiquity, every one looking like the background of some early Renaissance painting, she began to rehearse her memories of her life at Coorain obsessively. Each day as the sun made its passage through the sky, lighting our way through towns and villages which recalled layer after layer of Roman and medieval history, she sat beside me asking whether I thought this new fence necessary, or whether that piece of farm equipment would have lasted longer if properly maintained. The sound of her voice was like a broken record and no matter what my response, it was refuted angrily. Her change of mood was accompanied by her customary concerns. The food was too rich, it was not rich enough; the tea too weak, too strong; the beds too lumpy; the rooms too noisy. By the time we reached Geneva, I was wondering sardonically why I was spending time traveling with someone so impermeable to the stimulus of other cultures.

  After Geneva, we turned eastward following a meandering course toward Paris, which was to be our home while we explored northern France. We found Paris on the verge of yet another political revolution, the newspaper placards along its leafy boulevards announcing the rebellion of the French paratroop regiments in Algeria as we drove into the city. De Gaulle’s solitary decision to accede to Algerian demands for independence and to bring to a close the colonial wars which had sapped France’s energy since 1945 was being proclaimed as we unpacked our bags. It was surreal to hear the ebb and flow of my mother’s stream of consciousness about Coorain at such a moment. No matter how she complained I left her alone in our luxe small hotel on the Right Bank and set out for the Assembly, arriving in time to join the crowd awaiting the modest car from Colombey which carried General de Gaulle to one of the great moments in modern French history. Although I was aware that the placards of the newsstands carried nothing but foot-high letters announcing the arrival of the paratroop regiments, I scarcely heeded them in my delight at seeing the beauty of Paris. It was an unaccustomedly empty city, drained of the people who had left in anticipation of a military occupation, and this made it easier to see the Place de la Concorde or to stroll along the Seine, free of the roar of unceasing traffic. Strolling along the Left Bank, alternately browsing at the booksellers’ kiosks and stopping to gaze at Notre Dame, I heard on the radio from a nearby wine shop de Gaulle’s voice begin “Françaises et Français, aidez-moi” and proceed to announce his decision that it was the moral choice for France to withdraw from Algeria. It was a riveting speech, all the more remarkable to me for being heard in the company of the French workmen and casual passersby who had gathered to listen. The group was divided and deep in political argument seconds after the speech concluded. I was entranced. Here were the French left and right obligingly acting out their roles in real life, verifying everything I’d read about French history. As we made our way home after dinner that evening, my mother’s flood of conversation was arrested by the sight of tanks parked at street corners and uniformed soldiers carrying submachine guns. The city was preparing seriously for battle, a battle anticipated for dawn the next morning. Suddenly focusing on the present, her response was characteristically British. “I want to leave at once,” she said. “These French quarrels have nothing to do with me.”

  By the late summer, we had spent more than six months in England. I had walked my way through the collection of cities which joined to make the center of London. There was scarcely a trace of Elizabethan London I had not found, nor a section of the city and its museums we had not explored. Our excursions to the countryside were planned to explore a region and its country houses, gardens, churches, and museums, and our overnight stays introduced us to every variety of country inn and great house turned hotel. We made friends in London, visited English acquaintances made on our voyage over from Australia, and made many new friends in the large Australian expatriate community in England.

  I delighted in transacting the details of daily life along the King’s Road near our Chelsea flat. The variety of accents, the shops crammed with produce from every part of Europe, the never-ending fascination of antique shops filled with furniture and porcelain, the parading Chelsea matrons with their dogs, and the nannies with perambulators were an unfailing source of amusement. Our flat was minutes from the Chelsea Pensioners Hospital, and after I had sat in the garden enough times I made friends with several pensioners, and could count on them to regale me with tales of 1914–1918 or of Second World War campaigns.

  I liked the cheerful butchers and grocers, and the superior being who discussed wine with me in a hushed voice at Harrods’ wine department. When we made weekend visits to the country, I was less certain about our English hosts, hospitable though they were. They could not have been kinder, but I resented their air of superiority toward Australians. I wasn’t used to being patronized by people less well read than I, nor to having the history I knew so well explained to me as though I could not possibly know anything about it. I came to wait for the ultimate compliment which could be counted on by Sunday breakfast. I knew the confidential smile and the inclination of the head would be followed by “You know, my dear, one would hardly know you were not English.” I couldn’t control the irritation produced by such accolades, and would usually begin to tell preposterous stories about life in the outback to emphasize how different I was.

  Australia’s class system seemed harmless enough when one observed British snobbery and class consciousness at work. I chuckled at overhearing one friend my mother made on shipboard tell her proudly about the dinner party at which she and her husband had been guests the night before. “My dear, we were sixteen sitting down to dinner, and Freddy and I were the only ones without a title.” But it was not so funny to see the very intelligent child of the caretaker of our flat taken from school at fifteen and sent to work, so that he wouldn’t get ideas above his place.

  It was startling to meet the men who ran the fabled head office of the land and finance company which sold our wool and invested in Australian land. Throughout my childhood, this company hierarchy had been represented as the ultimate in economic wisdom. Now, on meeting its members, I saw not men of financial genius but comfortable bureaucrats who throve on borrowing money at one rate in the London financial markets and then lending it to gullible colonials at a three or four percent higher rate. Australia’s predictable droughts could be counted on to send many clients into bankruptcy, and thus the land and finance company had acquired its vast Australian landholdings with little risk and less economic enterprise. This was not the way the men in question saw themselves. They saw themselves as financial wizards, performing important services for the development of Australia. Certainly, the managing director could count on a knighthood after enough years of presiding over this enterprise and contributing regularly to the Tory Party.

  Wandering around Westminster Abbey, through some of the churches which were regular places of worship for Guards regiments, or the smaller churches which were home to a county regiment, one could not help wondering whether the Anglican Church of Elizabeth I, a compromise I admired, had become by stages more concerned with the worship of the British Empire than with matters of salvation and damnation. Plaque after plaque commemorated bloody battles—Lucknow, Omdurman, Mafeking, the first and second Opium Wars—all occasions at which some luckless colonial people had been obliged by superior force to accept the benefits of British rule. I had known in theory that the
church and the army had been the pillars of traditional European society, but it took seeing the sacramentalizing of empire embodied in the walls of Anglican churches for me to comprehend what the mystical blending of church and state meant. I stood in the dampness of the Abbey, and thought at one and the same time of the coronation of Edward the Confessor, and the perspiring Sunday congregations praying in some far-flung outpost of the Empire for the reigning British monarch. I couldn’t get the two images into any harmonious relationship in my mind. I respected the unbroken monarchical tradition reaching back to the eleventh century and the British capacity for compromise which had enabled the parliamentary tradition to flourish alongside the monarchy. But I couldn’t stomach the self-satisfied exploitation of colonial peoples which was clothed in comfortable rhetoric in peacetime and exposed as cold calculation in time of war. That was the problem with my attitudes to this beautiful and perplexing country. I loved its medieval and early modern history and detested its imperial complacency. One thing was clear. I was not at home here and never could be. I could perhaps learn to speak idiomatic French and settle in Paris or Provence with no psychic difficulty, but in England these contradictions would always irritate me like a hair shirt worn under fashionable outer garments.

  It was tiresome to have such contradictory reactions. To see St. Paul’s or to hear Big Ben was to be reminded, with a tug at the heart, of London in the Blitz. All through my childhood we had clustered around the crackling radio to hear the sound of Big Ben striking, and then the impeccable BBC accent announcing “This is London” in tones that conveyed British determination to resist the evil of Nazism to the end. Yet, when I was in a fashionable West End restaurant, I would find myself gazing around at the other patrons, wondering which pink and well-fed face belonged to someone who had been all too ready to collaborate, too pro-German to believe any of those ridiculous fabrications about the persecution of the Jews.

  I loved the fashionable Mayfair world. Its discreet shops dispensing impeccable tailoring, its perfumes and leathers, its jewelers, its quietly authoritative opulence. For a few months, I dabbled at the customary occupation of tall, willowy Australian girls and worked as a model for a Mayfair couturier. Still smarting from rejection of my intellectual talents, I took the job when offered, just to see whether people would actually pay me for what I looked like. This childish gesture contributed to my education in many unintended ways. It required only modest powers of observation to see that most of the designers and fashion photographers didn’t like women, enjoyed seeing them looking ever more foolish in some outlandish getup, and treated the models like so much horseflesh. From the inside, promoting fashion and beauty was a business like any other, intent on stimulating demand and creating obsolescence. Once I knew how those stunning fashion photographs were posed, I stopped buying fashion magazines, began to wear comfortable shoes, and started to dress as I liked rather than slavishly following the dictates of the season. If one looked at the subculture of designers and dressmakers as an anthropologist would, they assumed their place in the long continuum going back to painting the body and putting bones through one’s nose. I was determined that my particular form of nose bones would be comfortable from now on.

  These discoveries offered distraction for a season, but as the promised year abroad accompanying my mother wore on, boredom set in. I knew now what I was going to do. I was going home to study history. It was no use pretending that I wasn’t a scholar. I could certainly make myself an idle life in London being another expatriate Australian enjoying the cultural riches of the city, but that was to live perpetually by the standards of a culture I now saw as alien. I didn’t want to take another degree at an Oxford or Cambridge college either, for that would involve going more deeply into the contradictions of being a colonial in the metropolitan society. I’d made one or two excursions to senior common rooms as the guest of fellow Australians. I found I wasn’t interested in the rituals of scholarly one-upmanship which seemed to delight my hosts. Several times, I was outraged by the unmistakable undertones of studied rudeness to women. I wasn’t interested in becoming less womanly to avoid that hostility, and I certainly wasn’t interested in becoming more English and less Australian. I was going back to Australia to test my new sense of the world and my new perspective on Australian society. So far as my mother was concerned, I told myself I would see her established in Sydney once again, and then break the news that I would not be living with her.

  I thought, as we made the long journey home by air, that it might even be an easy transition to make. Just before we set out for home, the news came that Barry had married the pretty young nurse I had met on my last visit to him in Charleville. Soon, I thought, there will be grandchildren to fill my mother’s life with interest and affection. A lot had changed about her from the days of our childhood, but though she was often paranoid with adults, she blossomed when with small children.

  I heard the broad Australian accents of the Qantas stewards and hostesses with new appreciation, as we listened to the flight announcements before our departure from London Airport for the two and a half days in the air required to reach Sydney by the shortest route home from London across the United States. Once I’d thought those voices a tiresome sign of deviation from standard English speech. Now they were an accent like any other, an inheritance of history and dialect. The flight was long and tiring, but always made amusing by the slangy good humor of the crew, and the friendliness of the other passengers.

  After Shannon, Gander, and Sydney, Nova Scotia, came New York. I was asleep when a fellow passenger shook me awake and pointed below. There was New York, glittering in the light of an early autumn morning. There was the island of Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty, the outline of the Chrysler Building. I hadn’t expected to be curious about America (the name all Australians inaccurately gave the United States) but at seeing the skyline made familiar by countless photographic images, I suddenly wished I were stopping for long enough to explore.

  Two days later, I was gazing down at the coastline north of Sydney, waiting for the first sight of the Harbor to appear. I’d always thought Sydney beautiful, but now I planned to look at it on its own terms. It was a great seaport city, lying on the rim of an arid continent, Mediterranean in light and vegetation, its greys and scarlets and lemon scents unique to its native eucalyptus. It looked out across the vast expanse of the Pacific, not to Europe but to Japan and continental Asia. To arrive where we started and know the place for the first time, I thought, as Sydney’s golden beaches appeared, strung out like a necklace around the grey-green city, dancing in the morning sunlight. I promised myself I would never speak about the Far East again. It was absurd that it had taken me until I was twenty-three years old to get oriented on the globe, but I was glad that I finally knew where I was.

  9.

  THE RIGHT

  COUNTRY

  ALTHOUGH I’D promised myself I would make the break with my mother as soon as she was settled after our return to Sydney, I kept backsliding. For one thing, it took a long time to get her settled. No house seemed to suit her exactly. We were no sooner home than she needed treatment for gallstones, and the prospect of surgery loomed in the future. The house and garden she finally liked wasn’t available for another six months.

  At Coorain, a much-needed new breeding strategy required introduction. Our flocks had been developed to produce long, fine combing wool for the British market. Now the bulk of Australian wool was sold to Japan, where new technologies made it possible to comb and spin high-quality woolen thread from a shorter-stapled fleece. It was a touchy business convincing my mother that higher earnings would come from breeding larger-bodied sheep with denser, shorter fleeces, but she eventually seemed persuaded. She agreed to the expensive purchase of a new line of rams and the culling of the existing flock for sale, provided I would supervise the operation. Telling myself that I would get her through one set of changes at a time, I temporized about my departure. It would be foolish to bring on th
e possible break in our relationship before I’d got the economic future of Coorain on a solid base.

  Within weeks of our return I made the first step toward the eventual break by taking a teaching assistantship in the History Department at the University of Sydney and enrolling as a student for an M.A. in Australian history. The teaching assignments which secured my economic independence were simple and enjoyable. I gave tutorials in European and British history to groups of ten to twelve students, gave occasional lectures in the Australian history course, and graded large piles of essays and examinations. There was no course work for the M.A. degree at the University of Sydney. One simply found one’s own thesis topic, persuaded someone to direct one’s research, and wrote the dissertation. I wasn’t sure there was anyone in the Department of History who would want to direct the kind of study I wanted to write, but to get myself started I signed up with John Ward, the head of the department and the occupant of its only chair. Before I embarked on more research it seemed sensible to turn my undergraduate honors thesis into a series of articles for publication, an exercise which kept me happily at work for the first three or four months after my return. On publication, the essays were well received. They cast new light on the early phases of colonial economic development, and earned me a reputation as a likely future contributor to Australian history.