Nowadays Epping is a shrine to middle-class affluence. Its streets are paved and guttered; dunny-men no longer trot down its driveways with fragrant cans balanced delicately on their shoulders. Outside the primary school, where in the late forties one or two children still rode to school and tethered their horses to a hitching-post, a line of Volvos, Saabs and four-wheel drive monsters waits each afternoon for the classrooms to disgorge their well-clad and properly shod youngsters. The shops nestled around the railway station display those heathenish goods—garlic-laden salami, capsicums, strange smelly cheeses—which, when I lived there, were almost entirely unknown: their gradual advance was greeted as the vanguard of the forces of darkness. Epping in the forties was, in other words, an example of an Australia which has disappeared entirely from Sydney, though I suspect that it survives in isolated pockets of Greater Melbourne.
To our European eyes it gave every indication of village life. In retrospect it is possible to be nostalgic about its sleepy charm, a quiet place where cows grazed in the paddocks behind several of the streets, a world where front doors were rarely locked, where you walked to school barefoot on hot bitumen, or in a sea of paspalum, wearing your threepenny imitation pith helmet. It was, nevertheless, a dreary place. Most of its handsome turn-of-the-century bungalows and two-storey houses were encrusted with fibro, corrugated-iron or timber excrescences: a verandah boarded up here, a lean-to added there. Elsewhere, weatherboard cottages leaned in various states of disrepair, victims of crumbling foundations, dry rot and termites. Only the gardens showed any signs of care and ownerly pride. And everywhere paspalum: the mile-long walk to the railway station (or at least as far as the few streets with properly made footpaths) had to be negotiated through acres of the weed which threatened to ruin your clothes with its burrs and oils, and harboured, besides, such dangerous nasties as ticks and snakes. The locals walked on the road; we had been too much regimented in our previous life to dare to do that.
Epping was at the time (and may well be still) the heartland of the nonconformist bible-belt. There was, it is true, a solidly constructed Church of England not far from the shopping centre, but the true spiritual aspirations of the place were represented by the Methodist, Baptist and Congregational establishments. One neighbouring family seemed to spend its entire Sunday walking back and forth between their place of worship and their house-cum-chicken-run at the bottom of a very deep battle-axe block. Sunday schools and youth fellowships flourished. The School of Arts in the shopping centre represented the secular arm of this firmly entrenched tradition: it provided a venue for various Lodges and Orders, into one of which I was briefly inducted as a teenage aspirant, in a ceremony that bore some resemblance to an amateur performance of The Magic Flute.
To us outsiders, all this appeared homogeneous and harmonious in its blandness. Here was a world of prejudices, perhaps, but one entirely lacking passion—or so it seemed. Its prejudice against us, who had strayed into this Arcadia from another planet, was essentially unmenacing. The crone who screeched obscenities at us over the picket fence of her tumbledown cottage was much too decrepit to offer any threat of violence and, besides, she had the reputation of being off her rocker—the children of the neighbourhood were convinced she was a witch. Passions, and indeed hatred, were reserved, as we came to learn, for others.
Our street was a broad roadway running for several miles bordered by the obligatory unmade verges and miniature fields of paspalum. It was, however, sealed as far as the point, a few houses beyond our place, where it took an abrupt ninety-degree turn. There the dirt road began. I do not know what bureaucratic decisions determined this highly symbolic frontier, but the distinction was very real. Beyond the curve, along the dirt, the houses were smaller, meaner and in even greater disrepair. The families living in them were larger, their front yards showed none of the care over clipped hedges and neatly swept driveways that distinguished the world of the bitumen.
We were too ignorant to read these signals. I made friends at school with two boys called Dunnicliffe, victims of scatological jests which, at first, I could not understand. They were the youngest in a large family that lived beyond the curve. I do not think we had much in common—how could we have had?—but no doubt we were drawn together because they too were shunned by the other children, just as I was after the initial impact of my arrival in 5B had worn off. This desultory friendship advanced a step or two when the Dunnicliffes arrived unannounced one Sunday afternoon. This was something quite beyond our experience. In my very early childhood when social life of a sort was still possible in a Hungary largely protected from the worst effects of war, social contact with other children was governed by a strict protocol of invitations and supervision. The Dunnicliffes said that they had come to play. We went into the paddock at the back, and played—as far as my still very limited command of English and of the mythology of Australian children’s games permitted. They reappeared the following Sunday and then spasmodically throughout the summer holidays.
My friendship with these boys led to an incident which was our first significant insight into Australian society. Until then our relationships with our neighbours, with Australia as a whole, had been fleeting and sporadic—a halting conversation here, a hastily flung insult there. We had been living in a dream. People, places, events floated in and out of our experience without much impact. We observed the world of Epping from the outside, separated from it by an almost impenetrable screen. My father used later to say it was like watching a film you couldn’t entirely follow. But the confrontation brought about by the Dunnicliffes’ visits began to lead us inside a world from which we had been until then almost entirely isolated. There occurred, in short, some form of interaction between us and the people among whom we lived. Their world demanded a response from us, and consequently, for the first time, we found ourselves in a relationship with this society, and in a situation where, in theory at least, we were required to exercise some choice. Here was, in other words, our first real step towards assimilation, even towards becoming ‘Australians’. But at the time the incident was merely an embarrassment, an awkward situation, and also an alarming recognition of the complexity of a world that had seemed until then quite simple and untroubled.
Our landlord was a mild-mannered man, a second-generation Australian of solid Lancashire stock, bearing a distinct resemblance to the King according to the women of his family. He spent most of the day pottering around in the backyard, tending his ducks and bantams. We did not know and never found out (such was our isolation in this world) whether he ever had an occupation. One of his three children, the eldest, lived at home (mostly in a chenille dressing-gown) because she suffered from ‘nerves’—the consequence of an unfortunate marriage. They were an orderly family. Voices were never raised, speech never strayed beyond the laconic. Their days were largely governed by the wireless: The Lawsons, the news (for the war had established habits that proved hard to break), Mo and young Harry, and the Sunday night play.
One day our landlord knocked on the glazed door of the kitchen, the only entrance to the flat, having been no doubt egged on by his wife, a lady of much stronger personality, to remonstrate with my mother over the defilement of their Protestant paddock, if not home and hearth. For, of course, the Dunnicliffes were Catholics, as were most of the people who lived beyond the bitumen. My mother’s surprise—once she understood what it was all about, after I had been fetched to do a spot of interpreting—was genuine, especially since for Hungarians (at least in our usage) the word ‘Catholic’ was barely if at all distinguished from ‘Christian’. We knew that our landlord and his family were churchgoers, so what could all the fuss be about? At length my mother understood: being Catholic here was not all that different from being Jewish in Mitteleuropa. She accepted, it goes without saying, our landlord’s ultimatum: either I was to tell the Dunnicliffes to stop coming around, or he would have to ask us to find somewhere else to live. As it turned out we did not have to do anything: the word must ha
ve travelled down the grapevine, for the Dunnicliffes never came again, and by the time we had gone back to school, they had found someone else to play with.
I have dragged this anecdote out of a confused array of memories not in order to draw analogies between Australian and European instances of intolerance and prejudice—for this minor comedy of bigotry pales into insignificance beside the brutality of the world we had left—but rather to illustrate how my first tentative and largely unconscious steps towards assimilation inevitably put me off-side with the dominant force in this little society. I had, entirely unwittingly, begun to align myself with people who were not acceptable to the tight proprieties of nonconformist Epping—families, like the Dunnicliffes, of Irish-Catholic ancestry, whose forebears had come to Australia as convicts, as seekers after gold, or else, like us, to escape a desperate and brutal world in search of security and immunity from persecution. The Protestant population of Epping, as of most parts of Australia, prided itself on descent from free settlers. Many years were to pass before it was chic to have convict blood running through your veins. In attempting to penetrate the social fabric of a world where my parents and I were considered outsiders, I had been attracted to a group within that community which was, for very different reasons, also excluded from full membership—they lived, after all, beyond the end of the bitumen.
In this way the doctrine of assimilation was given the lie (as retrospect clearly tells me) at a very early stage of my halting attempts to become a paid-up member of Australian society. People like us were urged on all sides to try to become good Australians. But one fundamental question was left unasked: what sort of Australians were we to become? What would being a New Australian (the cant phrase of the sixties) entail? Should you attempt to align yourself with Irish-Catholic Australia and its (to the newcomer) largely incomprehensible mythology of ancient wrongs? Or should you try to throw in your lot with what Manning Clark referred to as the Protestant Ascendancy? Should you become working-class or middle-class? The possibilities were and are numerous. The demand that newcomers must assimilate, promoted at the time when Australian society began to realise that it harboured considerable numbers of ‘DPs’, ‘refs’, ‘balts’, ‘dagoes’ and ‘wogs’, was entirely self-defeating.
Nobody seemed to realise at the time (or was prepared to admit in public) that assimilation could well become a two-way process. The emphasis was always on the newcomer’s obligation to merge into Australian society, to adopt its ways, to learn the customs of the country, without in the least altering established patterns of behaviour, religious practice or communal ethics. The possibility that the migrant population might in some ways change the face of Australian society was generally feared. Programmes of assimilation were seen, consciously or otherwise, as insurance against such an eventuality. Nevertheless, the arrival of large numbers of migrants inevitably influenced the country’s way of life. On the surface Australia seems to have eagerly embraced foreign habits and tastes. Yet underneath the old suspicions linger—even when they are expressed in terms of fashionable environmental and ecological concerns. Many people lament the passing of the old Australia. I know an elderly lady who is greatly distressed that you can’t nowadays find a restaurant in Melbourne which serves what she calls decent Australian food.
The days of assimilation, at least as far as official policy is concerned, are long gone. Multiculturalism is the doctrine of the time. I find it curious and not a little amusing that, having been urged for many years to put aside my foreignness, I am now sometimes censured for having neglected my ‘ethnicity’. But that, in turn, raises another issue. The doctrine of multiculturalism rests on the dogmatic basis that newcomers to this counry must not be forced, as they had been in the past, to discard their rich cultural heritage in favour of a possibly futile attempt to adjust their way of life. The dangers inherent in encouraging such a potential ghetto mentality are menacing and should not be left unquestioned. Moreover, advocates of multiculturalism have given birth to a highly misleading and inaccurate mythology concerning the aspirations of people who came to find a refuge, safety and a new home in this country; it involves the notion of coercion, symbolised by an image of hapless migrants, desperate to retain their characteristic ethnic headdress, cuisine, social rituals or whatever, being forced by the jackbooted agents of conformism into adopting Australian norms.
Since 1788 most people have come to this country under some form of compulsion—at first because they were convicts or were conscripted to become their gaolers, later to escape famine, hardship or persecution. In the worst days of the Cold War English families fled to Australia to escape the prospect of thermonuclear annihilation. But for many of them the compulsion was not sufficiently strong: after a couple of years they decided that the threat of extinction was preferable to their being denied what they saw as the civilised amenities of life—ranging from fish and chips wrapped in newspaper to the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Those migrants who stayed here, often because there was no possibility of return, and attempted to make a go of it, were usually impelled by nightmarish memories of the dreadful world they left behind. For my parents, initially at least, Australia was paradise. It may have been a curious and perplexing place, but it offered considerable safety and very little menace. If the worst that could happen to you was to have ‘Go home, bloody ref!’ shouted at you in the street, then the worst was good enough. The boring blandness of suburban Sydney was the guarantee they had been seeking. Surely, you could never have concentration camps in a place like this. Australia was a haven, a blessed land that seemed miraculously to have escaped the evils and the horrors of the old world.
For that reason, despite a sense of strangeness and perplexity, my parents were only too prepared to admire the world in which they had chosen to live; they were eager in their desire for acceptance. They knew in their heart of hearts that they would never become more than passably proficient in English. They also came to realise that they would always hanker after the world they had lost—a world which, they reminded themselves, had ceased to exist in 1939: a world, moreover, where they had witnessed brutality of a sort that could not possibly exist in these enlightened modern times, or so they had imagined. In their eyes, assimilation became not something imposed on them by a threatening and hostile society, but a desired goal, an aspiration which could never, alas, be fulfilled.
Along with that desire, bred out of gratitude and a sense of relief, went an unrecognised but, I think, deeply felt wish for something which was in essence nothing other than the desire for oblivion, the annihilation of the personality. This disturbing state of mind arose because they were only too conscious of what, in later years, was to become a recurring theme for discontent—the strangeness of Australia, an unfamiliar society which they came to regard as culturally impoverished. If only they could forget what they had lost. If only the past, the good together with the appalling, could be wiped out, then surely happiness and contentment would be theirs. They wanted to be remade, knowing all along what an impossible desire that was. They could not, of course, be refashioned. Freedom and security were theirs, and that was almost enough to compensate. Yet it was not quite enough. Though willing to become Australians—even if that were to prove impossible—those old habits, the familiar comforts of a very different world, could not ultimately be suppressed.
As time blunted their sense of relief and gratitude, and as the irritations of their life in Australia came more and more to grate on them, so dissatisfaction, frustration and nostalgia (which increasingly saw the past in a rosy glow) came to dominate their lives. They entered into a spiritual and social no-man’s-land, citizens of no nation except by name and by the legal fiction of naturalisation—a predicament I have, to some extent, inherited from them. Long after their deaths, at a time when I have spent by far the greater part of my life as an Australian, I am still conscious of how fragile and provisional is the identity which I carry on my passport. Yet that other world, Europe—to which I am dra
wn by my instincts, my preferences, indeed by my inability, after so many years, to come to terms with Australian heat and humidity, for instance—seems to me as alien and as perplexing as were my first glimpses of Australia in the summer of 1947. That sense of dislocation colours these reminiscences in their attempt to lay troublesome ghosts, and to come to a better understanding of the world in which I have spent most of my life.
OVER THE RAINBOW
In 1946 my parents were preparing to emigrate to Australia. They spent long hours in queues waiting to be interviewed by stony-faced officials for exit permits and entry permits, for passport clearances and transit visas. One afternoon they took me to see The Wizard of Oz, a film which had been banned in Hungary (together with all American films) during the war years. There was no particular significance behind their choice; we often went to the cinema in that year. They merely wanted me to see a film they thought I would enjoy. Many years were to pass before that particular visit to the cinema would assume a retrospective irony. At the time Oz was nothing other than the place at the end of the yellow brick road. We were nevertheless soon to embark on a voyage that we thought might lead us somewhere just as remote and fabulous. My parents did not suspect that their journey could also end in a place as gimcrack as the mountebank’s tent Dorothy discovers on the other side of the rainbow. Or if they did harbour fears and premonitions, they never spoke about them.
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