Inside Outside

by Andrew Riemer

  A great deal has been written about the migrant’s experience of Australia, but relatively little attention has been paid to the aspirations and fantasies that prompted large numbers of people to undertake what was for them, quite literally, a voyage to the other side of the world. The migrant’s predicament, which is that of the exile and the outcast, begins long before the moment of arrival in the new land. It is impossible to understand the anguish of alienation, perplexity and suffering—topics that have become parts of a minor mythology—without recognising those often contradictory forces that impelled people to take such large steps, to reach what was for many of them a frighteningly irrevocable decision. Each individual migrant’s case is unique. Yet in the final count all these stories are the same story. Our experiences are typical, in broad pattern if not in fine detail, of the fortunes of those who went in search of the end of the rainbow to make a fresh start from the ruins of an older life.

  What we found at the end of the rainbow was the most commonplace of images. Australia will always be represented for me by that first glimpse—a row of streetlights strung along a low hill, seen in the early dawn of a February morning. This image has haunted my imagination for almost half a century. It has become for me the essence of Australia, even though my rational self knows that such a very ordinary emblem cannot adequately reflect the varied and contradictory facts of a land or its inhabitants.

  I saw those lights—the crest of Watsons Bay as I was to learn later—from the deck of the Marine Phoenix, a decrepit World War Two hospital ship, hastily refitted and reclassified as a ‘Matson Liner’, which plied between Sydney and San Francisco in the years immediately after the end of the war in the Pacific. It was the early morning of 21 February 1947, marking the end of our journey which had begun three months before in a freezing Budapest, a febrile, near-hysterical city trying to recover from the worst effects of air-raids, bombardment, occupation, disease and hunger. Here was the promised land, the gateway to the new life my parents had dreamt about through the darkest days of the war. After an extraordinary gamble (one shared by every migrant) and a long, difficult journey undertaken by people who had never travelled widely, the goal was this—a string of lights on a low hill.

  Even if the Heavenly City had opened its gates to us as the Marine Phoenix made its way up the Harbour, the disappointment would not have been any the less poignant. Journey’s end is boredom, frustration and anxiety. The traveller whose jet sets down at Heathrow or Kennedy after a seemingly interminable flight knows that feeling of flatness. Was it worth all the bother just to come to this? We, too, asked ourselves that question on that morning, and on many subsequent mornings. Given the circumstances of our journey and the doubts and uncertainties surrounding my parents’ decision to leave their familiar world—no matter how appalling it had become in the course of the previous decade—that numbing flatness, compounded of disappointment and fear, and exacerbated by the necessity to face the consequences of such an irrevocable decision, conferred on our arrival an exceptional and almost intolerable sense of weariness and despair.

  An hour or so later we were lined up on the deck, our sleeves rolled back for the inspection of vaccination marks. Above us in the bright sunshine we caught sight of the arc of the Bridge, the one public image of Australia known to us, flanked by squat buildings with red roof-tiles. Scattered here and there were stands of scrawny trees that looked for all the world like overgrown broccoli. Another hour, and we had disembarked into a dreary, unimaginably hot shed, an ugly utilitarian edifice—one of the finger wharves at Woolloomooloo—amidst a throng of sweating, excited people. Tearful war-brides, bursting out of their smart New Look clothes, many of them carrying infants in those curious shoulder-slung canvas carriers which vanished mysteriously after the early fifties, were greeted by their bemused relatives—those who had said farewell to them, not many months earlier, when these young women set out (often on the same ship) to join their American ‘husbands’. An important executive of Coca-Cola, whose family had occupied the only private cabin on board, while the rest of us were accommodated in dormitories of three-tier bunks, was surrounded by a gaggle of obsequious company officials. And scattered in this crowd, a handful of reffos, wogs, balts, DPs like us, in our strange clothes, with our equally curious gestures and demeanour, were being reunited with our embarrassed, thoroughly ‘Australian’ relatives—who were no doubt beginning to wonder whether it had been wise to sponsor these odd remnants of a discarded way of life.

  We had come to that finger wharf through a combination of folly and courage, of hard-headed realism and romantic self-indulgence. We followed the dictates of a seemingly impeccable logic which was nevertheless based on absolutely false assumptions. Family mythology always insisted that my parents had intended to emigrate to Australia in 1937. They saw what was coming. Their affluent and comfortable life—all the more precious because they were the first among both their families to enjoy such affluence and comfort—was threatened on all sides. The atmosphere of Hungarian political life was growing nastier each day. This was no place for a family whose surnames told all: Riemer, Neubauer, Weiss, Schillinger—not a decent Magyar name among them. In the world outside, the ambitions of National Socialism were apparent to all. But, the mythology continued, there was a child to be considered; was it safe to underake a journey of such hazards with an eighteen-month-old? An eminent paediatrician was consulted. His verdict was unambiguous: travelling was out of the question, my parents must postpone their plans for at least a year. By the following year the unthinkable had occurred: Austria had been reunited with her historic German heritage. To leave Hungary, that threatened, landlocked little country which had always reacted nervously to events in the world outside, became all but impossible. Or so the myth insisted.

  How much truth there was in all this I shall never know. It would have taken prescience of an extraordinary sort to foresee the state of affairs that was to exist by the spring of 1938. Yet many people had precisely such prescience. They got out. We stayed. The next seven years proved to my parents the extreme folly of their decision. They realised too, I think, that the paediatrician’s verdict may have been a convenient lifeline; they had clutched at it eagerly because it gave official sanction to their inertia. They must not be judged too harshly. It takes greater courage than most comfortable middle-class people possess to cut all ties in the firm conviction that a stable and familiar world will soon vanish. At any event, my parents stayed. The consequences of their miscalculation ultimately proved to them the error of their judgment. And so, when they came to find themselves among the relatively few survivors—everyone else in my father’s family had perished—they attempted to make good that folly. We were among the first to leave Budapest.

  Why did they choose Australia? There are three answers to that question, each of them highly significant in its individual way. The first was based on purely practical grounds. One of my father’s cousins had lived in Sydney since the early thirties; before the war, he had written encouraging letters about the opportunities for migrants in Australia. The second reason was directly related to the first. My parents knew very little about Australia but they knew that the best wool in the world was grown there. That is where fantasy began to play an essential role. My father was a skilled textile designer. From the early thirties until the last phase of the war he had conducted his own business. He ran a small weaving mill which manufactured high-class men’s suiting from the best worsted yarn in quantities sufficient to supply the fashionable bespoke tailors of Budapest and the larger provincial towns, with some exports to Vienna and Prague. Where else, then, to use his skill and knowledge to the best advantage but in the land where the wool he had worked with year after year was grown? What he did not know, but soon learnt to his cost, was that the comfortable world of bespoke tailors, unchanging designs of cloth—blue pinstripe, brown pinstripe, grey hopsack and the Austro-Hungarian version of tweed—supplied by small, specialised manufacturers was not a commodit
y much in demand in postwar Australia, if indeed it ever had been.

  The last, largely unacknowledged, reason was, I think, the most potent. It could not have been spoken about (at least until after the war) because it represented a fundamental desire or compulsion seemingly so irrational, so against the grain of good sense that one could not, in all conscience, talk or even think about it very much. It was simply this: to flee to a place as far away from Europe as possible, to find the antipodes in the full myth-laden sense of that word. My parents must have pored over maps often enough, they must have had the intuition that if they were to seek a world which would prove to be the converse of the horrors, injustices and brutalities of Europe, that unknown landmass at the southern and eastern extremity of the Eurocentric image of the world must answer their need. And in one sense they were absolutely right. To the ends of their lives, despite the disappointment, the frustration and the radical dislocation they had experienced, both of them retained considerable gratitude for the political freedom and security they had discovered in this curious land. Neither of them ignored—as I do not ignore—the fact that Australia was (and still is, though I sometimes wonder how long it will remain so) a liberal and generally tolerant society.

  I do not wish to exaggerate or sentimentalise that sense of freedom and tolerance. People were often abominably rude, narrow and provincial, fearful and suspicious of our strange ways. Insults were hurled at us from the moment we set foot in Sydney. My first day at school is still painful to remember. These are instances of the crassness of Australian society which has become familiar from many migrants’ reminiscences. It is entirely proper to register complaint, to point out that a society which prided itself on being almost exclusively Christian demonstrated precious little evidence of Christian charity. But the coin has another side. Though people were rude or insulting, they did not spit at you; they did not hurl bricks through your windows; you did not have to register your every movement with the police or the prefecture; no-one stopped you in the streets to demand your identity-papers; and certainly nobody battered on your front door with heavy fists in the dead of night. In comparison with much of the rest of the world, the essential health of Australian society in the years immediately after the war was remarkable. No amount of pettiness or small-minded meanness could tarnish it.

  In the main, therefore, my parents acted wisely in seeking a new life in Australia. They found freedom and tolerance in this upside-down world where the outbursts of intolerance they encountered were often merely ceremonial. What they had not considered—or if they had, they dismissed the thought—was that they would find that there were certain aspects of this world to which they would never adjust. Australia, while offering us personal and political freedom, failed to fulfil a much deeper desire, a longing which gave birth to the fantasies we had fashioned out of a few scraps of knowledge and a great deal of wishful thinking.

  We were woefully ignorant about conditions of life in a land that was not merely remote but had been isolated from Europe by the long years of the war and by primitive methods of communication. Most Europeans who made their way to Australia in the late forties were almost as ill-informed about the country where they intended to settle as were those who had embarked on such a journey in the nineteenth century. A few months before leaving Budapest we went to a cinema which, someone had told us, was showing a film about Australia. It turned out to be an item in an ancient newsreel. I cannot recall its subject matter. All I remember are three classical, cliched images: a flock of sheep in a cloud of dust, a koala, and the Harbour Bridge. The koala was something new. With the addition of the kangaroo—and everyone knew about kangaroos—these images accounted for the sum of our knowledge of Australia. For the rest, we invented a paradise, a promised land, an El Dorado patched together from the dreams and fantasies of people living in a landlocked country of ice and snow.

  My parents saw Australia as a balmy, tropical place beside an emerald-green sea. They imagined Sydney as a graceful Mediterranean pleasure-city (their model was no doubt picture-postcard views of Monte Carlo, Cannes or Nice) with palm-lined boulevards sweeping the curve of an ample bay. They saw white sand and, in the evenings, elegant, Latin-looking ladies and gentlemen sitting in the open-air cafes of these maritime boulevards. They saw sleek automobiles and many neon lights; they saw nightclubs with liveried doormen, and opulent restaurants. Somewhere, not far from this magical shoreline, they would find the opera house—for every large city had, it went without saying, its opera house. This would be, no doubt, like La Scala, the Met and the opera house in Budapest, but probably more splendid than any of those.

  What does one wear to the opera in a tropical climate? they wondered—for air-conditioning had never entered into their scheme of things. Miraculously, my father still had some lightweight black material among his cache of prewar cloth, enough to make several dinner-jackets—he had wondered whether tails would have been more appropriate. My mother had a harder time: material for ladies’ clothes was very difficult to come by. Fortunately someone knew someone else who had an American parachute for sale, and this provided enough silk, which could be dyed various colours, for three or four evening garments. My mother spent many hours with her dressmaker, a lady of alarming and probably phoney French accent, discussing what, precisely, should be made out of this marvellous cloth which had, so to speak, fallen out of the sky. Details of other clothes for Australia and for the last leg of our journey—first class from San Francisco on the Matson Line, we were assured—were worked out with equal care. Appropriate luggage had also to be ordered: light enough for the journey by air from Vienna to New York, but sturdy enough for use during the vacations we would no doubt be taking once we had established ourselves in Australia.

  Then there was the matter of furniture. We assumed that we would be living in an apartment in a ‘skyscraper’: to an inhabitant of Budapest this meant a building of more than eight storeys. It would, of course, have a fine view of the bay, of the palm-fringed promenades with their cafes and elegant shops, and of the fashionably dressed ladies and gentlemen strolling beside the sea in the soft light of twilit evenings. How many rooms were there in a typical Sydney apartment? my parents wondered. Should they try to have some appropriately modern furniture made and have it shipped to Australia? Alas, neither suitable timber nor craftsmen reputable enough to be entrusted with the task could be found. They had to be content with my grandmother’s family furniture, which, unlike their own, had survived the war—heavy Viennese pieces dating from the 1860s. Never mind, they thought, they could always get rid of the detestable stuff and buy something suitable when they knew what was needed—for there was never any doubt in their minds that they would achieve financial stability and success quite quickly, or that the money left over after the payment of fares and necessary bribes would multiply rapidly. As things turned out, that sum, about three thousand pounds, which would have been sufficient to buy a modest house in Sydney in 1947, thus removing an anxiety that tormented my parents for the next twenty years, disappeared within six months, my father having been expertly fleeced by several ‘business associates’ he had discovered among the newly-arrived migrants.

  There was much speculation about the type of domestic help we would find. Did one have live-in servants or daily women? What colour were they? Were they usually negroes? I was reminded of that long-forgotten preoccupation many years later when visiting a lady my mother had known at school, who had been living in France since the early thirties. She told me how much she would love to visit us, to meet my mother again, but also to see those marvellous boats—what were they called? junks?—moored under the great bridge. There was a great bridge, wasn’t there? It must be a wonderful place. Did we have very high fences to keep the kangaroos out? Did we have much trouble with our coloured servants? How many did we have? Were they honest, or did they steal food and clothing? Where did they sleep at night, in the house or in a compound?

  It is easy to mock these fantasies—t
hey were naive and self-indulgent, and, worse still, they revealed the narrow insularity of Mitteleuropa’s view of the world. People like my parents never looked beyond the confines of their restricted environment. They never entertained the possibility that elsewhere in the great wide world things might be ordained otherwise. They assumed that their priorities—based upon a bourgeois way of life in a society where labour was cheap and servants therefore plentiful—would hold good everywhere. They were, indeed, as ignorant about life in Australia as were most Australians about the nuances of European society. Yet these fantasies, the cloud-cuckoo-land they had invented, formed a crucially important element in the expectations they brought with them in their exile. They were to become the yardstick by which their experience of the new land was to be measured, even though it had been made to fit other standards. That is perhaps the most potent paradox in the migrant experience.

  Elizabeth Jolley clearly understood that predicament in her story ‘Paper Children’, where an elderly Viennese lady travels to Australia to visit her daughter whom she has not seen since the child was smuggled out of a Europe about to burst into flames. When she arrives at her daughter’s farm she finds an Arcadian idyll—or is it the most abject poverty? The daughter and her Australian husband seem to live in perfect amity; or is he brutal and heartless? Contradictory possibilities flicker over the surface of the story. Confused images of life in Australia clash and merge. But they are only fantasy-images fashioned in the last moments of the old lady’s life: she had never set foot beyond her gemütlich Viennese world. Had she completed her journey, the reality she would have found would have been quite contrary to her fantasies, just as my parents and I found a world quite different from what we had expected when we disembarked from the Marine Phoenix.