Our fantasy-image of Sydney was quickly and irrevocably shattered once we emerged from the shed at Woolloomooloo into the dazzling sunshine. Yet such fantasies represent a fundamentally important facet of the newcomer’s experience. They are an essential cause of a predicament all migrants must endure. My parents’ childishly naive image of Australia was cobbled together from images culled from various films—usually with a Latin American setting—and from odd scraps of information picked up here and there. Their true source, however, was the fantasies entertained by people living in a landlocked country, who had never seen the open sea, who had encountered only stunted palm trees in a hothouse. Inevitably then, they imagined Australia, which they knew had a warm climate, as something of an amalgam of Carmen Miranda’s Copacabana and Dorothy Lamour’s Tahiti. Deep down, they were probably aware that the reality of Australia would turn out to be entirely unlike their dreams and aspirations. But they could not have imagined—even if they had been able to discard their Hollywood inspired vision of a South-Seas paradise—the extent to which their new home would contradict their cherished expectations. There remained, throughout their lives, something within their consciousness which whispered that it should have turned out otherwise, that, somehow or other, they had been misled and sorely cheated. This was not primarily a matter of external reality, of the stage-setting of their fantasies. It was, rather, a consequence of their inability to reconcile themselves to a world which ethically and socially, but also visually and architecturally, proved so alien and uncongenial to people who had never experienced the suburban sprawl of London, Manchester or Birmingham. They did not care for suburbia, and to the end of their days complained about its dullness, its lack of variety, its vistas of empty streets.
So powerfully ingrained within their consciousness was the image of European city-life that they conveniently forgot that they themselves had eagerly embraced a type of suburban existence in the first flush of their metropolitan affluence during the thirties. Some little time after I was born they gave up their fashionable rented apartment and bought a house—a ‘villa’ in the terminology of the time—in what they called a village and we would call a suburb, a short journey by electric train from Budapest. They thought that it was a very courageous and rather smart thing to do. No-one in the family had ever owned a villa, nor had an orchard of walnut, cherry, pear and apricot trees, as well as a small vegetable garden. While everybody had a maidservant, and some people could also afford to employ a cook, none of their acquaintances, confined to inner-city apartments, could boast a housekeeper (whose husband acted as part-time caretaker) living in a small self-contained flat in the basement.
It goes without saying that this village or suburb was a pleasant, leafy place, a Killara or a Kew, not at all like the ocean of red tiles you could see from the windows of our rented rooms in Hurlstone Park, or even the snake-ridden paddocks and paspalum-patches of Epping. Nevertheless, my parents’ longing for the kind of urban life that Australia could not offer failed entirely to acknowledge that their happiest and proudest days were when they owned a villa out of town, when they could tell their friends that living there was not at all inconvenient—after all, the trains ran late into the night, you could easily get home after the theatre or the opera. Essential to their view of life was the irrepressible conviction that a city was only a city where people lived in apartment-blocks neatly joined one to the other, that a city which seemed to consist entirely of an expanse of sprawling villages had no right to call itself by that name. They longed for a world where you could go for a stroll in the evening to do a spot of window-shopping or meet your friends in a café, a way of life they had largely abandoned in order to immerse themselves in the joys of living in the ‘country’.
Their disillusionment was in many ways inevitable, and it set in with remarkable rapidity. As the row of streetlights on the horizon drew closer, as the Marine Phoenix sailed past the headland, as the sun rose in a cloudless, pollution-free sky, and as we sweated our way through the interminable customs and immigration procedures, it was already establishing its grip on us. Once free of the wharf, we were bundled into our cousin’s car, and made our way swiftly from Woolloomooloo to the Bridge through a Sydney ignorant of traffic-jams. What we saw was confusing and meaningless, lacking any context or point of reference, like a shadowy dream or a poorly edited film. Momentarily, a street which we came later to call Martin Place offered an urban vista we could understand; but then came the short stretch of George Street, its squat buildings with their menacingly disproportionate awnings, and very soon afterwards we were crossing the Bridge, travelling towards Cammeray and Northbridge.
‘Is this a working-class district?’ asked my mother, with the woeful lack of tact that was to prove in the years to come a frequent source of embarrassment, as we made our way up the hill towards the Suspension Bridge. The small brick or stucco houses, their fussy gardens, the general absence of street-life, the forlorn shopping-centres with their collapsing posts and awnings did not look like the kind of city my parents had expected. Where were the golden sands, the swaying palms, the elegant cars? Where was the promised land in which they would find not only political freedom, but that luxury and vitality which they had imagined from the grim perspective of a continent at war and a city under siege? Why wasn’t this a happy and joyful land? In later years they were to ask the same questions in more complex ways. My parents grew, at length, to understand why Australians were not given to dancing in the streets, why their great ideal was to own a house with heavily curtained windows. Yet they never lost the feeling, which I have inherited from them, that this was a land of sleepwalkers.
I came to learn much later that such an attitude to life in Australia, no matter how hastily achieved, partial or unjust, is profoundly attractive to the displaced European sensibility. The image of a somnolent and anaesthetised land is powerful among European writers who have recorded their impressions of Australia. Lawrence’s bleak vision in Kangaroo of a dreary Sydney, beyond which lay the threatening void of the bush, Conrad’s laconic comment in Lord Jim that this is une triste ville, or Anthony Burgess’s remark that the sky above Sydney seems too innocent for crime or passion, represent Europeans’ dismayed reaction to their first contact with the upside-down world. Australian writers are just as fond of using such images. Expatriates like Christina Stead or Shirley Hazzard, who look back from the perspective of the Northern Hemisphere on their early life in Sydney, and also those, like Patrick White, who made the difficult decision of returning to Australia, fill their books with those images of aridity, lack of passion and numbing propriety we fancied we saw in the Sydney of 1947.
As our cousin’s car made its way through streets that, by European standards, were empty and drained of life, we began to wonder where the real city, the centre of its life, might be found. In The Road from Coorain, Jill Ker Conway writes eloquently about her first visit to Seville. She was amazed and enchanted to discover its great civic spaces—the cathedral, the plaza, the university—around which the life of the city turned. Here was something absolutely alien to her experience of city life—restricted as it had been to Sydney, Melbourne and Newcastle—an urbanity the like of which Australia could not provide. Though I could not have recognised it at the time, our first impression of Sydney was the direct opposite of the awakening that young Australian woman was to experience in Seville—we could find no physical, spiritual or social centre in a city which seemed to contradict all our notions of what urban life should be.
In later years, for people of my parents’ generation, that image of deadness, of a world without a centre, came to be grafted on to another cliché about life in Australia which, curiously but significantly, also found expression in terms of space and of emptiness. The geographical void of a largely uninhabited continent—as seen from the perspective of the tight European world—the horror vacui Lawrence evokes memorably in Kangaroo, became transformed into the notion of a cultural desert. As the wave of Central E
uropean migration increased in the early years of the fifties, so that phrase and that concept were adopted and trotted out by people whose own cultural life had frequently not extended beyond the latest hit-play, movie or blockbuster novel. Yet, as espresso-bars began to sprout all over Sydney, so the lamentations about this horrible philistine place grew louder and louder. Where were the theatres? Ach, remember the opera (in Budapest, Vienna, Prague, Leipzig etc.). In the same way that many migrants automatically cranked themselves up several notches on the social scale, knowing that nobody could check on the extent of their confiscated estates that stretched, according to them, from horizon to horizon, so people began to lament the loss of those amenities which they had not much valued while they were available to them—the easily, at times glibly, invoked marvels of European high culture.
This attitude was often accompanied by a great arrogance—an arrogance that did much harm to emerging relationships between newcomers and Australian society. We were (I am speaking communally) only too ready to scoff and look down our noses on those poor antipodean provincials. That such attitudes arose out of fantasies and deeply mythic needs, rather than out of a just and balanced assessment of the nature of Australian society, was revealed to me with particular force in the London of the early sixties, when circumstances were forcing me to address myself to the difficult question of cultural identity.
Like so many young Australians—and by this stage I had come to think of myself as thoroughly Australian, until that illusion was totally shattered in the course of my first few days as a postgraduate student of English Literature—I was enchanted by the life London offered. You could hear great performers from the back row of the Festival Hall for five shillings; you could get a reasonable seat at Covent Garden for one pound. I lived near Selfridges, the department store, where the basement supermarket provided an ideal place to do the week’s shopping on a Saturday morning. Around the corner, a little way up Baker Street, there used to be a curious establishment called the Balkan Grill. This was, despite its name, a typical Viennese Konditorei specialising in those oozingly baroque confections which are perhaps the old Habsburg Empire’s most lasting contribution to world culture. After the exertions of shopping, I used to drop in at ‘The Balkans’, as it was known in the neighbourhood, for a cup of coffee. As I grew familiar with the place, drinking coffee became no more than an adjunct to the real purpose of the visit: to eavesdrop on the babel of Austro-Hungarian lamentations that filled the room. Ancient crones, their mouths grotesque scarlet gashes, sporting pearls and diamonds in almost obscene abundance, used to sit in their mink or Persian lamb coats drinking Kaffee mit Schlag, consuming lethal quantities of saturated fats, while they lamented the world they had lost, loud in their complaint that they were obliged to live in a cultural desert. Where was the music? Where was the art? Ach, where was the culture? And besides all this, why couldn’t you find decent plumbing in this benighted city?
They were ridiculous and risible. London’s cultural life was, at the time, probably the finest in Europe—more varied and of a higher standard than that of Vienna, Budapest, Prague or even Berlin before the war. But these sad and grotesque old ladies, reciting litanies which had probably lost all but their incantatory significance, were giving expression to their deep sense of loss. They were mourning a dead life. The ‘cultural desert’ of London was no more than a convenient counter to identify their sense of displacement, their longing for a past which could never be recovered. Seen from this perspective, London was as much a cultural desert as the most remote corner of Australia.
The tragedy of such lives is that an inevitable and natural nostalgia, an ever-present clog at the exile’s heels, is invariably expressed in terms of comparisons and judgments which are made without much pertinence or justification. In a most important sense, such people have ceased to live; they are the living dead. What is different seems to them, naturally enough, inferior. A new environment, with its real or imagined disadvantages, is often blamed for the simple fact that people have been wrenched from the old. The agony of loss and longing casts a sentimental glow around what has been lost; it is always inclined to denigrate the new. We do not know how to recognise the benefits of a new world because the old has placed a template over our eyes—we perceive nothing except what those apertures allow us to see. Our lives are dissipated in longing and in the suffering of loss, even though what we have lost is only a country of the mind, a memory, or even a pure invention.
As we approached our cousin’s house near a bushland reserve on Middle Harbour on that February day in 1947, the process I have been describing had already commenced. We were making comparisons between our old life and the new. And because we did not know how to make such comparisons, or on what to base our discriminations, we had begun in our arrogance and ignorance to judge harshly. To understand the source and the implications of those hastily achieved judgments—which I am still prone to make, long after I have come to realise that they are often partial and false—I must record what I can remember of our life before the moment of our arrival at the end of the rainbow, a moment which marked the cutting of our last ties with the past. Although my parents and I could have no way of knowing at the time, the instant we caught sight of those streetlights on a dark headland, our former life entered the realm of legend.
BEFORE THE FLOOD
Memory does not go back very far in a family like mine. Our story is a commonplace tale; it has been told many times. The broad chart of our particular fortunes nevertheless reveals something important about the perplexity of those people whose familiar existence was disrupted by the great upheavals of the middle of the twentieth century, who were obliged to remake their lives in circumstances that produced confusion, anguish and, for some, a debilitating sense of loss.
I know something about my grandparents, a little about my maternal great-grandparents, but beyond them there is nothing. Or rather, what came before must have been those inhabitants of the Austro-Hungarian world who were at one time Austrian, at another Hungarian, who may have lived in Bohemia, or in Moravia, or even outside the actual political confines of the Empire, perhaps in places like the Russian segments of Poland. In other words, though these people lived in and were no doubt citizens of the Dual Monarchy—the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Empire, to give it its most pompous title—they did not belong exclusively to any one of the various groups constituting that cumbersome, polyglot realm. They were neither Magyar nor Slav, neither Galician nor Ruthenian. If anything, they saw themselves as vaguely Austrian (even though in my father’s family Hungarian was the first language), no doubt as a consequence of some sort of cultural osmosis of ‘Austrianness’ through the walls of one of the many ethnic, social or professional ghettoes which flourished in that complicated world. For all of them German was a lingua franca, establishing social, cultural and professional links, and providing for many of them the medium of their intellectual life. My father studied in Germany; my mother’s family were primarily German-speaking—or, better to say, they spoke the outlandish dialect of a district known as Burgenland.
There had never been anyone famous in our family. On my father’s side there was a half-hearted myth that we were somehow related to the Dr Riemer who was for a time secretary and factotum to the great Goethe—Thomas Mann depicts him as an unctuous, slimy pedant in Lotte in Weimar—but there is not, as far as I know, any shred of evidence to support this. Nevertheless, the fact that they entertained such a fantasy, even though in a half-serious, almost jesting fashion, reveals something important about their aspirations and their image of themselves. For such people, even a spurious connection with a ‘famous’ intellectual (in reality probably nothing other than an ill-paid and abused hack) provided quite a feather in the family’s cap.
My father’s people were thoroughly bourgeois, respecting rather than leading the life of the intellect. They had lived in Budapest for several generations. The men were usually engineers or held fairly important positions in va
rious large companies. They made good marriages, often to quite wealthy women from a slightly higher stratum of society. My grandfather, for instance, was a sales executive for a firm of textile manufacturers. I do not think that he ever went from tailor to tailor hawking the company’s goods, at least not by the time of his marriage, yet my grandmother always felt that she had married beneath her proper station.
I know next to nothing about her family except that her maiden name was Schillinger, and that she had a large number of sisters or female cousins who were either widowed or unmarried, and spent most of their time gossiping or lamenting the cruelty of life. My grandmother was a great cemetery-goer. According to my father, she would never miss a funeral, even of someone only vaguely connected by ties of blood or acquaintance. The anniversaries of the deaths of the more important members of her family and circle were observed meticulously by ceremonial visits to various burial grounds. She gave birth to three children, a daughter and two sons, of whom my father was the youngest. Her life was not happy.
She was beyond any shadow of a doubt my favourite grandmother—largely because, unlike my maternal grandmother, she did not live with us. I remember her as a white-haired lady who always wore black dresses with white dots (except when in grand deuil) and lace-up boots. She had a wonderful china-cabinet filled with Dresden figurines, which I was never allowed to touch, and a collection of small silver objects—windmills, boats, cottages—with which I was allowed to play whenever we visited her. My mother used to say that her mother-in-law and my father’s sister had initially resented her, the provincial upstart, but by the time of my earliest memories these resentments seemed largely to have vanished.
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