I entered a grey period. My adolescence was boring, unsatisfying and obsessed with the need to become indistinguishable from people I took to be genuinely Australian. I even lacked the excitement of being unusual. Epping had got used to me. People may not have been any more kindly disposed towards us who were, for many years, one of the very few ‘New Australian’ families in the district, but at least we had been around long enough to be remarkable no longer. The greengrocer stopped asking my mother how many budgies she kept every time she bought capsicums. He would even go as far as saying: ‘I’ve got some nice red ones today, Mrs Riemer.’ I made a few friends, boys as lonely and lacking in personality as I was, or those who were briefly attracted to the mildly exotic. Such friendships could not develop firm or lasting bonds. My mother used to remark from time to time how strange it was that I was never asked to birthday parties. People in Epping did not give parties—or if they did, they did not invite me. My social life consisted almost entirely of meandering rides on my bike, often alone, sometimes in the company of one or two boys, always ending at the oval where a group of us would stand around watching the inevitable rutting dogs.
I was plump, pimply and wholly uninteresting. I had no accomplishments. Though I managed to keep my head above water at school, I was not particularly good at any subject except Scripture. Since everyone was obliged to attend Scripture lessons, I decided to play it safe, and joined the Church of England class. I found that I had a strange ability to remember recondite bits of Bible-lore for the tests the minister gave us. I almost always got top marks, and on one occasion in primary school a prize of threepence as well, but these achievements never appeared on the term reports. Otherwise I chugged along, content to ape what I understood to be behaviour acceptable to my contemporaries. I broadened my accent as far as I could manage. I learnt to spit with gusto, though I could never contrive to whistle through my fingers. I feigned an insatiable interest in cricket and football, read the racing guide without any understanding of its arcana, and, for a brief time, became the owner of one half of a pair of boxing gloves purchased in partnership with a boy called Brian. I spent much time with him in his father’s shed, taking turns at punching an ancient mattress propped up in a corner.
Because everyone attended Sunday school, I too went to Sunday school at St Alban’s Church of England in Epping. There I was exposed to the joyless puritanism of Low-Church Anglicans. I was even confirmed as a communicant of the Church of England—that I hadn’t been baptised seemed to worry no-one—and succumbed to the obligatory religious mania of adolescence. I grew obsessed with my imperfection and fell into the sin of despair. Those in charge of our spiritual welfare impressed on us the powerlessness of the human spirit to achieve salvation. There was not much emphasis on a loving and forgiving God: rather, we were urged to be on a constant guard against the flesh and the devil—one erotic dream and you were gone. I continued to experience the odd erotic dream and considered myself irrevocably lost. Now a sense of religious inadequacy was added to my other shortcomings and failures. Even in the eyes of the Lord I was destined to be an outsider. I gave religion away when I was about seventeen, having followed for several years a chart which guaranteed that if you adhered to it you would eventually have read all of the Bible. The only thing religion did for me was to cram my head full of odd facts that won me Scripture prizes.
I got almost nothing out of school. It taught me a few skills and gave me a reasonable proficiency in French—the only aspect of my school education to have been the source of lasting satisfaction and stimulation. The books we were expected to study—King Richard’s Land, Kim, Kidnapped—failed to stir my imagination to life. In the early years of secondary school I persuaded myself that I detested Shakespeare and hated The Lay of the Last Minstrel. It was only in my last year at school that I discovered the world of literature, and even that discovery was made in areas somewhat remote from the books we were obliged to study and the way in which they had been taught to us. Before that, I passionately wanted to be the open-faced philistine most of my classmates seemed to be—though as it turned out several had hidden their lights under bushels, whereas I had never kindled mine. I was abominably bad at sports. I was forbidden to sing in the compulsory choir (‘Just open and shut your mouth, but do not make a sound!’) because I was incapable of holding a tune. I tried to join the debating team but I was outclassed by boys far more articulate and witty. My parents sent me to dancing classes—just as, in another world, in the year before we left Budapest, they had sent me to a fencing academy where on one occasion I sparred with a scion of the great Eszterházy family—but I proved to have two left feet.
I had learnt to mimic with some efficiency the superficial characteristics of Australian adolescence, but it was no more than mimicry, representing nothing fundamental or intrinsic, merely a thin veneer pasted over emptiness. The anguish and self-loathing I experienced through those years were, I am convinced, the product of that aggressively practical-minded, exclusively male society in which I spent my schooldays, a world that allowed no scope for emotions or for the cultivation of the sensibility. Being the child of a culture where feelings and affection are expressed far more readily than they were in that pragmatic middle-class boys’ high school, I suffered (as I now realise) from the suppression of life-sustaining emotional energies—no matter how bizarre their manifestations might have been among the gesticulating patrons of the espresso-bars. The lack of personality that afflicted me when the drab adolescent replaced the multicoloured freak of Hurlstone Park revealed the extent of my spiritual impoverishment.
In many ways the greatest influences on my life at that time were closer to the world I had tried savagely to deny, the world of the expatriates with their nostalgic memories of Europe. When I was dragged, resentful and complaining, to visit my parents’ friends, or on our mountain holidays (‘Why can’t we go to Terrigal, for goodness sake, like everyone else?’), I was coming into contact with a world I would eventually have to recover—though not in the stunted and grotesque forms in which it survived amongst us. At the time, though, I could not allow myself to admit that such a despised way of life touched in any way on my real self, or had any relevance for what I was hoping to become.
Nevertheless, the old world and its influences were beginning to creep back into my life in unusual and wholly unsuspected ways. The earliest and most powerful warning that Europe—to use a convenient shorthand for complicated states of mind, memories and longings—would not lie down and fade away, came through that discovery of music which proved to be one of the few consolations of those bleak years. It happened quite fortuitously when I was confined to bed with a suspected bout of rheumatic fever. I spent weeks in bed, listening to the radio for most of the day and well into the night. At first my favourite programmes were serials: Martin’s Corner, Portia Faces Life, Mrs ’Obbs and When A Girl Marries. I also discovered the crooners and songsters of the day: Bing Crosby, Dinah Shore, the Andrews Sisters, Danny Kaye singing ‘I’ve got a loverly bunch of coconuts’, and many others whose names I have forgotten. I listened to radio plays, to Parliament and even the river heights when nothing else was available, and to the Quiz Kids, Jack Davey and Bob Dyer.
Through various bouts of illness in my teens, I lay curled up in bed, the Stromberg-Carlson emitting the faint odour of heating bakelite, listening, lost in the wonder of the serials, the quiz shows, the plays. When I saw Woody Allen’s Radio Days I was immediately taken back to a familiar and well-loved world. One night, quite by chance, I wound the dial round to the ABC, catching the middle of a concert from the Town Hall. Something entirely inexplicable and magical happened. I have forgotten what piece of music the orchestra was playing, but I can still sense, almost as keenly as I did on that night, the sensuous thrill of hearing the sound of an orchestra in full flight transmitted through the tiny loudspeaker of my decidedly low-fidelity radio. I could not understand why ‘classical’ music, to which I had remained relatively indifferent until th
at moment, should have exerted such a powerful influence on me on that particular occasion. Perhaps the sound filling my dark room reminded me of the music I had heard emerging from the orchestra pit all those years ago, which at the time had seemed merely an accompaniment to the more substantial magic of the stage. Yet all the orchestral music I had heard until that evening had left me wholly indifferent. After that night my hunger for music became insatiable. I began exploring the classical repertoire, by means of the radio, with a dedication bordering on obsession. To this day, music provides for me greater consolation than words—words are of the mind, but music speaks to the soul.
The discovery of music was, of course, the rediscovery of European ways of life, a means of recognising that the despised world of the expatriates among whom my parents moved from time to time—to my eyes a grotesque and almost entirely contemptible society—embraced values to which I could relate, values that could fill to some extent the spiritual void in which I lived. Music became, moreover, a way of reconciling the two worlds between which I was already dwelling, even though that recognition, too, lay in the future. At the time, music was apparently no more than an escape, a way of finding an alternative to the humdrum life I was leading—a life entirely devoid of emotional satisfaction, of self-confidence or of any shred of fulfilment, yet a way of life I pretended to find wholly desirable.
After a while the sounds coming out of the tiny loudspeaker-cone were not enough. My parents, always more than prepared to indulge me in even the most difficult circumstances, purchased a record-player and several sets of 78s—The Nutcracker Suite was, I remember, the first. Buying a musical instrument and paying for tuition was, however, out of the question. I longed for a piano or a violin but knew that I had to keep silent. At one time I bought some music paper and tried to write a symphony by making marks on the staves without any knowledge whatever of the meaning of those mysterious symbols I saw in the few music scores the school library possessed. In adulthood I took music lessons for a year, painfully picking out some easier pieces on my wife’s piano. It was, it goes without saying, much too late—fingers wouldn’t respond, a semiquaver-run proved an insurmountable obstacle. I could hear the music, but all I could produce was halting, thumping confusion. I remain a passive consumer of music, just as I had been in my teens.
The radio and the record-player were supplemented when I was fourteen or fifteen by concerts in the Town Hall. In the fifties, tickets for orchestral concerts in Sydney were as hard to obtain as subscriptions to the opera in Budapest had been in 1946. You could, however, queue up for several hours outside the ticket booth on the Town Hall portico and buy places in the organ gallery or better still on bentwood chairs placed at the top of the steps in the Eastern Gallery. Reluctantly my parents occasionally allowed me to travel into the city on a Saturday evening, decked out in my school uniform, to sit in the organ gallery or on those bentwood chairs and experience the excitement of an orchestra in full cry. When I returned, still wide-eyed with enthusiasm, they would wait for me at the station in Epping, worried and concerned whether I would survive safely the hazards of an unescorted trip to the city—our neighbours’ suspicions about that godless place had obviously rubbed off on them.
The Town Hall’s elaborately coffered ceiling, its dark-stained podium dominated by huge grey organ pipes, like menacing upended cannons, the niches dotting the walls around the galleries, provided the setting for those evenings when I began to discover aspects of European life which were to play a fundamentally important part in my reconciliation of Australia with the world I had left behind. As with my nights at the opera, the performances I heard at the Town Hall—accompanied by the clatter of trams and the screeching of tyres on those stifling humid nights when the side doors were left open to allow some air into the concert hall—did not make as much of an impression on me as the event itself, the fact of being there, of participating in a glamorous way of life. Many of the concerts were conducted by Eugene Goossens—soon to be knighted and then disgraced—and these were in all probability some of the finest performances Sydney has ever heard. But I was insufficiently educated in the ways of music to know that. For me, as for Thelma Parker in The Tree of Man, to hear the music was enough; even if the violins had emitted the most ear-tormenting whine, or the horns had burped unmusically, or the tympanist had merely whacked at his drums with all his strength, to have been there would have satisfied. The connoisseurship of later life has robbed music of a good deal of its magic for me.
In the audience, whom I would observe sitting in rows or chatting under the large chandelier of the main foyer during the interval, I caught sight of elements of Sydney life from which my parents and I had been almost wholly excluded. Well-dressed people conversed discreetly, greeted acquaintances with a smile or a wave of the hand. They displayed, in short, the outward and visible signs of a civilised way of life as the consumers of high culture, in a way not very different from the social pantomime enacted amid the gilt of the Budapest Opera House. Among these people I would occasionally see some of my parents’ acquaintances, those people whom I looked upon as crassly un-Australian, as representatives of that European nonsense which I, as a good citizen of Epping, thought entirely beyond the pale. Yet there they were, in the Town Hall, listening to the music I was listening to, standing in the foyer as the other members of the audience were doing. At the time I merely noted what I took to be an anomaly. It did not occur to me that the distinction between the two worlds of my experience was much less clear-cut than I had imagined it to be, or that the two might, indeed, be to some extent reconciled.
Such a recognition lay in the future, when I would make tentative and at times evasive attempts to allow ‘Europe’ back into my life, at first by means of immersion in its culture, later—quite recently indeed—by the realisation that the allure of European culture was, in large measure, indistinguishable from nostalgia for a vanished way of life. Meanwhile I had to endure the torments and dissatisfactions of adolescence, its furies and rebellions which could not break out into major eruptions of self-assertion because, as I came to understand in later years, I could at that time see no possibility of amelioration in my life. It was no use threatening to leave school, to run away to sea, or whatever other fantasies adolescents entertain, because I could not anticipate anything in the future that would guarantee even a small amount of satisfaction except, perhaps, the impossible—becoming Australian not merely spiritually, but in all other respects as well, most importantly in physical appearance. When I became the first boy in my class who had to shave daily, when my chest and back began to sprout the thick black fuzz that made going to the beach a ceremony of acute embarrassment, my depression and despair reached rock bottom.
I now know that this joyless time was not vastly different from the despair and anguish many adolescents around me were enduring. I also know that those stirrings of longing and desire for other ways of life which, as yet, I did not recognise in the least, were beginning to seethe among many of my contemporaries, several of whom I was to come to know well in later years. At the time I blamed all of my sorrows and troubles on the unalterable fact of my difference, on the difficulty I was experiencing in becoming a true Australian, which in essence meant the particular aspect of Australia that Epping represented in its moral, social and cultural horizons.
I felt bitterly resentful that I was trapped in a European family with its quaint and foreign ways. I made my mother’s life misery by refusing to take anything but spaghetti and baked bean sandwiches to school for lunch, not realising that those little bits of pasta in a watery tomato sauce that came out of a tin were, themselves, a version of food that only filthy dagoes ate. In public I became violently xenophobic—I recall with particular shame a couple of disgraceful episodes where I tried to join a small, nasty group of boys at school who tormented the two people of Chinese descent among us. It did not occur to me that my discontent was the product equally, if not more, of the world in which I was living, the worl
d I wanted so desperately to accept me as its own. Yet there, in its very midst, in the myths and fantasies of that important aspect of Australian life in the forties and the fifties that I have chosen to describe by the convenient shorthand of ‘Epping’, lay one of the means of escape, one of the ways in which I was to find something of an identity for myself. It was to provide an alternative to the pedestrian world around me, and a way back to acknowledging my European self through aspirations which I could share with the people among whom I lived. Its source was nothing other than the bête noire of modern political and literary polemics: Australia’s status as a colonial culture.
It is difficult for those who cannot remember the Australia of the forties and the early fifties to imagine the isolation and introspection of those times. In a world of rapid and relatively cheap travel, in a world, moreover, where images of war, disaster and outrage are transmitted almost instantaneously around the globe, the tyranny of distance—to use Geoffrey Blainey’s evocative phrase—has to a large extent been overcome. Back in the forties and fifties—at least in Epping—it was otherwise. People were cut off from the world by an almost complete lack of curiosity about anything outside their immediate experience. My most lasting memories of our early years are not of hostility but of suspicion—the war years had, of course, exaggerated the inward-looking smugness that produced these attitudes. The people of Epping were convinced of the absolute superiority of their dust-blown, paspalum-infested little community. Even the nearby and more affluent suburbs of Cheltenham and Beecroft were looked upon with considerable suspicion. The evil city was unspeakable, to be visited only when absolutely necessary. Melbourne was another world—of interest only on the first Tuesday of November.
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