Inside Outside

by Andrew Riemer

  People of my generation are probably the last to have any clear memories of such a life. The title of David Malouf’s The Great World reveals for us a poignant irony. We are able to remember a time when the great world was no more than a compact backwater of the kind in which Digger Keen is content to spend his life. But unlike Digger, none of our neighbours in Epping had served overseas, none had experienced the menacing life beyond the confines of their comfortable little world. They could not imagine that anyone would have found this paradise anything other than the answer to their fondest dreams. I pretended to myself that I agreed with them; my parents had to learn to disguise their ache, their longing for the old life, and their regret that they had not discovered the palm-fringed Sydney of their fantasies.

  Yet the people of Epping, like many Australians of their kind, entertained fantasies of their own. What little they knew of the world consisted of several layers of a mythology about a dream-England to which they hoped one day to return. They often spoke of going ‘home’—when asked how long ago they had come ‘out’, they would look at you in surprise: they were all second, often third generation Australians. Nevertheless, they spoke about the ‘old country’, and named the dusty streets of their suburb after English counties and towns. The street directory of the districts around Epping reveals a cartographic litany of green fields, dreaming spires and winding lanes.

  Everyone was fiercely loyal to the Empire. Photographs of the King and Queen, sometimes even of the two Princesses, decorated many shops, church porches and the classrooms of the school. On Empire Day a huge bonfire was built on an empty block of land near our place. We stood around the blazing pyre of dry wood and old rubber tyres singing ‘God Save the King’ and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ (never ‘Advance Australia Fair’) while the neighbourhood dogs yapped in fear and ecstasy as children let off torn thumbs, double hungers, skyrockets and volcanoes. The day the King died, the shops, closed in respect, swathed their windows in black cloth. The loudspeaker outside the electrician’s, which drew devoted crowds on the first Tuesday of every November, relayed the BBC World Service’s broadcast of the funeral to a group of solemn-faced people huddled together in the dark. For the inhabitants of Epping, despite their Australian patriotism, a nostalgic fantasy of England provided as powerful a source of longing and heartache as my parents’ yearning for an increasingly imaginary Europe which haunted their memories and disappointments.

  England and things British lay at the heart of the educational fabric of this world. We were taught a great deal of English history at school. The maps we studied were, indeed, coloured red for much of the globe. The books we read, the poems we were made to learn and recite all came from England—or if they did not, as in the case of Longfellow’s ‘The Village Blacksmith’, they were deemed to be English by adoption. The few bits of Australian writing that came our way, chiefly ‘Bell-birds’, were filled with the imagery of English Romantic poetry—though at the time we knew nothing about that. The only ‘patriotic’ or characteristically Australian verse I remember from that time is ‘My Country’. I do not think that ‘The Man from Snowy River’ or ‘Clancy of the Overflow’ ever rated more than a mention. The short stories we read were all English, as were those faded essays by Lamb, Hazlitt and Chesterton that spoke of a world we could scarcely understand, but one about which we could entertain many fantasies.

  We were made to think of ourselves as the proud heirs of a noble British tradition. England had brought civilisation and Christianity to Australia just as it had tamed the wild Indian subcontinent, which was falling apart under our very eyes because of its people’s foolish desire to throw off what they were told by agitators and rabblerousers was the yoke of Empire. We were urged to persuade our parents to contribute to the scheme of sending food parcels to the people ‘at home’ to see them through their hour of need, just as they had seen us through ours when the forces of evil and darkness threatened our homes and hearths. We were constantly reminded of our privileges, that we lived under the protection of British law, of the British sense of justice and fair play, that our language was the richest and noblest in the world, and that it had produced the greatest writers the world had ever known.

  It would be redundant to comment on the emptiness of these political and cultural ideals. In contemporary Australia decrying the ‘cultural cringe’ of former days has become an essential ritual within an elaborate political mythology. Of course those attitudes were foolish and fundamentally untenable. No-one stressed the brutality of the infant years of the colony; everyone conveniently forgot that it was America, not England, that came to our aid in our time of peril, just as no-one had ever mentioned that the disaster of Gallipoli occurred because the British High Command considered a ragbag collection of Antipodeans even more expendable than its home-grown cannon-folder. Nevertheless, I am growing increasingly aware as those years recede into the past that such a seemingly mindless worship of a distant and arrogant society conferred benefits on Australian life which we have discarded to our cost. At the very least, it provided palliatives for the discontents suffered by people like me, and, as I was later to learn, for some of my Australian-born contemporaries, for whom escape was the only means of dealing with the unsatisfactory and stultifying life they were forced to endure.

  One of the chief benefits for people of my generation—and in this respect it did not matter whether you were Australian-born or a newcomer—of this immersion in England and things English was to put us in touch with emotional and aesthetic possibilities which were sadly lacking in our world. It may be true, as Shirley Hazzard noted in The Transit of Venus, that we were exposed to much nature poetry which spoke of things entirely beyond our experience; none of us had ever walked through a field of daffodils. Yet we were made aware, at least, of a way of responding to nature which was not possible in our familiar environment. We were city children; the streets of Epping, or of almost every other suburb of Sydney, offered little more than dusty roadways and well-tended gardens. The bits and pieces of bushland we knew were generally no more than scrawny scrub, much of it practically choked by lantana, ivy and morning glory. Nothing in our environment suggested that nature could be a source of wonder or consolation, let alone transcendence.

  Our teachers and mentors had failed us, by making no effort whatever to suggest that out there, beyond the Blue Mountains most of us knew, and beyond the plains that some of us had visited, was a natural world, certainly unlike Wordsworth’s fields of daffodils or Keats’s seasons of mist and mellow fruitfulness, which could nevertheless inspire awe and veneration. They could not have told us about it; for them it was merely desert, the awful emptiness of an empty world. Yet even if we had come to know that world as anything but hostile and menacing, where were the poems that preserved and interpreted this world for us, made it meaningful and allowed it to enter the stream of our imagination?

  Had there been a poetry of the Centre, the ‘poetic’ experience of that natural world would not have answered our emotional requirements in the way that English verse was able to speak to a surprisingly large number of my contemporaries, and to the generations of Australians before them who were brought up in the same educational and literary tradition. Adolescence is a time of longing that requires the consolations of that mixture of gentleness and melancholy which English nature poetry is uniquely qualified to provoke in those fortunate enough to have access to the language in which it is written. Adolescents are often incurably romantic; their burgeoning sexuality demands to be channelled into areas of emotions and sensibility where a sense of beauty—a term entirely absent from modern aesthetics—provides a counterpoise to the turmoil and confusion of complex psychological and physiological changes.

  Many of these requirements were fulfilled by the literature of England, and the traditions it preserved, for which Australian life provided no counterparts. It gave us experiences and emotions which were not available either in our physical or in our home-grown literary environment. We knew
very little, it is true, about the intellectual traditions of English poetry. We had never read a line of Donne or Marvell; our entire experience of Milton consisted of the sonnet on his blindness. But the magic of ‘The splendour falls on castle walls’ exerted a powerful influence on us. We saw snowy summits old in story, as well as the glory of wild cataracts, with a vivid immediacy, as if words were capable of stimulating the retina to provide precise images of what they described. The echoes of these beguiling words rolled from soul to soul in more instances than we were prepared to admit to others or even at times to ourselves. True, the experience was vicarious, perhaps gimcrack, like the ecstasy produced in me years before when I sat enthralled in our box at the opera, but Tennyson’s words represented for us an essential experience which we could not approach in any other manner. His poetry, and that of Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley (though not Pope, for instance, whom we usually detested), provided an escape from and a consolation for the ugliness and meanness of the world in which we were forced to live. Neither the physical world we inhabited, nor any of the poetry produced by it, could provide such escape or consolation. The windows of my classroom did not give onto a sylvan glade, but looked out on a busy thoroughfare where lorries laboured up a hill past the garish bunting of second-hand car yards. The literature of England conducted us into the world of the romantic imagination which served one of the essential needs of adolescence. It also catered generously for others: a heroic or noble past in which we could participate, and ethical structures to provide models for fantasies, if not for actual life.

  These are contentious issues to raise in the current climate of cultural nationalism. The literature we were required to read at school—and those other books to which we were gradually drawn after many of us started to discard our infatuation with a philistine way of life—provided models of loyalty, altruism, courage and perseverance which, once again, appealed strongly to our adolescent need for imaginative structures that seemed to avoid the compromises we were instinctively making in our daily lives. Literature gave us heroes to worship. It gave us, for instance, Henry V, whom many of us got to know by way of Olivier’s stirring film, this leading us, in turn, to reconsider our scorn for Shakespeare. It gave us Sidney Carton; it gave us some of Scott’s noble and romantic creatures. It gave us, on a more familiar and domestic level, Jane Austen’s characters and the world in which they lived, a cosy rural England, where the values of good breeding, politeness, and consideration for others were mixed with the art of conversation and other civilised accomplishments. We were aware of Austen’s irony; we may even have been aware that some of her novels contained disturbingly ambivalent father-figures. But the greatest appeal of her novels to many of my contemporaries during our late adolescence lay in their picturesque representation of a way of life that seemed to many of us more attractive and comforting than our humdrum existence. Some of us, of course, devoured Georgette Heyer as well.

  In my own case, an immersion in English culture found its focus in a world of illusions, contained by the proscenium arch of a theatre. In this instance it bore no resemblance to the gilded opera theatre in Budapest; it was an attractive though modest hall in Phillip Street which fell victim to the epidemic of demolitions that swept Sydney throughout the sixties and seventies. A Shakespearian repertory company flourished there for some years led by John Alden, a flamboyantly rhetorical actor in the tradition of the actor-managers of the nineteenth century. In front of often makeshift scenery and in costumes that had probably seen service as curtains and bedcovers, the company performed the great plays—King Lear, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It and even such a relatively difficult and obscure work as Measure for Measure, which drew some disparaging comments in the press for its subject matter.

  The acting style was largely operatic, the vowels bore no trace of the despised diphthong. Alden as King Lear raged against his daughters’ ingratitude, writhed in his insanity, howled as he staggered onto the stage with Cordelia’s lifeless body. As Shylock he rubbed his hands with diabolic glee at the prospect of getting hold of a pound of Antonio’s flesh, yet rose to heights of dignity in the court scene where the essential humanity of the predator was suddenly revealed without any suspicion of a ‘Yid’ accent. Sitting there on Saturday afternoons I was no longer in Sydney, but found myself transported into that fantasy-England which we had been told was our birthright. Everything in that theatre turned its back on the reality that surrounded us. There was no question of making Shakespeare relevant to the audience’s immediate experience. The Forest of Arden was a vista of crudely-painted oaks, not the Australian bush. The powerful allure of the theatre reinforced the fundamental nostalgia for a cloud-cuckoo-land England which I shared with my ‘native-born’ contemporaries of Epping, living in streets named in honour and commemoration of these fantasies.

  Such values seem particularly offensive to many sections of contemporary Australian society. Perhaps they represent aspirations which are best discouraged for the sake of equality and social harmony. Our books and the plays we saw, held up as models by our teachers and by other figures of cultural authority, may often have recommended sexist, paternalistic and elitist ideals and patterns of behaviour. They may have mirrored the values of a dominant culture which implicitly suppressed other ways of looking at social, political and religious issues.

  For us Ned Kelly was a bandit; Henry VIII, despite his less than admirable domestic life, a Protestant hero; Irish politics during World War One a shameful instance of ingratitude and treachery. We, in our Anglophile, culturally Protestant state schools, never considered what people like the Dunnicliffe boys, who were swallowed by the world of the Christian Brothers after we left primary school, would have made of all this. We were heirs to a noble tradition. Through the political ties of the Empire and by way of our mystic Britishness, the world of English literature—Wordsworth’s Lake District as much as Goldsmith’s deserted village, Scott’s medieval fantasies as well as Charles Kingsley’s thrilling tale of sea-dogs and Empire-builders—became our world and our heritage, even though we lived at the other end of the earth in a scorched land that provided little solace for the romantic agony of adolescence.

  Our educational institutions and the type of literature we were called upon to admire, the way in which English history was presented as a steady progression towards the establishment of British justice and fairness throughout the wide world—in England’s present and former colonies as much as in the great sister-nation of the United States of America—may be difficult to defend on social and political grounds in the climate of contemporary Australia. The presence of large numbers of people like myself, who became members of this cultural world even more vicariously than our Australian-born contemporaries, probably helped to bring about the decline of these ideals and aspirations. For people like me, and for many of my contemporaries, however, these structures fulfilled emotional and psychic needs which could not be met in any other way.

  Current educational and cultural attitudes towards the intellectual climate of Australia in the decade after the end of the war are probably correct in their political and sociological emphases—though I sometimes wonder whether they represent nothing more than the replacement of one rigid orthodoxy by another. But it is clear to me that contemporary educational structures do not cater for the psychic and emotional needs of adolescents in the way that we were able to indulge in the romantic fantasies generated by our immersion in English literature, or by our being made to feel that we were the inheritors of a rich civilisation that exerted its influence over many lands, and in an unbroken chain from the dawn of history to our visually and physically pedestrian present. It gave us ideals; it suggested that we too had a place in a great design. It is just possible that contemporary adolescents may be capable of discovering these essential elements in a specifically Australian context: in their relationship with the ‘real’ as opposed to the urban or cultivated Australian landscape; in their dedication to environmental issues; in the
ir feeling of kinship with the original inhabitants of the continent who, shamefully, were regarded as savages by our mentors in the late forties and the fifties. Yet they lack the imaginative structures—chiefly in literature—to give substance to their fantasies, longings and torments.

  Australia is not a land for romantics. The Australian writing schoolchildren are exposed to nowadays is eminently capable of making them aware of social, economic and political issues to which adolescents should perhaps be exposed in order that they might avoid the mistakes and injustices of the past. They are sensitive to the pressing social and sexual issues of the kind that our prudish mentors constantly swept under the educational carpet. Children now know that the world is larger than the firmly British-biased model that was presented to us in those discredited days. But nothing in the contemporary educational and cultural climate caters for those powerful longings—romantic, idealistic, seeking for beauty which the individual finds hard to recognise or to define—that our membership of the British world provided for us through books, through a version of history, and through models of behaviour which these structures recommended to us. The few locally-grown instances of such romantic idealism, Patrick White’s portrayal of Voss for instance, are too constricted by their authors’ doubts and alarms about heroic individualism to serve that essential need.