Australians, other than the original inhabitants of this perplexing land, require, for their emotional and indeed spiritual well-being, contacts with a past and with a tradition which they may regard as their own, of the kind that those Aboriginal people who have not become spiritually annihilated by their contact with urban or even rural Australia have been able to retain. We cannot, however, become naturalised Aborigines. In this respect the terrible gulf that I saw between myself, the short and hirsute ‘New Australian’ adolescent, and my long-limbed, fair-haired contemporaries was not nearly as deep as I or as they had imagined. In essence we belonged to the same world. The differences of language and custom between us, which were a cause of much anguish as I tried to exist between the laconic world of school and the gesticulating society of the espresso-bars and the mountain holidays, were superficial, accidentals only.
Whether we arrived in this country on the Marine Phoenix on a stifling day in February 1947, or whether our ancestors had sailed through the Heads on 26 January 1788, past that headland which in 1947 was to display a row of faintly twinkling streetlights, culturally we were all Europeans. ‘White’ Australia, that terrible and embarrassing term that is to be spoken only in whispers nowadays, is in essence European Australia, whether your forebears were English, Irish, Scottish or that indefinable mix of nationalities, racial strands and ethnic characteristics my parents and I brought with us from the ruins of the Habsburg world. In terms of real Australian culture and history, there is no difference whatever between people who came here in 1788 or 1947, or for that matter in 1991. But the emotional, cultural and spiritual quandary of people like myself, which I am attempting to capture in these pages before they recede from communal memory, refers very particularly to problems and perplexities produced by the fine and in the long view irrelevant differences between one set of European cultures and social habits and another.
The characteristics of Australian society which became for me at first ideals to emulate, later a source of dissatisfaction and frustration, affected equally many ‘native-born’ Australians whom I got to know in my years at university, people who proved to be as confused and ambivalent about their cultural allegiances as I, the product of an immigrant culture, felt myself uniquely to be. They had to travel the same road as I was obliged to travel. They had to untangle similar riddles and conundrums. Many had to discover their own identity, and in some cases, as in mine, achieve an understanding of what it is to be Australian, in the old world. There the notions of identity, nationality and culture were to provoke among some of my contemporaries responses as extreme, at times, as the rituals of expatriate society in Australia, when Budapest and Vienna gathered at the Twenty-One or beneath the summit of Mt Kosciusko.
It took me many years to discover the essential affinity between my own apparently very particular confusions and ambivalences and those of people who seemed to me to belong to an entirely different order of existence, to be enjoying an altogether greater sense of harmony with the social structures within which they lived. I now know that the difference between myself, in my own eyes a strikingly grotesque representative of an alien way of life, and the confident people who surrounded me at school and in the streets of Epping or Wahroonga, where we went to live in my last year at school, was only of key and register. I was also to learn, to my surprise and mild dismay, that the despised way of life led by my parents’ friends and acquaintances was merely an individual response to circumstances to which ‘real’ Australians, those who staggered home semi-conscious from the pub on Friday nights and many other nights as well, or those who seemed to concentrate their whole attention on cultivating their gardens, were responding with a deep though unrecognised sense of emptiness and spiritual loss.
We are all strangers in the land. We have all been cut off from forces that are necessary for our psychic or spiritual survival. For my parents’ society, as much as for me and for the generations of Europeans who have lived in this country, Australia offers political safety and a measure of financial stability. Our material way of life, even for those who fall into the alarmingly growing ranks of the poor and economically disadvantaged, is infinitely superior in many cases to that which we or our forebears sought to escape, or from which they were, in a literal sense, transported. My parents may have lost a brief but spectacular period of affluence, but they gained freedom from the secret police, and from the swift and terrible changes of political climate which could turn you overnight from citizen to pariah. Many of their acquaintances discovered wealth and economic power beyond the wildest dreams they had entertained in their stuffy apartments in Budapest and Vienna, where their only prospects were, literally and metaphorically, the light well or dark courtyard they saw from their windows.
Similarly, the parents, grandparents and great-grandparents of the people I knew at school or was later to know much more fully and intimately at university, discovered a land—whether they had intended to come here or were brought under duress—where they found, eventually at least, plentiful food and a healthy climate in which to grow and prosper physically. The lanky sun-tanned Australian (especially in those innocent days when we knew little about melanomas) kicking a football or driving through the surf became an image of that body-worship which the denizens of the espresso-bars practised in their different ways when they flashed their diamond rings at each other or waxed lyrical over the latest instances of their business cunning and acumen.
European Australians, too, are frequently the living dead. Like the more spectacular manifestations of this condition among the postwar migrant population, they also lack a sustaining tradition, a network of social, religious and tribal ceremonies which are appropriate for the world in which they live. Their paltry rituals—the worship of the body, the pretence of disdain for the life of the imagination (which many of them practise in secret, behind drawn blinds), their dedication to a practial, down-to-earth, no-nonsense view of life—all produce a spiritual desiccation that manifests itself in social practices as ugly as those of the espresso-bar culture of the fifties and the sixties. The spectacles of public crassness, street-violence, the displays of adolescent sexuality visible in every suburb of every Australian city, and the pursuit of mindless pleasures have a particularly Australian accent. But they are as much the product of disorientation, of the suppression of traditions and obligations which had provided, in a different world, sustenance and solace, as the vulgar rituals of the nouveaux riches ‘reffos’ of Double Bay with their flashy ‘un-Australian’ ostentation and worship of the external signs of affluence.
Throughout the fifties, which were the last years I spent at school and also encompassed my years as a university student, Australian society witnessed an extraordinary conjunction of social, cultural and psychological forces. These were the years in which people like myself, the children of those postwar migrants who were too old even to consider becoming integrated within the society of their new nationality, and the children of ‘native-born’ Australians, who were themselves in many cases growing alienated from what they saw as their parents’ philistine way of life, were discovering a common ground. The fifties and the sixties were the great decades of integration. People like me had achieved acceptance and had become assimilated without, as was certainly true in my case, noticing that the hoped-for miracle had occurred. These were also the years when, at institutions like universities, new and old Australians mixed freely, discovering common concerns, common perplexities and preoccupations. The sad sights of present-day student-life, where Greek sticks with Greek, Vietnamese with Vietnamese, where Arabs are deeply suspicious of, sometimes hostile to non-Arab people taking courses in Islamic studies, did not exist in those golden years to anything like the extent that they are visible nowadays.
We, by contrast, attempted, even if in a halting and pedestrian fashion, to address ourselves to the question of cultural identity, though none of us, I think, thought of it in such specific terms. What made that possible for us was the fact that n
ewcomers like me had gained by this stage a command of English far in excess of what our parents were capable of achieving. We had the skills of communication, consequently we could reach out across the gulf of appearance, experience and custom that separated us from our Australian- born contemporaries, allowing us to discover that we shared many vital concerns and aspirations. We spoke the same language in much more than a lexical or phonological sense. The education we had received, and indeed the education we were receiving in our traditional, British-inspired universities, made us partake of that mystic Britishness which had been inculcated in us at school. The English-speaking world was our oyster. We had the tool to open it, irrespective of our racial or religious origins—or so we thought. We were united by a common desire to explore that world, to use the magical formula printed on our passports—‘Australian Citizen and British Subject’—that would allow us to conquer that world. Many of us ached to escape the restrictions and narrowness of Australia.
The escape route, for most of us, whether we were born in Australia or elsewhere, led to Britain: to London or to Oxford or Cambridge, the great cynosures for people of my generation. For many of us, moreover, the question of what we were, or to put it another way, what it means to be Australian, could only be addressed when we had reached our cultural and intellectual homeland. The way in which individuals dealt with that process revealed curious ironies. For many of us, among them people now well known in circles far beyond intellectual and literary institutions, ‘homecoming’ meant the impossibility of returning to the land in which they were born. For me, by contrast, it became necessary, through a variety of complex circumstances, to come ‘home’ to a world where I never felt completely at ease, where I never, in fact, felt entirely at home.
HOMECOMING
I went to England in 1960 armed with a travelling scholarship to write a doctoral thesis in English Literature as well as a crisp new passport declaring me an Australian Citizen and British Subject which contained a request from the Governor-General that all courtesies and considerations due to a loyal subject of Her Majesty should be extended to me. As the boat docked at Southampton on a dull October morning, I thought that I had arrived in all senses of the word. I passed through immigration formalities in what seemed a matter of seconds, in sharp contrast to the fate of all those unfortunates we had picked up in Colombo, Aden and Port Said, who were made to form long queues in a separate part of the arrival hall. I remembered that other arrival, in the stifling shed at Woolloomooloo, where my parents’ passports were summarily impounded to indicate that their being allowed to enter Australia was merely provisional and even temporary. In Southampton, the immigration official returned my passport, after a cursory examination, with a few mumbled words of welcome. In those golden days you needed no stamp or entry permit, no limit was placed on the length of your stay in the United Kingdom as long as your passport bore, as mine did, the magic formula.
That arrival was the climax to a long and at times painful process that brought me from the Idiots’ Class to the doorstep of the great British academic world. I do not remember what fantasies I entertained as I sat in the boat train to Waterloo, clattering past rows of cabbages and a sign reading BEWARE ADDERS, but I was convinced that a career of singular brilliance lay ahead of me. That confidence was inspired not merely by the academic success I had enjoyed at the University of Sydney as a student of English Literature (after a false start with a couple of disastrous years in the Faculty of Medicine). It was much enhanced by the certainty that I had taken my place in Australian society, and had therefore become the recipient of all those privileges that went with the status of being a British Subject.
My undergraduate days in Sydney, after the two nauseating years of cutting open a succession of stinking stingrays and bloated white rabbits, had been a time of awakening. For the first time in my life I had friends whom I could meet on an equal footing, not with those tentative and frequently suspicious steps towards friendship that marked the few relationships I had formed during my schooldays. I now came into contact with people whose cultural and social horizons were not nearly so restricted as those of the people of Epping had been. The complexity of Australia’s social fabric was coming gradually to be revealed to me. I met people from many and varied backgrounds. One friend I made in those days—whose friendship I have kept ever since—was the offspring of a wealthy and cultivated family who wore his advantages with grace and modesty. That was something entirely unknown in espresso-bars. I began to enjoy a social life. With my new friends I discovered the heady world of talk—hour after hour, day after day, in coffee shops, in the quadrangle, on the beach, indeed wherever two, three or four of us had gathered. The load of unhappiness had lifted; I was at last able to enjoy life to the full.
These changes were not unconnected with an improvement in my family’s way of life. During these years, and for a year or two afterwards, my parents enjoyed a modestly comfortable though by no means reliable income. Our living conditions had improved greatly. In my last year at school we moved from the flat in Epping to a rented duplex in what estate agents called Wahroonga but the caste-conscious inhabitants of that world knew as the much more plebeian suburb of Waitara. Those niceties of social distinction did not worry us greatly. We now had more space, and a pleasant garden (part of which was entirely ours) a telephone, and best of all a septic system which functioned perfectly as long as you remembered to run the pump for two hours each week. The mangle of Epping was replaced by a washing machine, the ice chest by a refrigerator manufactured by the animal-loving knight who was to confer citizenship on my grandmother a year or two later.
At last we were living in a place where our heavy furniture, which had once belonged to my father’s family, could be accommodated without making the rooms resemble a furniture store. My mother, who had formerly detested these pieces, now looked at them with considerable pride, eagerly anticipating their hundredth birthday in the late sixties, when they would rise to the status of genuine antiques. The years when she had to spend hours at a rattling sewing machine were, at least for the present, gone. For a short time my parents knew a small measure of peace and security, even though, as once before, several danger signs were visible—my father’s business was already on very shaky ground. The battering their emotional life had received during the previous decades left them unequipped to deal with the next round of financial crises they were shortly to face. In the meantime, though, we were content with our lot. I threw myself wholeheartedly into the delights of university life.
The climate of Australian universities in the fifties and sixties—indeed until the days of the war in Vietnam—must seem, from the perspective of the present, naively irresponsible, complacent, and unjustifiably self-confident. Universities were small institutions, catering for people who knew they were privileged because they had gained entry to these places of learning. Having arrived there, you could get to know, even if only superficially, most people who were interesting, or even those who ‘mattered’. These institutions were probably no less representative of the spectrum of Australian society than present-day universities. The Commonwealth Scholarship scheme, which ensured free tuition to anyone gaining a relatively modest pass in the school-leaving examinations, made it possible for many people who would otherwise have found it impossible to raise the fees to study at university. The difference between universities then and now was more a matter of attitude and aspiration, of style and fashion, and it lay in the fundamental notion of what a university should stand for.
We were, I suppose, indefensibly conventional and conformist, in outlook as much as in appearance. Some women students still wore hats to lectures; most men wore ties, many appeared in suits as a matter of course. A few radical spirits signalled their independence by sporting open-necked shirts, or turtleneck sweaters in winter; one remarkable woman gained notoriety by coming to lectures in bare feet. Most of us lived at home. Many country people lived in the various colleges, around which an elaborat
e social hierarchy had evolved. For many of my contemporaries, though of course not for me, life at university was an extension of wider social networks and family associations. The place was like a club: people were connected by family, social and religious ties. They were, nevertheless, able to form associations beyond these relatively well-marked boundaries far more easily than had been possible during their schooldays. Jill Ker Conway, whose upbringing had been relentlessly Protestant, notes in The Road from Coorain that she first came into contact with a cultivated Roman Catholic (a woman who became, many years later, my wife) at university, thereby realising how very limited the view of Catholicism implicit in her family’s attitudes and prejudices had been.
By and large though, people still retained the habit of congregating in recognisable groups. One was centred on the solid burgher-values of the upper North Shore—the pearls-and-twin-set brigade, as the women were sometimes known. There was the ‘fast’ Eastern Suburbs set, and the country people living in the colleges. And there were the Christians of various persuasions trying to convert anyone they could lay their hands on, while, to counterbalance their influence, Libertarians flaunted their daring non-conformism by refusing to wear ties or shoes.
This little world was no less conformist or seemingly un-adventurous in intellectual matters. Though a number of politicians emerged from the ranks of my contemporaries, few of us had much interest in politics beyond a decision to vote Labor or Liberal once we had turned twenty-one. Nor were we much intent on questioning the structures of society either within or beyond the university. Most of us respected what our lecturers and professors—those incredibly learned people in black gowns—stood for, even if we found many of them unutterably boring and stuffy. We were eager to profit from our education, as long as, of course, it did not involve too much work or distraction from the pleasures of life. We accepted without question the shape and structure of our courses of study. Though we were frequently bored by the books we were required to read, or the topics we were obliged to consider, many of us felt that the lack was in us, not in the system. I, for instance, found (and still find) the novels of George Meredith practically unreadable—almost as unreadable as Henry James’s and much less rewarding. It did not occur to me to question the prominent place Meredith occupied in our syllabuses, nor to wonder what academic nest a certain lecturer might have been feathering in his insistence that so much Meredith should appear on our reading-lists. In such matters, as in many others, we were very naive when compared with the streetwise undergraduates of the contemporary world.
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