I did so partly because the uncertain and often unstable life I had led throughout my childhood and adolescence—when financial insecurity had replaced the much greater perils of war—had conferred on me what is probably an excessively pessimistic temperament. To this day I constantly expect things to go wrong—and they usually do—and I am always intent, therefore, on recognising the advantages of the bird in the hand. I was, in addition, increasingly concerned about my parents, whose business affairs had begun to turn sour, and whose cheerful letters could not disguise the worry and anguish, and, worst of all, the deteriorating personal relationship that I was to find on my return to Sydney.
But most of all, I think, I was driven to return to the place I provisionally thought of as home because deep down I knew that I could not succeed with my mimicry, my parody of an Anglo-Saxon way of life, in a world jealous of its traditions and social rituals. I realised in those last weeks I spent in London, as the great smog was replaced by a bitter blast of wind from the north, that my decision three years earlier not to accept the advice of people in Sydney, whose judgment I respected, that I should study at Oxford was probably the first warning of my reluctance to risk exposure to a traditionally British academic life with its arcane rituals and ceremonies. I suspected that I would be safer in the cosmopolitan anonymity of London. Having lived in London for almost three years that suspicion was confirmed; I came to the clear realisation that I could not attempt to remake my life a second time. I could not face the prospect of being obliged once more to adopt the vigilance and desire to learn to fit in with the ways of another world that had marked my early years in Australia, even if in this second instance I would be starting from a position of considerable advantage. I accepted, therefore, the position in Sydney.
The Agent-General for New South Wales paid for a first-class berth on the Canberra, the newest and most glamorous of the P &O fleet, which was to sail from Southampton in the last days of 1962. The night before I left London a massive snowfall brought the city to a standstill. I managed somehow to get to Waterloo for the boat train. The station looked like a film set for the fall of Shanghai. Eventually a train was produced which crawled to Southampton preceded by a steam-locomotive spraying boiling water on the rails to unfreeze the points. I was exhausted and relieved when I was shown to my cabin, having reached Southampton many hours after the official sailing time. On the coffee table I found a large bouquet of flowers with a card reading ‘Bon Voyage and Lots of Happiness to Darling Valmai from all the Girls’. The steward whisked the vase away, apologising profusely, and asked whether he should lay out my dinner jacket. I decided to take a shower in the generous bathroom attached to the cabin. The semicircular perspex shower-screen got stuck, trapping me inside the humid little cubicle. The bell was far away, out of reach near the washbasin. I remembered that my mother used to get her wedding ring off her swollen finger by rubbing it vigorously with soap. I rubbed the runners of the contraption and managed at last to escape. I went down to the dining saloon in my David Jones dinner suit.
A couple of nights later, on New Year’s Eve, the Captain made a speech wishing us every success and happiness for 1963. He announced with considerable pride that his splendid crew had increased the ship’s speed to such an extent that we would berth in Naples on schedule, where we would pick up those passengers who were prevented by the terrible weather from reaching Southampton by the time we had been obliged to sail. I spent a pleasant day in Naples saying goodbye to Europe, confident that I would soon be back on study leave. We sailed in the evening. The people who had missed the boat in England spoke of their relief; they were looking forward to a voyage they had thought they would have to forgo. I stayed up late into the night to catch a glimpse of Stromboli. I could see nothing; the volcano was asleep. A few hours later I was standing on deck at a lifeboat station. Clouds of acrid smoke were billowing out of the ship, bells were ringing without cease, planes of the Royal Air Force circled overhead, while I shivered in my life jacket, clutching my passport, my traveller’s cheques, a carton of cigarettes and the two volumes of A Study of the Life and Works of James Shirley.
BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
Canberra. A sparkling autumn Sunday in 1991. The stifling heat of the last few days has lifted. Crystals of ice suspended high above the hills glitter in the bright sunshine. At the university a writers’ festival is drawing to a close. For two days I have been watching, from the sidelines, the rituals of contemporary literary life. In the quadrangle, under deciduous trees which are just beginning to show the first signs of a response to what they have been led to believe is autumn, groups of writers, critics, publishers and hangers-on are striking deals, making or murdering reputations, or just gossiping. Soon there will be another book launch where someone will say something flattering about a mate who had probably said the same things about the launcher at a similar function not very long ago.
In the meeting rooms and lecture halls the last papers, readings and discussions are taking place. A well-dressed feminist is telling anyone who cares to hear how much she is marginalised by a patriarchal society. Yesterday a British writer got into hot water for saying that we Australians seem to have achieved a great deal in two hundred years. That provoked outrage and breast-beating protestations of guilt from people who are, almost without exception, what one may continue to call for the next week or two Anglo-Celtic—though probably some of them already know that very soon that term will also be proscribed. I do not, however, see a recognisable Koori anywhere. Many people have already left. Some are waiting anxiously for taxis to take them to the airport so that they may continue their busy lives on Monday morning. The well-known writer of thrillers has already gone, having left early in the morning to return home to feed his dogs. Those of us who remain are thinking about what we have to do next week.
A few kilometres away, on the other side of the lake, groups of people are converging on a sprawling white building (which looks from the distance like a ‘Spanish’ project home of generous proportions) set in the middle of a sea of tall dry grass. Though there is no other building in sight, the roadway is meticulously kerbed and guttered. There is, however, nowhere left to park. Like the other latecomers I have to drive into the waist-high grass, hoping that I will be able to drive out again. I join the people making for the building. A large red, white and green flag flutters from a mast set in the gravelled yard. Many of the people, I notice, are wearing little bows made out of plaited red, white and green silk threads. The courtyard is crowded. People are smiling, shaking hands, kissing, embracing, slapping each other on the back. A man with a clipboard is saying something to a group of attentive girls and boys in colourful costumes. The cool air is suddenly rent by the banshee whine of feedback from a loudspeaker.
Today marks Hungary’s national day, commemorating the beginning of the uprising in 1848 which almost succeeded in throwing off the yoke of the hated Habsburgs. The festival atmosphere is prompted, however, by something more significant than the celebration of an unsuccessful revolution which started 143 years ago. This is the Hungarian Embassy. For the first time it has thrown its doors open to the expatriate community of Canberra and the surrounding districts in a spirit of reconciliation. These people, who left their homeland at various times in the course of the previous forty years, are no longer regarded as traitors. The hand of friendship is extended to them by the representative of the democratic new order in that faraway land, which had recently gained its freedom after almost half a century of Soviet domination.
Someone finds a place for me to sit in a row of plastic chairs placed under a colonnade, and introduces me to a couple of people while, on a small dais in the courtyard, a woman in a long black dress and sunglasses, apparently a famous Hungarian actress from New York, recites with palpitating emotions and flailing arms a turgid poem about freedom that everyone around me seems to know. How do I happen to be here? I am asked in reasonably correct English. I am spending a few days in Canberra, I explain, and have
come at the invitation of one of the Embassy people. How nice, their looks seem to say; but we fall silent because an elderly man, also carrying a clipboard, now mounts the dais and embarks on an interminable account of the sufferings of the Hungarian people, and of their heroic attempts to throw off the oppressor in 1848 and 1956. He does not mention, it occurs to me, that other oppressor, whom I saw many years ago welcomed with open arms by people waving little flags with swastikas on them. A kind person offers to translate for me. No need, I smile, I can understand much of it. General surprise: how do I come to know Hungarian? I was born there, I say. And then, even before the elderly woman in the fashionable white linen suit has a chance to open her lips, I know what she is about to say: ‘But you don’t look Hungarian!’ And indeed I do not.
In England I was not able to pass myself off as Australian in front of people who knew what Australians looked like—something like those people at the writers’ festival at the other end of town who are dressed in their carefully chosen ‘bush gear’, worn, as everything seems to be these days, in order to make a statement. Now, among these people with high cheekbones, and the indefinable but unmistakable look of the steppes in their eyes, who have always believed that they, the Magyars, were the only true Hungarians, I seem as alien, perhaps even as much of a charlatan, as I did to those English men and women whom I told, in my innocence, that I was Australian. But the people sitting and standing around me in the brilliant sunshine, as the boys and girls in national costume begin to twirl to the accompaniment of a tape fed through an improvised public address system, betray no trace of the puzzlement those English people betrayed. They understand only too well. They look at my face, at my build and features and they know that of course I could very easily have been born in Budapest. Yet in their eyes that gives me no licence to call myself Hungarian—perhaps one or two of them might have already noticed that I had been very careful in my choice of words: ‘I was born there.’
Throughout the long years of trying to come to terms with Australia, of shrugging off the isolated instances of bigotry and race-hatred I have encountered (‘Fuck off you bloody wog, can’t you see that’s my parking place?’) I had all but forgotten hatreds of another kind I had witnessed in my childhood. I now begin to search the faces of these people around me, most of them alive with emotion and patriotic pride, trying to work out how old they might be, wondering whether any of them, as very young men and women, could have spat and jeered at those lines of people, wrists tied to wrists with long strands of rope, as they were dragged off to be killed on the embankments of the Danube.
I had asked myself the same question a couple of months earlier as I sat through an interminable Christmas Day mass in a pretty Gothic church on a hill overlooking the graceful curve of the Danube that separates the two parts of Budapest. On the first Christmas Day that going to church was no longer considered an indefensible activity, I was listening to an ancient priest with amazement and distress as I began to realise that he was intoning a discredited part of the old Catholic liturgy, the prayer for the conversion of the Jews. I now understand, more fully than ever, as the folk-dancing reaches a climax of twirling and stamping, that this is not my world, not part of my heritage, just as that dead world of the espresso-bars, whose denizens would not come to a celebration like this even if they were fit enough to make the journey, had little to do with my life, with what I am or have at least become, even though I cannot discard its influence or the marks it has left on my personality.
At a convenient gap in the proceedings, I murmur my apologies in English—once again I am reluctant to speak Hungarian—extract my car from the grass, and head back across the lake to the university. The writers’ festival is all but over. Only a few people are left among the long shadows of the quadrangle. The last bits of sound equipment, cartons of books and empty wine flagons are being packed away. On the way to my room, where I intend to put my feet up and watch the final episode of ‘Rumpole’, I stop to have a long chat with an acquaintance. We agree that the festival has been fun and proceed immediately to say how awful so-and-so’s been, how we’re sick to death of the way such-and-such constantly goes on about this and that, how it’s a shame that some people are able to find publishers for the muck they churn out year after year, whereas others are having an uphill battle in these days of austerity, when publishers are only interested in books about pets and sex. And I realise once again that this is much more my world than anything else I’ve encountered in the course of the day, or, for that matter, than any country I have visited or lived in briefly in the decades since my return to Sydney on a Qantas 707 in January 1963, still shaken by the experience of fire at sea.
I may have no more than a legal right to call myself Australian, and as I look at daily life around me, I am not at all sure that I would want to identify myself entirely with the Australia in which I live. As the years go on, I find myself increasingly intolerant of the crassness and vulgarity of the urban hothouse I see each day. The packs of oversexed teenagers milling around the cinemas in George Street, the empty-headed young women in tennis dresses congregating for hours around their four-wheel drives in the carparks of suburban shopping centres as they gossip in their rising intonations, the dreadful jargon that passes for literary criticism these days, the unwillingness of contemporary undergraduates to read anything written before about 1975, the pot-bellied executive types nattering into their portable phones in restaurants and at street corners, the abysmal lack of integrity in political life, the intellectual poverty of much Australian writing—these and much, much else make me ask at times what I am doing here, whether I am living in a backward, second-class world rapidly sinking into material as well as spiritual mediocrity. But I remind myself that people like me are often prone to confuse cause and effect, shadow and substance. In the streets of London and Paris, of Munich and Vienna, I see much the same crassness, much the same vulgarity that irritates me in Sydney, though it is often in a different key in those cities, and possibly less offensive because less familiar. I wonder whether I am blaming Australia for the discontents of middle age.
I am nevertheless more Australian than anything else. This is the only society with which I am at all familiar, where I feel least alien. This is the world where I have put down roots, and a world where I have, I allow myself sometimes to think, made a small contribution. There is no other home for me. I have to come to terms with being the type of Australian I am, and I have learnt that I must no longer entertain fantasies of what I am or what I might become. I realise that the programme of assimilation I had set myself in those grim days in the Idiots’ Class or among the paspalum of Epping represented an aim which could never be fully achieved. I could not remake myself, just as I could never throw off entirely my physical, emotional and spiritual affinities with the gesticulating world of the espresso-bars. And yet I have become Australianised, if it is possible to invent a word as ugly as that. The remnants of my heritage exist within a consciousness and a sensibility that were largely formed by the experience of growing up in Australia. Nothing that I could have attempted to do would have been able to achieve whatever balance there happens to be between my various cultural and spiritual selves. That balance had to emerge in the way it has, and, of course, it could just as easily have developed in an entirely different way, given other circumstances and a different temperament. My assimilation, or the extent to which I may claim to represent multiculturalism—it comes to the same thing eventually—has come about as an inevitable consequence of my personality and of the environment in which I live, but it has nevertheless emerged in a wholly haphazard manner. It could not have been otherwise.
For that reason, I view with alarm and misgivings those programmes of multiculturalism that provide a powerful preoccupation for the political and cultural life of the nation. Occasionally, I still see remnants of the few cultivated members of espresso-bar society when they meet in a suburban town hall where recitals of chamber music are given. Bent and frail, man
y showing recognisable signs of major surgery and courses of chemotherapy, they gossip in reedy voices with liberal use of the scatological vocabulary of their culture. There are many younger people in the audience too, some young enough to be my children. Looking at them you would think that they are ordinary middle-class citizens of Sydney, which they are in most ways. But their speech betrays something quite individual. They speak Hungarian, employing those indecent expressions that even now must not be spoken aloud in English, and using the same gestures as those elderly people, despite the fact that their years of exposure—since birth in most cases—to Australian ways should have imposed on them an entirely different pattern of behaviour. When they turn to address a remark in English, you can hear faintly but distinctly the unmistakable awkwardness with diphthongs and accentuation that distinguishes their parents’ or grandparents’ attempts at Australian-English.
Were these people consciously encouraged to retain what they thought was their heritage? I do not know, for since my parents’ death I have drifted away entirely from that world. Whether they should be encouraged to continue in their ways is a much more pressing and difficult question. There is no reason, as far as I can see, why a genuinely free and tolerant society should not accommodate people who are different—as it must tolerate and regard as full members of the community those people who are immediately identified by their appearance as belonging to a particular ethnic type. Problems arise where these people are urged to think of themselves as different, as set apart. This seems to be the danger among those groups who are intent, on religious or social grounds, to retain certain customs that are clearly out of step with the way of life of most people in contemporary Australia.
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