The Idea of Home

by Geraldine Brooks

  When the camera focused on a very young woman being dragged by police off the road in front of Johnson’s motorcade, I wanted to be her. (Later on, I still wouldn’t have minded being Sandra Levy, who went on to be the head of television at the ABC and to run the Australian Film, Television and Radio School.) More recently, when I read barrister Charles Waterstreet’s memoir, Repeating the Leaving, I envied him, too. His private school had delivered a busload of its students to the official Sydney welcome for the president, titled, rather deliciously, ‘Make Sydney Gay for LBJ’. But when the bus arrived, Waterstreet took off his school blazer and did a runner, joining the protesters.

  All this political and social ferment took place in a city poised for immense physical change. Construction cranes perched on the horizon like a flock of strange prehistoric birds hovering over their prey. The historic heart of The Rocks was to be torn down, razed for office blocks. Much of Centennial Park was to be concreted over and sacrificed for a stadium. The iconic waterfront and neighbourhoods of Woolloomooloo and the character of Kings Cross were about to be high-rised into history. But the Vietnam protests were a kind of yeast, and the bubbles worked in all kinds of unexpected places. A group of North Shore women — women not unlike my mother, but a bit better off — decided that they didn’t want to lose their neighbourhood’s precious remnant of urban bushland to another development. In 1971, they asked for, and received, help from an unlikely quarter, the Builders Labourers Federation. And so in the affluent Sydney suburb of Hunters Hill the green bans were born, and with them, a few hundred unskilled labourers, led by a man who, like my mother, had left school aged thirteen, saved the city. At the height of the green ban movement, Jack Mundey and the Builders Labourers Federation had stopped work on projects valued at 3000 million dollars. I cannot begin to calculate what that sum would be in current dollars, but I doubt that anyone today would rather we’d taken that money in exchange for the heritage buildings and human-scale neighbourhoods, majestic old trees and preserves of urban bushland that the green bans saved.

  Then, in 1972, something really odd happened: after twenty-three years of conservative government, someone my parents voted for actually got elected. ‘It’s Time,’ Gough Whitlam had said, and it seemed that it was time, at last. It was time to abolish the draft, revise a yes-man foreign policy, acknowledge Aboriginal land rights, give women equal pay, and end educational elitism by making uni tuition free. The Australian diaspora began coming home, and suddenly we stopped cringing about our culture. We had our own films, our own books, our own voices on the radio and television instead of the plummy pseudo-Pom accents that had once been de rigueur. Even our gardens got a makeover: out with the wilting hybrid tea roses, in with grevillea and callistemon.

  I was young, in those days, and change seemed an easy thing. It has been a grief of my middle years to recognise what that early, Australian-instilled optimism obscured from me: times of radical change are rare, and the forces of reaction are strong.

  Nowadays, when the brief spring of the Whitlam era is discussed, the narrative is a predictable one. The era is generally portrayed as bringing needed social reform at the cost of near economic ruin. I’m sure it felt like that to the big end of town. But it didn’t feel like that on Bland Street. Many of the people around me, especially the infirm and the elderly, felt more prosperous because their pensions had become more generous. When I finally made that longed-for walk across the quadrangle as a first-year student at Sydney University, I felt rich. I had a generous living allowance. Free of the burden of future debt, I could contemplate the intellectual buffet in front of me without making calculations about the impact of my choice of study on my post-graduate earning power. It was a time for big dreams, and those around me had them. My fellow students from that era have gone on to enrich our cultural, intellectual and scientific life in myriad ways.

  I don’t understand why, as we have become more prosperous, we have become less generous. When the Hawke government decided it wanted more Australians to participate in higher education, that was a worthy goal, for even now, we lag comparable countries like Canada by a wide margin in this metric. Forty-two per cent of Canadians undertake tertiary studies, while only twenty-nine per cent of Australians do. But Hawke, unlike Whitlam, saw higher education as a private good, and not a public one. Since graduates stand to benefit from their education, he believed they should pay for it. Paying for increased participation through the tax system was, to the Hawke government, regressive, and succeeding governments have concurred with this. But to me that reasoning reflects an American individualist vision of how society works, and not an authentically Australian one. If a graduate earns more because of her degree, then she will pay more income tax and the society will be materially enriched. But her learning also enriches the entire society in non-material ways. An educated population is the medium in which creativity and innovation flourish, in which inspiration and prosperity are born.

  It was my great good fortune to have come of age in an Australia that extended to its children the freedom to dream those large, unfettered dreams. Yet my generation seems to be okay with tying down our own children, binding them up in a web of future debt. I am aware of the statistical studies that show the introduction of schemes like HECS and HELP have had no discernible effect on the tertiary enrolment of high school leavers from less economically advantaged backgrounds, and that’s a great relief. But it would take a very sophisticated statistical analysis to discern the effect of these debts on people’s dreams, ambitions and willingness to take risks on studies that aren’t immediately or reliably remunerative, to become artists or activists, actors or environmentalists — the creators and caregivers that inspire and uplift a nation. The kind of people that Australia, that the planet, so badly needs right now.

  I do know that my generation — or some large part of it — owes something to the generation that now is coming of age. I had been in the workforce for just about two years when I bought my first house, in the inner-Sydney suburb of Erskineville. It was almost as small as it’s possible for a house to be: less than three metres wide in front with a dunny out the back. But it was a home of my own, and it was cheap. For the deposit, I used my seven weeks annual leave pay from the Sydney Morning Herald. We got paid in cash in those days, and I remember the payroll clerk handing me that brick of banknotes. I clutched it, gratefully yet gingerly, and nervously transported it across the road and into the hands of the loan officer at the credit union.

  It’s like a fairytale, that story, isn’t it? I don’t know which element is more implausible. Seven weeks annual leave. With a generous leave loading. Or a single woman from an unprosperous family background buying her own home in her early twenties.

  I do know that it is implausible, if not impossible, to imagine any young person being able to do it today. The fact that they can’t inspires many feelings in me. Regret. Guilt. A certain shame at my generation’s heedlessness — that those of us who had such opportunities haven’t felt the political will to demand them for the ones who’ve come after us. It’s not supposed to go that way, after all. The older generation is supposed to smooth the way for the younger. And we haven’t done that.

  When I was young, expatriate Australians would come home to give lectures like the Boyers, and they almost always irritated me. Often, they talked about the Australia of their own youth in disparaging terms. It was, they declared, racist, misogynist, homophobic, puritanical, conservative, boring. ‘Why are they banging on about this?’ I would think to myself. ‘That place doesn’t exist any more.’ Well, perhaps I am guilty of a similar transgression. The progressive, working-class paradise I’ve described doesn’t exist any more either. But I am banging on about it because I think the ardent, radical mood of those days deserves reconsideration. The days of wine and rage that Frank Moorhouse so memorably wrote about, when he and Helen Garner, David Williamson and others created the literature of untidy terrace houses and the restless activists who inhabited t
hem. The days when an Australian dream could be lived by a kid from Bland Street.

  Back in the first century, when the Romans occupied Jerusalem, two rabbis named Hillel and Shammai disagreed about pretty much everything. Shammai was a zealot, Hillel a conciliator. Shammai was strict and exclusive; Hillel was liberal and inclusive. But one thing they did agree upon: no matter how fierce their debate, the argument had to be l’shem shamaymim — for the sake of heaven. You argued, in other words, in good faith and not in enmity, in an honest quest for truth.

  Our political discourse these days is not so heavenly. She says ‘to-may-to’, he says ‘to-mah-to’. Worse, actually. Generally, political opponents can’t even agree that the thing they are naming is a round, edible fruit. And to make a point, they’ll squash it under foot with a big, wet splat. Then they’ll say, ‘See? I told you it wasn’t round and edible.’

  I want to make my case for a reconsideration of the brief, progressive era I’ve revisited in this chapter. I want to do it in the spirit of l’shem shamaymim, an argument for the sake of heaven. Australia has gained many things in the last thirty years, and I’m not for a moment belittling those gains. But some things have been lost, or misplaced, along the way. Maybe we can come to a new consensus that retrieves some of the best elements of the old one, that fair, visionary, daring and idealistic view that once defined us.

  Maybe, once again, it will be time.

  THREE

  AT HOME IN THE WORLD

  In the year 2000, I participated in the Sydney Olympic Games. I’ll never forget the feeling, walking out into the unearthly roar of the crowd in Stadium Australia, watching the twinkle of camera flashes light up the night like thousands of fireflies.

  I wish I could tell you I was an athlete, part of the higher, stronger, faster youth of the world. But I’m not fast — in fact I couldn’t win a race if I started the night before. As for strength, I couldn’t knock the skin off a rice pudding. And since I turned forty-five the day before the Sydney Olympics began, youth could only be described as a distant memory.

  I was there as a pixel. A speck of highly costumed colour in the extravaganza of the Olympic opening ceremony. My job was to be part of the moving human grid that directed the athletes in the parade of nations, making sure that all 10,500 bodies wound up in a pleasing arrangement on the field of play. It was a bit like being a sheep dog, only with choreography. The athletes marched onto the field in alphabetical order by nation, and we costumed Kelpies artfully nudged them into position.

  The parade of nations is one of the ceremonial grace notes required at each Olympic Games. Others include the torch, the Olympic flag and the release of peace doves. These were always real birds, until the Seoul Olympics. In Seoul, the live doves decided that the Olympic cauldron looked like a lovely place to perch, and became dead doves. So the Sydney ceremonies office decided to rethink the doves.

  After the athletes were all assembled, something unexpected happened. A huge white flag fluttered out above our heads, covering the entire field of play. I was underneath it, with the athletes of 199 nations — more countries than had ever come together at an Olympics. Suddenly, we were in a very intimate, strangely luminous space. And onto that flag, billowing over all of us, was projected the image of doves made of light: bright, fluttering symbols of peace.

  Underneath the flag, I looked around me at all the young athletes’ faces. They were turned upward in surprise and wonderment. I was standing right near the nations beginning with the letter I. The athletes of Iraq were there, and right beside them were the athletes of Iran. Last time I’d seen young people their age from those two nations, more than half of them had been dead. They had been bloated, stinking corpses, littering the sands of the Faw peninsula on the Iran–Iraq border after a brutal battle in the eight-year conflict between the two countries. Now they stood — alive, joyful — together. Not far away, athletes from Eritrea lined up right by the team from Ethiopia. A few years earlier, during the thirty-five-year civil war between those nations, I’d visited the site of a massacre where all that remained of the victims was a trophy pile of bleached skulls.

  I took a deep breath of the spring air that night, and I thought to myself, this really is the new millennium, and the world really is at peace. It seemed, at that moment, that we had done it at last. Perhaps we really would study war no more. It was a sweet moment, and so bitterly brief. Before the closing ceremony of those millennium Games, word arrived in the press pavilion of trouble on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. The Associated Press reporter was packing her desk, called away from covering the Games to cover the new outbreak of violence. Within days, the second intifada was in full eruption, the smoke of suicide bombs and the sour reek of tear gas filling the air. The world turned, a mere year passed, and the following September the twin towers of the World Trade Center came down in a roar of rubble and dust. We were back in our accustomed element. Endless enemies, infinite wars.

  These lectures are concerned with the idea of home and its various meanings. If one definition of the word ‘home’ is a goal or objective, then I have to be clear that becoming the kind of journalist who covered war was never my goal or intention. I didn’t even aspire to be a foreign correspondent. In the late 1970s, as a newly minted cadet in the Sydney Morning Herald newsroom, I looked across, awe-struck, at Margaret Jones, recently returned from a stint as the first Western reporter in Beijing since the Cultural Revolution. I knew that it was theoretically possible to aspire to do such things, but my world then seemed suddenly wide enough already.

  I’d been raised in a very small corner of Sydney; apart from brief school vacation visits to Melbourne and Hobart, I barely knew Australia beyond my city at all. Being a reporter was, for me, a licence to acquaint myself with what I had not known, to become at home as an Australian in a far broader sense. Reporting allowed me to explore the lives of Sydney people both richer and poorer than the neighbours I’d known. I loved discovering the city’s colourful back alleys and its beautiful pockets of bush or watery coves. I always had my hand up for rural assignments, because they took me to an Australia that had existed for me only as a rumour. It was eye-opening and mind-expanding, to experience lives uncushioned by the kind of city amenities that I’d taken for granted. The hard work that went into the wool cheque or the wheat harvest or droving a mob of cattle on the ‘long paddock’ through times of drought was different in kind and in degree from the kind of work I knew. I could understand, also, what kept people on the land and in the remote towns: the link with nature and seasons, the humour and the wit. Before long, my desire to be in the bush led to an interest in covering environmental issues. I learned, to my astonishment, that you didn’t need a wide, groomed trail in order to undertake a bushwalk, or a chairlift in order to ski the backcountry of Kosciuszko. I learned to carry a backpack that weighed half my body weight, to camp in the snow, and to lie under night skies that had more stars than I’d ever imagined.

  It was fulfilling work and I would have kept at it indefinitely. But the Herald’s then editor, David Bowman, told me that there was a scholarship on offer, for the master’s program at New York’s Columbia School of Journalism. It was being set up in memory of Greg Shackleton, one of the reporters who had been killed while covering the Indonesian invasion of East Timor. Shackleton had nursed an ambition to attend the Columbia J School, and his widow, Shirley, thought a scholarship for a young journalist would be a fitting memorial to him.

  When I won that scholarship, I flew down to Melbourne for the presentation ceremony. Shirley Shackleton was there, and so were many of Greg’s colleagues from Channel 7 News. They played his dispatches from Balibo, the last of which was made just hours before he and his colleagues were brutally murdered. Watching those reports began to change my focus as a journalist. It became clear to me that bearing witness, as Greg and his crew had done, was a reporter’s most vital role. If they had not gone to Balibo, the truth of what Indonesia did there may never have been known. The testimo
ny of Timorese victims might never have been credited if no outside, independent reports had existed to corroborate it. And so, five years later, when the Wall Street Journal asked me to be their correspondent in the Middle East, I didn’t hesitate to accept the offer. As it turned out, I was near the midpoint of a trend that saw the percentage of women assigned to foreign bureaus increase dramatically. By 1992, a third of foreign correspondents were women, compared to only six per cent in 1970.

  In most respects I was woefully unprepared for the job. I hadn’t studied the region at university; I knew only as much Arabic as I’d been able to cram with an inspired Egyptian teacher in the four brief weeks before I had to leave Sydney and take up the assignment. Yet in other ways, merely being an Australian of my generation was preparation of a sort. Our strange bifurcated place in the human story, European by history and Asian by geography, means that we live turned out to the world. We are curious before we are introspective, inclined to receive what the world has to offer in literature, music, film, food. We pay attention to foreign news, because what happens elsewhere affects us — our economy and trade, and our security, since it seems we can’t shake the habit of jumping into every foxhole that America chooses to dig. On a personal level, growing up with neighbours who had fled unrest and hardship in Russia, Turkey, the Balkans, Greece and Lebanon had taught me that not every place was as safe and predictable as the Sydney suburbs.