Inside Outside (23 page)

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 world 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.

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.