Inside Outside (24 page)

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 their 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.

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.