The Road from Coorain (20 page)

After I discovered Shakespeare’s sonnets, I began to bombard my teachers with requests for references to read about the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, and moved on from these to any book I could find about Tudor England. J. B. Black’s detailed histories of the Elizabethan Parliaments were just coming out, and I hung upon the appearance of the next volume as though I were reading a popular serial. These brought me to the character of Elizabeth I and my first model for a woman leader. It was a new and comforting idea—greatness in a woman. I had not been conscious of hunger for such an image, but it was immensely satisfying to learn about this woman with “the heart and stomach of a prince.” I used my pocket money to buy copies of the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, Marlowe and Ben Jonson. Their images and characters peopled my imagination far more than anyone in my everyday suburban world.

At the very end of my year in the lower sixth, when we had completed the required syllabus, our English teacher, Miss Shell, appeared with copies of T. S. Eliot’s
Murder in the Cathedral
which she distributed to the class, instructing us to read it over the coming weekend in order to perform a proper play the following Monday.

Here was a new and astonishing discovery. Someone in my own day who wrote blank verse and who shared my feeling of distance from the emptiness of modern life. Eliot might have been writing about my feeling of detachment from the surface of
things, and my longing for a world of real feeling and passion, instead of the polite proprieties of afternoon tea in the suburbs. I quickly borrowed
The Waste Land
from Miss Shell. It was a revelation. Here was what I took to be an English poet whose attitude to nature was not romantic, who mentioned deserts and whitening bones. It was great poetry about a landscape I
knew
. No one told me Eliot was an American poet, or that his imagination was rooted in a midwestern American landscape. I just knew that it resonated for me in ways English romantic poetry never could. I began to think that when I got to the University of Sydney, I would study English literature.

My final year at Abbotsleigh raced away. I was made a prefect, a status which conveyed many privileges for the ten or twelve senior girls chosen. We had our own study, a large room with a spacious bay window, a large study table, and comfortable shabby furniture. Our presence or absence at class was no longer recorded or questioned and our blazers were emblazoned with a special badge indicating our special role. Our corresponding responsibilities were to administer discipline outside the classroom. We were responsible for the decorum with which people marched to morning assembly, for their bearing during all formal school occasions, and for getting people in and out of classrooms when the school bell rang before and after every break. We could detain the unruly after school, assign punishments, or haul up some unlucky younger student, caught teasing or badgering another student, for a thorough dressing down.

Outside our study, we were models of decorum, but within our sanctuary we were a noisy, irreverent, and lighthearted group. One of our number, a gifted mathematician with shining aquamarine blue eyes and pigtails of unbelievable tidiness, straightened out all our confusions on mathematics homework. My good friend Robin and I, friendly rivals for the school history prize, coached people who were slow to get the point of history questions. Everyone argued vociferously about the interpretation of the English text of the moment, while those who had chosen
biology instructed the group about evolution, and the physics and chemistry wing talked portentously about the splitting of the atom.

One of the pleasantest parts of the day came when we made our way to the study at lunchtime, produced sandwiches, tea or coffee, sat in a circle around the window seat, and talked about life. While several of us had been close friends for a number of years, our group, formed by Miss Everett’s selection, quickly settled into amiable collaboration, rather like a group of junior officers in wartime. Being Australian, we exchanged no deep confidences. Our talk ranged from current events to our favorite films and music, our parents and their vagaries, to the question of what we would do after finishing school. We were all economic and social conservatives and mirrored our families in rejoicing that the politically conservative Liberal Country party coalition had ousted the Australian Labor Party in 1949, and defeated Labor’s plans to nationalize Australia’s banks. We were also aesthetic conservatives. Our
tastes
in music and art were conventional, and although we were living in a period of great artistic achievement in Australian painting and literature, we had registered very little about it. Our favorite films were British, the music we hummed American, and the clothes we wore derived from British and French fashion.

As young women, we were in an anomalous position. Our school, whatever its colonial blind spots, existed to maximize the talents of its students, taught them to strive, whether intellectually, in athletics, or in seeking social eminence. Our group of prefects had been singled out as leaders and encouraged to take charge, albeit in minor and symbolic ways. While we lived within the boundaries of the school, being ambitious was rewarded, but as we approached graduation we had to resolve personally the contradictions which were observable within the ranks of our teachers about what should be our goals in life as adults.

Miss Everett’s message was crystal clear. We were privileged young women who owed it to society to develop our minds and
talents to the limits of our ability. She let us know repeatedly about her hope that we would distinguish the school by the numbers of us who continued our studies at the University of Sydney, then the only full university in our city of close to three million. Other messages were more puzzling. Some girls’ parents, planning on their early marriage, did not want them to waste time in university study. Others were encouraged to think about something practical like nursing training, which did not take too long, and provided a limited but reliable professional skill. The message was clear that they would not be doing this kind of work for too long. Then there were clear injunctions from the adult world about what fields of university study were appropriate for a woman. “Not law,” we were told, “it’s not a good field for a woman. You’ll only end up trying divorce cases, and besides no good law firm would take you in.” I loved chemistry, but then there was the specter of Miss Allen and my undistinguished record in mathematics. “Don’t take science,” family friends advised. “There is too much mathematics, and besides, what would a girl like you do in an industrial laboratory?” The things that were “nice for a woman” to study were unintellectual, like nursing, physiotherapy, or occupational therapy, or strictly decorative, like music or a foreign language, subjects which only the strangest parents thought their daughters might pursue professionally.

My mother favored “something practical” like medicine. A woman needed a strong professional training before any thought of marriage, she said. One never knew whether a marriage would last, or when one might be widowed, and a woman’s most precious possession was her economic independence. I didn’t much like the idea of caring for sick people. My years spent caring for the emotional needs of others made me long for some wonderfully abstract study, elegant, clear, free of messy human demands.

Miss Shell and Miss Hughesdon, my English and history teachers, swung the balance. “It will be a great loss if you don’t go
on to do further study in history and literature,” they told me. “You could do outstanding work.” I didn’t know what was involved in doing outstanding work, or where the study of English and history might lead, but if they said so, I was ready to follow their advice.

As my time to leave Abbotsleigh approached I suddenly realized how much I had come to love the place. I forgave it its foolishly hot uniforms and its genteel rules of behavior; I even forgave some of its less admirable pretenses. It had given me a secure and orderly environment in which to grow, and adults to admire who took it for granted that women would achieve. Moreover, it had been a haven of sorts from the pressures of home. Each morning when I left there was no challenge about my departure, nor after I became a prefect was there any challenge about the time I came home. It had also given me friends with whom I could grow slowly from childhood to adolescence. In our time there, we had all come to accept one another like comfortable pieces of furniture, and no longer had to earn one another’s approval. I had almost forgotten my paralyzing shyness during my seven years as a member of this companionable group. Now I began to wonder how I would manage without them.

I knew I couldn’t cope with the world outside my family and school yet. I’d never managed to learn to chatter easily with strangers, partly because my home and family wasn’t the kind I could chatter easily about as most young people my age did. The silence in our house was palpable. After her abortive interest in psychic research, my mother had settled back into her solitary ways. There were no laughing parties of young people coming and going, because my mother’s sense of what was appropriate for entertaining the young simply didn’t fit with the way my classmates lived. Even had I been able to persuade her otherwise, the effort of having company exhausted her, and I knew it was better to leave well enough alone. My party clothes hung unused in the cupboard after our fling on our cruise to Ceylon. There was literally no occasion to wear them. My weekends were spent in
reading and gardening, and doing errands for my mother. We lived together like an elderly couple with an iron routine which was never broken. If the preordained order of things was interrupted, my mother became flustered, didn’t sleep well, and suffered from headaches. When I went to the houses of friends, I would look hungrily at the fathers and mothers who were quietly amused by their sons’ and daughters’ scrapes, and wish above all else to have a normal family.

But there was no getting away from the fact that mine wasn’t normal, and that I was different from my school friends. So much of my time had been spent with my older brothers and their companions that I didn’t really find the high school boys my friends went around with interesting. Outside school I still spent all my time with adults. My obsession with Tudor history and Elizabethan drama did not make me an interesting conversationalist with young men who wanted to talk about last weekend’s football game, or the newest hero of the surf club.

My appearance didn’t give me many opportunities to be bored by young men. At seventeen there was no getting away from the fact that by the Australian standard of prettiness I did not measure up. Good-looking girls were slender, almost boyish, athletic, always ready for tennis or some outdoor amusement. Their skin tanned easily, and their blond hair curled delectably whether at the beach or on the tennis court. My hair was fair, but fine and wispily straight. No matter what efforts were expended to improve it, it always collapsed dolefully at the beach. My skin, easily irritated by the Australian sun, meant that a day by the sea resulted in scarlet suffering. Our household diet still made me overweight. My friends had slim ankles. Mine puffed and swelled by the end of a hot day. Later I learned that this was the result of a reaction to too much salt in my diet, but as this condition got worse in my last year of school, it meant that fashionable footwear reduced me to hobbling pain by the end of the day. My mother’s comments about my appearance were tactless. She wondered out loud how someone whose ankles were
as elegantly slim as hers could have produced a daughter with such problems.

If my mother’s comments about my swollen ankles were tactless, her comments about some of my other personal defects were downright depressing. When I inveighed against the hopelessness of doing anything with my limp straight hair, she looked at me with genuine puzzlement. Her hair had always been abundant and curly, and she couldn’t think what could be done about mine. I should just wait to grow out of my heaviness, she assured me, not realizing that her generous hand with salt in cooking was part of my problem. “Puppy fat” always disappeared in one’s twenties, she said, and too much concern with dieting was foolish. Meanwhile, I watched my school friends become willowy and graceful, and felt more than ever an ugly duckling.

There was more than my appearance to worry about. My family and school friends agreed that I was “brainy.” This was a bad thing to be in Australia. People distrusted intellectuals. Australians mocked anyone with “big ideas” and found them specially laughable in a woman. My mother herself was divided on the subject. One moment she would be congratulating me on my performance at school, and the next contradicting her approval by urging me not to become too interested in my studies. If I did, I would become a “bluestocking,” a comically dull and unfeminine person. The more I heard these predictions, the more I struggled to become just like all my classmates. This was not easy to do because the aspiration brought me into conflict with my mother over what was appropriate in dress for a seventeen-year-old. I wanted to dress in grown-up clothes, and to buy expensive and stylishly tailored dresses. My mother, mindful of my derelictions on the trip to Ceylon, gave me only enough pocket money to pay for my train fares and a few weekend jaunts to films or the theater. I didn’t go as often as I might have because she kept on buying me girlish flowered dresses which made me look and feel “all wrong” when I went out with school friends.

There was a lot to build my ego at home despite my insecurity
about my appearance. With adults I overcame my shyness. My mother made clear her reliance on me, and her gratitude that I was such a steadfast source of company. “Jill’s a great companion,” I heard her tell our neighbors. “She’s a wonderfully sensible person. Not flighty like most girls her age.” She had long since persuaded me to apologize for neglecting her to run off with a group of young people on our voyage to Ceylon, and my character was once again cause for congratulation. She now discussed every detail of the management of Coorain with me and told me, even though Barry was himself working hard toward that goal, that she expected that one day I might run the place. When we went together to see our wool on display before the annual sales, she boasted about me to her woolbrokers. “Jill’s her father’s daughter. She’s a fine judge of wool and she knows as much as I do about raising sheep.” “I don’t know what your mother would do without you,” my uncle and aunt frequently told me during their weekly visits. They were the only visitors my mother genuinely loved to see, and their arrival on a Saturday or a Sunday afternoon presaged a leisurely stroll in the garden, and an island of talk in a silent week. I swelled with pride at discharging my responsibility to care for her so well and at the approval given my conduct and sagacity. I might not be pretty, and I was certainly dangerously bookish, but it was clear that I won lots of approval from the adult world. That was no help when I thought about leaving school and finding my way among the teeming thousands of young people at the University of Sydney. I knew I loved to study, but just what I would do there was unclear. What would I become after three years of higher education? Try as I might I couldn’t conjure up a single image to fill in the blank prospect of the future. I knew it would involve the responsibility for the care of my mother and Coorain, but my picture of myself as an adult was as empty as the western plains. I tried hard to develop the right aspirations, but I had no map of the future to guide me. Fretting about this just before the end of my final school year, I remembered my father’s advice about what to do if one were ever
to become lost in the bush. “Don’t panic and rush about,” he said. “Stay in the shade, and wait for the night sky. You’ll be able to see the Southern Cross, and you can navigate by that.” I wished there were pointers for life’s journeys like the planets and constellations which could help pilot us along the surface of the earth. I needed some pointers for the future because I dreaded being stranded at home, the only companion of an increasingly dependent mother, even as I took my sense of self-worth from doing the job well.