The Road from Coorain (23 page)

Within twelve months the routine of the medical practice had begun to pall. My bank account contained what looked to me like large resources, and provided she stayed within her iron routine, my mother’s health was robust. Her most recent arguments with the manager of Coorain had been resolved, and there was adequate help on the place. As my mind began to turn to finding more stimulating work, I regretted my foolishness in giving up my scholarship and dropping out of the University. My mother surprised me by urging me to return. She could easily afford to pay my fees. Furthermore, she acknowledged that she’d been giving me a miserably small allowance in my first student year. We worked out what would be a comfortable allowance for food, clothes, books, and travel. I could scarcely believe this happy state of affairs, nor my good luck when a kindly official in the Department of Education reinstated my scholarship for my
readmission to the University of Sydney in the late summer of 1954.

This time I took a leisurely three subjects: a comfortable nine hours of lectures in history, English, and psychology. I knew my way around, and now accustomed to talking to strangers, I could chatter easily with whomever I sat next to in lectures. Within a matter of weeks, coming brazenly late to a class I met Toni, a young woman of striking beauty and elfin charm, a latecomer also seated in the back row in a history lecture. We took to one another, and began one of the intense undergraduate friendships through which young people learn about themselves by discovering the inner life and feelings of friends. Toni was dark-haired with dazzling cornflower blue eyes. Her cultivated voice and her talent for self-mockery fascinated me. She seemed to take nothing seriously, to laugh at life, and to look upon her parents’ generation as denizens of a world to be tolerated but not taken seriously. She and her brother, who studied economics, became regular companions. They came from a country family, had attended schools like mine, and shared my questions about whether I belonged to Australia’s bush culture or to its urban professional classes. They were cheerful hedonists who took it for granted that one should enjoy one’s university life, paying only the modicum of attention to studying which was necessary to “get through” each year’s annual examinations. Once approached in this fashion, university life could indeed be wonderfully leisurely. There was only one annual examination at the end of the year, attendance at lectures was not compulsory, and the written assignments for each term were not onerous.

Before I knew it I was skipping lectures on fine days to walk in Centennial Park, dashing off to the one remaining vaudeville theater in Sydney for the afternoon matinée to learn the music hall songs of the thirties, setting out for the zoo on the whim of the moment for a ride on the elephants, or simply spending long afternoons talking, talking, talking. Our conversations were not intellectual, but focused on our parents, our families, our uncertainties
and insecurities, our feelings about being Australian, our puzzlement about what to do in life. Toni was in the midst of romantic turmoil, hopelessly in love with a suitor disapproved of by her family. We talked the year away, our conversations interrupted only by vacations. I began to emulate Toni’s bon mots, her talent for telling funny stories, and her casual but stylish dress.

It was perfectly easy for me to keep up with my courses by reading at home in the evenings or on weekends. My essay assignments were occasionally daunting, such as the required essay in first-year English language on the origins of the fused participle, but these too could be crammed into systematic work on weekends without affecting the pleasures of the week. From Toni and her brother I learned the art of enjoying life, of stopping to savor the joys of the moment, and of letting the cares of tomorrow wait. In my mother’s eyes, I was staggering under a burden of academic work, since I fell to with a vengeance when at home and scarcely lifted my head from my books. She was unaware of how I spent my daytime hours, and impressed by the longer and longer hours I seemed to need to put in at the Library.

My new way of life might have gone undetected for years, but at the end of my first year, during the annual examination study period, I fell into the classic undergraduate scrape. My mother had chosen the weeks of November and early December to visit Coorain, taking with her a woman friend her own age. Her friend was widowed, with a daughter close in age to me, so it was arranged that the two daughters would live together in our house while the two mothers made their trip to the bush. My mother was scarcely out the front door before I invited Toni to join me so that we could study together. Various and sundry other friends came for meals, overnight stays, parties, conviviality. I quickly became too engaged in cooking, cleaning, and the general duties of a hostess to notice that my new arrangements were grating on the nerves of my authorized guest, who departed after a week to stay with other friends. News of her new arrangements filtered through to Coorain, so that the day before my first history
examination I learned that my mother was returning early to investigate. The comic scene of the mice playing while the cat traveled was interrupted, requiring feverish cleaning and tidying on my part to erase all signs of visitors before meeting my mother’s train which arrived at 6:30 a.m. the following morning. I went to meet her feeling like a political prisoner, conscious of no real wrongdoing, but nonetheless headed for the gallows. The storm would descend and I could do nothing to avert it.

My mother surveyed the house tight-lipped. It was spotless. The sole focus of disapproval was therefore my behavior. She told me she was deeply disappointed in me, but that we would reserve the discussion of my multiple sins until after the examinations were concluded. For the remainder of the day a deep calm descended upon me as I turned to reviewing the fragmentary notes of the few lectures I had actually attended and glanced over the books assigned for the year. I was up and away the next morning before my mother appeared so that I could be at the University an hour at least before I had to begin the examination in the Great Hall. Despite a sleepless night, my sense of calm and detachment remained, so that when I took up the paper and began to write my head was clear. I was long past having examination nerves.

The examination was on Tudor and Stuart history, a subject about which I had been reading extensively since my early teens. My attitudes to study were still those of a high school student, so I didn’t realize that I was very well prepared for the examination. Being “prepared” in my book then meant having committed to memory everything the instructor said, all the notes of lectures, and key sections of the textbooks. Having failed to undertake this counterproductive labor, I was obliged to rely on my years of reading. It was astonishing how easily quotations came to mind to illustrate my points, and how broad I discovered was the spectrum of interpretations of Tudor and Stuart constitutional history I had read and could discuss. The map of Elizabethan London was in my head. I knew exactly the peregrinations of Cromwell’s Parliaments, and R. H. Tawney’s resounding prose
from
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism
echoed in my mind as soon as I turned to discuss the dissolution of the monasteries and the Puritan Revolution. The resulting examination was more thoughtful and reflective than any I might otherwise have written. I hoped it would suffice and turned determinedly to tackling the obstacle course of three-hour examinations which came in rapid sequence during the next few days.

By the time the examinations were concluded, my mother’s lecture on my conduct was delivered more in sorrow than in anger. It was clear, she said, that I had frittered the year away through my foolish predilection for inappropriate company. Mine was a weak character too easily swayed by the influence of others, and I had doubtless wasted my year through my folly in spending my examination preparation time in partying when work and adherence to my mother’s plan was what was called for. Privately I thought I had scraped through in all my courses, but I listened to the rebukes and recognized the wisdom of agreeing not to err in this fashion in future. Toni’s cheerful attitude to the older generation had given me sufficient distance to listen dutifully, but pay no inner heed to the injunctions.

When the annual examination results were published just before Christmas, my mother and I were in Queensland for a Christmas holiday. For the first time in our lives we were alone at Christmas that year. Barry had taken the profits from his air charter business and used them to finance a journey of exploration to Europe. When his
Wanderjahr
was over he planned to buy a light aircraft and fly it home, exploring the Middle East and Southeast Asia along the way. For diversion my mother and I were spending the holidays at the small, unspoiled coastal resort of Surfer’s Paradise, about forty minutes’ drive south of Brisbane. We loved the slow pace of the town with its cluster of simple beach houses. A few unpretentious blocks of flats, and one modest hotel, hard by the miles of quiet, uncrowded beach. No Sydney papers reached such a sleepy little town, so we were startled when telegrams of congratulation were delivered from my uncle
and aunt, and half a dozen other Sydney friends. My mother, who had been expecting to discuss my failure and lay down the terms on which she was prepared to support my studies in future, was taken aback. We agreed that I should drive up to Brisbane, find a Sydney paper, and return with the news. Finding a paper at Brisbane Airport, I scanned the list of passes for each subject and saw with horror that my name was not there. Then I saw it in the list of honors and prizes, and gradually it dawned on me that I had done very well. I drove back down the coast in a trance. My vindication was complete. I had come first in history, earned high distinction in English, and had ranked high in the class in psychology.

I had scored a smashing psychological victory. It was hard to see how such results might have been improved on, and since success was what counted for my mother, the basis for future strictures about my conduct had suddenly been completely undermined. Better still was my inner feeling that I had found something I could do well, and my new awareness that university study was about learning and reflection, not the cramming of texts and information. Now I had a purpose in life. I would take an honors degree, rank high in the class, and set about choosing between the variety of promising career opportunities which went with such achievement. Some of the inner tension went out of me because I saw a solution to the dilemma I could discuss with no one. If I were to become a success academically and chose a career which would take me away from Sydney, it would finesse the whole question of leaving home. My mother would never stand in the way of success. Moreover, if it were public enough, its sweetness might cushion the blow of my departure. I could remain true to my obligations to the family by covering the family name with honors. For the moment, the path ahead was clear. I could settle down to my studies for the next three years, and let the future take care of itself.

My mother’s apology for her mistaken assessment of my first-year performance was handsome. One morning shortly after we
returned home, I found a jeweler’s box beside my breakfast plate. It contained a diamond and sapphire pin and a graceful note expressing pride in my achievements and an apology for her unwarranted disapproval. As I exclaimed with delight and pinned it on, I forgot my earlier insights about my mother’s lavish gifts. I was too excited by the future I painted in my mind to practice the most elementary caution.

The beginning of my second year at the University of Sydney was a heady time. People knew who I was. Faculty, hitherto superior beings clad in black gowns, now nodded as they passed me in the Quadrangle. Everyone taking history or English honors in the years above me began taking an interest in what I was doing. I started out taking a double honors program in history and English, enjoying the special status that this ambitious program brought. The pass course was taught by lecture to classes of hundreds of students whose relationships with faculty were of necessity limited. Each department prided itself on its honors program, however, which was based on very detailed seminar work with small groups of students, whom faculty came to know very well indeed. I loved literary studies as much as I did history, but there was no comparison between the level of intellectual challenge offered by the first year of the history honors program compared with that of the English Department.

In history we took seminars on modern European and British history, and on historiography. We plunged into reading Vico, Marx, Hegel, Burckhardt, Acton, Mannheim, Max Weber, and modern philosophers of history like Collingwood, without pausing to consider whether we had the background to analyze them critically. In seminars, our discussions were about the 1848 revolutions in Europe, the character of industrial society, the concept of alienation, the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism, the modern trend toward authoritarian mass societies, the differences between realpolitik and romantic notions of democratic liberal or socialist world order. Our instructors were the liveliest
and most challenging minds among the history faculty: Alan Shaw, Oxford-trained, witty, urbane, and an inspired teacher; Ernst Bramstedt, a German Jewish scholar, of formidable intellect, exiled from Germany by the Nazis, an early collaborator with the great Karl Mannheim; Marjorie Jacobs, the one woman on the history faculty, learned, intellectually incisive, the first person I met who did not automatically see Australia and the world from a conventional European point of view. We spent six hours a week in the company of these fascinating minds, discussing the most central ideas and problems involved in understanding the twentieth century. The seminars never really ended because some segment of the student part of them moved off for coffee and more talk. Milton Osborne, son of an academic family, brilliant, whippet-thin, radiating intellectual energy and insatiable curiosity, possessed the most interesting and rigorous mind of my fellow history honors students. Ken Hosking, a more reflective and more aesthetically concerned person, was the needed counterpoint in an argument. Rob Laurie, intent on a career of public service, provided a spirited defense of traditional conservative points of view. I found myself intoxicated by the pleasure of abstract ideas, by the company of others who shared my interests, and by the notion that one could get beneath the appearances of events to understand the property and class relationships which constituted the stuff of politics and culture. Milton and I, whose families were near neighbors, spent endless hours arguing about historiography, politics, life.