The Road from Coorain (26 page)

Knowing the bush, I wanted to know the things most urban writers left out. How did people learn to find their way around, to find water, to know where to start looking for gold? Much of the nineteenth-century history of Australia revolved around the economic results of the grazing of sheep, yet every account of the breeding of the flocks I read was patently absurd. Sheep which had been hair-bearing were supposed to have sprouted fabulous coats of wool on being exposed to the Australian climate. How had it really happened? When had they learned how to breed for wool and how many generations had it taken to produce those elegant merino flocks? What did it feel like to be one of those early squatters, lord of all he surveyed, out beyond the limits of settlement, looking toward the vast interior, planning sheep runs on a scale beyond anyone’s dreams of avarice? When had they and their sheepherders first come to love the landscape and feel at home in it? What did its colors mean to the first settlers? Were they ever afraid of the space and emptiness as I had been as a child? Were they different from Europeans as a result of conquering such fears? How different were they? What was our poetry and painting about if not that same existential awareness of the continent? None of this was in the history texts and at first I thought no one but me noticed its absence.

Late in the year, Professor Manning Clark, of the newly founded Canberra University College, came to deliver a series of
lectures in our Australian history course, lectures which dealt with Australian culture and its contradictions. He pointed out the contradiction between the average Australian urban experience and the Australian imagination formed by vicarious awareness of the empty continent. We saw ourselves too much as though we were bush settlers, he thought, and so we failed to notice our cities, churches, artists, and writers. He was obsessed by what the Australian experience had all added up to since the days the first Asian predecessors of the aboriginals had landed on Australian shores. An essay he published that year chastised the Australian historical profession and Australian universities for standing in the way of a real flowering of Australian culture. In Clark’s view, Australian academics saw Australia as something less than Europe and by conveying these attitudes to their students taught them to see Australia as derivative. The important questions for Australian intellectuals, Clark said, were about what being Australian meant without reference to any external standards, except those which had made Western culture historically minded: the search for the meaning of mankind’s journey in time. I agreed with him passionately, although his essay ruffled many feathers among my teachers.

I took out my frustrations by writing a term paper on the process by which Australia’s merino flocks were bred, correcting, as I laid out the story, the errors and omissions of many generations of Australian historians. It was fun to get away from the bureaucratic prose and read some real accounts of the settlement. I could imagine what it was like to be the first person to ride out onto the plains beyond the coastal range of New South Wales, and could catch the tone of excitement in the diaries and letters I read describing the experience. It never occurred to me to think of the story from the aboriginal point of view. This was a new country and a new society, I thought, and there was a history about it I wanted to write.

My aspirations to write history were real, but unfocused, and at odds with the other purpose which was forming in my mind. I
wanted to be part of the exploration of Australia’s relationships with its Asian and Southern Pacific neighbors, to play what I saw as a practical role in the general reorientation of the country’s culture and external relations. Along with Milton Osborne and Rob Laurie, my two closest friends in the history honors program, I decided to apply as a candidate for admission into the junior ranks of the Australian Department of External Affairs. Since the three of us ranked at the top of our class, our selection seemed reasonably certain, lending to our discussions after classes a new theme on the subject of Australian international affairs. This objective would, I hoped, finesse nicely the question of when and why I would leave home. My mother would not oppose so prestigious a career. I would be posted abroad, and with the Department of External Affairs as an unwitting but cooperative deus ex machina, I would be released from my predicament at home. This objective in turn flew in the face of my attachment to Peter, and fueled the tensions between us about my commitment to my work. Caught as I was between my mother’s hostility and skillful war of nerves over my ties to Peter, and his anger that he did not take precedence over my work and my family, I began to feel trapped. My response was to speed up the pace of life, make more contradictory promises to everyone demanding my attention, and to ease my taut nerves with stiffer and stiffer doses of Scotch. I was headed for a traumatic confrontation between ambition, love, and duty. It was a contradiction Australians were taught to resolve through stoic adherence to duty. I knew that turning one’s back on one’s duty was dishonorable. So far as my ambitions were concerned I knew they were deviant. Women were supposed to be governed by love. Yet, though he had been dead more than a decade, I still heard my father’s voice saying, “Do something, Jill. Don’t just put in time on this earth.” In this hierarchy of values, romantic attachments were a poor third. Intellectually, I might criticize Australian values and the elders who imparted them, but in a crisis I fell into line. When the inevitable confrontation came I chose duty and
ambition, motivations I still thought compatible, and abandoned romantic love.

This denial exacted its toll. I very nearly didn’t make it through the last examination in the series that year. I took my seat and picked up the questions feeling disembodied and very strange. The examination was on historiography and I had been looking forward to it. Now feeling uncannily detached, I began. I would use the question on Hegel to define history; make the answer to the question on Marx and
The German Ideology
a means of elaborating my theme; and conclude with a discussion of Collingwood and
The Idea of History
which would round out my picture of the way the discipline had evolved since Hegel’s extreme claims for the philosophy of history. The whole paper would then read like an extended essay on a single theme. I became so engrossed, I forgot my immediate predicament and kept writing until the end of the three hours.

By all the received romantic scripts of a woman’s life, the next year, my twenty-third, should have been an unhappy one. Instead it was golden. Our major task in our fourth year was to carry out a major piece of historical research, and write it up as a dissertation. All the requirements for our honors degree were finished except for a series of history seminars, and it was possible to live the life of a scholar, rather than that of a student. Milton, Rob, and I had all chosen dissertation projects which required us to carry out our research in the manuscript room of the Mitchell Library, a handsome public library and state archive which looked out across the Sydney Botanical Gardens to Government House and Sydney Harbor. Our days of scanning documents could be broken by walks in one of the world’s most beautiful gardens, and occasionally we could treat ourselves to an elaborate lunch in one of the bistros selling fine Australian wine and simple, elegant food which were beginning to appear in Sydney’s downtown.

Sometimes I would meet Nina, now graduated and working
for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, for a drink after work. Often, a group of us congregated for pasta in an Italian restaurant, ready to catch up on the gossip of our now scattered circle. Whenever Barry paid a visit to Sydney, he and I met at one of the city’s best restaurants, and he treated me to a long, leisurely luncheon. This was when we brought one another up to date, talked about our plans for the future, recalled the past, and deepened our understanding of one another as adults.

The most enjoyable part of the year was unquestionably the chance to become a real professional historian, to undertake the labors necessary to reconstruct some piece of the past, and to extract its meaning. I chose to write the history of the early settlement of New South Wales, and to trace the evolution of its pastoral industry in the context of the distant European markets for wool and their transformation through new technologies. Australian social history was undeveloped at the time, the history of its merchant families and bankers little understood, and many of the collections of documents of important colonial families had only just become part of the state archives. I never tired of reading colonial newspapers, or of sorting out the crabbed, crossed handwriting of nineteenth-century family letters. Observing the evolution of a merchant family through three or four generations gave one the feel of the society, its silences and pretenses, its deepest emotions and its formulae for expressing them. It was fascinating to discover which Australian entrepreneurs, many thousands of miles distant from the British cloth industry, understood the potential of new technologies for combing and spinning wool, and raised the capital from distant bankers to benefit from the opportunity. How was one to account for their mentality, as compared with their compatriots who simply aped English country life and paid only a modicum of attention to the breeding of animals and the development of bloodlines? I tried to understand how some new arrivals could
see
the land and its potential, and others lived out their lives complaining how different it was from England.

The very best part of the year was the actual writing of a monograph, balancing accuracy and style, footnotes and the full panoply of scholarly reports, with a smooth-flowing and compelling narrative. My characters spoke for themselves through the rhetoric of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century letter writers, and I believed that by telling their story I was also tracing the way their prose changed from the conventions of early romanticism to a crisper, clearer sense of Australia as a place not just to be conquered and made to yield wealth, but a piece of the earth where one sinks one’s roots and learns to live as a native rather than an exile.

The last test of the year was our journey to Canberra, as part of the group of aspiring trainees seeking to enter the Department of External Affairs. We were full of youthful idealism, our heads crammed with information about the various issues facing Australia in her relationships with the rest of the world, walking compendiums of statistics about trade, the possibility of economic recovery for Japan, power relationships in Southeast Asia. Our interviews aped many aspects of the fabled British Foreign Office weekend, where recruits were put through their intellectual paces and tested for their social graces and their general sangfroid.

The beginning of the first day was not auspicious. We were ushered into an elevator at the Department of External Affairs, along with several senior officers. They wore striped trousers, carried furled umbrellas, and as they entered the elevator removed bowler hats from perspiring heads. I could not believe my eyes. It was 103 degrees outside and these men were dressed as though they were in Whitehall. I was careful not to meet Milton’s eyes lest we be caught in irreverent laughter.

Keeping the proper expression of gravity was not hard for the rest of the day, as we were taken through our paces in discussions of Australia’s regional interests, and her proper stance in all the trouble spots of the world. I was used to arguing forcefully for my point of view in our history seminars and insisted on having my
say by means of interruption, if necessary, in this all-male group. Our evening dinner was bland, and before nine we were released to our government boardinghouse and the blankness of a Canberra suburb. Our next morning was a further series of discussions, followed by personal interviews about our career aspirations and motivations for wishing to join the Department of External Affairs.

When the results of the selection were announced, Milton and Rob received invitations to join the Department of External Affairs, but I received a blandly courteous letter thanking me for my interest. I was dumbfounded. Milton and I had ranked first in our class and were to be awarded the University Medal jointly for our academic achievements. I could scarcely believe that my refusal was because I was a woman. Inquiries made by faculty friends and friends with connections in Canberra confirmed that this was the case. “Too good-looking” was one report. “She’d be married within a year.” “Too intellectually aggressive” was another assessment. “She’d never do for diplomacy.” I knew I was no more and no less intellectually aggressive than Milton and Rob. That left my sex and my appearance. I could not credit that merit could not win me a place in an endeavor I wanted to undertake, that decisions about my eligibility were made on the mere fact of my being female instead of on my talents. It should have made me angry, but instead I was profoundly depressed. What was I going to do with my life? Where could I put my talents to some useful work? How was I now going to extricate myself from my dilemma at home? If there was no justice in such things, I could never expect to earn a place in life through merit. People were taking what I’d justly earned from me. It was all prejudice, blind prejudice. For the first time, I felt kinship with black people. I could never remember the image of my parents resting in the evening, sitting on the front veranda step at Coorain, quite the same way again. In one dimension, it was a golden image from childhood. In another, I saw that their feet resting heedlessly on the nardoo stone step were resting on the tribal treasures of black
people, things our ancestors had felt free to possess because of the aborigines’ blackness. They and I were participants in the process by which those black people’s land and rights had been taken away from them.

Now I understood directly and personally what injustice rooted in assumptions of biological superiority meant, I could see with sudden clarity what our use of the nardoo stones signified. As it came home to me that my sex rendered my merits invisible, I thought differently about the way we had taken over the aborigines’ land. It chilled me to realize that there was no way to earn my freedom through merit. It was an appalling prospect.