I became a grandmother last year, at sixty-nine, to a lively girl born to my youngest daughter. My grandmother was forty-eight when I was born and when she died I was thirty-seven, pregnant with my granddaughter’s mother. People say that seventy is the new fifty, but it’s not true. My grandmother had held the hands of my first two children. I doubt I’ll do the same for little Helena. There is a relentless logic to generational succession.
A grandmother for barely a year, I have thought a lot about the gifts I might bestow on the newest member of our family. Inevitably, perhaps, these are the gifts my grandmother gave me: love and a visceral sense of the past.
My grandmother lived on a farm in the Goulbourn Valley, where she kept chooks, helped with the milking and cooked on a woodstove for my grandfather and uncles. Twice a year, our family spent a week at the farm. She was my father’s mother, and my brother, sister and I adored her, as did our cousins. And we all loved the farm, which seemed to exist in its own self-contained world, barely connected to the bureaucratic rhythms of schools and trains that governed our house in the suburbs.
The past was everywhere: iron bedsteads, old farm machinery, a tumble-down blacksmith’s shed with a huge pair of bellows, my grandparents’ wedding portraits, my father’s old schoolbooks, a cable tram from the North Carlton line converted into a sleep-out, my grandfather’s rambling anecdotes about his exploits as a water diviner, my grandmother’s more contained stories of my father as a child and her short time as a teacher at Cummeragunga, an Aboriginal settlement on the Murray, before she married. There were remnant middens too, where patches of charcoal and broken mussel shells interrupted the furrows, and a canoe tree standing on the edge of what was once a swamp. With little sense then of the horror of Indigenous dispossession, to us this tree was just one of the things that made us feel like special children. I pitied my friends whose grandparents lived in neat Californian bungalows on quiet suburban streets, even if their grandmothers were better cooks than mine.
The first of my grandmother’s gifts was unconditional love. My parents loved me unconditionally too, but they also had to bring me up and rein me in, and I had to find out how I was not them. Some ambivalence is necessary in our feelings for our parents, but there’s no need for it with a grandmother who makes no demands and is interested in everything you do. This is the ideal grandmother, the one celebrated in the many sentimental grandmother quotes on the internet, who ‘remembers all of your accomplishments and forgets all of your mistakes’. Of course, many grandmothers are not like this at all, but I was lucky. Once I was old enough to travel alone, I would take the train up in my school and university holidays and stay for a week. I would read, walk, daydream and have my grandmother all to myself, chatting away with her about my life and hers.
When I read Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space in my twenties, I knew what he was talking about: the house as a cosmos, holder of memories, shelter for dreams, securing me in the world. But it was not Bachelard’s storied European house of cellars, front parlours and attics that was lodged in my unconscious. It was my grandmother’s single-storey wooden farmhouse with a corridor down the middle, a big kitchen, lots of doors opening to wide verandahs and the shimmering light of a flood plain. Bachelard imagines the house as vertical; mine is horizontal, and I much prefer plains to mountains or even rolling hills. But, like him, I imagine the house as safe, where I am who I am.
I know not all houses are safe, that dangers can lurk, like the evil fairies in the Grimms’ fairy tales, waiting to curse unsuspecting young girls, that houses can hide the sexual and emotional abuse of women and children, and sometimes of men too. But I never lived in such a house. Coming back from a walk at nightfall, I would see my mother and grandmother through the lighted kitchen window, preparing our tea, and feel happy. Gothic tales of haunted houses, the sharp-edged empty suburbia of John Brack’s paintings, Howard Arkley’s blank windows, even Elizabeth Harrower’s The Watch Tower, wake no echoes in me.
To raise our family, my husband, Graeme, and I bought a single-storey, double-fronted weatherboard house with a front verandah, a central passage and plenty of sheds. It was as close to an Australian farmhouse as you could get in the inner suburbs, and after we renovated you could see right through from the front door to the back. We still live there, and, as a new grandmother, I imagine our granddaughter exploring the house and garden, making huts, climbing trees, having a little plot to grow radishes and marigolds, poking about in the sheds full of old stuff that might just come in useful one day.
The other gift my grandmother gave me was the past as a lived reality. Because of her, and my grandfather too, I have ended up as a historian, reading old documents, visiting old buildings, looking at photos and paintings of things that once were. There are many reasons for practising history, and some are essentially practical: to study past mistakes and failures so we can try to avoid them, or to uncover the origins of social problems in order to find solutions. Others are more personal: to understand the people who shaped us and what made them, the places they lived in and the textures of their daily lives.
Grandparents are a doorway back into history. Their stories of childhood and school, work and war, and of our own parents’ childhood and youth convince us that time is real, and full of consequences. Even if they are not storytellers, their very existence tells us that things were once different and that we too will one day be old like them, if we live that long.
There are, too, the rich pleasures of detailed remembering—Proust’s madeleine triggering the recreation of a lost world. Sitting in the archives, reading old letters, I can drift into reverie: the cursive handwriting, the deckle-edged bond paper, the embossed house name in the top right-hand corner evoke the solid confidence of middle-class homeowners and their carless streets. I wonder what the writer’s house was like, and what they were wearing when they wrote the letter. Some psychoanalysts talk about reparation fantasies, the need to believe that one can repair a loved one damaged by one’s own destructive impulses. I don’t think this is what drives my need to remember. It is rather the ravages of time itself that I want to undo as I try to keep the people I love from disappearing.
Both Graeme and I struggle to throw things out. Not for us the joys of decluttering or of the clear desk. Graeme feels he is betraying where he came from if he throws out a broken appliance, so he puts it in the shed to fix later, and occasionally he does. I just feel sad and can only move things out of the house by becoming cross and accusatory: this was always a mistake; I never really liked the person who gave me this; it is tripping me up. Sometimes I do pass things on for their own good: I’m not looking after you, so you should go to someone who will, before neglect renders you useless.
In our house, only the beds, the whitegoods, the computers and the artwork were bought new. The tables, the chairs, the couch, the coffee table, the piano, some of the cupboards, and much of the china, cutlery and glassware all had lives before us: some in my parents’ mid-century modern lounge room, the brown furniture in earlier interiors. We have the butter churn from Graeme’s family’s farm, and a cane washing basket big enough for a sleeping baby, which my grandmother bought at a clearing sale in the 1920s. Then there’s the dress archive in the trunk, special dresses of mine and a few of my mother’s, like her printed linen 1960s sheath with a keyhole at the neckline.
The house contains it all, and we are never bored. Graeme always has things to mend, and I can read or sort: my parents’ courtship letters, old photos, wooden boxes of costume jewellery my sister and I once wore. And if I run out of memory prompts in the house, there is always the garden, where I can weed around my grandmother’s violets and white flags, divide the irises from my childhood home, or strike cuttings from my mother-in-law’s Jerusalem sage for my daughters to plant in their gardens.
So there will be plenty of paths back to past ways of doing things for little Helena, should she be so inclined. Of course, she may not be; she may want to throw balls, keep guinea pigs and play the ukulele, or do a myriad of other things that don’t need my kept objects. But the possibility has given me another reason not to throw things out. Little Helena could play shops with these old pennies, or dress-ups with these old necklaces and stoles, or push the dog around in the 1950s white wicker pram my parents bought when I was born and Graeme restored as a surprise Christmas present after it had spent decades in the old chook shed.
Recently, though, and increasingly, the pleasure of remembering is being overshadowed by my horror at environmental destruction and by my anger that it is continuing almost unabated. My grandparents’ farm was on Yorta Yorta land near Kyabram, an Aboriginal word meaning ‘thick forest’. Well, there was no thick forest in my childhood, nor native grasses, nor marsupials, just cows, and the occasional native daisy—billy buttons, my father called them. There were birds: carolling magpies, grass parrots, and spoonbills, herons and ibis when the paddocks were being irrigated, the occasional quail, perhaps even a plains wanderer, though I never saw one. But there are a lot fewer birds now. When I drive through Gippsland I mourn the temperate rainforest that once grew there, before the settlers with their fire and axes. And it still goes on: landclearing in Queensland, logging in old-growth forests in Tasmania and Victoria, the draining of wetlands to build coastal housing, the chopping down of eight-hundred-year-old trees sacred to the Djap Warrang people to widen a highway in western Victoria. On and on. On and on. It fills me with despair. What will be left when Helena is my age?
I have never been any good at imagining the future. For a short time in the early 1970s, I had a job in the long-term planning section of Telecom, the statutory organisation that once provided Australia’s telecommunications, before it was privatised. I was in a team of social scientists assessing the possible social impacts of advances in telecommunications. It was a job for which I was temperamentally totally unsuited. When the engineers extolled the benefits of ‘the wired city’, I saw loss: deserted shopping centres, as people shopped online, old ladies forlornly pushing their shopping jeeps, looking for someone to talk to.
In 1975, the planning section, which I had now left, published a report called Telecom 2000 and I wrote an essay about it for the 1980 Melbourne Journal of Politics. I now had a daughter, which gave me another way of imagining the future. She would be twenty-one in the year 2000, I wrote, ‘a comforting thought, for it gives a human meaning to the technological future…It reassures that the cyclical time of generations will continue as the linear time of technology speeds on.’
In ‘Science as a Vocation’, the great German sociologist Max Weber wrote about Leo Tolstoy brooding on the meaning of death in the modern world. According to Weber, Tolstoy concluded that progress had rendered our individual deaths meaningless, that because there is always a further step ahead on the path of progress, the individual life, according to its own meaning, should never end. By contrast, writes Weber, ‘Abraham or some peasant of the past died “old and satiated with life because he stood in the organic cycle of life; because his life…had given to him what life had to offer…Civilised man, placed in the midst of continuous enrichment of culture by ideas, knowledge and problems, may be “tired of life” but not “satiated with life”.’
I am not as sure as Weber that the organic cycle of life has lost its meaning. Our experience of time moves both in straight lines and in loops and circles; we adapt to external changes and live with chains of consequence, but we also move through the generational positions. Recently my ninety-five-year-old father moved in with us. He sits snoozing and reading in the corner of our lounge, in the chair my mother’s mother sat in when she lived in his and my mother’s house in my childhood. He still has his mild and gentle manner, but dementia is eroding his agency. I care for him, because he was a good husband and father, but also because he is my grandmother’s eldest, much-loved son drifting into a second age of dependency. And when Helena toddles into the lounge, he waves to her, and she waves back.
Nor am I as confident as Weber was about progress and the ‘continuous enrichment of ideas’. I fear instead that we are living in an age of decline and endings. There are many strands to this fear: the way the human brain is changing as screens replace books, for instance, and the reappearance of fools and liars with political power, after we thought democracy had saved us from mad kings and queens and their venal courtiers. But my worst fear by far is an existential dread of unstoppable changes to the climate. It haunts everyone I know. It is where the external linear time of nature intersects with the circular time of our generation and those who will follow.
Not everyone feels this fear yet. Most are ignorant of the dangers we face. Some are in denial: all those mad old men who believe in cryogenics and put their brains and bodies into deep freeze, waiting for science to discover how to revive them. And men and women in power, who could lead the world into a carbon-free future, but who are barely able to lift their eyes beyond the next electoral cycle.
So what can a grandmother do?
She can join the climate movement, go to demonstrations, write letters to politicians, sign petitions, donate to environmental organisations. But what can she do for her granddaughter in a world in which she, the grandmother, feels increasingly helpless? She can’t protect her from the future. She can’t guarantee her the seven decades of post-war peace and prosperity in which she was lucky enough to spend her life. All she can do is give her a house to remember, in which she knows that she was loved.