Trekking from Childhood to Adulthood
It is a commonplace to say that the rapid disappearance of meaningful rite-of-passage ceremonies has caused difficulties for our young people in their progress towards adulthood. Nonetheless, it’s true.
Rite-of-passage ceremonies in Western societies nowadays often lack deep meaning, are negative, and can cause serious damage: for example, getting drunk for the first time, trying drugs for the first time, losing one’s virginity, the notorious ‘Schoolies’ weeks. The few adult-sanctioned ‘ceremonies’ we have for young people include eighteenth and/or 21st birthday parties, graduation ceremonies, debutante balls, the test for a driver’s licence, and the end-of-Year-12 exams.
In the interests of convenience and efficiency, even many of these ceremonies have been stripped of much of their meaning. A couple of years ago I was invited to give the address at a graduation ceremony at an Australian university. It was a depressing experience. A dozen or so academic staff, dressed in their robes, were present: some told me it was their fourth graduation that day. They looked uninterested and uninspired. The vice-chancellor and other senior members of the university were not present. We straggled onto the stage, and sat looking out over an audience of 600 graduates and their family members. A few perfunctory speeches were made, I gave my address, and then, for an interminable time, the well-rehearsed students came onto the stage one by one, accepted their certificates, turned and smiled for the obligatory photographs, then exited stage left, to begin their adult journeys as members of their respective professions.
It was sausage-factory education at its worst. It’s not a new phenomenon though. Barney Tobey had a cartoon in the New Yorker magazine in the 1970s, showing an endless queue of university students at their graduation ceremony, each receiving a scroll of parchment, as the eminent scholar presenting the degrees intoned ‘Congratulations, keep moving, please. Congratulations, keep moving, please. Congratulations . . .’204
traditional rites of passage
There are a number of ways rite-of-passage and initiation ceremonies in Western societies differ from those in tribal or indigenous cultures. As I mentioned earlier, chronological age is nowadays frequently taken as the only criterion for maturity. In Australia, a person is allowed to join the armed services at seventeen, to vote at eighteen, to buy and drink alcohol at eighteen. A person accused of a crime is treated in the adult justice system from the age of seventeen in Queensland, eighteen in other states. The legal age for having sex is sixteen or seventeen, depending on the state you live in, but conditions apply in certain cases up to the age of eighteen.
Many societies with little interest in chronological age initiate children when they start behaving in ways that indicate they are ready. By our standards, this may be when they are quite young. Photographs of Aboriginal boys preparing for initiation suggest that the boys were often only nine or ten. This could have been to help the tribe survive: hunters and warriors may have been needed to keep the group safe and well fed, and the sooner boys could take up these roles, the better the chances of the tribe members keeping themselves healthy, and fending off enemies.
Another of the crucial differences in Western society is that we make the ‘official’ ceremonies as safe and easy as possible, because we are terrified of inflicting pain or causing distress.
For over 3000 years, members of the Jewish faith have recognised the importance of making a rite of passage truly challenging. When a boy approaches his thirteenth birthday and prepares for the bar mitzvah, he has quite an ordeal ahead. This includes attending frequent special classes, learning Hebrew, studying the Torah at home and, on the day of the ceremony, leading the service, speaking and singing in Hebrew. There may be many hundreds of people in the congregation and the challenge is daunting for a boy whose voice is cracking or breaking, but there is no escape if he is to accept the responsibility of fulfilling all the Torah’s commandments and thereby entering the world of Jewish adulthood. The bat mitzvah, for girls, a more recent feature of Jewish life, is found in progressive congregations, and also has demands and challenges, but these can vary quite widely, depending on the beliefs and practices of different groups.
As is well known, other societies have subjected young people to physical pain: having teeth knocked out, ears or nose pierced, penis circumcised or sub-incised, or flesh cut with sacred markings. In the Solomon Islands, boys and girls were tattooed on the face – usually with symbols of the frigate bird – as part of initiation ceremonies. I once showed a documentary film about face carving in the Solomon Islands to a Year 8 class in Australia; one boy fainted. In Fiji, girls who had reached puberty were tattooed on the vulva by ‘skilled female artists who have been described as hereditary priestesses’.205 The Sateré-Mawé people of the Amazon subjected young boys to the stings of swarms of the exceptionally painful bullet ants that were placed in gloves woven from leaves. The boys donned the gloves for at least ten minutes, suffering repeated stings. Once the gloves were taken off, further pain, swelling and paralysis of the arms followed, but each boy had to undergo this ritual repeatedly, until he was able to do so without shedding a tear. Only then could he be declared a man.206
modern rites of passage
Schoolies’ weeks demonstrate that if adults have no meaningful rite-of-passage ceremonies involving real challenges for young people, the young people will create rite-of-passage trials and ceremonies for themselves. And if they do not participate in large-scale communal ones they will organise small-scale ones. These may centre around gang membership, involving for example drag racing, games of chicken, or even, for male gangs, pack rape. They may include tattooing, drug taking, or so-called ‘hazing’ or ‘bastardisation’ experiences that, under the seemingly innocuous heading of ‘practical jokes’, can include being branded, being forced to swallow vomit-inducing pills, being subjected to sleep deprivation, being continuously drenched by iced water, or being force-fed alcohol or drinks too disgusting to specify. Wikipedia reports at least one hazing death each year in the United States alone between 1969 and 2016.207
Late in 2018, a 28-year-old Sydney man died after eight years of suffering. When he was twenty, he had been dared by friends to eat a garden slug that had crawled across their table. His mother told a TV channel: ‘Twenty-year-old boys, red wine, alcohol, sitting at some mate’s table – a slug goes onto the table, someone banters about a dare . . . boys will be boys.’208
Unfortunately, the slug was a carrier of a parasitic worm. The worm infected his brain; he became quadriplegic, experienced seizures, and could only eat and breathe through tubes. He had to be bathed and toileted by his carers until he died from the infection.
Such a tragic story is an excruciating reminder of the lengths young men will go to in order to prove their courage, virility, manliness. It is as though the young men and women involved in hazing, daring and the like share a widespread unconscious recognition that facing challenges, experiencing danger and suffering pain are necessary for them and their peers. It would not be unreasonable to hypothesise that this is part of the collective unconscious of all people. The National Youth Gang Survey in the United States reported that in 2012 there were around 30,000 gangs and over 800,000 gang members in that country. This was a rise in gang members of 8 per cent in five years. In the same period, gang-related homicides rose 20 per cent.209
Frequently nowadays we are confronted by uninitiated men. A few years ago, I was in a shop in Barkly Square shopping centre, on Barkly Street, Melbourne, trying on a pair of jeans. I went into the little cubicle, pulled the curtain shut, took off my trousers, and started pulling on the jeans. Suddenly the curtain was ripped open. I looked up, startled. A young guy, maybe twenty years of age, was standing there. He was a lot younger, taller, stronger and bigger than I was. He said, ‘I left eighty bucks in here. Where’s my eighty bucks?’
I tried to stay calm, and I answered: ‘Sorry, I can’t help you. There isn’t any money here.’
The saleswoman appeared behind him. She was about seventeen or eighteen, lightly built. She pulled at him, saying: ‘You can’t do that. You can’t walk in on people like that.’
He turned away, saying, ‘But I left my money in there. He’s got my money.’
I drew the curtain shut and, determined to stay calm, buttoned up the jeans. They were a pretty good fit. I started taking them off. The curtain got ripped open again. It was the same guy. Now he was really boiling. ‘Where’s my money, bro? I want my money. Give me my eighty bucks.’
‘I’ve told you, there’s no money in here. You must have left it somewhere else.’ But he wouldn’t listen. He kept standing there, swearing at me, demanding his money, getting angrier and angrier. Once again the saleswoman came and pulled him away. I admired her strength of character. I heard him complaining to a friend in the shop about how I had stolen his money and how he was going to get it off me.
I came out of the cubicle and took the jeans to the counter. I was nervous enough to consider abandoning the purchase and walking out of there, but I was keen not to be frightened and not to look frightened. The man and his friend were near the counter, the guy swearing continuously at me and demanding his money, his friend listening sympathetically but not getting involved.
I pulled out my wallet to pay for the jeans. The man walked towards me, saying, ‘You’ve got my eighty bucks. I want to look in your wallet.’
‘Back off,’ I told him. ‘Just back off.’
He did, rather to my surprise. I was relieved to know that there was still a line he wouldn’t cross. The jeans were $50, but I was so disturbed that I gave the salesgirl $80.
She said, ‘They’re only fifty.’ I quickly stuffed the other $30 back in my wallet. Luckily the guy didn’t notice.
I got my jeans in a bag, along with a sympathetic smile from the sales assistant. The young man continued to stare at me and abuse me, saying to his friend, ‘I know he’s got it. If I could just prove that he’s got it . . .’
I said to him: ‘Be a man. If you’ve lost your money, you’ve lost it. Deal with it.’
He said sulkily: ‘I don’t want to deal with it. I want my money back.’
I headed out of the shop. I wasn’t going to run to my car. I wanted to show this guy that he hadn’t got to me, even though he had. So I walked at a leisurely pace out to Barkly Street, got into my car, started the engine, and pulled out from the kerb. But all the time I was thinking, I don’t want to let this go; this is unfinished business.
I drove towards the intersection of Barkly Street and Sydney Road, really troubled about leaving the situation. Something told me I had to resolve this. Suddenly I saw the two young men walking along the footpath, on the other side of the street. I did a U-turn, although I was still unsure about what I was going to do. I pulled over, jumped out of the car and called to them. They looked startled.
But by now I had decided what to do. I said to the tall one, the angry one, ‘I want to show you something about human beings. I want to prove something to you.’
I got my wallet out again and opened it. But I realised the young men were too close for comfort. I put up one hand and said, ‘Back up, both of you.’
They did, and again I thought, Good, they’re still not totally out of control.
I had decided I would give the man $160. If I gave him $80, he would think I had stolen his money and he had scared me into returning it, or that I’d had an attack of conscience. The only way I could prove I did not take the money was to give him double the amount he’d lost, $160. But I was too nervous to stand there counting out all those notes. So I took four fifties and pushed them at him. ‘Here’s two hundred bucks,’ I said. ‘And the next time you start judging people, the next time you’re so certain you’re right, just remember that maybe you’re actually wrong.’
Their whole attitude changed. They looked Middle Eastern, which I mention only because the quieter one started showering me with blessings: blessing me, my wife, my family, my home, my car . . . The taller one tilted his head. He seemed disconcerted, but kind of admiring, and finally he said, ‘You’re a mad cunt, but yes, bless you.’
They walked on, laughing and talking to each other, shaking their heads. I went back to my car and did another U-turn. By the time I got through the intersection, they were halfway down the next block. I passed them, and they saw me. They waved affectionately, enthusiastically.
It would be nice if the story ended there and I could make a few smug comments about how I had changed the life of this aggressive young man. But about a week later I was in the same shopping centre, going past the same shop, and I caught the eye of the young saleswoman. She clearly remembered me, and smiled and waved. I went in. She was full of talk about the incident. She told me that after I left the shop, the guy had found his money, which he’d put in his fob pocket instead of his regular pocket. When he came back the next day and told her how I had given him $200, she was furious with him. ‘I told him that he was a complete shit,’ she said. ‘I told him, “How could you take that man’s money? Don’t you have any morals at all? You’re disgusting.”
‘He just said that you were an idiot with stacks of money, and so he didn’t care.’ She said to me: ‘No offence, but you were stupid to give him $200. I know that guy. He’s no good. He does drugs and everything.’
Well, I still think I got good value for my $200. I spent the money to jolt him, to shock him. I like to think that he’ll remember it for the rest of his life. That he’ll never be quite certain about people again. No matter what he said to the sales assistant, I believe he was shaken, because he came face to face with something he couldn’t fit into his understanding of the world.
I think that he was a typical alienated and uninitiated young man. His reaction to the possible loss of his $80 was infantile. He had been careless with his money – his response to its loss showed that it was important to him, but if it was so important, why had he not taken better care of it? He seemed to see the world as a place where people were after all they could get; and everyone was trying to rip everyone else off. By his age he should have been tacking towards the commitment of a long-term or lifelong relationship perhaps, and/or a job, and/or fatherhood. His family and society had let him down. He was maybe twenty years old, but twenty going on six.
It has been said of Australia that it’s a country where every boy is in a hurry to reach his eighteenth birthday, and once he gets there he stays there forever. The challenge for a boy is to become a man: a man who has integrity, strength, kindness and understanding.
modern rite of passage options
In order to try to help the maturing process, quite a number of well-meaning adults have devised and implemented rite-of-passage experiences and ceremonies, for both boys and girls. Sometimes these are offered on a commercial basis, where a school or community group, or an informal group, pays an organisation to send people to run such a course.
I don’t like the idea of commercial organisations sending in strangers for these purposes. After returning home from the funeral of Adam Butterworth, a wonderful young man I had taught, who committed suicide in his early twenties, I wrote a book called Secret Men’s Business, which was intended to give young men information, instruction and ideas so that they might navigate their adolescent and adult lives more successfully. After it was published, I started getting invitations from schools to talk to assemblies of boys – for the most part boys in Years 8, 9 or 10. I accepted the invitations because I was happy to talk about some of the issues these boys were likely to encounter, and I thought it was important work. But many of the schools wanted me to include sex education in my advice to the audiences. I refused, because I felt it was wrong for the boys to be assembled en masse and subjected to such intimate, personal and powerful information from a complete stranger. Tribal societies, I’m sure, would have regarded such a scenario as bizarre.
In recent generations, quite a lot of pressure has been put upon fathers to have ‘The Talk’ with their sons. Many or most fathers are uncomfortable with this idea, and subtly or openly resist the pressure. I think their instincts are probably correct. When the father talks to the son about sex with women, he has to be – there is no avoiding it – talking about having sex with the boy’s mother. At an unconscious level at least, it is unbearable for the boy to hear this. Tribal societies tacitly recognised this threat to the unconscious mind by ensuring that boys undergoing initiation were taught by the elders of the tribe, which could include the boy’s uncles, grandfathers, cousins, or other men, but never the father.
So if we disbar strangers and fathers from teaching young people about sex, we are, realistically, left with only three possibilities. For girls, it may be appropriate for the mother to take on this essential task. However, being a biological, adoptive or foster parent does not automatically confer on the parent a right to do this. The right must be earned, through years of good communication and a loving and mutually respectful relationship, so that trust has been established. Equally, for boys, a grandfather, uncle or other trusted male in the boy’s life can take on the role, but only if they have earned the right.
And of course, it does not have to be an individual who conducts these conversations. The second option is for an informally connected group of adults or an informally constituted committee to organise something for an individual, or for a group of their sons or daughters. It can be done quite creatively. A friend of mine, when her son was about to turn thirteen, asked a number of men known to her and her son to write him letters about what it meant to be a man. She had these bound, and presented them to him as a thirteenth birthday present. From time to time, groups of Candlebark mothers have organised weekends for their daughters where they have celebrated the approach of adolescence, the menarche, and the meaning of womanhood in the 21st century.
The third option is to have a formal rite-of-passage experience created and carried out by a school or some other well-defined organisation to which a boy or girl belongs, such as a religious institution or a scout or guide group.
When the visionary young headmaster of Geelong Grammar School, Dr James Darling (later Sir James), established the school’s Timbertop campus in 1952, it was largely because he recognised the need for Year 10 (later Year 9) students to go through an intense experience that would help them make the transition from childhood to adulthood. I taught at Timbertop for four years, and was astonished at the achievements of the students, which were far beyond anything I had imagined fourteen- or fifteen-year-olds could accomplish. The program was gruelling, physically, emotionally, mentally. Based on the ideas of Austrian educator Kurt Hahn (as were Gordonstoun in Scotland, and Salem in Germany), the program required students to do many hikes, over seriously high peaks and tough country, carrying all their needs on their backs, enduring conditions that were sometimes dangerous, and at all times navigating for themselves.
Encounters with adults were rare on a number of these expeditions. The longest hike went for six days, and it was not unusual for the kids to cover more than 160 kilometres through demanding terrain in that time.
In 2012, a Geelong Grammar publication reported that in the Timbertop ‘Option hikes’ for that year (where students, in groups of six, chose their preferred route), 33 of the 36 hike groups chose the harder of the options offered. This accords with our experiences at Candlebark and Alice Miller, where time and again, many students on hikes, if offered an extra challenge, such as a pre-dawn detour to the summit of a nearby mountain before returning to continue with the main route, jump at the opportunity to make a difficult experience even more difficult.
Gradually other wealthy independent schools began to establish programs that were inspired by Timbertop, and in more recent years, the Victorian government, with its Alpine School program, has shown an equally innovative spirit.
adolescents and parents: the essential divorce
The essence of these experiences is that adolescents are given an opportunity to start to separate from their parents. Earlier I used the dramatic word ‘kill’ to describe one of the inevitable stages in a child’s journey to adulthood: that the child must, metaphorically speaking, kill the parents. But in a healthy relationship, this will be the prelude to a new era, a resurrection, in which parent and child reconnect in a more adult and equal manner.
Read as metaphor, the story of the life and death of Jesus Christ is interesting in this context. One of the great unanswered questions of the Christian New Testament is ‘What happened to Joseph?’
Jesus has two fathers (three if we include Abraham), but one of them, God, is of course rather difficult to ‘kill’, given that he is held to be omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus (or the closest equivalent to an earthly father that Jesus can have), was nowhere to be found during his son’s tribulations. He simply went missing. Mary was there at the end, at the foot of the cross, and is shown in innumerable artworks, like Michelangelo’s Pietà, cradling her dead son in her arms. But Joseph? Where was he? Down at the pub? Away in Judah doing a spot of business? Busy at work, making a kitchen bench for an important client?
The last time Joseph got a mention in the story was when Jesus, at the age of twelve, nicked off without his parents’ knowledge or permission to the Temple in Jerusalem, to listen to and talk with the priests and scholars there. When Joseph and Mary eventually found him, ‘they were amazed’, according to the King James Bible. This in itself is rather amazing, as one might reasonably assume that they would have worked out by then that their son was not the average kid, having been born to a virgin and attended by three kings from the East at his cradle. But Jesus replied to Mary’s remonstrances with the words: ‘How is it that ye sought me? Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?’210
We can assume from his chronological age, from his independent action in leaving his parents, from the fact that Joseph is never mentioned again, and from his response to his mother, that at twelve he is at the dawn of adolescence. The healthy answer from a young man at this stage of life would be: ‘I’m getting on with my own stuff. Places to go, things to do, people to see . . .’ Not the answer Jesus gives: ‘I’m working for my dad (the other one) now.’
Instead of moving out of his father’s sphere of influence to launch his own adult life, Jesus is merely moving from one parent’s shadow to another. No boy can carry this weight.
Under these circumstances, Jesus, sentenced to death by the authoritarian father figure Pontius Pilate, must die, metaphorically if not literally, because no other outcome is possible for someone so overshadowed by his more important father. God is so powerful that no son could escape him. Perhaps Joseph’s situation is one of impotence rather than importance: unable to compete with God, he is pushed out of the story, shoved aside and forgotten. Or perhaps he is like so many earthly fathers: not committed enough to his parental responsibilities. (Most biblical scholars, incidentally, go for the easy answer, and assume Joseph has died at some earlier date – and without any miraculous intervention by Jesus.)
Although Jesus is resurrected three days after his execution, it is not so that he can lead a mature adult life, enjoying a mature relationship with a loving partner and perhaps in time fathering his own children. Instead it is to ‘ascend into Heaven where he sitteth at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty’, according to the Apostles’ Creed. It seems that he is never to separate from his father; he is destined to be by his side forever, obeying his will.
Equally, he is not allowed to outgrow the childish relationship with his mother. It is she who sees him to his death and who nurses his body afterwards. He has not been able to choose his own partner, who, in the normal course of a human life, might be to the fore in tending to the dying and death of the 33-year-old man.
fictional separations
Jesus is like Hamlet in some ways. Hamlet has to deal with no fewer than three fathers: his biological father, who has died, his stepfather, and the ghost of his biological father, who demands that the young man put his own life on hold and instead carry out the father’s agenda. The prince is, understandably, paralysed as a result, unable to reason or function.
The tensions between parents and adolescents are necessary and healthy, but rarely understood on either side. Some parents react angrily to the adolescent’s need to separate; some try to hide what is happening under a suffocating cloud of unremitting niceness, relying on fixed smiles and good grooming to carry the day. Many are between those two positions.
One common cause of tension arises in separated families when adolescents express a wish to leave the home of the parent who has raised them, and go and live with the other parent. The adolescent can be relentless in his or her pursuit of this goal. The mother (it is usually a mother) and the adolescent may both believe that the absentee parent has been neglectful, selfish, possibly abusive, possibly a heavy drinker, whilst the parent who has done most of the work has been self-sacrificing, starved of adult company, dedicated to the son or daughter.
The single parent can be devastated by this turn of events: ‘I was always there for her’, ‘I had to be both mother and father’, ‘He knows what a bastard his father is; how can he possibly . . .?’
But it is necessary for the adolescent to leave, partly because he or she must ‘get out from under’ – escape from the home that has been safe and secure for the child but that now feels suffocating. A Disneyland Dad, who sets few limits, often goes missing in action, lives a casual or hedonistic life and has had a number of short-term relationships, may be more likely to treat his teenage son or daughter as an adult, even if sometimes that does not seem to be in the adolescent’s best interests.
As well, many teenage boys, and often girls too, feel a yearning for the presence of the father in their lives once more. They overlook issues such as a father’s alcohol problems, abuse of the mother, stinginess with money, lack of integrity, neglect of his kids . . . it’s all conveniently brushed aside. On the other hand, girls who have been living with the father may yearn to be with the mother for the critical period of growth into adulthood.
Because the missing parent has not been much of a parent, the child may feel less urgency to ‘kill’ him or her. It is either the dedicated parent or parents or the destructive parent or parents who must be shirtfronted, and made aware that a new era has begun. This need not be too painful if the parent or parents are aware of its inevitability, and gracefully and gradually keep stepping back, stepping aside, and allowing without ugly confrontations the autonomy craved by the teenager. For the over-controlling parent, the outcome is likely to be all or nothing: there may be a bloody battle, which, if won by the parent, will result in the child never achieving his or her potential. That child might be the daughter who at 40 is still living at home, faithfully caring for the ageing father or mother. He might be the son who is passive and colourless, bullied by his girlfriend or wife. With great sadness I remember a friend of mine whose last words to his son were, ‘Get out and don’t come back until you’ve sorted yourself out.’ They had no further contact, because the young man was killed in a vehicle accident – caused by his reckless behaviour – a few months later, at the age of nineteen.
Not long after I wrote So Much to Tell You, in which a fifteen-year-old girl ultimately forgives her father for the scarring he has inflicted on her face, I read in newspapers of a Queensland court case in which a young woman whose father had slashed her across the face with a knife, leaving her with permanent scars, spoke in his defence at his trial. She said she had forgiven him and didn’t want him sent to prison because she would like to live with him again.
If the child of the over-controlling parent has to fight a pitched battle in order to gain the independence so necessary to him or her, he or she may subsequently break off all contact with the parent, or have only a polite and distant relationship with him or her thereafter.
In the old days of children’s literature, authors avoided exploring such intensely powerful situations as parents and adolescents going their separate ways. In the classic Australian novel Seven Little Australians by Ethel Turner, the wild and spirited Judy clashes repeatedly with her authoritarian father.211 Both seem so determined and bloody-minded that it is hard to imagine how their conflicts can be resolved. In an outcome all too common in nineteenth-century fiction, Judy, aged thirteen, is killed by a falling tree – just before she reaches the age where a final battle is likely. In this paternalistic society, the huge tree, upright, dominating the landscape, yet ageing, ringbarked and ‘rotten through and through’,212 may have come from Ethel Turner’s unconscious mind and is a perfect symbol: the father-tree, fading in strength but still powerful enough to fall on the wilful Judy and crush her.
In more recent times, novelists like Enid Blyton found ways to get rid of the parents (for example by sending the children to boarding school, or sending them on long extended country holidays, or rendering them into orphans, or condemning the parents and children to be separated as a result of some catastrophe) or ignore the parents pretty much completely, as in the Famous Five and Secret Seven series.
But in the late twentieth century, when a new genre, that of adolescent fiction, emerged, writers found the courage to depict the confrontations and showdowns between parents and children. I have mentioned Melina Marchetta’s novel Looking for Alibrandi, in which John Barton, the seventeen-year-old son of a powerful and successful politician, is unable to escape the long shadow cast by his father, and commits suicide.
In Jonathan Harlen’s novel The Lion and the Lamb, the main character, Hector, is fourteen, a significant age in a boy’s life. His father has a big gun, and I guess there’s no need to explain that symbol. Hector doesn’t have a big gun; he has not reached puberty – we know that from his father’s taunts: ‘“Your arms, look at your arms!” Juan reached out and enclosed Hector’s thin bicep in his enormous fist. “I have more muscle in one thumb than you have in your whole body.”’213
Hector constantly challenges his father, saying that he has no respect for him and that he is a fool. So, among other things, the book is about Hector’s transition from boyhood to adulthood. As with all children, speaking symbolically, it has yet to be determined whether he will grow into a man or a ‘woman’.
His father says: ‘You are like a woman yourself, cielito. You are soft and thin, you have a pretty face.’214
Hector defeats his father in at least three ways. Firstly, by taking away Juan’s bullets, a kind of castration of the father. Secondly, by asking a girl out on a date, against his father’s orders, thus starting to establish his own potency. And thirdly, by building a boat. The father had been a professional fisherman with a boat called The Lion, but he doesn’t want Hector to become a fisherman. Hector builds a boat, however, and in a nice touch calls it The Lamb. There’s more than a little irony in this, as Hector has already demonstrated convincingly that he is not going to be his father’s sacrificial lamb.
Towards the end of the book, the potency battle between the two males reaches a climax. Hector reaches puberty, symbolically indicated by this scene, when he is trapped in a lift but takes advantage of the situation to ask his girlfriend for a date: ‘In the midst of the confusion, Anna took Hector’s hand between his knee and hers, and squeezed it. At that same moment the lift gave a sharp jolt underneath them, as though it had just woken up from a long sleep.’215
No sooner does Hector announce that he is going out with Anna than his father raises the ante by announcing that he, the father, is going to get married. He then takes off his belt and beats his son for stealing the bullets, but also of course because Hector has shown that he is now sexually potent and therefore a threat to the father’s ascendancy. It proves to be the last throw of the dice for Juan, and for all that he and Hector actually have a good relationship in some ways, it is nevertheless a war between them – as to some extent (and often in concealed ways) it must be in every family, regardless of whether the relationship between father and son is good, bad or indifferent.
Undaunted by the beating, Hector takes The Lamb down to the sea and launches it, but Juan finds out, and in a state of primeval rage grabs the shotgun and comes after him:
Juan . . . looked between the pier and the headland and saw a strange shape on the water, dancing in the face of the sun. His eyes burned with the brightness of it, and his head swam. It was a silhouetted figure, with the palms outstretched to form the shape of a cross, calling to him across the water in words he could not understand.
He bellowed in rage and raised his shotgun. He aimed it at the dark shape and crooked his finger around the trigger ready to shoot. Then the words came to him more distinctly, and in a voice which sounded familiar, as high and clear as the sky: ‘It floats! It floats! Anna! Evgeny! Look, it floats!’
Juan . . . slowly lowered his gun and sank to his knees. He stared straight into the sun, no longer dazzled by its brightness, and when he finally spoke, he spoke softly. ‘My son!’ he said. ‘My son is a fisherman.’216
Thus the archetypal story of Abraham and Isaac, so powerful in Judaism, Islam and Christianity, of the father who will kill his son rather than lose the potency battle, is played out again – on the sands of a Sydney beach. Hector the young fisherman is also shown to be another incarnation of Jesus, whose own story re-enacts (and extends) that of Abraham and Isaac. Juan’s belated acceptance of his son’s previously unsuspected strength and skill reassures readers that this relationship between father and son has a future, and the future will be healthy. There will be a resurrection more satisfactory perhaps than the one experienced by Jesus.
In the Agamemnon and Clytemnestra legend, retold by Colm Tóibín in 2017 in the novel House of Names, the assassination of Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra occurs when their son, Orestes, is too young to countenance the sudden extinction of his omnipotent warrior-father from his life. Had Agamemnon lived longer, Orestes would have come to realise his father’s shortcomings. But instead the child is left with his belief in an unrealistic idealised father.
Haunted by this immature perspective, Orestes is compelled to murder his mother, in an act of filial revenge. But he cannot do this as a child; he needs his mother too much. The killing must wait until Orestes is well into his adolescent years.
The outcome for Adrian, the mill boss’s son in Ivan Southall’s 1962 Australian bushfire novel for children, Hills End, is not good. As the children struggle through crisis after crisis, Adrian emerges as an impressive young leader. But when the adults, including Adrian’s father, finally arrive, and find the children have survived the catastrophe, Adrian does not fare well:
‘Stop that,’ he bellowed.
Adrian lowered his whistle, startled, not understanding. ‘But, dad,’ he said, ‘I was only calling the kids. It’s our signal.’
‘Signal! Signal! Don’t you dare do it again.’
Adrian shrank, frightened by this anger, wondering how he could have forgotten this wrath that so often was in his father. The grown-ups were back all right . . . Slowly Adrian pushed his whistle back into his pocket, and somehow it was symbolic. It seemed to signify the putting away of the little bit of dignity he had had, the little bit of bravery, and the adventure of fighting back.217
It is noticeable that these are all episodes of sons pitted against their fathers. So many powerful literary archetypes in our culture concern themselves with this struggle. Girls’ relationships with their parents are often more complex, subtler and full of day-to-day negotiations. Josie in Looking for Alibrandi is in conflict with her tough grandmother and forceful mother for a long time, but the bond between the three strong women is so powerful that we know none of them will ever walk away from the other two.
Rivalry between a parent and an adolescent is common. At a school writing workshop for older teenagers that I ran a few years ago, a group of girls started talking about their sense that their mothers were in competition with them. They told stories of mothers borrowing their clothes, adopting the same hairstyles, playing the same music that the girls passionately loved. One girl said that if she drove the family car, her mother would deliberately leave the P plates on the vehicle, hoping people would think the mother was seventeen years old.
One girl, Arabella, said in frustration: ‘Everything I do, my mother copies. I started learning piano; my mother started learning piano. I started going to yoga; now my mother goes to yoga. I started playing netball; my mother joined a netball team.’
Later, I was telling one of the teachers about this conversation. ‘Interesting,’ she said. ‘Arabella’s been in a psychiatric day care centre for the last eight weeks. We don’t see her often, but occasionally, like today, she gets leave to come to school. But you know the funny thing? She’s in the school debating team, and we have regular interschool debates. She hasn’t missed a single one.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Because her mother can’t join the debating club.’
helping teenagers on the long walk to adulthood
So, how do we help these young people transition to adulthood?
Apart from a rite-of-passage ritual or ceremony organised by a school or other organisation, a group of adults who are connected to each other in some way can, as I mentioned, design a program that might be formal, semi-formal or quite informal.
Both of these options are valid. There are a couple of problems with both of them, but before mentioning the problems, I want to stress that something is better than nothing. As long as the course ‘has a heart’, to borrow a phrase from Carlos Castaneda218, as long as it is not vicious or driven by extreme gender politics or riddled with distorted values or propagandising for a particular cause, it is likely to have value.
Insidiously, however, these courses can sometimes be subverted by adults or kids who want to play practical jokes on one or more of the participants. This is very dangerous. It is impossible in any area of life to have a practical joke in which no one is humiliated, embarrassed, belittled or hurt. Mature adults must be in charge and must set the tone, which, for a good deal of the time, must be serious.
A major problem with these homemade courses is that they are, to some degree, artificial. They cannot be anything else. They have not arisen organically over thousands of years from the beliefs, values and practices of the society. They have to be devised by people who, metaphorically speaking (or perhaps literally), sit around a table with the intention of devising a rite of passage. But if that is our best option, then that is our best option. We must simply do what we can, using our collective wisdom, imagination and knowledge.
Another reservation I have with courses designed in recent times is one to which I alluded briefly earlier. In Western societies, we are determined that all young people should ‘pass’. No one can be allowed to fail. Our concern for the psychological health of those who fail is so great that we construct rite-of-passage rituals where everybody succeeds. Such a luxury is only possible to those who live in strongly built houses, in secure areas, where Goths, Vandals, Vikings, barbarians, tigers and wolves pose no threat. And of course, that is how we live today. For many of us, the greatest danger we collectively face is the zombie apocalypse.
What happened, in tribal societies, to those who failed the tests that would have allowed them to be warriors, healers or leaders? I assume they became fringe dwellers, living on the margins, hanging around the edges of the tribe, scavenging for food, doing menial jobs. In one way, now that we no longer need as many young men as possible to become warriors, now that we select potential healers by means of Year 12 exams and similar, we can afford the luxury of having tests everybody passes. But the danger is that tests which no one fails are rendered meaningless.
The third problem is that graduating from rite-of-passage ceremonies in our society usually does not result in any meaningful change in the lives of the young people. One of the greatest weaknesses of Timbertop was that when students returned to the main campus at Geelong for their final three years of schooling, they were treated as infants again. Having completed arduous hikes in the Australian Alps, through blizzards, using nothing but their compasses and maps to navigate, they were suddenly not trusted to cross the street without an adult supervisor. Middle-aged men and women were paid to push lawnmowers, change light globes, prepare and cook meals, while fit and healthy young men and women – who a few months earlier had been cooking elaborate meals over campfires high in the mountains, or chopping wood for their hot water, or digging drainage trenches – lay around watching them from their banana lounges, or, more likely nowadays, ignoring them while they played games on their electronic devices.
Similarly, in modern times many Jewish thirteen-year-olds who go through their bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah find that nothing actually changes: once the celebrations are over they continue to be treated like little kids by their parents, schools and the wider community. It can stay like this for many years.
Our reluctance to allow adolescents to grow up, our determination to keep them as children laced tightly into metaphorical Shirley Temple corsets, our resistance to treating them as adults, is so powerful that we deny them meaningful roles in our society until they are in their early twenties, at least. And then we complain about their immaturity and irresponsible behaviour.
teenagers need a meaningful role and purpose
We lack imagination in tackling the issue of roles for adolescents. The cruel truth is that adolescents have a great deal in common with residents of most nursing homes. Neither group has a useful role in our society. The residents of nursing homes are fed, medicated, looked after, and (sometimes) entertained. Their lives are essentially passive; they are deemed to have nothing they can contribute. They are in death’s waiting room.
Teenagers are required to stay at school, whether they have outgrown it or not, sometimes for years after school has ceased to have value for them. Successive governments continue to extend the compulsory school leaving age for cynical economic reasons: it makes employment/unemployment figures look better. Babysitting young people in schools is the cheapest option available for keeping them off the streets, because on the streets they look untidy and get in the way of grown-ups. If it became economically advantageous to reduce the school leaving age to fourteen again, it would be done tomorrow.
Young people who are hankering for something to do, wanting to take on adult roles and responsibilities, are so often told that there is nothing for them until they are about 25 years old and have thirteen years of primary and secondary education, not to mention four or five years of tertiary studies, under their belt. What a waste of resources! More importantly, what a dangerous thing to do to the young. No wonder so many of them feel frustrated and enraged.
Some years ago I suggested in a newspaper column that teenagers could be mobilised to deal with the Indian mynah birds that have colonised Australian cities.219 Indian mynahs are an imported species, like foxes, rabbits and blackberries, and, like foxes, rabbits and blackberries, they spread everywhere and drive out the original inhabitants. The effect on Australian native birds around the city and suburbs has been disastrous.
My solution was designed to kill two birds with one bullet. A popular weapon for kids, not many years ago, was the air rifle. Fired from a reasonable distance they don’t do much damage to humans. It can be a different story if they’re fired from a close distance: there are a few one-eyed adults around who have bitter memories of air rifles. But squads of teenagers, armed with air rifles, properly trained, and under the direction of a responsible adult, would make a big difference to the mynah population. They could eradicate the pests within twelve months. And let’s not get sentimental about the little critters. For good reason they are called the rats of the bird world.
What benefits for the young people involved! They would have something useful to do, something that was of genuine benefit to society, something that little kids could not do: a role that genuinely reflected their ability to accept adult responsibilities. They would feel useful and important, because they would be useful and important.
Would this turn teenagers into serial killers? When I was growing up around Kyneton, Victoria, and later Devonport, Tasmania, a lot of kids went out shooting hares and rabbits. I don’t think they became murderers as a result.
It’s an opportunity to deal with a conservation problem and a social problem, by mobilising people power, with a good old-fashioned solution.
Alas, when I suggested it in the newspaper, nobody took me seriously. I wasn’t altogether surprised.