Where do you live?
Such a pedestrian enquiry, one that any moderately verbal toddler is schooled to answer briskly with a street address, a house number, the name of a city or a town. Some of us will live in only a few places in our lives; others, like me, are the kinds of people who mess up your address book, constantly sending out change of address notices. When I make a tally of the places which I could, at various times, have given in reply to the question where do you live, I arrive at nineteen. This, rather alarmingly, averages out to one move about every three years. There was a Cairo address that I learned to write in Arabic. A street number that was hard to find amid the graffiti tags in lower Manhattan. A house without a number in rural Virginia, a graceful old apartment in Cleveland, a horsehair-mortared terrace in Hampstead … numerous dwellings on four continents. But very few have truly felt like home.
The idea of ‘home’ is bigger than the floor plan of any given four walls or the mass of any roof line. It cannot be encompassed by rote recitations of suburb or postcode, nation or state. In the previous chapter, I mentioned the various definitions that dictionaries give for that small, heavily laden word, home. Here I would like to explore some of them: home as ‘a place of origin, a native habitat’, home as ‘an environment offering security and happiness’ and home as ‘the place where something is discovered, founded, developed or promoted. A source.’
My place of origin was the vast sprawl of red tile and liver brick that comprised the Australian suburbs of the 1960s. The sprawl despised by Patrick White, satirised by Barry Humphries. The first address I was schooled to give, as a toddler, was for a Victorian terrace house in Bland Street, Ashfield, an address Patrick White probably wishes he’d thought of. Bland was how they characterised us, White and the other intellectuals who looked backward from their self-exile in London or Oxford and found ordinary Australians slightly embarrassing: dull, uncreative, petty and repressed. These men — and in that era, the pundits were mostly men, although Jill Ker Conway and Leonie Kramer also had a go at us — understood some things about Australian suburban life, but vastly misconstrued others. They accurately described the unglamorous surfaces — the chipped enamel, worn linoleum and bindi-infested buffalo grass; the weathered grey fences and weathered faces of adults who moved tight-lipped through dull chores or commuted dutifully to mundane jobs.
They saw a mean and unaccommodated material existence, but did not grasp the emotional and imaginative richness of the lives played out against those frugal backdrops. They deplored the conformity, but they did not see that its corollary was a sustaining solidarity. They did not grasp that the bedrock value of that time and place was an enduring and defining Australian sense of shared community. Living in the United States, as I have done, off and on, for almost two decades, I have experienced a society in which the defining ethos is precisely the opposite: the individual’s rights are always and everywhere ascendant, success is assumed to be self-earned and bootstraps are an indispensable item of attire. This constant background noise has worked, for me, like a chisel on stone. Over time, it has thrown the very different lessons of my Australian home into bright relief.
‘The cultural dead heart’ is how Dame Leonie Kramer described the suburbs of my childhood. I’m pretty sure she had, in her mind’s eye, some place very like my grandmother’s home: a little bungalow in Hammondville, south-west Sydney, where freshly poured concrete kerbs butted right up against bushland at what was then an outer rim of the city’s advance. When our clan gathered there, what I remember is music and singing, and adults whose greatest pleasure was to get a little bit tipsy and recite their favourite verse. My grandmother favoured a romantic, melodramatic set piece titled ‘Laska’. My Uncle Ed could be relied upon for standards such as ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, or ‘The Man From Snowy River’. My mother could passionately deliver Portia’s mercy speech. I remember, also, my grandmother’s 78s, the arias by Caruso and Callas, huge voices expanding the walls of her little house. I still have a few of the works of Eastern philosophy that spoke so ardently to my grandfather, as well as my grandmother’s well-thumbed and heavily annotated poetry anthologies. ‘Learn a poem,’ my grandmother urged. ‘No one on Earth can ever take it away from you.’ Decades later, when I was briefly jailed in Nigeria, my books confiscated, it was the poems I’d memorised that filled the hours and sustained me. Nan was right: the secret police could not confiscate those.
I’m not sure where her passion for poetry sprang from. She grew up in rural New South Wales, the daughter of a semiliterate stockman and a self-taught midwife. She had little formal schooling. My grandfather was an immigrant, coming from Holland as a nineteen-year-old and working as a fruit picker until he mastered English. My point is that my grandparents were not outliers, merely average suburban Australians of their era. But despite Dame Leonie’s grim diagnosis, their cultural heartbeat was strong.
And I don’t remember Patrick White ever making reference to the Sarsaparilla Public Library. Yet the local library stood at the centre of our life. The Saturday pilgrimage there was as much an embedded rite as the Sunday trip to mass. My parents’ bedside tables were always piled high with works of literary fiction. ‘Read this,’ my mother would say, shoving another classic into my hands. Then we’d discuss it. Sometimes, her acid, iconoclastic critiques shocked me, even as they taught me to interrogate everything I read. ‘Nobody on Earth is such a goody-goody as that Marmee,’ she told me dismissively of Louisa May Alcott’s saintly and idealised mother in Little Women. Years later, when I researched the Alcott family for my novel March, Mum’s words came back to me, and shaped the direction that my novel took.
My mother had little time for a woman like Mrs March, perennially serene, utterly devout, who never raised her voice. A woman who had learned, Alcott tells us, to fold her lips tightly together and leave the room rather than show her anger. My mother was not inclined to leave the room. If someone angered her, she let them know. Neglect of children, cruelty to animals, wanton tree felling, industrial pollution and any kind of racial or religious discrimination called forth her wrath. Raised at a time when bigotry between Catholics and Protestants was the norm, my mother became intensely intolerant of intolerance. And as our neighbourhood filled up with ‘New Australians’ my mother became their staunchest advocate. The sound of her voice, polite yet relentless, was the background noise of my childhood as she worked her will on various bigots, bureaucrats and bosses.
Much later, when my mother came to visit my home in the United States, she brought her astringent eye and her flawless moral compass with her. On one visit, she became ill with a bacterial chest infection, an ailment that often plagued her and for which she knew the treatment. But there is nothing simple in the convoluted and crazily expensive private enterprise mess that is the US health care system. The doctor she saw would not prescribe her usual antibiotic without sending her off for a costly chest X-ray. When we returned to his office (two visits, two bills) he confirmed Mum’s self-diagnosis and gave her the prescription she’d asked for, several hundred dollars and several wasted hours earlier. We filled it at the local pharmacy. When Mum saw the astronomical price of the drug, she gave a mordant laugh. ‘Give me that receipt,’ she said. ‘I’m going to keep it, otherwise no one in Australia will believe me.’
‘Well, Mum,’ I said. ‘Someone has to pay the costs of these medicines, even in Australia.’
‘Yes,’ she shot back. ‘In Australia we all do. And those who’ve got more, pay more.’
I realised then that I’d been away from my homeplace too long. I’d started to forget the lessons of Bland Street.
They were not just my mother’s lessons, but lessons instilled by my father as well. Born and raised in California, he’d become an Australian by accident. He’d come here on tour as lead singer with a dance band of the great music hall era, and had found himself stranded and penniless in Adelaide when the tour promoter absconded with the band’s pay. To earn his fare back to the United States, he joined an Australian band, and swiftly fell in love with the country and its egalitarian ethos. He was playing a gig the night news came that Paris had fallen to the Nazis. After the show, he and the band members went out drinking. ‘Gunna bloody well enlist,’ one of the musicians slurringly declared, and, in the morning, they all did, my father included. He was, possibly, the only American citizen serving in the AIF. When his unit returned to Sydney after tours in New Guinea and the Middle East, he just stayed on. No bureaucrat had decided the circumstances under which he stayed. He was, I suppose, an illegal immigrant. He didn’t get around to regularising his citizenship until prompted to do so by a government official who finally noted that a septuagenarian American named Lawrie Brooks had been voting in every election since the 1940s and was collecting an old age pension. But it didn’t take an oath or a sheaf of paperwork to make my father an Aussie. Nobody could have been a more authentic and enthusiastic Australian than my American dad. I know that his Australian heart would break, if he were alive today to see how far we have strayed from our bedrock values in the treatment of refugees.
It was just the kind of issue that engaged him. If my mother’s activism was directed at the plight of the people around her, my father’s was often more global in scope. While she made phone calls, he wrote letters. Impassioned, eloquent, angry. Letters to the editor. To our prime minister. To other people’s prime ministers. To Churchill, Einstein, Rupert Murdoch. More often than not, he got a considered reply. More often than not, the newspapers published them. Sometimes, I would watch my mother reading Dad’s latest published rant, her expression a combination of pride and dismay.
‘You really shouldn’t call the prime minister a liar, darling.’
‘Why not? He bloody well is one.’
I can only imagine the letters my father would write today. I think he would be appalled that a Labor prime minister embraces so fully the shallow rhetoric of ‘We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come’. An avid student of Australian history, he would be swift to point out that the Aboriginal inhabitants of this place were denied that luxury when the boatloads of England’s despised poor — who most certainly had not decided the circumstances under which they came — were dumped out on the fatal shore. I think he would say that, since we cannot, on this thin-soiled, fragile continent, take everyone, we might well look at who we were in deciding who we will welcome. The most authentically Australian immigration policy would be the one that takes not the rich entrepreneurs or the talented and skilled, but the poorest and most desperate; the outcasts, in short, who most resemble the underestimated underclass whose grit and resourcefulness built this country and made it what it is.
The message instilled by my parents was that you didn’t need to be a plutocrat to have an opinion. I also learned very early that you do not rise by planting your foot in someone else’s face. Our way, the Aussie way, was to extend a hand so that no one was left behind. This is not nostalgic platitude but the plain unvarnished truth of how my parents and our neighbours lived. For my father, this truth expressed itself in a lifelong commitment to trade unionism. Although money was always tight, if a fellow worker was in a bind or unjustly treated, you went on strike, and you went without, together. Other neighbours worked through the church, quietly taking care of needs that were never spoken of, merely dealt with.
It is true that these same neighbours did not, generally speaking, embrace my father’s brand of leftist politics, or my mother’s enthusiastic multiculturalism. Australia had been in the grip of its post-war conservative mood for decades, and that grip was slow to loosen. But you could feel the beginnings of something, even from where I stood, a convent schoolgirl on the cusp of adolescence. Opposition to the war in Vietnam was roiling at Sydney University, the Valhalla towards which all my thoughts were bent. Instead of rock stars, my idols became the draft resisters and their fabulously articulate student advocates. In 1966, when the American president, Lyndon Johnson, visited Sydney, 10,000 demonstrators — a remarkable number — turned out to protest. I begged my parents to let me go to the city and join the rally. I was eleven, and even though they were no fans of Johnson and his war, their answer was a very firm ‘No’. So I watched the protesters on the news that night, chanting along with their cries of ‘Hey hey LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?’
When the camera focused on a very young woman being dragged by police off the road in front of Johnson’s motorcade, I wanted to be her. (Later on, I still wouldn’t have minded being Sandra Levy, who went on to be the head of television at the ABC and to run the Australian Film, Television and Radio School.) More recently, when I read barrister Charles Waterstreet’s memoir, Repeating the Leaving, I envied him, too. His private school had delivered a busload of its students to the official Sydney welcome for the president, titled, rather deliciously, ‘Make Sydney Gay for LBJ’. But when the bus arrived, Waterstreet took off his school blazer and did a runner, joining the protesters.
All this political and social ferment took place in a city poised for immense physical change. Construction cranes perched on the horizon like a flock of strange prehistoric birds hovering over their prey. The historic heart of The Rocks was to be torn down, razed for office blocks. Much of Centennial Park was to be concreted over and sacrificed for a stadium. The iconic waterfront and neighbourhoods of Woolloomooloo and the character of Kings Cross were about to be high-rised into history. But the Vietnam protests were a kind of yeast, and the bubbles worked in all kinds of unexpected places. A group of North Shore women — women not unlike my mother, but a bit better off — decided that they didn’t want to lose their neighbourhood’s precious remnant of urban bushland to another development. In 1971, they asked for, and received, help from an unlikely quarter, the Builders Labourers Federation. And so in the affluent Sydney suburb of Hunters Hill the green bans were born, and with them, a few hundred unskilled labourers, led by a man who, like my mother, had left school aged thirteen, saved the city. At the height of the green ban movement, Jack Mundey and the Builders Labourers Federation had stopped work on projects valued at 3000 million dollars. I cannot begin to calculate what that sum would be in current dollars, but I doubt that anyone today would rather we’d taken that money in exchange for the heritage buildings and human-scale neighbourhoods, majestic old trees and preserves of urban bushland that the green bans saved.
Then, in 1972, something really odd happened: after twenty-three years of conservative government, someone my parents voted for actually got elected. ‘It’s Time,’ Gough Whitlam had said, and it seemed that it was time, at last. It was time to abolish the draft, revise a yes-man foreign policy, acknowledge Aboriginal land rights, give women equal pay, and end educational elitism by making uni tuition free. The Australian diaspora began coming home, and suddenly we stopped cringing about our culture. We had our own films, our own books, our own voices on the radio and television instead of the plummy pseudo-Pom accents that had once been de rigueur. Even our gardens got a makeover: out with the wilting hybrid tea roses, in with grevillea and callistemon.
I was young, in those days, and change seemed an easy thing. It has been a grief of my middle years to recognise what that early, Australian-instilled optimism obscured from me: times of radical change are rare, and the forces of reaction are strong.
Nowadays, when the brief spring of the Whitlam era is discussed, the narrative is a predictable one. The era is generally portrayed as bringing needed social reform at the cost of near economic ruin. I’m sure it felt like that to the big end of town. But it didn’t feel like that on Bland Street. Many of the people around me, especially the infirm and the elderly, felt more prosperous because their pensions had become more generous. When I finally made that longed-for walk across the quadrangle as a first-year student at Sydney University, I felt rich. I had a generous living allowance. Free of the burden of future debt, I could contemplate the intellectual buffet in front of me without making calculations about the impact of my choice of study on my post-graduate earning power. It was a time for big dreams, and those around me had them. My fellow students from that era have gone on to enrich our cultural, intellectual and scientific life in myriad ways.
I don’t understand why, as we have become more prosperous, we have become less generous. When the Hawke government decided it wanted more Australians to participate in higher education, that was a worthy goal, for even now, we lag comparable countries like Canada by a wide margin in this metric. Forty-two per cent of Canadians undertake tertiary studies, while only twenty-nine per cent of Australians do. But Hawke, unlike Whitlam, saw higher education as a private good, and not a public one. Since graduates stand to benefit from their education, he believed they should pay for it. Paying for increased participation through the tax system was, to the Hawke government, regressive, and succeeding governments have concurred with this. But to me that reasoning reflects an American individualist vision of how society works, and not an authentically Australian one. If a graduate earns more because of her degree, then she will pay more income tax and the society will be materially enriched. But her learning also enriches the entire society in non-material ways. An educated population is the medium in which creativity and innovation flourish, in which inspiration and prosperity are born.
It was my great good fortune to have come of age in an Australia that extended to its children the freedom to dream those large, unfettered dreams. Yet my generation seems to be okay with tying down our own children, binding them up in a web of future debt. I am aware of the statistical studies that show the introduction of schemes like HECS and HELP have had no discernible effect on the tertiary enrolment of high school leavers from less economically advantaged backgrounds, and that’s a great relief. But it would take a very sophisticated statistical analysis to discern the effect of these debts on people’s dreams, ambitions and willingness to take risks on studies that aren’t immediately or reliably remunerative, to become artists or activists, actors or environmentalists — the creators and caregivers that inspire and uplift a nation. The kind of people that Australia, that the planet, so badly needs right now.
I do know that my generation — or some large part of it — owes something to the generation that now is coming of age. I had been in the workforce for just about two years when I bought my first house, in the inner-Sydney suburb of Erskineville. It was almost as small as it’s possible for a house to be: less than three metres wide in front with a dunny out the back. But it was a home of my own, and it was cheap. For the deposit, I used my seven weeks annual leave pay from the Sydney Morning Herald. We got paid in cash in those days, and I remember the payroll clerk handing me that brick of banknotes. I clutched it, gratefully yet gingerly, and nervously transported it across the road and into the hands of the loan officer at the credit union.
It’s like a fairytale, that story, isn’t it? I don’t know which element is more implausible. Seven weeks annual leave. With a generous leave loading. Or a single woman from an unprosperous family background buying her own home in her early twenties.
I do know that it is implausible, if not impossible, to imagine any young person being able to do it today. The fact that they can’t inspires many feelings in me. Regret. Guilt. A certain shame at my generation’s heedlessness — that those of us who had such opportunities haven’t felt the political will to demand them for the ones who’ve come after us. It’s not supposed to go that way, after all. The older generation is supposed to smooth the way for the younger. And we haven’t done that.
When I was young, expatriate Australians would come home to give lectures like the Boyers, and they almost always irritated me. Often, they talked about the Australia of their own youth in disparaging terms. It was, they declared, racist, misogynist, homophobic, puritanical, conservative, boring. ‘Why are they banging on about this?’ I would think to myself. ‘That place doesn’t exist any more.’ Well, perhaps I am guilty of a similar transgression. The progressive, working-class paradise I’ve described doesn’t exist any more either. But I am banging on about it because I think the ardent, radical mood of those days deserves reconsideration. The days of wine and rage that Frank Moorhouse so memorably wrote about, when he and Helen Garner, David Williamson and others created the literature of untidy terrace houses and the restless activists who inhabited them. The days when an Australian dream could be lived by a kid from Bland Street.
Back in the first century, when the Romans occupied Jerusalem, two rabbis named Hillel and Shammai disagreed about pretty much everything. Shammai was a zealot, Hillel a conciliator. Shammai was strict and exclusive; Hillel was liberal and inclusive. But one thing they did agree upon: no matter how fierce their debate, the argument had to be l’shem shamaymim — for the sake of heaven. You argued, in other words, in good faith and not in enmity, in an honest quest for truth.
Our political discourse these days is not so heavenly. She says ‘to-may-to’, he says ‘to-mah-to’. Worse, actually. Generally, political opponents can’t even agree that the thing they are naming is a round, edible fruit. And to make a point, they’ll squash it under foot with a big, wet splat. Then they’ll say, ‘See? I told you it wasn’t round and edible.’
I want to make my case for a reconsideration of the brief, progressive era I’ve revisited in this chapter. I want to do it in the spirit of l’shem shamaymim, an argument for the sake of heaven. Australia has gained many things in the last thirty years, and I’m not for a moment belittling those gains. But some things have been lost, or misplaced, along the way. Maybe we can come to a new consensus that retrieves some of the best elements of the old one, that fair, visionary, daring and idealistic view that once defined us.
Maybe, once again, it will be time.