The Road from Coorain (19 page)

A new view of history began to shape my perceptions as soon as we left Colombo. The city itself, with its fragrant gardens, white-galleried buildings, and thriving commerce, registered only vaguely through my jumble of emotions about the poverty and the thinly veiled resentment of British-looking people. Our first visits to Buddhist temples and sacred sites gave me what then seemed the astonishing information that this great religious figure had existed nearly six hundred years before Christ. Each great temple contained relics of the Buddha, objects of veneration, just like Christian relics. Why had no one taught me more about this earlier faith so similar to Christianity in so many respects? Moreover, why had I been taught to date everything from the birth of Christ and the emergence of the Christian West, when great capitals like Anuradhapura, among whose white, gold, and grey ruins we climbed, had been thriving three hundred years before Christ’s birth? Seeing these remains was an
unexpected culture shock which meant that Europe could never again seem “old.” After that, ancient remains always conjured up for me the greying rocks of Anuradhapura, the outline of its temples and palaces in perfect scale, clearly visible despite the encroaching jungle. Hitherto I had dated my understanding of political life with the development of the British parliament. As our guide talked about the thriving empire ruled from Anuradhapura and the political conflicts which had flourished there, the picture captured my imagination and made me realize that there were other political traditions about which I knew nothing. Military history also took on a new aspect after the scorching day when Barry and I climbed the hill fortress of Sigirya, dating from the sixteenth century. At the top, surveying the plains below, one could picture the ruling monarch whose armies had ridden elephants and had controlled the exuberant fertility of the irrigated plains below. One entered the pathway to the fortress through the fierce mouth of a lion carved in the mountainside, as large and commanding a monument as an Egyptian pyramid. Away from the massed population of the city, I could take in the beauty of the island and register such vivid new sights as the outline of the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy. Nearby, a patch of rain forest of breathtaking beauty, containing an undreamed-of profusion of exotic vegetation, had been preserved. The avenue of palm trees in the gardens of Kandy along which processions mounted on elephants had once paraded became a symbol for other kinds of grandeur than the photographs of England I had been taught to revere.

Despite the fact that such powerful and enduring subversive perceptions were being etched on my mind, I was not a happy traveler. I had been raised in a household of such precise regularity, governed by such an obsession with cleanliness, that I shared my mother’s fears about whether our rooms were really clean, and I joined her in rejecting the unfamiliar-tasting food. Along with this low-level anxiety, I was puzzled about how to understand and organize the daily flood of new images. My first
sight of a Hindu wedding procession outside a small village looked like such fun. The bright colors, the flowers, the music, and the energy expressed in the procession as it flowed sinuously along captured my imagination. My mother remarked that the bride was a child, and that village people often sent themselves into bankruptcy for such festivities. I knew this was true, but when I contrasted the scene with my mental picture of the kind of wedding I and my classmates would likely have, I wondered for the first time whether ours might be a little stuffy. It was disturbing to be prompted to such thoughts, and I was not certain I enjoyed it. So much of the culture we were viewing in our journey round the island was the product of religion. This was a Buddhist and Hindu country. I wondered idly what Australia was. Did people in Ceylon believe in karma and a cyclical view of history to explain away the terrible inequities between classes and castes? This set me wondering what beliefs we had at home to justify our inequities. Such ideas were unheard of. I began to look forward to going home and settling into a familiar routine.

As our return voyage drew to its close, it was clear that my mother was also relishing the thought of home. She had set about the journey impulsively and had given us an expensive and luxurious vacation, hoping to ease the sadness of Christmas without Bob. She had managed that wonderfully for Barry and me, and for Eva’s daughter, but she had not reckoned with what her actions would mean. She had introduced us to the very world of fashionable luxury she had previously ruled out of bounds. Her action was prompted in part by guilt at the thrift which had prevented her from gratifying some of Bob’s much simpler wishes. While she recognized this, she felt, childishly, that we should be more visibly grateful for the largess than we were. Our journey together made clear that she was no longer the center of our world, and that we were poised to search for new adventures on our own. She kept her peace while we were traveling, but on our return her wounded feelings began to show.

On the second weekend after our return, Barry and I, sitting
idly with the Sunday morning paper, found ourselves in the midst of a hurricane of disapproval. Why were we lounging around? Couldn’t we see that the grass needed cutting, the shrubbery cried out for pruning, and the garden was choked with weeds? Had we been so spoiled by our ten weeks of sea cruising that we were incapable of taking care of the place? Her words and her bearing conveyed the impression of someone vexed by the recognition that she must face the future dragged down by a pair of useless drones. Without exchanging a glance, we leapt to attention and fell to with a vengeance. As I set about attacking the weeds, an inner voice I had not heard before remarked, “So, we are going to have to pay for it.” I quickly silenced it as unworthy. Yet it was there, waiting to be attended to. It was a long time before I heeded it seriously, but from this point on, at one level of my consciousness, I knew that my mother’s gifts came at a considerable price. They might seem to be freely given, but there would come a time afterwards when they had to be earned.

The general cloud of disapproval vanished on my return to school, with the discovery that I had been chosen as captain of my class. My mother was genuinely delighted when one of her children excelled, and this recognition from the respected Miss Everett counted heavily with her. Barry, however, was not so fortunate. My mother told him sternly that his current life lacked focus, that he was drifting from one kind of work to another, and that this could not be tolerated. She asked him to go back to Coorain to work under the supervision of the manager, Geoff Coghlan, and to prepare himself for the day when he would assume responsibility for running the property.

That my brother’s life lacked focus was certainly true. But the remedy betrayed little understanding on my mother’s part of herself, her son, or the manager she had chosen to run Coorain for her. Her notion that she would happily release the reins of management of the family enterprise to her son in the not-too-distant future was pure fantasy. She was incapable of such an action. She took her psychic energy from being in charge and
could not delegate the smallest decisions to her long-suffering manager, let alone her young son. Barry, at twenty years of age, was dispatched to work as a subordinate on the property my mother herself had found an unbearably lonely place without the companionship of her husband. Just at the time he longed for friends, for laughter, and for lively society, Barry found himself alone, without young companions, without the stimulus of new ideas, without any element in the daily schedule but the hard labor of caring for sheep. Moreover, he was caring for them under the aegis of a crusty and unsympathetic taskmaster. Geoff Coghlan was a good and upright man by his lights, but he was not a saint. Only a man given to self-sacrifice would have trained his replacement and encouraged my brother to feel his powers of command, when Coorain represented to Geoff and his wife the home and the independent life circumstances which the accident of Geoff’s age and generation had withheld from them. Instead, Barry, whose self-confidence had withstood a school which did not encourage slow learners, now found himself working daily enduring the burden of regular criticism and encouragement constantly withheld. His time at Coorain was a test of endurance which he survived, but his letters home, while outwardly optimistic, revealed the price he was paying. It was from this time that I dated his taciturnity, his difficulty showing his feelings, and the clouding of a naturally cheerful nature by a stoic view of life.

My mother, intent on establishing her son in the country, tried to persuade several of his friends to join him as workers on Coorain. She filled them with stories about the wonders of the independent life in the bush, the pleasures of seeing direct products from one’s work, anything but the truth about the hardships and the inevitably losing battle with the seasons. My brother would write back to her urging restraint and reminding her of the realities of life in the bush: the loneliness, the harsh weather, the grinding routine of heavy labor, “the general deadness of the place,” and the difficulty a landless young man would encounter
in building a real competence through work for others. He was the twenty-year-old realist, and she the impractical romantic.

In fact, she thought little about the consequences for others of the plans which would serve her objective of the moment. By the time Barry was ready to abandon the bush, recognizing the impossibility of the role in which he had been cast, one of his friends was en route to Coorain, to experience the same disillusionment, and the same postponement of realistic career plans. As it became clear that Barry’s experiment was not working, my mother tried the expedient of buying him a small plane and inviting him to Sydney to undertake the necessary training to fly it. Once he had his pilot’s license, he could escape the loneliness on weekends, and at least in theory, enjoy the best of both worlds.

It was one of my mother’s more endearing characteristics that she thought big about removing the obstacles to her objective of the moment. Thinking in large terms about the problem of reviving Coorain after the drought had stood us all in good stead. However, this tendency to the broadest possible attack on the problem could lead her to offer very large incentives to her children to fall in with her wishes, without much reflection on whether the wishes were really in her child’s best interests. Had she succeeded in keeping Barry at Coorain, the future would have been grim for him, working for a woman who could not bear her children to be independent. Fortunately, after eight months of determined effort Barry’s good sense triumphed and he announced that he was leaving Coorain for good.

At Abbotsleigh, I had fallen happily into the routine of the lower sixth form. All our efforts were now bent on preparing for the School Leaving Certificate examination which would come at the end of the following year. The school prided itself on the number of women who went on to the University, and on the number of honors earned by its sixth form. There was a general air of seriousness about our classes, increased by the departure of many of our more lighthearted friends for finishing school or
country life after the Intermediate Year. We now had the best teachers, the most convenient schedule, and the excitement of a not-too-distant goal.

Better still, the course of study prescribed by the New South Wales Department of Education was intensely interesting. In our Intermediate Year, we had studied Australian history using a textbook of such comic inadequacy that we were reduced to gales of laughter in class by its flat-footed statements. All we were taught of Australian history was the story of the exploration of Australia, mostly a sad tale of headstrong efforts to cross trackless deserts, missed rendezvous, death from thirst or starvation. The matter-of-fact chronicle of disaster touched our sense of the absurd as we were asked to recite the dates of this or that ill-starred expedition, or to explain why Leichhardt or Burke and Wills had perished and where they had met their tragic end. We giggled also because of the sheer nonsense of treating Australian history as the history of exploration while neglecting the history of its settlement, the growth of its cities, the evolution of its constitutional arrangements, its place in the British Commonwealth.

Now in the lower sixth, we began to study modern European history, and the facts and figures we committed to memory helped to raise tantalizing questions about the world of our own day. Would there have been a Hitler without the Treaty of Versailles? Were the same mistakes being repeated in the peace treaty with Japan, being negotiated as we studied? We argued passionately about this, in class and outside. Our history teacher, Miss Hughesdon, took some of us to the Australian Institute of International Affairs to listen to John Foster Dulles discuss the terms of the treaty with Japan, so that we would gain the sense that we too were part of great historic moments. When I volunteered my views on the need for generosity with Japan at home, they evoked such an angry response that I began keeping what I was learning to myself.

Our French teacher, Mrs. Fisher, long jaded by years of teaching
recalcitrant pupils, took the offensive on entering the room. “You, today you’re Public Enemy Number One,” was her frequent first utterance at the opening of a class. The enemy could be someone lounging listlessly, someone laughing, or someone she correctly suspected of not having mastered her irregular verbs. This approach could convert a French class into a war of nerves, rather than an attack on the opaqueness of language. After three years of desultory attention, I suddenly began to be able to read French and to engage in the pleasures of accurate translation. Language was no longer simply the words to which we gave utterance but a set of structures of miraculous complexity.

Learning another language made me hear English more acutely. For six years I had marched every morning into the school assembly and listened idly to the instructions and sermons of the day. Because we sat on the floor of the gymnasium for these meetings and the teaching staff sat on a raised platform, our eyes were usually directed at the level of the teachers’ feet. This meant that I developed careful anthropological classifications of people in terms of their footwear and the shape of their ankles but I retained not a word of the good advice delivered from the platform. Now, as though I had been deaf before, I began to hear Miss Everett’s beautiful voice lingering lovingly over the cadences of the King James Bible. I had loved poetry before because of its imagery, but now I heard language as a form of music, and I waited for the succession of readings marking the liturgical year as though I were a traveler looking for familiar places along a well-traveled path. This sense transformed my reading of Shakespeare, which I now began to read aloud to myself, instead of memorizing the blank verse with silent joy. I went with friends to the first postwar Australian performance of the Stratford Shakespeare company and became addicted to Elizabethan theater as though it were a drug. I could never hear and see enough. I could scarcely read a page without self-discovery, for it seemed as though my experience of life and the one expressed in the plays were identical. When Hamlet spoke of the smallness of man
washed up “upon this bank and shoal of time … creeping between earth and sky,” it evoked my sense of smallness before the vastness of the bush. The inexorable swiftness with which the fates closed in upon Macbeth reminded me of my childhood. Henry V’s call to English patriotism seemed utterly contemporary. The plays were about great men and great events, larger than life-size human passions, causes to which people committed every ounce of their energy. Beside them, Sydney and its sunny suburbs, or the Australian pastime of sunbathing at the beach, seemed unexciting.