The Road from Coorain (24 page)

Marx and Engels opened my eyes to another way of seeing my parents and the enterprise of Coorain. Was it true that we were monopolizers of land, that Shorty and all my other shearer friends were expropriated laborers? Were the family values of thrift and industry simply signs that we were bourgeois? Who were the rightful owners and users of the land I had always thought to belong to us? I began to wonder about the aboriginal ovens I had played with as a child, and the nardoo stones we had so heedlessly trodden upon as we entered and left the house.
What had happened to the tribes which once used to hunt over our land? For that matter, where had those huge, pink, delicately hollowed stones been carried from to end up on Coorain? Why had they been discarded?

I read
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
, treating its subject as though it were about some distant and different race rather than my own sex. Certainly it reminded me of my mother’s outraged complaints at her investments and the product of her labor being subsumed in my father’s estate, but I had unthinkingly taken on the identity of the male writer and intellect present in all that I was reading, and did not take in emotionally that the subordination Engels wrote about applied to me. Obtusely, I did not pay heed to the fact that I was the only woman taking history honors that year, or how unusual I seemed to all my friends because I was aspiring to excel academically.

I was excited to find myself arguing about Marx and Engels with two intellectually able young union organizers, friends of Milton’s, who were history honors students in the year ahead of me. They were tolerant in the kindest way about my “best girl’s boarding school” appearance. They sent me off to collect one of the free sets of the works of Marx and Engels handed out by the Communist Book Shop in downtown Sydney. “Go on, Jill, why pay for them? The Party members won’t eat you,” they urged me as I teetered on the brink of paying good money for these necessary texts. “You’d better park that fancy grey Rover up the street so they don’t see what a bloody plutocrat you are.” I did as I was told, sidling anxiously through the door, and emerging half an hour later with my arms full of books and Party tracts.

When I reported the mission accomplished the next day, I produced shouts of laughter, and was escorted off to a real working-class pub for a beer and congratulations. For the first time, I glimpsed what a choice had been made when my mother took on her extra job to send me to Abbotsleigh. I liked the loud conviviality of my left-wing friends and the union “mates” they introduced me to. They were amused at the sight of someone like
me in my proper North Shore uniform of cashmere sweater, grey flannel skirt, and English walking shoes, genuinely puzzling about Marx, but we were denizens of different worlds. Inwardly, although I had adopted the uniform of well-brought-up young women of my generation, I was curious about the other Australia I had fled so precipitously as an eleven-year-old. The shearers and station hands I’d known as a little girl were important figures from my childhood, as were the values I’d picked up at smoko time listening to the shearing team talk about life.

Whenever I went off to work on Coorain, I was conscious that academic Australia was made up entirely of urban social types, people totally different from the tough, hard-bitten men and women of the western plains. In the winter of 1955, when I made my first visit to my brother, now operating a flourishing air charter service in the western Queensland town of Charleville, where he had settled on his return from Europe, I had the same experience. Charleville was a town poised on the edge of real wilderness, with the uncharted land beyond the Cooper and the Diamantina rivers to the west, and the vast, isolated cattle stations of western Queensland and the Northern Territory in its hinterland. Here I saw another authentic outback world. Nothing could have been in greater contrast to the sedentary life of the urban scholar. Barry was up at four, the plane ready at sunrise, and we were off across trackless barren country until we landed at a lonely station or beside the drovers and a herd of cattle making their slow passage to the railhead three or four hundred miles away. On the return flight, having carried out the mission of the day and dropped our passengers, we were free to dive down to see some beautiful waterhole filled with wildfowl hundreds of miles from anywhere or to watch the herds of wild Arab horses which bred up in the isolation of the land across the Cooper, spread out galloping, manes flying, symbols of Edenic freedom. Juxtaposed in my mind when I returned to the city would be the image of some wiry Queenslander, body burnt brown above tattered khaki shorts, heaving around petrol drums at a backcountry
airport, or the faces of the aboriginal stockmen who came into Charleville on their days off. I could make a class and race analysis of this world according to the categories I was learning in my history seminars, but I was also groping for a way to describe it which recognized its difference from the industrial working class in England or the jacquerie of the French Revolution. I was already reading the standard left versions of Australian history, but they didn’t satisfy me either. They had been written by sedentary people who had never lived in the bush and had no notion what settling it was like.

By contrast with history, the first year of English honors was heavy going. We learned Anglo-Saxon and read
Piers Plowman
, intellectual tasks which required lots of
sitzfleisch
, but didn’t offer much excitement. My fellow students were mostly headed toward master’s degrees and high school teaching. I could learn languages easily enough, but found it hard to care about them, except as they opened new literatures and new experiences to me. The literary part of the English honors program came in the second year, but by that time I had decided to concentrate my efforts in history and take the pass course in English.

There was more than enough excitement for me in the pass English course where we studied the modern novel, romantic poetry, and Shakespeare’s comedies. It didn’t matter that there were no seminars and discussion groups because the lectures were superb, balancing critical insight with historical context and attention to technique. I had taken to jotting down in the margin of my notebook all the references made to major critical works, and simply read them on my own early in the term before time was needed for essay writing. There were often long afternoons when I became so entranced by reading John Livingston Lowes on Coleridge, or Keats’s letters to his brothers and sister, that I noticed the passage of time only when the slanting afternoon sunlight disappeared and the lights came on in the Fisher Library.

I made many earthshaking discoveries in the Fisher Reading
Room, as I sat at one of the long heavy mahogany tables, semi-oblivious to the rustling of other students’ papers and the counterpoint of whispered conversations. I was thunderstruck by reading Samuel Butler’s
The Way of All Flesh
for our course in the modern novel. Toni’s sardonic view of her family had shown me someone who looked clear-eyed at family relationships, but Butler’s full-fledged satirical treatment of the Pontifex family and its shameless exploitation of the young, exploitation justified by parental authority and through the mouthing of empty pieties, left me feeling that I had been struck by lightning. I heard for the first time the self-deception in my mother’s often-repeated “Of course I want my children to be free to do what they want, travel where they choose, and not be tied to me.” “Jill’s very dependent on me,” she often told people, neglecting to mention that most of my trips away had to be canceled because she began to have dizzy spells. “I can’t stand parents who think they own their children,” she would announce, not mentioning her ferocious attacks on the character and motives of any friends I was incautious enough to bring home. From that afternoon in the Fisher Library on, I listened to her complacent voice differently. I still saw her as a moral agent, the heroic figure whose courage and industry had rescued us from disaster and sheltered me from my childhood insecurities, but these images were now paired with less favorable ones.

The afternoon I finished reading Joyce’s
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
, for the same course, I sat for a long time gazing out the window of the library. In Stephen Daedalus’s argument with his student companion about
claritas
, I saw my ideal of intellectual life perfectly articulated. That was it. Like Stephen, I was seeking “wholeness, harmony and passion,” the
claritas
which was the equivalent of the Christian vision of God. Somewhere, somehow it must be possible to reconcile the conflicts of the emotions, the pains of life, the sense of beauty, in one unifying understanding. This was what I was doing here, what these stone walls had been built for, and why these books had been painstakingly
accumulated. Joyce’s Dublin and the indictment of his Catholic education were merely a backdrop for me for this sudden vision of what the young were seeking from a university.

Another thunderbolt struck one afternoon when I turned idly to look at the shelves behind me, my preparation for the upcoming lecture in psychology finished, and fifteen minutes remaining till the class began. I lifted from the shelves a volume of Jung’s
Collected Works
. Flipping through the pages, I began to read an essay entitled “The Positive and Negative Aspects of the Mother Archetype.” It was astounding. There I was, described to a T. There was my mother sitting on the page before me, as though Jung had known her every mood. I never went to the lecture on abnormal psychology, but instead read like one possessed. I needed no convincing that we were Demeter and Persephone, and that my mother would indeed turn the world about her into a desert of grief if she were to lose me. It was a comfort to see my life situation so well described, but it was also alarming to realize that it was even more elemental than I had supposed. The next time I was at a bookstore, I bought the
Collected Works
of Jung and set it on my bookshelves to go back to again and again. My psychology course was strictly behavioral in approach, and psychiatry in the Sydney of my day was the recourse of weaklings and emotional cripples. Yet there was no getting away from the fact that my mother’s emotional need for me went far beyond normal limits. Whenever my mind went down this path, I braced myself, gritted my teeth, and told myself not to complain. She had suffered a great deal and her care was my responsibility.

My afternoons in the Fisher Library were solitary after the first term because early in the year Toni was dispatched on the standard Australian trip to Europe, a family stratagem to divert her from unacceptable romantic attachments. It was sad to see her walking, bright-eyed and elegant, out to the Qantas Constellation, shortly to depart in a flurry of propellers for Singapore, Karachi, and farther points en route for London. I knew I would miss her merry and intelligent laughter, and her sense of life as an
unending human comedy. She had been wonderful company during my year of playful discovery of the University, and her good example had taught me that I need not be as compulsive about working as was my natural disposition.

Not long after Toni’s departure, coming early to a lecture in Romantic poetry, I sat down beside a fair-haired young woman who, like me, always sat close to the front of the class. She stood out in the group for the melodiousness of her voice and her silvery peal of laughter, heard whenever the lecturer said something witty. We fell to chatting about the subject of the day’s lecture, and progressed quickly to introducing ourselves. Nina Morris was a few years my junior, and also in her second year at the University. Our paths had not crossed before because she had been educated at Catholic convent schools, whereas Abbotsleigh was Anglican. So great was the social chasm dividing Catholics and non-Catholics in Australian culture that schools did not compete in athletics across denominational lines, and the two groups kept pretty much to themselves during the first year of University. After the lecture, in which the instructor had inspired us all by describing Keats’s sense of the creative imagination as the capacity to pass through the house of life, never resting before a closed door, but instead opening the doors to one new experience after another through the power of empathy, we wandered off for coffee to prolong the excitement created by the skillful lecture and its wonderful subject.

Nina became a daily companion. I was fascinated by her zest for life, her inexhaustible sociability, her curiosity about people, her religious sensibility. She was the first well-educated Catholic I had met, and her interest in sacred music, in contemporary painting and modern theater, opened a range of aesthetic interests to me which had not entered my life before. She was also the center of a lively group of friends who quickly also became mine. Cam McKinney, the child of an American father and Australian mother, looked at our world from the perspective of someone whose high school education had been in the United States. His
vibrant, musical voice was never silent, and was regularly to be heard expounding on matters of taste and modern aesthetics with unconscious but well-informed authority. His quizzical gaze took in one’s appearance at a glance, and we all became accustomed to receiving his exacting grades for stodginess or style in our appearance. He was critical of the Australian female tendency to flowery emulation of the Royal Family, and mocked us into awareness of New York and Paris as the source of style and elegance. He studied anthropology and was forever explaining the social symbolism of our comings and goings, or of significant events in Australian life. His creative energy was so infectious it was impossible to be dull in his company.

Vanessa Schneider, the most dazzling beauty of the group, shared Nina’s religious concerns; Patty O’Connel, vivacious, red-haired, bubbling with Irish wit, had the same talent for wicked social commentary that was so amusing in Cam McKinney; Ken Hosking and Hugh Gore, good-humored and hospitable neighbors in residence at St. Paul’s, the Anglican men’s college, shared Nina’s love of music and theater. All congregated in a circle held together by Nina’s zest for life and gift for entertainment. She was the hostess whose parties in her parents’ spacious flat in Mosman kept us all in lively contact. It was she who organized the delectable picnics we took to the beach at Newport or Palm Beach to celebrate the end of the examinations and the arrival of summer. A beach picnic under Nina’s supervision involved the provision of plentiful beach umbrellas for the morning to avoid sunburn for people with skin like mine; at least three courses of magically cooled food, eaten in the early afternoon on some tree-shaded rock above the beach where ants and flies never appeared; and an evening party at someone’s nearby house where we could shed the day’s sand, cool our sunburn, eat ravenously again, and talk late under the stars.