The Road from Coorain (25 page)

I always enjoyed wandering into the dining room at the Women’s Union on days when Nina was about because I knew I would find her at the center of a lively group, eager to introduce
me to interesting new people she had met, to tell the newest story, or offer a knowledgeable commentary on the orchestra’s performance at last night’s symphony concert.

One afternoon, in the second term of our second year, I came in to find her with several newcomers in the group, including a newcomer I took for an Englishman because of his accent and manners. The general conversation was about Australian theater, and a new play which treated the experience of cane cutters in northern Queensland as though they were the stuff of Greek epic. My curiosity was piqued by our new companion’s comments. It was clear that he knew the London stage well, but little about Australia’s new and vibrant theatrical world. I was excited by the play and immediately dived into the conversation to defend it. It was the first I’d seen to treat real Australian types, and to make their experience universal. Seeing the world that way on the stage helped to undo a lifetime of lessons in geography. On our way to our three o’clock English class, Nina told me her friend was the heir to one of Australia’s great mining fortunes, but had been educated since early childhood in England and Europe. He was back in Australia to get to know his native country and to sample its culture for a year or two of university education.

Peter Stone quickly became a member of our group, and soon my frequent escort. I liked hearing his downright views about Australian society announced with the self-confidence of an old Harrovian. They were a mixture of love for the natural world and its scenery, and impatience with Sydney’s provinciality. To my astonishment and delight he liked clever women and didn’t seem to think my reputation for learning detracted from my attractiveness. I was used to concealing how well I did academically when in male company, and to feigning interest in explications of subjects about which I knew a great deal more than the speaker. This was required conduct for women in Australia. It didn’t do to question male superiority in anything. One learned early not to correct mistakes in a male companion’s logic, and to accept the most patent misinformation as received truth. Peter would start
to tell me something, watch my face assume the required expression of rapt interest, and burst out laughing. “But why am I telling you something you know all about anyway?” It was intoxicating not to have to set a watch on my tongue, to be actually found more interesting because of my mind. In his company I enjoyed the experience an intellectual woman needs most if she has lived in a world set on undermining female intelligence: I was loved for what I was rather than the lesser mind I pretended to be. Our deep attraction for one another was mutual. He needed the affection of someone with a sense of purpose in life. I was totally unlike any debutante of the season, and bored by trendy small talk. I scarcely comprehended the international world in which he had been reared and on which he needed to gain perspective. Our lives and our interests were bound to diverge, because I was, without really knowing it, a genuine intellectual. He was intent on a career in business or government, something in my current phase of life I did not value. While we both teetered on the brink of adulthood, we were one another’s ideal companion, providing exactly the emotional energy needed to meet life and rise to its challenges.

Peter’s mother and her friends were a window on another world. She had made several fashionable marriages and it seemed to me that she clearly intended to make another. Her friends were world-weary international travelers who talked about money and political scandals and told risqué jokes. They were amused by our intense affair and ever ready with worldly advice. “Why are you wasting time on Peter,” one remarked to me as the ladies took coffee apart from the gentlemen after a dinner party. “Why don’t you go off to London for a season. With your brains and your looks you could make a
really
splendid marriage.” It was comforting to be accorded such impressive sexual powers, and endlessly amusing to see how the world looked to such people, even as I was encouraging Peter to set course for a more purposeful and creative life. The thought of an imaginary London season could always divert and reassure me when I felt my afternoons
working painstakingly in the library at my history research papers were unexciting.

By forming my first deep attachment with Peter, I had complicated my life enormously. At home I made no secret of the depth of my attraction. Immediately I had to juggle a new set of conflicts. My mother waged undeclared war on the relationship, using every weapon in a formidable arsenal, and showing a brilliant tactical sense. If Peter’s Harrovian ways could be made to look foolish or superficial, she found the way to do it. If I could be embarrassed in front of him, she managed it with artistry worthy of Mrs. Siddons. Never an inspired cook, she contrived the most numbing combinations of backcountry food to give him “a taste of Australia.” Yet in another dimension of herself, she enjoyed watching me come into my own. Her lingering sense of adventure made her favor exploring new worlds. It reminded her of her own youth, and some of my stories made her recall her own growing up laughingly. It was when I spoke of forming a permanent attachment that her mood darkened and she insisted that I must finish my degree before I could consider any such commitment. After some painful discussions I learned not to raise the subject, because I encountered her in a new persona, a sardonic woman who mocked my emotional life as though it were the stupidest farce. I was startled and troubled by the destructiveness she revealed and tried to explain it away as the result of ill health.

Peter’s lively sense of the absurd made him more than equal to tests of his digestion or mockery of his manners, but he was less tolerant of the time I needed for my work. I hadn’t experienced this conflict before, and dealt with it badly. I let tomorrow take care of itself, spent long golden afternoons wandering in rapt conversation through Sydney’s beautiful parks or along its shining white beaches, and let the hours needed for everything but the term’s required written work slide by. Then, when the last possible moment came for preparation for examinations, I simply disappeared to study and refused all invitations. This incomprehensible conduct produced many storms which left me
feeling guilty about studying, a new and startling experience. Doing one’s best work was sacred in my family, and pressing though my mother’s demands for my company had been, she always yielded to my claim that I needed to be alone to study. When presented with the conflict, there was no question on which side I would finally come down. Studying history was more important to me than the strongest infatuation. I knew this was not the way women were supposed to be, but I couldn’t change my deepest motivations. I wondered what it would be like to be loved for one’s working self. In the Sydney of my day that didn’t happen to a woman.

As my third year unfolded, my work became daily more intensely interesting. The third year was devoted to the study of the development of European imperialism, the history of the British Empire and Commonwealth, the history of the United States, and the emergence of the modern Dominions—Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and India. As we studied European imperialism the French, British, and Dutch empires were collapsing: the French army facing defeat at Dien Bien Phu; client states like Chiang Kai-shek’s China yielding to Mao Tse-tung’s Communist Chinese army; the new state of Indonesia, literally next door to Australia, was consolidating under an authoritarian regime following bitter ethnic and ideological strife; Australian troops fought beside the British in the campaign to suppress the Communist uprising in Malaya. It was logical to ask, Could Australia remain a white island in the South Pacific? In the postcolonial era, should it even try? To ask was to question the White Australia Policy, a racist article of faith which united every spectrum of political opinion in Australia, except the Communist Party.

The study of imperialism could lead to comfortable identification with the metropolitan society and its values, something which had happened for many of my teachers, who were products of graduate study at Oxford or Cambridge, people who took Oxbridge to be the intellectual center of the globe and eagerly
awaited their return there on sabbatical leave. Or it could open up profoundly subversive questions, even about contemporary Australia. If one looked at the baneful effects of cultural imperialism in India, what were they in Australia? My schooling had been supposed to be training an elite for leadership, but it had really been training me to imitate the ways and manners of the English upper class. To talk of Australian elites was to realize that the people I and my brothers had known in school were working not on Australia’s social and political problems, but on gaining recognition from an external British world. My male peers at the University of Sydney strove for a Rhodes scholarship, not so they could come back to tackle Australia’s problems, but to settle down happily to the life of an Oxford or Cambridge don, and forget about Australian culture as soon as possible. My friends on the left were no different. They were hostages to the worldview of the British working class, and the history of the nineteenth-century industrial revolution. Australia was different. Its class conflicts were real but they needed analysis on their own terms, not automatic redefinition in terms of received British Labour views. Study of the American Revolution raised the question of why Australia remained under the British monarchy, especially as Australia’s defense was now guaranteed not by Great Britain, but by the ANZUS Pact. Why did the crowds go into such an undignified frenzy whenever George Ill’s hardworking but intellectually undistinguished descendants paid a ceremonial visit to Australia? What was wrong with us? My generation knew it was the United States which had rescued Australia from occupation by the Japanese in the 1939–1945 War. Moreover, talk of the establishment of a postwar European Economic Community made us aware that Australia’s economic links with Great Britain were eroding. It was time to give up the pretenses of the old British Empire, recognize that we were a Southern Pacific nation, and begin to study and understand the peoples and countries of our part of the globe. I read Southeast Asian history and began to
learn as much as I could about the politics and geography of the part of the world where I really lived.

This change of worldview made for difficult relations with the older generation, and even with one’s peers who were not students of history and politics. When I told my mother that the White Australia Policy was wrong, a racist heritage from British colonialism, she burst into tears, claiming that she never expected to hear such heresy from a child of hers. From my new perspective, the ANZAC Day we celebrated with such respect, remembering the courage of Australian troops at Gallipoli, had a different symbolic meaning. Colonial troops had been sent on an ill-conceived and bungled mission by a callous British government, which could afford to run the risk with troops whose parents, wives, and children were not voters at home. I saw Australia’s proud military history differently: the troops raised for the expedition to the Sudan, for the Boer War, for 1914–1918, for 1939–1945, were cherished for their valor and military prowess, but they could also be sent on the most dangerous and foolhardy expeditions (like the Canadians sent to certain death at Dieppe) without too serious political repercussions in Britain.

As these political perceptions shattered most of the ideas I’d been brought up to take as the bedrock of moral and political values, my course in English literature had an equally profound impact. It was an extraordinary year. In English poetry, we studied Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, but Professor Wilkes, one of the most brilliant intellects of the Faculty of Arts, concluded the course with the poetry of Christopher Brennan, an Australian-Irish poet of great power. We had in our instructor someone who took Eliot’s conversion seriously, and whose own learning made it seem easy to comprehend the range of symbolism in Eliot’s poetry. He read poetry beautifully, so that one could hear people lay down their pens to listen to him recite “Ash Wednesday” or “Little Gidding.” I had never thought it possible to entertain religious belief, accepting, before I knew how to state it, Marx’s
view of religion as the opiate of the masses. Now I listened while the intellectual and spiritual progression of one of the twentieth century’s great poetic geniuses was analyzed with great sensitivity. The verse became as much a part of the inner landscape of my mind as Shakespeare’s sonnets, and its language made it possible for me to examine my own religious feelings. To do so was unfashionable in the extreme. Australia’s academic culture was one of conformity to shallow rationalism and positivism. To think about taking Catholicism seriously was to begin to enter my father’s religious experience, and also to challenge my mother’s fierce belief that Catholicism was Popish nonsense aimed at the suppression of women. Nonetheless, I started reading other Catholic writers, Hopkins, Waugh, Graham Greene.

I was so intent on the lectures about Christopher Brennan, my first encounter with serious Australian poetry, I might have been turned to stone at my seat. We traced our way through Brennan’s life, the inspiration of his muse, his theories of language, his reaction to the Australian natural world. It was a new experience to hear verse in which the landscape and imagery were drawn from my familiar Sydney, its trams and ferries, the very buildings and classrooms of the University of Sydney I now inhabited. That year, I bought Australian verse and read the literary heritage that up to now had been obscured by an exclusive focus on English poetry. It was hard to contain my excitement.

I found the study of Australian history an exercise in frustration. Its focus was almost exclusively political, and of necessity this meant seeing the colony and its population through the eyes of the British army and naval officers who were its administrators. The documents we studied were the memoranda and letters of Englishmen in Australia to the Secretary of State for Colonies. The constitutional crises were the battles over the relationship of the executive to the colonial legislature, and the efforts of both to expand their powers at the expense of the other. The tradition of left-wing writing about Australian history was equally unsatisfying. It required the romanticizing of the population transported
to the colonies, and the exaggeration of the wickedness of the hardworking but unimaginative colonial governors. I could not see what process but capitalism would have converted Australia from a penal colony to a free society, and in any event I was more interested in what Australian history
meant
than whether some past historian had misread the correspondence of Governor Bligh to Lord Bathurst, or whether Governor King had made land grants to all his political cronies. I wanted to know what difference the environment had made to the people who settled it. What new kind of society had emerged here, seen not as derivative from Great Britain, but on its own terms?