The Road from Coorain (27 page)

A
LTHOUGH
I
DIDN’T
see it that way at the time, the Department of External Affairs did me a great favor by refusing my application for a traineeship. I would have been unhappy working in one of the stuffiest parts of the Australian civil service. The glamorous history of the British Foreign Service haunted the imagination of the department’s senior officers, and the colonial mentality with which I was so impatient dominated its culture. I needed a few hard knocks to foster a little humility and shatter the complacency which comes with being bright in a small society where there are few real competitors. Above all I needed to be made to think about what it meant that I was a woman, instead of acting unreflectingly as though I were a man, bound to live out the script of a man’s life. This one blow of fate made me identify with other women and prompted me, long before it was politically fashionable to do so, to try to understand their lives.

In the short run, the consequences of my first brush with outright discrimination were painful and sometimes paralyzing. I lived for the satisfaction of working hard at important tasks, and my initial response to my rejection was to worry desperately about what I was going to do with myself. What could I do? Where would what I could contribute to the world around me be welcome? My last years at the University of Sydney had been
filled with systematic, disciplined intellectual effort and I dreaded having to stop. I made perfunctory efforts to article as a law clerk, but the two firms I contacted were discouraging. One rejected the idea of taking on a woman out of hand; the other agreed on the understanding that I would never expect to work on anything but divorce and family law. Earlier in my life I might have jumped into the study of law confident that my merits would convince people not to treat me like other women. Now I was wiser. I was furious with myself for having been so blind and stupid as to expect that I could, by some special merit, leap over the barriers society placed in the way of serious professional work for women. How could I have studied the newspapers every day where jobs were advertised in segregated lists, or listened to people’s disparaging remarks about women doctors or their jokes about bluestockings, and not realized they were about me? I used to dismiss Dr. Johnson’s often quoted remark about a woman talking in public being like a performing animal as a sign of the benighted attitudes of the eighteenth century, but they were around me every day in my fellow students’ comments about the tiny number of women faculty.

I was angry with myself for being so upset by receiving the treatment I ought to have expected anyway. I took myself to task for my feelings of sadness that there seemed nothing intellectually challenging that I could usefully do. I was a privileged young woman in a privileged society, and my small injuries were nothing beside the whole weight of human misery that weighed down the twentieth century. Beside the Holocaust or the genocide taking place at that very moment in Indonesia, where millions of men, women, and children, members of ethnic minorities, were being killed, my affronts were trivial. They were nothing beside the handicaps my aboriginal friend Ron, who had been such a loyal worker at Coorain, faced every day. Yet try as I might, I couldn’t choke back a sense of grief for my lost self.

My new ability to empathize with other women made me see my mother differently. My perceptions were so painful I could
hardly bear them. As I sat listening to her railing against life, her language growing more extreme as she progressed through several of the brandy and sodas she liked in the evening, I would place beside her in my mind’s eye the young competent woman, proud, courageous, and generous, I’d known as a child. I was living with a tragic deterioration brought about because there was now no creative expression for this woman’s talents. Lacking a power for good, she sought power through manipulating her children. The mind that once was engaged in reading every major writer of the day now settled for cheap romances, murder mysteries, and a comfortable fuzz of tranquilizers and brandy at the end of the day. No one had directly willed her decline. It was the outcome of many impersonal forces, which had combined to emphasize her vulnerabilities. The medical fashion of the day decreed that troubled middle-aged women be given tranquilizers and sedatives. She, once a rebel, had acquiesced in settling down to live the life of an affluent woman. Society encouraged a woman to think her life finished after her husband’s death and encouraged a woman’s emotional dependence on her children. I forgave her neurotic illnesses and her long, angry tirades against the doctor of the moment. I heard them now as expressions of her own frustrations at having no chance at professional training in medicine. She, who would have been a great healer, was now busily contriving her own ill health. I often needed several very stiff Scotches to get myself through an evening with this inner monologue proceeding while I feigned attention to the subject of the moment.

I found it hard to go through all the celebrations of graduation that marked the end of our college years. After several stiff drinks I could genuinely congratulate my men friends on their plans for careers in the professions or public service, and listen affably to my women friends’ plans for marriage. I didn’t plan to attend my own graduation or to be present to receive my University Medal. It would have been a bizarre charade to me then, for I thought I had learned all too quickly what its real value was. Instead, I
agreed to accompany my mother on her long-dreamed-about journey to England and Europe. I was too depressed to care whether we managed the journey in harmony, and whether her obsessive need to eat and sleep at exactly the same moment each day would become unbearable. I knew that my education had been made possible by her efforts, and that I owed her the travel she would be too shy and too dependent to undertake alone. What I would do after that I didn’t know. I couldn’t see myself settling down to become a professional scholar. The year of my graduation was notable for a series of petty wrangles between Australian historians on subjects of only minor antiquarian interest. I feared becoming similarly pedantic, and at a deeper level I feared choosing a career that was universally seen as unfeminine. I feared the only sensible choice for me, the life of a scholar, because I was too uncertain of my identity as a woman to risk the cultural dissonance the choice involved. My moods swung all around the compass. Sometimes I thought I should just settle down, marry, and get on with the expected pattern of an Australian woman’s life. Sometimes I thought I might simply stay in England after my mother’s journey of discovery was over. Despite my criticisms of Oxbridge and my impatience with Australian deference to England, my view of academic life outside Australia was still conventionally colonial. Study abroad meant study in England. Just before we left on our travels, I met a brilliant young medical researcher, recently returned from doctoral work in the United States. His attitudes to life were just what I needed to hear. He wasn’t troubled by the restrictions of Australian academic life, he told me. One could be a scholar with an international group of colleagues anywhere in the world. One didn’t necessarily have to accept the Australian definition of the role. He set me thinking about the future less parochially, and encouraged me to think about creating new styles of scholarly life if I didn’t find the current ones congenial. He was an inspiration at a low point in my life, a new model of a professional scholar, very much to my liking.

Traveling in England and Europe with my mother proved as trying as I had expected it to be, but it was filled with sudden wonderful moments of illumination, and with recognitions of things hitherto only half-understood. When we sailed on the P. and O. liner
Orsova
, in early January 1958, I thought I knew my sixty-year-old mother well. After we’d unpacked and settled into our comfortable flat off the King’s Road in Chelsea, I discovered a new person.

My mother’s reactions to new sights and new mores were strong and spontaneous. On our first necessary pilgrimage to Stratford-on-Avon, she announced that she didn’t care for the English cottage gardens she’d always admired when seen on chocolate boxes in Australia. “Too flowery and fussy,” she said definitively. But when I took her to Syon House, for a Sunday afternoon expedition from London, she was as excited as a child by the flawless Inigo Jones facade and the Adam interiors. Capability Brown’s garden at Syon House barely rated comment. No matter how I expounded on the notion of garden merging imperceptibly into landscape she was unimpressed. It was untidy. Her obsessions with regularity in time took on a new meaning for me, and I wondered whether she could have been relaxed and spontaneous in a world of eighteenth-century balance.

After we had made all the routine tourist visits to the sights of London, she asked to go back to St. Paul’s. Thinking her interest related to its symbolism for the distant Empire during the war, I suggested that we take the time to study Wren’s plans, climb to the galleries, and look out over the city to imagine the way Wren had planned the relation of his great monument to the eighteenth-century city. We had the luck to come upon a pleasant and well-informed guide, so that even though the climb was agonizingly slow because of my mother’s worries about her blood pressure and her rheumatism, we eventually made the 627 steps up to the golden gallery; we lingered there while the guide described Wren’s plans for the great square and colonnades surrounding the cathedral, and pointed out the eighteenth-century buildings
which could help one imagine London as he saw it. When we descended hours later and made our way to our car parked in Paternoster Square, my mother suddenly dissolved into tears. Thinking her exhausted after hours of climbing and gazing at great heights, I began to make soothing noises and to hurry her home to our comfortable Chelsea flat. “You fool,” she finally got out through clenched teeth, “I’m only crying because it is so beautiful. Why have they destroyed it now with all this clutter of buildings?” From then on I knew the day would be a success if it included a great eighteenth-century building, or a manicured garden in the classical style.

For me, schooled as I was in English literature, my mental habits formed by the relationship to nature expressed in Renaissance and Romantic poetry, actually seeing the landscape was a disappointment. The light was too misty, the air too filled with water. The Cotswold hills, the deer grazing in the park at Knole, even the great heath that inspired Hardy’s Egdon Heath in
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
seemed on the wrong scale. I had imagined it on a larger scale, and kept wanting to get a longer perspective on things. It took a visit to England for me to understand how the Australian landscape actually formed the ground of my consciousness, shaped what I saw, and influenced the way a scene was organized in my mental imagery. I could teach myself through literature and painting to enjoy this landscape in England, but it would be the schooled response of the connoisseur, not the passionate response one has for the earth where one is born. My landscape was sparer, more brilliant in color, stronger in its contrasts, majestic in its scale, and bathed in shimmering light.

The powerful visual images which took hold of my imagination were architectural. Medieval history was not taught in my university because the library collections were inadequate for serious research. Although the cities of my childhood Australia were vast, they were modern creations of the railway and automobile, without the spaces and buildings which expressed a coherent urban community and culture. The conventional tourist
visit to Bath, made early in our stay, was unforgettable. Here was the Roman city clearly preserved; growing organically within it was the great medieval town which had supported the building of Bath Abbey, with its spare graceful windows and entrancing facade, decorated with a sprightly Jacob’s ladder of angels going to and fro from heaven, an image commemorating a dream of its founder, Bishop Oliver King; flourishing beside it was the great eighteenth-century city, yet another coherent urban expression, each of the three more powerful on its own terms than anything I’d seen before. Thereafter, I planned an itinerary which wound through the great cathedral cities, the sites of Roman remains, and the shattered reminders of the dissolution of the monasteries. We made the obligatory visit to the Lake Country to inspect the landscape which had inspired the Romantic movement, but it remained picture-postcard-ish in my memory, whereas Ely Cathedral, first seen at sunset and then viewed through the deepening dusk while the rooks wheeled to settle on its facade, stayed detailed and three-dimensional.

Hungry for sun after a misty English spring, we set out in early April for southern France, Spain, and Portugal. New facets of my mother’s character emerged as soon as she encountered Latin culture. She loved to sit sipping tea in an open-air café, watching the life of the square, getting into conversation with strangers by means of signs, broken English, and her few words of French or Spanish. I marveled at the sight of this woman, totally solitary at home, in animated conversation with strangers. Hitherto an adherent of the meat-and-three-vegetable school of English cooking, she cast caution to the winds and ate whatever was the dish of the region. She was less curious about seeing buildings and museums than she was about people. I could leave her happily ensconced at some bar or café, and wander through the buildings she thought too cold and damp for her rheumatic joints.