The Road from Coorain (29 page)

Australia’s class system seemed harmless enough when one observed British snobbery and class consciousness at work. I chuckled at overhearing one friend my mother made on shipboard tell her proudly about the dinner party at which she and her husband had been guests the night before. “My dear, we were
sixteen sitting down to dinner, and Freddy and I were the only ones without a title.” But it was not so funny to see the very intelligent child of the caretaker of our flat taken from school at fifteen and sent to work, so that he wouldn’t get ideas above his place.

It was startling to meet the men who ran the fabled head office of the land and finance company which sold our wool and invested in Australian land. Throughout my childhood, this company hierarchy had been represented as the ultimate in economic wisdom. Now, on meeting its members, I saw not men of financial genius but comfortable bureaucrats who throve on borrowing money at one rate in the London financial markets and then lending it to gullible colonials at a three or four percent higher rate. Australia’s predictable droughts could be counted on to send many clients into bankruptcy, and thus the land and finance company had acquired its vast Australian landholdings with little risk and less economic enterprise. This was not the way the men in question saw themselves. They saw themselves as financial wizards, performing important services for the development of Australia. Certainly, the managing director could count on a knighthood after enough years of presiding over this enterprise and contributing regularly to the Tory Party.

Wandering around Westminster Abbey, through some of the churches which were regular places of worship for Guards regiments, or the smaller churches which were home to a county regiment, one could not help wondering whether the Anglican Church of Elizabeth I, a compromise I admired, had become by stages more concerned with the worship of the British Empire than with matters of salvation and damnation. Plaque after plaque commemorated bloody battles—Lucknow, Omdurman, Mafeking, the first and second Opium Wars—all occasions at which some luckless colonial people had been obliged by superior force to accept the benefits of British rule. I had known in theory that the church and the army had been the pillars of traditional European society, but it took seeing the sacramentalizing
of empire embodied in the walls of Anglican churches for me to comprehend what the mystical blending of church and state meant. I stood in the dampness of the Abbey, and thought at one and the same time of the coronation of Edward the Confessor, and the perspiring Sunday congregations praying in some far-flung outpost of the Empire for the reigning British monarch. I couldn’t get the two images into any harmonious relationship in my mind. I respected the unbroken monarchical tradition reaching back to the eleventh century and the British capacity for compromise which had enabled the parliamentary tradition to flourish alongside the monarchy. But I couldn’t stomach the self-satisfied exploitation of colonial peoples which was clothed in comfortable rhetoric in peacetime and exposed as cold calculation in time of war. That was the problem with my attitudes to this beautiful and perplexing country. I loved its medieval and early modern history and detested its imperial complacency. One thing was clear. I was not at home here and never could be. I could perhaps learn to speak idiomatic French and settle in Paris or Provence with no psychic difficulty, but in England these contradictions would always irritate me like a hair shirt worn under fashionable outer garments.

It was tiresome to have such contradictory reactions. To see St. Paul’s or to hear Big Ben was to be reminded, with a tug at the heart, of London in the Blitz. All through my childhood we had clustered around the crackling radio to hear the sound of Big Ben striking, and then the impeccable BBC accent announcing “This is London” in tones that conveyed British determination to resist the evil of Nazism to the end. Yet, when I was in a fashionable West End restaurant, I would find myself gazing around at the other patrons, wondering which pink and well-fed face belonged to someone who had been all too ready to collaborate, too pro-German to believe any of those ridiculous fabrications about the persecution of the Jews.

I loved the fashionable Mayfair world. Its discreet shops dispensing impeccable tailoring, its perfumes and leathers, its jewelers,
its quietly authoritative opulence. For a few months, I dabbled at the customary occupation of tall, willowy Australian girls and worked as a model for a Mayfair couturier. Still smarting from rejection of my intellectual talents, I took the job when offered, just to see whether people would actually pay me for what I looked like. This childish gesture contributed to my education in many unintended ways. It required only modest powers of observation to see that most of the designers and fashion photographers didn’t like women, enjoyed seeing them looking ever more foolish in some outlandish getup, and treated the models like so much horseflesh. From the inside, promoting fashion and beauty was a business like any other, intent on stimulating demand and creating obsolescence. Once I knew how those stunning fashion photographs were posed, I stopped buying fashion magazines, began to wear comfortable shoes, and started to dress as I liked rather than slavishly following the dictates of the season. If one looked at the subculture of designers and dressmakers as an anthropologist would, they assumed their place in the long continuum going back to painting the body and putting bones through one’s nose. I was determined that my particular form of nose bones would be comfortable from now on.

These discoveries offered distraction for a season, but as the promised year abroad accompanying my mother wore on, boredom set in. I knew now what I was going to do. I was going home to study history. It was no use pretending that I wasn’t a scholar. I could certainly make myself an idle life in London being another expatriate Australian enjoying the cultural riches of the city, but that was to live perpetually by the standards of a culture I now saw as alien. I didn’t want to take another degree at an Oxford or Cambridge college either, for that would involve going more deeply into the contradictions of being a colonial in the metropolitan society. I’d made one or two excursions to senior common rooms as the guest of fellow Australians. I found I wasn’t interested in the rituals of scholarly one-upmanship which seemed to delight my hosts. Several times, I was outraged by the
unmistakable undertones of studied rudeness to women. I wasn’t interested in becoming less womanly to avoid that hostility, and I certainly wasn’t interested in becoming more English and less Australian. I was going back to Australia to test my new sense of the world and my new perspective on Australian society. So far as my mother was concerned, I told myself I would see her established in Sydney once again, and then break the news that I would not be living with her.

I thought, as we made the long journey home by air, that it might even be an easy transition to make. Just before we set out for home, the news came that Barry had married the pretty young nurse I had met on my last visit to him in Charleville. Soon, I thought, there will be grandchildren to fill my mother’s life with interest and affection. A lot had changed about her from the days of our childhood, but though she was often paranoid with adults, she blossomed when with small children.

I heard the broad Australian accents of the Qantas stewards and hostesses with new appreciation, as we listened to the flight announcements before our departure from London Airport for the two and a half days in the air required to reach Sydney by the shortest route home from London across the United States. Once I’d thought those voices a tiresome sign of deviation from standard English speech. Now they were an accent like any other, an inheritance of history and dialect. The flight was long and tiring, but always made amusing by the slangy good humor of the crew, and the friendliness of the other passengers.

After Shannon, Gander, and Sydney, Nova Scotia, came New York. I was asleep when a fellow passenger shook me awake and pointed below. There was New York, glittering in the light of an early autumn morning. There was the island of Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty, the outline of the Chrysler Building. I hadn’t expected to be curious about America (the name all Australians inaccurately gave the United States) but at seeing the skyline made familiar by countless photographic images, I suddenly wished I were stopping for long enough to explore.

Two days later, I was gazing down at the coastline north of Sydney, waiting for the first sight of the Harbor to appear. I’d always thought Sydney beautiful, but now I planned to look at it on its own terms. It was a great seaport city, lying on the rim of an arid continent, Mediterranean in light and vegetation, its greys and scarlets and lemon scents unique to its native eucalyptus. It looked out across the vast expanse of the Pacific, not to Europe but to Japan and continental Asia. To arrive where we started and know the place for the first time, I thought, as Sydney’s golden beaches appeared, strung out like a necklace around the grey-green city, dancing in the morning sunlight. I promised myself I would never speak about the Far East again. It was absurd that it had taken me until I was twenty-three years old to get oriented on the globe, but I was glad that I finally knew where I was.

A
LTHOUGH
I
’D
promised myself I would make the break with my mother as soon as she was settled after our return to Sydney, I kept backsliding. For one thing, it took a long time to get her settled. No house seemed to suit her exactly. We were no sooner home than she needed treatment for gallstones, and the prospect of surgery loomed in the future. The house and garden she finally liked wasn’t available for another six months.

At Coorain, a much-needed new breeding strategy required introduction. Our flocks had been developed to produce long, fine combing wool for the British market. Now the bulk of Australian wool was sold to Japan, where new technologies made it possible to comb and spin high-quality woolen thread from a shorter-stapled fleece. It was a touchy business convincing my mother that higher earnings would come from breeding larger-bodied sheep with denser, shorter fleeces, but she eventually seemed persuaded. She agreed to the expensive purchase of a new line of rams and the culling of the existing flock for sale, provided I would supervise the operation. Telling myself that I would get her through one set of changes at a time, I temporized about my departure. It would be foolish to bring on the possible break in our relationship before I’d got the economic future of Coorain on a solid base.

Within weeks of our return I made the first step toward the eventual break by taking a teaching assistantship in the History Department at the University of Sydney and enrolling as a student for an M.A. in Australian history. The teaching assignments which secured my economic independence were simple and enjoyable. I gave tutorials in European and British history to groups of ten to twelve students, gave occasional lectures in the Australian history course, and graded large piles of essays and examinations. There was no course work for the M.A. degree at the University of Sydney. One simply found one’s own thesis topic, persuaded someone to direct one’s research, and wrote the dissertation. I wasn’t sure there was anyone in the Department of History who would want to direct the kind of study I wanted to write, but to get myself started I signed up with John Ward, the head of the department and the occupant of its only chair. Before I embarked on more research it seemed sensible to turn my undergraduate honors thesis into a series of articles for publication, an exercise which kept me happily at work for the first three or four months after my return. On publication, the essays were well received. They cast new light on the early phases of colonial economic development, and earned me a reputation as a likely future contributor to Australian history.

My occupation introduced me at once to a new society. The people who had previously taught me now became colleagues. It was the custom of the department to ignore generational differences on all social occasions, and different as our places were in the academic hierarchy, we all sat round the same lunch table, or gossiped together over coffee as though we were more or less contemporaries. It was a heady experience to shift gears and begin to call Alan Shaw, my former instructor in British history, whose wit and learning I relished, by his first name. Ernst Bramstedt, the
echt
German scholar who had taught me European history, now consulted with me about the course and pressed offprints of articles in German on me. Duncan Mac-Callum, the impossible but lovable eccentric who taught Australian
history and had trouble moving the class beyond the mid-nineteenth century in the course of an entire year, was suddenly eating his vegetarian diet of raisins and carrots at my side, and offering bizarre but often brilliant comments about Australian politics. Bruce Mansfield, the warm and gentle humanist, who persevered in believing one could study Erasmus in Sydney even though no library resources were available, gave me a new sense of what it meant to be a scholar. Marjorie Jacobs, already a friend, delighted me by her capacity to cut laughingly through the petty detail of her colleagues’ discussions and get the conversation to the point in minutes. They were a wonderful group of friends, encouraging about my teaching, interested in my career. My one problem was that they had very little interest in intellectual and cultural history. I couldn’t make them understand the kinds of events I thought interesting. Our department was strong on techniques of research, but no one could understand the kinds of cultural documents I wanted to study. They weren’t in archives, but in people’s minds and imaginations. Marjorie Jacobs, the most sensitive observer, noticed my frustration, and kept urging me to go abroad to study. “If you don’t like England, go to the Sorbonne. Go somewhere where you can see things from another perspective. Whatever you do, don’t just stay here.” I knew she was right. The question was where.