The Road from Coorain (30 page)

The pretense of equality masked the fact that the academic structure of Australian universities was inordinately hierarchical, with a single professorial position dominating each discipline, and more junior readers, senior lecturers, and lecturers filling out the ranks of the faculty. Whoever held the chaired position dominated appointments and could virtually build the junior ranks as he pleased. I was fortunate that John Ward had liked my honors dissertation, and was an encouraging friend and mentor. Through my appointment I acquired at least a portion of a room of my own. I was assigned to share a spacious second-floor office, looking out on the tranquil green Quadrangle, with a young Englishwoman who worked in medieval history. She was
in Sydney because of the posting of her naval officer husband on an assignment to the Australian navy, and was an intelligent and cultivated observer of Australian society and academic life. I hadn’t known many intellectual women before, let alone one close in age to me, so that my friendship with Ruth Chavasse was important.

Early in the 1959 academic year, I was taken aback to be called into John Ward’s office and asked if I would pinch-hit for him by giving the lectures in the American history survey course for the next term, since he’d been advised to have medical treatment requiring a term’s absence. As my face registered astonishment he said, sensibly and practically, “Come now, Jill, you know much more about this field than the students, and just about what I did when I first began to teach it, so I’m sure you will do it very well, and without too much difficulty.” John was Cambridge-trained, but an innovator in his day for his insistence that an educated Australian must know the broad outlines of the history of the United States. I gulped and agreed to give the lectures. It was one thing to give a few lectures on my own particular area of knowledge in Australian history, but quite another to be asked to get up a course at short notice, and do all the lecturing myself. When I asked if there was a syllabus I should follow, John Ward said airily, “Why don’t you make up your own. It’s always more effective teaching about what interests you. You’re interested in the West and the settlement of Australia. Teach them Turner and his critics. It will help you think about your own work.”

Suddenly I was as busy as I liked to be. In Sydney some part of each day went into reading nineteenth- and twentieth-century American history. On many weekends, I drove the five hundred-odd miles to Coorain to review the expenditures planned for the next year’s maintenance, the sheep sales which went with redirecting the flock to produce the new type of wool favored by Japanese buyers. The two new demands on my time were mutually stimulating. John Ward had given me a nudge in the direction of reading American history, just at a time when I was spending
long hours traveling back and forth to the bush, free to speculate about the differences between Australian and American society. My reading about Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, Oscar Handlin’s studies of immigration as a factor in shaping American society, and Perry Miller’s analysis of the way the physical environment of North America began to shape the mind and imagination of American colonists introduced major themes for reflection as I made my regular car journeys through several climate zones out to the western plains.

On those journeys I liked to leave Sydney about 4:30 or 5:00 a.m. so that I was away from the heavy traffic on the main routes over the coastal mountains by breakfast time, and ready to settle down to maintain a steady eighty miles an hour west and southwest along the straight dirt roads of the bush, until after about ten hours’ driving I arrived in a cloud of red dust by the front gate of Coorain.

In springtime the road west to Bathurst across the mountains was a wonderful passage of extended views across valleys and early morning mist. On the western side the mountains’ gentler hills sloped down to rolling countryside; valleys covered with rich black soil sheltered streams winding westward. The gentle slopes rising from each watercourse were crowned with orchards in blossom, while below the contoured patterns of spring crops burst in brilliant green from the dark earth. I liked looking at this scenery with the dew still on it, well before the heat of the day. I always brought breakfast with me: strong tea, brown bread and butter, hard-boiled eggs, and fruit. These I ate at favorite spots: in the middle of a deserted pear orchard alive with bees, or on the roadside at the brow of a hill where the patterns of agriculture—green, brown, gold, and red—could be looked at with half-closed eyes to produce an instant impressionist painting.

Here where the farming was intensive, each curve of the land had its plume of smoke rising from a homestead, nestling beside its accompanying silos and dairy barns. My new interest in American history prompted reflection on how this land had been
settled, and on the political heritage of the nineteenth-century battles to wrest it from the hands of the squatter pastoralists, to make it available for small family farms.

Several hours later, one hundred and fifty miles or so beyond the eastern slopes of the mountains, I entered what we called the scrub country. Its bright scarlet earth nourished stunted mallee trees, four to five feet high, twisted by wind and drought, supported by huge gnarled roots. Much of it had been cleared, the roots painfully grubbed and burned, to make way for dry wheat farms, which throve in good seasons and produced relentless, red, dusty heartbreak when the rains did not come. These farmhouses were poorer, the outbuildings shabbier, and the children and dogs playing about skinnier than one saw closer to the coast. The red earth, the blazing sun, and the broken hearts of these settlers were the recurring subjects of great Australian painting. It had never occurred to me before to wonder why we didn’t celebrate the plenty and lyrical beauty of the fertile slopes beyond the mountains. Now I occupied hours musing about why it was that this experience of the marginal wheat farmers shaped Australian imagery about landscape, as did the figure of the drover and the drover’s wife silhouetted against the emptiness of the western plains my journey would bring me to about one or two in the afternoon, when the sun dominated the sky, and the mirages were shimmering on the horizon.

Why was my mind full of images of exhausted, marginal people, or outlaws like Ned Kelly, rather than triumphant frontier figures like Daniel Boone or Buffalo Bill? I knew that somehow it had to do with our relationship to nature, and with the way in which the first settlers’ encounter with this environment had formed the inner landscape of the mind, the unspoken, unanalyzed relationship to the order of creation which governs our psyches at the deepest level. Australians saw that relationship as cruel and harsh, and focused the mind’s eye on the recurring droughts rather than the images of plenty I could recall from the rich seasons at Coorain. It startled me to realize that although I
was now running the enterprise at Coorain to produce an income that was handsome by any but the most plutocratic standards, my emotional life was dominated by images of the great drought. I wished there were a clear way to understand the process by which a people’s dominant myths and mental imagery took shape. Now I had seen England and Europe, these myths seemed more important to me than any study of the politics of Federation, or of the precise details of nineteenth-century land policy. I could see that there were models for thinking about such questions in the writing of American history. There was so much to learn I could barely fall asleep at night because my mind raced on at fever pitch about a set of questions I felt no one else understood, or even cared about much.

The actual experience of delivering my first course of lectures was daunting. I had surmounted my shyness in most social settings, but standing up before several hundred people and talking connectedly for fifty minutes was a grueling test. Because university education was virtually free, many students were just putting in time in university study, and lacking motivation, could be raucous.

The morning of each lecturing day, I woke up with a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach and set out for the University like a prisoner headed for the guillotine. I was beset by a sudden new set of worries about my appearance. I didn’t want to hide my anomalous female self under the conventional black academic gown. People must accept or reject me for what I really am, I thought. I’m a woman standing here teaching, not some apologetic, sexually neutral person. I didn’t have the powers of analysis to understand that my tenseness and anxiety came from crossing social boundaries, but I did have a visceral sense that if I gave in and muted my female appearance I was lost. At night I had nightmares of standing naked before laughing audiences, or of losing my notes and standing on the platform in terrified silence. In the mornings I taught the day students, all a year or so younger than I. In the evenings I lectured to an older, more thoughtful and
diverse group of evening students. They were from every walk of life: taxi drivers, schoolteachers, civil servants, construction laborers. Slowly, cured by exhaustion and frequent exposure, I began to be able to walk toward the lecture hall without my knees knocking together, or becoming sick to my stomach with nervous anxiety. My students mostly listened attentively, and some of the older ones even became friends. I began trying out some of my ideas on the parallels and differences between Australian and American culture on them. People began to ask questions. I started to enjoy teaching.

Outside the University, my new role set me apart from most of my own generation. On the round of Sydney cocktail parties I learned not to volunteer what I did for a living. If I did, most men my age looked at me in astonishment and turned to talk to someone less formidable. Most women were puzzled and didn’t know what to talk to me about, assuming, mistakenly, that I wouldn’t be interested in talking about the usual women’s subjects: clothes, parties, the latest films. Someone doing what I was doing was a real anomaly in the Sydney of the 1950s, and no one in my generation knew what to make of me. In strange company I often told people I was a secretary, just to see how they would react to me if they were not perceiving me through the stereotype of a professional woman. It was hard to drum up much interest in the usual round of Sydney charity parties. My London model days had cured me of wanting to cut a swath as an exponent of fashion, and my daily occupation did make it hard to manage standard party small talk.

It wasn’t any more satisfactory to spend time in real intellectual circles. The history department at the University of Sydney was the model of solid respectability, and not noted for its intellectual daring. The most interesting circle at the University revolved around the philosophy and political science departments, and a small coterie of gifted faculty and students who were iconoclasts, cultural rebels, and radical critics of Australian society. I liked their ideas, and enjoyed the fact that their circle
also contained journalists and serious writers about Australian politics. The trouble was that their intellectual originality went along with a stultifying conformity to what were considered “advanced” sexual mores. Everyone regarded marriage and monogamy as bourgeois conventions, and it was more or less de rigueur to join in the sexual couplings of the group to share its intellectual life. At their parties, the men dressed colorfully, were lively talkers, and laughed a lot. The women, having rejected bourgeois fashion, often seemed rather drab. They talked intensely about ideas, but their eyes were watchful because it required close attention to sort out the shifting amatory relationships of the group. When I rejected the inevitable sexual advances, I was looked at with pained tolerance, told to overcome my father fixation, and urged to become less bourgeois. It was a bore to have to spend my time with this group rebuffing people’s sexual propositions when what I really wanted to do was to explore new ideas and to clarify my thoughts by explaining them to others. I didn’t know then that I was encountering the standard Australian left view of women, but I could see that the so-called sexual liberation had asymmetrical results. The women of the group, often brilliant, worked as librarians or journalists, and came home to care for the children in the evening, while their men friends retired to the study. I needed their irreverence about Australian academic life and their clear-eyed analysis of the Australian universities as guardians of a colonial establishment. But in time I came to see that their position of isolation from the mainstream of Australian society was an unhappy and paralyzing one. There
was
no social group on which cultural radicals could base a program of action in Australia. Nothing could be more straitlaced and conservative than the traditional Australian Labor Party. People who were radical and avant-garde in the arts could not have been more comfortably wedded to middle-class mores in other respects. That left my friends living the life of the mind with no audience to whom they could communicate. We might spend all the time we liked discussing McCarthyism in the
United States and the antidemocratic tendencies of Catholic Action in Australia, but there was no one waiting for our pronouncements on either subject. My radical friends were isolated and alienated, more like a religious sect within an uncaring secular society than their models, the European intelligentsia who labored intellectually in a world where ideas
mattered
.

The place I was most at home in was the bush. The older I grew the more I liked backcountry people. I enjoyed the slow and stylized way conversations with strangers developed—the weather, the state of the roads, where the kangaroos were swarming this year, whose yearling had run well at the picnic races. It was as easy as wearing old clothes to arrive at the ram sales, lean on a fence, gaze attentively at the pen of animals, and argue with Geoff Coghlan about which ones would be best for the Coorain flocks.

On my weekends at Coorain I sometimes took an extra day and drove over to spend the night at Clare. I loved Angus Waugh just as much now as I had as a child. It was just plain comfortable to sit by the fire in the evening at Clare, beneath the paintings of highland cattle, and listen to Angus tell stories. His tales were full of close observation of people, psychological insight, and a wonderful sense of the absurd. He would tease me for being “a bloody intellectual,” but underneath the laughter was an old-fashioned Scottish respect for learning. When he came to Sydney for the annual agricultural show, we always made a date to spend the day there, looking at sheep and cattle, agricultural equipment and sheepdog trials, and talking about the wool business. We stayed away from the subject of my mother, because the Australian code didn’t permit complaining about life’s difficulties, but there was an unspoken understanding between us about why I was spending so much time at Coorain, and about how difficult she had become. After the ceremonial dinner in Sydney’s best hotel dining room which finished the day, I always left him smiling to myself over his unique and pungent personality. He never failed solemnly to tip the headwaiter sixpence, out of a combination of
tightfistedness and the desire to watch the pained expression on the man’s face. “Doesn’t he ever give you a hard time getting a table?” I asked once after observing this transaction. “No, the poor bugger can’t do that,” Angus replied. “He knows I’ve been staying here for forty years, and my father before me.”