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| ISBN-13: | 9781742699165 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Allen & Unwin |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 238 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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Inside Outside
Life Between Two Worlds
By Andrew Riemer
Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 1992 Andrew RiemerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74269-916-5
CHAPTER 1
The Customs of the Country
When I arrived in Australia in 1947, a few days before my eleventh birthday, the question of multiculturalism had not yet arisen. Everyone assumed that it was the newcomer's duty to fit in, to learn the language, to adopt the customs of the country. Whatever cultural heritage you had brought with you had to be discarded; the past was irrelevant to the new life you were about to forge. With ominous symbolism, the only items from my parents' luggage to be seized by His Majesty's Customs were half a dozen or so decorated wooden platters, garish examples of Hungarian folk art. Now, almost half a century later, the wheel has turned. The dream of a multicultural Australia, a heady brew of contrasted but harmonious cultural strands, has left those of us who listened to our mentors, and tried to assimilate, in some perplexity and confusion.
I have now spent more than three-quarters of my life in this country. My passport tells me that I am an Australian. This is the only society where I feel relatively at ease, safe and comfortable. I depend on it not merely for a livelihood and occupation, but, much more importantly, for the essential and life-sustaining structures of family and friendships. Whenever I am away from Australia, my thoughts turn towards home. Yet I cannot claim to belong here fully. There is a state of mind beyond fondness, or even love, for a country, beyond familiarity or the knowledge that you have carved out a life for yourself in these surroundings. That state of mind is indefinable. To say that it is a lack or a vacancy is an approximation approaching the truth, yet not quite touching it. Nor is it a matter of substitutions: I yearn for Europe, but it is a Europe that no longer exists, and may never have existed. The closest I can get to a description of this condition, dilemma, perplexity, or whatever term may be put upon it, is to say that it is an existence between two worlds: one familiar, substantial, often humdrum and commonplace; the other a country of the mind, fashioned from powerful longings and fantasies. Such longings and fantasies are the products of a complicated network where experience and inheritance intersect.
Perhaps I am merely describing the human condition. I have come to learn that this sense of displacement, of not belonging, even of having been uprooted, is shared by many people whose lives have not been so obviously displaced or uprooted as mine. And yet, as every migrant knows, being obliged to start again, to find that you must remake your life, brings that predicament into sharper focus than might be the case otherwise. To look back at the slow unfolding which began for me on a hot February morning in 1947 is to raise many ghosts, most of which would have been better left undisturbed. It also runs the risk of self-pity and a yearning after the might-have-been. At worst it may seem mere self-indulgence. But the process of learning about and assimilating into an adopted society may, if viewed without rancour or passion, reveal something essential about that society, its values and its problems, which are often seen with greater clarity by the newcomer. Reconstructing that vision many years after the fact entails an alteration of perspective. I am able to look at the past only from the vantage point of my present self. Yet the memory retains enough of those initial impressions, and the present self bears sufficient scars from the past, to make it possible to capture with some accuracy and truth the predicament of those of us who were received by a not entirely welcoming Australia in the years immediately following the war in Europe.
It is only too easy, from the perspective of the much more cosmopolitan society of contemporary Australia, to scoff at the smugly bigoted attitudes of that time. Australia of the immediate postwar years was a narrow, inward-looking society, convinced of its absolute superiority, contemptuous of anything foreign or out of the ordinary. Wherever you went in that low and sunbaked collection of villages called Sydney, you were shown the living and visible proof of that superiority. An incident recorded by Glenda Adams in Longleg is echoed by my own experience: the AWA tower, which in those days dominated the city's skyline, was hailed as an astonishing example of engineering and architectural skill. The Harbour Bridge was, of course, the longest single arch suspension bridge in the world. And there were other marvels — the world's longest stretch of straight railway-track; the Burrinjuck dam, unique in the world, or was it in the Southern Hemisphere? 'Isn't this the most wonderful country on earth?' people in the streets would say to you, without a hint of self-consciousness or irony. In some ways they were justified; though, in retrospect, it strikes me as entirely characteristic that these litanies rarely if ever included natural marvels. Many years were to pass before we became aware that there were, indeed, wonders to behold, though not of the man-made sort.
In this cultural and moral climate, my parents and I embarked on the task of assimilating. For some of us the task was easier than for others. Naturally I, as an eleven-year-old, experienced less difficulty than my middle-aged parents. They, in turn, came closer to being absorbed into Australian society than many of their contemporaries, largely because circumstances forced us to live away from those Central European enclaves which were already in existence by the early fifties. But the attempt was ultimately futile — though its futility did not come home to us for very many years. Intrinsically, full assimilation is impossible. At the simplest level, there is nothing you can do about your physical features, no matter how many unconscious fantasies you might entertain about becoming truly Australian. Being Australian, then as now, meant possessing the physical characteristics of people whose forbears came from the British Isles. I became aware of that truth with particular poignancy when I returned to Budapest, the city of my birth, after an absence of more than forty years. My first reaction as I got out of the train and began walking along a noisy, crowded platform — a scene that conjured up the look, indeed the smell of the Balkans — was amazement at seeing all those funny little people milling around me. It took more than a moment's reflection to realise, with a mixture of shame and distress, that I am one of those funny little people.
There are, naturally enough, deeper and much more significant reasons why any naive attempt at becoming absorbed by an alien society must prove futile. I am no physiologist. I do not know to what extent cultural characteristics, in addition to the physical, are encoded in one's genes. But it is evident — and should have been evident to all of us in that dreamtime of the late forties and early fifties — that you cannot discard the complex, contradictory but fundamental reticulation of manners, ethical priorities and social conventions, in short the individual's cast of mind, which are the outward and visible signs of an inner cultural reality. Trying to deny or to reject them makes you run the risk of becoming a simulacrum, a pretence, or, in the worst instance, a parody. You may, it is true, become proficient in the language. It is easy enough to realise that it is not polite to sprinkle salt over your food, whereas placing it in a little heap on the side of the plate (anathema to Central European notions of good table manners) is entirely acceptable. You notice soon enough that forks should be held with the tines pointing downwards, and that you must spoon your soup away from, rather than towards, your person. But you cannot change the intimate, deeply-ingrained, essentially mysterious core of the personality which seems to be implanted very early in life — perhaps stamped on at the moment of birth, in the way that newborn babies are tagged with name-bands.
Some of us are better parodists than others. Some, perhaps because of a neurological or biochemical deficiency, prove incapable of achieving the confident mimicry others acquire with relative ease. Yet even if you have managed to assume the superficial characteristics of an alien culture, the feat always retains some elements of parody. No matter how thoroughly you have been absorbed by your adopted society, and even if you have been accepted within its structures, as I have been, your otherness cannot be expunged. The last turn of the screw may well be that the more thoroughly assimilated you are and the more you come to think of yourself as an integral part of your adopted society, the more you are likely to be troubled by confusions of identity, by the anxiety of living in a vacancy between two worlds.
These paradoxes are frequently overlooked in the often simple-minded and pointless controversies about multiculturalism. One essential consideration tends almost always to be ignored. In the same way as it is impossible to become thoroughly assimilated, to wipe the slate clean at the moment of arrival in a new land, so it is futile to imagine that someone's heritage may remain entirely unaltered by a new environment. Preserving an 'ethnic' identity, in the manner implied by the propagandists of multiculturalism, may also be tantamount to cultural and social isolation. To encourage people to retain their native language is sensible for the simple reason that the more languages you know, the more open-minded, intellectually alert and perceptive you are likely to be. To put on your national costume and perform folk dances on the steps of the Opera House is, no doubt, great fun. The danger arises where such commendable and harmless activities are accompanied by attempts to lock people into ethnic enclaves or ghettoes, to seal them off from the society in which they must live, in the name of preserving an often dubious cultural heritage. I do not find it shocking that toddlers in the streets of Sydney should be heard babbling in outlandish regional dialects. But it is shocking that many of them, by the time they reach school, have acquired no more English than the phrases and slogans they have learnt from their daily bombardment by television.
It is not possible to achieve assimilation in the simple sense in which it was urged on us in those innocent days before politicians saw the prospect of enough votes to make them bother about us. Moreover, the impossibility of full assimilation has as much to do with the nature of Australian society — or indeed any society — as with the newcomers' predicament, their linguistic clumsiness, and their frequent prejudice against the people among whom they have chosen to live. I am not referring merely to the average Australian's unwillingness to accept anyone different, foreign and therefore deemed to be peculiar, though that was certainly a reality in the forties and early fifties, and is still to be encountered today. Rather, all migrants must face the insoluble problem of deciding which element of Australian society they should endeavour to join or adopt as a desired model.
A basic and fatally flawed assumption behind demands for assimilation is the fantasy that the society in which the newcomer has settled is uniform and homogeneous. Newcomers themselves willingly accept such myths because to them their bewildering new world inevitably seems harmonious, lacking in variety, tension or enmity. Recognising that the true state of affairs may be very different often takes considerable time. I cannot recall the exact point during the course of my education into Australian ways at which it became apparent that this world contained deep and unhealing scars. One incident nevertheless remains memorable because it revealed for me (and even more tellingly for my parents) that this seemingly uncomplicated and bland society was torn by passions of the sort that were only too familiar to people who had grown up in Eastern or Central Europe between the two wars. The shock of that recognition was sharper because it occurred not in one of those seething urban ant-hills of Europe, where political, religious and racial rivalries may so easily arise, but in a peaceful, sleepy and in many ways idyllic setting.
* * *
After several months of moving about in the inner suburbs of Sydney — a boarding house in Neutral Bay, two rooms with use of kitchen and bathroom in Hurlstone Park — my parents were lucky enough to find a self-contained flat in Epping, at that time more like a country town than a suburb of a large city. The flat itself was nothing much to speak of, no more than the perfunctorily converted servants' quarters of a handsome liver-brick bungalow, but in those days of acute housing shortages finding it represented a piece of extraordinary good fortune. One of its three rooms had no window but contained a large and entirely unusable fireplace. There was a kitchen and a lean-to, as well as a bathroom of sorts. The choko-covered dunny under a superb jacaranda proved a source of constant terror on account of its thriving colony of red-back spiders, which we were taught to disperse in the approved manner with a rolled-up newspaper. Nevertheless, securing that flat through the good offices of an acquaintance who had settled in Sydney some time before the war was the one bright spot in the otherwise bleak and depressing beginning of our life in the new land.
Nowadays Epping is a shrine to middle-class affluence. Its streets are paved and guttered; dunny-men no longer trot down its driveways with fragrant cans balanced delicately on their shoulders. Outside the primary school, where in the late forties one or two children still rode to school and tethered their horses to a hitching-post, a line of Volvos, Saabs and four-wheel drive monsters waits each afternoon for the classrooms to disgorge their well-clad and properly shod youngsters. The shops nestled around the railway station display those heathenish goods — garlic-laden salami, capsicums, strange smelly cheeses — which, when I lived there, were almost entirely unknown: their gradual advance was greeted as the vanguard of the forces of darkness. Epping in the forties was, in other words, an example of an Australia which has disappeared entirely from Sydney, though I suspect that it survives in isolated pockets of Greater Melbourne.
To our European eyes it gave every indication of village life. In retrospect it is possible to be nostalgic about its sleepy charm, a quiet place where cows grazed in the paddocks behind several of the streets, a world where front doors were rarely locked, where you walked to school barefoot on hot bitumen, or in a sea of paspalum, wearing your threepenny imitation pith helmet. It was, nevertheless, a dreary place. Most of its handsome turn-of-the-century bungalows and two-storey houses were encrusted with fibro, corrugated-iron or timber excrescences: a verandah boarded up here, a lean-to added there. Elsewhere, weatherboard cottages leaned in various states of disrepair, victims of crumbling foundations, dry rot and termites. Only the gardens showed any signs of care and ownerly pride. And everywhere paspalum: the mile-long walk to the railway station (or at least as far as the few streets with properly made footpaths) had to be negotiated through acres of the weed which threatened to ruin your clothes with its burrs and oils, and harboured, besides, such dangerous nasties as ticks and snakes. The locals walked on the road; we had been too much regimented in our previous life to dare to do that.
Epping was at the time (and may well be still) the heartland of the nonconformist bible-belt. There was, it is true, a solidly constructed Church of England not far from the shopping centre, but the true spiritual aspirations of the place were represented by the Methodist, Baptist and Congregational establishments. One neighbouring family seemed to spend its entire Sunday walking back and forth between their place of worship and their house-cum-chicken-run at the bottom of a very deep battle-axe block. Sunday schools and youth fellowships flourished. The School of Arts in the shopping centre represented the secular arm of this firmly entrenched tradition: it provided a venue for various Lodges and Orders, into one of which I was briefly inducted as a teenage aspirant, in a ceremony that bore some resemblance to an amateur performance of The Magic Flute.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Inside Outside by Andrew Riemer. Copyright © 1992 Andrew Riemer. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
PREFACE,OUTSIDE,
THE CUSTOMS OF THE COUNTRY,
OVER THE RAINBOW,
BEFORE THE FLOOD,
AFTER THE FALL,
A NIGHT AT THE OPERA,
INSIDE,
THE LANGUAGE OF THE TRIBE,
THE LIVING DEAD,
BRITISH SUBJECTS,
HOMECOMING,
BETWEEN TWO WORLDS,