A First Place

by David Malouf

  But regard goes both ways. When we look at the British we see both what we were to begin with and what we have turned out not to be; we also see the way they see us.

  Sometimes this is condescendingly or with contempt. It was certainly the way we felt their regard in the nineteenth century and for much of the twentieth, and the way some of them, we feel, see us still. Think of all those opportunities for a cheap laugh, in Oscar Wilde for example, simply by dropping the word Orstralia or Orstralian into an otherwise ordinary conversation. The point of the joke is almost always the extraordinary presumption on the part of Australians to be taken seriously. That, and the immediate association of Australia with the kangaroo, a comic creature if ever there was one, not least in its presumption in rising up, in an almost human way, on its hind legs and begging like a dog or offering to box. We get an early glimpse of this in that occasion when ‘the Great Cham’, Dr Johnson, in a mood of extravagant high humour, hauled himself up on to a table-top among a party of friends, and with his great haunches lowered and his paws tucked neatly under his chin, made hopping motions in mimicry of the curious beast that had been described to him by his acquaintance Mr Banks.

  We reacted to this in different ways. Some of us tried to disguise what we were and win the regard of the English by practising as complete an imitation of them, including their prejudices, as we could manage – not excepting their prejudice against ourselves. Or, filled with resentment at the injustice of being disregarded and misread, we practised a reciprocal contempt and did everything we could to be as little like them as rationality allowed – given that what we had inherited from them was for the most part rational and good, including, not least of all, a high opinion of rationality itself. Or we settled, very sensibly, for what we were; always with a certain awareness of their scrutiny and their eagerness to criticise, but in the determination to do better than they had done. That is, we needed our awareness of their scrutiny to keep ourselves up to the mark. The one thing we did not do was pretend they were not there and looking.

  They too reacted in different ways. Australia would always be, from their point of view, an offshoot and imitation. The question was whether, as a variation, it was inferior or ‘improved’. And increasingly in the nineteenth century, for good family reasons, Australia was in their thoughts. Dickens, when all else failed, sent his characters there – the Micawbers and the Peggottys in Copperfield, along with little Emily and poor Mrs Gummidge, and that lovelorn youth Augustus Moddle in Chuzzlewit. He also sent two of his sons there, one of them at the tender age of sixteen, and Trollope sent one of his sons as well. Odd to think how often, and how poignantly, Australia, far off in the other part of the day, must have been on the mind of these very English writers; in the morning as they settled to their daily quota of words, and in Dickens’ case, late at night as he set out on his gloomy wanderings through the town.

  The judgement in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, except among those who themselves expected to be improved, was that Australia was inferior.

  Charles Darwin, who arrived in 1836 on the Beagle, is impressed by the country’s extraordinary development in just five decades of settlement. ‘It is a magnificent testimony,’ he writes, ‘to the powers of the British nation … My first feeling was to congratulate myself that I was born an Englishman.’

  But his second feeling, as an Englishman, was that for all that Australia was ‘a new and splendid country – and a grand centre of civilisation’ – it wasn’t as yet so civilised that he could imagine living there. ‘My opinion,’ he writes, ‘is that nothing but rather sharp necessity should compel me to emigrate.’ And his final assessment is devastating: ‘Farewell Australia! you are a rising child and doubtless will reign a great princess in the South: but you are too great and ambitious for affection, yet not great enough for respect. I leave your shores without sorrow or regret.’

  The balance in the past two or three decades seems to have shifted. The difference is, that when the British look at us now, what they are seeking is another and different vision of themselves: themselves caught in a new light; under new and warmer skies and after 200 years of another and less disappointing history. And this is equally true of the thousands of young backpackers who flock here on working holidays and those older visitors, themselves too old to change, who come to spend a month or two with sons or daughters who have married and settled here and made lives for themselves of a kind their parents could scarcely have imagined.

  Not long ago, during a visit to Edinburgh, I decided to take a couple of days off and look at somewhere else in Scotland. I chose Dundee. I got in late at night, and stepping out of my hotel after breakfast next morning found myself stopped dead on the pavement, overwhelmingly flooded with a Proustian feeling of time regained. I was back in Brisbane in, say, 1941. The smells, the bodies and faces of the people around me in the street, something indefinable in the whole atmosphere and style of the place, had taken me back. And that was the clue, of course: style. I hadn’t stepped back in time, or into a place where time had simply failed to ‘move on’. What I had encountered was something that was continuous in this place but which Australians had long since abandoned – when? sometime in the fifties, perhaps – and so completely that this, the original, which I found so immediately recoverable, must for most of us be no more now than a distant memory, and for young people so entirely foreign that they might feel no connection with it at all.

  We get some sense of this from Max Dupain’s famous photograph of women in a meat queue: the uniform black straw-hats, and the grim determination with which they are clamped down over the brow; the whole shape and expression of these weathered faces, the mouths either toothless and sunken or filled with dentures so ill-fitting they can barely be managed. This is how a poorer age looked, a time of pinched horizons and few amenities, of gas or chip-heaters in unheated bathrooms, a single cold-tap over the kitchen sink, an ice-chest with a daily delivery by an ice-man who was always on the run, with a great dripping block at the end of steel claws and yesterday’s soggy newspaper-wrappings to be got rid of.

  It is a time but also a style. It is Brisbane or Sydney or Melbourne in the late thirties and early forties, but it might equally be Scunthorpe or Cork. A time of boils and chilblains and whitlows, and mouths open wide each morning in the winter for the daily spoonful of cod-liver oil and malt, with a block of camphor in a flannel scapula round our necks.

  All this, along with Milk of Magnesia, castor oil in its own blue bottle, and Antiphlogistine plasters to be boiled up and slapped on the chest, is so ancient and unimaginable, so unlike any Australia that most Australians have a personal experience of today, that we might be talking of galingales and syllabubs or the relics of saints. It is my childhood.

  We went away most weekends, piled into our huge ’27 Hupmobile, with its reinforced canvas top and snapped-down celluloid windows, to a caravan ‘down the Bay’ that my father had built in our backyard with the help of an ex-ship’s carpenter called Old Pop. To Scarborough, a quiet still-water beach with a wooden slippery-slide at either end and the sandhills of Moreton Island on the not-so-distant horizon.

  At Redcliffe, a mile away by road (two if you walked it the Beach Way, round the cliffs), there was a skating rink and an English-style pier with big silver weighing machines, flipper games with two little teams of footballers in painted jerseys and shorts, and a row of peep-shows. On the other side of the road, the Redcliffe Pictures: Abbott and Costello and Rita Hayworth, but also Gracie Fields and George Formby, and from the Redcliffe Newsagent’s our weekly supply of comics. English of course: Radio Fun and Film Fun.

  At low tide we play beach cricket or Red Rover – a game known in other states as British Bulldog – and on Saturday nights we go with our parents to the Saturday Night Dance at the School of Arts, where we do the Progressive Barn Dance, the Albertina, the Modern Waltz, the Gipsy Tap and the Pride of Erin.

  This is the old world translated – rather imperfectly
, of course, as any English person recalling the real Scarborough might have told us. Perhaps because there were so few signs in it of modern times, the Americans when they arrived, in 1942, found it oddly ‘British’ and quaint. For us it was neither. It was Australian and where we were.

  Modern times began for us with the end of the War. The Surf, bringing with it an awareness of ocean rather than bay – the Pacific and its culture of Casben swim-shorts for men and bikinis for women, sun-tan oils, thick-shakes, beer gardens, drive-ins – replaced the old still-water sea-side world of the English watering-place.

  Southport, near Brisbane, as its name suggests, had been such a place since the early years of the century, its sleepy waters closed in by The Spit, its pier ending in a vast picture-house where you could see the water glinting through the floorboards as you watched a Tarzan or Bette Davis movie.

  Almost overnight it became a backwater. Now it was the surf-beaches that ran south of it that were all the go. Over the next decade their dunes were reclaimed and levelled; the little settlements of one-storeyed fibro houses along the coast linked up and became continuous; the swamps behind were drained to create canals and islands. New and more exotic names – the Isle of Capri or Florida Keys – replaced older ones like Brighton and Ramsgate.

  What was under way was the move from an English to a West-Coast/Mediterranean style – outdoor café-tables, espresso coffee, gelato, octopus, rocket and parmesan salad – and that obsession with ‘look’ that is about as far as you can get from the joyless austerity that still hangs on, in some parts of modern Britain, as a last grim assurance of non-conformist virtue and moral seriousness.

  The danger is that ‘look’ can become all there is, and there are times when Sydney especially comes perilously close. But the look is there and has become recognisably Australian enough to have travelled back to the UK under that label: as Australian cuisine, Australian clothes, Australian interior design, the Australian ‘lifestyle’ as it is exhibited daily in Neighbours and Home and Away.

  Peter Conrad has recently marked the distance Australians have come in the thirty years he has been in London from a bit of dialogue in the English series Queer as Folk. ‘Me though,’ a bemused Vince says to his mate Stuart of a new boyfriend. ‘I can’t be the best shag ’e’s ever had. ’E’s Australian.’

  For the English these days Australians have got away and become sexy.

  How far this has gone in Australia itself I judge from an exchange, not long ago, with a laid-back waiter in a bistro in Perth.

  ‘Do you do an espresso?’ I ask innocently enough, having recently had experience of Bermuda.

  There is just a flicker of pain in the blue-blue-eyes at this suggestion from an East Coaster that he might have washed up in some corner of Hicksville.

  ‘Ristretto, sir?’ he asks with a slight curl of the lip.

  ‘That’d be great,’ I say.

  ‘Coretto?’

  Put thoroughly in my place, I tell him meekly: ‘I don’t think we need to go that far.’

  Songs My Father Sang

  A good deal of the energy of an advanced society like the one we live in goes into diverting people; filling their time and their heads with whatever they need in the way of entertainment; some of it enlivening, most of it trivial. What mass entertainment means is that there should be something on offer, pretty well twenty-four hours in the day, for every taste. But none of it any longer has precedence, none of it exerts such a dominating influence as to constitute a mainstream: in that sense there is no mainstream. There is simply more and more variety, and with each year that passes, more and more specialisation: a many-stranded mix from which we are free to take whatever pleases us, whatever we please.

  It wasn’t always like this. When I look back on the world I was growing up in, in the late thirties to the early fifties, what I am struck by is how homogeneous the culture was, how little it offered, beyond its own particular kind of riches, to specialist or divergent taste; the degree to which all the members of a family, for instance, young and old, shared the same social occasions and enjoyed the same interests: card-games like Euchre or Five Hundred or Auction Bridge; the pictures on Saturday night. There was, as yet, no separate ‘youth culture’, though by the mid-fifties, the first signs of it – with Rock ’n’ Roll and the growing beach culture – were beginning to emerge.

  Families sang together round the piano on Sunday evenings, and gathered round the household’s single wireless – in those days a sizeable piece of furniture – to listen, along with millions of others, to such central items of the national culture as ‘The Amateur Hour’, John Dease’s ‘Quiz Kids’, ‘The Lux Radio Theatre’; or to dramatisations (on a commercial station, not the ABC) of such classic novels as Emma or Harrison Ainsworth’s Old St Paul’s, or to the long-running serials whose twists and turns of plot made up, next day, part of the nation’s shared conversation in school playgrounds, at Smoko in work-places, and over morning-tea at McWhirter’s or David Jones.

  This was the nation’s culture: low to middle-brow and very nearly universal.

  The ABC orchestras were there, and the ABC broadcast its own symphony concerts and played a limited range of ‘classical music’, but what made up the bulk of what was to be heard on virtually every radio station – along with the Big Bands, Broadway melodies and the latest hit tunes from the movies, some early country music and a whole range of popular ballads – was something called ‘light classical’, an odd mixture in which the enduring favourites, known to pretty well everyone, were Handel’s ‘Largo’, Liszt’s ‘Liebestraum’, Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C Sharp Minor, ‘The Nun’s Chorus’ from Casanova, and half a dozen arias from opera or operetta. Virtually nothing in this almost universal mix was Australian save by adoption. It was what might have been heard at that time anywhere in the UK, and with a few local variations, in any other part of the English-speaking world, from Christchurch to Calgary.

  Our tie to a particular world, to occasions and the memory of occasions, is intimately bound up with the emotions inspired in us by the songs we sing. Music, of all the arts, goes directly to the heart, catching us out sometimes when in another part of ourselves we have already moved on. There are a good many of us, I’d guess – committed republicans, rejecters of all things English, all things British – who still feel a shameful tug at the heart when we hear the first bars of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ or any number of those folk-songs, and hymn tunes and ballads, that once made up the fabric, not simply of what we listened to and sang along with, but of our deepest feelings. It is impossible, in the end, to disentangle what was merely personal in what we felt back there from what tied us to a household and its rituals, and through a dense intermingling of cultural associations that grounded us deeply in both place and time to at least two countries, one of them always Australia.

  My father, a Rugby League footballer and professional boxer in his youth, later the owner of a small trucking business, had little formal education, but was fond of music and played both the piano and the piano-accordion by ear. He had a high, sweet tenor voice, his model, of course, John McCormack, who had also been the idol, two decades earlier, of James Joyce. One of the strongest memories of my early childhood, in the late thirties and early forties, is of him singing in the car on the hour-long drive to Scarborough down the bay, or on Sunday nights round the piano – my mother playing while he sang ‘Mother Machree’ or ‘Just a Song at Twilight’ or, with one of my mother’s friends, ‘The Indian Love Call’.

  The locally-born son of Syrian (Lebanese) migrants, he was passionately Australian, but that his patriotism included strong feelings for England, a place to which he had no connection and had never seen, went naturally, it seemed to me, with what he took up from the English and Irish ballads he liked to sing. He would have said, I think, that Britain represented all he most admired in the world he had grown up in: fair play, decency, concern for the weak and helpless, a belief that life, in the end, was serious.

>   Of course even a culture that is on the whole coherent and uniform has its elements of the exotic, and of dissatisfaction and dissent.

  I did not think of us as exotic, we were too ordinary, too much like everyone else, for that; and despite the name and the ‘background’, my father was too Australian. But he did have mates who were different; disaffected in ways he was not – dissident even – and I remind myself that at the precise moment of which I am writing, though unknown to me, Clem Christesen’s Meanjin Papers was getting under way, which had a very different notion of what our national life might be, and that on the other side of the river, across Victoria Bridge, at The Pink Elephant, a late-night café run by Frank Mitchell and financed in part by the painter Donald Friend, writers, artists, and young men in lipstick and high heels were preparing to shock us out of our suburban complacency with explosions of Modernist colour and Expressionist visions of our world that by interiorising it, by allowing imagination a part in how we might regard it, would break the mould of our thinking, and with it the old ‘British’ culture in which we had for so long been comfortably stuck.

  One of my father’s friends from the Markets was Max Julius, who was a big noise in the local Communist Party. Through him we went to a showing of the first part of Ivan the Terrible at a big fundraising affair at the Town Hall for the Russian war effort, and I had my first encounter with Russian cinema, which I would follow up, a decade later, at the monthly showing of the latest Soviet extravaganza, at the Lyric, West End.

  What all this represented was a quite different line of interests and affections from the one my father followed. But it was an aspect of the ‘coherence’ of the time that he was in close contact with it, and while remaining fiercely loyal to Australia and to Empire, allowed it a place. I have no idea how he voted in the 1951 referendum to outlaw the Communist Party, but my guess is that for all his admiration for Mr Menzies he might have allowed even more to his misguided friend Max Julius.