In fact, she thought little about the consequences for others of the plans which would serve her objective of the moment. By the time Barry was ready to abandon the bush, recognizing the impossibility of the role in which he had been cast, one of his friends was en route to Coorain, to experience the same disillusionment, and the same postponement of realistic career plans. As it became clear that Barry’s experiment was not working, my mother tried the expedient of buying him a small plane and inviting him to Sydney to undertake the necessary training to fly it. Once he had his pilot’s license, he could escape the loneliness on weekends, and at least in theory, enjoy the best of both worlds.
It was one of my mother’s more endearing characteristics that she thought big about removing the obstacles to her objective of the moment. Thinking in large terms about the problem of reviving Coorain after the drought had stood us all in good stead. However, this tendency to the broadest possible attack on the problem could lead her to offer very large incentives to her children to fall in with her wishes, without much reflection on whether the wishes were really in her child’s best interests. Had she succeeded in keeping Barry at Coorain, the future would have been grim for him, working for a woman who could not bear her children to be independent. Fortunately, after eight months of determined effort Barry’s good sense triumphed and he announced that he was leaving Coorain for good.
At Abbotsleigh, I had fallen happily into the routine of the lower sixth form. All our efforts were now bent on preparing for the School Leaving Certificate examination which would come at the end of the following year. The school prided itself on the number of women who went on to the University, and on the number of honors earned by its sixth form. There was a general air of seriousness about our classes, increased by the departure of many of our more lighthearted friends for finishing school or country life after the Intermediate Year. We now had the best teachers, the most convenient schedule, and the excitement of a not-too-distant goal.
Better still, the course of study prescribed by the New South Wales Department of Education was intensely interesting. In our Intermediate Year, we had studied Australian history using a textbook of such comic inadequacy that we were reduced to gales of laughter in class by its flat-footed statements. All we were taught of Australian history was the story of the exploration of Australia, mostly a sad tale of headstrong efforts to cross trackless deserts, missed rendezvous, death from thirst or starvation. The matter-of-fact chronicle of disaster touched our sense of the absurd as we were asked to recite the dates of this or that ill-starred expedition, or to explain why Leichhardt or Burke and Wills had perished and where they had met their tragic end. We giggled also because of the sheer nonsense of treating Australian history as the history of exploration while neglecting the history of its settlement, the growth of its cities, the evolution of its constitutional arrangements, its place in the British Commonwealth.
Now in the lower sixth, we began to study modern European history, and the facts and figures we committed to memory helped to raise tantalizing questions about the world of our own day. Would there have been a Hitler without the Treaty of Versailles? Were the same mistakes being repeated in the peace treaty with Japan, being negotiated as we studied? We argued passionately about this, in class and outside. Our history teacher, Miss Hughesdon, took some of us to the Australian Institute of International Affairs to listen to John Foster Dulles discuss the terms of the treaty with Japan, so that we would gain the sense that we too were part of great historic moments. When I volunteered my views on the need for generosity with Japan at home, they evoked such an angry response that I began keeping what I was learning to myself.
Our French teacher, Mrs. Fisher, long jaded by years of teaching recalcitrant pupils, took the offensive on entering the room. “You, today you’re Public Enemy Number One,” was her frequent first utterance at the opening of a class. The enemy could be someone lounging listlessly, someone laughing, or someone she correctly suspected of not having mastered her irregular verbs. This approach could convert a French class into a war of nerves, rather than an attack on the opaqueness of language. After three years of desultory attention, I suddenly began to be able to read French and to engage in the pleasures of accurate translation. Language was no longer simply the words to which we gave utterance but a set of structures of miraculous complexity.
Learning another language made me hear English more acutely. For six years I had marched every morning into the school assembly and listened idly to the instructions and sermons of the day. Because we sat on the floor of the gymnasium for these meetings and the teaching staff sat on a raised platform, our eyes were usually directed at the level of the teachers’ feet. This meant that I developed careful anthropological classifications of people in terms of their footwear and the shape of their ankles but I retained not a word of the good advice delivered from the platform. Now, as though I had been deaf before, I began to hear Miss Everett’s beautiful voice lingering lovingly over the cadences of the King James Bible. I had loved poetry before because of its imagery, but now I heard language as a form of music, and I waited for the succession of readings marking the liturgical year as though I were a traveler looking for familiar places along a well-traveled path. This sense transformed my reading of Shakespeare, which I now began to read aloud to myself, instead of memorizing the blank verse with silent joy. I went with friends to the first postwar Australian performance of the Stratford Shakespeare company and became addicted to Elizabethan theater as though it were a drug. I could never hear and see enough. I could scarcely read a page without self-discovery, for it seemed as though my experience of life and the one expressed in the plays were identical. When Hamlet spoke of the smallness of man washed up “upon this bank and shoal of time … creeping between earth and sky,” it evoked my sense of smallness before the vastness of the bush. The inexorable swiftness with which the fates closed in upon Macbeth reminded me of my childhood. Henry V’s call to English patriotism seemed utterly contemporary. The plays were about great men and great events, larger than life-size human passions, causes to which people committed every ounce of their energy. Beside them, Sydney and its sunny suburbs, or the Australian pastime of sunbathing at the beach, seemed unexciting.
After I discovered Shakespeare’s sonnets, I began to bombard my teachers with requests for references to read about the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, and moved on from these to any book I could find about Tudor England. J. B. Black’s detailed histories of the Elizabethan Parliaments were just coming out, and I hung upon the appearance of the next volume as though I were reading a popular serial. These brought me to the character of Elizabeth I and my first model for a woman leader. It was a new and comforting idea—greatness in a woman. I had not been conscious of hunger for such an image, but it was immensely satisfying to learn about this woman with “the heart and stomach of a prince.” I used my pocket money to buy copies of the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, Marlowe and Ben Jonson. Their images and characters peopled my imagination far more than anyone in my everyday suburban world.
At the very end of my year in the lower sixth, when we had completed the required syllabus, our English teacher, Miss Shell, appeared with copies of T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral which she distributed to the class, instructing us to read it over the coming weekend in order to perform a proper play the following Monday.
Here was a new and astonishing discovery. Someone in my own day who wrote blank verse and who shared my feeling of distance from the emptiness of modern life. Eliot might have been writing about my feeling of detachment from the surface of things, and my longing for a world of real feeling and passion, instead of the polite proprieties of afternoon tea in the suburbs. I quickly borrowed The Waste Land from Miss Shell. It was a revelation. Here was what I took to be an English poet whose attitude to nature was not romantic, who mentioned deserts and whitening bones. It was great poetry about a landscape I knew. No one told me Eliot was an American poet, or that his imagina
tion was rooted in a midwestern American landscape. I just knew that it resonated for me in ways English romantic poetry never could. I began to think that when I got to the University of Sydney, I would study English literature.
My final year at Abbotsleigh raced away. I was made a prefect, a status which conveyed many privileges for the ten or twelve senior girls chosen. We had our own study, a large room with a spacious bay window, a large study table, and comfortable shabby furniture. Our presence or absence at class was no longer recorded or questioned and our blazers were emblazoned with a special badge indicating our special role. Our corresponding responsibilities were to administer discipline outside the classroom. We were responsible for the decorum with which people marched to morning assembly, for their bearing during all formal school occasions, and for getting people in and out of classrooms when the school bell rang before and after every break. We could detain the unruly after school, assign punishments, or haul up some unlucky younger student, caught teasing or badgering another student, for a thorough dressing down.
Outside our study, we were models of decorum, but within our sanctuary we were a noisy, irreverent, and lighthearted group. One of our number, a gifted mathematician with shining aquamarine blue eyes and pigtails of unbelievable tidiness, straightened out all our confusions on mathematics homework. My good friend Robin and I, friendly rivals for the school history prize, coached people who were slow to get the point of history questions. Everyone argued vociferously about the interpretation of the English text of the moment, while those who had chosen biology instructed the group about evolution, and the physics and chemistry wing talked portentously about the splitting of the atom.
One of the pleasantest parts of the day came when we made our way to the study at lunchtime, produced sandwiches, tea or coffee, sat in a circle around the window seat, and talked about life. While several of us had been close friends for a number of years, our group, formed by Miss Everett’s selection, quickly settled into amiable collaboration, rather like a group of junior officers in wartime. Being Australian, we exchanged no deep confidences. Our talk ranged from current events to our favorite films and music, our parents and their vagaries, to the question of what we would do after finishing school. We were all economic and social conservatives and mirrored our families in rejoicing that the politically conservative Liberal Country party coalition had ousted the Australian Labor Party in 1949, and defeated Labor’s plans to nationalize Australia’s banks. We were also aesthetic conservatives. Our tastes in music and art were conventional, and although we were living in a period of great artistic achievement in Australian painting and literature, we had registered very little about it. Our favorite films were British, the music we hummed American, and the clothes we wore derived from British and French fashion.
As young women, we were in an anomalous position. Our school, whatever its colonial blind spots, existed to maximize the talents of its students, taught them to strive, whether intellectually, in athletics, or in seeking social eminence. Our group of prefects had been singled out as leaders and encouraged to take charge, albeit in minor and symbolic ways. While we lived within the boundaries of the school, being ambitious was rewarded, but as we approached graduation we had to resolve personally the contradictions which were observable within the ranks of our teachers about what should be our goals in life as adults.
Miss Everett’s message was crystal clear. We were privileged young women who owed it to society to develop our minds and talents to the limits of our ability. She let us know repeatedly about her hope that we would distinguish the school by the numbers of us who continued our studies at the University of Sydney, then the only full university in our city of close to three million. Other messages were more puzzling. Some girls’ parents, planning on their early marriage, did not want them to waste time in university study. Others were encouraged to think about something practical like nursing training, which did not take too long, and provided a limited but reliable professional skill. The message was clear that they would not be doing this kind of work for too long. Then there were clear injunctions from the adult world about what fields of university study were appropriate for a woman. “Not law,” we were told, “it’s not a good field for a woman. You’ll only end up trying divorce cases, and besides no good law firm would take you in.” I loved chemistry, but then there was the specter of Miss Allen and my undistinguished record in mathematics. “Don’t take science,” family friends advised. “There is too much mathematics, and besides, what would a girl like you do in an industrial laboratory?” The things that were “nice for a woman” to study were unintellectual, like nursing, physiotherapy, or occupational therapy, or strictly decorative, like music or a foreign language, subjects which only the strangest parents thought their daughters might pursue professionally.
My mother favored “something practical” like medicine. A woman needed a strong professional training before any thought of marriage, she said. One never knew whether a marriage would last, or when one might be widowed, and a woman’s most precious possession was her economic independence. I didn’t much like the idea of caring for sick people. My years spent caring for the emotional needs of others made me long for some wonderfully abstract study, elegant, clear, free of messy human demands.
Miss Shell and Miss Hughesdon, my English and history teachers, swung the balance. “It will be a great loss if you don’t go on to do further study in history and literature,” they told me. “You could do outstanding work.” I didn’t know what was involved in doing outstanding work, or where the study of English and history might lead, but if they said so, I was ready to follow their advice.
As my time to leave Abbotsleigh approached I suddenly realized how much I had come to love the place. I forgave it its foolishly hot uniforms and its genteel rules of behavior; I even forgave some of its less admirable pretenses. It had given me a secure and orderly environment in which to grow, and adults to admire who took it for granted that women would achieve. Moreover, it had been a haven of sorts from the pressures of home. Each morning when I left there was no challenge about my departure, nor after I became a prefect was there any challenge about the time I came home. It had also given me friends with whom I could grow slowly from childhood to adolescence. In our time there, we had all come to accept one another like comfortable pieces of furniture, and no longer had to earn one another’s approval. I had almost forgotten my paralyzing shyness during my seven years as a member of this companionable group. Now I began to wonder how I would manage without them.
I knew I couldn’t cope with the world outside my family and school yet. I’d never managed to learn to chatter easily with strangers, partly because my home and family wasn’t the kind I could chatter easily about as most young people my age did. The silence in our house was palpable. After her abortive interest in psychic research, my mother had settled back into her solitary ways. There were no laughing parties of young people coming and going, because my mother’s sense of what was appropriate for entertaining the young simply didn’t fit with the way my classmates lived. Even had I been able to persuade her otherwise, the effort of having company exhausted her, and I knew it was better to leave well enough alone. My party clothes hung unused in the cupboard after our fling on our cruise to Ceylon. There was literally no occasion to wear them. My weekends were spent in reading and gardening, and doing errands for my mother. We lived together like an elderly couple with an iron routine which was never broken. If the preordained order of things was interrupted, my mother became flustered, didn’t sleep well, and suffered from headaches. When I went to the houses of friends, I would look hungrily at the fathers and mothers who were quietly amused by their sons’ and daughters’ scrapes, and wish above all else to have a normal family.
But there was no getting away from the fact that mine wasn’t normal, and that I was different from my school friends. So much of my time had been spent with my older brothers and their companions that I didn’t really find t
he high school boys my friends went around with interesting. Outside school I still spent all my time with adults. My obsession with Tudor history and Elizabethan drama did not make me an interesting conversationalist with young men who wanted to talk about last weekend’s football game, or the newest hero of the surf club.
My appearance didn’t give me many opportunities to be bored by young men. At seventeen there was no getting away from the fact that by the Australian standard of prettiness I did not measure up. Good-looking girls were slender, almost boyish, athletic, always ready for tennis or some outdoor amusement. Their skin tanned easily, and their blond hair curled delectably whether at the beach or on the tennis court. My hair was fair, but fine and wispily straight. No matter what efforts were expended to improve it, it always collapsed dolefully at the beach. My skin, easily irritated by the Australian sun, meant that a day by the sea resulted in scarlet suffering. Our household diet still made me overweight. My friends had slim ankles. Mine puffed and swelled by the end of a hot day. Later I learned that this was the result of a reaction to too much salt in my diet, but as this condition got worse in my last year of school, it meant that fashionable footwear reduced me to hobbling pain by the end of the day. My mother’s comments about my appearance were tactless. She wondered out loud how someone whose ankles were as elegantly slim as hers could have produced a daughter with such problems.
The Road from Coorain Page 15