My mother surveyed the house tight-lipped. It was spotless. The sole focus of disapproval was therefore my behavior. She told me she was deeply disappointed in me, but that we would reserve the discussion of my multiple sins until after the examinations were concluded. For the remainder of the day a deep calm descended upon me as I turned to reviewing the fragmentary notes of the few lectures I had actually attended and glanced over the books assigned for the year. I was up and away the next morning before my mother appeared so that I could be at the University an hour at least before I had to begin the examination in the Great Hall. Despite a sleepless night, my sense of calm and detachment remained, so that when I took up the paper and began to write my head was clear. I was long past having examination nerves.
The examination was on Tudor and Stuart history, a subject about which I had been reading extensively since my early teens. My attitudes to study were still those of a high school student, so I didn’t realize that I was very well prepared for the examination. Being “prepared” in my book then meant having committed to memory everything the instructor said, all the notes of lectures, and key sections of the textbooks. Having failed to undertake this counterproductive labor, I was obliged to rely on my years of reading. It was astonishing how easily quotations came to mind to illustrate my points, and how broad I discovered was the spectrum of interpretations of Tudor and Stuart constitutional history I had read and could discuss. The map of Elizabethan London was in my head. I knew exactly the peregrinations of Cromwell’s Parliaments, and R. H. Tawney’s resounding prose from Religion and the Rise of Capitalism echoed in my mind as soon as I turned to discuss the dissolution of the monasteries and the Puritan Revolution. The resulting examination was more thoughtful and reflective than any I might otherwise have written. I hoped it would suffice and turned determinedly to tackling the obstacle course of three-hour examinations which came in rapid sequence during the next few days.
By the time the examinations were concluded, my mother’s lecture on my conduct was delivered more in sorrow than in anger. It was clear, she said, that I had frittered the year away through my foolish predilection for inappropriate company. Mine was a weak character too easily swayed by the influence of others, and I had doubtless wasted my year through my folly in spending my examination preparation time in partying when work and adherence to my mother’s plan was what was called for. Privately I thought I had scraped through in all my courses, but I listened to the rebukes and recognized the wisdom of agreeing not to err in this fashion in future. Toni’s cheerful attitude to the older generation had given me sufficient distance to listen dutifully, but pay no inner heed to the injunctions.
When the annual examination results were published just before Christmas, my mother and I were in Queensland for a Christmas holiday. For the first time in our lives we were alone at Christmas that year. Barry had taken the profits from his air charter business and used them to finance a journey of exploration to Europe. When his Wanderjahr was over he planned to buy a light aircraft and fly it home, exploring the Middle East and Southeast Asia along the way. For diversion my mother and I were spending the holidays at the small, unspoiled coastal resort of Surfer’s Paradise, about forty minutes’ drive south of Brisbane. We loved the slow pace of the town with its cluster of simple beach houses. A few unpretentious blocks of flats, and one modest hotel, hard by the miles of quiet, uncrowded beach. No Sydney papers reached such a sleepy little town, so we were startled when telegrams of congratulation were delivered from my uncle and aunt, and half a dozen other Sydney friends. My mother, who had been expecting to discuss my failure and lay down the terms on which she was prepared to support my studies in future, was taken aback. We agreed that I should drive up to Brisbane, find a Sydney paper, and return with the news. Finding a paper at Brisbane Airport, I scanned the list of passes for each subject and saw with horror that my name was not there. Then I saw it in the list of honors and prizes, and gradually it dawned on me that I had done very well. I drove back down the coast in a trance. My vindication was complete. I had come first in history, earned high distinction in English, and had ranked high in the class in psychology.
I had scored a smashing psychological victory. It was hard to see how such results might have been improved on, and since success was what counted for my mother, the basis for future strictures about my conduct had suddenly been completely undermined. Better still was my inner feeling that I had found something I could do well, and my new awareness that university study was about learning and reflection, not the cramming of texts and information. Now I had a purpose in life. I would take an honors degree, rank high in the class, and set about choosing between the variety of promising career opportunities which went with such achievement. Some of the inner tension went out of me because I saw a solution to the dilemma I could discuss with no one. If I were to become a success academically and chose a career which would take me away from Sydney, it would finesse the whole question of leaving home. My mother would never stand in the way of success. Moreover, if it were public enough, its sweetness might cushion the blow of my departure. I could remain true to my obligations to the family by covering the family name with honors. For the moment, the path ahead was clear. I could settle down to my studies for the next three years, and let the future take care of itself.
My mother’s apology for her mistaken assessment of my first-year performance was handsome. One morning shortly after we returned home, I found a jeweler’s box beside my breakfast plate. It contained a diamond and sapphire pin and a graceful note expressing pride in my achievements and an apology for her unwarranted disapproval. As I exclaimed with delight and pinned it on, I forgot my earlier insights about my mother’s lavish gifts. I was too excited by the future I painted in my mind to practice the most elementary caution.
The beginning of my second year at the University of Sydney was a heady time. People knew who I was. Faculty, hitherto superior beings clad in black gowns, now nodded as they passed me in the Quadrangle. Everyone taking history or English honors in the years above me began taking an interest in what I was doing. I started out taking a double honors program in history and English, enjoying the special status that this ambitious program brought. The pass course was taught by lecture to classes of hundreds of students whose relationships with faculty were of necessity limited. Each department prided itself on its honors program, however, which was based on very detailed seminar work with small groups of students, whom faculty came to know very well indeed. I loved literary studies as much as I did history, but there was no comparison between the level of intellectual challenge offered by the first year of the history honors program compared with that of the English Department.
In history we took seminars on modern European and British history, and on historiography. We plunged into reading Vico, Marx, Hegel, Burckhardt, Acton, Mannheim, Max Weber, and modern philosophers of history like Collingwood, without pausing to consider whether we had the background to analyze them critically. In seminars, our discussions were about the 1848 revolutions in Europe, the character of industrial society, the concept of alienation, the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism, the modern trend toward authoritarian mass societies, the differences between realpolitik and romantic notions of democratic liberal or socialist world order. Our instructors were the liveliest and most challenging minds among the history faculty: Alan Shaw, Oxford-trained, witty, urbane, and an inspired teacher; Ernst Bramstedt, a German Jewish scholar, of formidable intellect, exiled from Germany by the Nazis, an early collaborator with the great Karl Mannheim; Marjorie Jacobs, the one woman on the history faculty, learned, intellectually incisive, the first person I met who did not automatically see Australia and the world from a conventional European point of view. We spent six hours a week in the company of these fascinating minds, discussing the most central ideas and problems involved in understanding the twentieth century. The seminars never really ended because some segment of the student part of them moved off for coffee
and more talk. Milton Osborne, son of an academic family, brilliant, whippet-thin, radiating intellectual energy and insatiable curiosity, possessed the most interesting and rigorous mind of my fellow history honors students. Ken Hosking, a more reflective and more aesthetically concerned person, was the needed counterpoint in an argument. Rob Laurie, intent on a career of public service, provided a spirited defense of traditional conservative points of view. I found myself intoxicated by the pleasure of abstract ideas, by the company of others who shared my interests, and by the notion that one could get beneath the appearances of events to understand the property and class relationships which constituted the stuff of politics and culture. Milton and I, whose families were near neighbors, spent endless hours arguing about historiography, politics, life.
Marx and Engels opened my eyes to another way of seeing my parents and the enterprise of Coorain. Was it true that we were monopolizers of land, that Shorty and all my other shearer friends were expropriated laborers? Were the family values of thrift and industry simply signs that we were bourgeois? Who were the rightful owners and users of the land I had always thought to belong to us? I began to wonder about the aboriginal ovens I had played with as a child, and the nardoo stones we had so heedlessly trodden upon as we entered and left the house. What had happened to the tribes which once used to hunt over our land? For that matter, where had those huge, pink, delicately hollowed stones been carried from to end up on Coorain? Why had they been discarded?
I read The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, treating its subject as though it were about some distant and different race rather than my own sex. Certainly it reminded me of my mother’s outraged complaints at her investments and the product of her labor being subsumed in my father’s estate, but I had unthinkingly taken on the identity of the male writer and intellect present in all that I was reading, and did not take in emotionally that the subordination Engels wrote about applied to me. Obtusely, I did not pay heed to the fact that I was the only woman taking history honors that year, or how unusual I seemed to all my friends because I was aspiring to excel academically.
I was excited to find myself arguing about Marx and Engels with two intellectually able young union organizers, friends of Milton’s, who were history honors students in the year ahead of me. They were tolerant in the kindest way about my “best girl’s boarding school” appearance. They sent me off to collect one of the free sets of the works of Marx and Engels handed out by the Communist Book Shop in downtown Sydney. “Go on, Jill, why pay for them? The Party members won’t eat you,” they urged me as I teetered on the brink of paying good money for these necessary texts. “You’d better park that fancy grey Rover up the street so they don’t see what a bloody plutocrat you are.” I did as I was told, sidling anxiously through the door, and emerging half an hour later with my arms full of books and Party tracts.
When I reported the mission accomplished the next day, I produced shouts of laughter, and was escorted off to a real working-class pub for a beer and congratulations. For the first time, I glimpsed what a choice had been made when my mother took on her extra job to send me to Abbotsleigh. I liked the loud conviviality of my left-wing friends and the union “mates” they introduced me to. They were amused at the sight of someone like me in my proper North Shore uniform of cashmere sweater, grey flannel skirt, and English walking shoes, genuinely puzzling about Marx, but we were denizens of different worlds. Inwardly, although I had adopted the uniform of well-brought-up young women of my generation, I was curious about the other Australia I had fled so precipitously as an eleven-year-old. The shearers and station hands I’d known as a little girl were important figures from my childhood, as were the values I’d picked up at smoko time listening to the shearing team talk about life.
Whenever I went off to work on Coorain, I was conscious that academic Australia was made up entirely of urban social types, people totally different from the tough, hard-bitten men and women of the western plains. In the winter of 1955, when I made my first visit to my brother, now operating a flourishing air charter service in the western Queensland town of Charleville, where he had settled on his return from Europe, I had the same experience. Charleville was a town poised on the edge of real wilderness, with the uncharted land beyond the Cooper and the Diamantina rivers to the west, and the vast, isolated cattle stations of western Queensland and the Northern Territory in its hinterland. Here I saw another authentic outback world. Nothing could have been in greater contrast to the sedentary life of the urban scholar. Barry was up at four, the plane ready at sunrise, and we were off across trackless barren country until we landed at a lonely station or beside the drovers and a herd of cattle making their slow passage to the railhead three or four hundred miles away. On the return flight, having carried out the mission of the day and dropped our passengers, we were free to dive down to see some beautiful waterhole filled with wildfowl hundreds of miles from anywhere or to watch the herds of wild Arab horses which bred up in the isolation of the land across the Cooper, spread out galloping, manes flying, symbols of Edenic freedom. Juxtaposed in my mind when I returned to the city would be the image of some wiry Queenslander, body burnt brown above tattered khaki shorts, heaving around petrol drums at a backcountry airport, or the faces of the aboriginal stockmen who came into Charleville on their days off. I could make a class and race analysis of this world according to the categories I was learning in my history seminars, but I was also groping for a way to describe it which recognized its difference from the industrial working class in England or the jacquerie of the French Revolution. I was already reading the standard left versions of Australian history, but they didn’t satisfy me either. They had been written by sedentary people who had never lived in the bush and had no notion what settling it was like.
By contrast with history, the first year of English honors was heavy going. We learned Anglo-Saxon and read Piers Plowman, intellectual tasks which required lots of sitzfleisch, but didn’t offer much excitement. My fellow students were mostly headed toward master’s degrees and high school teaching. I could learn languages easily enough, but found it hard to care about them, except as they opened new literatures and new experiences to me. The literary part of the English honors program came in the second year, but by that time I had decided to concentrate my efforts in history and take the pass course in English.
There was more than enough excitement for me in the pass English course where we studied the modern novel, romantic poetry, and Shakespeare’s comedies. It didn’t matter that there were no seminars and discussion groups because the lectures were superb, balancing critical insight with historical context and attention to technique. I had taken to jotting down in the margin of my notebook all the references made to major critical works, and simply read them on my own early in the term before time was needed for essay writing. There were often long afternoons when I became so entranced by reading John Livingston Lowes on Coleridge, or Keats’s letters to his brothers and sister, that I noticed the passage of time only when the slanting afternoon sunlight disappeared and the lights came on in the Fisher Library.
I made many earthshaking discoveries in the Fisher Reading Room, as I sat at one of the long heavy mahogany tables, semi-oblivious to the rustling of other students’ papers and the counterpoint of whispered conversations. I was thunderstruck by reading Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh for our course in the modern novel. Toni’s sardonic view of her family had shown me someone who looked clear-eyed at family relationships, but Butler’s full-fledged satirical treatment of the Pontifex family and its shameless exploitation of the young, exploitation justified by parental authority and through the mouthing of empty pieties, left me feeling that I had been struck by lightning. I heard for the first time the self-deception in my mother’s often-repeated “Of course I want my children to be free to do what they want, travel where they choose, and not be tied to me.” “Jill’s very dependent on me,” she often told people, neglecting to mention th
at most of my trips away had to be canceled because she began to have dizzy spells. “I can’t stand parents who think they own their children,” she would announce, not mentioning her ferocious attacks on the character and motives of any friends I was incautious enough to bring home. From that afternoon in the Fisher Library on, I listened to her complacent voice differently. I still saw her as a moral agent, the heroic figure whose courage and industry had rescued us from disaster and sheltered me from my childhood insecurities, but these images were now paired with less favorable ones.
The afternoon I finished reading Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, for the same course, I sat for a long time gazing out the window of the library. In Stephen Daedalus’s argument with his student companion about claritas, I saw my ideal of intellectual life perfectly articulated. That was it. Like Stephen, I was seeking “wholeness, harmony and passion,” the claritas which was the equivalent of the Christian vision of God. Somewhere, somehow it must be possible to reconcile the conflicts of the emotions, the pains of life, the sense of beauty, in one unifying understanding. This was what I was doing here, what these stone walls had been built for, and why these books had been painstakingly accumulated. Joyce’s Dublin and the indictment of his Catholic education were merely a backdrop for me for this sudden vision of what the young were seeking from a university.
The Road from Coorain Page 18