Maria Katsonis & Lee Kofman (ed)
Page 9
When did I first become a rebellious daughter? When did I wilfully flout my parents’ expectations, snub their culture and way of life to assert my independence? The immediate answer is after high school and starting at Melbourne University in the early ‘80s. My new world was far removed from my traditional Greek upbringing and Baba’s strict rules: no parties on weekends, no socialising after school, basically no fun. These were frivolous distractions that interfered with my studies.
While I started conventionally, enrolling in a Commerce degree as dutifully expected, I soon realised I couldn’t stomach the rugger-bugger private school boys in my economics classes. I gravitated to the student theatre department where I found my kin on the stage of the Guild Theatre. Tutorials on the Keynesian model of national income determination were no match for the dazzling, kaleidoscopic life in student drama. I banded together with the other misfits and renegades to form our own theatre company, an enterprise that occupied my every waking hour. The trajectory my parents had planned for me before I was born – a tertiary education, a white collar profession and a good Greek marriage – began to veer off course as I found my own orbit in a universe the antithesis of theirs.
Lectures became irrelevant and I spent my days either backstage or in the upstairs cafeteria with my fellow refugees from the halls of study. The occasional sweet scent of dope permeated the air as we hunched over our strong espressos, deep in conversation, dissecting the latest production we’d seen at La Mama. In deference to my young nephews, I shall simply say I puffed on the occasional reefer but never inhaled. But I smoked unfiltered Gauloises, mastering the art of the drawback and blowing perfect smoke rings. Whenever I was flush with cash, I bought Sobranie, black Russian cigarettes tipped with a gold foil filter. These I saved for parties where I wanted to be anything but the good Greek girl from Caulfield.
I began to cast my own identity, including how I looked. My flowing curls gave way to a number 2 buzz cut which my mother hated. Once, freshly shorn from the barber, I had to knock on the front door of our house as I’d lost my keys. My mother took one look at my stubbly scalp and slammed the door in my face with disgust. She also disapproved of my new look fashion: ripped Levi 501s, a black t-shirt and workman’s boots. ‘Why don’t you wear a dress anymore?’ she’d complain. I couldn’t tell her yet that the dresses she wanted me to wear weren’t for me, just like boys weren’t. I’d look out of place in a flowery dress at the women only dances I went to in San Remo Ballroom or in lesbian bars like Penny’s where I began to explore my sexuality. Coming out to Baba and Mama as gay felt fraught with danger and I wasn’t emotionally prepared for the inevitable Greek drama nor the consequences of their hurt.
And then there was Carlton – magnificent, free-spir-ited, seedy Carlton, even more of a reason not to go home. Good Greek girls were expected to live at home until they married and I was destined to live with my parents until I summoned the courage to leave in my third year of uni. While living at home, I escaped the polite silence of eating with Mama and Baba for a bowl of penne amatriciana at Tamani’s (now Tiamo) before catching a screening of A Clockwork Orange at the Carlton Bughouse. Together with my theatre mates, I consumed alcoholic beverages at any number of watering holes like the Albion or Stewart’s. Our pub of choice was the Clyde on Elgin Street, scene of marathon drinking sessions that started at lunch time and continued until the barman called time. When the pub closed, we simply de-camped with a couple of wine casks to a nearby student household, usually a poky terrace furnished with beanbags, milk crates and makeshift book cases made of planks of wood and bricks.
After drinking till the wee hours of the morning, I staggered to Twins, an all-night greasy takeaway joint, for half a dozen fried dim sims and a fizzy lime soda to sober up. Going home smashed was out of the question as, more often than not, Baba was waiting for me no matter what the time, and that’s when the slanging matches started about how I disgraced the family. I tried to steel myself against the insults, deflecting them against an imaginary shield I carried home with me, but every now and then, some cruelty pierced the shield, and my heart. I accepted Baba’s angry tirades as the price I had to pay for my newfound freedom. Occasionally he locked me out of the house and I’d sleep in the car, the smell of riesling and fried fat exuding from my pores.
Some nights, I didn’t come home at all after an all-night bump-in in the Union Theatre. It was a badge of honour to stay up until morning, rigging lights and hanging scenery. We celebrated our endurance with a breakfast stubby of beer before fuelling up on a carbo laden brunch at Genevieve’s. On these occasions when I returned home, there wasn’t any shouting, just icy silences and crushing looks of disappointment.
While this was the heyday of my rebellion, its roots can be traced much earlier. A seed was planted in 1975, when I was 13, in what became known as ‘the Greek coffee incident’. It was the first time I didn’t blithely accept the mantle of being a good girl.
There’s an art to making Greek coffee (Ellinko kafe). First you need a briki, a small copper or stainless steel pot narrow at the top and wider at the bottom. You then add a demitasse cup of water into the briki together with a heaped teaspoon of finely ground Greek coffee and sugar if needed. A coffee with no sugar is called sketo, metreo has one teaspoon of sugar and a glyko kafe two teaspoons.
Place the briki over medium heat and stir briefly. You have to watch carefully as the coffee brews; when it comes to the boil, foam will rise and you need to remove the briki at the exact moment to garner the maximum amount of foamy crema (kaimaki). If you leave the briki on the stove for a fraction too long, the coffee will boil over. Carefully pour the kafe into a demitasse cup to preserve the kaimaki, sip and enjoy.
As a child I watched my yiayia make her ritual kafe every morning. She padded out in her blue flannel dressing gown and men’s corduroy slippers from the bedroom we shared. Sitting at the kitchen table, she crossed herself before drinking her coffee with a breakfast of rye bread, tomatoes and olives. Occasionally, it was just bread and a raw clove of garlic with salt when she wanted to ward off a cold. I waited patiently for yiayia to tip a small mouthful of kafe into the saucer which I slurped with relish. So began my love of coffee.
When visitors came, Mama served kafe in the saloni together with an ice cold glass of water. She brought the drinks on a sterling silver tray decorated with a lace doily and always in our best china and glassware which were kept in a walnut display cabinet. Everything in the saloni was reserved for special occasions. Sometimes the kafe was accompanied with a small dish of Mama’s glyko tou koutaliou, homemade sweet preserves of quince or cherries. Other times, the kafe came with a plate of koulouria, an orange scented butter biscuit traditionally baked at Easter. Mama made so many we ate them for months afterwards. If yiayia was in the saloni with the visitors, she surreptitiously dunked a koulouri in her kafe and slipped me the biscuit when no one was looking.
And please, when you are with Greeks, never ever refer to kafe as Turkish coffee. While purists will tell you they are one and the same, Greeks have claimed the brew as their own since 1974 when Turkey invaded Cyprus and nationalism rose to fever pitch levels. The truly zealous patriots will also lecture you about 400 years of Turkish occupation and the Greek rebellion against the Ottoman Empire in 1821 to claim Greece’s independence.
According to Baba, Lambros Katsonis was my great, great, great, great, great uncle. Hailed as a revolutionary hero, Lambros was a Greek naval admiral in the 18th century when the Ottomans ruled Greece. He enlisted in the Russian Imperial navy and joined the revolt of 1770 which preceded Greece’s War of Independence. Russian empress Catherine the Great honoured him with the Order of St. George, the highest military decoration for his bravery during sea battles. But when the Russians called a truce with the Turks, Lambros assembled a Greek pirate fleet of about 20 ships to continue the fight against a Turkish navy at least double his might. The Ottomans destroyed his fleet and Lambros escaped to Russia where he was granted an estate
by Catherine the Great. It is rumoured she then took Lambros as one of her many lovers.
With such a lineage, perhaps I was destined to rebel.
My father drank his kafe metreo style, with one sugar. He came home from work every day at five, carrying his battered brown leather satchel and the afternoon edition of The Herald rolled under his arm. Sometimes he’d conjure my favourite chocolate bar, a Kit Kat, from his satchel before laying out the newspaper on the kitchen table. He then brewed himself a kafe which he savoured as he read the paper. It was a half hour of quiet respite sandwiched between the rigours of a working day and the clamour of family dinner.
Baba migrated to Australia from Greece in 1957, the year after Melbourne’s Olympic Games and the introduction of commercial television. He followed Mama in order to marry her as she had arrived a year earlier to join her mother and two brothers in what the eldest described as the land of milk and honey. Opportunities abounded in Afstralia for Mama, Baba and their unborn children, while economic hardship blanketed Greece after World War II and the subsequent civil war. The influence of the European migrants descending on Melbourne had yet to be felt. When my parents arrived here, it was the time of the 6 o’clock swill and the most exotic meal available was a mixed grill with not a lamb souvlaki in sight.
Baba took up the panel beating trade, learning how to hammer dented car bodies and twist them back into shape, before spray painting the duco as new. He eventually opened his own workshop in the back streets of Richmond. I loved visiting Baba’s workshop, not just because it was opposite Ernest Hillier’s chocolate factory where the kindly ladies fed me samples. Baba looked so worldly sitting at the desk in his cramped office, satchel at his feet. Often there was an olive green accounting ledger spread out in front of him, his fingers tapping on an adding machine as he tallied the daily accounts. No wonder Baba wanted me to enrol in a Commerce degree.
In the main workshop, air compressors thrummed, spray guns hissed and hammers clanged as cars were restored to mint condition. I stood in the middle and inhaled deeply, the intoxicating smell of paint and thinners making me giddy. Like Proust’s madeleine, to this day the scent of a freshly uncapped texta instantly transports me back to Baba’s workshop where the brilliantly hued tins of paint were laid out like coloured Smarties.
One day, when I was 12, Baba broke from his usual afternoon routine at home. ‘Ella etho, Maria, mazi tha fiaksoume kafe’ (Come here, Maria, together we’ll make coffee.) He proceeded to teach me how to make a Greek coffee, step by step. I followed his instructions precisely and when I poured the kafe with just the right amount of kaimaki into his cup, Baba exclaimed ‘Bravo!’ and gave me a five-dollar note. Five dollars, what a fortune! I could buy my next record, Suzy Quatro’s Can the Can or Skyhooks’ Living in the ‘70s. I radiated pride when Baba pronounced the coffee as perfect.
The next day when Baba came home from work, he called out ‘Maria, kafe!’ and I ran to the kitchen, this time making the coffee without any coaching. Baba smacked his lips with pleasure after taking the first sip but this time there was no monetary reward.
The next day Baba called out ‘Maria, kafe!’ and the day after that and the day after that. Every day, week in, week out, the clarion call of ‘Maria, kafe!’ resounded throughout the house, summoning me from wherever I was. The novelty of making Baba’s kafe soon wore off and sullen resentment replaced my initial enthusiasm. Was I now destined to make my father’s coffee every afternoon? The short answer was yes.
For a year or so, I complied like a dutiful daughter until the day came when I didn’t want to make his coffee. It wasn’t as if I had anything better to do. I was probably watching television, something like The Brady Bunch, perhaps the episode where Jan was forever complaining ‘Marcia this, Marcia that... Marcia, Marcia, Marcia’. I ignored the first ‘Maria, kafe!’ as I switched on my selective hearing which I occasionally used at the dinner table when it was my turn to clear the dishes. After a few minutes, I also ignored the second more insistent, ‘Maria, KAFE!’ Up until now I always responded after the second call. The third ‘MARIA, KAFE!’ had a dangerous undertone as if to say ‘Ignore me at your peril’.
I dragged my feet to the kitchen, seething with anger. Why did I always have to make the coffee? It wasn’t fair. As I banged the tin of coffee on the kitchen bench, Baba scowled. I reached into the cupboard for the jar of sugar and that’s when I saw it: Mama’s cooking salt in an almost identical jar.
A heaped teaspoon of salt followed the coffee into the briki and I stirred the mix with satisfaction. Placing the brewed kafe in front of Baba, I hurried away to busy myself at the sink so I wouldn’t be looking directly at him when he took the first mouthful.
‘Phtt!!’ he spluttered, spitting it out. ‘Ti eine afto?’ (What’s this?).
‘I don’t know what you mean Baba,’ I said, feigning innocence.
‘Ella etho and taste this,’ he commanded.
I took a mouthful of the vile brew and tried not to gag as I swallowed. I faked an incredulous look of surprise, ‘Oh Baba, I must’ve mixed up the salt and sugar.’ Baba stared at me with suspicion as I waited for the inevitable explosion. It never came. Instead, Baba ordered me to make him another coffee. ‘This time, make it right,’ he said, his voice edged with steel.
I scurried to the stove and made him another kafe without incident just as I did every day from then on until Baba put a premium on homework in high school and the pursuit of straight A’s instead of his coffee. But as I brewed the replacement, I felt secure in the knowledge that I had a choice: to obey or disobey. I now knew I could deviate from the norm and didn’t always have to be the good Greek girl. It was a choice I didn’t fully explore until a decade later when my rebellion took full flight above the sandstone buildings at Melbourne University.
A MAN OF ONE’ SOWN
SUSAN WYNDHAM
My diary for 1969 has a cover printed with fashion images from Swinging London and a flimsy lock that long ago lost its key. I didn’t have much to hide as an 11-year-old, at least not until July 6 when I wrote: ‘I love Paul’, then on July 7: ‘I began my first period. Mummy was very nice.’
Those haiku-like lines capture me as a child teetering on the brink of womanhood, elated, reluctant, tipped over by my hormones. That night, when my body leaked a few rusty drops of blood, I tried to curl into my mother’s lap and sobbed into her shoulder, too well informed to be afraid I might die, but afraid all the same. On July 16 I reported only that the Apollo 11 astronauts, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins, had taken off for the first moon landing. The diary ends there, as we were all rocketing into the unknown.
That year, before most other girls reached puberty, I was tall for my age, top of my class, and felt a sudden rush of confidence. I fantasised that I was Olivia Hussey, the beautiful woman-child of heaving chest and breathy speech in Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet. I was infatuated with my sixth class teacher, Miss Everingham, who applauded my spelling, moulded my handwriting, and invited me into a small group she took out for ice cream cones after school. There were other fleeting crushes. I felt faint if the teenage boy next door smiled at me as he passed by in his army cadet uniform. And I was in love with the Monkees. My mother had taken me to their concert at the Sydney Stadium and I’d caught a comb Micky Dolenz flung from the stage. But ‘I love Paul’ was different. I fell for him at first sight and 14 years later we were married.
We met in the winter of 1969 on a night when my mother was taking her young sister and me to the ballet. Dressed up in a striped woollen dress and a hairband, I climbed into the back seat of our Mini Minor so we could pick up my favourite aunt. She was waiting outside her apartment building with the older man she had begun seeing and, beside him, his 16-year-old son, slender and blue-eyed, in shorts and long socks. As they saw us off, Paul’s white-toothed smile made my stomach fizz. He seemed so mature, so gentlemanly compared with the boys I knew. For the rest of the drive I interrogated my aunt about him and
from my theatre seat the dancers became just a chorus to my imagined pas de deux.
Seeing Paul was easy because he became part of the family – my step-cousin big-brother idol. My aunt and his father moved into a Victorian terrace house and Paul was often there with his Irish setters, helping his father with the renovations and charming us all with his cheerful attention, strong arms and enthusiasm for practical jobs. We drank tea amid the dust and walked the dogs in the park. Soon Paul was dropping in to our place for dinner on his way home from Maths coaching and the life of my tiny family grew more exciting.
I was a good girl then, closer to my mother than most girls of my age. We’d lived alone since I was a baby, and I told her everything, so now I could share my first love with her. None of us knew then how fateful my aunt’s choice of husband would be for all of us, but Mum must have wondered at her little girl’s intensity.
My parents had married too young, she at 19 and he at 23, and by the time I was born, nine years later, he was in love with another woman. After he left us, my father had been overseas or interstate for much of my childhood. When he was home, he was as attentive as he could be, taking me fishing, kite-flying and to the ABC television studios where he was an executive, bringing gifts from Vietnam or Disneyland, but he wasn’t part of my daily life. Once at school, when I was seven, our headmistress advised me to ask my father to fix a broken badge, and I responded with tearful melodrama: ‘I don’t have a father’. During my teens, he lived nearby with his wife and daughters, and we had a warm but formal relationship. He was worldly and handsome, with a smooth broadcaster’s voice, and took me to the new Opera House for concerts. But if ever there was a need to choose, I was on my mother’s side.