Inside Outside

by Andrew Riemer

  The world of the espresso-bars at least confined rivalries to a personal level—these people never rioted at soccer games or stormed embassies and consulates. On an emotional and psychological level, however, they lacked the comfort and support that tightly-knit groups, fully aware of their cultural identity, are capable of providing. In such communities the various social and religious rituals, the continuity of the generations, and the sense that individuals are members of a group create a type of communal life far above the capacities of the Twenty-One at Double Bay or Quittner’s in North Sydney.

  The people of my parents’ circle belonged to a totally secularised society. The families of many of them had discarded their Jewishness generations earlier, and had intermarried with people of vague and ill-defined religious backgrounds. Some even came from families that had formally converted to Catholicism in the late eighteenth century, thereby escaping, theoretically at least, the legal restrictions placed on Jews throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the days before their emancipation. For that reason, for many of them who had thought of Judaism as a religion, the Nazi-inspired legal insistence that Jewishness was a race—something to be inherited, rather than embraced or discarded at will—came as a profoundly disturbing shock. They knew of course that in the past members of their families had been reviled, persecuted and slaughtered. But they had given all that away long, long ago—who could remember a time when garberdine was anything other than a type of cloth? They had to suffer the stigma of being Jewish, and the persecution that followed from it, without the spiritual comfort and sustenance that faith or commitment could provide.

  Even those who resumed after the war the customs and ceremonies abandoned in their parents’ or grandparents’ time did so in a sentimental way as a mark of respect for the sufferings of others. In few of them did it rekindle a sense of community, of belonging to a group, from which they could draw psychic sustenance and spiritual nourishment even in adversity. They lived in a limbo where they enjoyed the freedom to indulge themselves in the worst tendencies or characteristics of their heritage, becoming parodies of a way of life that had, for them, entered the realm of sentimental nostalgia. They evolved a mythology of loss, regret and yearning which, over the years, twisted their lives into bizarre and grotesque forms.

  The other great institution of this world developed into precisely such an essay in nostalgia, even though its roots were firmly located in the most commonplace of physiological facts. Most Central Europeans find it difficult, almost impossible, to endure a subtropical maritime climate. For many years I believed that, given sufficient time, I would come to tolerate humidity and high temperatures, the oppressive blanket of damp heat that hangs over Sydney for almost half of the year. I now know otherwise—I know that each February will be more difficult than the last. The discomfort of the climate led people, sensibly enough, to seek relief at high altitudes. The cult of the mountain holiday began, therefore, as a purely practical attempt to find a place that would provide a couple of weeks of escape from the heat and humidity of the coast. People soon discovered that on many summer days the Blue Mountains were as bad as Sydney; consequently they explored the high country near Mt Kosciusko. They began spending several weeks at The Chalet at Charlotte Pass, a blessedly cool place just above the tree line, where they could stay in a modest, old-fashioned, rather rundown establishment operated in a half-hearted, lackadaisical manner by the state tourist authority.

  We did not join the annual pilgrimage to Charlotte Pass until after the arrival of the beige Morris Minor. It was possible to get there by train and bus, but to all intents and purposes you needed a car. A certain camaraderie arose, therefore, among the people who made the trip each year: they were game enough to undertake the tiring and hazardous drive. For people who had not in most cases learnt to drive a car until middle life, whose eyesight and reflexes were frequently in decline, the drive to Kosciusko provided a daunting prospect. The road between Canberra and Cooma was an appalling ungraded dirt track, pitted with murderous ditches liable at any moment to cause major damage to suspensions and differentials. There were several unmarked level crossings where you were likely at any moment to have a train carrying material for the Snowy Mountains Scheme bearing down on you. From time to time the road would be blocked by a fallen tree. No sign of life was visible anywhere—the Central European fear of empty spaces had full play on that desolate stretch of road. We sighed with relief when we caught sight of the outskirts of Cooma or Canberra.

  The last few miles of the mountain road were narrow and unsealed, with treacherous hairpin bends. At many points two cars could not pass; one of them had to reverse into the natural bays that dotted the mountainside, a nerve-racking experience for people who had not, so to speak, been born with a steering wheel in their hands. The descent into The Chalet was a straight, steep gradient. Our Morris could not manage the ascent fully loaded; when we set out for Sydney at the end of our holidays, my mother and I would have to walk up to the road to make it possible for the little engine to chug its way up the hill.

  The first summers at Charlotte Pass were merely a prelude to the golden age of mountaineering in the sixties and seventies. Accommodation was primitive; meals were of the standard boarding house variety: clear soup each evening, with peas floating in it one day, slivers of carrot the next, pieces of potato on the third, followed by cold meat and hot vegetables, the mashed potatoes served with an ice-cream scoop according to the demands of immemorial custom. The lounge, where gentlemen were obliged to wear ties, and slacks for ladies were not tolerated, was a dimly lit affair decorated to look like a combination of a hunting lodge and a baronial hall. But it was all bliss.

  The air was cool, cold at night with even the occasional flurry of snow. During the day you could sit for hours in a sunny corner protected from the frequently biting winds, soaking up the sunshine in a way that would have been intolerable on the humid coast. At long last a use could be found for those furs rescued from the collapse of the old world or purchased in the affluence of the new. Admittedly there was nothing to do except to talk, to remember other holidays in other mountains long ago, and to play out the rituals of rivalry and enmity transported from the espresso-bars of Double Bay and North Sydney. In that clear air you could form a firm alliance with your mortal enemy of last week, or savour the drama of the ending of a lifelong friendship through a chance remark or a malicious slight. The few genuine Australians, usually weather-beaten bushwalking types, watched with bemusement these strange ceremonies conducted with flailing arms in an outlandish tongue.

  The annual holiday in the mountains soon developed into a ritual with its unique mysteries. As the number of people wishing to escape the heat of the city increased, other resorts—hitherto devoted entirely to winter sports, remaining closed for the rest of the year—began to exploit the opportunities offered by this new type of holiday-maker. At Perisher Valley, and later at Thredbo, lodges of sumptuous appointment and outrageous tariffs vied for their custom. An en suite bathroom became obligatory. The table d’hôte grew increasingly elaborate with masses of heavy, carbohydrate-rich food that could not be comfortably consumed on the coast. A nostalgia for a European climate was joined by a nostalgia for its food; the cool breeze and soothing sunshine, imported it would seem from another hemisphere, were complemented by the wonders of the cuisine.

  Distinctions and discriminations began to enter the rituals of mountain-lore. The fondue at Marritz was deemed to be incomparable, whereas the Matterhorn’s cream-cheese pancakes could not be surpassed. One establishment would be censured for its vulgar and flashy clientele. Another had too many families with noisy children. A third was rumoured to be none too clean. Everyone had his favourite place, the merits of which would be defended passionately. Families would pay ceremonial visits to people staying elsewhere in the valley; afterwards, over fondue or sauerbraten, goulash or schnitzel, the shortcomings and inconveniences of those establishments and the vulgarity of their patrons would be
dissected and examined with the elegance of a brilliant anatomist. More and more people flocked to the mountains throughout the sixties, eventually robbing the place of some of its former charm and distinction which the pioneers came to remember with affection. And, as a final outrage, the time arrived when Australians outnumbered ‘our people’ at these resorts.

  For some years, though, until age and infirmity kept more and more of these people marooned in their air-conditioned houses and apartments throughout the long summer, this extraordinary society, brought into being by the displacement of relatively large numbers of people from their familiar environment, continued to live out its fantasies among the stunted snow gums of the high country. Women in furs and men in expensive suede jackets would stroll arm-in-arm in front of the Candlelight or the Alpenhorn, whispering confidences, or stressing a point of view with expressive fingers and hands. In the evenings they would sit in well-upholstered lounges, discussing with earnest dedication the fine social distinctions to be drawn between various hostelries: their clients, the standards of service, situation and cuisine. For a few weeks at least they could live again the life they had lost, before they were obliged to return to the alien and incomprehensible world of the coastal plain, where the only thing to do was to make money. For a while they could continue the snobberies and niceties they remembered from former holidays in mountains or by the lakeside. They were keeping alive a dying world. The high, clear air quickened their responses, gave them a feeling of well-being, put a little colour in their sallow cheeks. Their eyes sparkled: they were alive once more. Years later, thinking about the ceremonies and rituals of this grotesque and sad little society, I came to realise how much it resembled that other dying world, the bright-eyed consumptives of Davos in The Magic Mountain, a book that few of those people strolling arm-in-arm in the alpine dusk had ever read.

  BRITISH SUBJECTS

  On the 29th of August 1952 my father and I took the train to the city, and made our way to the courthouse in Liverpool Street. We crossed an ill-kept yard littered with cigarette butts and torn newspapers, and climbed a short flight of crumbling steps leading to a gloomy vestibule. There we waited on a dark-stained bench, surrounded by groups of glum people, their backs hunched, many staring vacantly at the floor. Court officials busied themselves with clipboards, summoning now one now another of the people sitting around us. Finally my father was called. He went off with the official, leaving me stranded within the curious gaze of several bench-sitters. After a little time the official returned and conducted me into one of the courtrooms. The Stipendiary Magistrate asked me my name and duly recognised my existence. My father had just sworn allegiance to the Queen, and so became an Australian Citizen and British Subject. I, being a minor, crept in as an addendum. My mother, a mere woman, had to wait some months for the privilege of attending a sitting of the Court of Petty Sessions.

  In later years, the granting of citizenship through the courts came to be deemed intolerable. Receiving new members into the bosom of the Commonwealth in the company of people caught exceeding the speed-limit or involved in brawls outside pubs was considered inappropriate to the ideals society wished to foster among its new citizens. By the time it was my grandmother’s turn to be led into the fold, naturalisation ceremonies had developed their individual forms and rituals. We put on our best clothes, and drove to the municipal chambers in Hornsby, where she was made a citizen by Sir Edward Hallstrom, zoo patron and manufacturer of refrigerators, who made a platitudinous speech about koalas.

  It was a much more civilised ceremony than our appearance some years earlier at the courthouse. Yet that cruder, essentially down-to-earth way of putting an official seal on the newcomer’s request to be granted citizenship was, I think, a fundamentally correct way of going about things, even if it acquired unpleasant associations in the seedy world of the lower courts. The people sitting in that depressing vestibule, waiting to be had up on a variety of petty charges, came closer to representing the real world than those fantasies of communal life enacted in town halls and municipal chambers which never quite escaped the sense of make-believe.

  There notabilities made fatuous, at times condescending speeches. In later versions of these rituals, about-to-be-admitted members of the tribe were encouraged to deck themselves out in their national costumes. The ranks of New Australians in fancy dress receiving their certificates of naturalisation looked marvellous on colour television, but the custom served only to emphasise their otherness. This was not the real Australia in which traffic-offenders and pub-brawlers play a minor but undeniably real part. Naturalisation ceremonies became operettas, fantasies of multiculturalism, fundamentally irrelevant to the life of the community. Fantasy was the last thing that many migrants needed; they had indulged in far too many to require official sanction for indulging in more. People of my parents’ generation, at least, needed to come to terms with the frequently commonplace and at times depressing reality of the world where they had chosen to live. Turning up at the lower courts registered symbolically a desire for an engagement with reality—that you were now entering into the fabric of Australian society, that you had come under the dispensation of the law of the land, with all its benefits as well as its prohibitions.

  Nobody congratulated us as we left the courtroom to be replaced by a Drunk and Disorderly or perhaps a Break and Enter. And we, as we stepped out into the winter sunshine, into the messy life of the wrong end of town, felt relief rather than elation. Our last formal ties with a world of brutality and horror had just been broken—though my mother was obliged to languish for a little longer under the technical burden of being a stateless person. The curious and disturbing ambivalence of postwar migrants towards their new home came into particularly clear focus on that occasion. My father was grateful that he had been granted citizenship; he did not feel that he had done Australia a particular favour in deciding to put our relationship with it on a legal and so to speak permanent footing. Yet my parents knew that naturalisation would not substantially alter their difficult and frustrating attempts to come to terms with the world around them, and that they would always remain alien, whatever their legal status.

  A couple of years after my father and I made our appearance at the Liverpool Street court, my mother developed certain alarming symptoms which required thorough investigation in hospital. We set out in the blue Hillman Minx that had replaced the little Morris Minor, tense with the anxiety of people who find it almost impossible to deal with the normal disasters of life. My father, at the best of times a carefully diffident driver, took special pains not to cause any distress to my mother, who was one of those people who believe in some sort of mystic magnetic attraction between cars: if two were near each other, they were bound to collide.

  On this occasion she was absolutely right. We felt a bang and a jolt as a large car demolished much of the Hillman’s boot. The driver, an irate gentleman, who would nowadays be described as tired and emotional, leapt red-faced from his vehicle, and, taking note of our appearance, began abusing my father in the customary jargon of the time with insults about refs, filthy balts and smelly dagoes. We pointed out to him that legally he was at fault. We mentioned that we were on our way to hospital for tests. He calmed down a little, but did not really get off his high horse, telling us that he was a Member of the House of Representatives, a power in the land, not to be crossed lightly. My father produced his driver’s licence, and managed to stammer out that this gentleman seemed to be our federal representative. A few days later, having no doubt ascertained the truth of this from the electoral rolls, the MHR sent a large bouquet of flowers with a note on expensively embossed parliamentary stationery offering to pay for repairs, expressing the hope that my mother’s tests would prove negative (which they did), and praising the contribution New Australians were making to this great country.

  The benefits of citizenship for people like my parents were clearly defined by that episode. They were legal and social, not at all sentimental or emotional
. Just because you had been granted a piece of paper with official signatures on it did nothing to alter your appearance or make you feel any more at home in a world which showed many, though rarely extreme, instances of hostility towards you. It gave you, nevertheless, a modicum of protection. For people coming from a world where officialdom had arbitrary and often limitless powers over citizens, such a benefit was of inestimable value. Even so, doubts and perplexities remained. During the various crises of the early years of the cold war, my parents were often alarmed by the possibility that their citizenship might be revoked if Britain, America and therefore Australia declared war on the countries that now lay behind what had come to be called the Iron Curtain. Menzies’s attempt to outlaw the Communist Party was a particularly ominous promise of what might come. My father was much relieved when the referendum was defeated; it seemed to him yet another instance of the fundamental good sense and political responsibility of the people of Australia, despite their frequent crassness, insularity and refusal, on a social level, to tolerate other than established ways.

  As for me, citizenship by proxy was merely a confirmation of what I thought I had already become: an Australian. Being an Australian implied, of course, adopting the customs of the country, not merely the formal acknowledgment that I was recognised as a potential citizen who would be entitled to vote in elections and to carry a passport in due course. Naturalisation put the finishing touches to my attempt to refashion myself, to suppress my European self, at a time when the structures of European society—to be endured on our holidays in the mountains, or when I was dragged off to visit my parents’ friends, or when intolerable creatures like the former landowner came to visit us—seemed to my adolescent self-righteousness entirely offensive and insupportable. My friends’ fathers would never be seen walking arm-in-arm in an alpine twilight. Admittedly, I didn’t much care for what I saw them doing on the rare occasions when I visited other boys’ homes—immersed in the racing-guide on Saturdays, rolling home on Friday evenings cross-eyed from the six o’clock swill, or else pulling weeds out of the front lawn with robot-like concentration. Yet so powerful were the forces driving me to conform, to seek acceptance by this world, that I allowed myself to experience no distaste whatever for its way of life, reserving my anguish and discontent for my tirades (delivered in Hungarian at the top of my voice) to my unfortunate parents about their frightful friends and acquaintances.