by Alex Miller
When I saw Kevin Rudd on the television and heard him say, in the bitter tone he invoked on that occasion, words to the effect that refugees who sought sanctuary here by boat would never set foot on Australian soil but would be banished to a prison camp in a country that had no tradition of dealing with immigrants or refugees, and when no one resigned from the Labor Party in protest at this, I wanted to go into a state of denial. I didn’t want to deal with it but wanted to go on as I had been, believing in the generosity of this rich country towards those who over the past two centuries have sought refuge here. I am still trying to go on believing in what was once our genuine acceptance of a common humanity with those in need of our protection and care, a great Australian quality if ever there was one. Surely, I tell myself, there has been a misunderstanding. Surely Australians are still the generous people I once knew. I want to believe we will turn around and admit our mistake and be big enough to offer a gracious apology and go ahead and build centres here in our own country, as we once did for migrants from the Baltic countries and other far-flung places from which they had fled cruel regimes. Surely we will find the decency to deal with the problem of refugees arriving here by boat in our own country. Surely we can’t go on deciding not who comes to Australia, but who goes to Manus Island. It is a Guantanamo solution and we all know it is immoral and deeply un-Australian in its meanness. A great irony in this situation is, of course, that Afghans were some of the earliest successful settlers in this country.
But does all this really concern you and me? I mean, we’re a rich country, so can’t we just enjoy our good fortune and get on with our beautiful lives without castigating ourselves over the fate of the poor folk we’ve sent off to Manus Island and other concentration camps? I mean, clearly they made the wrong decision when they gave their money to the smugglers and stepped on board those leaky old boats. Is it our fault they did that? Why spoil such beautiful beach weather with all this soul-searching and questioning of where we stand morally today as a nation compared to where we once stood, in those good old days when we made refugees from tyranny welcome among us no matter how they got here? Or is that too much of a golden age myth? Were we really ever like that, or are we just kidding ourselves? I hope we were really like that, and I hope we can be like that again. No, I believe we can be again. I have to believe it. I’ve seen cultural change here and I’m ready for some more. I’m ready to give up a lot of things and let them slip into the past but I’m not ready yet to give up that great old idea of Australians as a humane and generous people. I’ve given my life and my best endeavours to the cultural realities of this country and I want to go on seeing myself as part of that story, the story Frank Budby tells us is not over yet. And, who knows, maybe one of these days some Afghan refugee will discover a great-great-great-aunt who was married here back in 1870 and who mothered a brood of little Aussies way back then. What a homecoming that would be. For all of us.
2014
The Writer’s Secret
I was driving my daughter home from school one afternoon when she broke a silence that had lasted for several minutes. ‘I’m good at writing stories,’ she said, ‘but only if someone gives me a beginning. If someone gives me a beginning I can easily write a middle and an end.’ She turned to me. ‘Give me a beginning, Dad, and I’ll tell you a story.’ I replied without a moment’s hesitation, ‘Better than that, darling, I’ll tell you the writer’s secret—then you’ll be able to find your own beginnings.’ When I didn’t tell her at once but concentrated on my driving she demanded impatiently, ‘Well, what’s the secret then?’ My daughter is nine, and I knew that at her age children sometimes reject angrily and out of hand anything that does not make sense to them at once. I was hesitating because I felt I’d spoken rashly and without giving enough thought to the consequences of what I was promising her. I said, ‘The secret is very simple, but you may not understand it at once. Even though it’s simple, not everybody understands the writer’s secret straight away. It took me many years before I understood it.’ She regarded me thoughtfully for some time. ‘If it’s so simple, why did it take you a long time to understand it?’ I heard the disappointment in her voice at learning that her father was not, after all, as bright as she had thought. I fell silent, pretending I needed to give my full attention to the traffic. But I was thinking of Primo Levi’s beautiful sad book, The Periodic Table, in which, in the section entitled ‘Nitrogen’, he points out to us that the most simple structures, whether in architecture or in chemistry, are also the most durable, the most stable and, to human eyes, the most beautiful. I knew that Levi’s observation held true also for writing and for all the other arts. I knew that it is the artist’s task, and that it is also the task of scientists and engineers, to simplify the chaos of appearances and to draw from the random impressions with which our outer and inner senses are constantly bombarded structures that will retain their form and will illustrate some underlying condition—some would say a truth—of existence. I knew that the simple and the true are sworn to a mysterious and indissoluble alliance. But I also knew that such hard-won simplicities are beyond the reach and persistence of most of us and that we must use the mask of the elaborate and hope by this means to distract our readers from our failure.
We were driving along an inner-city street that is familiar to us both—so familiar that we scarcely noticed it. The traffic was light and there were few pedestrians about. Our daily world was rushing by outside the car windows: hotels, cafes, old Victorian houses, a grid of wires above it all delivering our power and telephone services, and above the grid of wires the sky. It was a sky of an uncertain hue, neither blue nor white nor grey, neither quite clear nor exactly clouded. The day was still and humid. A sullen, muggy, reluctant day in that indeterminate season before the oppressive heat of summer at last gives way to the cool serenity of autumn. When we stopped at traffic lights my daughter turned to me and said, ‘Are you going to tell me the secret or not?’ The traffic lights went to green and I accelerated down the hill. Beside me my daughter stared at me, dignified and angry, waiting to hear the writer’s secret, so that she would henceforth possess the whole story and not just its middle and end.
Each morning before she leaves for school she visits me in my study. She is proud of the fact that her father is a writer. Though she has never told me this, I know it to be the case, and it is on her behalf that I fear my own failure these days. We share the walls of books, the sticky tape and the paperclips and the coloured post-its and textas and marker pens, the supplies of copy paper and the small yellow Spirax notebooks and silky grey Uni-ball pens that stand in a bundle in a pewter mug on the mantelpiece. My study is also her domain. She takes what she likes from it without asking. This is our understanding. Nothing is forbidden her. She doesn’t speak to me when she comes for this morning visit and I pretend that I’ve not noticed her and continue working at my desk. But secretly I watch her.
This morning I saw that she had been cast under a mysterious spell and could not see or hear or feel anything from the ordinary world inhabited by people like me. She moved as if she were an automaton, her arms stiff, her knees unbending, her chin held high and her gaze steady on the bookshelf directly in front of her. She stepped across the room in this manner and went up to the books until her nose touched the dark green spine of J.P. Stern’s The Heart of Europe. She stood there, perfectly still, her arms at her sides, bewitched, waiting to be released from the spell that had been cast over her. I got up from my desk and I went over to her and cupped my hands under her elbows and I lifted her slowly—as steadily as a mechanical lift would lift her—towards the ceiling, past the leached buckram spines of The Cambridge History of English Literature and, without pausing, on past the gaily illustrated covers of A Dream of Red Mansions, higher and higher, until she was held as high as I could reach her, way above my head, her nose at last on a level with the blue sky of Patrick White’s Voss. And that’s it. I can reach no higher. My arms were trembling with the strain. �
�You’re getting too heavy for this,’ I said and I lowered her to the carpet. She turned and lifted her face to me and we kissed. We both know that she has almost ceased to be a child.
I parked the car in front of our house and we sat looking out through the windscreen, making no attempt to get out, silent with each other and hoping for a peaceful resolution. She was waiting for me to speak. ‘The writer’s secret,’ I said, ‘is to choose just one thing from all the things you can see and to begin with that.’ We looked out at our street. The parked cars along the kerb, the houses, the little gardens, the corner pub, the Housing Commission flats across the road, the motionless branches of the tall casuarinas. ‘Can it be anything?’ she asked uncertainly. ‘The doors of the pub on the corner?’ We looked across at the open doors of the pub on the corner. As if she were speaking of the entranced world of her morning elbow lift she said, ‘No one’s going into the pub and no one’s coming out. Because they’re all in the back arguing.’ We sat watching the hotel doors, waiting, forgetting that we had begun a story and wondering what was to happen next. I have been reading Proust for some months and she has decided he is my favourite author, which is not so far from the truth. ‘What about Proust?’ she asked, to fill in time while we waited for something to happen. ‘How did he begin?’ I turned in my seat and looked at her. I know that no beginning is more noble than another. I know that all beginnings are the same. ‘That’s easy,’ I said. ‘Proust’s beginning is famous and everyone who reads his great book remembers it. He begins, For a long time I used to go to bed early.’ She half closed her eyes and repeated Proust’s opening sentence as if she were certain it must possess some hidden magic. Then she said quietly, ‘I never go to bed early unless I have to.’ We looked at each other and smiled. ‘That can be my beginning,’ she said. Then with sudden excitement, and beginning to see beginnings everywhere, she said, ‘It’s easy!’ She looked beyond me and pointed, ‘Look! There’s a fat man with no shirt coming out. He’s going to sweep the footpath. He thinks it’s still summer. They’ve told him to do it and you can see he’s in a bad mood and doesn’t want to do it.’
I listened to her unfolding her story, observing it in her mind at the corner pub and discovering that it does not matter where you begin, because everything is connected to everything else and you cannot speak of one thing without sooner or later speaking of another, and then another, until you arrive mysteriously back at the place from which you started out and realise that your story is finished, as surprised as if you had just read it for the first time and uncertain whether it can really be your own story or perhaps must belong to some other storyteller who has told it long ago before you chanced upon it. ‘It feels real,’ was the way she put it when she had found her ending and the fat man had returned inside and had closed the doors of the pub. She looked at me. ‘You could write me a story that begins with, I was driving my daughter home from school one afternoon.’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I suppose I could.’ And then we got out of the car and went into our house and closed the door.
Alex with his daughter, Kate, 1999
(PHOTO: PONCH HAWKES)
1999
Speaking Terms
I notice them when I’m going back across the island to where the ferry is waiting. We are the only ones going towards the ferry. Everyone else—a considerable crowd—is moving away from the ferry dock and fanning out over the island, moving against us. And this is what takes my attention with them, the fact that they are the only ones going in the same direction as me on this fine summer morning on the island. They walk a distance apart from each other and don’t look at each other and don’t speak to each other. The distance between them varies, stretching out at its furthest to around fifteen or twenty metres and coming back at its closest to around four or five metres. That’s as close as they get. He’s the one causing the variation. She’s staying on the crown of the road, going straight down towards the ferry dock, keeping a steady pace. He strays a bit, out onto the grass verge then veering back onto the tar, looking about at whatever takes his interest. She doesn’t look about. It’s early and the sun is still low. It glints on his spectacles when he looks around.
On the ferry we are the only passengers. As we pull away from the dock he’s leaning on the aft rail looking back at the island, his khaki rucksack on the deck beside him like a little tan dog waiting with him. Hungry. His denim jacket is dirty and frayed at the cuffs. His jeans are stained, maybe with paint or some kind of chemical substance that doesn’t clean off. He leans on the rail looking back at the island and crosses one foot over the other ankle. His shoes are black and heavy and they are dull and greasy-looking. Street shoes that he’s using as work boots. He’s watching the in-line skaters and the families setting up picnic spots and claiming positions at the public barbeques, the children throwing balls and the older people opening up stripy canvas chairs. It’s a warm Sunday in June and as the ferry moves across the open water towards downtown Toronto there’s a cool breeze on deck. Even when the detail is lost in the distance the man still stands there, leaning against the rail, one foot crossed over the other, gazing back at the pleasure island. He stays there till the ferry docks.
When we came on board the woman went into the cabin and I haven’t seen her since. When the ferry docks I go down to the front and she’s sitting in the shade by the gates to the exit ramp, which is as far forward as a passenger is permitted to go, between her feet the plastic shopping bag. Heavy and full of stuff. Three crewmen stand talking beyond the passenger barrier in front of her. They don’t look at her. As I come down the stairs from the upper deck the woman turns and looks at me. She doesn’t acknowledge me in any way, but her eyes stay on me all the way down. When I reach the deck on a level with her she stands up and faces the exit ramp, her back to me, watching the three men getting things ready for the disembarkation. She is wearing a cerise headband made of some kind of silky material. It is tied like a turban or bandeau and makes her black crinkly hair stick up like an untidy rooster comb. Her yellow jacket is old and frayed and made of some light cottony or synthetic material. There is a pale stain the shape of a heart low down on the back of the jacket. Under the yellow jacket she is wearing a cerise dress in a matching silky material to the headband. The dress is coming unhemmed. Her flat shoes are heeled over to the outside. They have the same dull greasy look as the man’s.
The man comes down the stairs from the upper deck and waits behind me. The woman doesn’t look around for him. We make a queue, the three of us, the woman in front at the barrier, then me, then the man.
On the quay I hold back and let them go ahead of me. He is looking about again, as if he could be a tourist and has never been to the Toronto harbourfront before and is interested to get his bearings and see what goes on here. She is walking straight ahead, the heavy plastic bag hanging from her hand. They’re closer now. Two or three metres apart. And keeping on a level with each other. They’re not exactly sauntering, they’re not aimless, they know where they’re going, but they’re not hurrying either. They’ve got time. Or maybe they’re dog-tired.
I cross Queens Quay West behind them and stand watching them go on up Bay towards Union Station, see them go in under the elevated freeway, going into the neutral area between where the tourists are down at the harbourfront and where the commuters are in the business district. They’re close now. Less than a metre separating them, and I see him lean in towards her. She doesn’t look at him but she must be speaking to him the way he leans in towards her, stepping close beside her, his shoulder almost touching hers, catching what she’s saying to him. Their shoulders touching now, bumping each other lightly as they go on. A team. A couple. Partners in life. Knowing the pace and style of the other. She never looks at him.
2008
Impressions of China
I began to write The Ancestor Game in the hope of coming to terms with the suicide of a friend, Lang Tzu, the fictional name of the man on whom the main character in the book is based. Lang wa
s a fourth-generation Australian Chinese. He was an artist who had failed to achieve recognition for his work. In his mid-fifties he gave up the struggle and shot himself. Along with one or two of my fellow Australians I believed Lang Tzu was a highly talented artist and that one of the factors in his failure to achieve recognition had been the inability of Australians at that time to view the work of an ethnic Chinese as representative of Australian culture, this despite the fact that Chinese had lived in Australia in large numbers since the middle of the last century. I may be wrong—I hope not; it’s always difficult to quantify these things—but my feeling is that this perception no longer holds true in Australia.
I began the book as a memorial to Lang Tzu’s life and to our friendship. As I worked my way deeper into the material of the novel, this simple aim became complicated for me by questions about the nature of belonging and the meaning of the idea of home. Gradually I was drawn into an exploration of the ambiguities of colonialism and displacement, conditions which have limited and inspired the human race for centuries. The earliest poems in Old English, the works that mark the origins of English literature—Beowulf, The Ruin, Widsith and The Seafarer—all deal with journeying in distant lands, or with the presence of foreignness in one’s own land. It hasn’t always been as fashionable as it is today to write about life in the suburbs. I am an immigrant myself and my meditation on Lang Tzu’s life soon became a kind of concealed autobiography. I was deeply intrigued by the experience of exile, by its positive aspects just as much as its negative ones. Exile as opportunity, rather than as cultural deprivation, was what interested me. And of course we don’t have to leave the country of our birth to experience the condition of exile. Drusilla Modjeska’s Exiles At Home: Australian Women Writers 1925–1945 is a fine study in this condition.