Inside Outside (5 page)

There was much speculation about the type of domestic help we would find. Did one have live-in servants or daily women? What colour were they? Were they usually negroes? I was reminded of that long-forgotten preoccupation many years later when visiting a lady my mother had known at school, who had been living in France since the early thirties. She told me how much she would love to visit us, to meet my mother again, but also to see those marvellous boats—what were they called? junks?—moored under the great bridge. There was a great bridge, wasn't there? It must be a wonderful place. Did we have very high fences to keep the kangaroos out? Did we have much trouble with our coloured servants? How many did we have? Were they honest, or did they steal food and clothing? Where did they sleep at night, in the house or in a compound?

It is easy to mock these fantasies—they were naive and self-indulgent, and, worse still, they revealed the narrow insularity of Mitteleuropa's view of the world. People like my parents never looked beyond the confines of their restricted environment. They never entertained the possibility that elsewhere in the great wide world things might be ordained otherwise. They assumed that their priorities—based upon a bourgeois way of life in a society where labour was cheap and servants therefore plentiful—would hold good everywhere. They were, indeed, as ignorant about life in Australia as were most Australians about the nuances of European society. Yet these fantasies, the cloud-cuckoo-land they had invented, formed a crucially important element in the expectations they brought with them in their exile. They were to become the yardstick by which their experience of the new land was to be measured, even though it had been made to fit other standards. That is perhaps the most potent paradox in the migrant experience.

Elizabeth Jolley clearly understood that predicament in her story ‘Paper Children', where an elderly Viennese lady travels to Australia to visit her daughter whom she has not seen since the child was smuggled out of a Europe about to burst into flames. When she arrives at her daughter's farm she finds an Arcadian idyll—or is it the most abject poverty? The daughter and her Australian husband seem to live in perfect amity; or is he brutal and heartless? Contradictory possibilities flicker over the surface of the story. Confused images of life in Australia clash and merge. But they are only fantasy-images fashioned in the last moments of the old lady's life: she had never set foot beyond her
gemütlich
Viennese world. Had she completed her journey, the reality she would have found would have been quite contrary to her fantasies, just as my parents and I found a world quite different from what we had expected when we disembarked from the
Marine Phoenix
.

Our fantasy-image of Sydney was quickly and irrevocably shattered once we emerged from the shed at Woolloomooloo into the dazzling sunshine. Yet such fantasies represent a fundamentally important facet of the newcomer's experience. They are an essential cause of a predicament all migrants must endure. My parents' childishly naive image of Australia was cobbled together from images culled from various films—usually with a Latin American setting—and from odd scraps of information picked up here and there. Their true source, however, was the fantasies entertained by people living in a landlocked country, who had never seen the open sea, who had encountered only stunted palm trees in a hothouse. Inevitably then, they imagined Australia, which they knew had a warm climate, as something of an amalgam of Carmen Miranda's Copacabana and Dorothy Lamour's Tahiti. Deep down, they were probably aware that the reality of Australia would turn out to be entirely unlike their dreams and aspirations. But they could not have imagined—even if they had been able to discard their Hollywood inspired vision of a South-Seas paradise—the extent to which their new home would contradict their cherished expectations. There remained, throughout their lives, something within their consciousness which whispered that it should have turned out otherwise, that, somehow or other, they had been misled and sorely cheated. This was not primarily a matter of external reality, of the stage-setting of their fantasies. It was, rather, a consequence of their inability to reconcile themselves to a world which ethically and socially, but also visually and architecturally, proved so alien and uncongenial to people who had never experienced the suburban sprawl of London, Manchester or Birmingham. They did not care for suburbia, and to the end of their days complained about its dullness, its lack of variety, its vistas of empty streets.

So powerfully ingrained within their consciousness was the image of European city-life that they conveniently forgot that they themselves had eagerly embraced a type of suburban existence in the first flush of their metropolitan affluence during the thirties. Some little time after I was born they gave up their fashionable rented apartment and bought a house—a ‘villa' in the terminology of the time—in what they called a village and we would call a suburb, a short journey by electric train from Budapest. They thought that it was a very courageous and rather smart thing to do. No-one in the family had ever owned a villa, nor had an orchard of walnut, cherry, pear and apricot trees, as well as a small vegetable garden. While everybody had a maidservant, and some people could also afford to employ a cook, none of their acquaintances, confined to inner-city apartments, could boast a housekeeper (whose husband acted as part-time caretaker) living in a small self-contained flat in the basement.

It goes without saying that this village or suburb was a pleasant, leafy place, a Killara or a Kew, not at all like the ocean of red tiles you could see from the windows of our rented rooms in Hurlstone Park, or even the snake-ridden paddocks and paspalum-patches of Epping. Nevertheless, my parents' longing for the kind of urban life that Australia could not offer failed entirely to acknowledge that their happiest and proudest days were when they owned a villa out of town, when they could tell their friends that living there was not at all inconvenient—after all, the trains ran late into the night, you could easily get home after the theatre or the opera. Essential to their view of life was the irrepressible conviction that a city was only a city where people lived in apartment-blocks neatly joined one to the other, that a city which seemed to consist entirely of an expanse of sprawling villages had no right to call itself by that name. They longed for a world where you could go for a stroll in the evening to do a spot of window-shopping or meet your friends in a café, a way of life they had largely abandoned in order to immerse themselves in the joys of living in the ‘country'.

Their disillusionment was in many ways inevitable, and it set in with remarkable rapidity. As the row of streetlights on the horizon drew closer, as the
Marine Phoenix
sailed past the headland, as the sun rose in a cloudless, pollution-free sky, and as we sweated our way through the interminable customs and immigration procedures, it was already establishing its grip on us. Once free of the wharf, we were bundled into our cousin's car, and made our way swiftly from Woolloomooloo to the Bridge through a Sydney ignorant of traffic-jams. What we saw was confusing and meaningless, lacking any context or point of reference, like a shadowy dream or a poorly edited film. Momentarily, a street which we came later to call Martin Place offered an urban vista we could understand; but then came the short stretch of George Street, its squat buildings with their menacingly disproportionate awnings, and very soon afterwards we were crossing the Bridge, travelling towards Cammeray and Northbridge.

‘Is this a working-class district?' asked my mother, with the woeful lack of tact that was to prove in the years to come a frequent source of embarrassment, as we made our way up the hill towards the Suspension Bridge. The small brick or stucco houses, their fussy gardens, the general absence of street-life, the forlorn shopping-centres with their collapsing posts and awnings did not look like the kind of city my parents had expected. Where were the golden sands, the swaying palms, the elegant cars? Where was the promised land in which they would find not only political freedom, but that luxury and vitality which they had imagined from the grim perspective of a continent at war and a city under siege? Why wasn't this a happy and joyful land? In later years they were to ask the same questions in more complex ways. My parents grew, at length, to understand why Australians were not given to dancing in the streets, why their great ideal was to own a house with heavily curtained windows. Yet they never lost the feeling, which I have inherited from them, that this was a land of sleepwalkers.

I came to learn much later that such an attitude to life in Australia, no matter how hastily achieved, partial or unjust, is profoundly attractive to the displaced European sensibility. The image of a somnolent and anaesthetised land is powerful among European writers who have recorded their impressions of Australia. Lawrence's bleak vision in
Kangaroo
of a dreary Sydney, beyond which lay the threatening void of the bush, Conrad's laconic comment in
Lord Jim
that this is
une triste ville,
or Anthony Burgess's remark that the sky above Sydney seems too innocent for crime or passion, represent Europeans' dismayed reaction to their first contact with the upside-down world. Australian writers are just as fond of using such images. Expatriates like Christina Stead or Shirley Hazzard, who look back from the perspective of the Northern Hemisphere on their early life in Sydney, and also those, like Patrick White, who made the difficult decision of returning to Australia, fill their books with those images of aridity, lack of passion and numbing propriety we fancied we saw in the Sydney of 1947.

As our cousin's car made its way through streets that, by European standards, were empty and drained of life, we began to wonder where the real city, the centre of its life, might be found. In
The Road from Coorain,
Jill Ker Conway writes eloquently about her first visit to Seville. She was amazed and enchanted to discover its great civic spaces—the cathedral, the plaza, the university—around which the life of the city turned. Here was something absolutely alien to her experience of city life—restricted as it had been to Sydney, Melbourne and Newcastle—an urbanity the like of which Australia could not provide. Though I could not have recognised it at the time, our first impression of Sydney was the direct opposite of the awakening that young Australian woman was to experience in Seville—we could find no physical, spiritual or social centre in a city which seemed to contradict all our notions of what urban life should be.

In later years, for people of my parents' generation, that image of deadness, of a world without a centre, came to be grafted on to another cliché about life in Australia which, curiously but significantly, also found expression in terms of space and of emptiness. The geographical void of a largely uninhabited continent—as seen from the perspective of the tight European world—the
horror vacui
Lawrence evokes memorably in
Kangaroo,
became transformed into the notion of a cultural desert. As the wave of Central European migration increased in the early years of the fifties, so that phrase and that concept were adopted and trotted out by people whose own cultural life had frequently not extended beyond the latest hit-play, movie or blockbuster novel. Yet, as espresso-bars began to sprout all over Sydney, so the lamentations about this horrible philistine place grew louder and louder. Where were the theatres? Ach, remember the opera (in Budapest, Vienna, Prague, Leipzig etc.). In the same way that many migrants automatically cranked themselves up several notches on the social scale, knowing that nobody could check on the extent of their confiscated estates that stretched, according to them, from horizon to horizon, so people began to lament the loss of those amenities which they had not much valued while they were available to them—the easily, at times glibly, invoked marvels of European high culture.

This attitude was often accompanied by a great arrogance—an arrogance that did much harm to emerging relationships between newcomers and Australian society. We were (I am speaking communally) only too ready to scoff and look down our noses on those poor antipodean provincials. That such attitudes arose out of fantasies and deeply mythic needs, rather than out of a just and balanced assessment of the nature of Australian society, was revealed to me with particular force in the London of the early sixties, when circumstances were forcing me to address myself to the difficult question of cultural identity.

Like so many young Australians—and by this stage I had come to think of myself as thoroughly Australian, until that illusion was totally shattered in the course of my first few days as a postgraduate student of English Literature—I was enchanted by the life London offered. You could hear great performers from the back row of the Festival Hall for five shillings; you could get a reasonable seat at Covent Garden for one pound. I lived near Selfridges, the department store, where the basement supermarket provided an ideal place to do the week's shopping on a Saturday morning. Around the corner, a little way up Baker Street, there used to be a curious establishment called the Balkan Grill. This was, despite its name, a typical Viennese Konditorei specialising in those oozingly baroque confections which are perhaps the old Habsburg Empire's most lasting contribution to world culture. After the exertions of shopping, I used to drop in at ‘The Balkans', as it was known in the neighbourhood, for a cup of coffee. As I grew familiar with the place, drinking coffee became no more than an adjunct to the real purpose of the visit: to eavesdrop on the babel of Austro-Hungarian lamentations that filled the room. Ancient crones, their mouths grotesque scarlet gashes, sporting pearls and diamonds in almost obscene abundance, used to sit in their mink or Persian lamb coats drinking
Kaffee mit Schlag,
consuming lethal quantities of saturated fats, while they lamented the world they had lost, loud in their complaint that they were obliged to live in a cultural desert. Where was the music? Where was the art? Ach, where was the culture? And besides all this, why couldn't you find decent plumbing in this benighted city?