A First Place Read online

  It comes into existence as a space because of the need to get those houses up on stumps; to get them level on the hills it might be, or to keep them cool by providing a buffer of air underneath. There are several explanations, no one of them definitive.

  So the space down there may be a cube, but is more often a wedge of deepening dark as the high house-stumps at the back diminish till they are as little at the front as a metre or half-a-metre high.

  The stumps are capped with tin and painted with creosote against termites. The space they form is closed in with lattice, sometimes all the way to the ground, sometimes to form a fringe of a half-metre or so below floor level. The earth is bare, but flooring boards being what they are, a good deal of detritus falls down there from the house above: rusty pins and needles, nails, tacks, occasionally a peach stone or some other rubbish where a child has found a crack big enough to push it through. And a good deal of what the house rejects in other ways also finds its way down there: old sinks or cisterns or bits of plumbing, bed-frames, broken chairs, a superannuated ice-box or meat safe, old toys.

  It’s a kind of archaeological site down there, and does in fact develop a time dimension of its own that makes the process of falling below, or sending below, or storing below, a passage out of the present into limbo, where things go on visibly existing as a past that can be re-entered, a time-capsule underworld. Visiting it is a way of leaving the house, and the present, and daylight, and getting back to the underside of things.

  It’s a sinister place and dangerous but you are also liberated down there from the conventions. It’s where children go to sulk. It’s where cats have their kittens and sick dogs go. It’s a place to hide things. It is also, as children discover, a place to explore; either by climbing up, usually on a dare, to the dark place under the front steps – exploring the dimensions of your own courage, this is, or your own fear – or by exploring, in the freedom down there, your own and other people’s bodies. There can be few Brisbane children who do not associate under-the-house, guiltily or as a great break-out of themselves, with their first touch or taste of sex.

  A landscape and its houses, also a way of life; but more deeply, a way of experiencing and mapping the world. One of our intellectual habits, it seems to me, is the visualising, in terms drawn from the life about us, of what is not visible but which we may need to see. One such entity is what we call mind or psyche. One observes in Freud’s description of how the mind works how essential architectural features are, trapdoors, cellars, attics, etc. What I wonder is how far growing up in the kind of house I have been describing may determine, in a very particular way, not only habits of life or habits of mind but the very shape of the psyche as Brisbane people conceive it; that is, how they visualise and embody such concepts as consciousness and the unconscious, public and private areas of experience, controlled areas and those that are pressingly uncontrollable or just within control – and to speak now of my own particular interest, how far these precise and local actualisations may be available to the writer in dealing with the inner lives of people. What I mean to suggest, at least problematically, is ways in which thinking and feeling may be intensely local – though that does not necessarily make them incomprehensible to outsiders, and it is the writer’s job, of course, so long as we are in the world of his fiction, to make insiders of all of us.

  We have tended, when thinking as ‘Australians’, to turn away from difference, even to assume that difference does not exist, and fix our attention on what is common to us; to assume that some general quality of Australianness exists, a national identity that derives from our history in the place and from the place itself. But Australians have had different histories. The states have produced very different social forms, different political forms as well, and so far as landscape and climate are concerned, Australia is not one place. It might be time to forget likeness and look closely at the many varieties of difference we now exhibit; to let notions of what is typically Australian lapse for a time while we investigate the different sorts of landscape the country presents us with, the different styles – social, political, educational – of the states, the different styles of our cities, and even of suburbs within cities, and for those of us who are concerned with literature, for example, to ask ourselves how many different sorts of Australian writing there may be and how much the differences between them may be determined by the particular social habits and physical features of place. Is there, to come back to the present occasion, a Brisbane way of experiencing things that we could isolate in the works of writers who, even if they have not spent their writing life in the city, grew up there, and were in their first experience of the world shaped by it? Is there something in the style of mind of these writers, even in their use of language – a restlessness, a delight in variety and colour and baroque effects, in what I called earlier ‘drama’ and ‘shifting views’ – that we might trace back to the topography of the place and the physical conditions it imposes on the body; to ways of seeing it imposes on the eye, and, at some less conscious level, to embodiments of mind and psyche that belong to the first experience, and first mapping, of a house?

  1984 Blakelock Lecture

  MY MULTICULTURAL LIFE

  AUSTRALIA BEGAN AS A MYTH, an idea in the mind of Europe, and when something approximating to the shape and bulk of it was discovered by European navigators in the seventeenth century, it continued to occupy a largely fabulous place in the minds of those who were transported or migrated there and had to live with its unpredictable and sometimes harsh reality. It has taken us a long time to accept the place as where it is and what it is; to link up its settled parts and see it, and ourselves, as whole. Perhaps it was to avoid the problem that we accepted for so long the myth of its uniformity. It was a way of not having to face how different the place is from city to city and state to state. It afforded us the comfortable illusion that there was a general Australian type as well. The question of Australian identity has arisen, in its present form, precisely because we are so aware these days of Australian diversity.

  In fact the diversity was always there. The difference is that we can see it now because the evidence, on TV, on talk-back radio shows, in the newspapers, is so clear. Evidence of what we are. Not as a newly multi-racial people – this is a surface thing – but as people. The truth is that diversity, a kind of multiculturalism if we want to call it that, is the norm in any society. We only see societies as uniform when the power of the word is in the hands of a single group.

  Women and men who live together and share their lives also, to some extent, inhabit separate cultures; that is, have different aims, different interests, codes, icons, and when speaking among themselves, a different language. Children, for a time, live in a different culture again, and so, to take just a few examples, do Catholics as opposed to Protestants, people who go to private schools and those who go to state schools, readers of The Herald Sun and The Age, supporters of Rugby League and Rugby Union or soccer or Australian Rules. Most of us belong to several of these groups, sometimes in surprising combinations, or we shift from one to another in the course of a lifetime. Our individual encounter with the culture, the strands we choose to take up out of the mix, is just that, an individual mixture, an adherence to some of the many moralities the society offers – one or two of them, of course, widely shared – its many interests and allegiances, and the various dialects that compose its speech. This is already a ‘multicultural’ situation, before we add in what might come with our being, say, both Australian and Welsh, or Irish, or – these days – Greek, or Chinese, or Chilean, or Vietnamese, or an urban black, or a ghettoised gay male, lesbian separatist, Pentecostal Christian, Moslem, or any other of the newly visible and vocal minorities.

  There is only one way to challenge the generalising tendency that comes from the domination of one voice, and that is by being specific. The experience of each Australian is essential as evidence of a complex and paradoxical whole. It is in this spirit that I mean to talk
specifically about the strands that went to the making of this particular Australian, and it is the variousness of the strands I want to keep in sight. The individual at the centre is there only to make them appear. I offer myself as a specific example but a general case.

  The fact that I am a writer means that much of what I have to say has already appeared elsewhere but in a disguised and transmuted form. A good deal of Australian writing, I think, is an attempt not only to render actual experience but to discover what this actual might be, to make it stand, in all its specific detail, against a stereotype that is generalised and needs to be challenged because from the individual writer’s experience it does not fit. This in fact is one of the great subjects of all writing, but Australians have had a harder time than some others in grasping what is authentic in their experience. For one thing, they had to throw off the purely English stereotype – the job of early Australian writing, and living too, was to disentangle what was local from what was transported English. But this ‘local’ keeps changing and it has been the job of succeeding generations to revise, in terms of their own experience, that later stereotype as well.

  But there was, from the beginning, a complication here: the influence of reading, and especially of fiction.

  Australians are, and have always been at every level of society, readers, among the most literary, if not the most literate people in the world. Now what fiction presents is not life as it is but life intensified, drawn to a pitch and given significance. To assume, in a naïve way, that the world you get in a novel is the way life actually is, and then require ordinary, everyday existence to live up to it, can make your life seem impoverished, make you believe that real life can be experienced only in Moscow or Paris or on the Yorkshire Moors. This is in itself one of the greatest subjects for fiction. I touched on it, lightly, in Johnno, which takes up both of these themes, the difficulty of establishing your own problematical and perhaps uncharacteristic nature against the local stereotype, but also the gap between fiction and living; and the irony to be got, and the tragedy created, from the failure to discriminate between them. I wanted to turn life as I actually knew it into fiction of my own, resisting the nostalgia for a life lived more fully elsewhere, giving fictional life, against all expectation, including that of my narrator, to what had always seemed to me, in my literary way, to be the most unliterary place in the universe, the Brisbane I had grown up in.

  So let me home in on a particular moment, a Saturday night in 1943 in the very middle of the war.

  I am nine and I am sitting at the end of my grandfather’s bed in the living quarters above my grandmother’s shop, at the corner of Melbourne and Edmondstone Streets, South Brisbane, a corner shop, a large, well-appointed one that sells groceries and fruit but also malted milks and creaming sodas from a real American-style bar. Behind the shop is a courtyard with a scrubbed wooden table where they eat; behind that a garden with a grapevine, and a shed where ropes of garlic hang over sacks of rice and cracked wheat. All this back part of the shop is very odd and foreign. There is nothing like it in our own house, or in the houses of our friends when we go and visit. My sister and I are embarrassed by it, and especially doubtful about eating at our grandmother’s; there is something shameful, surely, about eating in the backyard from a table with no cloth. They eat cabbage-rolls and yoghurt with cucumber and mint, and chopped-up salad with oil on it. At home we have proper meals: stew or cutlets with mashed potatoes and peas, all hot, and a nice boiled pudding with custard. Salad, which we eat only at lunchtime, is a lettuce leaf and half a tomato, with two or three slices of beetroot and a dob of bottled mayonnaise.

  My grandfather is dying. I sit on his bed to keep him company. I am reading Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, a funny title: Cymbeline. (The better-known tales I have already read.) Every now and then my grandfather asks for something and I get up and get it for him, though he speaks no English and I understand no Arabic.

  There is an altar in the room with pictures of saints, a plaster Virgin, and several vases filled with wax roses and lilies. I am a Catholic but I disapprove of such garish paraphernalia because my mother does. She is not a Catholic. In fact she is anti, and regards my grandmother and my father’s sisters, all three of them at this time still unmarried, as bigots: they serve Protestants in the shop but do not let them into the house. My mother is anti-Catholic because, as she has told us many times, she was made to ‘sign us over’ before we were born, though she did a deal with my father at the same time that we would never go to Catholic schools. Being anti-Catholic she is also anti-Irish and anti-Labor, since Queensland politics is dominated by the Labor Party, Labor politicians are mostly Irish, and the priests tell you at mass how to vote. Still, she does send us to mass.

  I am a Catholic like my father, who is very simply pious (my mother insists he is a saint), but I am also anti-Catholic out of loyalty to her.

  Because we are Catholics but do not go to Catholic schools, in a city where everything – schools, clubs, department stores, even dancing-classes – is either Catholic or Protestant, we are neither one thing nor the other. In fact my mother is Jewish, but she cut herself off from her family when she married, so at this point I am only dimly aware of that.

  My parents, tonight, are at the pictures, in the seats that are held in their name, each Saturday night, at the Regent. Normally, we too would be there, but children have been barred from the city theatres in case of air-raids. We have, however, been to the matinee at West End: an episode of The Spider, a Hopalong Cassidy, then the Big Picture – all American. Half of my life is spent in an American dream made up of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney musicals, Flash Gordon, Dagwood, the Katzenjammer Kids, the Reader’s Digest, Life magazine, rounders, American pop songs (even if I do learn the words from the Boomerang Songbook), Wrigley’s chewing-gum, and Nigger and Cowboy chews. I live in one-storeyed, wooden, subtropical Brisbane but also in the dream of a twentieth century that has, as yet, reached us only in brilliant reflection on the screen, and is, as I see it, in every respect American, since ‘America’ means up-to-date and modern – though I am also in love with ‘the olden days’, which are English. Just at the moment I have got as far back as Ancient Britain with Cymbeline, unless my grandfather wants something in Arabic, in which case I step back into the present and fetch it for him.

  At home, just two doors from my grand mother’s, I am enjoying, in this fourth year of the Second World War, an almost perfect Edwardian childhood, recreated in reach-me-down Australian terms by my mother, in imitation of her own growing-up in London before the First World War.

  Everything in our house, except for us, is English. We eat heavy English meals, quite irrespective of the heat, off English china. We listen to the BBC news. In the afternoon, my mother and our ‘girl’, Cassie, take turns at reading while they shell peas or darn socks: The Channings, Lord Oakburn’s Daughters, John Halifax, Gentleman, The Lamplighter – the books my mother read as a girl. The front of the house is sand-bagged; we have a slit trench in the yard; and I am living a barefoot version of the long Edwardian summer, broken only by coconut ice-blocks, the occasional tropical storm, and at six-fifteen each weeknight another episode of The Search for the Golden Boomerang, which is brought to us by the makers of Hoadley’s Violet Crumble bars. We are very much concerned about the Heart of the Empire. My mother calls it ‘Home’. My father, rather confusingly since he was born in Australia, calls it ‘the Old Country’. But when my grandmother refers to ‘the Old Country’ she means Lebanon.

  On summer weekends we go to Scarborough, down the Bay, and live another life altogether. In the early days we had a tent. Now we have a caravan built by my father in our backyard.

  At Scarborough we play rough games on the sands, have gang wars, and our parents at night play cards, even Black Jack, which my mother would never tolerate at home – even she becomes more ‘Australian’ down here.

  The campers are an easy-going lot and my father knows every family, as we kids do. We go
to Methodist Sunday School on the beach and on lantern processions where we sing hymns like ‘Jesus Died for All the Children’ and ‘Build on the Rock’ – not very Catholic of course but this is the beach.

  This Australia, ‘down the Bay’, is older than 1943 and is just about to disappear. It is an English/Australian watering place with amusement arcades and a pier. In just a few years, like everyone else, we will desert it for Surfers Paradise and the more glamorous, up-to-date, Californian world of the surf.

  I would pause here, just for a moment, to ask what class I belong to in all this, and the question, in a very Australian way, is hard to answer. When I look back at the Australia of my childhood it seems to me to have been uniformly working class, whereas today, wherever you go, it is one or another version of middle class.

  As the eldest son of poor immigrants my father left school at twelve, worked for a while for a grocer, then got a horse and cart of his own and made deliveries. At the time I am now evoking, 1943–44, he owns three trucks, three houses and a block of flats, but still drives one of the trucks himself, leaving at six each morning for the Markets, in shorts and leather apron, and coming back at five in the afternoon. He would certainly call himself a working-man.

  My mother, on the other hand, would define herself in terms of the life her parents lived in London before the bank crash that brought them to the other end of the world: a big five-storeyed house at New Cross, with a cook, chambermaids, a nurse, and her parents, as in the portraits we have of them, in flash evening-dress. We have a ‘girl’ ourselves – Cassie. It isn’t a very grand thing for the time, but it does suggest a certain degree of ‘comfortableness’. On the other hand, I go to one of the roughest schools in Brisbane, West End State, where there are many Greeks (all of South Brisbane is migrant territory) and few of the seventh-graders will go on to secondary school.