The changing face of our nation
IT is in one sense rather fitting that Australia Day falls towards the end of January, crowning weeks of summer holidays. At this time of year, most of us are absorbed in a sensual experience of this harsh and strange country; the heatwaves and hailstorms, the echo of a kookaburra in the bush, the flies, the smell of steak on the barbie at dusk. The peace of mind, and for those with migrant roots, particularly, the stubborn restlessness of the heart.
I find myself imagining what it must have been like for my European parents to arrive here shortly before Christmas about 50 years ago. The shock like a blast of humid wind. The homesickness of the new Australians, we now know, was so achingly physical; a yearning for the sound of snow crunching underfoot, each whiff of dry eucalyptus only sharpening the memory of a pine forest after soft rain.
Of course, uneasiness with the Australian landscape is a legacy of white settlement generally.
The country’s appeal is an enigma that even our most celebrated national poets had to work at unravelling. “She is the last of lands, the emptiest,” wrote AD Hope. In Train Journey, Judith Wright exhorts “box-tree and ironbark” to “break with your violent root the virgin rock … till the unliving come to life in you”.
Australia’s mesmerising beauty eventually came to life in my ¬≠parents. Four decades ago, they bought a beach house on the Mornington Peninsula, despite the contemporary wisdom deeming it a lousy investment. (Imagine!)
During the summer holidays, my parents’ friends would drive down for the day. They spent the long afternoon lazing on deck chairs amid the tea trees. They sipped coffee and smoked and listened to scratchy recordings of Hungarian cabaret artists. They told jokes about the communist regime.
In one childhood photo, I’m swimming in a Clark rubber pool — we had one for a few years — with a chorus line of curvy women in floral bathing caps behind me. The women radiate happiness.
Also in Train Journey, Judith Wright referred to the Australian interior as “country that built my heart”. Does one’s place of birth always mould the heart? Has the feel of sand between my toes or the chime of cicadas in the half-light been imprinted on my soul?
My parents may have warmed to the climate easily enough, but blending in with the culture was an entirely different story. The white-bread Australia of the 1950s was a genteel sort of hell. Well-meaning ladies of the Good Neighbour Councils sought to “educate” newcomers about native flora, Australia’s dried fruits industry and other vital matters. Each year, at the Australian Citizenship Conventions, the nation’s Anglo elites would discuss how to integrate migrants, while the migrants themselves looked on from the sidelines.
In those days, my sister was called a “dago” for bringing salami on rye to school. My mother provoked gasps of horror at a gathering of parents from Black Rock Primary when she asked for lemon in her tea. For at least their first decade here, my parents didn’t bother with Shabbat dinners. (As it happens, I also dispense with the ritual over January.)
A few years ago, I interviewed a Holocaust survivor whose perspective on this long-lost era jolted. Back then, she lived alongside Poles, Ukrainians and Croats in inner-city Melbourne. “They worked for us in the butcher shop,” she said. “We did not talk about the past, we were all in the same boat.”
The lady said everything changed “when we all started collecting money for Israel”. What surprised me was the hint of nostalgia for this time when migrants banded together in a weird state of historical amnesia. This was before multiculturalism and identity politics and Gough Whitlam shook everything up.
Few would disagree that the change, once it came, was a breath of fresh air. It brought alfresco dining and SBS and all sorts of weird and wonderful tea, with lemon or chai or anything else you might fancy. To my family, in time, it brought regular Shabbat dinners. Come Australia Day, I’ll be tossing another tandoori shrimp on the barbie and counting the reasons to celebrate.
Julie Szego is a writer with The Age.