Inside Outside (2 page)

There are, naturally enough, deeper and much more significant reasons why any naive attempt at becoming absorbed by an alien society must prove futile. I am no physiologist. I do not know to what extent cultural characteristics, in addition to the physical, are encoded in one's genes. But it is evident—and should have been evident to all of us in that dreamtime of the late forties and early fifties—that you cannot discard the complex, contradictory but fundamental reticulation of manners, ethical priorities and social conventions, in short the individual's cast of mind, which are the outward and visible signs of an inner cultural reality. Trying to deny or to reject them makes you run the risk of becoming a simulacrum, a pretence, or, in the worst instance, a parody. You may, it is true, become proficient in the language. It is easy enough to realise that it is not polite to sprinkle salt over your food, whereas placing it in a little heap on the side of the plate (anathema to Central European notions of good table manners) is entirely acceptable. You notice soon enough that forks should be held with the tines pointing downwards, and that you must spoon your soup away from, rather than towards, your person. But you cannot change the intimate, deeply-ingrained, essentially mysterious core of the personality which seems to be implanted very early in life—perhaps stamped on at the moment of birth, in the way that newborn babies are tagged with name-bands.

Some of us are better parodists than others. Some, perhaps because of a neurological or biochemical deficiency, prove incapable of achieving the confident mimicry others acquire with relative ease. Yet even if you have managed to assume the superficial characteristics of an alien culture, the feat always retains some elements of parody. No matter how thoroughly you have been absorbed by your adopted society, and even if you have been accepted within its structures, as I have been, your otherness cannot be expunged. The last turn of the screw may well be that the more thoroughly assimilated you are and the more you come to think of yourself as an integral part of your adopted society, the more you are likely to be troubled by confusions of identity, by the anxiety of living in a vacancy between two worlds.

These paradoxes are frequently overlooked in the often simple-minded and pointless controversies about multiculturalism. One essential consideration tends almost always to be ignored. In the same way as it is impossible to become thoroughly assimilated, to wipe the slate clean at the moment of arrival in a new land, so it is futile to imagine that someone's heritage may remain entirely unaltered by a new environment. Preserving an ‘ethnic' identity, in the manner implied by the propagandists of multiculturalism, may also be tantamount to cultural and social isolation. To encourage people to retain their native language is sensible for the simple reason that the more languages you know, the more open-minded, intellectually alert and perceptive you are likely to be. To put on your national costume and perform folk dances on the steps of the Opera House is, no doubt, great fun. The danger arises where such commendable and harmless activities are accompanied by attempts to lock people into ethnic enclaves or ghettoes, to seal them off from the society in which they must live, in the name of preserving an often dubious cultural heritage. I do not find it shocking that toddlers in the streets of Sydney should be heard babbling in outlandish regional dialects. But it is shocking that many of them, by the time they reach school, have acquired no more English than the phrases and slogans they have learnt from their daily bombardment by television.

It is not possible to achieve assimilation in the simple sense in which it was urged on us in those innocent days before politicians saw the prospect of enough votes to make them bother about us. Moreover, the impossibility of full assimilation has as much to do with the nature of Australian society—or indeed any society—as with the newcomers' predicament, their linguistic clumsiness, and their frequent prejudice against the people among whom they have chosen to live. I am not referring merely to the average Australian's unwillingness to accept anyone different, foreign and therefore deemed to be peculiar, though that was certainly a reality in the forties and early fifties, and is still to be encountered today. Rather, all migrants must face the insoluble problem of deciding which element of Australian society they should endeavour to join or adopt as a desired model.

A basic and fatally flawed assumption behind demands for assimilation is the fantasy that the society in which the newcomer has settled is uniform and homogeneous. Newcomers themselves willingly accept such myths because to them their bewildering new world inevitably seems harmonious, lacking in variety, tension or enmity. Recognising that the true state of affairs may be very different often takes considerable time. I cannot recall the exact point during the course of my education into Australian ways at which it became apparent that this world contained deep and unhealing scars. One incident nevertheless remains memorable because it revealed for me (and even more tellingly for my parents) that this seemingly uncomplicated and bland society was torn by passions of the sort that were only too familiar to people who had grown up in Eastern or Central Europe between the two wars. The shock of that recognition was sharper because it occurred not in one of those seething urban ant-hills of Europe, where political, religious and racial rivalries may so easily arise, but in a peaceful, sleepy and in many ways idyllic setting.

After several months of moving about in the inner suburbs of Sydney—a boarding house in Neutral Bay, two rooms with use of kitchen and bathroom in Hurlstone Park—my parents were lucky enough to find a self-contained flat in Epping, at that time more like a country town than a suburb of a large city. The flat itself was nothing much to speak of, no more than the perfunctorily converted servants' quarters of a handsome liver-brick bungalow, but in those days of acute housing shortages finding it represented a piece of extraordinary good fortune. One of its three rooms had no window but contained a large and entirely unusable fireplace. There was a kitchen and a lean-to, as well as a bathroom of sorts. The choko-covered dunny under a superb jacaranda proved a source of constant terror on account of its thriving colony of red-back spiders, which we were taught to disperse in the approved manner with a rolled-up newspaper. Nevertheless, securing that flat through the good offices of an acquaintance who had settled in Sydney some time before the war was the one bright spot in the otherwise bleak and depressing beginning of our life in the new land.

Nowadays Epping is a shrine to middle-class affluence. Its streets are paved and guttered; dunny-men no longer trot down its driveways with fragrant cans balanced delicately on their shoulders. Outside the primary school, where in the late forties one or two children still rode to school and tethered their horses to a hitching-post, a line of Volvos, Saabs and four-wheel drive monsters waits each afternoon for the classrooms to disgorge their well-clad and properly shod youngsters. The shops nestled around the railway station display those heathenish goods—garlic-laden salami, capsicums, strange smelly cheeses—which, when I lived there, were almost entirely unknown: their gradual advance was greeted as the vanguard of the forces of darkness. Epping in the forties was, in other words, an example of an Australia which has disappeared entirely from Sydney, though I suspect that it survives in isolated pockets of Greater Melbourne.

To our European eyes it gave every indication of village life. In retrospect it is possible to be nostalgic about its sleepy charm, a quiet place where cows grazed in the paddocks behind several of the streets, a world where front doors were rarely locked, where you walked to school barefoot on hot bitumen, or in a sea of paspalum, wearing your threepenny imitation pith helmet. It was, nevertheless, a dreary place. Most of its handsome turn-of-the-century bungalows and two-storey houses were encrusted with fibro, corrugated-iron or timber excrescences: a verandah boarded up here, a lean-to added there. Elsewhere, weatherboard cottages leaned in various states of disrepair, victims of crumbling foundations, dry rot and termites. Only the gardens showed any signs of care and ownerly pride. And everywhere paspalum: the mile-long walk to the railway station (or at least as far as the few streets with properly made footpaths) had to be negotiated through acres of the weed which threatened to ruin your clothes with its burrs and oils, and harboured, besides, such dangerous nasties as ticks and snakes. The locals walked on the road; we had been too much regimented in our previous life to dare to do that.

Epping was at the time (and may well be still) the heartland of the nonconformist bible-belt. There was, it is true, a solidly constructed Church of England not far from the shopping centre, but the true spiritual aspirations of the place were represented by the Methodist, Baptist and Congregational establishments. One neighbouring family seemed to spend its entire Sunday walking back and forth between their place of worship and their house-cum-chicken-run at the bottom of a very deep battle-axe block. Sunday schools and youth fellowships flourished. The School of Arts in the shopping centre represented the secular arm of this firmly entrenched tradition: it provided a venue for various Lodges and Orders, into one of which I was briefly inducted as a teenage aspirant, in a ceremony that bore some resemblance to an amateur performance of
The Magic Flute
.

To us outsiders, all this appeared homogeneous and harmonious in its blandness. Here was a world of prejudices, perhaps, but one entirely lacking passion—or so it seemed. Its prejudice against us, who had strayed into this Arcadia from another planet, was essentially unmenacing. The crone who screeched obscenities at us over the picket fence of her tumbledown cottage was much too decrepit to offer any threat of violence and, besides, she had the reputation of being off her rocker—the children of the neighbourhood were convinced she was a witch. Passions, and indeed hatred, were reserved, as we came to learn, for others.

Our street was a broad roadway running for several miles bordered by the obligatory unmade verges and miniature fields of paspalum. It was, however, sealed as far as the point, a few houses beyond our place, where it took an abrupt ninety-degree turn. There the dirt road began. I do not know what bureaucratic decisions determined this highly symbolic frontier, but the distinction was very real. Beyond the curve, along the dirt, the houses were smaller, meaner and in even greater disrepair. The families living in them were larger, their front yards showed none of the care over clipped hedges and neatly swept driveways that distinguished the world of the bitumen.

We were too ignorant to read these signals. I made friends at school with two boys called Dunnicliffe, victims of scatological jests which, at first, I could not understand. They were the youngest in a large family that lived beyond the curve. I do not think we had much in common—how could we have had?—but no doubt we were drawn together because they too were shunned by the other children, just as I was after the initial impact of my arrival in 5B had worn off. This desultory friendship advanced a step or two when the Dunnicliffes arrived unannounced one Sunday afternoon. This was something quite beyond our experience. In my very early childhood when social life of a sort was still possible in a Hungary largely protected from the worst effects of war, social contact with other children was governed by a strict protocol of invitations and supervision. The Dunnicliffes said that they had come to play. We went into the paddock at the back, and played—as far as my still very limited command of English and of the mythology of Australian children's games permitted. They reappeared the following Sunday and then spasmodically throughout the summer holidays.

My friendship with these boys led to an incident which was our first significant insight into Australian society. Until then our relationships with our neighbours, with Australia as a whole, had been fleeting and sporadic—a halting conversation here, a hastily flung insult there. We had been living in a dream. People, places, events floated in and out of our experience without much impact. We observed the world of Epping from the outside, separated from it by an almost impenetrable screen. My father used later to say it was like watching a film you couldn't entirely follow. But the confrontation brought about by the Dunnicliffes' visits began to lead us inside a world from which we had been until then almost entirely isolated. There occurred, in short, some form of interaction between us and the people among whom we lived. Their world demanded a response from us, and consequently, for the first time, we found ourselves in a relationship with this society, and in a situation where, in theory at least, we were required to exercise some choice. Here was, in other words, our first real step towards assimilation, even towards becoming ‘Australians'. But at the time the incident was merely an embarrassment, an awkward situation, and also an alarming recognition of the complexity of a world that had seemed until then quite simple and untroubled.