The Idea of Home Read online

  When I was very young, I read John Wyndham’s post-apocalypse novel, The Chrysalids. In it, one of the characters keens for her devastated planet:

  What did they do here? What can they have done to create such a frightful place? … There was the power of gods in the hands of children, we know: but were they mad children, all of them quite mad?

  In my own mind, I create a character like Wyndham’s, in the aftermath of the climate wars, eking out a mean existence in a harsh landscape, and trying to explain to her kids the mass insanity that led them there. ‘And you know, they flushed their toilets with drinking water. They made durable things, like plastic plates and cups, and they would use them only once and then throw them away. They thought it was normal for one person to drive around in a huge thing called an SUV. They used air conditioning, when it wasn’t even really that hot outside …’ I imagine her kids rolling their eyes and thinking to themselves, ‘Mum. Always exaggerates. Nobody could ever have been that crazy.’

  But how do you convince people, here and now, that these common behaviours are indeed crazy? Machiavelli observed that:

  … there is nothing more difficult nor more doubtful of success nor more dangerous to conduct than to make oneself a leader in introducing a new order of things. For the man who introduces it has for enemies all who do well out of the old order and has lukewarm supporters in all who will do well out of the new order … who do not put their trust in changes if they do not see them in actual practice.

  Or, as Yeats put it more succinctly: The best lack all conviction, the worst are full of passionate intensity.

  This sums up the current political predicament, most especially in the United States. There is no nationally effective Green movement there. There is no energy policy. Barely even a breath of serious discussion. Climate change is an issue in the national political conversation only among Fox News bloviaters who use climate scientists as piñatas.

  In the United States, without leadership, the potential for any kind of concerted national action is bleak. So in the land of rugged individuals, it falls to individuals to act. In a funny little life irony, having fought against a hydro scheme on the Franklin, I have just completed an engineering study on how to use Benjamin Church’s 1665 dam for mini-hydro on the Tiasquam. We are designing a fish ladder at the dam, so that the herring can return after their long absence. We’re revegetating some wetlands with native shrubs for wildlife habitat, and planting fruit trees. Because we live in a rural place we can buy our meat and vegetables from local farms where the animals are treated humanely and the land sustainably.

  I know it’s not much. And I know that, small as these actions are, I am uncommonly fortunate to be able to afford to take them. And yes, I am well aware that by flying to Australia to give this lecture I just undid a big piece of it. But even if I can’t do everything, that’s no excuse for doing nothing. I will do what I can. And at this inflection point in human existence, I believe that what we can do, we must do. Perhaps an answer to Yeats’s despair lies in the words of the eighteenth-century Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav. He said: ‘If you believe it is possible to destroy, then believe it is possible to repair.’ The Jewish idea of Tikkun Olam, of each individual working to gather up and repair the shards of a fractured creation, is a metaphor that I think speaks eloquently to our present circumstance.

  Here in Australia, while the need for individuals to act is great, the potential for concerted national action is greater. The Australian Greens have put these issues at the front and centre of the national policy debate. We have a government willing to enact carbon price legislation and an opposition that at least accepts the broad outlines of the crisis and its causes. But is it the best we can do? Not by a long way. Australia can punch above its weight on this issue, and not only because we are the largest per capita carbon emitter. Our continent covers a vast land mass and our territorial waters represent a significant and critical share of the world’s oceans. Time and chance have made us custodians of a huge and significant piece of the planet. Our national temperament has created a peaceful and prosperous society here.

  We are, by any world yardstick, a rich society and a decent people. Right now, by some metrics, we are the richest people on the planet. Rich enough to expend some of that capital and decent enough to know it is the right thing to do, the right time to act. What we do here matters. What we do here could be a model for the world. It is depressing to hear politicians say that our sacrifices should be ‘in line’ with what the United States does. That’s a mighty low bar. Why should we align our ambitions with a nation that harbours justifiable fears of its own decline, that has created a national atmosphere increasingly hostile to science and reason, and that is locked in an arid political stasis? Please, let’s not line up there.

  What’s wrong with leading the way? Shouldn’t we aspire to set the line, to inspire, to become an example to the world, a byword for what a visionary country can be and do? We’ve played that role before, after all. We gave the world the secret ballot — the Australian ballot, as it was called — that did so much to raise living standards and improve conditions for workers worldwide. We were a leader in extending to women the right to vote. We were barely a nation when we set the bar for bravery and sacrifice by common soldiers in foreign wars. We grew up out of racism and misogyny and homophobia to become a mostly tolerant, successfully multicultural society in a world where, for too many countries, that seemingly modest ambition remains painfully out of reach.

  We did these great things because we know — we have always known — that we are in it together. It is our core value as Australians. And at this moment in history, our core value happens to be the raw, aching truth of the human predicament. It may also be the only belief that can save us as a species. A species that will continue to find comfort and delight in the companionship of animals, the miracle of birds, the colours of corals and the majesty of forests. We are in it together, on this blue, spinning marble in the cold and silent void. And we must act on that belief, if we are going to be able to continue to live a good life here, in this beautiful and fragile country, on this lovely planet, our only home.

  TWO

  A HOME ON BLAND STREET

  Where do you live?

  Such a pedestrian enquiry, one that any moderately verbal toddler is schooled to answer briskly with a street address, a house number, the name of a city or a town. Some of us will live in only a few places in our lives; others, like me, are the kinds of people who mess up your address book, constantly sending out change of address notices. When I make a tally of the places which I could, at various times, have given in reply to the question where do you live, I arrive at nineteen. This, rather alarmingly, averages out to one move about every three years. There was a Cairo address that I learned to write in Arabic. A street number that was hard to find amid the graffiti tags in lower Manhattan. A house without a number in rural Virginia, a graceful old apartment in Cleveland, a horsehair-mortared terrace in Hampstead … numerous dwellings on four continents. But very few have truly felt like home.

  The idea of ‘home’ is bigger than the floor plan of any given four walls or the mass of any roof line. It cannot be encompassed by rote recitations of suburb or postcode, nation or state. In the previous chapter, I mentioned the various definitions that dictionaries give for that small, heavily laden word, home. Here I would like to explore some of them: home as ‘a place of origin, a native habitat’, home as ‘an environment offering security and happiness’ and home as ‘the place where something is discovered, founded, developed or promoted. A source.’

  My place of origin was the vast sprawl of red tile and liver brick that comprised the Australian suburbs of the 1960s. The sprawl despised by Patrick White, satirised by Barry Humphries. The first address I was schooled to give, as a toddler, was for a Victorian terrace house in Bland Street, Ashfield, an address Patrick White probably wishes he’d thought of. Bland was how they characterised us, White and the other intellect
uals who looked backward from their self-exile in London or Oxford and found ordinary Australians slightly embarrassing: dull, uncreative, petty and repressed. These men — and in that era, the pundits were mostly men, although Jill Ker Conway and Leonie Kramer also had a go at us — understood some things about Australian suburban life, but vastly misconstrued others. They accurately described the unglamorous surfaces — the chipped enamel, worn linoleum and bindi-infested buffalo grass; the weathered grey fences and weathered faces of adults who moved tight-lipped through dull chores or commuted dutifully to mundane jobs.

  They saw a mean and unaccommodated material existence, but did not grasp the emotional and imaginative richness of the lives played out against those frugal backdrops. They deplored the conformity, but they did not see that its corollary was a sustaining solidarity. They did not grasp that the bedrock value of that time and place was an enduring and defining Australian sense of shared community. Living in the United States, as I have done, off and on, for almost two decades, I have experienced a society in which the defining ethos is precisely the opposite: the individual’s rights are always and everywhere ascendant, success is assumed to be self-earned and bootstraps are an indispensable item of attire. This constant background noise has worked, for me, like a chisel on stone. Over time, it has thrown the very different lessons of my Australian home into bright relief.

  ‘The cultural dead heart’ is how Dame Leonie Kramer described the suburbs of my childhood. I’m pretty sure she had, in her mind’s eye, some place very like my grandmother’s home: a little bungalow in Hammondville, south-west Sydney, where freshly poured concrete kerbs butted right up against bushland at what was then an outer rim of the city’s advance. When our clan gathered there, what I remember is music and singing, and adults whose greatest pleasure was to get a little bit tipsy and recite their favourite verse. My grandmother favoured a romantic, melodramatic set piece titled ‘Laska’. My Uncle Ed could be relied upon for standards such as ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, or ‘The Man From Snowy River’. My mother could passionately deliver Portia’s mercy speech. I remember, also, my grandmother’s 78s, the arias by Caruso and Callas, huge voices expanding the walls of her little house. I still have a few of the works of Eastern philosophy that spoke so ardently to my grandfather, as well as my grandmother’s well-thumbed and heavily annotated poetry anthologies. ‘Learn a poem,’ my grandmother urged. ‘No one on Earth can ever take it away from you.’ Decades later, when I was briefly jailed in Nigeria, my books confiscated, it was the poems I’d memorised that filled the hours and sustained me. Nan was right: the secret police could not confiscate those.

  I’m not sure where her passion for poetry sprang from. She grew up in rural New South Wales, the daughter of a semiliterate stockman and a self-taught midwife. She had little formal schooling. My grandfather was an immigrant, coming from Holland as a nineteen-year-old and working as a fruit picker until he mastered English. My point is that my grandparents were not outliers, merely average suburban Australians of their era. But despite Dame Leonie’s grim diagnosis, their cultural heartbeat was strong.

  And I don’t remember Patrick White ever making reference to the Sarsaparilla Public Library. Yet the local library stood at the centre of our life. The Saturday pilgrimage there was as much an embedded rite as the Sunday trip to mass. My parents’ bedside tables were always piled high with works of literary fiction. ‘Read this,’ my mother would say, shoving another classic into my hands. Then we’d discuss it. Sometimes, her acid, iconoclastic critiques shocked me, even as they taught me to interrogate everything I read. ‘Nobody on Earth is such a goody-goody as that Marmee,’ she told me dismissively of Louisa May Alcott’s saintly and idealised mother in Little Women. Years later, when I researched the Alcott family for my novel March, Mum’s words came back to me, and shaped the direction that my novel took.

  My mother had little time for a woman like Mrs March, perennially serene, utterly devout, who never raised her voice. A woman who had learned, Alcott tells us, to fold her lips tightly together and leave the room rather than show her anger. My mother was not inclined to leave the room. If someone angered her, she let them know. Neglect of children, cruelty to animals, wanton tree felling, industrial pollution and any kind of racial or religious discrimination called forth her wrath. Raised at a time when bigotry between Catholics and Protestants was the norm, my mother became intensely intolerant of intolerance. And as our neighbourhood filled up with ‘New Australians’ my mother became their staunchest advocate. The sound of her voice, polite yet relentless, was the background noise of my childhood as she worked her will on various bigots, bureaucrats and bosses.

  Much later, when my mother came to visit my home in the United States, she brought her astringent eye and her flawless moral compass with her. On one visit, she became ill with a bacterial chest infection, an ailment that often plagued her and for which she knew the treatment. But there is nothing simple in the convoluted and crazily expensive private enterprise mess that is the US health care system. The doctor she saw would not prescribe her usual antibiotic without sending her off for a costly chest X-ray. When we returned to his office (two visits, two bills) he confirmed Mum’s self-diagnosis and gave her the prescription she’d asked for, several hundred dollars and several wasted hours earlier. We filled it at the local pharmacy. When Mum saw the astronomical price of the drug, she gave a mordant laugh. ‘Give me that receipt,’ she said. ‘I’m going to keep it, otherwise no one in Australia will believe me.’

  ‘Well, Mum,’ I said. ‘Someone has to pay the costs of these medicines, even in Australia.’

  ‘Yes,’ she shot back. ‘In Australia we all do. And those who’ve got more, pay more.’

  I realised then that I’d been away from my homeplace too long. I’d started to forget the lessons of Bland Street.

  They were not just my mother’s lessons, but lessons instilled by my father as well. Born and raised in California, he’d become an Australian by accident. He’d come here on tour as lead singer with a dance band of the great music hall era, and had found himself stranded and penniless in Adelaide when the tour promoter absconded with the band’s pay. To earn his fare back to the United States, he joined an Australian band, and swiftly fell in love with the country and its egalitarian ethos. He was playing a gig the night news came that Paris had fallen to the Nazis. After the show, he and the band members went out drinking. ‘Gunna bloody well enlist,’ one of the musicians slurringly declared, and, in the morning, they all did, my father included. He was, possibly, the only American citizen serving in the AIF. When his unit returned to Sydney after tours in New Guinea and the Middle East, he just stayed on. No bureaucrat had decided the circumstances under which he stayed. He was, I suppose, an illegal immigrant. He didn’t get around to regularising his citizenship until prompted to do so by a government official who finally noted that a septuagenarian American named Lawrie Brooks had been voting in every election since the 1940s and was collecting an old age pension. But it didn’t take an oath or a sheaf of paperwork to make my father an Aussie. Nobody could have been a more authentic and enthusiastic Australian than my American dad. I know that his Australian heart would break, if he were alive today to see how far we have strayed from our bedrock values in the treatment of refugees.

  It was just the kind of issue that engaged him. If my mother’s activism was directed at the plight of the people around her, my father’s was often more global in scope. While she made phone calls, he wrote letters. Impassioned, eloquent, angry. Letters to the editor. To our prime minister. To other people’s prime ministers. To Churchill, Einstein, Rupert Murdoch. More often than not, he got a considered reply. More often than not, the newspapers published them. Sometimes, I would watch my mother reading Dad’s latest published rant, her expression a combination of pride and dismay.

  ‘You really shouldn’t call the prime minister a liar, darling.’

  ‘Why not? He bloody well is one.’

/>   I can only imagine the letters my father would write today. I think he would be appalled that a Labor prime minister embraces so fully the shallow rhetoric of ‘We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come’. An avid student of Australian history, he would be swift to point out that the Aboriginal inhabitants of this place were denied that luxury when the boatloads of England’s despised poor — who most certainly had not decided the circumstances under which they came — were dumped out on the fatal shore. I think he would say that, since we cannot, on this thin-soiled, fragile continent, take everyone, we might well look at who we were in deciding who we will welcome. The most authentically Australian immigration policy would be the one that takes not the rich entrepreneurs or the talented and skilled, but the poorest and most desperate; the outcasts, in short, who most resemble the underestimated underclass whose grit and resourcefulness built this country and made it what it is.

  The message instilled by my parents was that you didn’t need to be a plutocrat to have an opinion. I also learned very early that you do not rise by planting your foot in someone else’s face. Our way, the Aussie way, was to extend a hand so that no one was left behind. This is not nostalgic platitude but the plain unvarnished truth of how my parents and our neighbours lived. For my father, this truth expressed itself in a lifelong commitment to trade unionism. Although money was always tight, if a fellow worker was in a bind or unjustly treated, you went on strike, and you went without, together. Other neighbours worked through the church, quietly taking care of needs that were never spoken of, merely dealt with.

  It is true that these same neighbours did not, generally speaking, embrace my father’s brand of leftist politics, or my mother’s enthusiastic multiculturalism. Australia had been in the grip of its post-war conservative mood for decades, and that grip was slow to loosen. But you could feel the beginnings of something, even from where I stood, a convent schoolgirl on the cusp of adolescence. Opposition to the war in Vietnam was roiling at Sydney University, the Valhalla towards which all my thoughts were bent. Instead of rock stars, my idols became the draft resisters and their fabulously articulate student advocates. In 1966, when the American president, Lyndon Johnson, visited Sydney, 10,000 demonstrators — a remarkable number — turned out to protest. I begged my parents to let me go to the city and join the rally. I was eleven, and even though they were no fans of Johnson and his war, their answer was a very firm ‘No’. So I watched the protesters on the news that night, chanting along with their cries of ‘Hey hey LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?’