Abridged version of Should: A Reverie on Growing Up Female in Australia after World War II
By Colleen Chesterman
It was the last thing I expected when I returned to Sydney to live after twelve years away. But the first person I ran into was my twenty-five-year old self, running away.
It seemed everywhere I went she was there and stories about her life and experiences emerged and drifted around my consciousness. Much later I found myself writing some of these stories down. They involved somebody who was like me, but also very different from me. I found myself thinking of her as somebody else, a girl called Pam, say, a very common name for girls of that time. It could have been other names, Beverley or Sandra. But Pam this girl remained. As I wrote, I found that some of the stories took on a life of their own, diverged from my own experience. But they reflected it, they echoed my life in Sydney during the 1940s and 1950s. She had lived here since 1941, but by the middle of the 1960s had reached a point when she had to leave.
Knowing why she did that seems to me to tell us a great deal about living in Australia in the years during and after the Second World War. In this book I tell some of the stories about Pam that came to me. About being a girl during those years.
Overseas, I worked in Italy as a teacher of English, in London as a waitress and in publishing, in Kenya as an ethnography curator. I married an Australian lawyer there, I had my two sons there. After my sons were born, I went to the local university in the provincial town where my academic husband worked, and I retrained as a sociologist through a postgraduate degree. I became involved in the Women's Liberation movement, marched, picketed, joined political organisations. As a couple we formed close friends with whom we lived, ate, played, shared childcare and holidays. And yet as we approached our forties we had to face some questions. Had we really decided to leave Australia for ever? Could we imagine living the rest of our lives as provincial academics, with a holiday in a rented house in France or Italy each summer? The answer was, we had to find out, by returning to Australia to live.
This book is what French philosopher Gaston Bachelard describes as a reverie, somewhere between memory and story-telling. Bachelard specifically calls upon reverie in relation to childhood.
"When, all alone and dreaming on rather at length, we go far from the present to relive the times of the first life, several child faces come to meet us."
He says reverie represents and recaptures not just the actual, but the possible, the wished, the other.
"A potential childhood is within us. When we go looking for it in our reveries, we relive it even more in its possibilities than in its realities."
English historian Carolyn Steedman, in a book Landscape for a Good Woman, which I have long admired, describes her own recurrent memories as crucial in developing an understanding of her life.
"We all return to memories and dreams like this, again and again; the story we tell of our own life is reshaped around them. But the point doesn't lie there, back in the past, back in the lost time at which they happened; the only point lies in interpretation."
Within my reverie I found a number of other voices. People who were there with me, other books, newspaper articles, academic texts. Most important were autobiographies and fictional stories by women in my age range. I did not want to make my own individual story THE representative story of the time and place. Other stories assisted me in identifying the major organising narratives which worked through the lives of young women in the 1940s and 1950s.
Like many other women who became involved in the women's liberation movement of the 1970s, I have always had a conviction that the movement had its origins in the ways in which we grew up as young women in the 1940s through to the 1960s. As a young woman in Australia I faced many confusions and contradictions in negotiating my place in society. I received different and at times conflicting messages from parents, relatives, teachers and fellow students about what was respectable, about the aspirations reflected in activities like studying elocution, about American culture and about what comprised the appropriate activities of an intellectual.
Writers these days are always telling us that some of what they write is true and some is stories. When I was growing up I read stories and believed they were true. Many friends have said of me that I never let the truth stand in the way of a good story. The difference doesn't matter to me. It seems to me that these stories are what happened. I hope that readers of this book, both of the Pam stories and my questioning and reflecting on them, will also insert themselves into them as participants and questioners.
Introduction
A ring at the doorbell
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Pam watched a big canvas bag and boots, round-toed, shiny, black.
"Oh, Frank," Nita's voice was low. "I can't believe it after this time."
She moved towards the man. Pam grabbed her legs.
"Here she is," said her mother, pushing the girl forward. "Here's Pam. Kiss your father, now."
Pam's stomach turned sideways. Her father. She stood on tiptoes as he knelt down and she awkwardly brushed her lips across his cheeks. His cheeks were hard and bristled, not like her great soft grandfather's. His fingers ground into her shoulders. His hand was shaking.
Henry, her grandfather, rose slowly from his seat next to the radio in the dark living room. He moved forward to shake hands with the stocky man in khaki and clapped him on the shoulder. At the door of the kitchen, Dora suddenly appeared, moving restlessly from foot to foot and wiping her twisted hands on a faded apron.
"Cup of tea, Frank?" she said, abruptly, "or dinner's ready if you're hungry. We've only got to put on the beans."
"Dinner'd be good." His voice was roughened.
"Well if you're going to eat with us, you'd better get out of those army clothes." Her grandmother's mouth was tight. "God only knows what germs they'll have in them, the places you've been. Go down to the laundry and take them all off down there. Keep them out of here. Nita'll bring you down some of your old clothes."
Nita flushed as she looked awkwardly up at Frank. He seemed to be silenced. "That's a terrible welcome home, Mum."
She pulled the kit-bag forward for Frank to take downstairs. "Don't know what you've got in this, it feels like it weighs a ton. Hope it's not all washing!" She pushed him gently, her hand barely resting on his shoulder, as if she too believed her mother's warnings.
As she turned into the bedroom where she slept with Pam, she looked back. "Anyway, Frank, you'll be more comfortable out of uniform." She dragged out a towel, clean underwear and ironed shirt and trousers from the deep bottom drawer of the wardrobe. She pressed them tightly to her breasts, breathing in their fresh sweetness as she followed him downstairs to the chilly laundry. Pam followed quietly, her thumb in her mouth as she gazed around the laundry door.
In a few moments Nita dashed up the stairs into the kitchen, Pam still at her heels. She shook a starched cloth over the kitchen table. Dora put a large joint of meat, crisp skinned, onto the kitchen bench, ready for carving, and Henry moved heavily into the room, taking up a curved knife and razor strop. Dora shook flour into the baking dish and, stirring fiercely, poured steaming water which hissed as it struck the pan. Pam ran in excitement from one adult to the next.
"I'll just finish a smoke before we start," Frank's voice broke though the mesh of the flyscreen door as he stood on the concrete steps above the garden.
Pam got milk for the tea out of the icebox, where a steady drip marked the melting of the ice down the brown-stained back, and poured it into a jug. She put knives and forks around the table and then squeezed in beside her grandfather, while the two women served plates with strips of meat and mounds of vegetables.
At last they were settled. Pam couldn't eat. She wiggled around on her seat, craning her head up, trying to see the stranger's face, trying to grab her mother's dress, catch her attention, pull her back. Her voice piped high, chattering. "We were going to David Jones for my birthday, but they wouldn't open up because the war was finished so we had to go again ..."
Suddenly, he reached over the table.
"Nita! Control this child! Sit down and eat your dinner!"
And a smack, short, sharp, painful, flashed across Pam's face.
She was out, away. She fled from the table, pushing past her grandfather, out through the kitchen door. Tears spurted as she ran down the concrete steps onto a patch of lawn still dappled by sun. She pushed through a bush of pink azaleas, clung to the fence next door, trying to squeeze her body through the gaps between the posts.
Next door their big capable neighbour was pulling crisp white sheets down from the high clothesline. It was only for Pam's family that this was a special day.
"Shaw, Shaw," Pam called, "can I come in to you, he's trying to kill me!" …
Frank had nightmares, which woke him screaming and sweating in the middle of the night. Pam felt scared sometimes when he was home, standing on the back step, smoking. She had to be careful of what she said. She stayed quiet.
And then there were times he was kind. He patted her hair. He showed her a pen he had brought back from Borneo, a fountain pen with gold markings down the side. Frank said it had been used to sign the peace treaty. Pam wanted to know more about it. She asked him questions about whose pen it was, why he had it, whether she could take it to her new school, where she had just started kindergarten, to show the teachers.
"Why doesn't this child just keep quiet? She doesn't have to know everything. You've absolutely ruined her, Nita, you and your mother, kowtowing to her every whim." His voice was high. He was quick to anger, a rapid smack stinging the face and the knee.
Nita hugged Pam to her. "Leave it be, Pam. Don't keep hounding your father. As far as he is concerned, he's come back and that's it. It's in the past. He doesn't want to talk about it."
In the years that followed my father's return, I learnt to fear his uncertain temper, his quickness to violence. Years later my mother still conveyed a sense of disappointment, of being cheated. "Your father came back a different man."…
Pam hung over the gate at her grandparents' house and looked up the street. Surely he'd come soon. Why was he never home? He'd been away for the first four years of her life and now he was scarcely ever in her grandparents' house. He was always out, out or working back.
When she was little, during the war, her mother used to tell her that they would have their own house when her father got back. Yet now he was back and they still lived with her grandparents, in their small house with only two bedrooms. Her father slept with her mother in the big bed. She had a little bed placed on the closed-in back verandah.
It was crowded. Racing broadcasts reverberated through the thin walls. Pam's grandmother ran the household, a whirl of constant movement. She tightened her lips, imposed standards of cleanliness and proper behaviour. She made sure everything was spotless.
Pam wanted so much to see her father more. She wanted him to come home and take her out playing, perhaps to a park, where he could push her on the swings. Like the fathers in stories, he would arrive home from the office, take off his shoes and settle into an armchair with his newspaper. He would ask her to bring his slippers and his pipe. That would be nice. She would run off and find them, and then settle on a little cushion at his feet. He would pat her head. It would be lovely and comfortable. He would see she was a good girl and would love her.
Sometimes he enjoyed playing with her, telling her stories, reciting poems. Once they went to get the milk in a small bucket. Coming back from the shop, he swung the bucket around and around, no drops falling out. It was magic. But mostly, his work seemed more important to him. He always seemed to have important things to do at the Office. It wasn't fair. She wanted him to play with her.
When Pam looked at her face in the lid of a biscuit tin, she saw both herself, and someone who was not her, a face that was larger and softer around the edges, whose eyes were blurred and whose mouth made a funny grimace. The arrival of her father in her grandparents' house was like that. The activities of the house remained the same, the rooms and the garden were the same, but there was a new presence which altered those places and relationships.
When she and her mother were with her grandparents during the war, everything seemed happy. They washed and cleaned and shopped and ate. But now, there was something a little different. A raising of voices, her grandmother hissing through her clenched teeth, her mother running around more and trying to keep Pam quiet.
There was anger about the house now. It bristled in corners.
My father Joe worked at the Government Printing Office. At the age of fourteen he had been given an apprenticeship. It was the middle of the Depression and his bookmaker father was having difficulties making ends meet, with his wife and the family of four boys. Joe and his older brother Ken were put out to work. The Christian Brothers from Parramatta where he was at school didn't want him to go. They wanted him to complete his education. His Latin teacher walked all the way from Parramatta to their home at Rydalmere to ask his father to let Joe stay. But the money was needed. And though Joe was young, he had to pull his weight. Arch was little more than a baby and poor Frank was simple. He'd have to be put away soon. It was too much. No, Ken and Joe could start bringing something in.
When war started, Joe had been working for fifteen years. He had become a proof reader. It suited him. You needed a sharp eye and an accurate mind to be a proof reader. He had both: steely blue eyes, staring down a sharp and angular nose, a precision for detail, a keenness to get everything correct, an absolute certainty in his own rightness.
My mother said that they thought highly of Joe at the Printo, that they were grooming him for promotion, perhaps even training him eventually to become Government Printer. But when he came back from the war, he found that a younger man had been placed in a supervisory position. "You lot went away to the war," said the bosses. "Victor didn't go. He was loyal to the Office. He deserves everything he's got."
Joe continued to work at the Printing Office. It was all he knew. He stayed in the proof-reading section and devoted himself to checking the Hansards which arrived every Parliamentary sitting day, the Departmental reports, the School Magazine. He worked back late at least three days a week and often during weekends during the 1950s, particularly when Parliament was sitting. He became Father of the Chapel...
[Another sad but all too predictable consequence of Colleen’s father’s war service was that he became an alcoholic.]
Pam, ten years old, was excited. They were going to Dangar Island, in the Hawkesbury River north of Sydney, for their first family holiday…
It was a hard journey. They kept having to stop. Every few miles, Pam's Aunt Shirley said, "Oh stop, stop. Oh God, I'm going to be sick." Then she put her hand onto her throat and moaned. Pam curled up closer to Nita. It was such a crush and she didn't want any of Shirley's sick on her.
When they reached the Hawkesbury, George parked the car outside a big hotel at Brooklyn. "Okay, girls, now we're just going in for a quick one." He rubbed his hands. "Come on, Frank, we'll just wet the whistle, before we get on the ferry. And we'll get a bottle of oysters for you girls."
The two women exchanged glances. "Hurry up, then, if you must go. We'll wait here in the car, with the kids. Don't you be too long. Everyone's tired after the long journey." The sighed at each other. Decent women didn't go to pubs.
The minutes passed. The three children complained of heat. They rolled the windows down. The car seat stuck to Pam's legs. She was reading obsessively. The book formed a barrier against the slow drifting river, the flies whirling, the women's passivity.
Brian whined, "I'm hungry. Can I go and get some chips?"
Nita clapped her hand down on a fly. "Don't whinge, Brian. It won't get you anywhere. We can't buy everything you set your mind on. We'll get over to the house soon and have some sandwiches there."
The men appeared, faces red, laughing voices a little loud. They juggled a box of clinking bottles. They had forgotten to bring any lemonade for the children. George shouted that he'd go back. "Don't bother," sighed Shirley. "Just get into the car and let's get the blessed ferry. I've got a terrible head."
"What about the oysters?" Frank laughed.
"Come on, Frank," snapped Nita. "We'll never get there. There'll be no dinner on the table if you don't hurry up."
Brian grizzled. Pam kicked him. Nobody sensible would want lemonade anyway, nasty sweet stuff…
Pam lay in bed, suddenly awake. It was still dark outside, too dark to get up. She wished they could afford to get her a watch. Perhaps this year, when she finished her Leaving. Uncle Vince might give her one if she did well.
She realised why she had woken. The shower in the bathroom next door was running. Her father, presumably, getting ready to go to work. He was always off early, first into his desk, even if, as last night, he had not come in until after she had gone to bed. Working back, and then calling into an RSL afterwards, she supposed. Or had he brought a bottle back here, and stood out in the laundry over the stone sinks, smoking silently, cradling the liquid in his mouth? …
Nita was moving around the kitchen in her dressing gown when Pam came out in her school uniform, hair still tousled. "Porridge?" she offered as Pam opened the refrigerator to pull out the milk bottle. Pam nodded silently as her mother began buttering sandwiches for lunches. There seemed to be awkward silences often now, so many things couldn't be spoken of.
"I'll just go out to the toilet," said Pam. She stood on the wooden toilet seat, reaching steeply above her head to the cistern. The water felt clammy, as she moved her hand around, until suddenly she felt the smooth hardness of a bottle. She balanced precariously on her toes as she pulled it out. "Got him," she hissed to herself, "you rotten beast, I'll show you." She stared down at the VOP Rum and its inappropriately jaunty label of a sailing ship and old sailor with a pipe while she carefully wiped her hands on toilet paper.
She looked anxiously out of the door, ensuring nobody was in sight, before hiding the bottle, label down, in a patch of hydrangeas by the side fence. He would never find it there, she thought triumphantly, brushing the sand off her hands on her tunic. If only her mother could be stronger. If only she could beg her mother, let's move, let's leave him. But how could they? Her mother had not worked for sixteen years. And besides, Nita really didn't want to talk about it.
A Soldier’s Return
Pam rushed forward. She could not reach
the doorknob. She fell back behind her mother. A large shape filled the light, dressed in khaki. There was a musty smell.
During the years of the war and after, my world was the family of my mother and grandmother. Those were the visits that we paid, up and down the long railway lines, from Lakemba to St. Peters on the Bankstown line, out the East Hills line to Kogarah, Kingsgrove and Carlton, into Irene and Henry at Woolloomooloo, out to Bondi Junction to Florrie's. My world spread out through the lists of aunts and cousins, strange inter-connections, ages mixed up and down the family, as the children of my grandmother's oldest brother Jack met and mingled with the widow and daughters of the youngest boy Les, who had been born twenty-five years after his brother, with eight others in between. It was a pattern as fascinating to me as the elaborate doilies crocheted by my grandmother and her relations and set out stiffly starched on the dark gleaming wood of dining and dressing tables.
They were the world I knew, these aunts and cousins. There were differences in age and personality, some young and merry, laughing up and down hallways, others faded and grey, sitting quietly in the corner of the lounge-room, nodding as others put out the teacups and saucers, put their cakes onto plates. To my mother and grandmother they were a network of close attachments and familiarity; to me a blur of nodding heads and tinkling voices over the bell of teaspoons, and above all lists of names....this was Rosie's daughter, oh she was a terror, this was Clarrie's sister, this was Marge, this was Jessie, not really family, but almost, since the Hughes had lived next door…
Pam just couldn't understand it. There were so many aunties. Aunties and cousins and all of them girls. There were three cousins around her age, Sandra, Yvonne and Leonie. And her mother had cousins as well. Somehow they became Pam's aunties. There was Shirley and Merle and Madge and Violet and Betty and Elma. After that she got mixed up. And then her Grandma had sisters and cousins. Both Pam's mother and grandmother had brothers but Pam rarely saw them. All the men were at the war. Like her father.
The only man Pam saw was her grandfather, because they lived with him and Pam's grandmother in the house at Belmore North. He was a great soft mass of a man, bald head covered by a tweed cap, even indoors. When he removed it, his head was a perfectly smooth shiny ball, a few strands of grey hair wisping across it. Pam felt a catch in her heart whenever she touched it, as if it might shatter beneath her small fingers. He had broad strong hands, pulpy flesh. Each day, he sat in a corner of the darkened living room, in the middle of the house, thick curtains always drawn, poring over the racing form in a battered copy of the daily newspaper.
He was deaf. Her mother said his hearing was wrecked by years working as a boilermaker, working with noisy machines. Bang, clatter. Now the living room shook with the radio, blaring out raucous men's voices calling the names of horses. Pam had to shout so that he could hear her. He rarely answered. But he gave Pam a hug around the waist when she leant against him.
Her grandmother was fast and sharp, all jutting angles in her faded cotton dress and apron. She was busy around the house, cleaning, scrubbing and cooking. She washed every floor in the house each day, throwing out the rugs for airing. The front step was white as talcum powder.
Monday was the worst day. Then her grandmother and mother did the week's washing. Grandmother said, "Now get out from under our feet. Keep well away."
Pam crept down the concrete stairs at the back of the house. Beside them was a moist area called the fernery, always chilly even on the hottest days, dark tendrils of plants brushing Pam's face. It frightened her to go into the darkness there, to feel the plants with smooth sticky leaves. Better to take a doll or book to where the rest of the garden opened to the sunlight. On one side of the central path was lawn and an edging border of azaleas along the fence. On the other side were garden beds, carefully-dug black soil where Pam's grandfather grew potatoes and carrots, and alternated rows of beans and peas, first one planted and picked, then the other. At the back was a patch of fruit trees, lemon, peach, apple, pear, one of each, and a passionfruit vine coiling over the back fence. In summer when it bore its hard black fruits, with sweet juice spilling out, Pam's mother rushed to the back fence early each morning to pick the highest fruit before the neighbours. On the left, a tumbledown shack held at various times chickens, Uncle Jacko's greyhounds, old paintings and broken furniture, grandfather's workbench. Pam turned away from that and gazed back up the garden to the laundry, where the activity was.
The two women carried cane baskets of household washing down the stairs to the laundry and lit the fire under the copper, a big metal container taller than Pam, which stood in the corner. It began to bubble and steam.
"Keep away," they said, "it's hot, the water's boiling. You'd really get hurt." Nita grabbed a towel from the pile of washing, lifted the lid and threw it clattering into the stone sink. Into the steaming copper went a bar of Sunlight Soap, the water was stirred roughly with a bleached pole to set up suds, a long wooden stick agitated the heavy bundles of sheets. Later the sheets and towels, table-cloths, underclothes were dragged out from the copper on the long wooden stick and thrown into the great tub, steam rising from the piled whiteness. Nita and Dora's faces gleamed wet.
The clothes were then pushed through a large iron and wooden mangle that sat between the two tubs, spurts of water spraying from the heavy fabric. "Careful of your fingers, now. Stay away," the women cried out. Water gushed from the sheets back into the tub. They then threw the sheets into a scrubbed basket and carried them outside, where they were pegged onto rope lines that stretched across the garden, dripping moistly onto the rows of peas and beans, the mulched and rounded rows of potatoes. The sheets flapped in the breeze, the lines held up by the long wooden clothes props, curving dangerously if the wind blew fiercely, threatening to cascade all the blowing whiteness into the dark soil. Men came by in horse-drawn carts, their cry "Cloooothes Prop" echoing in the dewy stillness of early morning.
When the sheets crackled between the fingers, they were unpegged, Nita reaching up on tiptoes. One woman stood at each end of a sheet, holding a corner in her mouth while she stretched the edges of the fabric as tight as possible between her two hands. Then with the fabric taut, she walked slowly up to the other woman. The sheet was halved, then quartered, then held close to her body while she folded it over. Pam liked to help then. She was able to fold pillowslips, tea towels, grandfather's shirts and doilies, but not the heavy sheets and tablecloths which felt as if they dragged her arms out from the shoulders.
"Just smell the goodness, lovely fresh sheets." Nita plunged her face into a pile of clothes as she carried the basket upstairs.
On Tuesday when the clothes were ironed, things were quieter. While Dora mended seams or turned collars, Pam was able to snuggle up to her knee and ask her for some stories. They were always about her family.
"My mother was Irish as Irish could be: Mary O'Reilly from County Cork." It was always said like that. Pam had seen an old photograph at Muriel's house. It showed a short stocky woman, with jet black hair scraped back into a bun and coal dark eyes blazing at the camera. "She cleaned her teeth, night and morning, with a bit of coal. Oh, she had beautiful teeth, my mother, so white and she kept them all till the day she died. Ninety she was, and every tooth still in her head." Pam could only take it on trust; in the photo the great-grandmother's mouth was clenched shut, a determined chin jutting out and her neck tightly bound in a high black collar.
"Tell me about the ship, Grandma."
"Well, Mary O'Reilly was one of a family of girls. One by one, they all left Cork and came out to Australia to marry. They were poor, you see. Dirt poor it was in Ireland in those years. No potatoes, they were starving. Well, Mary, on the boat to Australia, met a young Dutchman. Jan van Heeren." The grandmother rolled his name over her tongue. "Jahn vahn Heeereen. He was tall and blond with bright blue eyes. Oh, he was a lovely man, my father. But he was Dutch. Dutch and a Protestant. They married in Sydney. Mary didn't want the name van Heeren. She changed it to Hare. Without an O."
Mary and Jan had children. Ten of them. Pam's grandmother taught her the names. Jack, Sissy, Tom, Dora (that was her), Annie, Wal, Rosie, Reg, Lily and Les. It was Pam's first nursery rhyme, first catechism. Ten names. Five girls, five boys, the grandmother said, five with black hair, five with blond, five with brown eyes, five with blue. Her family had formed her life. She and Annie were the only two girls without a boy between them. Pam nodded as she listened at her knee.
They lived in the Rocks near the wharves. Jan Hare got work as a labourer on the docks. Dora told Pam about their house in a small street, a dead-end up high on the cliff. All the other houses belonged to the families of Irish policemen. "All of them," she said. "All policemen, all Irish, all Catholic." Seven families, with great numbers of children. Next door were the Quigleys, and there lived Dora's friend Patricia Philomena, a name Pam rolled on her tongue. "She was a tiger," Dora laughed. "We used to have fun."
Pam listened, loved the thought of crowds of children playing in the street. She played alone in the garden, with her silent grandfather, her busy grandmother and mother for company. And went to visit her mother's relations.
My grandma's maiden name was Ellen Honora Bourk. She always pronounced it Ellen O'Nora, as if it was a second Irish surname. Like all her relations, she was proud of her Irish mother, although she was even fonder and prouder of her Dutch father. But the totally created name of Bourk, without an e, was their defining emblem with its suggestions of a mysterious Irish heritage. Just as her father, Jan van Borg, was a silent man, a shadowy figure in the stories, so the men of the family disappeared. Ours was a world of women.
The world of women
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Pam loved to get out Nita's collection of doilies, which Nita and her friends had embroidered and crocheted. They were kept in a flattener, two round pieces of thin board fastened together with ribbons. The doilies, after being bleached, washed, starched and ironed, were put one on top of another on the bottom board, and the top board tied down to keep them in place. There was a kookaburra on the top board, outlined in coal black and painted red. The child stared at the bird's one sharp critical eye. All these doilies had better lie flat and not get creased, he seemed to say, beak snapping shut.
Nita had brought the collection of doilies back to Dora's during the war, since they couldn't fit much else. She had loved doing up her own house. It was like a doll's house. Sometimes she nursed Pam on her knee at night, just before putting her down to sleep. "Oh it'll be lovely when we get back to our own place. I had it so nice. Everything in its place, little touches everywhere".
Pam loved making her own little touches. On Tuesdays, when the ironing was finished, she helped Nita and Dora put back the freshly washed doilies. One set of five crocheted doilies she placed on Dora's dressing table, with its triple mirror, and on them the cut glass dressing table set. "I'll do that, Pam," Dora said. "They're too heavy for you and we don't want my good set broken." More doilies were placed on the dining room table, on side tables and dresser, with cut-glass vases and bowls on them.
[Decades later, it was to my mothers’ female relatives that I turned to celebrate her 75th birthday.] I rang one of the cousins from my generation and gradually found names and phone numbers. They were mainly women, the surviving cousins. By the end of the week, I had asked twelve of the cousins from my mothers' generation and two of her aunts, who were still alive at over ninety. The only man was her younger brother, who suffered from Alzheimer's disease. My own younger brother was now working overseas. There were two female cousins from my generation, besides myself.
To all of them I emphasised that this should be a surprise. I was feeling quite pleased. I could show off my beautiful terrace house, the pieces of antique furniture we had picked up cheaply at auction in England or inherited from my husband's family. With the numbers coming it would be a squeeze, even around our big dining table, but some of us could sit in the kitchen.
My mother and her family imposed high standards of tidiness. None of the women in the family had gone out to work after they were married until my generation. Instead they devoted themselves to the maintenance of their houses and care of their families. I was the only member of my mother's family who had gone to university, and the only one who had worked full-time after marriage and children. Of the cousins in my generation who were coming, both had left school when they turned fifteen, had married and had children young. Now that their children were older, one, married to a publican, completed the pub's books on an occasional basis. Another worked for two days a week as a doctor's receptionist. At the time of the party I was Director of the New South Wales Council of Social Service, a very demanding full-time job. My two sons, aged eleven and twelve, were at school.
I had arranged not to work on the day of the party, but I had done no preparation. I found myself resisting my mother's model of entertaining, which had her preparing food for any luncheon party at least two days beforehand. I knew I was a good cook and could rustle up lunches for crowds with ease. Instead of cooking I obsessively dusted and cleaned, even though I had someone cleaning the house one morning a week. It was as if I did not want anyone to see that I had let my housekeeping standards slip because of my paid work. I even wiped the shelves behind rows of books where the relatives would never look but which I had convinced myself had to be tidy. My husband laughed at this unusual fussiness. He was glad he could go off to lecture at university and keep well away from the festivities.
I also became obsessed by the fact that I had no tea-cups and saucers. Just mugs. I couldn't serve tea in mugs, not to my mother's family. They always had matching cups and saucers. On the morning of the party, I rushed out to a nearby antique shop and splurged on half a dozen exquisite French porcelain cups and saucers. I knew six wasn't enough. But perhaps some would have coffee, which would be no problem. We had inherited from my husband's family an enormous number of small after dinner coffee sets, which must have been fashionable during the 1950s on the heights of Bellevue Hill.
But what to cook, now that was a problem…
At eleven o'clock, an hour before guests would begin arriving, I was arranging large vases of lilies and hydrangeas from our house in the blue mountains. Suddenly, the bell rang. It was my mother's youngest cousin, Fay. Fay lived in a town house in Campbelltown with her youngest son, now twenty.
She roared, beamed, embraced me. "You never know out our way when the bloody trains are going to come. That East Hills line. Anyway, one came as soon as I got to the station and just shot straight through. So I thought I'd come early and give you a hand."
I stared in shock. Time had really got away from me. I was already roasting a couple of large chickens and was planning to make a tomato and basil soup and a fruit salad. In one hour by myself I could have prepared them and a salad. But with a relative I scarcely knew, whom I had not seen since I was young! I could not show her my chaotic cooking methods. I cursed my casualness, which I was sure was a denial of my anxiety. I would have to change the menu and buy some food.
"Fay," I said, "make yourself a cup of tea. Just use this mug. I have to get a few things."
I rushed to the group of shops on the corner of our street, thanking my lucky stars that I lived in Paddington, well provided with expensive take-aways. I bought fruit tarts and baguettes from the French patisserie. I selected patés and cheeses from the delicatessen. In the store cupboard I had rice for an accompaniment and in the fridge lettuces and herbs for the salad. Done.
I took the flesh off the chickens, mixed it with paprika and sour cream and put it in the oven. I boiled the rice, washed the salad, put the patés out on a pretty plate. Fay cut the bread, sliced the tarts, took water biscuits out of a packet. At every turn she said "Have you got a doily?" She wanted doilies for under the vases, on the baskets to hold the bread, on the plate to hold fruit tarts, on the tray to hold the tea and coffee cups. She wanted them in the middle of the dining table. She wanted to put them on top of the place mats.
I had no doilies. I dived my hand into a drawer and pulled out black cotton and green linen napkins. Fay took them, but you could tell she did not approve…
My mother enjoyed her presents: scarves, handkerchiefs and a book or two. She noticed that the house was much less dusty, although she commented about dirty patches on the kitchen floor and cat's fur on one of the couches. All in all I was pleased I had given her this special party.
She rang me early next day to thank me. I said "Fay was really disappointed in me as a housewife. I don't have any doilies."
"You always need some," she said. "To keep things off your furniture and to make things look nice. I'll get you some."
She gave me half a dozen doilies and three tray cloths. They were beautifully clean, gleaming white and starched when they arrived, but soon lost their stiffness and became greyish. I keep them in a special drawer. I place one on the dining table under a vase of flowers. But mostly I use them when my mother comes to tea. Particularly on the trays underneath the French porcelain cups and saucers.
I haven't got a kookaburra doily-flattener. It is still at my mother's filled to bursting point with her doilies. I only have to ask…
Initially I thought this story was about the rather fragile nature of my feminist rejection of my mother's values. I think now that it is actually more about doilies. About their importance in a world where what you control is the area immediately around you. About women's desire to create something of beauty. About how easy it is to crochet or embroider something relatively small, which you can carry with you on the train to work and bring out at lunchtime. About the importance of the ritual of washing, cleaning and starching when you live in tight and crowded streets where dust from the road comes in and men return from their jobs on the wharves and at the railway yard with black dirt in their work clothes. About how doilies show that you care, that you aren't getting cast down. It is also about the pleasures of being part of a close-knit community formed by women working on shared household tasks.
Our childhood memories often concentrate around our mothers doing quiet and regular work, when there were few household appliances, like washing machines or dish-washers. We forget the harshness, the physical exertion…
Not long after my return to Australia in 1979, I bought myself a skirt at Paddington Markets, from a fey girl wearing a long flowered shawl. She made dresses out of old embroideries and net curtains. The skirt I bought was made up of twenty doilies, carefully patch-worked together. I wore it to a party. My friend Robin, an art historian, said, "You'd better not let any of the feminist art theorists see you in that. They're reclaiming women's art." Her voice rose stridently. She was involved in the new theoretical movements. Bodies of knowledge. Knowledge of bodies. "Those doilies should be in a museum. They're like Leonardos. That skirt is a total desecration."
The skirt still hangs in my wardrobe. I can't fit into it any longer; besides, I no longer wear hippy clothes. I have seen displays of doilies in the Powerhouse Museum. I suppose my skirt could end up there too. In the future, might it be seen not as a desecration, but as a faithful homage to the doily?
Doilies
Throughout the war I was protected and cosseted, playing in my patch of garden, in a world of my own. And then, as children do, I became aware of the world outside my family. How is it that children understand the powerful forces that operate, how do they respond when they realise that their parents and immediate family are not able to control everything? Who owns the lenses they use to focus, who provides the explanations they use to understand?
Another Sunday, another argument. Everyone was home, the small house at Belmore North was crowded.
Frank wanted Pam and Nita to go to church with him. Pam liked the thought. It would be something they could do, just the three of them together, leaving Brian with her grandmother.
"Nita", Frank stared out the window through the starched lace curtains, puffing on his cigarette, "let's stop this nonsense. She's a baptised Catholic. You gave your undertaking." Pam could tell he was angry.
"Some undertaking," Nita leant over their bed, smoothing out the creases on the bottom sheet. "That smelly old priest. Couldn't even be bothered to stay sober." There was a sob behind her voice.
Pam had not heard Nita talk about her wedding. There were no framed photographs in the lounge room, as Pam had seen at some of her relatives' houses. There were just a few black and white snaps, shoved into the back of a drawer in the bedroom. Nita was not a bride in a long gown and veil. She had been married in a short white dress, with a hat like a flat plate, turned up at the side. She looked smart and neat, smiling directly at the camera. Nonetheless, Pam was disappointed not to see a floating dress, a cloudy veil.
Once as they were walking across Hyde Park towards David Jones, Nita pointed out St. Mary's Cathedral, dominating one corner. "That's where we got married." Pam thought it must have been splendid to walk out to the top of the stairs, looking over the stiff palm trees.
Nita tugged her hand, a rough edge to her voice. "Dreadful place. It wasn't a proper service." Pam stared up at her. "Shouldn't go on at you about it, love. Nothing to do with you. But when I think of them, doing it under the altar. It was so dirty back there and all these old boxes stuck away. You could tell they couldn't care less. They wanted to make me feel bad because I wouldn't turn. And as for that old priest, fat old thing, and smelly. Making as though he was doing me a favour."
Now Nita's voice had the same bitterness. "You go up by yourself, Frank," Nita said. "It's all right for you. I've got things to do, Sunday or no Sunday. Mum and I'll get on with the cooking."
Pam crept quietly out to the kitchen. Dora was clattering pans under the sink. She sniffed heavily, muttering under her breath, "He shouldn't be pushing it down the poor child's throat."
Straightening up, she saw Pam gazing seriously at her. "Do what you have to do, Pam. But don't let them get you into their clutches. They made my mother's life a misery."
Frank paused at the door of the kitchen. "Will you come up the hill with me, Pam?" Pam nodded and ran into the bedroom to get Nita to change her into a pretty dress, though Nita did not fuss over her, as she did when they were went into town.
Pam, feeling important and serious, held her father's hand as they went up the hill. Frank did not speak, but walked straight ahead, wearing his office suit and dark hat. He blew cigarette smoke out.
The Catholic church was on top of the hill. It was dark and smelt intensely of smoke and a strange perfume which caught Pam's throat. She thought how different smells were. Nita smelt fresh and warm, like apples. The smell of Dora was soap and scrubbing, strong lemon, a trace of sweat. They both smelt of cakes, crumbled, sweet. Her grandfather smelt smoky and like old tweed clothes. Her father in the church smelt bitter like the smoke from his cigarettes.
Pam's legs felt damp on the wooden bench. She looked around at the people and knew no one. She puzzled about what her mother meant by 'turn'. How did Catholics make you turn and where did you turn? Certainly there was a lot of standing up, sitting down and kneeling on hard cushions. She copied what Frank did. She worried about what they might push down her throat, whether it was food or drink. She looked for their clutches, which she imagined were like the long fingers of witches. She wondered what they would do to her under the altar, where it looked shadowy and moist. She shuddered a little.
Her school, Belmore North Primary, was also on the hill just opposite the Catholic church and the crowded school where Catholic students went. Once a week, all the children gathered together and sat on the floor, wooden, scratchy, careful of splinters. A teacher stuck felt pictures on a board, of a baby in a crib, sheep and cows, with straw sticking to them. Another woman in a dark blue uniform taught them songs.
"Jesus loves me, this I know
For the Bible tells me so."
Pam liked that song. She liked sitting in the hall, with the large chalk drawings from Peter Rabbit. The Jesus from school seemed to be pleasant and smiling although he was also sad, since he suffered little children.
On Sundays in the Catholic church, Pam felt more frightened. The Jesus there wasn't white and gentle like that and didn't fit with drawings from children's stories. He was tall, skinny and long-haired, hanging from a cross, his hands above his head. His face was sad. Pam didn't feel he loved her. She tried to hold Frank's hand.
Once she asked Frank why there was a painting of a lady in a scarf with her chest open and a bright pink heart, like a chocolate box. "Be quiet and all will be revealed. Our Lady is always there for you," he muttered. Pam hated the picture. She tried not to look at the corner of the church where it was displayed.
She felt great sobs starting in her chest. It was so sad. Her mother was not there, her parents were always speaking angrily to each other. There was so much darkness under the altar, Jesus was hanging from a wooden tree and the strange woman had a big pink heart, a pool of blood spilling.
Frank pulled her outside. "You're a silly little girl. What are you doing, making a fool of me?" He shook her hard. He didn't ask Pam to come up the hill after that and only went occasionally himself. He came home later and later, often smelling sweet and sticky, and did not eat the lunch that Nita and Dora had made…
On Friday nights, Frank always ate fish, which Nita cooked. A nice bit of haddock, she said. Pam did not like the smell. “You won’t catch me eating that, just for the church,” Dora muttered. “What right have they got? Who’d ever know?” She grilled a chop or meat rissole and said to Pam or Brian, “Quick come on, eat it down, before your father gets home. And don’t let him know. This is our secret.”
Frank's brother, Vince, had come back from the war full of energy. He had been studying for the priesthood during the 1930s, but had dropped out and begun studying law. On some weekends, when all three brothers were at their mother's house, Pam heard arguments flaring between them. Vince didn't like the church. He talked about it as a curse. He shouted at Frank that it had got its tentacles into him. "What's it ever done for you!"
Sometimes during the week, Frank came home late from work, with a red face and slurred speech. He stabbed cigarettes into ashtrays or ground them under his heels, shouting.
"I'm not going to put up with it much longer. Nita, the office is full of cheats and ingrates. It's run by the Masons. They are nitpickers, they lean over your shoulders, they look for any slip."
Nita quietened him, "That's enough now, Frank. You shouldn't go to the club after work. It gets you too excited."
Dora struck her tongue against her teeth, mouth clenched.
Frank often said how he hated the Masons. Pam understood they were enemies. Nita sometimes pointed them out, when she and Pam came home from town. They stood in groups on the railway platform in the early evening, men in black evening suits, women in long organdie dresses, like tap dancing clothes but without frills, looking out of place in the fading sunlight. The women carried beaded evening purses, the men small, hard cases. Pam stared at these elderly people, the men with their red faces, the women with their hair tightly waved, and tried to see what was bad about them. They looked kind, but you could never tell. She noticed them laughing together.
For Catholics like my father, the world must not have seemed easy. He knew that many people were hostile to people of his religion. My grandmother's hostility was just one particularly close to home…
My mother tells me that when I was about six, I was playing with a girl my age called Lorraine. Lorraine’s aunt Mick had been one of my mother’s best friends at work. Sometimes we went out with Mick, her sister Tess and Lorraine.
Tess had been brought up as a member of the Church of England. Her husband was however a Catholic. As Mick put it, he made Tess give up her religion, he made her change. She became a Catholic and Lorraine was baptised a Catholic and went to Catholic schools.
Lorraine must have felt the anger about this. Enough at least to talk to me about it. Two little girls discussing their parents and their religion.
Mick heard me say “I’m never going to change my religion for my husband. He can change to mine. I’m never going to turn Catholic.”
My mother now sees this as evidence that I was an early convert to feminism, back then in 1947. I think it indicates more: a profound disturbance about the splits between Catholic and Protestant in the suburbs, a little girl who unquestioningly identified with her mother’s (implied) position.
In my first year living back in Sydney [1979]
I went to a Women's Liberation Conference
. It seemed a similar crowd to those who
went to conferences in England, though
there were fewer dungarees here. In my
flowered skirt, I looked like many of the
others. Sydney is too hot for perfect
ideology; few women get into complete workman's attire.
It felt odd, not having a group of friends to go to workshop sessions with, not knowing what were the areas of debate. I was pleased to find an old school friend, Cathy Bloch, and we raced to talk about the things we'd done since we had last seen each other in the early years of university. She said in surprise that my accent had not changed at all during the period I lived in England.
"You always spoke in a plummy voice," she said. Cathy has always been a socialist, trade unionist. "I could never work out where your accent came from. You didn't act stuck-up."
"Elocution," I said, "years of it. I had to learn to speak proper…
Then they started the half-hour lesson. Pam was taken into the lounge room, and stood on one side facing Mrs Carberry. Nita sat on a smaller chair out in the vestibule and read the Women's Weekly which Mrs Carberry kept on a low table in neat piles.
​
"Now, Pam," said Mrs Carberry, "I'm going to get you to do some exercises for me, to make sure you are pronouncing all your sounds correctly. Concentrate first on the letter O."
"O, O," Pam said, copying Mrs Carberry as she pulled her mouth into a perfect circle.
"Now read me this little verse." The verse contained a number of words with the letter O. Pam read it out, repeated it after Mrs Carberry, then was asked to memorise it for next week. She nodded, impressed by the importance of the word "memorise".
"Some vowels," Mrs Carberry explained, "are diphthongs."
Pam loved the strangeness of the word. And diphthongs were strange, two vowels which slid together; OW, for example.
"To make that sound correctly, you must say ah...ooo," Mrs Carberry demonstrated. "That is right. Don't cut it off too quickly. That would be wrong; that would not be giving it the rounded quality that it needs."
Pam tensed. She must be careful. She must not make an ugly sound like the ones she might hear out in the truck-yard. So practise, practise. "How now brown cow."
"Now we'll try some consonants." Another new word. "Consonants must be firm crisp sounds, Mrs Carberry frowned. "Repeat after me: p...p...p. It is produced on the front of the lips. Now read out this verse."
"Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.
Did Peter Piper pick a peck of pickled peppers?
If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,
Where is the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?"
Mrs Carberry laughed as Pam stumbled through the verse. She gave Pam the sheet of paper. "Learn it for next week, trying at all times to say p firmly and evenly." Pam frowned as she looked down at the paper. What on earth did it mean? But she didn't ask.
Mrs Carberry asked her if she had enjoyed the lesson. Pam nodded. Of course she had. Particularly as it had now finished and Mrs Carberry was telling Nita that Pam was a very nice little girl and had done very well. Pam looked up at her mother, who smiled back. Pam was excited. So many words. So much to learn…
Other women writing about the time talk of the importance of elocution. Jill Ker Conway is acute of the awareness of social class at public school in Sydney.
“I was a snob, and I knew the accents of the teachers and most of the students were wrong by the standards we’d had drummed into us at home… everyone spoke broad Australian, a kind of speech my parents’ discipline had ruthlessly eliminated”…
Nita and Pam went to the eisteddfod office across a run-down park from Central Railway and purchased copies of the set poems, typed on very thin paper which felt like dying leaves between Pam's fingers. Nita paid a fee for each section Pam was entering: under eight verse, under seven comic verse. At the next lesson Pam gave the poems to Mrs Carberry, who marked them. Then Pam read it through, aloud, and then at home again and again, until she knew it off by heart. Each night Nita said, "Can I hear your pieces?" and Pam stood up straight, chest expanded, eyes facing ahead, arms rigid by her sides, no fiddling please. She said her poem, while Nita and Dora prepared dinner or bathed Brian or put food aside in the oven for Frank who was working back.
The eisteddfod took place in a bare hall, with wooden floors, a small stage and a table for the adjudicator, a tall thin man, with a pair of glasses on a chain around his neck and a stained moustache. Through long afternoons, he listened to one young speaker after another, reciting by memory the same poem and carefully entered marks on the long list of girls and a few boys….
Eventually Pam's turn came. She quavered a little on the first words, then launched into the poem, staring down into the eyes of the adjudicator, focusing her attention on him, eyes shining, vowels rounded and consonants firm. And at the end of the session, she heard her name. She had won. Oh it was wonderful, wonderful, she swept on stage smiling, to receive a small silver cup, a shiny plaque on the bakelite base. Down in the audience Nita's face was beaming….
I was thrilled when I won prizes. Usually I was a runner-up. My tension often led to tight sounds and to strangled vowels. I had become friendly with other girls learning elocution and we would sit in rows, whispering, sometimes giggling. My mother liked their mothers and would talk to them, share a cup of tea out of a thermos flask. My younger brother also began to learn elocution.
One year, I was even more thrilled. My photo was taken for the newspaper. I was wearing a white dress with small red dots forming flower patterns on it. My hair was gleaming. The photographer took me out of the hall and stood me by a large urn of flowers. He asked me to start saying the poem, and then bring my hand up beside my mouth as if I were shouting across fields. The photo appeared in The Sun next afternoon, captioned Blackberries, blue blackberries. I recall saying that poem with enormous feeling, although I had never seen blackberries nor tasted their rich perfume. There was a gap between my front teeth which embarrassed me. But the photo gave me a sense of life beyond the world of Belmore North. I was in the newspapers. It was like being a princess.
Elocution lessons
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I was both fascinated and disturbed, finding it hard to identify the young girl as myself. Photographs can do that, moving between memory, desire and a sense of your present difference…
Gradually, I began to piece together the resonances that this photograph held for me. The setting is one of the side rooms at the Sydney Town Hall. In the background is a heavy cedar table. The carpet is deeply patterned, Persian motifs on a pale background. There is a dustbin under the table, suggesting that the room is normally used for meetings, where paper is scrunched up and thrown away. Amidst this municipal stolidity, I look like a grotesque butterfly.
The photograph commemorates an important moment for me. With other members of my dancing school I had just performed at a special concert for victims of the Maitland floods in 1952. For the first time I performed a solo in one of these concerts, instead of just being one of a line of dancers. It marked my greatest success in an occupation that dominated my life for six years. It also marked the moment when I walked away from it.
Pam was six years old when she first saw tap-dancing. She had recited a poem at a concert. Next on stage was a flock of beautiful girls in pastel dresses with frills that bounced around their legs. How she wanted to be one of them! She desperately wanted to stay on the stage and dance away with them rather than walking off on flat feet. Reciting poetry suddenly seemed boring and tedious to her. There on the stage was colour and glamour. That was where she wanted to be. She yearned to learn dancing.
At first there was much opposition to tap-dancing classes. Dora tightened her mouth and frowned at Nita.
"A lot of silly nonsense if you ask me. As if you haven't got enough to do, without traipsing around the countryside with that young lady. And who's going to look after the baby? No point in taking him out gallivanting with you."
Frank, who thought you had to learn to speak beautifully, also objected to dancing lessons.
"But dancing! God, come on, what are you thinking of!" he berated Nita, stabbing a cigarette towards her to emphasise his point. "How are we to afford it? And what kind of people will she meet there? Scottish dancing, now, that's a skill, that's an art. Or even Irish dancing. But this tapping nonsense, American claptrap".
Such attitudes to tap-dancing were to be expected in the restricted society of Sydney in the 1940s. Tap-dancing has always carried with it a connotation of vulgarity and commonness.
Girls from middle-class homes in the 1940s learnt ballet. Ballet was stylish. In the 1930s the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo had made three tours of Australia, playing to enormous audiences. Some of their members, most notably Eduard Borovansky, stayed behind and began professional ballet companies in Sydney and Melbourne. Ballet had the approval of influential critics, like Arnold Haskell, whose books I found on the shelves of public libraries….
Tap-dancing was associated with the shows which were on at venues like the Tivoli in Sydney. Theatre managements, in fact, became concerned to ensure that the young women dancing in these shows were not seen as vulgar, with loose morals…
Pam had seen the glamour of shimmering organdie and heard the clatter of taps. Scottish and Irish dancing did not have beautiful frilly clothes to float around the top of the legs nor ringlets to bounce on the shoulders.
Nita found out that the tap-dancers at the concert had been trained by Miss Elaine Glazebrook, who taught a class on Saturday mornings in the theatrette at radio station 2SM. Frank was influenced by this. 2SM was the Catholic radio station, she would have to be a good Catholic teacher. Perhaps tap-dancing was not such an unsuitable activity after all. So the next Saturday morning Pam and Nita got the train into the city. It was quiet around Wynyard station and their feet echoed in the draughty streets.
The 2SM theatrette was crowded with students. Along one side on narrow chairs sat a line of mothers, huge women, in shapeless dark dresses, hair drawn back at the nape of their necks. Some carried paper bags into which they shelled peas, others had soft black carry-alls from which they drew knitting needles with long grey jumpers hanging uncompleted, still others stitched bright sequins or lace around the hem of beautifully decorated costumes. Their lips pressed tightly together as they closely watched their daughters.
There were mainly girls in the class. The very few boys were scattered through the age groups and jumped around outside the hall until they were called in to perform. The girls had long legs, with white ankle-length socks. They moved their legs easily backwards and forwards. Some held onto a metal railing around the wall and kicked their legs high over their heads, showing frilly white pants. There was a busy hum and clatter through the room as they rushed around on their noisy tap shoes.
Dancing has always been a girls' activity. Boys are encouraged to play sport, to use their bodies aggressively, to stretch themselves physically. In the 1940s girls did not take part in much physical activity. Schools did not routinely have sports competitions and there were no regular periods of supervised exercise in primary schools. An emphasis on ladylike behaviour and dress meant that girls were discouraged from running and leaping around playgrounds. Girls grouped around skipping ropes, jumped from one foot to another. They played hop-scotch, balancing awkwardly on their toes down the narrow squares of the game.
"What do we have here, then? A new pupil, is she?" A tall woman was smiling down on Pam. She wore a full skirt of stiff net, slightly tattered around the bottom, and a pair of shabby black shoes with taps underneath them. "Ever learnt dancing before, dear?"
Nita felt Pam clinging to her hand tightly. "She hasn't before. And she's not actually very strong. But she's very keen to learn."
"Nothing like starting. We're doing a fairly new routine in a few moments. Get yourself ready, Pam, and I'll put you in the back row so you can follow the more experienced girls."
With Nita's help Pam put on her new white shoes. In the shed at the bottom of the garden her grandfather had hammered shiny metal taps onto the soles and heels. It felt peculiar walking on them, as if she were balancing on top of two upturned globes. They shoved her bottom up and made her legs feel free.
She stood at the back of the class. Miss Elaine was out the front.
"Now girls, we're going to practise the steps we learnt last week. I'll call them out. And we have a new girl joining us. Jennifer, if you could put her next to you and make sure she's doing the right steps."
Jennifer was tall, with long brown legs. Her black hair waved down to her shoulders. She flashed Pam a smile and then flexed her legs…
The steps seemed elaborate. Shuffle shuffle: the feet brushed to and fro across the floor. Tap: the toe of Pam's shoe bounced vigorously on the floor behind her other foot. Change: she jumped up in the air and transferred her weight onto the other foot. And so it went on. Initially she was all awkwardness and clumsy movements. Careful, don't fall over. Don't overbalance onto Jennifer. Step on the right foot, hop, step on the left foot, move the right foot forward and back. The movements were hard, but in her head she was dancing away like the girls at the concert, a mass of frills exploding, her hair bouncing up and down.
Gradually a feeling of freedom came. Her feet were doing what they wanted to do. And the noise was deafening.
Each Saturday they went to classes either in the city or in a church hall in Rozelle, when they were preparing for big concerts or performances. They were long journeys from Belmore and Pam cuddled up next to her mother on the trains and buses, reading the book she had borrowed that week from the Lakemba Public Library. Some were books about aspiring ballet students.
Pam did not, however, learn ballet…
I liked the sense of control that came from tap-dancing. Ballet presented a set of rigid rules, your feet had to be placed just so, the jeté, the plié all followed each other in a regular pattern. Tap-dancing presented more opportunity to impose your own style on the relatively simple steps. Tap-dancing encouraged aggression in the way that routines were developed, it demanded that girls impose their character on the stage. Is this why feminists took to tap-dancing? In Sydney in the 1980s I attended some classes with a group called The Freeda Stares. Living out fantasies, showing that we could master the beat.
Even in films of the time the two dance forms represented different things. In the American dance films that I so adored, tap-dancers took over the street. Stars like Ann Miller controlled public spaces with authoritative pounding, swirled their skirts, showed their pants, and got away with it. The films were bright - blue and gold. I remember feeling excitement and a sense of freedom from this.
Ballet did not have this sense of freedom…
Pam liked best the solo character numbers. Each girl was taught a song and dance to perform in the individual sections at an eisteddfod. She and Nita pored over the songs available, songs about flowers, sweet children, spring. One was chosen, the words learnt, the dance prepared. She was by herself on the stage. No other girls to make her feel out of step. She could dance away happily, her fantasy living itself.
When she was eleven, Pam actually won a solo character number at the eisteddfod.
"That's very good, Pam," Elaine Glazebrook smiled. Funny, she had never really thought Pam would come to anything. But it was an appealing little song and she had tapped very nicely. "Now, we've been asked to provide a few numbers for a benefit concert for the flood victims. You can do one of the solos, Jennifer can do her Firebird number and Beverley the Spanish tarantella. And the whole school can do the Wedding of the Painted Doll, with the boys as the toy soldiers and the bears."
The Lady Mayoress's Concert was for the Victims of the Maitland Floods. Maitland, north of Sydney, had been Inundated by the Waters of the Hunter River. That was what the voices on the newsreel had said. We crowded into the small cinema next to Wynyard station to watch extraordinary scenes: water swirling around the roofs of houses and shops, people standing on the tops of buildings clutching onto the chimneys, a dog drifting down the river on a sheet of corrugated iron, boys running around in shorts and rough woollen jumpers with long mud stains on their legs. The water moved slowly and thickly, like a great lake of cocoa, sucking in bits of wood and suitcases, concealing the shape of the land, enveloping people and buildings.
A big concert or performance always took more rehearsal, often both days of the weekend at the hall in Rozelle…
Pam and Nita earnestly debated what she should wear. They always bought lengths of fabrics in David Jones’ sales, choosing a range of pastel colours: pink, almost always pink, sometimes primrose yellow or pale, pale blue. For solo dances, Pam wore a heavily starched organdie dress over stiff organdie petticoats. The dress was tightly fitted to the waist, a full skirt made of three widths of fabric, trimmed with two layers of frills to froth out below. Accompanying it were small gloves with frills around the wrist, a straw hat with veil and flowers, little matching socks above the tap shoes. They were clothes of great delicacy, elaborately decorated, not like ordinary street clothes. Organdie, the favourite choice, was hard edged and shiny, and felt sharp against bare legs and arms. It starched up beautifully, Nita said. Starching increased its sheen, made it stand out stiffly from the body…
The night before the performance Nita prepared Pam’s hair. With the short hair around the girl's face she made kiss curls, pinning them in place. "Careful, don't move your head or the pins will stick into you." For the longer hair at the back, she got an old stocking, made of lisle, a washed-out fawn colour, with a peculiar dank texture, like a cold handshake. She fixed this close to the girl's scalp. Then she wound a hank of hair around the stocking, twisting it so tightly that the girl's eyes filled with tears. When she reached the end of the lock of hair, she opened what was left of the stocking and used it to twine back up around the ringlet with a final triumphant tie to the original toe of the stocking. Rat's tails, the grandmother called them. A dozen or so of these stuck out around the girl's head. A terrible night's sleep it was, tossing her head from side to side, trying to avoid the rolls of hair and stocking. In the morning the swaddling was unrolled and the hair emerged twisted into tight coils. Nita grabbed a brush and, spitting on her fingers, beat the hair around her first finger so that the ringlets shone and fell evenly. The agony of the bandages was forgotten as Pam threw her head from side to side, the soft hair bouncing on her shoulders…
Pam stared at the Town Hall where the concert was to take place. It was enormous. Line after line of wooden seats seemed to stretch back. Her heart jumped.
Round the back to the dressing room. Lots of faces she recognised. Tall graceful Jennifer was fluffing out the skirt of her deep blue ballet dress, gleaming with elaborate embroidery. She tossed her dark hair back as she pinned a feathered hat on her head. Next to her, Beverley the cart-wheeler chattered and giggled as she outlined her lips with scarlet.
Pam smiled slightly at them. They seemed so confident. She sat down in a corner while her mother arranged for Brian to play in a corner with another young boy. She opened a recently-borrowed book, Jane Eyre, difficult to read, but a thrilling story about an orphan girl becoming a governess.
Then Nita was with her, smiling and happy, shaking the dress out of the brown paper bag it had travelled in. Pam loved this dress, with its flurry of frills, a little apron making another layer to bounce and drift, gleaming white and pale pink, soft and baby-rabbitish. Pink is for girls. They had bought white gloves in the city and Nita frilled them with pink. The same store provided a bonnet shape which was also trimmed with pink organdie frills They bought a length of softer gauzy material for a long bow to tie under her chin, and bright pink ribbon for a huge bow around her waist.
Nita put the dress gently over Pam’s head, hoping there was no creasing, fluffing it out around her. Next came the careful brushing out of the hair, twisting ringlets around fingers, then the hat tied on. Then came what Pam thought the best moment, the application of makeup from a small collection bought by her mother. It was special, thicker and heavier than normal make-up. Cream was smeared over Pam's face, bright blue on her eyes, shocking carmine on cheeks and lips. In the floor length mirror, she saw a stranger. Her eyes were large and sparkled behind their black outlines. Her legs were loose and long on top of the jangly shoes. She treasured this sense of otherness, of sophistication, of contact with another world.
And just as suddenly, her turn. Behind her a great wall of curved organ pipes loomed. They had hung thick red curtains around the stage and finding her way through them proved difficult. Standing in the wings in the thick mustiness of the curtains, with their strong dusty smell tickling and making rough the back of her throat, she was scarcely able to breathe because of the warm softness of the velvet. Her arms embraced the curves of the curtain, holding its soothing calm close, imagining herself lost, lost forever, quiet, smothered in velvet. Then as they called her name she pushed through the thick folds, a moment of panic as if she would never find her way, until suddenly there she was, on the wooden length of the stage, lights glaring down, a huge glow at the centre shading out at the sides. Her eyes were stinging, her tap shoes clattering, as she tripped towards the edge of the stage, her hand screening her squinting eyes from the harsh lights.
And then the song. It was not a difficult song, and her voice only squeaked a little on the top notes. The tap routine was fairly slow and regular, with lots of spinning around, so that the skirt twisted enticingly. She knew she was performing well, that her gloved hand was picking up the skirt in a charming way, that the petticoats beneath were starched and glistening above her legs. And all the time, her feet were going tap tap tap. Her eyes, sparkling brightly, were fixed on the audience. She heard Miss Elaine's instructions, "Keep your head turned to the audience. And where are your big beautiful smiles?" She smiled and smiled. Her cheeks were stiff.
Finished at last. Final taps done. A deep curtsy. The clapping grew slowly. Her mother and brother came rushing backstage. They hugged her, no longer concerned to preserve the dress's stiffness. Her face was gleaming slightly through the powder.
"Good on you, darling," Nita rushed around, pulling Pam’s ordinary clothes over her head. "Now you'll have to really practise for the next eisteddfod won't you? See if you can get another cup for it."
"I don't think I'll do any more dancing," Pam said. "I'm tired of it. I really need to spend a bit more time on school work. I'm just about to go to high school, remember?"
She helped her mother flatten the dress for packing, put her clattering shoes in the bottom of the bag, then sat in the corner, engrossed in Jane Eyre, until Nita had everything ready to go.
Now when I look at the photo I cannot recreate the admiration I once felt for it as a photo nor the passion with which I approached tap-dancing. Now I see the strain in the face, a forced enjoyment very different from the delight that marks earlier pictures of me dancing. This photograph reminds me that I had not been as good a dancer as I wished to be, even if I did not talk about this to my mother or even acknowledge it to myself.
This photograph marks the moment when I began to withdraw from my dream of being a dancer. I justified my anticipated departure from tap-dancing by the development of other fantasies. When this photo was taken I was going to Erskineville Opportunity School. I was beginning to define myself as an intellectual, a reader, a student, a writer. Was I aware even then that tap-dancing was not something I could boast about to other girls in my class? The books I got out of libraries were about ballet students. In the Opportunity Class, and later in high school, other girls studied ballet. I would mention that I had studied some ballet, I would say that I hadn't done the exams. I did not tell them of the years of tap-dancing practice on the hard concrete steps next to my grandmother's fernery.
I established a dual silence. I withdrew from girls at dancing class by telling myself that I was cleverer than they were, that I read books, was a student, not a dancer. To girls at school I kept silent about a form of dancing I already perceived as more than a little common. Yet my pleasure in the pounding powerful rhythms of tap stayed with me.
Tap-dancing
My husband found the old photograph when he was preparing an invitation for a birthday party. He was amused by my rigid stance, arms held tensely out from my trunk, hands facing forward. The pose was in fact reproduced almost exactly in a photograph taken at another friend's party only a couple of months before, with me holding a groaning plate of food and two glasses of wine.
​
Pam lay on the floor in the lounge room, in front of the sputtering paraffin heater. She was desultorily looking over a list of French vocabulary for an exam the next day. She had the radio tuned to the Hit Parade on 2GB. Usually she didn't listen to this music. It was not the sort of program which a girl of fifteen with refined tastes and high intelligence should listen to, she thought. It was vulgar, it played noisy American music, and had a blustering compere, whose voice had an American twang. Anyway, if she did have it on, her mother called out from the kitchen. "Turn that rubbish down."
It was a matter of pride to Nita that Pam still looked so neat, in a pink and white striped shirtmaker frock, with clean white socks. The other day they had run into one of her old friends in the street, who looked at Pam and said "You're lucky. She's not turning into one of those teenagers." Nita smiled at her daughter, then, "Oh no, she's too sensible for that." And she had felt pleased when the woman went on, "Doing well at school then, is she?" Pam had smiled as well. Now as she lay by the heater she knew she felt uneasy, a twinge of envy in her soul, a spark of rebellion. If she hung out with others of her age, put on tight black skirts, teased her hair like one of the widgies who hung around Stones' milk bar in Coogee, would she be having more fun?
​
No, she said to herself, those girls just looked stupid. You could go too far. Some girls really went overboard about pop stars. That could make you look really foolish. Particularly if they were keen on ugly, greasy creatures like Elvis Presley. Not a man of taste and refinement. So Pam listened to the Hit Parade, playing it very quietly, but she made sure that when she talked about her enthusiasms at school she reflected careful distinctions. She might say she liked one of the British singers. Someone a little different. Johnny Mathis, the black high-jumper, for example. He was quite an interesting choice. Or she might choose songs which themselves had some distinction.
​
That day she heard an advertisement. 2GB wanted 'teenagers' to apply for the first panel of Australia's inaugural Jukebox Jury. Just ring in. Lucky young people would have the chance to select forthcoming hits, appear on radio.
Pam did. She telephoned. And here was the prize for Nita's steadfast determination to have Pam sound like Deborah Kerr. Pam's tightly-elocuted vowels won her a place on 2GB's Jukebox Jury…
​
They recorded the first session of Jukebox Jury on a Saturday. Pam met her fellow contestants. They were not typical pop music listeners. And certainly not bodgies and widgies…
The leader of the panel was Ross Higgins, an occasional disc jockey on radio. They had to call him the Interlocutor. Emphasis on the "loc". Strange word, but obviously an integral part of the whole set-up. The young people sat around a table, with earphones on; a record would be played, and each would express an opinion. It was indicated that if they could disagree, have a fight, shout out opinions, it would be all to the good. In fact they often had a practice session first, so that they could set out what points they would disagree on.
​
At the end of the session, they received payment. Ten shillings each, fares to and from the studio, a bottle of Coca Cola. And the record of their choice. They were all 45's. Now that was fine, though of little use to Pam, if to the others. Pam did not like Coca Cola but of course she could give the bottle to her brother. And she could certainly choose a record, although she had no equipment on which to play it. At least it was the start of a record collection. And she could show off, lending them to girls at school…
​
Each week she would precisely analyse the rock songs and say that she did not like the big pounding drum, found the rhythms uninteresting, the words corny. She would say that the ballad she had chosen that week had a good story, did things a little differently. Her message to the folks back home was just that. I'm not like the others, I'm not falling for all this over-advertised pap. And there was another message, to do with the deeply disturbing area of sex. Pam felt it was degrading, particularly for girls, to show themselves swept away by sexual desire. Particularly not desire for a pop star. Pam did not want it thought that any of this music or any of the singers aroused her. She chose sweetness and thought of Mr. Darcy.
​
Except once. One record drew her, not sung by Elvis or any of the well-known sex symbols, but by Bobby Freeman. The pounding rhythms of Do You Want to Dance worked their way through her hips, set her feet bouncing on the floor, just as when she had tap-danced, and had her affirming, to the radio audience of 1957, "Yes I like the rhythm, I love the beat." Inside her head it was pounding "Do ya, do ya, do ya, do ya want to dance?" and her head echoed "Yes, yes, baby I do, I do, I want to dance."
​
I still have a number of the records I won as a panellist on Jukebox Jury. I did not in fact lend them to school friends, whom I never told about my time in the studios.
Jukebox Jury
Like my contemporary Les Murray, I fear that "I will live and die in colonial times". Growing up as a child and adolescent in Australia after the second world war was to grow up in a country which represented itself as a child or adolescent. Images of youth, striving, maturing, growing up, were common. As a child is focused on the adults around, we were consistently focused on the powerful nations overseas. We sought approval, asked the opinion of visitors, followed instructions. Now I am a passionate supporter of the new republican movement, which affirms our capacity as a nation to stand alone and independent.
Our chief model was England. From the time I could read, I was engrossed in a world of fairytales which told the adventures and loves of princes and princesses. British History at the time dominated the syllabus: it seemed extremely important to be able to recite a list of the kings (and two queens) of England or the names of King Henry VIII's wives, in order of marriage and, where apposite, death. It was a short step to transfer my fascination from these fairy tales to a living, breathing royal family…
​​
The headmistress Miss Macintosh came to the front, a tall woman with brown hair pulled tightly from her face and twisted into a bun. She wore a long skirt and floating cardigan she had knitted herself in a pale pink wool. She had others in mauve and apple green. Pam thought they were beautiful, particularly the skirts which were ribbed and tight, long columns falling straight from the loose cardigan.
Miss Macintosh gestured to the school, which fell silent as she could be fierce with children who did not obey. They chanted "I honour my God, I respect my King" and then in a rising crescendo, as one of the teachers pulled at the ropes and the fluttering colours rose up the flag-pole, "I salute my flag." A ragged verse of "God Save the King" followed, the teachers standing erect.
Then Miss Macintosh raised her hand. It was going to be a longer assembly than usual.
"I wanted to talk to you children about history," she said in her fading voice. "I imagine you think of it as something that happened a very long time ago."
Pam stared up at her fiercely. Nita had plaited her hair that day, pinned it across her head, with a red bow on top to hide the place where the uneven ends joined. The plaits pulling behind her ears, the pins jabbing into her scalp, did not explain the frown that creased her forehead and the cross looks she flashed at her classmates. She wanted to know more. Miss Macintosh never talked about things like this at assembly, big ideas like history. She talked about picking up rubbish and not shouting. Pam knew that she cared more about history than anyone else around. She read books, after all, more books than any other child in the school. She had written a long poem in rhyme about the founding of New Zealand which she had read about in the Countries book, and her teacher, Miss Folkes, said she did not have to come to lessons, but could sit outside, read for herself. Now she felt singled out. Miss Macintosh was surely speaking straight to her. Pam had to concentrate.
"To think that history is only in the past is a mistake. History is not something dead. It is a living thing. It is happening around us all the time." The headmistress's fingers gently pulled a piece of hair from in front of her eyes and patted it into her bun. "Can any boy or girl tell me something that will go down in history that happened today?"
There was absolute silence. Pam's stomach churned. She so wanted to think of something to say. Her teacher had made her class captain, she waited to do messages in front of Miss Macintosh's office, she was special. She must know the answer. But she had no idea of what had happened in the last couple of days, which could be called history and written up in the pages of books.
"No? Well, here is an example of history in the making. Queen Mary, the King's mother, turned eighty today. She is the oldest person in the Royal family. Think to yourselves, 'Here is living history'. Look around you for other things which make up history."
Queen Mary. Living History. Pam's heart shifted. She stopped listening. From photos she had seen in newspapers she disliked grim-faced and disapproving Queen Mary, her high neck blouses, her hair pulled up seamlessly into a straight squat hat, with a brooch on the front. Pam could not remember how she knew that it was called a toque. And how did she know that Queen Mary was also called the Dowager Queen?
From now on, she would take more notice of her. No matter how cross she looked, Queen Mary had been transformed to the significance of history. Pam stared back at the headmistress as she moved away from the dais. As a good student, she knew this was serious.
​
Reverence for England
Erskineville Opportunity School
Miss Garville [the untypically feminist principal] leant forward. "And tell me Pam, what are your ambitions?"
Pam frowned and shook her head shyly. "I don't know, Miss Garville."
"You should join the diplomatic corps," The woman nodded slightly. "I've been watching the way you negotiate between different groups. You've got a habit of listening, of bringing people together. Tell your parents I said so."
Pam had no idea what she meant. In any case, Pam said, she would like to be a writer, just like her best friend Janice.
"You can always do that later in life," said Miss Garville.
"Get a career first. Gain some life experience."
Pam rolled the word over her tongue on the train journey home. "Diplomat": it certainly sounded grand. Nita wasn't sure what it meant either.
Sydney Girls High School
In third year as the class neared their first formal exam, the Intermediate, the roll teacher, the vague Latin mistress, gazed around the class. She frowned agitatedly, tapping the end of her pen against her teeth.
"We have to get some idea of what you girls are planning to do next year. Now as you're the A class, I would say most of you will be staying on for the Leaving Certificate. I want you to tell me whether you plan to leave this year or not, and then tell me what you want to do when you leave school, so that the school has some record of your aspirations. Girls, this will be difficult to do in the time we've got available. I want you all to keep perfectly still and answer in a loud clear voice when I call out each girl's name."…
The class looked around at each other. Some giggled. Leaving school. Pam tensed. It seemed very formal to outline ambitions or ideas. People might laugh at her silly half-formed notions.
Rosemary, an orphan living with a short-tempered aunt, frowned and tightened her mouth. She was not staying on at school and had already talked to the local bank about being taken on as a trainee clerk. Anything would suit her, as long as she could get some of her own money, save up and move away from Aunty Vera's.
Flashing a great smile, Lorraine stretched. She had been at the school for four years, repeating one year. She was getting out. Now. This was it. She could get a good job in an office as a secretary; she could go to Business College. She would be out of this hole. In a month's time she would whip the boring brown serge from her back and rip it into dusters.
"Now girls, let's get this started." Miss Hills opened a large document, readied her pen and started going down the list of names.
"Aalbrecht; Anderson; Andrews, Lorraine ...." As Miss Hills peeled slowly down the list, girl after girl said teacher, science teacher, kindergarten teacher. One of the Jewish girls said doctor and heads whipped around to look at her. Pam stared at her placid face. Certainly Rosalie was clever, always in the top ten, but a doctor?
"Architect," said a soft voice. Pam gasped. She had no idea that her quiet Chinese friend Joan had such an ambition. An architect. Pam did not even know what they did, other than something to do with houses. And then again: teacher, primary teacher, physiotherapist, Rosemary a bank clerk.
They were nearing Watson. Pam racked her brains. Nita often talked of her being a teacher. But high school had disillusioned her. Teachers were grey, shadowy figures. And all unmarried. Her lip curled as she looked at anxious Miss Hills in her unfashionable grey suit.
At Erskineville with Janice she had begun to think of herself as a writer. And this dream was continuing at high school, where she was getting poems into the school magazine and winning prizes. But she had another ambition, secret and protected. She had been learning elocution, reciting in eisteddfods. And she had spent the last term directing her classmates in the final scenes of their Shakespeare play Twelfth Night. It had been wonderful, wonderful. Could she say actress?
Her brow creased. These two ambitions, writer and actress, seemed unrealistic. They were certainly not to be inscribed on a formal list. She would seem a fool.
"Teacher, teacher, science teacher..."
Pam had another ambition. She knew she could speak well and convincingly (elocution again) even on things which she did not believe. Only that year she had great success in the Royal Empire Society competitions, with a speech on the role of the crown in the British Empire.
And the Shakespeare play they had studied last year, The Merchant of Venice, gave a wonderful role model. Portia was just like an actress. She appeared in court, spoke eloquently, saved her lover and lived happily ever after. Pam knew she could do that. And Vince, her favourite uncle, was a solicitor at Bankstown. Surely he would help. She played for a moment with the image of herself as a lawyer, standing in court, persuading all with her voice, tossing back long hair from under her wig.
She breathed deeply.
"Watson, Pam," Miss Hills called.
"Lawyer, I want to be a lawyer."
There, it was out, written down. Nobody said anything, nobody laughed.
Pam was rather proud. Her career plans distinguished her from the grey ruck of teachers and pupils. At recess, there was still some desultory conversation about people's choices.
"I care more about getting far far away! Imagine being around schools for the rest of your life," yelled Lorraine. Yvonne, who wanted to be a gym teacher, threw a doughnut at her and chased her to the end of the schoolyard. The others followed, running to catch up. A few gazed towards the boys' fence just fifteen yards away. Conversation turned to that weekend's dance.
A few days later a telephone call came from her Uncle Vince
“Pam, I’d like to have a word with you. Can I pick you up one afternoon from school?”…
"Now what's this I hear about you wanting to become a lawyer?"
Pam blushed. So this was the reason for his call. How could he have found out? She had mentioned it only to her mother.
"They just wanted us to say what we'd like to do after we left school. For the school's records or something. I thought I'd like to try it." Pam blushed, flustered.
"Ah, Pam, I'd be worried about that."
Pam's forehead creased. How could that be? She thought he'd be pleased. She started guiltily.
"Do you think I'd find it too hard? I wouldn't try if I couldn't manage it."
"There'd be no doubt about your ability. But it's a terrible career for a woman."
Pam's face went hot.
"It's a man's career, Pam. So few women do it. And those that do ... ! I saw that poor Gravatt girl going through the Law after me. You've only got to look at her to see the costs. Bent forward, stooping. Grey hair, hanging down all over the place. Completely grey. Losing her teeth. Ah God, it is a shocking sight. No man would have her."
Pam's eyes widened. Could that be true? All the study required by Law. Would it mean that you would need spectacles, go grey? And to have no husband, no marriage, no little children. What kind of woman would that make her? Almost as bad as the fussy old creatures at school.
"But surely, if I just studied it, I could become an assistant ... " Pam couldn't think of anything to say. She couldn't contradict her uncle. What would she know? Vince was the only lawyer she had ever met.
"You want to get married, Pam, don't you, have children? It's a dog's life for a woman, the law. Out all hours, time not your own. I wouldn't like to see it. I could not survive if Mona wasn't at home looking after me and the two girls. She has no time to do anything else. I can be of no assistance to her at all."
Pam's brow was creased. It was absolutely impossible. The strenuous brain work would put a strain on her body and appearance. But also the sheer length of time which being a lawyer demanded would make it completely impossible. Her own father was always working back at the office and he was only a proof reader. Being a lawyer would obviously take a great deal more than that.
"No, Pam, I'd be concerned. You should rethink, weigh the consequences."
"I didn't think," Pam blurted. "It was just an idea. Just a bit influenced, by Portia and all that."
"Ah, Portia. It's a very romantic view, a very romantic view I'm afraid. But you're liking your Shakespeare? A great writer, the greatest."…
When they reached Pam’s home, Nita rushed around the kitchen, making tea, putting out a large plate of freshly iced cakes. Pam looked at her. She had known he was coming and what he was going to say.
Pam tightened her jaw. Well she would show them, somehow. She might not become a lawyer, but she would never become a teacher.
The following year they went through the same ritual at roll class. Teacher ... teacher ... teacher ...
Pam sighed as she waited for her turn. What a charade. Somehow she would show them she wasn't in the same corny mould.
"Watson, Pam."
"Vocational psychologist."
There was silence.
"A what?" said the Latin teacher
"Vocational psychologist."
"And what, pray is that?"
"A person who analyses the work to which you are best suited," Pam preened. Luckily she had seen the Vocational Guidance Service at the Royal Easter Show and found this was the description of the person who interviewed her.
"You had better spell it for me, miss."
And she did.
​
One of the history teachers was designated as careers mistress and may well have been able to provide interested girls with some information about possible careers. But in fact it is doubtful that any of the teachers, all of whom had moved from school to university to teachers' college and back to school, would have known how to guide people interested in any other activity. Sydney Girls' High was an enclosed world, where in 1958, twenty-one out of forty teachers were old girls of the school.
There was also a government-sponsored vocational testing centre near Circular Quay, whose suggestions followed accepted sexist lines: like most girls I was told that my aptitudes showed that I could become a teacher or a nurse.
It was not surprising then that most girls from this highly selective school moved into the traditional female career of teacher. Sometime in 1982, my year had a reunion. One of our number prepared a list of my classmates from the school, or all that could be traced. Ninety-nine women who attended the school between 1954 and 1958 were on the list. The first in the alphabetical list described her career as "married a solicitor". Thirteen did not mention any work. Of the remaining eighty-six, thirty-five described themselves as teachers, either at present or in the past, another six were librarians, half of them in schools. The school emphasis on science had not had a huge result: four women were pharmacists, one a nuclear physicist, one a forensic scientist, two doctors. In fact a number of women from my year have gone on to retrain in professions after they had children and have moved into a range of varied and interesting careers: lecturing at universities, becoming lawyers, architects and writers…
​
Fourth year at high school. Pam could sense that this was their last year of relaxation. Next year all attention would be on the Leaving Certificate, the results of which would lead to matriculation. Pam could not think beyond that. She so wished to go to university, but questions such as how her family would afford it, what subjects she would study, were not easy to confront. She knew nobody at university…
Other girls were maturing. They talked more about boyfriends and going out. Pam closed her ears. She could not work out how she would ever meet any boys, let alone fall "in love". No, she would be an intellectual. She was becoming successful in the school. Her writing was often selected for the school magazine, she took part in public speaking competitions and this year she had been chosen as a member of the debating team.
For Pam debating created anxiety. They were given a topic one hour before the debate and then placed in a room with a dictionary. All four members of the team participated in one hour's research establishing the arguments, but only three took part. As first speaker she introduced what her team was going to say, then argued against the likely points to be put up by the other side. While the debate went on, they wrote notes, countering the points advanced by the other side, so that their third and last speaker, tall English Megan, could then demolish the opposition in her ten minute speech.
Pam often felt physically sick. Her skin was bad now, sore pimples on her cheek and chin. Nita had taken her to a Macquarie Street doctor, tall, grey-haired, in a shadowy office. "Is she a highly sensitive girl?" he had asked, pen poised above a pad. "No," Nita shook her head. "Very placid, I would have said." Pam's pulse had raced with bitter fury. How could her mother know so little!
Always in strange schools she had to find a toilet just before the debate and stand over it, retching. The debating mistress rolled her eyes. "Oh Pam, you must not carry on so. You're perfectly capable of debating like this. You've had the best performer award in the last two outings. You must not let these drama queen pretensions get in your way."
Pam felt a tear start behind her eye. She swallowed hard. How could Mrs Giles say such a thing? She was nervous. Each time they debated she thought she would not be able to do it, would fail publicly, embarrassingly. Yet when she stepped in front of the audience, she managed and launched into the four points she had written on a hand-sized piece of cardboard.
Tonight was their biggest test, the finals of the City of Sydney Eisteddfod Debating contest. Their team had already won the State trophy for the best girls' school. There had been a special school assembly to congratulate them. Megan had relished the occasion and made a witty speech of thanks to their debating teacher.
The opposing team were from North Sydney Boys' High, which had won the boys' trophy. The boys were fifth year students, a year older. Pam could see a number of girls from school in the audience. There were two of the girls she had met from the Brigidine Convent team, lively Kathleen and tall brown-haired Phila - she used her confirmation name Philomena, a bit of a mouthful, Pam thought, but it suited her dreamy beauty.
The subject A woman's place is in the home? played on the differences between the teams. As the negative, the girls were able to attack and show up the boys' conservatism. They were good, no doubt about it, but Pam found her ideas spinning after she had made her own speech, and she scribbled criticisms and repartee and passed them along the row to Megan. In fact, the boys' second speaker, thickset and spectacled, was a ponderous speaker and they made a number of jokes at his expense.
When their win was announced, the hall seemed suddenly filled with people congratulating them. The third speaker from North Sydney, tall and red-haired, joked that they would never have won if they had debated the affirmative. He chatted to Patty from their class, who seemed to know him from a youth club. Pam drew back a little. It was fine to speak on a stage, but she did not know how to embark on conversations with absolute strangers. Kathleen and Phila were laughing with the boys, wondering whether Repins would be open to have a milkshake. Pam moved over to her friend Joan, who had helped them as fourth speaker, her calmness a foil in the preparation room, and to the teacher Mrs Giles, who would take them next year in the English honours class. If only she could stop her heart thumping. No-one was going to eat her. Surely she would find something to talk about if they all went for a milk-shake.
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Fourth year at high school. Pam could sense that this was their last year of relaxation. Next year all attention would be on the Leaving Certificate, the results of which would lead to matriculation. Pam could not think beyond that. She so wished to go to university, but questions such as how her family would afford it, what subjects she would study, were not easy to confront. She knew nobody at university…
Other girls were maturing. They talked more about boyfriends and going out. Pam closed her ears. She could not work out how she would ever meet any boys, let alone fall "in love". No, she would be an intellectual. She was becoming successful in the school. Her writing was often selected for the school magazine, she took part in public speaking competitions and this year she had been chosen as a member of the debating team.
For Pam debating created anxiety. They were given a topic one hour before the debate and then placed in a room with a dictionary. All four members of the team participated in one hour's research establishing the arguments, but only three took part. As first speaker she introduced what her team was going to say, then argued against the likely points to be put up by the other side. While the debate went on, they wrote notes, countering the points advanced by the other side, so that their third and last speaker, tall English Megan, could then demolish the opposition in her ten minute speech.
Pam often felt physically sick. Her skin was bad now, sore pimples on her cheek and chin. Nita had taken her to a Macquarie Street doctor, tall, grey-haired, in a shadowy office. "Is she a highly sensitive girl?" he had asked, pen poised above a pad. "No," Nita shook her head. "Very placid, I would have said." Pam's pulse had raced with bitter fury. How could her mother know so little!
Always in strange schools she had to find a toilet just before the debate and stand over it, retching. The debating mistress rolled her eyes. "Oh Pam, you must not carry on so. You're perfectly capable of debating like this. You've had the best performer award in the last two outings. You must not let these drama queen pretensions get in your way."
Pam felt a tear start behind her eye. She swallowed hard. How could Mrs Giles say such a thing? She was nervous. Each time they debated she thought she would not be able to do it, would fail publicly, embarrassingly. Yet when she stepped in front of the audience, she managed and launched into the four points she had written on a hand-sized piece of cardboard.
Tonight was their biggest test, the finals of the City of Sydney Eisteddfod Debating contest. Their team had already won the State trophy for the best girls' school. There had been a special school assembly to congratulate them. Megan had relished the occasion and made a witty speech of thanks to their debating teacher.
The opposing team were from North Sydney Boys' High, which had won the boys' trophy. The boys were fifth year students, a year older. Pam could see a number of girls from school in the audience. There were two of the girls she had met from the Brigidine Convent team, lively Kathleen and tall brown-haired Phila - she used her confirmation name Philomena, a bit of a mouthful, Pam thought, but it suited her dreamy beauty.
The subject A woman's place is in the home? played on the differences between the teams. As the negative, the girls were able to attack and show up the boys' conservatism. They were good, no doubt about it, but Pam found her ideas spinning after she had made her own speech, and she scribbled criticisms and repartee and passed them along the row to Megan. In fact, the boys' second speaker, thickset and spectacled, was a ponderous speaker and they made a number of jokes at his expense.
When their win was announced, the hall seemed suddenly filled with people congratulating them. The third speaker from North Sydney, tall and red-haired, joked that they would never have won if they had debated the affirmative. He chatted to Patty from their class, who seemed to know him from a youth club. Pam drew back a little. It was fine to speak on a stage, but she did not know how to embark on conversations with absolute strangers. Kathleen and Phila were laughing with the boys, wondering whether Repins would be open to have a milkshake. Pam moved over to her friend Joan, who had helped them as fourth speaker, her calmness a foil in the preparation room, and to the teacher Mrs Giles, who would take them next year in the English honours class. If only she could stop her heart thumping. No-one was going to eat her. Surely she would find something to talk about if they all went for a milk-shake.
I had written the previous story because I wanted to show Pam enjoying some real success at school and because I remembered that my school debating team swept all awards in our fourth year. Sydney Girls' High took study seriously and we did not, like boys' schools, debate in our Leaving Certificate Year. In fact, when I did more research in the school archives, it transpired that my memory was quite wrong. We had won the English Speaking Union Trophy as the best girls' school, but were defeated by Sydney Boys' High in a friendly debate (on A woman's place) and by North Sydney Boys' in the Eisteddfod (on Co-education is desirable). The subject choices even now make me cringe.
In any case, that was it. We debated once more in our first week at University, when we were asked by the Women's Union to reform to meet a boys' team, the next year's overall champions… By then, it all seemed not to be something girls did; the young men, who became my friends, went on to become the nucleus of the university team, debate internationally and so on. I chaired them once, in a debate against a visiting USSR squad, who arrived with massive amounts of vodka which kept us all out of class for the next couple of days.
Lesley Johnson, in her important book on young women in the 1950s, argues that
"In the context of the modernised secondary school, young women would encounter alternative constructions of the self. Through the policies and practices of schools around such issues as the provision of domestic education for girls and the need for single-sex or co-educational schooling, all young women were increasingly identified in the 1950s and 1960s as, first and foremost, gendered beings."
Using her model, I am able to see the way in which my school provided a number of competing definitions of the possibilities for young women in "growing up," although these definitions were never unpacked, never 'debated'. It was a period of significant change in what Johnson describes as "the forms of trainings provided to young women". Like other young women who attended selective schools I particularly defined myself within the "vocabularies of educational achievement circulating around secondary schools". However, chief among the difficulties with this definition is that the period also emphasised that happiness was related to becoming the "loved individual" of romance, a role which fitted ill with the cut and thrust of the Oxford style debater...
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Acting as a career
Pam paused, catching her breath, in front of the large building near Newtown Station. The Elizabethan Theatre. She was so nervous. She had come here a couple of times with school groups to see Shakespeare plays. But now she was coming to audition. She said the word again. Audition. She was going to audition for the National Institute of Dramatic Art.
It was as if it had been planned. The advertisements had been in the papers. The Institute was starting next to the new University of NSW, near her home. She had sent off for the application forms and asked Lenny the postman to keep any unusual envelopes for her. She really did not want her mother to know about the audition. Nita was keen on her getting a teachers’ college scholarship and going to university….
She had chosen her audition pieces herself and practised them in her bedroom. She could not tell Mrs Carberry, could not rehearse with Nita. She was performing Anne's speech from Richard III, so wonderful when Clare Bloom did it in the film, and a speech from St Joan, "If ifs and ands were pots and pans there'd be no need of tinkers." Jean Seberg was St Joan in the film. If only she could look like her, slim and boyish. Pam pushed back her hair, running her fingers through tight permed curls.
In the dressing room was a tall girl, a year or so older than Pam. Christie's long hair drifted down beside a gaunt face. She really did look theatrical, Pam thought. When she left to go on the stage, Pam tried again to make sure that she had all her speeches in her head. And then she was walking on to the stage, shielding her eyes from the glare of one spotlight, peering out to the darkened auditorium where a small group of people sat in the stalls. She performed her two pieces, chin jutting forward, nervousness edging her voice. She felt rough, not at ease.
A clear English voice asked her to come down to the stalls. A distinguished-looking man, grey-haired, gestured to her to sit down beside him. The others wandered off, lit cigarettes.
"Keen to be an actress, then?" he smiled at her.
"Oh yes," Pam breathed.
"You're how old? Oh yes, just seventeen," he glanced at her application form, held languidly between two fingers. "And you've just completed exams? What subjects did you do?"
Pam blurted out her list. His brows narrowed at the mention of honours subjects.
"You're obviously a clever girl. A good chance of going to university by the sound of it. I must say that would be my advice to you. Go to university, get your degree. Do your acting there, through the drama society. That's what I did at Oxford."
And so I did, never knowing whether I could have been accepted by NIDA. At Sydney University I tried out for the Dramatic Society (SUDS), in the company of Marilyn Taylor, my best friend from primary school at Erskineville. Perhaps aptly we were cast as twin girls in a production of Anouilh's Waltz of the Toreadors….
The year afterwards, Leo Schofield cast me in his first University Revue, Nymphs and Shepherds. Bubbling, full of ideas, an imaginative designer and director, he bustled me into singing a solo, as an elderly spinster harassed by a phantom lover sending her flowers. I had not sung in public since I was a child and practised earnestly with the pianist Will Scarlet. I could not read music. I did not realise that I could be trained to sing. It was like performing as a child on the 2SM Gang Show, throwing my voice to an approximation of the notes.
My mother and brother came to the first night. "It was so embarrassing I didn't know where to look," my brother said. "No-one in the family has ever been able to carry a tune," my mother said. The reviews, in University and downtown papers, were enthusiastic. In honi soit, my voice was praised, I was called a 'delight'. "As it is you want to put her in a clear plastic box, take her home, put her on your mantelpiece and command her to give you stage-smiles, trips and eye movements when the world is very gloomy for you. You will not only be happy, you will think the world is worth living in after all." I never met Neil Jackson, who wrote these words, even though I worked on honi soit. Perhaps it was a pseudonym, or someone from far outside the close circle of revue and newspaper. I always experienced the words as displaced, not really about me. I felt I couldn't sing, wasn't really a good actress, not compared to the others in casts of the plays and revues I continued to star in. I had mislaid my capacity to own my talents.
Aspirations and Expectations
The 1950s were a period of sexual ignorance and avoidance. I was fascinated in my reading to see how Australian women writers described pain and outrage with their first menstruation, using this as a symbol of sexual ignorance…
In many cases, girls' first experience of menstruation could be extremely frightening, as there was no universal sex instruction in schools and girls were often ignorant. Furthermore, it is clear from many of the stories that menstruation was an unpleasant and awkward business…
Girls in academic schools were often more ignorant, as they were taught science rather than biology; I know a physiotherapist who says that learning physiology at Dulwich Hill Domestic Science School has been of great benefit to her life. Even then, teachers' prudery intervened. Another friend, at age sixteen, sat with eyes closed in a room with blinds drawn while their biology teacher dictated the human reproductive cycle, a section of the Leaving Certificate Biology Course. "Listen carefully girls, take no notes and ask no questions. I will deal with this subject once and once only!"
I was a beneficiary of a forward-thinking headmistress, Lucy Woodcock, who called Erskineville's eleven-year-old girls together to show us a sex education film.
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"You girls are getting to an age when you need to learn something about your bodies."
Miss Garville drew her tongue firmly over her lips and breathed in.
"I have an opportunity to show you a very good film. It's only short. But it will give you much useful information. Now I am going to write a letter to your parents. Some of them may have objections, in which case you may be withdrawn from the film. But in fact it is done in a very considered and tasteful manner. All parents will, in fact, be invited to view the film prior to your seeing it."
The children gathered together after she left. What could it all mean? Pam collected the note and took it home to her parents. She felt anxious, perhaps she would not be allowed. But no. Nita said, "I'll call by the school."
On the following Monday, only Nita came to view the film, wearing a neat hat with a feather. Pam thought it funny that other parents hadn't come, but she enjoyed seeing her mother around the school and smiled at her when the class were shown into the school hall.
"I'll wait and get the train back with you, dear," Nita said.
Pam flushed at times and felt a little ill when it mentioned blood or showed diagrams of the body. But then merry cartoon birds would appear on the screen and a soothing, American-accented voice would begin a detailed commentary. It provided a thorough understanding of where babies came from and why the girls should not be worried when they started to bleed. Pam thought it sounded as if you should worry, as if it would be very strange and messy. But Miss Garville had said the film was important, so of course as a sensible and mature student, Pam watched it with seriousness, not giggling like some of the class.
On the train back to Belmore, Pam nestled up to her mother. She was excited by what she had seen, and wanted to ask more questions, find out more about all these new words: sperm, ovulate.
"Mum, what do you think they meant about flushing the egg away? Can you see it?" She could feel herself blushing a little.
"I wouldn't know," said Nita. "No good asking me. You probably know more than I do now."…
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Few girls had parents who talked openly, as we have all done so self-consciously with our own children. Were there particular pressures for privacy in the multi-generational families in which so many lived during and after the war? Did the men being away make some women more conscious of the importance of respectability?...
Yet even when a teacher like Miss Woodcock demonstrated such open-mindedness, it was not carried through into high school. There we were given a badly written pamphlet at the end of our first year… We were flung back into our own reading to try and find out about life and relationships.
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Pam lay on her stomach, her fingers jammed over her mouth. The rough burgundy feltex on the floor of her bedroom scratched her bare legs. She heard Nita calling them to dinner. She wrapped Peyton Place in a scarf and hid it in a corner under her bed, near the wall.
Jill had lent her the book, covered in brown paper, the day before. They all knew about it at school. It had been discussed in newspapers, analysed on radio. A shocking story, the outline of a young girl's sexual awakening in small town America.
At assembly the week before, a senior girl had been brought to the front of the school, having been found reading Peyton Place in German class. The Headmistress made her views clear.
"This is a book which I believe is deeply unsuitable for any girl in this school to read. Now while I cannot control what you are permitted to do at home, I can in these buildings. Any copy of this book will be confiscated immediately and the girl responsible suspended from class for the duration of the week."
There was a collective sigh from the school. Severe punishment indeed.
Pam did not talk much during dinner and the washing up that followed.
"Your head’s in the clouds, my lady," said Nita, handing her the final cup to dry.
"I've got some reading to finish," Pam said as she hung the tea towel over the rack. "It's a Walter Scott book about the Crusades, a little hard to get through and I'm behind."
She backed away from more questions, to her bedroom and onto the floor. She opened The Talisman, just in case of an unexpected knock, then pulled Peyton Place out of its hiding place. Tomorrow morning she would worry about how to conceal it in the house, since she knew her mother cleaned and vacuumed her bedroom every day. But she couldn't risk taking it back to school until the moment she could transfer it from her own case to Jill's at the bus-stop. Perhaps since it wasn't ironing day she could smuggle it to the bottom of her drawer of underclothes.
More important to get it finished. It really wasn't a fabulous book, but there were some clear descriptions of things she did not know. She was stirred by words like fumble, fondle, stroke. Not that she understood some of the descriptions. It seemed as if even now that she was thirteen she was only told about certain things. Other things seemed shameful and nasty, not to be spoken about.
Controllable Passions
Arrival at Sydney University
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In my first year back in Sydney, I had lunch with Robin Cooper, who taught Fine Arts at Sydney University. We met about noon in the staff club. I received quite a shock, when entering the staff club, to see already at the bar the clearly recognisable faces of some of my English lecturers. They looked exactly as they had eighteen years before. I decided my aggressively short hair made me unrecognisable and scuttled past. I had never felt satisfied with my academic work at Sydney University and had retrained in England as a post-graduate sociologist, a subject I was now teaching at Macquarie University and the University of New South Wales. But even walking into Sydney University had brought back the memories of my first days there, my high excitement, my sense of difference. At that time only sixteen girls out of every thousand got to university, 1.6%, and I was the first from either side of my family to go, save for my solicitor uncle.
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It was hot, hot as Pam walked up the long steps. Her legs felt strange, rubbing together in nylon stockings, so different from the thick brown cotton stockings she had worn to school. Never, never again would she have to wear those thick clothes that made her look so podgy and unattractive.
She had taken a long time this morning to prepare for her first day at university. In her mother's glory box, where sewing materials were kept, she had found a skirt which Nita had worn to work in the 1930s. It came to just above her knees and was in navy blue grosgrain, a sleek, shiny fabric. Pam thought it looked sophisticated and not home-made. It was tight and pushed her legs in their stockings closer together. She was wearing a girdle, what Nita called a step-in, tight elastic around her bottom, a sheet of satin across her stomach and the stockings attached to it. Nita said she should wear girdles all the time as they would train her stomach to keep flat. Although it was tight and uncomfortable, particularly on such a hot day, Pam felt relieved that no parts of her were wobbling. At Paddy's Markets, she had bought a long-line white cotton sailor top, its collar trimmed with navy blue braid. She looked sideways at other girls walking up the stairs - full skirts and blouses, a couple of smart A-line dresses, a shirtmaker. She felt quite pleased. She looked different, distinctive.
Her foot twisted as she reached the top of the stairs. Damn these uneven cobbled streets. The thin high heel was caught between two stones. She knelt down, skewing her legs sideways in the tight skirt, and pulled the heel of her shoe out. These shoes, white, two inch heels, made her look taller. She straightened up, took a deep breath and walked with only a slight limp down to the main street of the University.
Along the street was a colourful gathering of stalls, all the University clubs touting for business. Pam was amazed by the selection, confused about where to look. In fact, she was embarrassed because she might be caught staring. Then somebody might think she was trying to gain attention (oh, all right, his attention). Pam wanted to be very sure before she looked for a boyfriend. She had to be absolutely certain that he liked her. And he had to be the right sort of person, clever and sophisticated. And good-looking of course. Perhaps he might even become a Professor and then she could come driving into the University to pick him up. She would have a drift of pale gold hair to swing over her shoulder as she got out of the low-slung red sports car. No, not red, dark green would be more stylish. She could see herself looking up at the carved stone walls like the ones in front of her now. She would smile at a beadle as she ran up the stairs to pick up her Professor husband. A Professor of Poetry, she thought, or Latin, or Philosophy. She would be wearing a tight sleeveless dress, in fine pink linen, with white embroidery around the neck. She had seen something just like this scene. It was Grace Kelly, wasn't it, in a film with Cary Grant? Well, Grace Kelly looked wonderful, and she had married a prince.
But Pam was here, now. What was she going to do? Momentarily, she wished she had come with a friend but no-one from school really had the same interests as she did. She wanted to make her own choices. She wanted to make herself something special and now she could. She was at university. Her mother was not volunteering in the tuck-shop, as she had when Pam was at school. Pam felt she could do anything. But she must stay calm and not look as if she was trying too hard. She did not want to get embarrassed. Just walk down the road, she said to herself, breathing hard to calm her panic. Look around casually, don't stare. Look intelligent.
There were a lot of clubs she did not want to join: chess, speleology, they looked boring; political clubs, no thank you. The University newspaper? Did she dare try that? No, she would need some good ideas for articles or be able to do something practical, like typing. The Poetry Society? No, that boy looked weedy and had awful pimples. Imagine having a poetry society anyway. Surely all real poets met in a coffee shop or wine bar. Debating? Mainly men on that stall and no-one that she recognised from her year of school debating. Also they looked too spectacled. Clever, but spectacled. She mustn't stare, she must keep calm. Everyone else seemed to know each other. People were shouting out greetings and shaking each other's hands. Some of the girls were even kissing boys on their cheeks. Pam clutched her handbag tightly.
Within a few weeks Pam had forgotten those moments of anxiety. She felt as if she had always been at Sydney University, so old, so gracious. Pam particularly liked coming up the staircase from Parramatta Road, blaring cars, trucks thrusting, and leaving all that noise behind. The bulk of the Union rose on her right. There was little traffic in Science Road. Occasionally students from the residential colleges might drive by, in a bright red sports car, stylish, bearing a sense of wealth and privilege. She often looked after them. They had formals in the Colleges. It would be wonderful to go to one, it would be like the May Balls at Oxford, which she had read about in novels. She would wear a long taffeta gown and whirl around an aged stone quadrangle in someone's arms. He would be tall.
From the road Pam ducked sideways through a small doorway to the right, a path cut diagonally across a small garden - just imagine dancing here - and then there was the main quadrangle. Nothing could be more perfect. Carved sandstone, a warm golden colour. Deep shade in the heavy walkways around the side. Green grass in the centre. Pam could imagine the tinkling laughter of guests around the cloisters.
In the far corner, up a wide staircase of cold stone, was Fisher Library, satisfyingly musty with old wooden shelves. This, Pam thought, was the way libraries should be, a smell of age, a sense of Europe…
The Homer Ellison Fan Club
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It was lunch time in Manning, the women's union, which Pam's friends favoured as a meeting place. There were fewer engineers there than the men's union. Pam looked around her crowd, now on their third cup of coffee. They were a group of girls who had met around the first week drama society auditions and who had then begun to work as sub-editors on the newspaper. They were joined by some boys who sat near them in English lectures and who had also begun to call into the small cottage where honi soit was edited. Robert, short, spikily intelligent, with prominent eyebrows, picked up a Women's Weekly which Valerie had bought ("just to read on the train", she said, giggling to think that anyone would think she seriously read it). They all laughed as he turned over the pages, sending it up.
"What on earth is this? What are they on about in this magazine!" Robert's voice rose sharply. "They've got a Teenagers' Weekly. Who are they intending to read it!"
Pam laughed. "It must be just for us. After all we're teenagers. We need our own paper."
"Oh thank you thank you, Women's Weekly," Peter mimicked a deep bow.
Robert was leafing through the pages rapidly. "But look at the subject matter. What on earth do these fools know? Why do they assume that teenagers are interested only in clothes and pop-stars? We're interested in more than that."
"Well, my dears, we're so artistic, we'll always be in advance of the hoi polloi." Genevieve fluttered her delicate fingers. "Oh, by the way, I've just read the most fantastic book, in that new Faber reprints series. Djuna Barnes. Nightwood. It's so decadent.
"The Women's Weekly really should be sent up." Janice's curved mouth broke into a grin. "It has no right to generalise so. Can we think of any way to show them how stupid they are?"
"I've heard from my father of a wonderful jape that some poets pulled." Piers, a scrappy beard beginning on his chin, spoke authoritatively, his eyes blinking. "They sent up modernism, wrote poems out of extracts from agriculture textbooks, car instructions and other total nonsense. Then they sent them to a modern poetry magazine that Max Harris had started."
"Oh how wonderful. Were the poems absolute nonsense?"
"Completely. Just words strung together. They said they were the work of a little-known poet called Ern Malley who'd died and his sister had found these poems."
"Did the magazine see anything odd?"
"No, Harris published them, all of them. Not only that, he wrote it up as the poetic find of the century. He said Malley was an undiscovered genius!"
"And then what did the others do? Did they expose him?"
"Absolutely. It was a huge scandal. The magazine was presenting itself as the avant-garde of Australian poetry and then Harris and his mates were shown up as fools."
Laughs all round. They were not like that. Mind you, avant-garde poetry to Pam and her friends was not something anyone could string together. Real avant-garde was the sort of work they wanted to write. It was written by their favourite poets or older poets at the University whose work they thought had some integrity.
"What a great idea, Piers. Why can't we do something like that?" It was Robert's school friend, Peter, chuckling away.
"Why not? Let's invent a poet, American, dead, and just write nonsense verse for him. And then we'll say that we are a group of young people who have discovered him, that we want his poetry to become better known, so we have formed a private fan club."
"Oh that's fantastic, just like they do for stupid pop-stars."
"Lets' call him Homer, Homer Ellison."
And so the Homer Ellison Fan Club was born. Over numbers of cups of coffee and drinks in the pub a series of splendidly stupid poems was composed. The Women's Weekly was contacted, a letter sent. Amazingly they rang back. They were interested and wanted to interview the Homer Ellison Fan Club.
Peter offered his parents' house on the north shore. They would tell the Women's Weekly that they were having a meeting to read the poems and commune with the spirit of Homer. They would all get there early, dressed like beatniks in dark colours, weird scarves, black stockings for the girls.
Pam woke in the morning with great excitement. What if they were found out and the Women's Weekly exposed them? No, it would be all right. The others, the boys, were so clever they would be bound to sail through it. And Women's Weekly reporters must be a bit stupid to work for such a publication.
Her major problem now was what to wear. It was all very well people talking about beatnik clothes, but she still had to get past the eagle eye of her mother. Last night she had made an excuse not to twist her hair into curlers, saying that she would wash it this morning. Now, saying that she had forgotten to wash it, she could pull it behind her ears. When she got to Peter's, she would brush it out and part it in the centre so that it looked straight. Her hair was getting longer and could almost trail on her shoulders, like a beatnik, like a French existentialist, like Juliet Greco. There was no black in her wardrobe, but she did have a dark-coloured skirt and she could wear a dark blue blouse she had bought at Paddy's Markets. She had one pair of black shoes. As they were flatties, they would make her look short. And she had hidden at the back of one of her drawers a pair of the new way-out black tights. Nita would die if she knew. Pam thought they spoke of King's Cross, smoking, dark cafes, sex, free love, evil. And today she was going to wear them.
She rushed into the kitchen.
"I've got to be quick," she said to Nita. "I've said I'll meet Janice and we'll go to Helen's place to do some work. And then tonight we are going to the John Alden Shakespeare Company at the Elizabethan Theatre. That's why I've got this skirt and blouse on, because they'll look all right for the theatre tonight and I can wear my coat over them today on the bus." So there. Answer that if you can.
At last she was out of the house, quickly breakfasted, just a weak Nescafe and a Weetbix. Anything to stop her mother asking more questions. She pulled the new black tights out and shoved them into the pocket of a heavy winter coat. She grabbed lots of makeup; she could put lipstick and powder on now, better if she did, but if she put on too much eye makeup Nita would say she looked too fast. Even girls of her own generation were funny about eye makeup. She had stayed one night on the North Shore with Margaret who also worked on honi soit. As they stood side by side in the bathroom putting on makeup before going to the train, Pam applied foundation, rouge and face powder, then carefully creamed a blue shade over her eyelids, outlined the top and bottom eyelids with a brown pencil and patted white shadow between the brown lines. Then she drew out her mascara, put on one coat, then powdered, then another coat, so that the mascara caught on the powder and made the eyelashes thicker. Margaret, standing beside her, said "Don't do that too heavily, those lines round your eye. They look too thick, you look fast." Pam laughed it off, but it hurt somehow…
Pam sat on the bus planning what she would get. Something really sophisticated. What about cigarettes? She could buy the exotic and perfumed Black Sobranies. Or there were the cocktail ones, all sorts of colours, so stylish. Certainly they were expensive, but they would be worth it. Janice did not smoke yet, neither did Pam, but they had to begin to be women of the world. And they would need to look sophisticated to be part of the Homer Ellison Fan Club.
My friend Libby Smith had saved a magazine cutting, from the 1959 Women's Weekly, a page from the newly introduced Teenagers' Weekly. It contained an article about a group of teenagers who were artistic and fans of a little-known American poet called Homer Ellison. In a photograph, they are sitting around on the floor. An angular boy with a beard is reading with an earnest look on his face. Around him, the others are composed in draped positions. The girls have long hair and ethereal expressions.
I can remember the occasion. Most of the others… would probably not want to now. Even then most of us… used false names. But it strikes me as a poignant testimony to our desire to assert difference, distinctiveness, to show how we were apart from Australian society of the time…
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Later years at Sydney University
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In 1989, I was asked by a group of students organising the Centenary Dinner for the Sydney University Drama Society (SUDS) to speak for my generation, seen in retrospect as a golden age. I resisted the request initially, explaining that I had never made my way into theatre, while among my friends at university were many who had become famous as the instigators of contemporary Australian drama. The students persisted; I think I was the choice of young feminists pressing for equal opportunity. It gave me an opportunity to think about why theatre was so important to us.
Sydney theatre at the time was moribund; apart from radio, occasional big musicals, like Kismet or The Pajama Game, an interminable round of British farces toured by J. C. Williamson, and the brittle humour of the Phillip Street Revue, the only independent houses were Doris Fitton's Independent and Hayes Gordon's Ensemble. Although learning elocution and tap dancing seemed driven by blind faith that Australian theatre needed an amalgam of Deborah Kerr and Shirley Temple, in fact I had not really seen professional acting as a possibility. That was done by beautiful women with long hair and English accents. Times were changing, however, with the opening of NIDA at the University of New South Wales.
Things were changing as well in theatre at Sydney University…
It was a coup to be involved in the theatre scene. [A couple of friends] recall rumours of casting couches, but my group of freshers all arrived together and nursed unresolved passions for many of the older male actors. University shows were treated seriously, reviewed in the major Sydney newspapers. We soon defined ourselves as taste-makers and spent even more time away from lectures, in the Forest Lodge pub and, after its opening, the new Union Theatre foyer, making authoritative pronouncements about authors and playwrights we scarcely had time to read.
And yet in retrospect, I wonder how innovative and exciting that golden age of Sydney University theatre really was. We ranged freely through the world of international theatre selecting almost randomly with little firm ideology. The strong tradition of exploring absurdist theatre was not surprising; our interest was the unusual, the striking and the odd; no meaning was as real as it seemed. Nowhere was this clearer than in the revues. Very occasionally sketches might engage with Australian political and social life, but these would usually satirise life in the working class suburbs from which very few of us came. Chester did write for me a song on the Chinese invasion of Tibet, but its political import was lost in its glittering rhymes. Most sketches moved through the world of our reading: the Russian Revolution, the invasion of Peru, Othello rewritten by Tennessee Williams, Harold Pinter rewritten by ... Harold Pinter.
We had little commitment to Australian theatre, nor even to new writers within our own groups. There was a 1959 play by Robert Hughes, which represented life under totalitarianism, but in 1962 Hughes was accused of poetic plagiarism by Geoffrey Lehmann. The major effect this had was a jihad between the University poets, with Hughes' friends, Clive, Chester and John Cummings on one side and Lehmann and Les Murray on the other and the springing up of more small magazines in which they could publish.
Women were actors, not directors; subeditors, not writers. Recently, my friend of the time, Danne Emerson, now Danne Hughes, said to me "You were always too scared to challenge them. Do you remember me suggesting that we direct a revue? But you, little Colleen, you wouldn't risk it." What surprised me was not that I had rejected her suggestion. It was that I had no memory of her ever making it. Was that how unacceptable such a thought was?...
​
Pam and her friends had settled into the third year Honours English class, smaller than previously, in dark rooms upstairs over the quadrangle. At last university courses were becoming a more stimulating intellectual environment. Pam had been disappointed by her first two years. Huge lecture theatres of students, especially in English, the lecturers seen in the distance. As time progressed, she had gone to fewer and fewer lectures, preferring to spend the time sitting and gossiping with her friends or listening to the honi soit clique at the pub.
Pam was doing both History and English Honours. She had dropped Psychology Honours at the end of her second year. It had promised so much, giving insights into sex. But what did sex have to do with dreary men talking about rats? There was nothing about Freud at all. They didn't even mention the words she loved to use like inferiority complex and traumas and obsessive and psychotic. Worst of all, in the Honours Class, they had done a test analysing pulleys and arrows, which the lecturer said measured pure intelligence. Pam had been mortified when Roger Heaney, whom she knew wasn't as clever as she was, had topped it. Why, he had gone to Waverley College and all they did was play football. She wasn't interested in Psychology as it was taught here.
Philosophy had also been a disillusion in her first year, although she had to fight to get it approved as a course under her Teachers' College Scholarship. They said she should do Latin as she had done so well in that in the Leaving. Then, with English and History, she would have three subjects to teach. Nobody taught Philosophy in schools. For Philosophy lectures they sat in a science lecture theatre behind a long tap, curving over a sink. Their Philosophy Professor, often quoted in the papers defending free love, was a short man given to wearing Hawaiian shirts. Pam thought this was not the way an intellectual should dress. He lectured in a high voice. "Is this knife good? It is good if it cuts well. But what do we mean when we say a person is good?" His voice rose. "How can this be measured?" The girls looked at each other and rolled their eyes. Not interesting. They giggled with some boys outside the lecture hall.
Some interesting students had stayed on in Philosophy. Pam still enjoyed talking to an older student, Ian Periera, who was around honi soit and the acting scene. He had a cap of curly dark hair and an aggressive spade-like beard. His ideas seemed exciting and radical, bursting out of him in a volcanic rush, as he explained the logical position supporting free love, the need to respect individual liberty. It was heady. "Bourgeois morality is a restrictive force on human behaviour and human creativity. To truly break the bonds, you must explore to the utmost all facets of life."
Pam was initially overawed by the power of his convictions. He took her to the Royal George pub one Saturday afternoon and pointed out exciting thinkers. He said, "I am going to write an article on abortion for honi soit. It is ridiculous that women do not have the power to decide for themselves whether to have children. Only in this way will they be able to enjoy their sexuality freely." Pam nodded. He was absolutely right. Yet he made her feel anxious, happier to think about free love in the abstract, not consider it in relation to Ian or Fred or Bruce. You had to be very careful not to get pregnant. Later the girls laughed around the Manning table. Ian had taken them all separately to the pub or coffee. They whispered to each other that he was not particularly good-looking. But Ruth, a lean intellectual, who had been at high school with Janice, had known him through Communist Party circles since she was a child and liked him seriously.
Ian told them about the terrible case of Sydney Sparkes Orr. A philosophy lecturer in distant Hobart, he had supposedly had a love affair with a young student. Pam sighed. What an ideal! A brilliant intellectual friendship, consummated by an affair which went beyond petty concerns. Provincial Tasmania had turned against him, thrown him out! He had strong defenders in Sydney, who defined this as a struggle for intellectual and sexual freedom. Pam and her friends agreed. When Orr came to Sydney to talk about his campaign for reinstatement, they saw him in the distance at a big meeting in Wallace. He seemed rather small and weedy, not a romantic figure. Oh well, Tasmania, what could you expect.
Pam grinned to herself as she remembered her early fantasies about university life. How she had imagined that she and her friends would pour out of their lectures and sit on the low ledges around the Gothic quadrangle. She had thought she would sit and discuss ideas and philosophies. Perhaps it was too hot. It often felt fake discussing abstract ideas in Sydney.
First Year English had been disappointing, no better than Leaving Honours at school. Lectures added nothing. The poetry lecturer looked like Chips Rafferty and recited poetry badly. "It's no go the bogeyman", he droned out the lines of Macneice, the rhythm all wrong. Pam and her friends looked at each other and tittered. And they still groaned at the memory of language lectures, studying photographs of ugly mouths, the professor's own, showing the formation of glottal sounds.
It seemed so much more significant at the pub. Bruce, the literary editor, tried out some ideas from his Hart Crane thesis. "That was as far as he could go with experimentation, the language of machines. Little wonder he ended up over the side of a ship." The enigmatic Cleaver, brilliant creator of curious revue scripts, rhymer and wordsmith, traced influences through Pound's cantos. "Pound created The Waste Land. It was an unwieldy mess when Eliot gave it to him. And what a brilliant thought, poems, cantos about Money, the capitalist system."
The pub was where they learnt and gossiped. "Did you hear about Selmar? You know, that philosopher from the Push. He's been sleeping with a girl who works in Fisher and he got her to borrow those Henry Miller Tropics books. They're banned, you know, on closed reserve. Well, he left them on an Oxford Street tram. Can you imagine the face of the cleaner on the tram? Lucky devil!" "And what are they like, the Tropics?" "A brilliant argument for the power of untrammelled sexuality!"
Each afternoon, they discussed books and what was happening in the world over at the Forest Lodge. People told witty stories, made up revue scripts around the table, planned articles for the boys to write for honi soit, devised special issues, like a parody of Time. Sometimes Pam flirted a bit with one of the boys, but she didn't feel very good at it. She was too serious somehow. Anyway, thought Pam, she didn't want to get caught up with a boyfriend.
By Pam's third year, people were dropping out. Some of the boys in the class last year had gone down to the law school. More dramatically, Janice was dropping back to a Pass class. She and Peter were talking about getting engaged and she wanted to leave university, to get some money together. Helen, from their group, was going out with Piers. That was a surprise: Helen tall, quiet and beautiful and Piers, angular, with a quick, destructive sense of humour. He had been dismissed from the English Honours class. His essay in second term the previous year had been judged insulting and careless. They had all been a little shocked. Everyone had done the essays overnight, pulling them together in a great haste. Pam's friend Valerie had started hanging around with little Jake, one of the Push guitarists. Pam thought, "I just can't understand her. He's nice, gentle, a great guitarist. But he's so ugly. His glasses are held together with sticking plaster. I just can't imagine kissing him."…
​
Sydney University was not at the time a stimulating intellectual environment. Introductory classes of over a thousand students were common and there were few tutorials. There was no continuous assessment. We did an occasional essay and then frantically 'swotted' as exams came round. But in many subjects my great expectations were dashed throughout class after class.
Take for example my third year in History Honours, a course on Australian History. Duncan McCallum, stooped, with thick glasses mended with tape, came into the room with a set of small scrappy notes. He was constantly losing them, getting them in the wrong order, forgetting where he was. Not that we went very far. Less than ten miles from Deptford, in fact. The whole first term was spent on the background to the First Fleet, the prison system, victualling, provisions. In the second term we were suddenly catapulted forward by A. G. L. Shaw to look at our development as a nation. Each week the population of NSW soared as we covered another year. The population of sheep grew even faster.
Despite enthusiasms here and there, very few of us became involved in consistent study until later in our Honours classes. Even then, Clive James, two years ahead, said he had written a thesis on Hart Crane in a few weeks. During my final year, my attention was so far away from my course that I changed my thesis topic four times, suggesting the last one a month before the thesis was due. I was driven by fears I would be copying a lecturer's opinion, by enthusiasms for a poet read in class, by an attraction to one of the lecturers. In the end I completed my thesis on a subject suggested by Derek Marsh, one of more charismatic lecturers. It was on Gerard Manley Hopkins' literary criticism, a subject in which I had no interest at all.
Some lecturers were understandably irritated. J. M. Ward, later Vice-Chancellor of Sydney University, used to turn off his hearing aid whenever I entered the room, to explain that I had not completed my essays because of the Intervarsity theatre festival or some other event. By the end of our time at university, some of us had enormous amounts of revision to do. Through Push contacts, we could get hold of methedrine which kept us awake for hours of study, then gave us the assurance that what we were writing made sense.
​
Pam and Phila lay on Camp Cove, bikinis open at the back so that their bodies tanned without obstruction. Their fourth year American literature texts lay open under their heads.
"Jesus, I'm so tired," Phila's mouth moved languorously. "I was out till all hours with Alan last night."
Pam smiled tightly. Phila, who had spent much time at university debating how a good Catholic girl could indulge in any pre-marital petting at all, had certainly moved fast. It seemed impossible that she was the naive young woman who had pushed away that creepy Pole acting in Lucifer and the Lord. She had said to Pam then "The trouble is, if you give in to any man, they'll enjoy you and then go off, leaving you like a shag on a rock." She had not understood why Pam giggled so.
Tall, blonde, broad-bosomed, a slow smile moving around her features, a quaint tip-tilted nose, Phila was one of the most desirable girls around Sydney University. She sat in the pub, a couple of admirers always nearby, happy to buy her a drink. She had had a couple of serious boyfriends, and now was going out with Alan, an older law student, who also dabbled in directing Revue. Pam felt a little like a child around them, particularly if Alan picked her up, as he had at last night's party, and twirled her around and around.
Occasionally Pam tried to talk to Phila about whether she was unattractive. It was odd the way that she still didn't feel as if she wanted to have anybody as a boyfriend. Phila never listened. "Oh, but Pam, you're so witty. You have everyone splitting themselves at your stories."
Phila rolled over, rubbing oil down her legs. "Now how the hell are we going to get through these Wallace Stevens poems. I just can't get what he's saying. You like him, Pam, tell me what he's all about."
Grey Selmar, a philosopher who drank at the Royal George, came into sight. His white skin, thick socks and desert boots indicated that Camp Cove was not his ordinary milieu. So, thought Pam, he had responded to Phila's flirtation with him yesterday at the Forest Lodge. Phila could have people following her into a burning fiery furnace.
He sat beside them on a greying towel and handed around cigarettes. He placed the small volume of Wittgenstein to one side and smiled wolfishly. "You girls are looking wonderful. That's one thing I like about this contraceptive pill. It gives all the girls big titties." A thick accent still clung to his vowels. Pam's lip curled. True enough. Gradually they had all started going to a Push doctor, getting pill prescriptions so they could be sure not to get pregnant. Even Pam's breasts felt a little heavier.
Pam waved at Lou, a whippet-thin girl, who had just arrived on the beach. Lou, sharp and lively, had a car, bought by her businessman father and could drive them back to the house she had just moved to in Paddington.
"Let's leave Stevens," Pam said, closing her book. "The essay's not due till Thursday. Let's have another swim and then go back to Lou's place out of the sun." She knew they would probably then open a flagon of wine and the young lecturer from England who rented the first floor room from Lou would bring some friends around.
Final exams approached. Time and again Phila arrived at Pam's place in the middle of the night.
"Here's this stupid madame again," Nita hissed to Pam. "I don't know how you two are ever going to get through anything."
"Oh hello, Mrs Watson," Phila smiled. "Pam's done an essay on Nabokov and it's much easier to revise if you're together."
Frank came to the back door, his cigarette a dull glow through the firescreen. He spent many evenings in the laundry, drinking through the night. "How are you Phila, getting down to the last stage, then?" he called, bowing formally.
Pam grabbed Phila and pulled her into her bedroom. Frank liked Phila, the head girl from the good Catholic school, but the last thing they needed was him raving drunkenly at them the night before an exam, telling them his successes in History and Latin. They closed the door and perched on the bed, books scattered around, Pam in her baby-doll pyjamas, Phila in a long cotton sweater and stretch pants. Phila took a last drag on her cigarette, passed it to Pam, who inhaled, then stubbed it out on the window sill. "Here," Phila passed over two small yellow tablets. "J. J. gave me these yesterday. They're fifteen milligrams. We should be able to stay up all night on these." The two girls swallowed them quickly. "Pity we can't smoke in here."
"Mum'd have a fit," Pam whispered. "Though Dad still smokes like a chimney. God, I just wish I had the money to move out. Still one day it'll happen. Now quick, how are we going to get through all this stuff before tomorrow morning?"
Her heart was racing, as they laid out likely texts. Contemporary American literature had been well taught. If they went through the Wallace Stevens poems, the Hart Crane, talked a bit about Marianne Moore's animals, then that should cover poetry. Pam had written an essay on Nabokov, based on a review she had read in Fisher on how being a butterfly collector affected his choice of subject matter, Lolita as a trapped moth, that was the idea, and they'd both read Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner. They just had to sort out what the likely topics would be. Gothic melodrama in Southern novels. Lean prose style. They just had to be speedy.
Three hours later, Phila had slumped on her side, breathing heavily. Pam wormed her legs under the sheets beside Phila's curved body. Her eyes were stabbing with pain and tiredness, but her head felt fantastic. These tablets were incredible. You could just stay awake and awake. And more than that, she knew she could see it all, the whole pattern, how all these writers fitted together, how it all made sense, how she could solve any problems likely to present themselves.
At the end of our first year back in Sydney, John and Dottie Hoddinott, old friends from Sydney University, invited us to a Boxing Day party. It was a large party, a hundred people or so, crowded on a hot day into a terrace house in Glebe. People sat on benches in a small back yard or stood around a laundry sink crammed with bottles of wine and beer. Talk was energetic and lively, people shouting, glances of recognition. It was a cross-section of people who had been part of the same group at Sydney University in the early 1960s. I had not seen most of them since leaving Australia thirteen years before. It was unsettling to me to meet so many past acquaintances. I felt that I had changed a great deal while living overseas. I wondered what we would still have in common. I said to my husband that it was like an animated waxworks.
Those parties have become an annual ritual. The personnel changes. There are friends of the hosts from later periods. But the main players are still the members of a large and amorphous group of people, who worked around the university newspaper, were involved in the university drama societies, drank in the Forest Lodge Pub, just one hundred yards away from the house where the party is held. People who arrive from overseas for visits are drawn back into the crowd. The continuing contact reflects the fact that our most important experiences occurred around this huge group, that for most of us academic work took second place to our involvement in creative activities or even just the habit of sitting and talking. I no longer feel odd about the contact I make each year. These people are family, among whom I spent my most stimulating time at university.
Student life
When I was working for the NSW Women's Coordination Unit, we organised a visit to meet with women's groups at Blacktown. I was surprised to find a bustling city, large shopping centres, cinemas, a ring of hills around. For some reason, I had always remembered it as a flat desolate place, the site of Blacktown Girls' High, where I had spent an unhappy time. I had been a young teacher, sent to a large and confusing school, with a mass of girls, all of them in squeaky new uniforms. During my three years as a teacher, I operated under constant constraints and disappointments. These began when I first went to Teachers' College, under the terms of my scholarship bond, after finishing my Honours' year at Sydney University. The whole place had a conservative atmosphere and a punitive relationship with students from university.
​
Pam felt hollow that first day in March. This was it, the end of university as she had known it. She was to start at Teachers' College.
Going down, they called it. And it felt just like that. Down the hill from the mellow sandstone of the buildings in the main quadrangle, the mystic gold towers, to a marshy hollow, an ugly red brick building, like a suburban home. The building reeked of its
lower status.
Her sense of being cheated did not stop there. At the student welcome, the principal said that they had to learn discipline and conformity.
"You have been living in an ivory tower, studying at university. You've gone to lectures when you've felt like it, you've done essays to a very generous timetable. This year you are going to have to come to terms with living in the real world. You're going to learn to keep to a timetable, to write and mark essays on time. Only this will prepare you for the important job that's waiting out there, training the young citizens of the future."
"Oh, God, can you believe it." Pam and two friends from the English Honours class, who were also doing their year of teacher training, had fled up the hill to the coffee bar at the new Union Theatre. "It's worse than I ever imagined."
Valerie drew in on her cigarette and sent a train of small rings curling over the table. She drank her strong black coffee.
"It's like being back at school ourselves, so many petty rules and restrictions. I wish I'd never taken the scholarship."
"Don't mention it," Pam groaned. "When I think of the fight we had to put up to do an Honours year. And now, we just owe double the money."
"Have you seen the dills in our year, they all seem so boring. All those little Catholic girls. Where did they all come from?" Phila brushed her long hair back from her face. Once a good Catholic girl herself, she enjoyed her distance from those who still
conformed.
"My dear, they've been around here all along. Part of the great grey amorphous mass," Pam sighed theatrically. "We protected ourselves, but now we're part of it."
"They really are so square down there. Terrified of sex! I heard that we can't wear black or red, or at least not together."
"Why ever not?"
"They excite the passions, apparently. Those thin men in cardigans down there would get completely out of control. Or those few unattractive boys with acne in our year."
The three girls snorted. The post-graduate teacher training year was overwhelmingly female.
"God, look at the time! We're going to be out of control or out on our ears if we don't get down there. The next class begins at eleven o'clock and they're going to be marking us off on the roll."
"Kathleen doesn't know how lucky she is. To be married in Adelaide suddenly seems like heaven to me!"
"If I'd known it was going to be like this, I would never have signed the bond. Where on earth could I get a thousand pounds to pay myself out?"
​
Sydney Teachers’ College was in the grounds of Sydney University in a hollow by the sports fields. It looked physically different to the other buildings, red-brick, functional. There was no sharing of cultures between two institutions...
At that point in time, there was a shortage of teachers approaching as the post war baby boomers moved through the schools. The Education Department was therefore offering Teachers' College Scholarships: these gave University students seven pounds a week and a lump sum of twenty pounds to pay for books. In return students undertook to teach for a certain number of years, or else pay back a designated amount. For pass degree students the bonded period was three years, or five hundred pounds, but if students completed an Honours year, then they were bonded for five years, or one thousand pounds, to teach at a school determined by the Department of Education. The bond could be waived for married women.
​
"Look at these lists." The three girls leant against the walls of the college and stared at the sheets of typewritten pages pinned on to the board.
"Five classes in English! Can you believe it! How many English teachers does the country need?"
"Oh no, they've divided them alphabetically. We're not even going to be in the same English class. I can't bear it. Who can I talk to?"
Pam's group was the last. The end of the alphabet, she thought, the last resort.
Her English lecturer, Mrs Grant, briskly clipped into the class, a small woman, in a neat twinset. When she arrived at college in the morning she wore a hat perched on her tightly permed grey hair. Her manner was precise. She demanded that notebooks be open, gave clear instructions, made it apparent what should be copied down on the teaching of grammar, the study of the novel, the marking of an essay.
Pam slouched in a side row. Although inside the building, she still wore her sunglasses. Her skirt was full and dark, her fair hair trailed down her back. She wiped her hand over her forehead. She had a slight headache. Last night she had been at the pub with friends who had gone to the Herald at Broadway as trainee journalists. Her head felt as if it was still in the night before.
Oh this was complete and utter boredom, boredom. She loathed Mrs Grant's poetry classes most of all. Every single poem studied was tedious and conventional. Robert Bridges, the English Georgians. It reminded Pam of learning elocution. So prissy. What about all the exciting stuff she'd been reading in English at university - Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens. What about the poets they'd discovered for themselves, like Sylvia Plath. Imagine showing this old bat Allan Ginsburg. Pam loved his work. It was confronting, strong, dealt with real issues. Not like this predigested pap that Mrs Grant was spewing forth for the other dreary students around her.
As the lesson drew to a close, Pam stirred.
"How do you teach a poem if you don't think it's very good?"
"What do you mean by that remark, young woman? And at least have the courtesy to sit up straight when you're talking to me."
"Mrs Grant, you've taught this poem as well as anyone could. But I happen to think it's not a good poem. It's sentimentalised rubbish about snow, which most of us have never seen. What if such a poem is set for an exam, the Leaving Certificate for example? As a teacher you have to teach it to the kids doing the exam. I'm asking what you do if you can't find anything good to say about it." Pam could feel herself stumbling, her head not functioning properly.
The older woman's mouth tightened. This arrogant young miss, who had looked half asleep during the class, and indeed most of the classes that year, was being deliberately provocative. She breathed in briskly as the bell sounded.
"In my view you are being absolutely impertinent, young woman. I am not going to deal with this now. I want to see you, in my office, after four this afternoon."
At four o'clock, Pam knocked on the brown door. Mrs Grant sat behind the desk, bright red lipstick slashing her face, ashing a cigarette with quiet control into a small pillbox-shaped ashtray, its lid covered with petit-point embroidery.
"Perhaps you would like to give me some explanation of your quite unacceptable behaviour this morning?"
"I meant my question seriously," Pam wished her head wasn't throbbing quite so insistently. She had spent the hours until now drinking coffee in the Union Theatre Foyer with her friends. "I do think that a lot of the poems and stories you've used for demonstrating teaching are just not interesting for kids today."
"Miss Watson, you are in very grave danger of receiving an unsatisfactory report from me. This would have the effect of summarily terminating your scholarship here."
Pam's attention lurched. Not to have to teach! What a relief! But what else could she do? How would she pay back the bond? And what would her parents say? Her father would be furious.
"I think, young woman, that you need to reassess your attitude. The first step is to control and discipline yourself. Your whole attitude to this course has been casual and rebellious. You have arrived late to class on numerous occasions. This is just not feasible for a teacher at a school. If you don't get to the school on time each morning, you will find that your young charges are pulling it to pieces, brick by brick."
Mrs Grant slowly drew out the last words, rolling them between her teeth. She was clearly enjoying Pam's discomfort. And Pam was finding it hard to maintain her anger. Conservative old stick though Mrs Grant was, she had a point. Pam had been sloppy. She was often late. She really had to stop spending so much time with her old mates. Their lives were freer, their jobs more independent. And more of them were heading off on the boat to England. If she wanted to get there soon, she had no choice. She had to work out her bond and save her money.
"You clearly have a good brain and could make a real contribution as a teacher. Indeed you could make considerable progress in the profession. I would like to see you valuing yourself more. Look at your hair, trailing down over your face. And your clothes, they're not well-fitting and are scarcely flattering to you. If you had some pride in yourself and your appearance, pride in yourself and your self-discipline, you would get your hair cut, wear a good hat, get a neat suit. Oh, you can smirk, Miss Watson, but believe me, I know how these outward appearances
reflect our own spirit, our view of ourselves."
Pam felt stupidly close to tears. Who would ever take fashion advice from Mrs Grant? Come on, pull yourself together, she muttered, this'll be a great story in the pub later. Just look at that oh-so-precious little portable ashtray with its flower-embroidered lid. Oh, oh aren't we refined!
"So, Miss Watson." Mrs Grant pursed her lips. "I am prepared to leave further discipline for the moment. I will, however, be looking for a change of attitude. I will personally supervise your next practice teaching session."
Pam had the two-week November practice teaching session at Canterbury Girls' High, a school in a working class area just two train stations away from her grandparents' home where she had lived until she was twelve. She was in front of 7C when Mrs Grant quietly entered and sat at the back. Pam had roneoed for the class Kenneth Slessor's Carnival and was encouraging the girls to look for words which reflected the clip of the horse's hooves, the swirl of the music. Pam walked briskly between the rows, her high heels clicking, her cotton suit neat around her bottom, her bobbed hair shining. She stimulated the class, she could feel their enthusiasm as the small twelve olds clustered around as the bell went. "Miss, do you think ...?"…
And at the end, the year at Teachers' College over, I was posted to a school in Sydney's western suburbs. In the early 1950s Sydney was dramatically expanding westward. A high proportion of staff in schools in these areas were first year out teachers. Most did not live in the area where they taught, where the recently built houses were intended for families. There was a long journey on the train each morning.
And so it had come about that she was on this early morning train to Sydney's western suburbs. Mind you, she thought, Blacktown was so far out in the sticks I might as well be in the country. But at least I can go on living at home and keep on with my Sydney life. Who knows, I might even share a flat with Valerie or some other friends.
On the west-bound platform she found crowds of young teachers, some carrying coffee in plastic cups, the smoke drifting up. Voices rose.
"Hi, where have you been sent? What? Rooty Hill? God, what a name. Never heard of it. Where are these places? Who lives out there?"
Pam greeted some acquaintances, merry Sandra who had helped with costumes for SUDS plays, Jane who had been teaching at Parramatta for a year. They crowded into the carriage, chattering, groaning at the prospect of interminable journeys each morning. They seemed mostly to be teachers of English, Art and Music. Sydney Morning Heralds were open. Pam inhaled the first cigarette of the day, tight, acrid on the throat. Across the carriage she noted a Vogue magazine on a woman's knees.
Pam gazed out the window with tired, dead eyes. The train crept out through the long line of stations, stopping, starting. The scenery changed dramatically as they passed Parramatta, which now seemed quite close to the city. Pam was aware of the shock of red earth, a scattering of recently built houses, the raw colour of new bricks. New suburbs dripped along the railway line. Seven Hills, Rooty Hill, Doonside. Occasionally there was a stand of dusty gum trees, but most had been flattened to deal with the spread of new building.
The school at Blacktown was half a mile from the station, a dirty walk through red dust on unmade footpaths. It was a new school, a square building of harsh brick, a half-made asphalt playground, scratchy grass covering a field with a group of demountable classrooms. Pam was dimly aware of hordes of children, the noise of screaming in the playground.
The first term passed for her in a state of shock. Her colleagues in English, three other young women and a vague, gentle subject master, were pleasant enough. On the train going back to town she occasionally talked with Eileen, a music teacher of a similar age, witty, interested in clothes. But she felt antipathetic to the rest of the staff, comfortable middle aged women, rather like her mother, but most of all to the sour head teacher, grey-faced as if she had liver trouble. There were a couple of men on the staff. "Male teachers behave as if their brains and blood were made of chalk, don't they?" she said to her friend Jane on the train one morning. "I can scarcely bear to be around such dreary people. They wear brown cardigans!"…
"How did your play go?" Eileen asked, waving as her pianist friend Garth wandered vaguely up the aisle. A quiet sensitive man, with long tender fingers, he taught at a school further out. "Hello Garth, come and join us. Our little Pam's a trifle fragile this morning. This train's no place for stars of stage and screen."
"It was all right, I suppose." Pam was appearing in a short season of Maxwell Anderson's plays put on by the Graduate Theatre Troupe in a small theatre in Phillip Street. "Mind you last night there were more people on stage than in the audience. And you've got to admit that my part is not going to have Fellini rushing to our door begging me to be in his next film."
Garth and Eileen had come to the opening night the previous week. They nodded sympathetically. Pam played a wisecracking secretary in an unhappy relationship with the boss of the clothing firm. It was not a big part; she played it well, but the main focus was on the clash between the employer and the union boss.
Pam lit a cigarette and blew out rapidly. "Anyway, Paul came up last night, he'd finished early, so a crowd of us went off to Vadims."
Paul, one of Pam's occasional escorts, was a trainee journalist on the Herald. "We were celebrating for Fred. He's made a big decision and is leaving the law. The reviews he got last week for the boss's part really boosted him. He's ignoring his parents and yesterday he tried out for a professional theatre part. And he got it. Front half of a donkey or something in the Young Elizabethans touring South Australia. No, I'm joking, of course. They'll do short Shakespeare or something. He's over the moon."
Pam ground the cigarette under her foot and tightened her mouth. Blast the bond, or I'd try for something better too, she thought. "If I didn't owe so much money to the government, you wouldn't see my heels for dust. And I'll tell you it wouldn't be the dust of Blacktown either. Don't know how I'll bear the dump for another year. Anyway better start making myself look presentable, hadn't I, dahhlings. Do us a favour, Eileen, have you got an aspirin? I've just got to get rid of this headache. Too much red wine last night. It was hysterical. There were a couple of big chaps that Steve Vadim didn't know in the corner, so from ten o'clock onwards he was serving his red wine in coffee cups. Mine had steam coming out!"
"Why on earth?"
"They might have been licensing cops! They're always wanting to up the ante and poor old Steve's only got a with-food licence."
"Did you eat anything?"
"I had a sip of Paul's pelemeny soup and a bit of bread roll. Not hungry. Anyway, all to the good. I want to be able to fit into that red dress for the party on Sunday."…
Pam rested her hot forehead on the window glass. She felt things were flying out of control, as if life was somehow moving away from her on a faster trajectory while she sat on a train to Blacktown, dressed conservatively as a teacher, going out with Eileen to buy fabric at the Tissus Michels factory in St Mary's. Yet her friends from university, those left in Sydney, were flinging themselves into other things. Robert, now studying medicine, had started the magazine PRIVY, with student journalists from other universities. Lively and provocative, it had got them into court, challenging the conservatism. Yet what role could she have in that, in her little school suits, too scared to risk Department of Education ire? Geoff had begun making short films. She had been in the most recent, a character part, a club-footed Nazi spy. There were other scenes filmed down the Northern Beaches, with crowds of young women in bikinis with long swathes of hair. Even their bodies, long-limbed, sleek, seemed different to those of Pam's friends, not small like hers or heavy-breasted like Phila and Helen. They were beautiful, sexually confident. Where had they all come from? How had she suddenly come to be middle-aged, the character part?
She concentrated on the small mirror in her hand, frowning as she drew kohl lines along her lower lids and smothered bright colour on her lips. "Well, now I'm beautiful and here we are at Seven Hills. I've got 5B for poetry first period. Ohmigod, what am I going to give them?"
Another day starting. They pulled themselves from the train at sandy Blacktown station, the sun already beginning to feel scorching. Pam slipped out of her turquoise jacket as they ran up the stairs to purloin the station's only taxi for the short journey down to the school…
On a mid-winter day in 1966, Des McFarlane entered the door of the English staff-room, frowning. It had not been a satisfactory meeting with the headmistress. More complaints about his staff. He was going to have to raise it with them.
He enjoyed this position as head of the English Department at this growing new school. Four of his staff were in their first posting, just out of their various unis, all of them except for poor old Miss Cunningham who had arrived late the previous year… But the others were first rate. Beverley, Jenny, Barbara and Pam, all full of ideas, all now in their third year of teaching. Pretty girls too, bit of style about them, probably not long before they got themselves married off and out of teaching. Still, you never knew, some stayed on, like that young art teacher whose husband taught next door at the boys' school. They'd decided against starting a family and were saving up to have a trip overseas.
But his young teachers seemed to rub Miss Elliot up the wrong way. She was really one of the old school. Science teacher, firm disciplinarian. She liked her pupils and her staff to toe the line. She had got it into her head that his lot were flighty, trouble- makers, too popular with the girls.
It was true too. After all, they were only just older than the girls. None of the other masters seemed to have this problem. John Mark of Science had a couple of older women teachers and a young bloke, which was different. The maths staff, too, only had two young women and they were quiet, wouldn't say boo to a goose… Miss Elliot seemed to expect the Art and Music lot to be a bit odd.
No, it was the English staff that had really run into trouble. And particularly Pam Watson. She was the brightest of the lot, mind you, an Honours graduate. They wouldn't keep her long. She'd be off, into what he didn't know. She was mad about acting. The play she'd done last year with the senior girls was the best thing he'd ever seen in a school. She might go to the ABC, or back to university, not that she seemed too keen about that. Pity, if she only settled down she'd make a good teacher. The girls ate out of her hand, always crowding round her, looking at her clothes, admiring her new haircut.
He groaned. That was today's problem. Her hair. She'd come in this morning with her hair cut short right up the back, like a little cap on her head, with a cute fringe. And streaked blond.
"What do you think, Dessie," she'd cooed in the staffroom, twirling around on her toes. "Do you like what my hairboy Alex did for me. Do you think I look like Barbra Streisand? He does. Ooh I wish I could sing like her." She mimed a microphone.
"It suits you Pam, you look really smart. And what's that suit?"
"What do you think? Kangaroo leather, isn't it fantastic. It's taken all the money I was saving. I saw it in a shop in Double Bay and its just sooo different."
Burgundy leather, a short jacket, a skirt, perhaps three inches above the knee, but not obviously, as she had on dark burgundy stockings and matching shoes.
"Yes, and tonight I am doing it, doing it, doing it," she crooned along. "I'm going off to the Rolling Stones concert with this fantastic new bloke I met at the weekend. He's a photographer in advertising. He came with my pal Alan and me for a pub crawl on Saturday... all the way from the Quay to Sydney University. Bet you don't know another girl who could do that."
Particularly not one so tiny, he thought, and still with such bright eyes. A beer in
every pub?...
" No, I think the Waste Land is too hard for any of our girls. But I am celebrating my date with a wonderful pile of poetry for all my classes. 4A are having Yevtushenko, because he's been here and he's so gorgeous. And I've written out this little poem by John Lennon for 2E. Do you think that's a good idea, boss? They don't know what poetry is, complain and moan, so I'm showing them even their favourite rock stars write it."
It had been wonderful to see her in such high spirits. Sometimes she seemed so low, depressed or as if her mind was far from the job in hand… But there was something wild and daring about this girl, and something lost. An exotic bird in the wrong cage.
One lunchtime he had come in and they were all giggling. "Come on Des. Join us, shrieked Pam. "I met this chap the other night who was a flight steward. Seriously, his flat was full of these little sample bottles. And that's the medicine we're having today. I told him we desperately needed something at this school to perk us up. Now what have you got after lunch, Des? Ah, 3C. Well then, choose your poison. What'll it be? Benedictine, Drambuie or this little brandy?" She waved the tiny glass bottles before him. "Come on, Des. Screw the top off and down it goes, just what the doctor ordered." He'd coughed as the sweet aqueous substance slithered down his throat. Never before. "Now then, that's lifted all our spirits so much that we can even contemplate doing grammar. I think we should just get a few of these little bottles each week…
Remembering the drinking of the liqueur samples, Des shook his head. How could he have let them persuade him? If Miss Elliot got to hear of it, there'd be hell to pay. Or disciplinary charges to face. No, today's complaints were bad, but not that bad.
"And what about Miss Watson's hair?" Miss Elliot had said.
"What about it?" he'd replied.
"It's blond."
"I rather like it," he'd laughed, deflecting the complaint.
"Well I don't," she had snapped. "And I would be pleased if you kept a firmer eye on your staff in matters of dress and deportment."
"Steady on," he'd said. "They're good girls. And Miss Watson's a fine teacher. Her Leaving Certificate results in English last year were the best this school's had. She even had two girls with Honours. And that was only her second year."
"That could be a mitigating factor. But the long and the short of it is, they're not presenting themselves as objects of respect, as teachers should. Mr McFarlane, it's gone too far. I'd like to speak to Miss Watson this afternoon after three. And in fact send Miss McGrath along as well."
At three o'clock, the two young women entered the front hall of the school. It had been a sports afternoon…
Inside the front hall, the headmistress, narrow mouth tight, and her deputy were frowning as they knelt in front of a row of girls also kneeling on the cold linoleum. The deputy measured each girl's sports uniform with a long ruler. Those girls with uniforms more than two inches above their knees had their names noted by the headmistress. Next week they would have to demonstrate that they had obeyed instructions to let their hems down before beginning their sports lessons.
Her frown of disapproval increasing, the headmistress ushered the two young teachers into her study.
"Thank you for coming," she spoke soberly to them.
The two young women were silent. What choice had they had?
"You are aware that I have asked you here because I want to speak to you about the suitability of your wardrobe and demeanour as teachers in this school. As you are aware, we have a heavy responsibility here. These girls need guidance, particularly in matters of style. As teachers you must be well equipped to provide that."
Beverley and Pam stared straight ahead.
"Now, I wish to express my disapproval of your skirt lengths. I am aware that there is a passing fashion for a shorter skirt length, after that English model in Melbourne last year. Nonetheless, teachers must show that they are beyond these shallow trends. You have just witnessed our difficulty in ensuring that girls keep their sports uniforms at a decent length. That attempt is jeopardised by every sight of you younger teachers in unsuitably short skirts."
"Oh Miss Elliot," Beverley burst forth. "That is not acceptable. Both of us are very neatly dressed. Our skirts are quite a restrained length considering what is being shown in the shops right now."
"I also think you've got to remember that we are wearing dark stockings." Pam pointed down. "The colours complement the skirts, draw the eye down to the feet."
"That is another issue," Miss Elliot frowned. "Thick stockings in these, what are they called, mod colours are just not appropriate for young women in your position. You are here to maintain discipline. An appropriate flesh coloured nylon stocking is what other members of staff wear and that is how I expect you to be clad."
The two young teachers stared in astonishment at the older woman, her mouth drawn. Beverley, closely involved in the union, was the first to speak. Clearing her throat, she spoke slowly. "Miss Elliot, I am not quite sure what sort of disciplinary hearing this is. As far as I know, there are no guidelines against coloured stockings, or skirts of this length, just two inches or so above the knee. We know that the Department of Education has restrictions against wearing trousers. Now, none of us wears trousers. I happen to favour them at weekends. I have a number of smart tailored trousers which I think would be suitable for school wear, particularly on these crisp winter days. But I do not go against Departmental policy."
Miss Elliot's frown deepened. She was not used to this type of debate about her decisions. Other teachers accepted her strictures. Mind you, she would not have to speak to members of the maths or science departments like this.
Pam saw the frown, recognised that there was a weakening of position.
"Surely much of this, Miss Elliot, is a matter of taste, rather than appropriateness. It is my view that Miss McGrath and I are dressed smartly and in a relatively conservative way. I can assure you that I don't wear any of my most up-to-the-minute clothes to school." She smiled as she thought of the two velvet outfits which she had just had made by a Glebe dressmaker. Loosely based on photographs of Mary Quant's latest collection, they were in dark velvet, straight, skimming the body, cut low in front, with ties and chains drawing them together below the bust. They stopped four inches above the knee.
"Today, for example, I am wearing a suit. True, it is made of kangaroo leather, but that is an acceptable and stylish fabric. It also happens to have been bought at considerable expense in that heart of fashion, Double Bay." She smirked inside. Boring Miss Elliot would probably never get to Sydney's smart eastern suburbs.
"And as you can see, my shoes are the same maroon colour. In fact, I am rather pleased with the way it is also picked up in my burgundy and navy checked stockings. And these stockings, which you so much dislike, are in fact wonderfully warm and sensible for the early morning journey out of Sydney. Miss Moran, the music teacher, is wearing smart navy ones she bought at the same time."
Miss Elliot rose. Her hands were clenched tightly by her sides. "I did not call you here to discuss fashion. My point is that as headmistress of this school I do not believe that this mode of dress is suitable. I do not believe, Miss Watson, that you should have your hair cut in that short style and streaked blond. I accept that nothing can be done about that, now. However, I am requesting you both to wear longer skirts and to refrain from wearing coloured stockings, particularly those in bright colours such as red."
Pam and Beverley exchanged glances. "Thank you for bringing this to our attention, Miss Elliot," said Pam, smiling as sweetly as she could manage. "We will try to follow your request, as far as we can, considering the financial difficulties involved in getting a completely new wardrobe. I assume this suit would be acceptable if I just wore it slightly lower on my hips?"
Beverley's rather prominent teeth grazed her lower lip. "I am pleased that you are prepared to rely on our own judgement about what is suitable, Miss Elliot. I take your point about bright red stockings. I'll assume that these bottle green ones are in fact quite suitable."
They breathed deeply as they left the interview.
"Well that's torn it," said Beverley. "Stupid old cow. She's pushed herself into a corner, but she had no legitimate reason to discipline us."
"I suppose she wants us to dress the way she does!" Pam began to laugh. "Can you imagine me in that grey twinset and one string of pearls? Or little gloves?"
"What about her peter pan collar!" Beverley hooted.
"Oh God," Pam burst out of her laughter. "I can't bear it. I can't bear how boring she is, and Miss Cunningham and her bloody garden, and teaching the girls how to behave properly, and even dear old fussy Des. I've got to get out of here. I've got part of a fare saved to get on a boat to London. I'm going to really start saving up. I'm going to try and get off at the end of the year."
​
"Haven't you got two years left to work out your bond?" Beverley stared at her.
​
"Yes, but I can't bear to go on," Pam cried. "It's driving me crazy. It's making me feel like a delinquent. And Miss Elliot will give me a delinquent's reference, the sort we give kids who've played up…"
​
And so she did. When I left teaching, I received a reference which stated only that I had taught at the school for a certain length of time. It in no way outlined what my skills or contributions had been. It was exactly the reference which was written for girls whose attendance or behaviour had been poor or who lacked the intellectual capacity to complete schooling.
​
The head teacher still had enormous power in schools, but was often dealing with situations with which he or she had little familiarity. The teachers union was not at that stage a powerful force, and had not changed its policies to develop ones more suited to the increase in number of young women teaching, and the lack of relevance of the union to them.
​
Many teachers in these new schools were scarcely older than their students. Like me, they had great difficulty in identifying with the principal rather than the students. It was an era of emerging generational conflicts. There were conflicts over style, as Australia learnt about Carnaby Street, Mary Quant, Jean Shrimpton at the Melbourne Cup, mini-skirts. I wore these clothes, the children copied them in sewing lessons, although they appeared most unsuitable to the conservative headmistress. Magazines like Vogue and Nova were presenting different styles against the declining power of social arbiters, hats and gloves for lunch at Romanos. New music was exploding, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and teen culture. Young teachers were also close to their students in their appreciation of these. Such differences were exacerbated in the second half of the 1960s, when societal schisms occurred over Vietnam and Aboriginal rights. But these were just then emerging. While I was teaching I followed the media stories of the 1964-5 Freedom Ride, with a bus travelling around western New South Wales towns, and in 1966 Sydney erupted at the visit of L. B. Johnson. These were, in fact, small harbingers of a greater change coming.
Being a Schoolteacher
The first year back living in Australia I often found myself staring at the landscape with a sense of loss. We would drive out of Sydney and I would find my attention distracted, turned to the outside. And outside the window of the car was somewhere not familiar. It was bare. It was brown. The trees had an uncomfortable drooping appearance, their leaves thin and scant. There was little variation. And when there was, when a hill suddenly emerged on the skyline, it was worn and rounded. There was no ruined castle on its peak. I sometimes felt close to tears.
I did not know this landscape. I had been away for twelve years but that did not explain my sense of dislocation. As a child, I had not been taken into the country, yet that was not enough to explain my lack of familiarity with it. I had never learnt the words to describe it or developed a passion to celebrate it. It was completely foreign to me and I mourned the loss of the European landscape that I had learnt to call my own.
​
"It must have been so romantic back then," Pam sighed. She had been given a wonderful book by her Uncle Vince, a book which told stories of knights and ladies in the middle ages. He also gave Pam a small case, made of crocodile skin, open at the top, with smooth round handles. He had bought it in Egypt during the war. Pam put her pencils and lunch in it and took it to school. It looked much more beautiful than the hard brown globite cases the other children had. She ran her hands over its surface.
Anthony Hordern’s, Pam's favourite store, was enormous and dark. Above the heads of the shoppers was a long wire and when they paid for their purchases, the shop assistant placed the money in a small brass cylinder and sent it shooting along this wire to the other side of the store, making a curious whistling sound, like a distant train. In its book section, she found books called Countries of the World, with covers of stiff cardboard striped in blue and white. She particularly liked those about England and Scotland, with shadowy photographs of castles and richly caparisoned horses, while that on Holland told about tulips, clogs and starched white caps, like those that she wore in dancing and the boy with his finger in the dyke. Her favourite was on the Balkans, exotically named countries like Croatia and Slovenia, people in embroidered blouses with puffy sleeves and ribbons flowing. They were like Grimms’ Fairy Tales, dark forests, rushing streams, kings and princesses of shimmering beauty. She practised saying Bosnia-Herzegovina. On United Nations day, when children came in the costumes of various countries, Pam aged nine wore a white frilly blouse and a pinafore dress in blue and red made by Nita. She said she represented the Balkans. She recited a speech about how the prince of Austria was killed in the Balkans, which started the first world war but that after fighting these countries had now joined together. Everyone else dressed in kilts to represent Scotland or Ireland.
She loved the words rills and rivulets, run of water's creek, coves and gullies, deep forests, castles and turrets.
​
At Erskineville we spent a great deal of time doing individual projects, writing on a theme, illustrated, either by your own drawing or photographs cut out of magazines and stuck down with Perkins Paste. We had a book which showed us a range of printing styles and for headings I traced the required letters from the book, using greaseproof paper purloined from my mother, pencil at first, then filled it in with thick Indian Ink. I loved Old English best, of course. But I hated Indian Ink. I was always knocking the bottle over, after I had printed my essay and carefully copied or pasted in my drawings. It was agony trying to work out what to do about the splotches and blobs of ink which often went right across the page, until I hit on the idea of converting them to add extra life to the project: Christopher Columbus' ships; trucks carrying coal during the Industrial Revolution; a flock of black sheep which, together with Broken Hill, made us one of the richest countries in the world.
I remember doing many projects about countries, like Ceylon, India, Canada. I would sometimes go with my mother to Bridge Street in the city, stone buildings with grand porticoes. Here were the shipping companies on the hill, and below the city broke into a warren of little streets with grubby offices right on the road, before the noisy pubs and smelly fish cafes along the Quay. I went into the shipping offices, with high ceilings, big brass urns with palms and thick woven rugs on the floor. I asked for information, for a school project. They would hand out piles of pamphlets with pictures of famous destinations, The Tower of London, Suez Canal. The pamphlets carried a faint smell, like the shipping offices themselves, a smell of money, strange spices, salt. Down the hill the sun struck sparks from the waves splashing around the boats at the Quay. I learnt John Masefield:
"Quinquereme of Nineveh from distant Ophir
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,"
James Elroy Flecker was my favourite poet. There was an exoticism in his work which made my heart leap. Samarkand, The Golden Road. Line drawings of dashing men in turbans, heavily veiled women. He wrote of rich-sounding spices, bell-like names of cities, Marrakech, Trebizond. I gazed down to the harbour or returned to the shipping company with its large painting of a market in Port Said, shadowy jostling figures in gleaming draperies.
Overseas had romance. I could not imagine, in the absence of culture that represented Australia, that we could produce anything. In primary school we were shown a film set in wheat fields in Canada. I remember rushing to talk to my friend Marilyn about it. Something like this could be made in Australia, couldn't it? We had wheat fields, didn't we?
In many of the novels about the time girls find Europe and overseas through reading. Joan London has a story, First Night, about two young girls who put on a play. One, Jonelle, has written most of it, but the prime mover is her new next door neighbour, Antonia, the eldest daughter of a privileged South African family The girls are obsessed with English literature (the play is a sequel to Alice in Wonderland): Jonelle dreams of stories like "The ragged girl shivered and looked for wild berries before she set off across the moors". Or 'the mountains' or 'the snow'. The Northern Hemisphere. Nothing inspiring ever happened in Australia."
​
Esther, who had been ahead of Pam at school, was doing Law and nearing her final year. She had come back into Pam's network through her relationship with Rex, law student, theatre director and wit. Pam had always admired Esther. Now, clever, stylish, always well-dressed, Esther stood a little apart from the others at noisy drunken after-show parties.
In the Italian coffee shop in Elizabeth Street, Esther stirred her cappuccino. "But look at how restricted my time at university is, nothing but study, study. You're having wonderful times in Arts, acting in all those plays. And I would love to have studied English."
Pam rubbed her hand through her hair. "Yes, it's wonderful, Esther, what it's preparing me for. I'm in the midst of my Honours year, then I'll have five years serving out my Teacher's College bond. I'll never have the time to become an actress. I don't even know I've got the talent to be anything other than a support. Sure, Rex has got me doing the prostitute in the Brecht, but Rhoisin's playing the lead. And besides, studying English is managing to destroy all my love for poetry and writing, pulling the lines apart, analysing how it was done. It's killing it stone dead."
Esther laughed. She couldn't believe it. She had been encouraged to do Law by her father, who had migrated from Hungary after the war. He valued professions for girls.
Pam was surprised to be invited to Esther's twenty-first birthday. Just twenty of them, mainly friends from Law. Rex said he would pick Pam up. They were to go to dinner at a restaurant by the harbour.
Nita had made Pam a dress out of dark green satin, bell skirt, just below the knees. It suited her slimness. She twisted her hair into a French roll.
The Caprice was on the shores of Rose Bay, dark waters outside, heavy curtains framing the view, the glow from splendid chandeliers glinting on shining frocks.
Their table was a large circle, and scattered among the young people were Esther's parents and some of their friends, the women in thick fur capes, with splendid earrings caressing their cheeks.
Pam tried to sip her wine slowly. It tasted wonderful, so different from the thick clarets they usually bought in flagons. She must try to stay relaxed, not drink too fast and get tiddly. She inclined her head as her grey-haired neighbour, elegant in a black dinner suit with a black silk tie, asked if she enjoyed the filet mignon they were eating as main course.
"I am from Hungary and we appreciate our red meat. Here of course the quality is quite exceptional, but the cooking techniques, pah, it does not bear thinking about. They fry them as if they are trying to ensure that no morsel of taste will survive. But things will improve. Why do you not try a little more of this red? It is from the Hunter and for a domestic claret it is of really quite a reasonable standard."
Pam nodded her head, overawed, and listened as Esther's mother chatted to Rex's friend Martin Grant about the recent Sadler's Wells version of Orpheus in the Underworld, the Budapest Opera, the latest Saul Bellow novel, an Ingmar Bergman film. Esther's parents were planning a visit to Paris, buying for her Double Bay dress shop. Reflections from the chandeliers twinkled on the heavy silver cutlery. Pam wanted to sink into a velvet cloak.
Then Esther's father was standing, proposing a toast. "To my beautiful daughter, her great good fortune now and forever." A waiter padded behind the chairs, filling high glasses with bubbling golden champagne. They all stood, glasses tinkling, and then the grey-haired father, tall and straight-backed, drew Esther, wearing a red full-length dress, with slits to her knees, onto the polished floor. Pam found her eyes filling with tears as she watched them glide around to the beat of Strangers in the Night. What must it be like to have parents to whom you could talk about things? Who cherished you and gave you beautiful things? Who took you to Paris and concerts and discussed books with you?
Her mood was broken when Rex dragged her onto the floor, suggesting they jive and show what the younger generation were capable of. She laughed as he twisted her around.
The presence of an increasing number of European migrants among our friends indicated that overseas also had culture. Within Australia, the only excitement, glamour and sophistication came from exposure to people from overseas.
Madeleine St John has her heroine Lesley/Lisa [in The Women in Black, on which the film Ladies in Black is based] taken up by the Hungarian woman Magda of model gowns. Lisa sees European sophistication through literature (Anna Karenina), clothes (all the gowns come from Europe), men who are able to flirt, sophisticated eating habits (the Hungarian Christmas menu is pate, duckling with black cherries, bombe surprise and absolutely nothing to drink but champagne) and charming mature relationships between the sexes.
It is hard to reproduce the ways in which we devalued all things that occurred in Australia and how glamorous and exciting things happening overseas seemed to be. It affected even our municipal representatives. Lord Mayor Harry Jensen went on an overseas trip and came back to say that he had seen Hanging Gardens there. He reproduced them in Hyde Park, a few baskets of flowers hanging from wire cages
It became not enough just to think of overseas. Everybody who could went overseas. It provided a validation of our view of ourselves as intellectuals. A ticket on an Italian or Greek boat could be bought for just under one hundred pounds. Nobody went by plane unless the ticket was provided by government authorities, like a Commonwealth scholarship…
The kitchen of the shared house at Annandale was packed. Geoff from SUDS, one of the renters, was shouting as he passed bottles of beer from the ice chest over the heads of the crowd. "No, that's for Piers and John," he yelled, "They won't be getting good Australian beer in India, or even worse when they get to England. Warm as piss, Bruce says."
Pam pushed through the corridor, out to the concrete back yard. It was difficult to get through and she lent against the damp patches on the wall and guzzled the thick red wine. She was tired, having spent these holidays once again working at the Education Department checking Leaving Certificate results. There seemed to be just her and all these trainee Catholic priests. She was lucky that Frank had arranged it, the money was good. And the young priests were pleasant, though she often found one staring at her.
So many changes. In a week they would be beginning Teachers’ College. Pam's Honours result, high in seconds, was as fair as you could expect, but there was no hope of going on as a scholarship postgraduate student…
Pam moved out to the back yard. There was so much gossip about overseas. Bruce, the literary editor, had recently written to Martin. He had worked for a year as a journalist, continuing to write revue scripts, then went overseas with one of his Honours co-students, with whom he had a relationship. She had a Commonwealth Scholarship to study at Cambridge. They had visited Oxford. Martin quoted his scathing demolition of the eights, the May Balls. He was enjoying Cambridge and had got involved in Footlights Revue. "You know, the people who did Beyond the Fringe," Pam said to John. Cleaver was hanging around the Sorbonne, living on the Left Bank. Martin had also heard from his old school friend Rex, who had flown overseas after his final law exams. He had managed to get attached to the Royal Court Theatre, where some of the most exciting new theatre was being performed, kitchen-sink realism. Fred poured beer down his throat, punching the air around him. One bloody more year of law to go. Pam hugged his waist, dear funny Fred, such a brilliant actor, so dilatory in his studies. Geoff, interested in the French absurdist drama, asked if Rex was sending any scripts out.
The next night they gathered at the wharves in Walsh Bay, inky black water lapping on wooden piles. They piled into the boys' cabin with flagons of cheap red wine, bought from an Italian shop in the Haymarket, shouted and drank until the hooter sounded. As they moved off, debating whether to finish off at the Newcastle near Circular Quay, Phila grabbed Pam's arm. "Come with me. I've said I'll go for a drink with Grey Selmar at the Royal George." The word went out, Pam linked arms with Fred and Geoff as they headed up above the wharves.
In Australia nothing happened. People lived in suburbia. People rode surfboards. It was crass and vulgar. I wore neat little suits out to my teaching job.
We absorbed the ideas of Robin Boyd. The Great Australian Ugliness. Australia was a desert, an intellectual desert. Our parents, everyone living here were Alfs. Or as Martin Sharp called them in a revue, Norman Normals. We weren't normal. We were unusual, creative, original. Overseas, people like us sat at cafe tables. It was cold, the coffee steamed, they puffed cigarettes, they discussed ideas. They created art and were appreciated.
It was Pam's third year teaching at Blacktown. She was feeling more and more isolated and irritated. So many of her university friends were now overseas. Eileen was pleasant enough, but really not so similar to Pam. Besides, she seemed very keen on that young lawyer from Newcastle, where she had gone to the Conservatorium.
Pam couldn't imagine being married. She did seem to be going to a lot of weddings. Both her cousins. Jenny and Barbara from the English staff. She hated wearing those little bits of net and flowers to cover her head in church.
No, she had to get away. The graduate drama group was fun, but not really stretching her. She enjoyed playing bridge, once a week, with a couple of friends of Lou's from the English Department. But she was sick to death of hearing about all the political differences there. What did she care about Leavis or whether you could study writing in translation?
People came back so sophisticated from overseas. Kevin came back, with beautiful Liz from SUDS, whom he had married in London. They were going to open a second-hand clothes and jewellery market. Pam and Fred went to dinner at their newly-purchased Paddington terrace.
"They've got marvellous markets in London, darling. Everything's happening. In Portobello Road, people buy wonderful old things, clocks and Tiffany lamps and fringed scarves and fur collars and magnificent beaded gowns from the 1920s, original Mainbochers, Fortunys. It's fantastic, exotic. You can wear anything in London. We've got trunks full of stuff coming out. But I bet we'll come across some hidden treasure troves here, chatting up old biddies in Haberfield. Or Strathfield or Pymble." …
London sounded fantastic. Kevin played opera records. They had heard Lucia Popp sing the Queen of the Night at Covent Garden and had seen Norma at La Scala. "There was Trovatore this year," Pam said. "The Australian Opera put it on at the Elizabethan Theatre Newtown. It was really beautifully sung, they said." Pam had been with Garth and Eileen from the train, who had said just that. Somehow Newtown did not sound the same. "Opera here!" cried Kevin. "It's too terrible to contemplate. They are treating Utzon abominably. We'll be the laughing stock of the world. It will never get finished now. Imagine paying for an Opera House by lotteries. Australians are such Philistines! I don't know why we're back!" …
No, this was it. She could not wait another moment. Her bond went for another two years, but she would have to resign after this one. She would still owe five hundred pounds, but she would deal with that later. Something would happen. Something would turn up.
She had been saving in a desultory fashion. She had almost one hundred pounds. That would pay for the ticket, ninety-six pounds one-way, the very cheapest on one of the Greek or Italian boats. Then if she put more money aside for the rest of this year, she would have some to live on until she got a job in England. She could go back to her parents to live. That would save some money. And she could cash in her superannuation. She was never going to be a teacher again or any kind of public servant. So boring. So like her father.
She booked for just after Christmas, when fares were cheapest, on the Fairsky. She stood in front of her classes at Blacktown. Some of the girls cried, which was affecting. Poor kids, she had done as well as she could. They would probably get someone must less interesting, much less mod, as they said. Miss Elliot looked pleased to be rid of her.
There was the usual hectic round of Christmas parties. The art school crowd had wonderful drunken noisy sprees as usual. Barry, a tall, camp man from the art school, was telling a baying group about his Volkswagen, with a surfboard on top, being stopped by police in Oxford Street. "You should have seen their faces! We were all going off to a party dressed as nuns. And there was the bloody surfboard on top!" He told Pam that he would be in Athens in April. "It will be wonderful to see you, sweetie. We'll have a ball. We'll go off to Mykonos. It's magic, I've heard." They agreed to be in Syntagma Square on a certain day and time… Rex had come back, his directing stint at the Royal Court cut short by a family death.
"It was incredible there, Pam," he said, at dinner at Esther's, in a cheaply rented stone cottage on the water at Balmain. Esther was enthusiastic about catching a ferry into her law office in town each morning, saying it gave her a totally different view of Sydney. "You've got no idea what theatre is like in London. Just so challenging and confronting. And each year they bring the best of European theatre for a festival. Marvellous Eastern European stuff. Are you sure you have to go now? I think the time is ripe to start a theatre group here. I want to do this fantastic play Saved, a new writer, Edward Bond. It is so strong, so savage. Why not stay and do the lead. I'd cast Fred and Arthur as the two male leads, thugs who attack the woman and her baby."
Pam shook her head, sadly. "I just can't, Rex. I've got to get away. I am going crazy here. I'll just have to hope Fellini discovers me tap-dancing on the street in Rome." She pulled what she hoped was an ironic Giulietta Masina face, shoulders shrugging.
Her excitement was soaring. Esther grabbed her at a party.
"Do you remember Meredith Boycott? She's going on the same boat as you. And so's David Ziegler, who used to be at the boys' school. He did engineering."
"Meredith? She was a year or so behind, is that right? Did some cartoons for honi soit?"
"That's the one! She's been teaching too. You'll probably see her around."
There were last minute purchases. A large case. Pam wanted to take so much: lots of books, Elizabeth David cookbooks, a wooden salad bowl. "Mum, I'm still going to need to cook and eat." She could not say she was never coming back.
"Don't worry. Mum, I won't need a new winter coat, so don't bother making one. They're so cheap in England. Or I might get a suede one in Florence." Excitement rose. Her friend beautiful, dark-eyed Libby, who had got an Art History scholarship to London University, had bought a second-hand fur in Portobello Road for only two pounds. She couldn't tell Nita. Second-hand indeed! Full of germs.
It was late afternoon when they reached the ship, the good Fairsky, in the Darling Harbour docks. There were not many people to see her off, not so many close friends now. Her old friend Rosemary who had left school at the Intermediate was there. She was still working in a bank, living with a much older photographer. "I'll get there myself, kid, soon as I can." There were Rex, Esther, Arthur. Fred was acting interstate. Garth and Eileen were both away. All her family were there, except for her grandparents. Even Frank arrived late from work. Brian gave her a Good News Bible wrapped up in brown paper. What on earth would she do with it? It wasn't even the St James, just an awful new translation. Good News indeed!
She ran into Meredith in the corridor. Meredith's cabin was higher up the ship. She had a lean, clever face, a sharp tongue. They'd had a couple of good chats at various Christmas parties.
As the visitors milled off the ship, they headed for the highest deck. They looked down at the diminishing figures below them, threw the thin bright streamers.
Pam clutched them tightly as the ship nudged softly against the wharf, then shuddering softly drew away. Meredith poured a glass of champagne from a bottle left in her cabin. The streamers tightened, Pam's nails bit into her palms. How could she control this exhilaration? If she held tightly enough to the streamers she would be lifted from the deck and would float to Europe, more quickly than the five weeks this slowly turning monster would take.
The boat turned laboriously, the streamers snapped.
Meredith's face creased with triumph. "Well! That's that then!"
Pam smiled back at her as they clinked glasses. "Here we go, my dear," she crowed. "Let these thousand glittering waves carry us to the rest of our lives," she intoned.
They downed the sparkling drink and threw the glasses over the side. Then as the ship lumbered towards the Heads, Pam clasped Meredith's arm. "Let's get ourselves another drink."
The Landscape of Dreams
Nita was always reading to Pam. She herself had always been a great reader. "Always with her nose in a book," Dora would say, and not with approval. Nita used stories to take Pam's mind away from the agony of her hair being stretched over stockings and rags to make sausage curls. Pam sat on the floor, her head next to her mother's knee, while Nita twisted and twirled hair with fingers and brushes and hair pins. Mostly the stories she told were old favourites, simple tales, and Pam chanted some of the lines with her. "I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house in." But one night, the story was extraordinary. There were a queen and jewels and suspicious meetings with a young prince and challenges and duels. Pam could not breathe with excitement. She felt no pain from her hair.
The next day, Pam's birthday, Nita gave her a book, with a bright red cover, Rose Fyleman Fairy Stories. Excited, Pam ran down to the end of the garden and started to read it, all the way through, mouthing and sounding out words that she didn't recognise. And there, first in the book, was the story her mother had told her the night before. Nita hadn't made it up, she had read the book and told Pam a shortened version. Here it was in the book, rich and detailed.
That evening Nita placed the book in the linen cupboard. "You don't want to get it dirty."
Pam tried to tell Nita her disappointment. "You tricked me, you hadn't made up the story."
Nita laughed, "Of course I hadn't made the story up. Silly you."
Pam scowled at Nita. Her mother wasn't taking notice of her, fussing over that silly baby Brian. The story-telling sessions were getting shorter and shorter. But Pam could stand on her toes and reach behind the sweet-smelling towels and read the book to comfort herself. She was just six years old, she was reading the words. Here was the story. It was Rose Fyleman's, not her mother's. She loved it. She loved Rose Fyleman.
​
I won prizes throughout my schooldays for stories, poems and plays. Increasingly, however, I began to feel as if I was writing by numbers, as if the very desire for self-expression and fulfilment of personal fantasies which had propelled me into writing in the first place had been lost. I believed that there were forms of writing that were 'better', more acceptable. I find it difficult to remember just when it was that I began to undervalue my writing, when I became self-conscious about what I was doing, particularly about anything that seemed childish or sentimentalised.
In my final year in high school, there are two poems of mine in the school magazine. One is a dry little piece about Australia, its youth and immaturity, derived, if I remember correctly, from a poem by A. D. Hope. The other is derived from Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations of Mortality. This poem won first prize in a statewide Poetry, Poets and People competition judged by Judith Wright…
Like many of the other women writers I have quoted through this book, I felt I had to get away. Only in Europe, I thought, would I be able to fulfil my dreams. There I could act, write, create.
Writing and reading had informed my life. When I was a young girl my life took place through a series of dreams and fantasies, derived from books, films or shared stories. My childhood provided a perfect excuse for my mother, who loved reading, to form a closed world of imagination around her little daughter and herself. And reading took up much time in those days when families did not have television. When still quite small I would curl up in her lap and she would read to me, marvellous stories of fairies and elves. I passionately believed in them. There was no sense to me that they were make believe as I curled up in my mother's lap, my head next to her breast, her soft voice filling my mind with wonderful visions.
​
Nita was always reading to Pam. She herself had always been a great reader. "Always with her nose in a book," Dora would say, and not with approval. Nita used stories to take Pam's mind away from the agony of her hair being stretched over stockings and rags to make sausage curls. Pam sat on the floor, her head next to her mother's knee, while Nita twisted and twirled hair with fingers and brushes and hair pins. Mostly the stories she told were old favourites, simple tales, and Pam chanted some of the lines with her. "I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house in." But one night, the story was extraordinary. There were a queen and jewels and suspicious meetings with a young prince and challenges and duels. Pam could not breathe with excitement. She felt no pain from her hair.
The next day, Pam's birthday, Nita gave her a book, with a bright red cover, Rose Fyleman Fairy Stories. Excited, Pam ran down to the end of the garden and started to read it, all the way through, mouthing and sounding out words that she didn't recognise. And there, first in the book, was the story her mother had told her the night before. Nita hadn't made it up, she had read the book and told Pam a shortened version. Here it was in the book, rich and detailed.
That evening Nita placed the book in the linen cupboard. "You don't want to get it dirty."
Pam tried to tell Nita her disappointment. "You tricked me, you hadn't made up the story."
Nita laughed, "Of course I hadn't made the story up. Silly you."
Pam scowled at Nita. Her mother wasn't taking notice of her, fussing over that silly baby Brian. The story-telling sessions were getting shorter and shorter. But Pam could stand on her toes and reach behind the sweet-smelling towels and read the book to comfort herself. She was just six years old, she was reading the words. Here was the story. It was Rose Fyleman's, not her mother's. She loved it. She loved Rose Fyleman.
​
By the time I went to Belmore North primary school in 1946 I was reading very well. At school the teachers read to us, stories like the ones my mother told me at home. Fairy stories, nursery stories. Around the walls of the hall were huge drawings, bright in pink and yellow and green, of a little rabbit, wearing human clothes, in a lettuce patch, and in a bedroom. The teacher explained that these were drawings from a book called Peter Rabbit, a book I did not know. She showed me the drawings in a small book, the size of my hand, and showed me how she copied them on the blackboards with chalk. I tried to copy the drawings but couldn't. It was back to words.
In one class I wrote out the story of the Three Bears. It covered four pages in a small lined book. The teacher told my mother that this was exceptional. I was told I could stay out of reading and writing classes from then on, do messages for the headmistress and read my books.
My mother decided that the only way to deal with my obsession with reading was to find a public library. Her family did not buy books. The nearest public library was in Lakemba, just one stop down the train line from Belmore North. So once a week after school, I went with my mother and my brother to the library. It was in a small building and had low shelves all the way round. I could crouch down and look at the books. There I could borrow three books a week, by Enid Blyton, Noel Streatfield, Clare Mallory.
​
Pam read a lot of books about children who were orphaned, or whose parents were overseas. They had to fend for themselves, or go and stay with a distant relative. Or at a boarding school. It must be exciting, she thought. It must mean you could do anything.
One day, at West Ryde, Pam asked her grandmother quietly if she could go and look in Vince's bedroom. It had a comfortable musty smell. All around the walls were narrow shelves of books, in soft covers, with broad green, blue or orange stripes. Like a rainbow. She climbed carefully on top of Vince's desk. She moved around the narrow shelves, pulling out books, putting ones by the same writer together, as they did in Lakemba Library. She mouthed some of the names: Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley, Compton Mackenzie, George Bernard Shaw. Such odd names, hard to pronounce. She sniffed their dust. She began sorting each group into alphabetical order, by the author’s last name. She frowned over one called Ford Madox Ford; it was hard to work out what his last name was.
When Vince came bursting in, he shouted, "What a wonderful girl. Who's my favourite niece, then! I think we'll have to take her out to the garden and throw her up a tree."
She stood among the fruit trees at the bottom of the garden. Her heart seized inside her at the thought of all the things she wanted to do. If only she wasn't here, now. If only she wasn't called a boring name, like Pam. Pam, Pammie, Pamela. If only her name was Elizabeth, she could be all sorts of different people. She could be called Elizabeth, and be a writer, Lisa, and be an actress, Liz, an explorer, Lisbet, a star dancer, Bess, a doctor, Beth, a teacher and Eliza, a solicitor like Uncle Vince. She could be all these things, and still be the same person. Underneath.
​
My life as a lone reader changed completely when I went to Erskineville Opportunity School. There I met Marilyn Taylor who had read, just as I had, along the shelves of the public library. We shared the same imaginative territory. We wrote continuously, in class and out of it. At times the teacher would direct our energies to some set topic. For the most part we translated it back to a reproduction of the latest children's story.
Glenda Adams' story Friends is a wonderful picture of these close links between intellectual girls. My memories of the last years of my primary school education are to do with the joy of shared learning. Of the excitement of reading, of trying to emulate the writers we admired. There were, of course, jealousies and disagreements, but mostly an enthusiasm for the process.
​
Janice and Pam loved naming. They decided to invent a country somewhere in Middle Europe, called Transitania. It had wonderful countryside, with high mountains, taller than the Alps, jagged peaks, waves splashing up against towering cliffs, green and pleasant fields and great forests where the knights rode their chargers. The capital Inferon was an old walled city, there were castles on echoing crags, a sea-port with smugglers.
"It's more exciting if you can imagine yourself in the middle of the story, isn't it?" Pam wrinkled up her nose. Pam went to the beach with Janice's family. Janice and Pam walked away from the others after lunch and found a rocky inlet called Shelly Beach, where the waves did not crash onto the golden sand. "It's just like a secret entrance to a castle," Pam breathed quietly. "Let's pretend we're having an adventure."
"Let's work out the names of places first," said Janice, and so they did. Rocky outcrops, headlands, small pools were named: Buccaneers' Cove, Pirates' Landing, Aurora's Cave, Princess's Tower, Pool of the Nymphs, Craggy Castle. They lived out their dreams, spurred each other on to write.
​
When I was a child and adolescent I wrote all the time. I made up stories to fill the unhappiness that existed between me and the adults around me. I enclosed myself in a world of books and imagination, where I was able to inscribe a different reality for myself.
During high school, I mainly read the shelves called English Literature or Poetry or Drama, but as I grew older I found myself also reading American Literature. One name led to another. Through biographies and autobiographies I found out more about the people I admired. My favourite writers were English, and had little to say that was relevant to my life at the time, except that a book like Jane Eyre will always reflect the experience of an isolated clever girl.
But it does seem to me that my lack of knowledge of significant Australian literature established a belief that writing was not something which Australians undertook. Those crucial girls' stories Anne of Green Gables and Little Women both feature heroines who struggle to become creators and succeed. Sadly I did not read My Brilliant Career. But I did read Seven Little Australians. How much did it affect my ambitions for myself as a writer, as an Australian, that the heroine Judy does not emerge as a writer? Instead she is destroyed by the hostility of the bush around her, the tree crashing out of the sky.
​
Pam had delayed. The weekend before the story competition closed, she had no idea what to write. But there was an expectation that she would enter. Everyone was supposed to. She was supposed to be the best writer in the year. But what if she couldn't think of anything to write? She could not delay any more. She really had to start. It was compulsory.
She wrote a story of a child. The child lived with an alcoholic father by a railway track. The child was given a dog, a black spaniel called Nigger. Pam herself had never had a dog, but she had seen her brother's insistence that he have one and how much he enjoyed playing with it. She made the dog the focus of the child's happiness, the companion he loved. And then she had the father in a drunken haze, kicking the dog accidentally, damaging it internally.
Pam handed it in with gloom. It was meant to be a gloomy story, but she felt it was lacking in imagination. She was almost sixteen, yet still writing a story about a small child. It was babyish.
Two weeks later, as they were travelling to a debating engagement, Mrs Giles leant over the train seat. "We enjoyed your little story, Pam."
"Oh really," Pam blushed. "Didn't you think it was a bit, ... well, mawkish."
"Not at all, not at all," Mrs Giles was shaking her head. "A sad little tale, certainly, but written with restraint. I think you'll be pleased by tomorrow morning's assembly announcement."
Pam blushed as her team mates congratulated her…
​
In my final year in high school, there are two poems of mine in the school magazine. One is a dry little piece about Australia, its youth and immaturity, derived, if I remember correctly, from a poem by A. D. Hope. The other is derived from Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations of Mortality. This poem won first prize in a statewide Poetry, Poets and People competition judged by Judith Wright. Having written this poem, I grew to dislike it, feeling the ideas inflated, the expression cloying. Winning the competition not only disturbed my own critical judgement, although it did not make me revise my opinion of the poem, but also shook my faith in the judgment of those determining the prizes.
​
In the Leaving Certificate Honours class they read the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins for the first time. It amazed Pam. Loving words as she did, she was spell-bound by his descriptions, by the adjectives piling one on top of the other. The effect was of tall mountains, overbalancing with the sheer weight of descriptive richness.
"No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring."
Dinner was over. Silence from her father, the stale gravy of an argument. Pam's spirits were low. A feeling of depression settled behind her eyes. Life was boring, terrible. She would never get away from this small, stultifying house, this sense of blighted opportunities.
A storm blew up, a great wind whipping from the South West as only Sydney winds can. In Pam's street, it whisked the thin layer of sand from the garden beds, sending it whirling, clattering on to the asphalt, caught the stiff branches of the palm trees, twisting and crackling in its force.
Pam rushed out to the front verandah, with the wind dragging her skirt tightly round her legs and lent over the brick fence. She shouted at the wind:
"Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?"
Her hair stung her eyes as it was blown back into them. The wind and the words of the poem were becoming one, embedded with violence, with power, with emotions that were pushing themselves through her body. Her head was a confused blur of images. Giant crags with spray whipping up, mountains towering skyward, winds that swept through vast landscapes.
She did not feel the smallness of human emotions in the face of huge natural forces. Nor did she reflect the desperate anger of Hopkins' poem. Somehow, the power of his language, the violence in his words, signified for Pam that she could take on board the strength of nature, battle with it, overcome it. The wind called to her feelings, her potential. She felt the small voice shouting into a gale in the suburban street become huge with the force of the wind, speaking of power that could be unleashed, of journeys that could be taken, of words that could be forged.
She was shaking at the violence of it, shaking with the emotion which had been given expression. She felt, with the wind, with the crashing of the palm branches, the noise, that she could do anything. She could step onto this wind and fly, go down Hopkins' cliffs of fall, or scale his giant mountains. With the pressure behind her, with this power, she would be invincible…
​
Yet when I was at university, women did not write. The pages of honi soit, the weekly newspaper, Arna and Hermes, the annual magazines, are spare indeed of the words of women. Glenda Adams, in a thoughtful consideration of her years at university, read a number of back issues of Sydney University newspaper honi soit. Most students who wrote were men. In eight issues, she found only four pieces by women, and a debate on abortion was conducted solely by men.
"The young men knew what they wanted to do and were doing it the moment they left high school and set foot in the university. Given the state of our society it took the young women longer. They had to struggle much harder to grasp the possibilities open to them and to discover what it was they could do."
I looked at five years of Hermes. No women were editors. In 1959, there was a story by Jan Robert Lowe and a poem by Venetia Nathan. Nothing else until 1963, when Judith O'Neill had an article on Kafka and my friend Lee Sonnino (now Cataldi) had two poems and one more in 1965…
I actually worked on honi soit in my first year at university. With Richard Walsh, I regularly joined Graham Macdonald, the dedicated medical student who was editor, laying out the paper at the Sydney Morning Herald.
On Thursday morning the university newspaper came out. Pam, Helen, Janice, Genevieve, the whole crowd had become volunteers, helping to type out the newspaper and lay out pages, strip after strip, counting words to make sure each article fitted onto the page. Pam loved the newspaper work, the clear deadline each week, the explicit tasks to be performed. In the last weeks of first term she had begun to go down early to the Herald building, with spiky, amusing Robert, to help with laying out pages after they had been typeset, a great excitement in the mysterious smell of hot type, while silent men in dark blue overalls moved with concentration around huge machines. Pam always rushed to get the newspaper, excited to see what the final version would be like, the transformation of the scraps of handwriting she had first layed into printed pages.
This week as usual there was another clever poem by Bruce, the strutting literary editor, one of the authorities of the group of grand old men around the University, who was so sure of himself, his cleverness and his attractiveness.
Sitting in the back row of the English lecture in Wallace Theatre, Pam pushed the newspaper across the desk to Janice.
"Just look at this, he's so up himself. The thing's so corny, he's just copying e. e. cummings."
Like Bruce, the literary editor, Pam had read her way along the shelves of the public libraries. American poetry, that was where e. e. cummings was found, with his use of distinctive lower case. Pam could see that this seemingly clever little poem of Bruce's was not saying anything new, just using a new technique to say it.
As the lecture progressed she found herself scribbling away, parodying his poem. hey little boy, she wrote, using the lower case letters which he had purloined. The poem chided him on his derivativeness.
In Manning afterwards, she and her friends giggled over her poem.
"It's good, witty," Janice said, grinning at her. Pam flushed.
Helen showed it to a couple of her friends, poets whose work was not often published in honi soit, Graham, a big, awkward boy from the country with a wobbly head and a love for learning foreign languages which he rolled over his tongue, and his thin, spectacled friend who always wore a formal suit around university, like an undertaker. They also laughed at the parody. They disliked Bruce, blaming him and Cleaver for not publishing their work. They asked to print Pam's poem in a new little magazine they were starting.
"Oh no," said Pam, "I don't think it should be published. I just threw it off."
She hid what she wrote. Very occasionally she showed it to friends. Her last poem, a depiction of a Manning conversation, had upset Helen and Genevieve, who thought she was making fun of their pretensions. She did not write for magazines or for honi soit. None of the girls did, although Janice was still writing stories, Genevieve wrote clever, cynical rhyming verse and Helen some wonderful translations from French verse. Around the pub, where they had begun to drink, Cleaver dominated conversation, with Bruce throwing in examples from his writing. They span stories about previous years at University, the clever writers who had been around, the witty Revue scripts they had developed, the writers they admired. Day after day, they sat, crowds of people who wanted to talk about what they had read. They prized new discoveries, discoveries not covered in their set courses. Geoff had found poems by Allen Ginsburg. Piers brought in volumes of Edith Sitwell and they read the coruscating Facade poems. Now they were clever.
"There's a marvellous book by a writer called Karen Blixen. She's actually a Danish countess, but this one is about a farm in Africa."
"Scott Fitzgerald has the most pellucid prose style. Have you read that section in Tender is the Night where the two women go shopping. Isn't it wonderful? Absolute luxury. And you enjoy it along with them."
Perhaps one day she might write something for publication, Pam thought, but it would need to be very good. She would need to be very sure about it. Until then, she would just lay out other people's work.
"Don't underestimate your poem," said Graham, the big country poet. "It's amusing and sharp. And we need some other poets for the journal."
"Well, OK. If you really want to. But don't put my name on it. If I become famous I want it to be for things I've really put some effort into."
When the photocopied poetry journal came out a month later, Pam found herself blushing. The little poem read quite well. She hoped it didn't cause a problem. Still, it was unsigned and Bruce might never find out.
Next day she was in the queue at Manning, when he strode in. He came around the corner. She could feel herself going hot.
He drew his eyebrows together and stared down at her. Pam put a lamington onto her plate. His lip curled.
"OK, I've been looking for you," his words came out of the side of his mouth. "It was very funny, kid, but don't do it again."
He swung out of the cafeteria.
Oh, God, Pam thought, what will he be saying about me. How did he find out? Will everyone dislike me? Was it an awful thing to do? Was it sly?
She drank her malted milk at a table with her girlfriends. They began to laugh to each other. "Who does he think he is?" Pam spluttered. "Kid indeed. Hairy-chested Hemingway."…
​
Early in my second year at university, when I was, briefly, literary editor of honi soit, I stopped doing any writing of my own. Over the following years, I lost a clear consciousness of self. I felt displaced, decentred, inauthentic. I ran away, in the belief that somewhere else, somewhere other than Australia, I would 'find myself'. During the years that followed I lost the capacity to write so completely that I could not write even letters.
I continued to have the reputation of being a great spoken raconteur. Yet I find speaking different. It is more slippery, you can judge instantly the reaction of the listener, you can adjust what you are saying to please, or to draw a desired response. The writer, however, is on her own and must be able to face that 'I' on the page.
After the birth of my second child in England I recreated myself through a second university degree and a postgraduate thesis in sociology. I learnt to write in this abstract and arcane language. After my return to Australia, I entered full-time work, first at university, then as a government adviser and mastered the techniques of the academic article, the bureaucratic minute, the ministerial speech and the government report. Embarking on each of these careers in writing was a struggle with demons. It seemed as if every time I put words on paper I was convinced that this time I would fail, that I would not find the right words, that I would never know the right words. I found, however, that I did. Each of these forms of writing had its own rules, which could be acquired. Each time I wrote again in the form, it became easier.
Writing this book has been a return to a form of writing I had ignored for over thirty years. I wanted to move away from the calm certainties of government reports to writing which drew on my own ideas and experiences, even though this was the writing that I had most feared. I was still terrified at the prospect of putting words that meant something to me on the page. Yet I also knew that I had to try to do this, that in a significant sense my valuing of myself relied on taking this chance to tell my story my own way.
My father was a cricketer, who stopped playing during the war. Coming back to writing for myself, not having done it for over thirty years, I felt at times like an out-of-form batsman. I watched David Boon during 1995, not moving his feet, padding awkwardly to and fro in front of the wicket, not timing his shots, waiting for one of those glorious pull-shots to emerge.
A review of Ronald Fraser's wonderful autobiography In Search of a Past notes that one of the levels on which the book operates is that of "the act of writing itself, simultaneously a means to seek out the past and a hope to lay it to rest". Fraser himself describes the writing of the book as "recuperative", becoming the subject rather than the object of his own history.
Theorist Paul de Man says that the site of autobiography is in the reading process itself. Centred in a commonality of others, the writer makes a self. Readers can see what it is that is distinctive about this person. Some of this I have done by looking at the stories of other women, sharing their experience, recognising our similarities. Seeing how we were shaped as women, and as women in Australia during that particular period. And then writing it.
Virginia Woolf sees autobiography as a rehearsal for other art forms; she says that writing the self is practice for writing the world. With the completion of this book, I know a great deal more about how writing was connected to my sense of self. I can understand how my sense of displacement was related to doing things I thought I should do. Growing up in Australia after the second world war filled my head with other people's instructions. In writing myself I have found a way of returning to what I think - and to writing.
Losing My Voice – and Finding It