A reminder. This book is not intended as a family history. Tim’s Down in Demerara has already documented my own family history, and Ann’s Leaves from the Family Tree is starting to document Joan’s. These memoirs are simply an arrangement of my own journeys through life. Alongside are attempts to understand it all, which I will call journeys of the mind, and the soul.

THE ANCIENT JOURNEYS of a footloose world

Evolution. It was a brilliant cover picture on Punch magazine. Skeletons of our biological ancestors, going way back to when the fishes invaded the land and grew legs, and each struggling upwards through  geological layers. And there, on the surface of the earth, oblivious of the struggle below, a happy Punch and his dog are dancing and playing on the flower-decked and sunny meadows of the present. But back then, this struggle led to migrations in search of food, such as those of the dinosaurs in Fantasia and, much later, the migrations of our human ancestors. So, where did we come from? Out of Africa is one of two theories of how homo sapiens spread around the world. In the other, Multiregional, theory homo erectus spread around the globe first and was then wiped out everywhere by homo sapiens, as dramatised in William Golding’s The Inheritors.

Migrations. In either theory it is the pressure on scarce resources that drove migrating tribes of hunter-gatherers across the globe searching for food and shelter. Those that found it settled down in fertile river valleys and multiplied. The others, still hunter-gathers, were pushed further and further on. And so, the Amerindians where I grew up, and the aborigines where I live now, are still searching, facing either tribal extinction or the relative deprivation of assimilation.

Then, in the last few hundred years, came new forms of invasion by the Europeans. In South America where I came from these invasions were mostly from Spain and Portugal, but also from Britain, Holland and France. They were followed later by subservient migrations from Africa (slaves) and from India (indentured labour). Similar European invasions of indigenous people were happening all over the globe. But within Europe Paul Theroux once claimed there were no indigenous peoples, its history being one of continuous invasion and displacement. Europeans were simply invading each other all the time in a series of dynastic squabbles over real estate, the dynasties being the church and the aristocracy. In Australia the invaders were the British, followed later by legal migrations from China and Greece and, later from many other countries. Then, in the last 50 years, came migrations of poor people into rich countries. They came from the West Indies and Pakistan into England, from Algeria into France, and from Turkey into Germany. And now the US, Europe and Australia are facing something new: illegal migrants arriving in shipping containers and boats. Mostly they are political and humanitarian refugees and, in the case of Australia, tiny in numbers. But someone in today’s Herald is asking how many will come when climate change pushes the Pacific islands and half of Bangladesh under water.

Settlements. What do people do between all these upheavals and movements? Migrants always try to settle down, to “get a toehold”, to “put down roots”. So tribes of hunter-gatherers, fleeing other tribes became farmers and supported new social hierarchies in the growing towns and cities. For example, the pre-industrial city (Malina, B., 1981, The New Testament World, Insights from Cultural Anthropology) contained ten percent of the population that it controlled. Of these two percent were priests, administrators and absentee landlords (minor landlords lived on their farms). The remaining eight percent were small merchants, craftsmen, beggars and slaves. Cities grew into nations and then into the empires that, turning full circle, enslaved the hunter-gatherers that had stood still in time. The way all the people that I meet on my journeys are living today is thus an outcome of all these forces. So how has my own family settled down and adapted to these forces of change?

SOME MODERN JOURNEYS of a footloose family

The family video. My second migration took place when Kate, John and Madeleine were children, and our one and only family video spans this growing up period and so puts this migration into context. It was Mother’s collection of Standard-Eight and Super-Eight family cine reels 1962 to 1982 that was miraculously saved from the rubbish tip and are now, in varying quality and sequence, on a DVD which we each have. From Kate as a baby to Joan’s graduation, it illustrates a fair section of our history.  So now, as I sit like Punch on “the flower-decked and sunny meadows of the present”, I can watch this DVD of our children. In later chapters, I will follow their adventures, and those of the grandchildren that keep me young.

Filmed mostly in the garden at Martlets, there is Kate playing on the lawn with Tilley the cat, confronting Jenny the goat in the paddock and, walking with Granddad, carefully explaining his rose bushes to him. Though the focus varies, I can still smell the hay and the roses of that lovely garden. Two years later John, we called him Sunny Jim, on a vivid red striped cushion on the grass, shrieking with laughter as Kate rubs her head in his tummy, later looking more aprehensive as Kate practices somersaults a bit too near him. Later still comes Madeleine, hanging from the apple tree in a vertical kind of bouncinette and clicking her tiny heels together like a ballerina.

Abruptly, the scene now changes to Australia, the backyards of Sinclair Street and picnics at Balls Head and Berry Island, “driving” the wrecked car in the paddock at Mendooran, and golden summers at dozens of beaches stretching from South West Rocks down to Blackfellows Point.  Kate graduating from a little foam board via a surfoplane to the nine-foot “plank” we hired at Ocean Beach. Then, there is Rebecca, crawling on the kikuyu grass holding her favourite toy called LID which is in fact the blue lid of a tin of pins. Later she is playing peek-a-boo in a cardboard box called “Rinso” which falls over.

Equally abruptly we are now back in England, but for only four months, staying in Foxglove Cottage in Hankham. Here are Kate and John learning to ride horses while Rebecca, sucking her thumb and twirling her hair, is learning to ride in the papoose on my back. My Dad, who was just getting to know and enjoy his grandchildren when we left, has retreated again into his shell and into that sombre greatcoat when outside with us. Now here are the Hartleys with us at Pevensey castle. The moat on the north side was in shadow and three inches of ice. But the south side sloping to the English Channel was sunny enough for a picnic. The Hartleys also joined us rubbing brasses which was a good way of keeping warm in icy-cold village churches. We still have many black and white paper shapes of famous bishops and knights, though the rubbing became so popular it was banned before the images were all rubbed away. By the time the Simpsons were showing us how canal locks allowed barges to go up and down levels our new cine-camera, which was replacing Gran’s more reliable clockwork one, was giving trouble. So, regrettably, it was not used at all when we traveled back through Athens and the Greek Islands.

Now back in Sydney, the cinecamera repaired, and a spectacular shot of Kate, John, Madeleine and Rebecca swinging one above the other on four rungs of the rope ladder. There are now rabbits and guinea pigs running free range in our last year at Sinclair Street. They are not there in the next scenes at Morton Street since they have been eaten by the Davies’ dog. We are never far from the beaches so here we are on paddle boats at Port Stephens, then Kate riding on the Henri board at Anna Bay, and then Pippi under full canvas on Tuross Lake. Now Madeleine is laughing and waving her bleeding knuckles at the camera having skidded off her skateboard. Finally there is Joan proudly escorted by Mum, Pa and me on her graduation day.

Here are some stills to complement the video

Rebecca with LID, others squatting on a block of marble carved two and a half thousand years ago, And here exploring a beach at Mikonos while Spiros fishes for the octopus we will eat tonight. Any leftovers will be eaten by Peter the Pelican, a permanent resident at his café.  There were 365 churches on Mikonos and here is one drawn by Kate.

 

 

Meanwhile, in Hungary, in England and in Canberra there were other family movements. Tim had driven his new MG across Europe to marry Kathy Takats, and Dad had noticed that Mother was missing her grandchildren. Pig-face is much prettier than its name suggests and so Mother was given the garden room that overlooked the flowers at Sinclair Street. At Pa’s suggestion I drove Mother to Canberra to meet up with Mum and to tour the Snowy Mountains scene. “Stand here and keep a watch-out for women” said the plumber, also on holiday. He knew what the noise was in the ladies toilet and how to fix it. Driving back to Sydney and looking across to the ranges, Mother said “I’ve never seen clouds like those before”. And row below row of puffy white clouds descended across an immense sky, down to a razor sharp horizon. Mother later came twice more to Sydney and twice, coming back from Mendooran, she saw a rather different landscape. Once, at Springwood, a fireman stopped the little mini until the flames ceased leaping the road. And once, on the Bell Road, we stopped and peered down into a steep valley along which smoke and flames were boiling far below.

And then it was our turn to visit Mother and Dad, and Rebecca was two when we rented Foxglove Cottage.  Though we were fairly close to Martlets, Dad was emerging from a drink problem into moodiness, and visits were not always successful. But we had a car and we even got away as far as the Duberleys near the Welsh border. There, John Duberley had gout, and when the dog sat on his toe, he let out a roar that sent Rebecca scurrying across the room to me. But all she muttered was “Bossy boots”. For our return to Sydney Joan had suggested that Mother and Dad come as far as Portugal, but Mother advised us that Dad was becoming a little unpredictable and that we had better do our own thing. So we stopped off in Athens and took a bus round the Peloponnesus and a ferry to the island of Mikonos. “Tessera pethya” said the small man with dark curly hair, shaking my hand and embracing me. We were in the Museum of Antiquities and he was apparently congratulating me on having four children (in those days the mother was not usually congratulated). Perhaps four was now unusual in Greece, and most unusual as tourists, but four small children soon became our passports to a lot of help and friendliness. In Naphlion, for example, a blue-eyed and blond-haired Rebecca was adopted by four youths in a café who bought her orange juice and showed her how to use a straw. While they were playing with her toy car I rummaged for that other travelers’ passport in those days, gifts of cigarettes. We all survived on the sweets and biscuits that shopkeepers came out to give the “Koukla” (little doll) as she jogged past, asleep in her papoose.

Settlements. In between the upheavals and migrations come the settlements, the habitats carved out of the environment by people who want to settle down. In Guyana our houses had been white wooden buildings on stilts, open to sea breezes and with corrugated iron roofs reflecting tropical heat. Land breezes came from the bush, sometimes carrying sickness. In England our roofs were usually black and slate, and every effort was made to heat houses and keep out drafts. In Sydney red tiled roofs predominated, imported from Italy in our first home. Ceiling fans cooled you in summer and barbecues warmed you in winter. Guyana’s environment was dominated by rain forests, with luxurious tropical plants, and sometimes eucalypts, trespassing  in the suburbs. Rivers were vast and the sea muddy and warm. Overhead, stately white empires of cumulus sailed across the deepest blue skies and, on the streets, donkey carts competed with overloaded wooden buses tottering along on Ford Ten chassis. England’s environment was a shock to start with. On those very rare occasions, a fine and sunny day, the soft English landscapes, and particularly the Scottish, were amongst the most beautiful I had ever seen. But mostly, skies were grey in winter and, when it was fine, white in summer. Gardens were wet and soggy nine months of the year. The roar of London’s traffic and trains seemed to go round the clock, and even country lanes always carried lines of cars, forever shifting their manual gears in an effort to get there on time. Australia’s landscape, in comparison, is harsh and monotonous to those who don’t look closely, though it is hard to believe that number of eucalypt species. It seems to me that we have nine months summer and three months of spring. Sydney’s transport is comfortable and leisurely to those who have commuted in the cattle pens of the Bakerloo Line, and New South Wales country roads usually stretch empty to the horizon.

I have already said something of our neighbours and neighbourhoods in Guyana and England.  Now, moving to our first house in Sydney, we thought we had checked out the neighbourhood. But at 11 p.m. our first night Joan said “Is that an organ playing next door?” We did get used to the organ, to the hammering noise from two smash repair outfits over the back fence, and to the occasional domestic outburst from next door. These occurred regularly, usually when the McGuires were filling in their tax returns, and once, and I had already smelled burning, when Mrs. McGuire returned home to find Athol, tinnie in hand, trying to watch TV through a veil of smoke coming from the kitchen. There was a broken gutter opposite his garage which Athol had bridged with two rusty steel plates. In the days when you were allowed to drive home drunk from the club on Friday night, Athol needed four or five runs at these plates, gears clashing, steel clattering. But they were good neighbours as were the Fields two doors the other way. Their house had been burned down and, not being insured, Glenn had rebuilt it himself. It looked quite different to every other house in our street. “Just sit back. Don’t move” said Kate to a panicking Michelle Field. Glenn’s Volkswagen Combi, in which they were playing, rolled across the street and stopped, teetering on the concrete embankment. The girls had been sitting in the back seat when the handbrake released itself. Our suburb was Crows Nest, a motley collection of decaying shops whose commercial location presented no temptations to developers. Through Crows Nest runs the spine of the Pacific Highway from which falls away the block we lived in. Our block contained a maternity hospital which meant that, when Rebecca was to be born, Joan didn’t even have to cross the street. And for two weeks we listened for the clatter of feet as Kate and John raced up four flights to see their new baby sister. Kate knew the short cut from their school, through the rambling warrens of the old main hospital, since she made pocket money delivering papers to the patients there. Her monetary policy was never to have the exact change for the payments offered by grateful patients. “Who is that honking?” said Joan as we drove the kids back from Balmoral beach one hot summer evening. It was another neighbour, a bus driver, pulling his bus up alongside and asking if we had had a good swim. It was that sort of neighbourhood.

 

We had eight years in the little old cottage at 39 Sinclair Street and here are two sketches. A minute courtyard is enclosed by the kitchen on the left and, on the right, Kate’s bedroom. The living room, containing what furniture we could afford while paying off the mortgage, led to the kitchen on the right and, on the left, to the corridor to the front door. Homework had entered family life and, to allow for desks as well as beds, I built wooden platforms with stepladders to sleeping quarters. This had unintended gymnastic consequences in a completion to see who could run and dive the fastest between the upper and lower platforms without cracking their head open. Once, when redecoration had filled this corridor with furniture, Joan woke me early. “What’s that rattling noise?” It was breakfast, teetering on a tray as the children scaled the obstacle course to bring us a surprise.

In those days we were encouraged to trap funnel web spiders in a screw-lid jar for the people in the serum laboratories. Just as we had trapped one in the living room (I think it was an extremely distant relative of the funnel-web, but it was exciting anyway) Madeleine rushed in and accidentally kicked over the jar, releasing the spider and scattering the rest of us to hide behind the furniture. To make room for our expanding family we asked an architect to plan a Cape Cod roof extension. But, when he said it would go against all his artistic principles to design such an ugly thing, we took his advice, sold up and moved down to a proper house, at 33 Morton Street. From the front you can see the heavy lines of the typical Californian Bungalow, a design inspired, so they say, by Frank Lloyd Wright. From the back the Bouganvillea is shading the entertainment area. With Joan in the kitchen is Madeleine, a blues singer from New Orleans out with the Moses Hogan Chorale for a choral festival.

Golden Summers was the name of an exhibition of the work of the first Australian outdoor painters. These two words seldom leave my thoughts at this time of year. Our bouganvillia, never resting for long, is again showering us with new pink flowers from the arbor, under which I sit, watching dazzling lorikeets flash from tree to tree while baby lizards scamper across the hot stones. At this time of year the cicada chorus is deafening and the sun, setting well round to the south-west now, glistens on the white undersides of the big gum tree branches which overhang from next door.

Moving from 39 Sinclair Street to 33 Morton Street was downhill all the way. Only two blocks but we crossed a social contour line into a transition zone in which stately old Californian bungalows, family homes, were being replaced by new three storey boxes. The boxes contained distant people who seemed to move on before we got to know them, though cleaning up after a small hurricane once brought us all together out in the street. Our third and latest neighbourhood follows our general downhill slide being on the harbour at the bottom of the hill we started on. Otherwise is quite different. For a start it is like the letter Ell. In the vertical part of the Ell we are now Neolithic cliff-dwellers with people stacked seven floors above us in a development built into the side of a vast sandstone cliff. Our vertical neighbours include a retired rear-admiral who had also visited the Aquatic Club in Barbados, though I don’t think he would have dived off the springboard like I did.  The flat part of the Ell rises gently to a line of eucalypts and angopherors that turn orange when the early sun leans over the top of the cliff behind us. On this flat part are three swimming pools and four tennis courts. “How many laps did you do today?” asked Denise, one of our neighbours, as I climbed out of the pool. Other early morning swimmers include the “splasher”, the “monosyllable” and, occasionally, the “problem”, the visitor who tries to swim across instead of up and down. In summer there is the laughter of little children from the outdoor pool and, all year round, we hear the tennis players and see the gardeners maintaining our beautiful rolling parkland.

ADAPTATIONS.

So, as a migrant myself, what was I expecting in March 1967? On the plane I read a book that explained how  the Australian economy “rode on the sheep’s back”,  its society depended on the White Australia Policy,  its politics was someone else’s business and a dirty one at that, and that its cuisine consisted of burnt steak and tomato sauce. Wrong! On our first night we went to a Greek restaurant where there was dancing and the breaking of plates. On the second night we had sizzling garlic prawns at a Spanish restaurant. The following week we went for Dim Sum at Chinatown and to a political meeting where Ken Thomas of Thomas Nationwide Transport was arguing that we had no business in Vietnam. And within a year Australia was starting to get out of Vietnam and into the grip of a frenzy to buy mining shares. So Australia’s cuisine, its politics and its economy were at the start of a dramatic transformation. Later, when I was a teacher, the most common student surname would be “Nguyen” and, later still, John would be teaching children whose parents came from 40 different countries.

My own transformation was somewhat imperative.. “They were expecting you in Melbourne, but I’m told to take you to the North Sydney office” said the man from the Post Masters General Department. So he firmly detached me from my family and our greeting party of Jim, Kathy and Paree, and bundled me into a Commonwealth Government car. This was Friday afternoon at the airport and by Monday morning I was on the payroll. “I see they’re starting you on starvation wages” said the personnel clerk. Programmers were scarce as hen’s teeth then, I was senior programmer grade, and this was my first experience of Australian humour. But there were to be communications problems. I was in Sydney, my boss was in Melbourne and I had two programmers working for me, in Melbourne. The PMG spent two years trying to resolve this zig-zag line of communication, by getting me to move to Melbourne. I suppose the reason it took so long was that I had more experience than the PMG of how computer projects can go wrong. In life, he who is a scarce resource carries the power. In the end I left and joined the NSW Institute of Technology. Knowing nothing about education I was put in charge of three full-time and ten part-time lecturers. Fortunately, I had some experience of administration and, anyway, teachers always insist they know exactly what they are doing. The problem was I was also expected to teach. An American scholar, John Winings, came to my rescue. “Technical students, particularly in computing, learn their trade in the laboratory, not in the lecture hall.” He said. From then on I tried to design challenging assignments and spend lecture time guiding the anxiety that these created into enthusiasm for their solution. Others had a more cynical view of technical teaching, suggesting it “is largely a matter of casting artificial pearls before genuine swine”. But “vaulting ambition” in the Institute was now “o’er-leaping itself” in a rush to become the University of Technology at Sydney, or UTS. In the flurry of excitement, we were asked to suggest a motto. John Colville’s pertinent suggestion “Look Before You Leap” was regarded as cynical, which it was. And soon an astonishing civic monument  marking the occasion appeared at the main entrance. It was so obscure that it was two years before someone in the Biology Department figured out that it was probably a pair of apes copulating. But by then the sculptor had taken his fees and returned, laughing, to Papua New Guinea.

One of the benefits of university status was study leave. And, when my turn came, I caught up with the real world through two months in IBM, visiting colleges in England, and on two trips as a “Visiting Fellow” at the University of East Asia in Macau (more of this later). One of the problems with universities was to match the demand in student numbers with the supply of staff to teach them. At that time the problem was quite acute in computing. IT professionals were so well paid in industry it was hard to attract them to academia. And the demand in student numbers was large. Demand and supply were also out of kilter, but the other way round, in the chemistry disciplines. So, underused chemistry staff had time on their hands to infiltrate decision-making committees. Thus resources had a tendency to flow away from computing and towards chemistry. Do you remember the lesson on supply and demand I gave you in the “Settling Down” chapter? Well, Phil Stanley and I wrote a supply and demand analysis of this problem for an investigator on a committee of inquiry in Canberra into tertiary education. Essentially, we showed how the Australian economy would benefit greatly from a flow of resources away from chemistry and towards computing, but we heard no more. The investigator happened to be from a chemistry department in the ANU. Soon Joan and I started attending retirement planning seminars at which we got two pieces of advice. Don’t sell up and move to where you once had a great fishing holiday. “But why ever leave Sydney?” Joan and I said to each other. The other advice was to sell shares just before the market turns down and buy them just before the market bounces back. “But how do you know?” everyone muttered. In fact we didn’t know until John King next door suggested that our mining share certificates could always be used as wallpaper.

So, with all this useless advice and without any clear plan, I retired too soon and so started looking for work again. I bumped into an ex-student of mine in Crows Nest Post Office, got his bosses phone number, got an interview, and started work a week later with Telecom Australia. Henry Lebovic was our technical guru in a team called Small Systems, and we will meet him again in later chapters. After two years at Telecom I now knew what I wanted to do, resigned, and enrolled in Economics at Macquarie. Telecom had retrained me in personal computers and a compiler called Clipper and, since I was not going to use them commercially, I took to Macquarie copies of the software I had developed. Santonu Basu, whose grandfather had painted the portraits in the Queen Victoria building in Calcutta, was my lecturer in Development Economics. Discussing Santonu’s theory of rural debt over coffee, and remembering Vic Blundell’s lessons on land, I adapted my software to model third world land reform and showed it to others in the economics department. Since they were interested and, since they didn’t know what to do with Igor, they put us together. Igor comes from the Ukraine and used to lecture on the centralised Soviet planning system until there was no further point in doing so when they retired him early, much to his annoyance. Meanwhile, I had been asked to demonstrate my computer models to the economics department. Igor attended and, after a gruelling hour and a half demonstration Igor, still with a huge chip on his shoulder, seized me by the shoulder and whispered in his broken English: “David, I am so proud of you, you really showed those buggers in economics”. Over the next ten years “those buggers in economics” supplied me with three computers and some software and I started writing papers on third world development.

School for Seniors. At the School for Seniors everyone is old, some very old, but we have fun. The first hour teacher, a huge sergeant-major of a woman, jabs a large forefinger at the buttons on the tape recorder, often sending the lesson forward into the unknown instead of back for a repeat of a phrase. But whichever way, she always pauses in astonishment at the stream of high-speed French further distorted by low-grade equipment, and we all offer conflicting advice. After 3 weeks we all now realise that the tape is different to her instruction book. Last week, in moving her huge bulk between the blackboard and the tape recorder, she inadvertently dragged the recorder cord out of its socket. On leaping to my feet to help I caught my foot in my zip bag and did a Jacques Tati stumble across the room to peals of laughter. For the second hour, we all have textbooks with chapters 5 to 11 missing. We tried to explain to the school administrator, who is deaf. “I’ve already told you, if anything goes missing, always report it to the ground floor receptionist”. We tried to explain again and gave up in a fit of giggles. “Merci” says a lady in our group to whom I lent my dictionary. “Prego” says I absent-mindedly. More giggles. I shouldn’t really be in the third hour, Advanced French conversation. Whether I understand the question or not, I say oui or non without any conversational elaboration, the elderly teacher frowns, eventually moves on, and the rest of us giggle. We have fun.

Joan’s transformation was different in that she was a “returning” Australian. Nevertheless, her adaptations were extraordinarily varied, so I will start with the church and the description of Joan by Ursula, a fellow parish worker, as “that 16 year old who came to Mass with three children every Sunday”. And now in August 1992, it is 20 years since Joan and Jocelyn conceived the idea of a creative leisure centre, and last night at a dinner put on by the North Sydney leisure Centre, we listened to them both, sharing a microphone, telling us how it all happened. It started with Kate and Amanda complaining to their mums that boys at primary school were allowed to do craft, but girls weren’t. So it all took off from there, months of battles between the for-and-against factions in the local council, veiled threats from developers who wanted skyscrapers instead of playgrounds, until finally it all happened, with sandpits for toddlers and their mums, painting and sewing and jewelry and pottery for little ones, large and exciting trees festooned with ropes and ladders and nets for the more adventurous, and water colour painting, macramé, acapella singing, etc. for “oldies” like me.

Handel’s birthday. The performance, with 500 voices, was reported by the critic as the best large-choir Messiah he had heard. Anthony Walker, the up- and-coming conductor, was 25 that day, so after the performance 150 “Friends” converged on the North foyer, overlooking the harbour, for a double birthday party. We all sat on the steps, forming a natural amphitheatre, at the centre of which Joan at the microphone made a speech of welcome, then she introduced our guest from “upstairs”, Herr Haendel. Francois Kunc, a lawyer, chorister, and a bit of an actor, slouched onstage  in black tights and a wig (from his chambers) and started off in German (he knows 6 languages) until, as pre-rehearsed, Joan tapped him on the shoulder and whispered in his ear. “Ach” he said “This is Australia? I thought you said Austria. Under King George, German is the court language, but for now I will speak English. Can you understand English in Australia? Good. Now, when the King had to go to toilet during Halleluiah chorus, everybody stand up, so I assume same thing happen today. But some things surprise me. Firstly you were all in tune. This is most unusual. Also the audience was not talking all the way through the performance. Today the librettist (Isaiah) was not allowed down but I bring best wishes from upstairs from Otto Klemperer and Herbert Von Karajan”. Then the conductor Anthony Walker came on stage to cut the birthday cake, and said to Herr Haendel “Do you think you could rewrite a couple of passages for me?” Joan thanked everyone, including some choristers from the country (“I’m a girl from the bush myself” she said), and we all got stuck into cake and champagne. Next day a fax went to Francois from somewhere in outer space: “Georg, Where the hell are you? Down there the nations are furiously raging, while up here the place is awash with rumours about the last trumpet sounding at 00:23 hours. I’m trying to cover for you but Get your ass up here fast. Signed IZZIE (Isiah)”.

JOURNEYS OF THE MIND

On identity and citizenship. In Guyana I could say “I am native here and to the manner born” and I had a British passport. It was when I tried to go back to England to sell the house in Farley Road that I found out I was a stateless person. A kindly bureaucrat gave me a temporary six-month Guyanese identity to get me to England and back and I then became an Australian citizen. But, to do that I had to swear allegiance to the very Queen who had kicked me out of England. I never had to swear when I had a British passport. Joan and Madeleine had traveled out on a shared British passport. Later on Joan’s half lapsed, because I had not been born in England, while the other half, Madeleine, joined Kate and John as British citizens because they were born there. They now have dual nationality. Not surprisingly, a leading expert on international law once said of sovereignty: “It is doubtful whether any single word has ever caused so much intellectual confusion and international lawlessness.”

On language. “What do you think of Australia?” requires a careful choice of words in reply and, so far, I seem to be saying the right thing. A negative response in England would raise a laugh, but not here. I soon learned not to say “I grew up in the West Indies” as a conversation opener since this would be outside the square and the conversation would immediately be switched to the height of dams above the spillway, or the current price of wool. “I’ll have a ham and cheese and a salad sandwich” says my colleague Des O’Donoghue. In England I would have been conscious of a class distinction and said “Please” and “Thank you”. In France they would go even further, first having enquired about family, then saying “Merci beaucoup” and “De rien” and “Au’voir Madame”. Here in Sydney the sandwich cutter is your equal and filler words are unnecessary. When I said that I had passed my drivers test, I hid my confusion when the office typist said “You beauty”. Some words reflect attitudes to gender, for example Acacias are called “She-Oaks” on account of their inferior timber. “You shouldn’t be doing that, you know” said Kath Webeck’s husband in considerable consternation when he found me at the kitchen sink. And Raji once told me I was the first man she had ever seen inside a kitchen. Chris Richardson, listening to a group of Australian women at breakfast in a London hotel, described their conversation as “extraordinary good sense”. Of the English equivalent, he and I would probably use the word “twitter”. It seems to me that Australian dialog combines directness, economy, common sense and an amused cynicism. Australian humour is similar, but actually quite complex.

On work. The PMG department was, like the rest of the Australian Public Service, a closed shop. Employment was guaranteed and promotion was internal with, as I have explained, the single exception of computing. Since, originally, there had been virtually no computing experience within the Public Service, people like me were hired from outside. This was unprecedented. Normally, all appointments and promotions were from inside and were reported in a Gazette. There was an elaborate procedure allowing you to appeal against a promotion you thought you should have got. The PMG was a pleasant existence with a fair bit of drinking and eating, and productivity was low. I worked there for two years. Twenty years later when I returned the telephone part of the PMG was called Telecom Australia, workloads were much heavier and I often ran computer tests at weekends without overtime. I worked there for two years. As in the wider world the work ethic was changing fast. I had got to know and like two PMG managers in Sydney. One died early of a heart attack due to “good living”. The other made it into the new Telecom but died of a heart attack due to managerial stress. Today, the old economic idea of maximizing a utility measured in dollars and cents is being questioned. And the utility, the social value, of the old ideas of job security, egalitarianism, and the value of leisure are being reexamined.

On study. “The exam questions don’t change, only the answers” they warned me. I had already read the description of a pair of economists in a novel by Lawrence Durrell: “They are, for example, both economists. Why both, I ask myself? One of them must feel permanently redundant. They make love to two places of decimals only. Their children have all the air of vulgar fractions“. But I did have an escape route. When I felt economics was providing only some of the answers I was after, I started to trespass in anthropology, history, politics and sociology. Meanwhile I was seeing something of student humour. A printed notice on the electric hand dryer said “Press here for a short speech by the Vice-Chancellor”. And “I love deadlines, especially the whooshing sound as they fly by. “

CONCLUSIONS

So we migrated, we settled and we adapted. In the next chapters I look at our family life in Sydney, and our explorations of that “wide brown land” beyond Sydney.