Coming home

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 10: Family Politics
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by David Whish-Wilson

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David Whish-Wilson's biography and other articles by this writer

How Nature always does contrive – Fal, lal, la, la!

That every boy or gal,

That's born into the world alive

Is either a little Liberal

Or else a little Conservative...

– Gilbert and Sullivan

Recently, I was asked how otherwise intelligent people could dislike George W. Bush and John Howard so intensely. The man who asked knew that the conservative victories had left me discouraged – even though we had both known they were coming. I looked into his face for the smugness that filled the opinion pages and airwaves at the time: "We are all conservatives now." But there was only the question and the curiosity that had provoked it.

In any case, I am sick of fighting with my father.

After all, he is a good man. He has what his generation calls character. He believes in his family, he is honest and hardworking. He is also tough, eccentric and humane. His religious views are moderate and ecumenical. He calls himself a conservative but regards Kevin Andrews as a "fanatic".

Born just before the Second World War, my father was raised in backblocks Tasmania, in a Scots and Protestant farming community that boasts a street named after the family – the farm having been sold – to show that they were once there. My grandfather was a forestry worker who was away for months at a time, leaving my grandmother to raise their eight children as best she could. The children learnt early to be self-reliant and hardworking, but poverty has its costs and, according to my father, affection and care were expressed in labour and responsibility, in the fruits of food and shelter whose loving origins a child may yet fail to perceive.

When I was a child working in the garden beside my father, I remember him telling me how he used to work beside his father, on the farm, and how, despite the fact that nothing was ever said, he could tell that his father loved him. This struck me as odd at the time, quite possibly because I didn't understand the point he was trying to make. I was already struggling to maintain my dignity in what I regarded (in my teenage weirdness) as an enemy camp – my family home. On the surface, I couldn't have cared less.

I took him at his word. I have since heard that my grandfather, whom I remember only as a giant in a checked bush shirt, with a hunk of cheese in one hand and a mug of tea in the other, was also kind and quietly dignified, passive to his younger wife's imprecations and moods, a passivity my father swore he would never allow in his own marriage.

My grandmother was the woman I knew as "Champ", so named by her five sons, who sent me $10 out of her pension on my birthday and was the only person I ever saw stand up to my father (she had warned him to "leave the boy alone" – and he did). She was a tough woman with a sharp tongue that she used to keep order in her house. Her father had died young after escaping to the Great War, leaving her to raise her four siblings alone. Although her marriage to my grandfather had once been happy, a lifetime of poverty and hard work created a bitterness that she was unable to contain.

My father recently confided that, as a child, the only time he can remember an adult showing him any affection whatsoever was when he had whooping cough and his grandmother had sat beside him and held his hand. That he still remembers this simple, restrained gesture is telling; of all the horror injuries and illnesses he has suffered, of all the broken bones and dislocations and pulled teeth and cancer scares, it is this memory that brings tears to his eyes. Once, when I was embracing two of my nephews at an airport, I glanced over and saw that his eyes were filling with tears. As soon as I released the boys, the tears stopped. Now I know why.

Four days after I was born, my father was sent to Vietnam, where he survived many close encounters during his year of active service. For the most part he was based at Vung Tau, a beautiful coastal city where the enemy, the soldiers of the Viet Minh, also rested. The story that best describes my father's experience of Vung Tau was when he was jogging on the beach one day (he was a tri-services athlete and had played state level Aussie Rules ) and ran over the top of a dune into the path of a young Vietnamese man. The two men, dressed only in their swimming trunks, stood and stared at one another. My father says that he had never before seen a look of such revulsion, disgust and hatred as on that young man's face. In the long moments that followed, each waited for the other to attack until, finally, the tension broke and they skirted one another and went their separate ways. My father finished his run and returned to base. The young man continued to the beach before, presumably, returning to the jungle. The next day they might have tried to kill one another.

My mother and I didn't see him again for another year and only rarely in the years that followed. Now that I, too, am a father, I can see how hard it must have been for him to return to the child he had held only once, as a newborn in Newcastle Hospital, before he was sent away. He was a wonderful correspondent to my mother, given the circumstances, writing and sending tapes daily but, unlike my younger brother and sister, according to my mother, my father and I were unable to bridge the time lost in that first separation. Over the years he worked hard and was away for long periods, often returning exhausted. As a result, he always seemed to be under great stress, and his temper and inflexible ideas about his role as a father, ideas that I came to associate with the desire for order emphasised by conservative politics, meant that by the time I was in my teens, any real communication had broken down.

In any case, it is hard now not to regret the years of conflict that marked my childhood and youth. It is even harder not to regret the subsequent and longer periods of silence during my time overseas.

I LEFT AUSTRALIA WHEN I WAS EIGHTEEN AND DIDN'T RETURN FOR TEN YEARS. In retrospect, this was no backpacker's holiday or expatriate excursion. My travels over every continent were an obvious metaphor for the drawn-out genesis of an imaginative life, a life of new feelings. These things expanded out of a dark hard core and made it possible to continue living. The proof that this strange journey lacked narrative is in my memory, or lack of it. The frictions of travel erode the self and soon bring about the necessary conditions of what might loosely be called freedom – that is: not caring, not knowing, not remembering.

Like many rebellious young men, I tended to seek out destinations where the rule of law was weakest – yet where authority was paradoxically meted out most arbitrarily, cruelly and corruptly – ironically justified, considering the circumstances of my retreat from Australia, in the crude propaganda of a loving father trying to reassert authority over his children.

I was temperamentally suited to this life. Before my mother put her foot on the brakes, our itinerant family, because of my father's life in the military, had moved 21 times in my first decade. I quickly discovered that outside Australia I could "land on my feet", I was streetwise and invisible and somehow good with languages; it helped, of course, that I didn't care.

In the mid-1980s, on the tumultuous streets of every large east-African city, the highest compliment one could give or receive was to be called a "survivor". I managed to survive in this world, perhaps because Africa was where I felt furthest from home and therefore most at home. I was always aware that I could never belong, beyond being a survivor, and yet, where can one belong more than the place one goes to die, and learns to live again?

If this sounds rather melodramatic, I can only point to the fact that not dying was largely accidental. When the conditions of life are arbitrary, and survival accidental, there is another condition of freedom – that state of beginning again.

I survived by the usual black-market means, staying longest in Nairobi, Kenya, because that is where my money ran out (yet I would return to this place of running aground again and again). I had recently left India to get away from heroin, but no sooner had I "kicked" than I discovered it down on the similarly crowded and spice-laden streets beneath my hotel.

Nairobi had already grown to be a city of millions, most of whom lived in squatters' slums that filled the horizon. It was already a violent and desperate city when heroin arrived and heroin did nothing to improve the situation. Nigerian, Pakistani and Indian smugglers had long used Nairobi as one of many staging posts to get heroin into Europe and had only recently discovered that in its most impure form, "brown sugar", it could also be sold cheaply enough to sustain an African market. Brown sugar was dumped into big African cities in such quantities and at such prices that in the months after I arrived I watched the transformation of a vibrant street culture, with its usual dependable staples, into a cannibalistic nightmare where, from the highest ranks of the police to the lowliest street kid and thief, it seemed everyone was on the make. Prostitutes, such as my girlfriend, no longer put their younger siblings through school. Police robbed anyone with money left over from the gangs of marauding kids. The only businesses that thrived were those of the sex workers and the dealers supplied directly by the police.

At the time, I had no opinions on the subject. I bought and sold whatever I could to a niche market; the tourists in the coastal hotels and the young backpackers in the cities. When I had enough money or had simply had enough, I packed my bag and got the hell out of there. I travelled for months up and down the Congo River, from its trickling source in the jungle to its great delta and back again. I learned Kiswaheli and wandered around the Serengeti, I followed Museveni's rebel army as it finally took Kampala, and stayed for the celebrations. I hitched around Somalia and lay on the beaches of Lamu, reading, writing and getting clean. Then I returned to Nairobi and started all over again.