Confusions of an economist’s daughter - Page 3
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 13: The Next Big Thing
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Eve Vincent
IN HIS MEMOIR STRAIGHT LEFT (Random House, 1994), Tom Uren, of the old Labor left, describes the first two terms of the Hawke Government - from 1983 to 1987 - in which he served as Local Government Minister, as "bloody awful, lacking real compassion for the people they should have represented".
Uren was born in 1921. He learnt about collectivism when he was a prisoner of war in the Burma-Thailand Railway construction camps; in prison camps, teamwork, camaraderie and comradeship ensured survival. This experience shaped his optimistic understanding of "human nature". Uren was born in the same year as my maternal grandfather, whom I call Papa. Uren grew up in a working-class household, Papa comes from the established Melbourne middle class; he grew up in a big house with domestic help - a class formation currently making a comeback. Papa was a beef cattle farmer in the Western District, and still serves on agricultural boards. He sent his young sons away from the farm to attend the same exclusive Melbourne school that he did. Papa was in Papua New Guinea during the war, a decorated officer in that "stupid, dreadful" thing called war.
Before my family moved to the farm I grew up on, we lived in the bush in Victoria. My grandparents were on a small farm nearby. I didn't know him then as the veteran, hard-working grazier, the authoritarian father, the patriarch. Beef cattle farming in the Western District now, says Papa, is doing well thanks to Japan.
Papa, it seems to me, gets softer as he gets older. We are the best of mates. When I moved to Melbourne for uni, Papa and I really became friends. We were easy companions, sifting through stacks of papers together over breakfast: The Age and The Australian daily. "It's very biased, isn't it?" Papa commented, once, of Murdoch's flagship. We'd sit out the front in the sun for tea and Anzac biscuits, and pop down the main street for errands. Papa doesn't like the way the yuppies' kids careen around on scooters, but he likes going to the cafes that have sprung up to feed them. We'd watch three lots of news at night: commercial, SBS and ABC. "Shall we have a TV dinner?" he'd ask hopefully, and we'd balance the trays on our laps as we ate and watched.
Inevitably, over my weekend visit, we'd have a kind of meeting. "Now I want to talk to you about some things, Eve," he'd say, reaching for his notepad - the agenda. We covered the basics: What was I up to? What would I do next? He'd get me to write down the answers sometimes, so that he could refer to them later. He sometimes listened to me on community radio in the mornings, on a station that captures the left's identity crisis: retrograde Maoist politics, union solidarity shows and "ethnic" broadcasting, our breakfast editorial style cynical. In one of our meetings, Papa raised a suggestion - at first tentative, and then stern: we were too focused on the bad things happening in the world. There is good news to be told, Papa insisted. "Is that a fair point?" I thought it was.
If I ever got upset, or was evasive, he'd cup my chin in his hand and look me straight in the eye. We often discussed social issues. What did I think about global warming? And always: "What do you think of the Aboriginal problem?" Throughout these conversations, Papa was patient and attentive as I fumbled for a response. I may be an opinionated bitch, and I've been lucky to work with some excellent people who've taught me a lot, but I don't know how to fix the Aboriginal "problem", which is everyone's problem. How does a state increasingly concerned with wealth creation rather than redistribution deal with its most marginalised citizens? It is punitive: the Aboriginal prison population explodes; horrific "revelations" of extreme, entrenched disadvantage and abuse are met with an authoritarian response.
Certainly, much of what I offered did not sit well with him; he is an old man at ease in Melbourne's ultra-conservative gentlemen's clubs. But, in good grace, Papa has handed responsibility for the world over to my generation. It's not because he doesn't contemplate pressing problems, or care. He sits silent through his news rounds, absorbing, frowning, nodding. His stake in the future is diminished; he defers to the "young people" who he thinks understand it best.
"You young people," he says, admiringly. "You have so much to worry about."
"Can a woman who rode a horse to school as a girl live to see the end of the oil age?" a friend asks his grandmother. Papa's life and family are steeped in the traditions of his class, but he knows he has lived through the "end of certainty". In an increasingly fractured society, it's the inequities of access to cultural and social capital that matter as much as the distribution of wealth. My income may come in behind the poverty line ("Is that why you're looking thin?" Papa wondered as we discussed my dire financial situation), but life is rich. The precariousness and uncertainty that underline vulnerable existences also define my life, but are rendered exciting by possibility.
Papa gets out his pen and says: "Tell me what it is exactly that you're doing again? Where are you living now? Write your new phone number here for me."
The biggest thing that young people have to worry about, Papa thinks, is climate change - we will inherit the terrifying legacy of so much human activity before us. "You young people have so much to worry about, but you're so educated. You think so much. You have so many responsibilities."
I think about my chaotic existence. "When you were my age, Papa," I say, "you'd fought in a world war, were married with two little kids, and were running an isolated farm in the Riverina."
"That's a fair point."
In 2002, I asked Papa to respond to some questions I had about "his relationship to the land". I was still trying to pull apart my deep attachment to the country that I grew up on - Ngunnawal country. "This isn't about how all the money-grubbing farmers stole all the land from the Aborigines?" he asked cheerfully before he agreed to reply.
He wrote me one of his few letters, although all members of the family regularly receive envelopes in the post, stuffed with newspaper clippings that include comments, underlines and exclamation marks. Papa began by excusing his jagged handwriting, pointing out - unnecessarily - that he didn't have a computer. He wrote that in 1947 he moved to a property in New South Wales on the Murray River: "Aratula was a lovely property. Dark loam with a creek, Bullatale, meandering through the centre into most of the paddocks. The whole area covered with occasional large red gum trees, then gum forest between the lower paddocks and Murray River. It was a delight to ride a horse and work the stock in such a setting ... There were two large mounds (about as big as a house) alongside two picturesque lagoons, backwaters of the creek. These were Aboriginal campfires where fires for cooking and warmth were kept going day and night."
Absences, presences: we forget, and remember again, how recently this land was stolen. Aboriginal blokes worked in the shearing teams; Aboriginal women worked as domestic help. Their old people probably grew up around those campfires.
In a rambling, sagging house I lived in briefly, I went through the back door one night and found my housemate in the kitchen hunched over the phone to her grandma, who lives in Canberra. The two of them whispered and giggled like young girls, deep in an intimate conversation. Years earlier, when my friend was a smack addict, her grandmother's support never wavered. While other family members shifted through phases of a more complex kind of love that mixed in guilt, betrayal and anger, her grandma remained an ally. Why is it that our grandparents, who have had to make the greatest leaps in understanding different experiences and new social meanings, do it best? If Papa is disappointed by who I turned out to be, as I feel my dad is, he doesn't show it. My dad the economist, who worked so hard through decades of relentless change, is an unfailingly generous person, and he has poured his successes back to his family. He instilled a social conscious in us all, but he's dismayed by my interpretation of it. Most of all, I suspect the thing he wants from me is stability. He's looking for some certainty.
When I ask Papa, nervously, what he thinks of my ratbaggery, he says: "I admit, it's been challenging. I've learnt a lot from you over the years." ♦