The house of roses
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 20: Cities on the Edge
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Adam Aitken
Download the complete article PDF
Adam Aitkin's biography and other articles by this writer
The ‘new' stranger in Australia bears the burden of representing not only what ‘Australia' was but also what we might become ...
– Katrina Schlunke
I was in my own strange country, our first Australian house – 10 Churchill Avenue, Bicton, Perth. It was a house, but was it a home? Was it our own personal culmination of great material ambition and success? It was a ghost house in some ways, a place we should never have owned. My father, a native of Melbourne returning to Australia from London and Kuala Lumpur after a ten-year hiatus, hardly ever lived there, and my mother, a Thai woman with a cosmopolitan background, hated it.
After attending a literary conference at the University of Western Australia devoted to spectral hauntings and the persistence of disturbing memories in history, I drove the hire car through my old suburb looking for the house, a picture on the dashboard. I found my old school. It had hardly changed, except for the effects of a tornado that had ripped its roof off a few months back. I was quietly pleased. The school had bad karma. Oddly, I couldn't find Churchill Avenue. I couldn't find the house either, only a few resembling it. I asked a postie on a bike whether there was a Churchill Avenue. No, she said. Had I made up the address? No, Churchill Avenue was the address on an envelope my father had posted to my mother back in that year, when he was in Perth looking for a job and my mother was still in Kuala Lumpur waiting for Immigration clearance.
I nearly missed the plane back to Sydney. On the flight, I could not stop weeping.
BACK TO THE PICTURE. It was obvious from the clean, neat verge that everyone was supposed to tolerate strangers. The house surrounded itself with the correct public spirit: it was in the air that surrounded it. Public spirit hung in the sky above the trees. No stranger shall come against your will, said the trees. Tolerate strangers, they're not causing no trouble or nothing like that. But the idea only went so far. Strangers for sure behind those curtains, no doubt about it. We were invisible, but they still saw us. It was Western Australia, and now I always associate dry dusty heat with Perth.
I was eight, and it was 1968. I spent a lot of time in the outside toilet though I hadn't yet learned the word ‘dunny'. I retreated to the dunny to talk to myself, and to contemplate the wounds I'd sustained in school fights. Maybe that's why Dad bought it. This house was meant to make us feel more ‘at home'. London, like Mecca, was approximately north-east, behind those trees. Notice the garden? Dad loved gardening, but he never quite warmed to the floral barbed wire screen of roses that separated the private from the public. The lawn required constant watering. I became expert with complex sprinkling devices. Under that perfect imperfect lawn full of barbed grass seeds we called ‘bindi eyes' was a sandy desert. By pointing the garden hose at the sky, I could make it rain. When I was not crying for some reason or other, or when I felt like crying, I withdrew to the dunny and became mentally self-sufficient, a habit I still hold on to. I think this makes me a real Australian.
John Hughes writes in The Idea of Home (Giramondo, 2005), his memoir of Cessnock: ‘More than anything else, house and garden included, the quality of one's lawn signifies the intensity of one's commitment to civilisation. On the other side is only the dust and the wild.'
But before the child sees the wild, he must embolden himself in a dark overgrown garden behind the house. The dunny was infested with redback spiders. I went there for peace, and to pray to God to move us elsewhere. With father somewhere else, I relied on God most of the time for advice – the rather stern God of the Good Shepherd Convent School in Ampang, Kuala Lumpur, which had left me, I imagined, with stigmata. I went to the dunny constipated and prayed to God to help me shit and to save my mother and brother from the freckly barbarians we fought off daily on the school football oval. I prayed to God to give me the ability to catch and kick an oval ball through two vertical sticks. I prayed to Jesus to help us defeat our enemy. My mother said, ‘don't fight, turn the other cheek', and began to read us Buddhist scriptures every night when she put us to bed.
The house was a façade in more ways than one. The garage had no car because my mother didn't drive and my father hardly ever lived there. Dad was literally out of the picture. For my father, Perth quickly became yesterday's news. He had left abruptly a few weeks before my mother, my brother and I had arrived from Kuala Lumpur. He had written to my mother to say he'd be going to Sydney, and when we got to Perth, there would be lots of presents – and a house! We were to go on to Sydney, where he would find an even better house.
My father had gone east. He had never been a mining man, but an ad man. Sydney was the obvious place for sales and marketing. He had driven across the immense desert in search of fortune.