At home in both places
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 6: Our Global Face
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Desmond O'Grady
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Desmond O'Grady's biography and other articles by this writer
I still call Australia home. But I have another home in Italy. Virtual bilocation is my thing rather than geographic schizophrenia: I am at home in both places. Having insufficient money to move between them at will, I am not anguished by having to make a choice.
I did not realise Italy was to be my home when I sailed from Melbourne in 1955. It was merely to be the first European port of call on a working trip of a few years before settling back in Australia.
My family did not think of England as home in a personal way and, although sentimentally attached to Ireland, there had been no direct contact for more than half a century. My generation realised that the St Patrick's Day Parade and the Freemason bogey were old hat. Unlike some contemporaries, I was imbued with Australian and Australian-Irish culture, but it was all too monochrome. "Where are the poor?" I remember asking in Flinders Street. I objected to the "biggest-and-best-in-the-southern hemisphere" mentality and my father's conviction that Europe or, rather, continental Europe and particularly France, were finished. France was my alternative culture, a respite from Anglo-Saxondom, and French Catholicism, with figures such as Jacques Maritain, Yves Congar and the Belgian Joseph Cardijn, proof that Europe was not effete.
Italy was a much more dubious proposition. Anti-Italian prejudices had been reinforced by newsreel shots of endless lines of Italian prisoners of war in North Africa. Italians ran to fat. True, the headquarters of the Catholic Church was in Rome but at times the Italians there seemed to be all thumbs.
However, rather than pass through Italy, I stayed. After three months' learning Italian in Perugia, it was as if I had made an investment. I found work in Rome. My father had been upset when I walked out on my Education Department bond to go to Europe and worried that, if I did not return before I was 28, I could not enter the Public Service, where he was employed. I did return but brought something of Italy with me, a Roman wife. That proved decisive: five years later, I left my post as literary editor of The Bulletin to return to Italy because of the illness of my wife's widowed mother. My intention had been to have a piece of Italy with me in Australia but instead my wife found me, the travelling nation, back with her in Rome. I had to survive by writing.
AUSTRALIANS LIVING IN ITALY MAY BE ENVIED OR SUSPECTED OF BETRAYAL, perhaps due to a conviction that our national identity is a veneer that quickly rubs off. Instead, national identity is confirmed by the impact of a different culture. It may be easier to know you are an Australian in Italy than in Australia. It is an experience parallel to that of many Italian migrants who become more aware of their nationality in Australia. But even old friends visiting have asked, "Are you still Australian?" Thank goodness my family in Australia did not have this attitude or make a fuss, even though hurt by my departure. Some home-based Australians falsely imagine I inhabit a sybaritic paradise, with my main interests being good food and wines. But I can take or leave wine, do not drink coffee and rarely go to the opera. A few feel betrayed. The painter Justin O'Brien, who spent his last years in Rome, had similar experiences. He recalled a former staff sergeant at a returned soldiers' dinner in Chatswood who rebuked him with "aren't we good enough for you out here?" At a Sydney cocktail party, a man challenged him to "come back and face it". This implies that a migrant "flees from" rather than "runs to" and is a reminder that among those who do not change countries there are internal exiles.
Barry Oakley, who had planned to leave with me but instead married in Melbourne, later wrote in The Australian about my influence on him. It read like a bulletin from a Committee for UnAustralian Activities. He summarised our story as classmates interested in writing but who took different paths: "I got married and so did you. I was married, in an ill-fitting doublebreaster from The Leviathan, to Carmel Catherine Hart, of Maryborough, at St Mary's, East St Kilda. You, to Giuseppina Culotta, at St Peter's, Rome."
The ill-fitting suit bemused me. Both of us believe that the validity of a marriage is independent of where it takes place. St Peter's may sound a big deal but it was chosen because, as part of the Vatican, it enabled me to avoid Italian bureaucracy. In fact, the ceremony was held in a closed-off chapel and not in front of the main altar which, to put it mildly, lacks intimacy. Barry then contrasted my departure from Australia with his staying there: "Perhaps inertia was one of the reasons I did not [leave] but it was also because of a kind of faith that the ground of experience was here. St Mary's church means more to me than St Peter's, East St Kilda, where I grew up, is as storied for me as the ruins of the Forum."
There should be Literature Board brownie points for such worthy sentiments. I have written fiction set in East St Kilda, none set in the Forum. But I have never imagined that the "ground of experience" is confined to St Mary's or thereabouts. Barry may consider that I have been damaged as a writer by living so long away, and he could be right, but who can balance the pros against the cons?
He cited an episode when we were hitchhiking: while insomniac near Wilcannia. He felt at the world's end but somehow the marginality was transformed into meaningfulness and he believes he had a part in something similar in the Australian theatre. As he noted, I slept through that crucial experience in Wilcannia. But in dealing with Australian newspapers, I am constantly reminded of the marginality of Italy in respect to Australia and the difficulty of transforming this into meaningfulness.
Who you are is more important than where you are, but where you are affects people's perception of you. If you marry in St Peter's, it is presumed that it is in a handmade suit almost stitched to your body. If you have a Roman background, you must strut. An imagined life attributed to you becomes a rebuke for those who stuck it out on Gander Flat. But living and working in Italy is not like inhabiting the pages of Vogue. The question becomes: why should an Australian who writes from Italy be seen not as a mediator, or an Australian eye on Italy, but as one who has abandoned his culture for another?
I HAVE TO ASK MYSELF WHICH ITALIAN EVENTS WILL INTEREST AUSTRALIANS or, rather, Australian editors. Interpreting Italy for Australia is difficult because of the limited space and the huge gap between the experience of Italy and its image as the land of style and ease of living. It is also a land that has a national morning radio program subtitled "how to live in this country without going mad from frustration" and where a recent prime minister, Massimo D'Alema, wistfully expressed the hope that it might become a "normal country".
I would like to convey that Italy has similar problems to other contemporary societies, but suspect that outsiders do not want to know, cosseting an idea of it as the playground of the Western world. I would also like to do something that seems at odds with my first aim: show that Italy faces its problems in a distinctive way. If, as we are told, the world is becoming homogenised, it still has some way to go. Martin Boyd was perceptive in Much Else in Italy (Macmillan, 1958) when he said that although the spiritual world has been destroyed wherever puritans and materialists rule the roost, it persists in Italy. A crucial issue now is how much of it persists when materialists have power in Italy, but it cannot be handled in 500 words at the bottom of page 17.
Anyway, Australian newspapers seem tepid about cultivating correspondents with a distinctive Australian viewpoint. They prefer to use syndicated agency copy paid for yearly rather than pay something additional for articles from Australians. This makes short-term economic sense but seems a myopic policy. Australians may spot Australian "angles" that escape someone writing for The Baltimore Sun. A simple example is an article about the Lipari Islands off Sicily written for The Observer, London, and picked up by an Australian daily, which acquires rights to the weekly's articles. There is an interesting story in migration from the Lipari Islands to Australia and abundant evidence of it because people of Lipari descent return for the northern summer to run guesthouses there. The United Kingdom does not have similar links and there was no mention of these migrants in the article.
Another annoying aspect is the cockeyed stories that are given credence. For years there has been a concerted attempt to reinforce the myth of Mafia invincibility, as if Australians just love to read of concentrated evil at a distance. Good Weekend ran a Mafia story that highlighted a wildly exaggerated claim that in the 1980s "10,000 Sicilians died violent deaths – three times more than were murdered in Northern Ireland during the whole 30 years of troubles there".
Another example is Peter Robb's Midnight in Sicily (Duffy and Snellgrove, 1996). It presents the prosecution case against the former prime minister Giulio Andreotti for alleged collusion with the Mafia as if it were the whole truth. When I mentioned this to a literary editor he said, "no one has looked into that angle", meaning veracity, which is surely basic in assessing a non-fiction work. It is odd to be living in one of your homes and find that in the other it has become a fantasy realm.
Italo-Australians have complained to me about the clichés about Italy in the Australian press. They say that Italy is presented simply as the Mafia, trivia and the Vatican. The trivia and the Mafia tend to be taken seriously. They find their former home becoming a fantasy realm but they, too, reinvent their new country. Although I welcomed the arrival of Italian and other migrants in Australia, it is a pity that many think Australian history began with their arrival. They have contributed significantly but I appreciate also the previous narrow, matey, plucky Anglo-Irish Australia. Contrary to those who see an ever more radiant future beckoning, I think Australia was more of a world leader in social matters about 1910 than today. I am an Old Australian (the O'Gradys arrived in the 1850s and the Kiernans in the 1870s.), which is a basic reason that I often use Australia as a benchmark for Italy. It is comparatively healthy as regards institutions such as parliament, the judiciary, the bureaucracy and the education system. It has an institutional solidity that Italy lacks but compensates for with historical depth and widespread pietas. Talking of benchmarks, they can become double when one has two homes. Raffaello Carboni of the Eureka Stockade is a case in point: he saw his Australian experiences according to a pattern developed in Italy, where he had been engaged in conspiracy, arrested for high treason, involved in an insurrection, which for him was also a saga of solidarity.
Not only was this the background of the Italian goldminer in Ballarat but it influenced how he shaped his account of the goldfields events. The high point for him was not the armed clash but the diggers swearing solidarity beneath the Southern Cross flag. In his writing after he returned to Italy, he applied formal patterns he had developed to frame events in Australia. Patterns, benchmarks – if you apply them in one country it means that where you developed them is home in a certain sense.
Some of my fiction, such as the story "A Dedicated Young Man", concerns Australians overseas who end up with what they fled from in Australia or find the reverse of what they expected. Other Australians have found their passionate true selves in Italy; in Shirley Hazzard's words, "it brings out the best" in a person.
However, many Australians live in Italy because of circumstances rather than choice. Some are vague about why they are where they are, as if they have forgotten why they came or the path home. They could use the words Gore Vidal borrowed from Howard Hughes: when the multimillionaire was asked why he passed his time sitting in a darkened room, hair down to his shoulders, with his feet in empty Kleenex boxes, he responded, "It's just something I drifted into." They see the up and down side of Italy, while a few have been so hurt by Australia as to reject it. Although they have not made Australia their home, most still consider it home because it shaped them. Kate Inglis, a musicologist who admires Italians' outspokenness and says she was reshaped by Italy, says, "On visits home I always find Australia pleasant and relaxed whereas Italy is hectic, overcrowded and conflicted. That's closer I think to what the world really is. Italy's made me." But she still refers to Australia as home.
There are enough Australians in Italy to prevent nostalgia but they are not easy to find. Unlike some larger foreign communities whose members can live in an enclave, there is little that brings Australians in Italy together – only Anzac Day and Australia Day, which are now regarded by the embassy as a chance to assemble not so much Australians as potential Italian business clients. There is no Australian cultural institute and no Australian papers are available at kiosks, as are the Philippine dailies.
Even the Qantas office has been moved out of central Rome and the "flying kangaroo" no longer leaps directly from Rome to Australia. There used to be many student priests, sufficient to be the mainstay of an Australian cricket team that won the Roman competition, but now their training is given in Australia. There are simply isolated Australians with different bonds – one I share with a Jesuit here is that, although we did not know each other at the time, we were both present supporting South Melbourne in the memorable 1945 VFL final against Carlton in which South lost the match but won the stoush. When together, some delight in using probably outdated Australian slang.
There are 16,000 of Italian origin who have returned after years in Australia, publish a periodical Il Canguro and meet for nostalgic barbecues. Like a few surviving Italians who made friends as prisoners of war in Australia, some take group vacations in Australia. It has remained their second home. Then there are Australian-reared children of Italian migrants who dislike the narrow streets of their parents' villages, which tourists find picturesque, preferring the broad streets of Melbourne suburbia with their central nature strips. They are in no doubt as to which is their home.