At home in both places - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 6: Our Global Face
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Desmond O'Grady
IN THE POEM A BURNING FIERY FURNACE PETER PORTER ASKS WHY Australians wonder who they are. Perhaps a spiritual cringe in respect to Aboriginal culture has followed a cultural cringe towards Europe. But our identity problems pale beside those of many peoples in Central Europe. In the past century, without changing residence, many of them were raised in a different country from that in which they were born, then they were incorporated in another and grew old in a fourth, with all the attendant complications over roots, language, culture and identity. Latvians have the problem of a large proportion of Russians imposed on them. Belgians, looking to Holland and France, have a more obvious claim to identity problems than Australians. Argentinians, previously our rivals in the "biggest-and-best-in-the southern-hemisphere" boast, could well feel punch-drunk after their nation's regression from an "improved Europe" to a country in debt. Moreover, we are no longer a wee community: citizens of countless other nations have better reason to fear their homelands count for little on the world scene.
If, despite this, white Australians do wonder who they are, it may be because they feel a detached part of a source culture. They do not have the identity reinforcement that comes from a unique language and have to travel a long way to experience the self-definition that comes through dealing with other cultures.
But the problems involved can be exaggerated. The Italian resident, painter Jeffrey Smart, has said, "It's perfectly normal for an Australian artist to live in Italy – he can draw inspiration from both Italy and Australia. It's just that a huge cultural industry has grown up about navel gazing." A broader gap has to be bridged in coming to terms with Aboriginal or Asian cultures than with other parts of the West, such as Europe or America.
My first reaction to Italy was an upsurge of chauvinism that quickly subsided, although it still persists in a desire to challenge as well as appreciate. But my contrasts with Italy are not as distressing as were those with my home culture. Living in a foreign culture is living on a cusp between the different configurations of the human. Displacement relativises the customs of your own tribe because you see others do things differently but not necessarily better or worse. You are in a neutral (neutered?) zone, a no-man's-land that may seem privileged. But this demilitarised zone can turn into a trap where one is shot at from all sides.
Importantly, Italians do not expect foreigners to conform. At least in Rome, they are tolerant of "resident aliens" even if they are "extra-communitarians" (from outside the European Union). At meetings of my condominium committee, I have achieved a special status, never burdened with onerous tasks, such as keeping minutes.As I am tall and fair, I am sometimes taken as German or Austrian. My surname convinces many that I am Irish – or Scottish ("because your name begins with O you must be Scottish") or even Dutch; that is getting close – probably the fair Irish descend from the Danes. Perhaps I am a case of retarded reverse migration. I feel the belief that we are all pilgrims a long way from our home beyond the Jordan makes moving from one country to another easier, as was shown by the internationalism of medieval Europe. And the belief that we are all outcasts shifts the questions from who we are to why we are.
From another point of view, I am a citizen of what Raffaello Carboni called the Republic of Letters (living by writing superior material at inferior rates and recognising an affinity with others on the treadmill).
There is a saying that a man with two lovers is divided but a man with two countries is distraught. I think two can be accommodated but the number cannot be raised indefinitely – I mean countries rather than lovers. The actress Greta Scacchi, who has three (Australia, Italy and England), complains that "it becomes hard to know from which viewpoint to assess things. And wherever you are, there's always something missing."
I enjoy travelling but am as glad to turn for home as to set out. I have friends who always want to be on the move whereas I feel rooted – even if in more than one place. They seem to want to go off the map whereas I know the world is round. Inevitably, those who have several homes find those confined to one provincial but I also find many cosmopolitans supercilious. I am wary of rootless modernity and of the void of virtuality. Several wheres beat nowhere hands down.
Some countries seem to resent expatriates, others just ignore them. Italy paid little attention to its millions of emigrants even though their remittances shored the economy. It seems to have been a case of out-of-sight, out-of-mind and Italy has learnt little about handling the problems of its present influx from the experiences of its emigrants. They were disenfranchised until granted a postal vote recently, which was probably some decades after it mattered. Now there is an attempt to reinforce cultural links, for instance, by an interest in writers of Italian origin, such as John Fante, who wrote in other languages.
Some Italians say that the present asylum-seekers, who seem to arrive almost daily off Sicily, should be treated as Italians would like to have been received when they migrated in millions. This attitude is a factor in the debate inspired by the desperate asylum-seekers but there are many others such as the terrorist-Muslim link, the racist attitudes in the Northern League component of the governing coalition and the capacity of a struggling economy to absorb new arrivals.
For some Australians, expatriate seems to be a word covering a multitude of sinners. This is so to such an extent that there are clandestine expatriates who don't let it be known that they are out of the country. It may be possible to tab such traitors by inserting a chip in their heels. Distinctions can be made among expatriate experiences: between those who move to English-language zones and those who cross language barriers; between those who maintain only personal contacts with Australia and those who have work contacts (to what degree is patriotism a function of income?); between those whose partners are foreigners also and those living with indigenes; between those who had major formative experiences before leaving Australia and understood how the society worked and those who are lacking on both counts and woolly about how Australia compares with their new country. Expatriates tend to be composites learning different things in different places: I began playing cricket in Australia and began driving in Italy, which is different from learning cricket in Italy and beginning to drive in Australia.
As well as averaging a trip to Australia almost yearly, I have constant work contacts. I am in a non-English language zone that, although not a deliberate choice, is congenial because I wanted to go beyond Anglo-Saxondom. And I had major formative experiences before leaving Australia, such as at the University of Melbourne and working on The Observer and The Bulletin. I am anchored in Australia but do not want to be defined by its confines. People too anchored are immobilised or, to change the metaphor, one has to graft the Australian background onto the local culture or run the risk of fossilising and having a fossilised view of Australia.
One can keep calling Australia home but find the number has changed. People who move have to keep in mind that countries change, too.
What of Australia do I keep with me? On the walls of my lounge room is a French admiralty map of the Pacific in 1776 with most of Nouvelle Hollande's southern and eastern coast missing. To match this, I framed one side of a plastic bag from the NSW State Library (the Mitchell Library) bookshop, which shows the 1756 map Captain Cook used. The eastern seaboard is complete, although without the bulge. There is also an etching of a Suffolk tree by Arthur Boyd and, by his uncle Martin, a large painting of Frascati Cathedral with balloon-like coloured coffee-bar umbrellas floating in the foreground. In addition, there is a painting by a Japanese artist and the original for an illustration used with an article of mine in a New York magazine. The walls of my workroom are plastered with posters of Italian art exhibitions or buildings but there is also a postcard of a painting of the Harbour Bridge by Sydney-born Nikki Borghese, a postcard of bridge climbers and three photos of the bridge, one where the two sides of the span are about to join, another with "Eternity" blazoned on it. Close by is a copy of Clive James's poem on the scribe responsible for the "Eternity", which I used to see chalked on the pavements of Kings Cross.
There is also Vivian Smith's poem My Morning Dip and a shot of a ferry approaching the wharf at Mosman, Vivian's stamping ground, where he gives me refuge on my trips to Australia, but also my own when I went to school in Military Road. That is not all: there is a cover of The Melbournian featuring an article of mine, a poster from The National Times advertising one of my short stories, a Leunig calendar for 2003, reproductions of signatures of many Australian writers, which I picked up at the Mitchell, photos of the Swans' Roy Cazaly palming the ball from the ruck and of Warwick Capper marking. Last but not least, is a gift from one of my grandsons, Victor Desmond, a didgeridoo that was probably made no further away than Frascati.
MY TAKE ON ITALY IS VERY DIFFERENT FROM THAT OF GILLIAN BOURAS ON GREECE. I was irritated by the first articles I saw Gillian write about life in a Greek village, where she had moved after marrying a Greek in Melbourne, because they belonged to the consoling Australian writing genre of "you-don't-know-how-lucky-you-are". I thought the comparison between Melbourne and a village invidious.
But her books are another matter and made me reflect on our differences and similarities. We had both lived in the same street in East Malvern and studied English literature at the University of Melbourne, although at different times. Family entanglements were the reason we swapped Melbourne for the Mediterranean. So much for the similarities. The differences? She is a Presbyterian in the Peloponnese and finds the ritual of the Orthodox "made God seem far away".
I am a Catholic in what in some way is the capital of Catholicism and, despite surprises, recognise the religion. From this point of view, I am more at home in Italy than Gillian in Greece. Moreover, I had moved from a city to what is the prototype of Western cities, whereas Gillian had regressed to a village, which was another sore point. But she made the difficulties of being plunged among peasants her subject matter.
She found in the Peloponnese what hardly exits in Australia: a peasant culture, partly illiterate or still oral, and captures its strengths and miseries, particularly through a memorable portrait of her mother-in-law Aphrodite in Aphrodite and Others. She contrasts the culture's suffocating narrowness with the inventive Anglo-Celtic pioneering tradition but admits it has "a grave enchantment which was almost my undoing".
Through suffering, Gillian becomes tied to Aphrodite with her blinkered strength. It is a case of home is where the hurt is. Aphrodite reminds me of Artemisia, an Abruzzo peasant woman in Melbourne described in a short story by Gino Nibbi, who ran the path-blazing Leonardo bookshop in Little Collins Street and spent his life torn between Italy and Australia. Robust Artemisia joined her son and daughter-in-law in Hawthorn only six months before Nibbi wrote his story and knew little English but all the gossip in her street. In fact, she was more at home than her neighbours, the Nibbis, even though they had been there for 30 years, because she considered Australians the foreigners. Rather than being assimilated, she assimilated Australia and always called Abruzzo home. In fact, she never moved out of it. One suspects Gino Nibbi envied her because, by this time, he was not too sure where home was.
Gillian may have had a similar attitude towards Aphrodite because of her assurance and knowingness about her small sphere. Gillian came to feel even affiliation. When she broke from the suffocation and enchantment of Greece, she did not return to Australia but, as recounted in A Stranger Here (Penguin, 1996), went instead to England because she found it the closest thing to the Australia she had left. Rather than still calling Australia home, she began calling England home. Although a migrant herself, she had reservations about the "hybridisation" of Australian society through migration. This Anglo-Celt records reservations in her family even about the Irish Catholic element in Australia. She lovingly recalls her grandparents who "doted on the Royal Family... read books about England and Scotland, sang traditional songs, danced traditional dances and were deeply suspicious of Irish Catholics".
That kind of Auld Lang Syne was one reason I welcomed the variety introduced by postwar migration.
A character in Living Nowhere by John Burnside says that home is "the place where you bury your dead". Is it true in a wired era that allows one to have more frequent contact with home but to live, as it were, nowhere? The statement, by contrast, reminds me of the earthquake survivors I interviewed living uncomfortably in tents in the hills behind Naples who refused offers from relatives in Australia to join them there because they did not want to leave their dead.
Claiming two homes is wanting to have it both ways. For those living in another country, the death of friends and relatives in their homeland is attenuated by distance: they become new degrees of absence. But eventually expatriates suspect it might happen to them, too. That prospect, or the threat of old age and sickness, force some to decide where is home for them. But I recall Martin Boyd calmly facing the prospect of dying in Rome, saying that it was closer than Australia to where he had been born – Lucerne.
Matthew, in my story "You Haven't Changed a Bit", who wants to entwine Rome and home, is looking beyond death for a solution to his inability to bilocate. He has come from Rome to visit his parents in Melbourne and expresses concern that he might not see them again:
Sitting in the back garden after dinner, when he mentioned that he might not have the fare to fly out even if they were seriously ill, his father told him not to worry.
"It's strange," Matthew ventured, "It's so right sitting here with you both but it seems impossible when I'm in Rome."
His father, reclining in a deckchair, sat up. He wasn't at all sure what his son meant.
"When you're in Rome, it's hard to imagine being here," Matthew elaborated, "and when you're here, Rome seems unreal. But I'm at home in both places."
Matthew wasn't sure what he meant either – he guessed he wanted imagination to be the real thing, to be with his parents and to be in Rome at the same time, longing for a communion which was not of this world. ♦