ESSENDON AND ENVIRONS TO KALAMATA: A WHIMSY
GILLIAN BOURAS *
I am very flattered to be here: I keep on turning up like a bad penny or cent, but I can no longer say, alas, that I turn up like a bad drachma.
That sound you hear is the knocking of my knees: it is a daunting business, that of being in the presence of so many trained, rapier-like minds. I have not got a scientific or legal mind; I occasionally wonder what sort of mind I have got, in fact. Whatever sort it is, it favours the subjective, autobiographical “I”.
Some are born to greatness, some become great, and others, like a certain bottle-blonde Country and Western singer, have a kind of greatness thrust upon them. The matter of greatness is of course irrelevant, but this topic was very much thrust upon me, at least in a manner of speaking: this chronically indecisive person thanks you.
The first thing I did when the orders arrived was to rush off to my dictionary to check on the precise meaning of whimsy. We take so many words and the meaning of them for granted, after all. Always the teacher, said a reproving friend once. You prepare. You propound. You check. You mark. Well, I sincerely hope I do. So eventually I came to the word whim. Apart from being a kind of windlass associated with mines, as all good Australians doubtless know, a whim is deemed
a sudden fancy, a caprice, a quaint and freakish idea.
This last definition seems particularly apt, for it now seems to me that I settled in Greece on a whim, yes, but on one that was not my own.
And if anybody had told me 30 years ago that I would be standing here today, and that I would have one son in the Greek Special Forces as a marine commando, and another in the Athens Fire Brigade, I would have thought that person certifiably insane. Yet here I am. It is some relief to report that my eldest son lives in Melbourne, where he was born. Life and its various vicissitudes.
We all have our whims, and perhaps it is true to say that Greeks are whimsical by nature. But then so might Australians be. I digress, but with some purpose. There is a very dear person in this audience today, a Greek-Australian, who wrote to me on a whim, years ago. 25. In Melbourne, The Age was then publishing my pieces about the Great Leap in my life (I still can’t decide whether the Leap was Forward or Backward) and Anastasia wrote to me via that august publication. Times have changed so much that I rather wonder whether her letter would be forwarded now. So the year was 1984. In 1985 I was due back in Melbourne for the first time since my migration to Greece in 1980: we arranged to meet.
Anastasia, however, had not realised, and who could blame her? that I was marooned in the parental outer suburbs: it took me a bus, a train, a tram, a walk, and something like two hours to get to her place near my Alma Mater, the University of Melbourne.
I was wildly late, and even though I was running down the street, coat flapping, I was stuck fast in a mire of mental misery: punctuality is one of my big things, and one more reason for my being quite misplaced in Greece. As I approached a certain gate, I espied a diminutive figure glaring at me through huge and very fashionable glasses. Anastasia had despaired, and was about to leave a note pegged to the letter box. But as I panted up to her, and there we were, strangers, I ask you, she eyed me very severely, and said: ‘You bugger.’ And so a great friendship began, with its full complement of zaniness and, yes, whimsicality. I am so grateful for friendship in general and for this friendship in particular. She is the Greek in Australia and I am the Australian in Greece. But the significant difference is that she is very Australian and I am not at all Greek.
So said Her Conference Master’s Voice.
It is true to say that I have a strong connection with Essendon. My mother and her brother went to the Essendon High School, where I later, in my previous incarnation, did my first ever teaching round.
My mother’s sister lived in Essendon all her life, so that my cousins always barracked for the Dons/Bombers, and my maternal grandmother lived in Moonee Ponds before it became famous or notorious, depending on your point of view. I lived in both Essendon and Moonee Ponds much later, when Barry Humphries had already made his name. Because my parents were teachers we wandered about the Victorian countryside to some extent, and I did my secondary schooling in Geelong.
But I was born in central Melbourne, I spent my earliest childhood there, and returned to it when I was seventeen; when I left for Greece, I had been resident on the other side of the river from Essendon for many years. I am now in my 30th year of being away from it, but magnetic, marvellous Melbourne keeps drawing me back. And I still visit Essendon, where my mother’s oldest friend, 88 next birthday, still lives.
David Malouf has written that we are all exiles, even those of us who have never left home.
Old age, or the approach of it, makes exiles of us: things, facts, values, ways of living change and thus become hard to recognise, so that sooner or later we enter a foreign country. We already have evidence of this contention at this Conference: so far we have heard papers on terrorism, the increased violence in society and, the vast strides being made in medical technology. I am an exile in both senses.
I have been reading about the brain lately; it seems necessary to do so, seeing that the neuroscientists seem set to take over the world. Writer-psychiatrist Norman Doidge, author of The Brain That Changes Itself, has given me great relief, has made me feel not such a frail vessel. When I migrated very unexpectedly, the talk was all about culture shock. But, says Doidge, culture shock is mainly brain shock, the business of immigration being quite hard on the plastic brain.
Part of said brain has to draw a new map, adapt the old one, and try to negotiate some sort of synthesis, so that the soul can go on living. (As it were: I am paddling on the edge of deep scientific and theological waters here. And I part company with the neuroscientists who claim that there is a clump of brain cells which is what has until now always been known as the soul. I suppose I will believe in the soul as soul, and in the divine spark until I die. )
Australians my age are the product of a monoglot, monocultural situation and nation.
In our time you could almost tell what day it was by the dinner served: when my family lived in a Wimmera township, we ate that awful yellow-coloured smoked cod on Thursdays because the shop took delivery of it in the morning, and because ‘the kids had to have their fish.’ Sundays were sacrosanct to church and roast dinners. And so on. There might be a trip to the picture theatre once a month, and radio serials like “Blue Hills” that kept the housewives of the nation going, as did the occasional Bex, a cup of tea and a good lie-down.
Even though post-war immigration had started, the sound of a foreign language was a rare one indeed. My childhood world was overwhelmingly transplanted Anglo-Celt, and a very bigoted little world it could be. We live in terrible times today, but I am thankful for the erosion of Anglo-Australian prejudice against the Irish, and for the passing of the Catholic-Protestant bigotry that was such a scar on my youth.
It is a true, inevitable, and sad fact of life that we judge others by our own standards, and from our own points of view. It is very difficult to enter another mindset, hard indeed to walk a mile in another person’s moccasins, although it behoves us all to make the effort.
The father of my children is the son of an Orthodox priest, a fact I used to have trouble explaining to my Catholic friends.
In very early days I remarked airily to George that I supposed his mother – Aphrodite – must be a very busy woman.
‘Oh yes,’ he replied, ‘she certainly is.’
‘Of course,’ I rejoined, ‘all the committee meetings and the afternoon teas for the ladies of the parish.’
I am sure he looked at me strangely; I am equally sure I missed that look.
My great-uncle Jack was a Presbyterian minister; all my family was Nonconformist/Dissenting to the last cell and corpuscle. But Nonconformity has always been quite democratic, the Reformation having been a political movement as well as a religious one, hence the misunderstanding: my grannies were doing what I assumed George’s mother to be doing. Instead, she was the completely traditional woman: her marriage to her third cousin had been an arranged one, and she was pleased, because her father was a priest, so she knew what she was taking on. She was illiterate, but could use up every part of a pig, could bake bread, deliver a kid, and rear it. All that: in short, at the end of the much-feared nuclear winter, she could have crawled out of the fallout shelter and started again, whereas I would not have had a hope.
So there we were: Aphrodite in her top-to-toe black and me in my jeans and T-shirts. I lived with the cultural continuum for 16 months, and I learned a great deal. People far away and with a need to stretch their imaginations wrote letters in which they asked what I did all day. Well, just to give one example, having any sort of all-over wash took the best part of a morning. When it came to making beef tea or some such, Mrs Beeton said: First, slaughter your ox. When it came to abluting in traditional village houses way back then, it was a case of First, light your fire.
When we moved, it was only 300 metres away, so that my late education continued. And it was with the move that I began to develop my theory about the pioneer and the peasant. Please note that I do not use the word peasant in any pejorative sense: apart from any other consideration, we were all peasants once. But I realised that pioneers were forced to invent the day, while peasants had no choice but to repeat it. Pioneers had to question everything; peasants were afraid to question anything. Pioneers had to find out; peasants already knew, not that they were necessarily happy about that knowledge.
The subject of this conference is Facing Change in Law, Medicine and Science.
Change is an essential part of life, although many people resist it greatly and feel very threatened when it is forced upon them. I myself have changed a great deal; I am no longer the heedless girl I was. The period of thirty years spent in this country has been a privilege, albeit often a painful one. I have had the opportunity to view life through two prisms, as it were, a couple of mirrors reflecting each other.
I have always driven people mad with my questions.
Why is a corpse’s face covered at sunset?
Why is a mirror covered in the room where a dead person is lying?
The answer was invariably Etsi einai: that’s just the way it is.
Just the way it is, wherever we are, is complicated, it seems to me. But it also seems to me that the more we examine our own complications, the more we can understand those those of others, the more we can understand human nature, and whatever it is that makes us tick.
Well, that’s the theory. So far.
* Gillian Bouras, born in Melbourne, now lives in Kallamata, Greece.
Copyright 2009. Greek Legal and Medical Conference