Advance Australia FAIR?
AKA! "Excepting Fishes"
How we are seen determines in part how we are treated , how we treat others is based on how we see them; such seeing comes from representation".
[ Richard, Dyer, The Matter of Images ]
Today my birthplace in the Australian suburbs, my city haunts and stomping grounds as a teenager and a young adult- look different yet still familiar. The city is certainly different to 1959 when Ava Gardner, while shooting, On the Beach, on location in Melbourne, said it was the perfect place to film the end of the world.
Different also to how it looked 30 years ago when as a wide-eyed grad student in my 20s I packed my bags and headed- like the proverbial moth to the flame that was America.
In Melbourne since my childhood we always had Greeks and boy do they know how to cook and eat. But now Melbourne is the world’s 3rd largest Greek city. Visit any of our cities and you’ll find a truly international culture and cuisine with an increasingly heavy presence of students and citizens from throughout Asia. Don’t take my word for it- just consult Travel and Leisure or Conde de Naste Travel.
Last time I was back “home” I was waiting in the middle of the city [ the corner of Bourke and Swanston St. ] at 4 o’clock on a week day. I think they have now adopted another Americanism by referring to it as the CBD [ central business district ].
I knew this intersection very well. I spent years working in a department store just 2 blocks way during my summer school holidays. There was a coffee shop just across the street when my first real crush and I would meet, drink cappuccino and play the jukebox [ Terry Stafford’s, “Suspicion” ]. Now it looks like Asia. It is packed with noodle houses, curry in a hurry and at 4 when classes end at Melbourne Uni or RMIT they crowd the intersection. You could take a photo and show it to most Americans and ask them to identify where it was taken. Frame it right so there were no store fronts visible, no billboards or signs with English writing and this might well be any big city in Asia.
Unless they have been there , it is not a view most Americans have of Australia. Of course they are not the only ones who can get it wrong- who believe, albeit willingly in the myth rather than the reality. It might be racist, it might be anti Asian or anti- immigrant or it might just be a longing for the comfortable world that once was. A lot of the time it’s just plain ignorance. Of course ignorance can still cause harm to other people especially if they happen to be at the receiving end of a remark or an action that they don’t understand.
I would never have thought of my father as a racist. He was down to earth- egalitarian – a union member and a shop steward who took people as he found them and typically extended a the hand of friendship which in those days more often than not meant shouting [ treating ] another bloke a beer. His mates would say he was the sort of man who would give you the shirt off his back. Take Dad out of his element however and he could embarrass himself and others. My brother who was with him in Singapore at the time, cringed as our father approached a uniformed doorman at a fancy hotel and in his broadest Australian accent said:
“Gooday Gunga Din, where do ya get a drink around here”?
This month marks 10 years since my father’s passing. Oddly enough the year’s in America had brought us closer together despite the geographical distance. On perhaps the last occasion I saw him , when he knew he way dying, he assured me in good spirits and with no sense of rancor, that his respiratory problems were due in part to the number
of Vietnamese immigrants we had allowed into the country. It was pure Archie Bunker. You didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. All I could try to do, all I have ever tried to do- asked my own son to do, is to understand me as a product of the culture and times in which I was raised. The blame game is pointless . Holier than thou gets us nowhere; anymore than does unasked for, forgiveness. Rather than condemning individuals for views and values that do not match our own, we might all benefit from attempting to recognize the forces and factors that contributed to those perspectives [ including media representations ] so that we might challenge, change and channel those forces for social good.
My mother’s remarks about race were more subtle than my father’s, a little less public but they still showed the same lack of understanding. On her first and only visit to the U.S. while visiting me in Madison Wisconsin, we went out to dinner. Walking to the restaurant we passed a group of African Americans on a street corner playing drums and singing. As we passed by my mother looked at me and said words to the effect, “those people are all so musical aren’t they”.
Now the line sounded familiar. Darn familiar in fact. Before he became beloved in MASH, as Sherman Potter, Harry Morgan had appeared on the show as a racist officer. Just before he begins a court martial of a black soldier, his character asks him for a little number , you know, he explains, a song or a dance- because [ yes- you got it ] you people are so musical.
Nor was this type of racism restricted to my parents generation. Before leaving Australia I had an opportunity to experience first hand the limitations of book learning – that tolerance was OK as an abstract but didn’t always work in reality. I taught high school Australian history and American history. I had taught many of my students for several years in a row and knew many of them very well both inside and outside of the classroom since I lived in the community.
Our community was home to a major migrant hostel. Each new wave of immigration to Australia, usually resulted in newcomers in the school. There was a pecking order with the newest immigrants always at the bottom –always the butt of the jokes, the newest victims. But somehow it worked. Despite a shortage of ESL teachers or counselors, the newcomers somehow blended in with little real tension and few incidents of classroom or schoolyard violence. The one time we did see an escalation in conflict was in the 1970s when our new group included both Christian and Muslim refuges from the civil war in Lebanon.
But then something happened- an event- a natural catastrophe like none our nation had ever seen before. Australia’s northern- most city, Darwin was struck by a cyclone so powerful that most of the city was destroyed. Much of the population including aboriginal families, were evacuated south to the cities and suburbs that had never seen aboriginals except in the media.
Ironically my students, normally good kids- open, accepting of European immigrant waves and enormously sympathetic to the conditions of Negroes when we studied Civil Rights, and Indians when we read, Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, some of these same kids were now overtly racist. All our book learning was an abstraction- on their own turf, in their own backyard, they exhibited some of the same behavior they condemned in their studies of America.
They also resented it when I called them on it, just as my mother resented any suggestion that her remarks about blacks being a musical people, was somehow stereotypical or inappropriate.
Trying to put it in context for my mother was never going to work. She thought she was paying them a compliment and all I heard was a stereotype. What was I saying to her, the woman who had taken me to movies for all those years. Was all I could do now criticize?
“When I Was a Boy, World was Different Spot”
As a young child movies were big in our family. I did not live in a house with television. But there was the movie theater. Perhaps the first time I ever experienced a sense of some place different- something exotic where people did not look or act like those I saw around me in the streets of Coburg and West Preston, was that night in the mid 1950s when my parents took us all to see The King and I.
This suburban movie theater was the height of luxury. Plush red velvet drapes and plump seat cushions with gold trim. To go there, was to go upscale from our humble brick veneer house with laminated furnishings.
But this night is was not about the place, it was about the place it took me to- Siam .Now you have to understand we did not have television and I had never so much as been to a Chinese restaurant. This was my first vision of Asia and therefore Asians. It was love at first sight. I loved the pagodas and the costumes , the palace, the King , Anna and of course the children- all those beautiful children parading by to Rogers and Hammerstein’s, “March of the Siamese Children”.
My parents purchased the soundtrack and by age 7 I could sing entire numbers. For whatever reason, “Shall I Tell You What I Think of You?” was my favorite performance piece. I may have left out the lyrics that made reference to “slave”, “concubine” and “libertine”- either that or my aunts decided simply to let me sing without any need to explain any of it to me.
But it did introduce me to the idea of slavery. It was probably the first time I had ever heard of President Lincoln and it was definitely the first time I had ever heard of a woman called Harriet Beecher Stowe and a book called Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I was learning and my teacher was the movies.
Who would have thought in 1957 that 20 years later I would sit center stage 3 rows from the front in a Broadway theater and watch Yul Brynner in the revival of The King and I. As a child no one in my family had ever gone overseas. My father worked for an airline and would later work in New Guinea – but no-one else we knew could afford to travel, not family, not friends, not neighbors.
Our world and with it our world view , was limited by both distance and finances. Education was my passport and years later I would make the journey to Thailand. If Siam no longer existed as a country – much of it remained; the rivers, the temples, the palaces and yes, the respect and reverence for the king.
Coincidentally- a remake of The King and I had just been made with Jodie Foster. While we were in Bangkok the largest newspaper reported that government censors had banned the film. Anna and the King was deemed disrespectful. Whatever the rights or the wrongs of Hollywood’s depiction of Siam, its monarch, its history and its people , had been in the 1950s- a half century had now passed and modern Thailand was not receptive to what it regarded as distorted western media representations.
The King and I was not the only film my parents took me to see in 1956. This was the year the Olympic Games were held in our own city, Melbourne. We all filled with pride. There was a palpable sense of nationalism. My father made a mock Olympic torch for my older brother. It was nothing more than an empty can nailed to a length of dowell. But put a piece of cloth inside, dowse it with kerosene- set in on fire and it looked real. Our parents also drove us to the Olympic Village that housed the athletes. It was less than a mile from where my grandparents lived in Ivanhoe. We could approach the training track with our autograph books in hand and offer them to the athletes: we did not know their names and it didn’t matter. Their skin was dark, they wore turbans. They were different!
I was not aware of it at the time but the Melbourne Olympics were marred by violence in the swimming pool during the water polo events. Russia had just invaded Hungary and as it eventuated those two teams met in the pool at the Olympic stadium- there was little evidence of the true spirit of the games on that occasion.
Maybe it was the mood of nationalism sweeping the country that shaped my parents’ movie choice that night in 1956. The film they took us to see was Jedda. Few Americans will have ever heard of it. But it was a landmark. It was the first Australian feature film to use Aboriginal actors in the lead roles. It was the first Australian feature film invited to exhibit at the Cannes International Film Festival. The 100 Greatest Films of the Australian Cinema says that director, Charles Chauvel, “became the first Australian feature director to explore the still relevant issue of race relations between indigenous Australians and the white settlers who arrived after British settlement began in the late 18th century”. They also note that the movie, “revealed an Australia and a slice of its population unknown to the world and to many Australians”.
Today I have little memory of that night at the movies when I saw black Australia for the first time. But the names of Jedda and her doomed lover Marbuck remain with me. What I do know is that much of that summer at the beach, my brother and I played “Aborigine”. In our skimpy swimwear armed with sticks for spears, we hunted roos and each other. There is one black and white photograph from the time. On the back in handwriting appears the one word, Marbuck.
Conclusion.
As the air and its impurities impact our breathing and in turn our health, so the cultural environment shapes our well being- our ability to make informed thoughtful decisions- our willingness to respect and cooperate with others. While we may not always agree with each other, see everything the same way, we do inhabit the same physical environment and the way we live [as the melting ice mass indicates] does have an impact on our fragile eco system.
What happens in China may impact us here in the United States in just the same way that decisions we make – the way we live our lives in the northern hemisphere, may be felt around the world and impact even the yet unborn.
Responsible stewardship of our streams, pastures, oceans and air is a global responsibility we can ill afford to ignore. The same media that divides us, that polarizes us by stressing race, skin color, nationality, ideology, difference and division- can play a powerful role in helping us understand our roles and responsibilities as citizens not of a single nation but of a fragile planet,.
In the modern world change is constant. In the western world it is common to regard change as good and to equate it with progress. More ancient cultures may have reason to question change- especially when it appears to serve the interest of the few and not the many. In The King and I a troubled sovereign puzzled about the way the world had changed since he was a child:
“When I was a boy, world was better spot
What was so was so,
What was not , was not.
Now I am a man, world has changed a lot
Somethings nearly so; others nearly not”.
 The king’s confusion might seem familiar today; reassuring to many modern citizens and not just in Thailand. Too often our newspapers, our magazines and our television programs seem to rely on crisis and conflict, on what divides us rather than what we have in common. It is a formula which may generate sales and boost ratings but the consequences are potentially catastrophic.
As Siam’s king noted, “unless someday somebody trusts somebody, there’ll be nothing left on Earth excepting fishes’. Pictured Above. the author in Thailand 01/01/2000. |
