The Search (10 page)

Fourteen

“M
Y NAME'S
H
ILTON
. Yours?”

“Grierson. Trevor.”

“I'm Harry.”

“Hullo, Harry.”

Harry took him into a room which looked large and unfurnished. On a table there was a big wooden bowl with salad and glasses of orange juice.

“This is Tom. Tom Grace,” said Harry. “And this is Ralph Thorn. I think the two of you have met before.” Trevor nodded to the young student.

The room began to fill slowly with people, mostly, as far as Trevor could see, students.

“About the salad and the orange juice,” said Tom. “We club together to buy it. The speaker tonight is a man called Browning. I don't suppose you have met him?”

“No,” said Trevor. “Whose place is this any way?”

“Mine and Harry's. We rent it.”

“It's nice,” said Trevor.

“We can't really afford to furnish it,” said Tom, glancing at him enigmatically, “but it's okay. I'm not really a student. I sometimes do odd jobs but most of the time I'm unemployed.”

“And who's Browning?”

“He's a … he used to be a professor. He gave it all up. He's a sort of historian. Part economist as well.”

“And Harry?”

“Oh he's a student. He's doing a course in English literature. He sometimes writes short stories.”

“Are you by any chance English? Your accent.”

“Of English descent.” Grace didn't say more but drifted away, perhaps tired of Trevor's inquisition. Hilton replaced him by Trevor's side.

“Tom's father was a colonel in the British Army you know. Tom refused to fight in Vietnam.”

“Did many do that?”

“Quite a lot. It was a brave thing to do, don't you think?”

“Yes I suppose it was for someone with that background. I don't suppose his father would have liked it. Stiff upper lip and all that.”

“He's dead now,” said Hilton, smiling a sudden infectious smile.

A short, stocky man came over and Trevor said, “Are you a student too?”

“No,” said the man. “I used to be a policeman. And yourself?”

“Oh I'm nothing at all,” said Trevor abruptly. “Nothing at all.”

The other man looked at him in an odd manner but said nothing.

Eventually the speaker bustled in clutching a big, bulging attaché case. He had a small pointed beard like D. H. Lawrence and his brow was high and white like marble. He sat down in a chair behind the table straightening some papers in front of him while Hilton introduced him in a nervous rambling fashion, at the same time making incomprehensible ‘in' jokes about the university.

Trevor like the rest sat down on the floor, now and again glancing at the twenty or so serious people around him, who apart from the ex-policeman all seemed to be students.

When he met the eyes of any of them, they smiled encouragingly at him as if recognizing that he was a newcomer so that Trevor felt that he was being accepted into some kind of church. Tom Grace stood leaning against the wall in a corner by himself with an air of almost incredulous hauteur.

Browning began to speak abruptly and with some strength.

“When this country was created,” he said, not referring to the large untidy mass of papers that lay before him on the table, “it was inhabited as we know by jailbirds, and aborigines. We know for instance that the father of one of our first poets, Charles Harpur, was a jailbird. Nevertheless there was a possibility that we would create a model for the future in a land of such empty spaces. This however was not done, for there was greed and rapacity and self-seeking here as elsewhere. We see, for instance, what is happening and what has happened to the aborigine. Even now prospectors are drilling among their sacred graves. The white man doesn't understand the concept of their dreamtime and doesn't try to because he himself has lost all idea of the sacred. He considers the aborigine stupid because he has never actually looked at him as a human being. But how can one call a man stupid who can survive in a boiling desert with an equipment of five basic tools? The white man who is a capitalist intent on profit has no time for such a concept as dreamtime, nor inclination to read the aborigine's legends which are beautiful and complex with the beauty and complexity of poetry. He cannot understand that there is a relationship with nature other than exploitation. Consequently he uses towards the aborigine a mixture of threat and patronage. It never occurs to him that his own inner emptiness is anything other than superiority nor that other ways of seeing the world are possible. He thinks that if the
aborigine is given a few gifts equivalent to glass beads he should be grateful and not bother him again. Not so long ago I read in one of our newspapers a story of an owner of a pub throwing flour over an aborigine to see what he would look like as a white man.

“It was, as I have said, possible to create in this country a model of a classless society but that opportunity has been thrown away. We have a Prime Minister who, himself rich, does not understand the problems of the poor. He is arrogant and unsympathetic. Why do we have in this potentially rich land of ours such a high rate of unemployment? Why is unemployment pay so low? How is it that we are now seeing the Great Barrier Reef itself being threatened by prospectors and drillers? Is it not the case that the man who is admired nowadays is the unscrupulous exploiter and in short the capitalist? Is this what our early poets looked forward to?

“Australia was founded by unwilling exiles but a lot of people are exiles within this potentially rich land. If you look at Canberra itself you will see clearly enough who its real inhabitants are. It is civil servants, government employees obsessed with their respective grades. And what is the first question they ask each other when they are introduced at parties. It is the question: ‘What scale are you on? How much are you earning?' “ He looked around him aggressively and then said,

“Isn't that the case?

“This, as you know, is an artificial city. It doesn't even have the rough reality of Sydney.

“How is it that we have allowed a beautiful country to become what she now is, a country of classes, just like the eternal motherland, though the classes here are perhaps not so obvious as they are in Britain, since I don't suppose we have for instance the differentiation of accents that they have there? But is it not the case that Fraser is an admirer of Mrs Thatcher and probably keeps a picture of her above his bed, or under it as far as I know?

“And what sort of Labour Party do we have? Is it a real revolutionary party? I feel guilty when I see our so-called top classes, our bureaucrats and academics drinking their wine, holding their lavish conferences, protecting themselves against economic storms. Is it not high time that Australia became Australia and fulfilled her own destiny? Is it not high time that it ceased to mourn its dying motherland, that its inhabitants ceased to think of themselves as exiles, that they took on the burden of being themselves in a real world? I was talking yesterday to a man who told me that he couldn't afford to have medical attention because of the high prices. Who are the people with the highest salaries in our country? Precisely, the doctors. We fought in Vietnam while at the same time we had the scandal of the aborigine in our midst, our flagrant paternalism. I know of many graduates from our universities who cannot get employment. But at the same time I have been at parties where I have encountered ambassadors from other countries and we have talked amiably about the events of the world as if these events did not cast a shadow on ourselves. How can we live like this when the producers of our real wealth are underpaid?

“We should be a country of high idealism and yet what are we? We are the slavish lackeys of the United States, trying to stop athletes going to the Olympics while business firms are still trading with Russia, debating whether we should stop exports to Iran and wondering at the same time whether our principles will not cost us too much money.

“And what have we to look forward to but years and years of this government after the scandal of Whitlam was perpetrated? We all know that he didn't lose his premiership for doing too little but for trying to do too much. And if any of you attend parliament what do you see there? Orderlies who tell you to be silent while the proceedings are conducted in an undignified uproar. Members of Parliament have been known to call each other ‘fat pigs' and ask each other ‘to come outside'.

In this land of infinite potential riches why should so many families be living on the borderline while inflation rises and prices accelerate? Is that what our fathers had in mind when they held in their minds an idealistic vision of Australia? I myself left my professorship because more and more I saw I was living in an unreal circle of privilege, when I saw that my historical monographs were decorative scribblings on a void. It is this which sticks in my throat and refuses to be swallowed. It is time that we spoke out, that we stood in front of Parliament House with our placards and said what we believed in and said it publicly.”

Amid cheering Browning sat down looking around him with an aggressive stare as if he believed that his audience was the enemy. After he had finished the ex-policeman stood up and said, “I agree with what the professor has said. I say that the policeman is the servant of the upper classes and always has been. Do you think a Senator will be treated in the same way as a member of the lower classes? Of course one doesn't find this only in Australia, one finds it everywhere, but as the Professor said we expected more of this country. I have been a policeman in New Guinea and when a native policeman gets his salary there all his unemployed relatives gather round him and he gives them so much of it every week. Why should you do that, I asked him. They expect it, he said. It was because of their tribalism they expected this. It was because of their sense of community. Of course in a way it is unfair but it shows that the ones in work are expected to be responsible for the ones who aren't. If we don't have responsibility for each other what have we?”

A young student at the back stood up and began to speak in a quick nervous voice. “My name's Hilary Chase,” he said, “and I know perfectly well and every other student here knows perfectly well that all we do at our universities is try to gain good grades. Our examination system is a travesty of education. How is it that we find ourselves competing
with each other for certificates when so many people in the world are starving? How can we sit and listen to boring lectures day after day when we know that terrible events are happening in the real world? We are a sausage factory and that is a fact. Professor Browning talked of idealism but where is the idealism in the education system? Is it just for gaining grades that we go to a university?”

And so the discussion went on. Trevor felt around him the resentment of those who sensed obscurely that society was ranked against them and at the centre of it he saw his own brother curled up like a tramp in a ditch, asking for work on a sheep farm, sleeping in a seedy room. He too felt that this country, vast and new, could have been an example to the world but that something had gone wrong, that the corruption which was to be found in secretive Europe, in brash America, was to be found here as well. It seemed to him that what Browning had said was true, that the world in which he himself lived was a rich, privileged world, that he had never considered that other world which like a dark, invisible star accompanied the golden, glowing one till by its gravity it pulled one into it.

As he listened to the professor and the students preparing to hold their protest outside Parliament House the following day he remembered seeing Fraser sitting on a bench in Parliament, leaning forward arrogantly towards a scurrying minion, turning away from the Opposition benches, languorously standing up and making a short speech, secure in the knowledge of power.

Browning and Grace came over to speak to him while Thorn and Hilton hovered on the periphery.

“I liked your speech,” said Trevor to the professor.

“Thank you,” said Browning, looking modest and easy in his success. “I believe you are at the university.”

“For a short while.”

“And you're from Scotland.”

“That's right.”

“I was reading something about the Clearances recently. By a man called Prebble. Do you know him?”

“I haven't met him.”

“And another book by a man called Grimble. He said that Harriet Beecher Stowe approved of the Clearances, some of which took place, I believe, in Sutherland.”

“That is the ironical thing,” said Trevor. “She did. She couldn't see that a similar thing to what happened with the negroes was happening in Scotland.”

“I understand,” said Browning, sipping an orange juice. “We all live in contexts. Some of our Australian writers have strong social consciences. You must meet them.”

He added, “You have met Tom here. He is one of our heroes. He refused, quite rightly, to fight in the Vietnam War.”

“I had heard of that,” said Trevor.

“Yes, he defied his lares and penates. Not everyone has the courage to do that.” Trevor felt uncomfortable with Browning as if he were talking to someone who understood him. In the past he had attended so many parties where people spoke briefly to each other, though they had nothing to say, skidded words like stones across ice, glanced over each other's shoulders as if they were awaiting the ultimately brilliant and witty remark that never came, talked about their progeny, had an air of invincible rightness as if the world belonged to them. He remembered talking to a Swedish sociologist who had said to him, “The Australians don't like touching each other. Yet they always call you by your first name when they meet you.”

“Tell me,” he said, “do Australians look back to their past?”

“Some of them,” said Browning. “The Irish especially. Some of them consider this to be a new house which doesn't have the creaking sounds of the old one, and this makes them feel uncomfortable. They long for the noises of a real past. On the other hand, this is now a multi-racial society, which turns as easily to the East as to the West.”