When I left home, aged 20, circumstances didn’t allow me to take anything more than a suitcase of my clothes. My bedroom, mine since birth, was like one of those shells which crabs decorate as they carry them around. It was full of my life so far, books, drawings, train sets, sports gear, things my father had brought back from war, old school stuff. But I walked out, shed my shell, without a backward glance. I was eager for adventure, for life outside these four walls, this house, this family, eager to see what the world had in store for me. Adulthood was beckoning, imperiously, and I had to go.
Half a century on, I feel very differently of course. Want to have stern words with that young whippersnapper. It wasn’t the things so much that were important but the whole structure of family life I was leaving behind. And the psychological and emotional effects of twenty years a-growing (title of a book about an Irish childhood I’d been given). Without a backward glance, totally unaware that my much older self would look back with regret on what I was leaving behind – the comfort of familiar voices, shared history, common values, comfortable chairs, surroundings I could navigate with eyes shut. A stability which was going to be absent for quite a while as I tried to find my way bravely in a new world, where nothing was familiar. Oh, it hadn’t all been great, back home, we were a family with problems, and ups and downs like any other, but it was home, and it would take a while to find a new one.
Not unique? Of course not. We all go through this transition from youth to adult, one way and another. We all leave stuff behind. But looking around me now it seems far too many of us leave all behind. Every day there is news of bad behaviour by politicians, business leaders, unionists, sportsmen, of a kind that makes you want to have stern words, say “what would your parents think about this behaviour?”, “what would your grandparents think?”, “where did you leave the values you grew up with?”
But more than that. The country, Australia, I grew up in all those years ago, has itself changed immeasurably. The young Australia seems to have packed its bags, walked out the door of the old Australia (200 years a-growing), grabbing at a brave new world, leaving behind the baggage of fairness, equality, caring, mateship, anti-authoritarianism, mutual respect, honesty. Of course it hadn’t been perfect in the past, the treatment of women, indigenous people, migrants and the environment, were nothing to write home about. But we have lost more than we have gained. Think again, old country, look homeward.
Note – have told much of my story under “Dream” tab above. My family stuff starts about half way (say at “Leaving from Liverpool”).
Nice “word pictures” David. Of course, I can’t relate to the changes that have occurred in Australia but we’ve certainly undergone our changes here in the US. And, like you, I’m not real happy with them. I’m in the middle of a book right now that is making known absolutely despicable behavior by our own FBI agents simply because they wanted to cover up poor decisions. Our law enforcement agencies are losing integrity, principle, and character and that is a frightening thought to me.
I can relate to it David .. especially the old pictures of corner shops, big tins of biscuits (usually Arnotts) from which you could choose 3 Milk Arrowroot, 6 Morning Coffee, 1 Iced VoVo, 1 of those with marshmallow on top and receive them in a brown paper bag .. and the butcher with sawdust on the floor, the show bags from chemists which gave you miniature samples of things like soap and toothpaste for FREE, the greengrocer who used to give you a free apple while you mother (or in my case grandmother as my parents were in New Guinea) shopped, Saturday arvo pictures for 1/6d. at the Odeon down the road with 6d. for half-time, riding my bike to school no matter what weather in a uniform which even demanded gloves! Eating 1/6d. worth of fish’n'chips in the train from Essendon to North Melbourne with said gloves on and getting pinged by Prefects! And then there was travel from Melbourne to the north coast of New Guinea for Christmas holidays in a QANTAS aeroplane which was comfortable and gave you good food with real cutlery. Living in a 3-bedroom, 1-bathroom house with mother and father and 5 kids and sharing a bedroom with sisters, and funnily enough just last night thinking of a Blue Roan cocker spaniel I used to have called Sally-Ann and how she used to greet me when I arrived home by wriggling on her bum along the floor. What a memory.
We have lost so much, haven’t we?
G’day
I think it was the shift towards pragmatism in the 80s when I first noticed the shift away from “a fair go”, “mateship” and being “true blue” & “dinkum”. Even though Hawke used that kind of language as the country was moving away from those values.
Sometimes I wonder if the Whitlam era (while I was still in my last years of primary school & first year of high school – so at an impressionable age) when all those social justice laws were enacted were a highlight of social justice & equality in Australian politics, or an aberration. Those were also the Dunstan years here in South Australia.
I look back at the movie “Wall Street”, released when I was a young adult – so a “my generation” movie, I guess – and remember that Gordon Gecko was the bad guy in that. Why don’t people get that? Why has his mantra of “greed is good” become the norm now? What happened to our sense of community and our compassion?