So we left England after fourteen years. We had often talked
of going back to Australia - but until the last two years, without
passion for the idea. For me, never having returned in that time,
the reality seemed strange - even faintly confronting - apart
from the warm thought of seeing my family. But the idea of change
had now become vibrant - we both felt we needed it. Leaving London
was part sad nostalgia, part release; friends and that remarkable,
squalid, beautiful city, which had never been a bore, were a loss.
Jock felt some nostalgia but he had been working up enthusiasm
for a return to Australia ever since his work there in 1958.
When he knew he had the Chair at Monash he set about planning
- and not just academically. From every university town he visited
around the country in the months before we left, he brought back
antiques. He came striding in excitedly, a half satisfied, half
I've-been-naughty grin on his face, clutching a delicate 18th
Century birdcage or a fist-full of invoices for the delivery of
a chest, a table, a Caucasian rug, or any other 'useful' antique
that had taken his fancy. The house filled alarmingly. He was
happy; things were happening and he infected us with the feeling.
Our baby daughter was engulfed in this maelstrom of plans and
activity. She took it with surprising aplomb for which we, and
I in particular, through infant needs and feeding schedules which
rapidly devolved into 'demand', were mightily grateful - and grateful
too to our beloved helper Ivy Adams who had been there when needed
through so many years. I do not remember the detail of that last
month - a healing haze has descended. I do know we had a farewell
party and finally fell in exhaustion onto a plane bound for Boston
on April 1st and made for our destination - Yale University.
Jock gave the Trumbull Lectures during ten days. We stayed on
campus in the delightful 17th Century building which the University,
with civilised generosity, had set aside for visiting professors
and the like. We discovered the charms of the north eastern States,
still retaining traces of Elizabethan England, even in their social
customs. Children curtsied elegantly on being introduced. We
visited Ernst Mayr at Harvard and other friends in old universities
of the eastern seaboard, wallowed in the art collections of New
York and Washington, and on again to Ohio, and Iowa in the middle
plain country, and California, to visit Jock's old army friends
who were all medical men. It was an extraordinary three week
sweep across the huge changes in American landscape, culture and
people, so utterly different from the close-packed differences
in Britain. Jock was showing me some of the America he knew with
an affectionate flourish and a touch of the entrepreneur. We
arrived in Sydney on April 21st, and fell into the welcoming embrace
of my family.
Australia again - strange now and yet so familiar. Sydney had
changed but in typical style: beauty on one hand and ugliness
on the other, encapsulated in what was going on in Sydney Cove
- the budding Opera House, its extraordinary and exciting skeleton
soaring like a cathedral, and the bald banality of high-rise boxes
replacing historic warehouses fringing the quay. Australia had
been sloughing off some of its 'Mother England' outlook and was
beginning, in spite of its conservative Prime Minister Robert
Menzies, to turn its gaze eastwards across the Pacific. But all
this had to be absorbed and we had little time to observe or discuss
it before Jock had to be off again. He went down to Monash and
then in three weeks had to return to America to give the Lida
Scott Brown Lectures at the University of California in Los Angeles.
He would be away for two months. When he left I leased a cottage
near my parents at Palm Beach on the bushy peninsula just north
of Sydney that points like a finger into the mouth of the Hawkesbury
River. It divides a large part of the estuary from the crashing
surf of the Pacific Ocean; yellow sand, surf and rock swimming
pool on one side, yachts and a little boat that chugged across
to the National Park spreading up the river, on the other. There
were white-trunked eucalypts scattered thickly between houses,
and one in our garden miraculously held a family of koalas. The
children were enthralled by new animals and confronted by blood-sucking
ticks. It was a world away from London and forays into the English
countryside.
On the other side of the Pacific Jock was working, talking and
playing. 'We had a hilarious time' said Tony Lee, then working
at UCLA and who later became a lecturer in the Zoology Department
at Monash - he had been asked to drive Jock about while he was
at the University of California in Los Angeles. Jock was in holiday
mood. The pressures of the last year in England and the move
across the world were gone. Monash was in the future. Wicked
amusements floated into mind. The Lida Scott Brown lectures brought
to the University distinguished biologists who had an interest
in ornithology. The lectures were held in the evening and open
to the public, although most of the audience were graduate students
and staff, who were distinguished but conservative. The graduate
students 'in those days, went through a series of hurdles such
as oral exams aimed to "put them in their place".'
Jock heard this and could not resist giving the under-dogs a little
moral help. 'To one lecture he invited a stunning mullato actress
he knew from London days. Remember this was in the days before
the race riots of the '60s and certainly before it was widely
accepted to mix with people of non-European background' said Tony
Lee. Jock arranged for her 'to dress to the hilt, arrive about
15 minutes into the lecture and be escorted on my arm to the very
front row of the lecture theatre. The reaction was just what
he wanted' - the stuffier elements of the audience were plainly
discomforted. There were other tales about a visit to a bar at
Ensenada where he sent back the chilli dip saying 'this isn't
as hot as Jane's curry.' The astonished Mexican barman did better
next time. Jock picked up the bowl and scooped out the contents
with a corn chip. His companion said in amazement 'his eyes didn't
even water.' These tales kept the students delighted and the
lecture theatre full. Tony Lee noticed this characteristic streak
back at Monash 'He positioned himself centre stage and when he
met someone with similar goals like Harry Waring, he would go
to any length to hold him out.' Professor Harry Waring, a good
friend, would have made the game difficult. 'I saw Jock as a
curious mixture' said Lee 'in Australia he would defend English
values, particularly those of Oxford, but overseas he loved to
fit the "Australian image". ' Another young man, working
at UCLA at the time, impressed Jock and also came to Monash -
James Warren, now Professor of Biology there.
Two months later Jock came flying back - actually and metaphorically.
He re-charged briefly at Palm Beach, and then in July we were
off to Melbourne.
We landed up on a hill just above the tiny settlement (as it was
then) of Narre Warren 36 miles from Melbourne. It had a garage,
a general store and a two-roomed primary school which Jock said
needed only some gum trees to echo Dumbleton. The children deemed
it to be just as boring - and confronting after their school in
London. Re-tribalisation proved to be a double-edged weapon.
David Jamieson had shown Jock a property, called "Oatlands"
which seemed to be exactly what we sought. It was to be part
of a subdivision of 165 acres. On it was a rambling 19th Century
house which would be sold separately with eight acres surrounding
it. It was 17 miles from the paddocks of the emerging university,
but we didn't care. David and my sister, with enormous generosity,
had lent us a car. We were optimistic.
It was the middle of winter. The sun shone often enough; compared
with its pallid image in an English winter it seemed bright and
warm. The house sat on top of the hill surrounded by majestic
old trees, two large barns and a cottage occupied by a friendly
country couple who were care-taking the entire property. We discovered
there was a hitch in the subdivision - the property was in escrow
- but we were allowed to pay a rent and remain there until the
question was resolved. 'It's full of charm and inconvenience'
said Jock, with deadly accuracy. It had plenty of bedrooms from
an earlier era, a huge 'withdrawing' room with an exuberant, Italianate
plaster ceiling which had been added about the turn of the century,
a dining-room outside which was the only toilet, feeding into
a septic tank placed cosily against the kitchen verandah. A bath
and a hand-basin occupied the original tiled entrance porch and
looked out through a superb old linden tree to the country stretching
40 miles to the coast. I discovered in due course that the large
fuel stove in the kitchen couldn't be used because its flue had
powdered to rust. There was nothing else. I acquired some primitive
electric aids to cooking (we were not allowed to make any alterations
to the house). There was a telephone of a design seen only in
museums now. It had iron bells on which a band of mice played
with tuneless energy whenever the house was quiet. On the tin
roof of the encircling, spacious verandah, possums promenaded
at night. Underneath a trap door opened onto steps leading to
a large cellar.
We fell in love with this uncommon dwelling. It fired us with
plans. We spread our collection of furniture, hung pictures and
stood off to admire the glow we had made. Jock immediately bought
a devilish black pony (Shetland / Welsh cross - aptly called "Thunder")
for the children who, up till then, had never been on the back
of anything that moved faster than an elephant at the zoo.
The early colleagues at Monash and old friends who came from their
civilised dwellings around Melbourne must have conjectured on
our sanity when they arrived at this place overgrown with 19th
Century plantings and variegated wildlife: possums, house-bats,
mice, geese feeding on the tennis court , and "Thunder"
who insisted on a beer with the guests in the garden or marched
up the wide hall on the slimmest chance with an arrogantly possessive
air. Jock encouraged all these activities with a prideful grin
- his love of strange pets was satisfied.
I wondered about sanity myself quite often as I dealt with that
black pony whose evil intent was to carry nobody. She wiped me
and the children off on pine-trees as she aimed deliberately at
the lowest branches and galloped over my toe while I tried to
pretend to the young that this was the greatest fun. I was as
unhorse-trained as my children, but thought I would get away with
it since my feet almost touched the ground. And I thought of
it as I washed nappies in the bath and ferried the young to school
and Jock and the baby Wilga to Monash in the little Morris Minor
over the muddy tracks of Dandenong Road (in the throes of becoming
a 'highway') or the lovely swampy back road with its water birds
flapping through the trees. Jock, who had driven all sorts of
vehicles at odd times during the war, had never since bothered
with the necessary licence. Now, he had to get it and buy a car
with gears on the steering column or an automatic. The police
were unimpressed with his habit of holding the wheel with his
chest while reaching over to change gears.
The whole set-up was mad and exhausting, but exhilarating. Jock
was invigorated and totally involved with the changes for the
family and his work; it was his retribalisation plan in full
spate.