Inside Outside by Andrew Riemer Read Free Book Online

spaces—the cathedral, the plaza, the university—around which the life of the city turned. Here was something absolutely alien to her experience of city life—restricted as it had been to Sydney, Melbourne and Newcastle—an urbanity the like of which Australia could not provide. Though I could not have recognised it at the time, our first impression of Sydney was the direct opposite of the awakening that young Australian woman was to experience in Seville—we could find no physical, spiritual or social centre in a city which seemed to contradict all our notions of what urban life should be.
    In later years, for people of my parents’ generation, that image of deadness, of a world without a centre, came to be grafted on to another cliché about life in Australia which, curiously but significantly, also found expression in terms of space and of emptiness. The geographical void of a largely uninhabited continent—as seen from the perspective of the tight European world—the
horror vacui
Lawrence evokes memorably in
Kangaroo,
became transformed into the notion of a cultural desert. As the wave of Central European migration increased in the early years of the fifties, so that phrase and that concept were adopted and trotted out by people whose own cultural life had frequently not extended beyond the latest hit-play, movie or blockbuster novel. Yet, as espresso-bars began to sprout all over Sydney, so the lamentations about this horrible philistine place grew louder and louder. Where were the theatres? Ach, remember the opera (in Budapest, Vienna, Prague, Leipzig etc.). In the same way that many migrants automatically cranked themselves up several notches on the social scale, knowing that nobody could check on the extent of their confiscated estates that stretched, according to them, from horizon to horizon, so people began to lament the loss of those amenities which they had not much valued while they were available to them—the easily, at times glibly, invoked marvels of European high culture.
    This attitude was often accompanied by a great arrogance—an arrogance that did much harm to emerging relationships between newcomers and Australian society. We were (I am speaking communally) only too ready to scoff and look down our noses on those poor antipodean provincials. That such attitudes arose out of fantasies and deeply mythic needs, rather than out of a just and balanced assessment of the nature of Australian society, was revealed to me with particular force in the London of the early sixties, when circumstances were forcing me to address myself to the difficult question of cultural identity.
    Like so many young Australians—and by this stage I had come to think of myself as thoroughly Australian, until that illusion was totally shattered in the course of my first few days as a postgraduate student of English Literature—I was enchanted by the life London offered. You could hear great performers from the back row of the Festival Hall for five shillings; you could get a reasonable seat at Covent Garden for one pound. I lived near Selfridges, the department store, where the basement supermarket provided an ideal place to do the week’s shopping on a Saturday morning. Around the corner, a little way up Baker Street, there used to be a curious establishment called the Balkan Grill. This was, despite its name, a typical Viennese Konditorei specialising in those oozingly baroque confections which are perhaps the old Habsburg Empire’s most lasting contribution to world culture. After the exertions of shopping, I used to drop in at ‘The Balkans’, as it was known in the neighbourhood, for a cup of coffee. As I grew familiar with the place, drinking coffee became no more than an adjunct to the real purpose of the visit: to eavesdrop on the babel of Austro-Hungarian lamentations that filled the room. Ancient crones, their mouths grotesque scarlet gashes, sporting pearls