Bloody hard

Australia is a rugged country, most people who live elsewhere get this. Perhaps we who live here find it a bit curious, and find that we are not so much rugged or tough, but laid back.
We often say that we are the land of the ‘fair go’. But like so many such statements, the ones who get ‘the fair go’ are those who are doing pretty well already, thank you very much.

One of the things that has saddened me in the more than half a century I have lived here, is that our hearts seem to have become increasingly hardened.
Not rugged but HARD.
We are no longer saying,”If you want to live here then you have to work hard, and pull your weight.”
We are saying stupid stuff like
“We are full!”
“Go back to where you came from.”
“If you come by boat you will never settle here!”
Now, I came here by boat in 1967.But then I am white, I was born in the UK…and though I may have some non-Aryan ancestry…yet of course I speak English ( and a smattering of other languages…looking forward to retiring to brush up on Bahasa Indonesia !)
Curiously we moved into a South Australian industrial town, Whyalla, as did hundreds of other UK citizens in the late 60s. There was a real sense of ‘ghetto’.

I went to the central High School ….I had never experienced ethnic discrimination before …but I did there. I was a Pom!
People laughed at my accent (NW England) as if they some how had the key as to how English should be spoken.
Let me tell you that Maroon …is pronounced MAH ROO N
Not MA RAWN!!!
That it’s perfectly OK to say DANCE with a hard ‘a’ and you can say DARNCE if you want to…but who cares?
To provincial South Australians these seemed like linguistic baseball bats.
We tended to retreat to our ethnic homelands…so my four close friends were from Liverpool, Tyneside, Luton and North Wales.
By the time I graduated with education degrees and became a teacher in the third High School the tables had reversed.
In that school 85% of the students were not born in Australia. Most came from the UK with about 10% a mix of Greeks, Italians, French and others.
While I realise I was subjected to the pejorative “Pom”…in the Eastern school, the Aussies were “Skips” in the Western school …and thought to be as thick as two planks.
This is how prejudice works, not with logic but with the prejudice of the majority mocking the minority.
All of this is of course nonsense.
I was fortunate to have teachers who realised that when I was a minority “Pom”, I had actually probably had better schooling in Maths, Physics and Chemistry before I came to school in Australia than they had been able to deliver. John Lyon my Chemistry teacher was one of the first to spot this.
He gave me an A in my first series of reports even though I had been taught under an ‘old fashioned’ way. He took time help me translate this, and I accelerated with his help.
Five years later, inspired by him I guess, I went to be a teacher in school of which he was Head (Stuart High School). I understand now that he had not only an educational vision, but also a spiritual, philosophical and theological vision of what a school might be. I liked that.
Deeply influenced by liberal Protestant theology. He promoted such epithets as “Freedom to choose!” and “Acceptance of consequence” deeply seated in the theology of Tillich, Bonhoeffer and others.
Made sense to me.

The term of my natural life

I have lived most of my life in South Australia and I am glad to have done so. There is always a modicum of melancholy at this time of years because it was on March 18th 1967 that we arrived on the SS Orsova (pictured) at Outer Harbour. We did not get to see much of Adelaide, our family who had come to meet us were in much haste to get back to Whyalla where they had work commitments etc.

Those of you who have made the journey from Adelaide to Whyalla will know that you travel from the relative lushness of the city to the edge of the desert. It was for us a great adventure, though the culture shock was probably greater than you imagine. Looking back it felt more like moving into the American mid-west than Britain down-under. It was remote, culturally sparse, and educationally harsh.

All but one of my siblings has gravitated to Adelaide, and I often think how fortunate we are to live in such a temperate and stable place. Here, in the middle of a State election campaign, you get the impression that even if the worst happens and your opponents win, life will still go on much the same.

Although in SA we bemoan all sorts of things, and we are mocked ceaselessly by those who live on the Eastern seaboard for being small, quiet and perhaps a little inward looking; I suspect that most of us quite like that. And in fact I sometimes think we like to keep the secret and certainly do not want Adelaide to become like Sydney or Melbourne, so we almost conspire to not promote ourselves too much.

It would be good to be included on some of the national tours a bit more often. It's a pity that plays, musicians, art and so on seem to manage to go to Perth but find that Adelaide is hard to do.

As for the rest, I am glad to have discovered the secret.