J V D’Cruz in conversation with

GWENDA TAVAN

Dr Gwenda Tavan, who teaches politics at La Trobe University, Melbourne, recently published The Long, Slow Death of White Australia (Scribe 2005). She speaks of experiences that led to her present research interests.

Early in my postgraduate days I was struck by what appeared to be two very dichotomous images of Australia – the bad old days of White Australia, and the good, contemporary multicultural Australia of the post-1970 period. There was something jarring about the fact that we had these two very contrasting images. This got me thinking about how, when, why, that transition had taken place.

As a first-generation Australian, the daughter of Italian immigrants, I was very well aware that the two such images were somehow interrelated. My life experiences (and later, my research) suggested to me that the changes have never been as concrete, nor as clear-cut as some representations seem to suggest. That was what first attracted me to the topic and eventually I tried to map the changes that had taken place, to understand the nature of the changes, the processes that had taken place and to evaluate what had changed and to what extent. The project took on a life of its own, leading to the publication of my book The Long Slow Death of White Australia.

GROWING UP IN SUBURBAN MELBOURNE
My mother, who comes from southern Italy, arrived in Melbourne in 1959, aged 19. She was the youngest in her family and came out to join two sisters and two brothers who were already here. Her idea was to make some money and eventually return to Italy. My father, from northern Italy, arrived in 1961, with two friends. His motivation was to “have an adventure, earn some money”. My parents met in a factory where they both worked and married after a quite short courtship. I was born in June 1963 and two brothers followed in 1966 and 1971.

We lived in North Carlton until I was 9. We returned to Italy for nine months in 1968. My mother hoped to stay there permanently, but my dad felt work conditions and pay were better here in Australia. I still remember our time in Italy even though I was 4. Those memories are very dear to me, inspiring strong feelings of nostalgia.

I remember life in North Carlton with mixed feelings. My parents seemed to have a lot of friends then. There was certainly a sense of being part of a larger community, family, friends, and happy memories of picnics, parties, church, playing with friends in the street. There were bad memories too. My mother had a nervous breakdown when I was 5 years old. The experience was very traumatic for me, and the aftermath profoundly unsettling for the whole family. My mother was not the same afterwards and I lost my sense of safety and security. She has battled with depression ever since. Meanwhile most of her siblings had returned to Italy, leaving her isolated and lonely. Also, my father worked long hours for many years, creating further tension with his absence.

Life in North Carlton became increasingly scary for me. Those were pre-gentrification days and there were a lot of larrikins, who we called bodgies, who lived nearby. They used to drive their cars really fast and I saw one of them steal a car once. Very scary! I begged my parents constantly to move us somewhere safe.

But there were also rays of sunshine. There was a teacher who lived next door. She took me under her wing, introduced me to music and books, and would take me out for excursions.

At 9 we finally moved to a housing estate in Reservoir. This proved to be a bleak and terrible experience, especially for my mother. The place was a cultural and social wasteland. People were not very friendly. There were no shops, no public transport, and not even sewerage, but the house was modern and new, and this was seen as important. My mother became very isolated. My father was absent for up to twelve hours a day. There were no schools nearby so we were bussed in every day. My life at the new school was unpleasant. I don’t recall having any set friends while there, probably partly because I wasn’t a local girl.

RACISM, XENOPHOBIA – EARLY ENCOUNTERS
My first memory of racism was in Grade 3 when someone called me a dago. I still remember the name of the girl who called me that. I felt ashamed though I didn’t really know what a dago was. I don’t recall ethnicity being a primary issue in those early years, probably because there were many Italians in Carlton.

Racism and xenophobia became a real problem after we moved to Reservoir. There were many migrant kids in the area and though we mixed a lot, Italians were very clearly near the bottom of the pecking order. There were a lot of Maltese in the area and they seemed hostile to Italians. (I clearly remember a burning sense of shame and anger when the mother of one kid I was playing with called out to her daughter “not to play with those bloody wogs”. My dad said if she said it again I should say ‘hello sister’ to her. It’s quite funny looking back, because the lady was very clearly of Mediterranean origin herself!)

High school would prove to be a quite traumatic experience. The school in Fawkner was pretty rough. There were about a thousand kids there. Those were the days of Skinheads and Sharps. I was quite isolated for the first two years with no set girlfriends. I recall being on my own a lot. This was partly my own fault I suspect. I was very conscious of who was ‘in’ and who was ‘out’. I refused to hang out with the ‘outs’, most of whom were migrant kids, though I wasn’t accepted by the ‘ins’ (nearly all Anglos) either. I became the target of both physical and verbal abuse in Year 7. This lasted for about two years. Much of it was racially based, with some Anglo girls spitting on me, punching me, and leaving racist graffiti on my locker. Looking back, it may have been partly inspired by jealousy. I was pretty and smart, boys liked me, as did some teachers, and despite my problems, I was quite confident in my ideas. In other words, I was an ‘uppity wog’, which is the worst kind. Things were very tough.

It was about this time that I completely rejected my Italian ethnicity. I stopped speaking Italian and I anglicised all my family members’ names. I still have an essay I wrote about my family in Year 7. Gwendalina became Gwendoline. Anna, Luciano, Gino and Domenic became Anne, Lou, Jean and Mickey. Needless to say, I feel very sad for that young girl who denied so much that was worthwhile about herself and her family.

In my teens I was very rebellious, and self­destructive. I think this reflected a lot of self-loathing. It was a feeling of shame about my migrant background, and a desperate desire to belong to the Anglo mainstream. (I recall daydreaming about what it would be like being part of a normal Australian family.) Unhappy as I was, I couldn’t imagine any other world than the one I was in. My mother was always threatening to take us back to Italy. I feared this, having internalised all the stories about dirty wogs. I imagined it would be a fate worse than death.

Books were in many respects my only escape. According to family members, I was always reading. I remember Jane Eyre was a firm favourite, which is not surprising in hindsight (it is about a girl who lives on the margins of her society, but whose integrity and courage allow her to make her way in the world). I also took comfort from the support of various teachers over the years who saw some potential in me. Most were English and History teachers, the subjects I enjoyed most at school.

TURNING POINTS
Some major changes happened when I was 15. I met a very nice young boy named Robert at a party. He was smart, kind, respectful. We became very good friends. Things became better at school.

I had a boyfriend, not Robert, who was very popular and this allowed me to wangle my way into the coolest group of girls at school (all Anglos). We became good friends, even though I remained conscious of my difference. I actually became quite popular and all the kids who’d made my life miserable a few years earlier became more respectful. Though a ratbag at school (I was absent a lot and very disruptive), I managed to retain the support of my teachers because of my academic skills.

When I was 16, Robert and I fell in love and began a very intense relationship. I was very reliant on him because so many other aspects of my life were unravelling. Despite my academic skills, I couldn’t focus on study and dropped out at 16, but was unable to get work. I spent all my time with Robert and he ended up dropping out of university as well.

My family accepted our relationship at first because they knew Robert and liked him. There appeared to be no concerns about his ethnic background. My parents had come to accept that I was ‘Anglo-oriented’. However, my mother became increasingly concerned at the level of intensity of my relationship with Robert and tried to break us up. Home life became increasingly unbearable and I left home at 17 to live with Robert and his family.

Rob’s parents accepted me because he was clearly in love with me. But they were understandably concerned about my close association with him, and (probably rightly) believed that we were too young to be so serious. My ethnicity was never directly mentioned to me though their ambivalent feelings about migrants weren’t hidden either. Robert’s outlook was quite different from his parents. He went to school with migrant kids all his life and has always been very open-minded about people.

LIVING AND LEARNING
My real life began when I turned 21. I married Robert, returned to study and visited Italy when I was 23. Italy allowed me to rediscover my roots, my extended family and reclaim a big part of myself (as well as my language skills). It remains a very important place for me, not least because it is a reminder of the other ways my life might have turned out.

I enrolled to study at La Trobe University, Melbourne, when I was 25. I’ve always thought of it as a sort of homecoming. I rediscovered my love of writing and learning. I gained a capacity to articulate and explain the problems my family and I had experienced while I was growing up. University life also offered me a haven from the hard culture I grew up in. Here I met other like-minded people who had experienced or were interested in marginality. The rest, as they say, is history . . .

Reflecting back, my experiences of prejudice and racism while growing up affected me profoundly. I developed deep feelings of insecurity, difference, marginality and restlessness, as well as a deep-seated need to belong. On a more positive note, those experiences also provided me with a will to succeed, strong commitment to living an authentic life, and, I like to think, a sensitivity to the plight of the marginalised amongst us.

Academically, my experiences, and the experiences of my parents, have no doubt prompted my interest in issues of Australian national identity, racism, migration, and the like. These interests go back a long way. I can remember writing a creative story when I was 16 which was about the migrant experience. It has to be said though that subsequently I have focused largely on issues of Australian identity and attitudes, rather than the migrant experience. I think this interest reflects a long-standing sense of marginality, of being on the outside looking in, and of wanting to understand this society so I can find a way of fitting in. Nevertheless, feelings of marginality provide a vantage point for reading the culture and for observing the myriad, subtle and complex ways in which power relations are played out.

My sense of marginality in Australia, the country of my birth, led to a need to understand what makes Australia tick and to chart the even more overt marginality of non-Europeans, e.g. Asians, in Australia. I recall that in my fourth year at university I wrote an essay analysing a series of short stories written in the late nineteenth century which were about Anglo-Chinese relations on the goldfields. That was my first (somewhat clumsy) attempt at understanding the psycho-dynamics of Australian racism. It may also be that the issue provided me with a degree of emotional distance I couldn’t have had if I had focused on something closer to home, e.g. Italians.

In the mid 1990s I was hopeful, believing that Paul Keating had a vision for Australia and that his assertive stance on issues of race was having a healing effect not just for Indigenous people or people like myself, but for the country as a whole. Not that I was entirely convinced. Despite his rhetoric of friendship, one could detect ongoing anxieties about Asia. Asia was no longer a racial threat, but it remained one in economic terms. The strategy to counter this threat was not that of the past, i.e. through exclusion (self-versus-other), but through integration (self-in-other). I was never convinced by the argument that multiculturalism had solved all social ills. There was plenty of evidence to suggest that a very strong assimilationist strand remained in Australian culture. Multiculturalism became a new way of achieving old ends, namely, the preservation of core Anglo values/interests, by some minor concessions to Aborigines and ethnics. Still, it has been a shock to realise how far we have regressed emotionally and politically during the Howard years.

It is too easy to exaggerate the significance of the winding down of the White Australia policy, which was in essence a moderate and inevitable liberalisation of policy in relation to non-European immigration rather than a direct challenge to strongly held beliefs about the white, British nature of Australian society and state. Could it have been otherwise, given our history and the strength of our cultural/political institutions which still privilege white, Anglo values and interests (while obscuring them behind the mask of civic idealism, and liberal-democratic principles)?

What strikes me most is our chronic ambivalence about ourselves, and thus our relations with others. We seem to be locked in a state of arrested development; unable to relinquish completely our colonial status (both a colonised and colonising people). How else do we explain the uneasy shifts in our attitudes to the rest of the world today, still oscillating madly between ‘the cringe’ towards the US and ‘the strut’ in the Asia Pacific region (to paraphrase the late A.A. Phillips)?

It does seem lately that we are only really comfortable with Asia when the power dynamics are in our favour – giving aid, helping out in a crisis, sending experts. It was only a few years ago that Howard actually publicly raised the proposal of sending five hundred young Australians to Asian countries to do good works (thankfully, the idea came to nothing). We still seem uncomfortable with notions of Asian agency, autonomy, and tend to condemn their behaviour as barbaric or ungrateful when it doesn’t conform to our standards (how dare the Indonesians have a legal system different to ours, how dare they not speak English during trials!). Our sneering and our strutting may well be a means of keeping other anxieties at bay, namely, our colonial status in relation to great, white, powerful friends, and our limited economic and strategic power in global terms.

LIFE TODAY
Today, I find myself a woman of 42, happily married with two young children and a very large mortgage. In some respects, I’ve never been so settled. On the other hand, I’m often prone to restlessness; the curse of the migrant who is often doomed to experiencing life ambivalently, always with a sense of dislocation – neither here, nor there; and always with a sense that life might have held other possibilities – What would I have been like if I’d grown up in Italy? Would I look different, be different? Would I be married? Would I live in the south or the north? Would I have a different political outlook?

I worry about my parents a lot more as they get older. They haven’t had the benefit of extended family or church or social life to keep them connected to the broader society or culture, and most of their socialising today depends on their kids. I don’t see this as entirely healthy. It saddens me.

I have found a special redemptive quality in our two children. They have linked Rob and me to each others’ families in a way that wasn’t possible before. I take a lot of pleasure in knowing my kids have a cultural hybridity which empowers but does not inhibit them. They have a rootedness here that I can never experience, but at the same time can still connect to their Italian heritage. Things have worked out pretty well, all in all.

The audio-tape component of the interview was transcribed by Rita Camilleri, Hon. Research Fellow, Monash Asia Institute, Monash University.

J.V. D’Cruz is Adjunct Professor in Australia–Asia Relations, Monash Asia Institute, Monash University.

Overland 180–spring 2005, pp.17–20