Presented on Radio National 21 July 2006
The other Monday, at the Maroochy RSL, I was guest speaker to the large Sunshine Coast Branch of the War Widows Guild. I had been invited to speak about my book Homeland, which I wrote, in grief, when my Lithuanian-born husband died four years ago. It was written as a fictional memoir, woven around our lives together; I regarded it also as a tribute to the almost forgotten men - for they were mostly men - who constituted the first postwar wave of non-British immigrants.
Strangely though, from the moment I walked into that room at the RSL, a wave of nostalgia swept over me: for the days when I was a kid, between the wars, with the Anzac Day marches, and the concerts at the Manly RSL, which always included renditions of Roses of Picardy and robust community singing of Tipperary, and family-friendly digger jokes... The nostalgia was so strong it almost choked me.
I spoke spontaneously that day, of my family - a 'military family' - father, brother, uncles, cousins, all in the forces in World War One or Two. My mother was a VAD, a Voluntary Nursing Aide, in the former, and I was in the AAMWS, the Australian Army Medical Womens Service, a reincarnation of the VADs, in the latter. And then I married across, so to speak, and lived for over fifty years outside that Anglo-Celtic mainstream, as the wife of a Displaced Person immigrant.
A different life, mine, in many ways, from that of the war widows, but one to which they warmly related. We had all lived through the same times and changes; many of their partners, like mine, had kept silence on horrors seen and suffered. There was a common humanity. My talk was very well received.
That night Australia played Italy in the World Cup, and as in the friendly Melbourne game against a Greek side, and the match against Croatia, we saw the true depth of our multiculture: people of mixed ethnicity (like my own children and grandchildren) managing pride in and love of two elements in their backgrounds: their mixed heritages, and their homeland, Australia.
Many of the fans were ambivalent about which soccer side they wanted to win, about which colours they should wear, those of their parents' homelands, or of Australia; some solved the dilemma by wearing fifty-fifty jerseys - one side Croatian, the other green and gold. Nowhere was there rancour or anger.
I believe that in those two Monday episodes - the War Widows meeting and the football match - was encapsulated that elusive quality we are always being exhorted to discover: Australia's true identity. I believe that identity lies in our history, in our true and fundamental history - that is, in the stories of the many peoples who have made Australia, and their melding together, over generations if necessary, into one people... With mostly decency and tolerance...
The history that some politicians and academics would thrust on us scorns much of that. They want a distortion; they want an Anglo history, with the cruel occupation sanitised, and the wars of Empire glorified, and jingoistic wrapping in the flag - even if that does foster division, and horrible events like the Cronulla riots.
Often, as I am talking to groups about Homeland, I ask, 'Who in this audience is of pure Anglo ancestry?' Invariably, even among older age groups, few people are.
Then I ask for the Anglo-Celts, and many more hands go up, as people recall Irish grandparents or parents, or Scottish. And then the others start to talk: about Italian or German or Dutch or Lithuanian forebears, and in-laws, and wish they knew more of their stories, and why they left their homelands to come here, and how they fared once here...
My own children are of mixed Lithuanian, Irish, Welsh and English descent and, far back, we believe Jewish; some of my grandchildren have Aboriginal and Scottish ancestry. Intermarriage has made them truly multicultural, multiracial, in other words - dinkum Australians, part of our country's really pivotal history - the story of its people. Which is yet so largely untold and always changing.