Reunion Read Online Free PDF Page B

loss of confidence in the power and promise of the left. Spin was confined to tops and planets, backroom boys were illegal gamblers, and globalisation and the global economy were yet to enter the lexicon. The marriage between science and the military was still in its honeymoon phase with both parties on their best behaviour, and business donations to political bodies were made with a sturdy veneer of social responsibility. Broadsheet seriousness dominated tabloid trash; CNN was yet to be born and the BBC lived up to its accent. Australia was poised to make its way in the Asia–Pacific region, but in the real world of Europe, the only world that mattered to those like them with scholarly interests, Australia was not on the map. In the post-Nixon era in America and the post-Whitlam era in Australia, politicians in the West had lost much of the respect they had formerly engendered, although were far from being the sweet-talking, poll-driven shysters of recent times. In fact, the cavalier attitude of the self-righteous liar so common to contemporary democratic leaders was thought back then to be the exclusive province of despots and criminals. When they entered university there was a sense of the future, and the future was positive.
    It was also young. Far from parents being your best friends, in those days of free will and self-expression, the family, rotting deep in the reservoir of determinism, was definitely onthe nose. People moved out of home as soon as possible, and many of them, including Ava, returned rarely, if at all. Both Helen and Ava were the first members of their family to attend university. Helen’s parents were proud of their daughter but, according to her, bewildered. Ava marched into the future as if her family did not exist.
    Jack was willing to give up sleep for his new friends, he was willing to share his music, he would dress down, read up, he would march for the liberation of women, but when it came to family he was stymied. Family was his connective tissue: to turn away from his mother and father would be to walk away from himself. He, too, was the first of his family to attend university, but unlike the Bryants and Rankins, his parents, forced by circumstances to leave school early themselves, had always touted tertiary study as a basic essential of life, along with food, drink, shelter, warmth, a sense of history and left-wing politics. He would observe Ava and Helen as they shaped themselves according to the times and their ambitions, and even if he had wanted to follow suit it would have been impossible. It was as if he were grafted onto his parents and their past, saddled with all the hopes and opportunities denied by Polish anti-Semitism, by Hitler, by the brutal deaths of aunts, uncles, cousins and neighbours who had remained in Poland long after his own grandparents had migrated to Australia. Then there was communism and the years of loyalty, visionary years followed by confusion and distress and disbelief and finally his parents quitting the Party not long before he was born. Jack doubted he would ever be a child of his times although he tried to make light of it. ‘I am a cyst on history,’ he wrote at the top of a blank page. But despite his efforts, neither the essay nor his levity progressed.
    He knew that Ava and Helen envied him his background; more families like his, they said, and the institution might be worth saving. And he accepted their compliments, although in truth what they admired he had experienced primarily as discomfort. He was convinced that 1960 was a most inauspicious time to be born. All the excitements of the sixties, the new politics, protest music, students determined to strip the world of their parents’ mistakes, all of this was happening while he was still in primary school. Too young to have a personal stake in the movement for change, as the child of activists he nonetheless found himself at its centre.
    He had marched with his parents in Vietnam