The Idea of Home Read Online Free PDF

discern the effect of these debts on people’s dreams, ambitions and willingness to take risks on studies that aren’t immediately or reliably remunerative, to become artists or activists, actors or environmentalists — the creators and caregivers that inspire and uplift a nation. The kind of people that Australia, that the planet, so badly needs right now.
    I do know that my generation — or some large part of it — owes something to the generation that now is coming of age. I had been in the workforce for just about two years when I bought my first house, in the inner-Sydney suburb of Erskineville. It was almost as small as it’s possible for a house to be: less than three metres wide in front with a dunny out the back. But it was a home of my own, and it was cheap. For the deposit, I used my seven weeks annual leave pay from the Sydney Morning Herald . We got paid incash in those days, and I remember the payroll clerk handing me that brick of banknotes. I clutched it, gratefully yet gingerly, and nervously transported it across the road and into the hands of the loan officer at the credit union.
    It’s like a fairytale, that story, isn’t it? I don’t know which element is more implausible. Seven weeks annual leave. With a generous leave loading. Or a single woman from an unprosperous family background buying her own home in her early twenties.
    I do know that it is implausible, if not impossible, to imagine any young person being able to do it today. The fact that they can’t inspires many feelings in me. Regret. Guilt. A certain shame at my generation’s heedlessness — that those of us who had such opportunities haven’t felt the political will to demand them for the ones who’ve come after us. It’s not supposed to go that way, after all. The older generation is supposed to smooth the way for the younger. And we haven’t done that.
    When I was young, expatriate Australians would come home to give lectures like the Boyers, and theyalmost always irritated me. Often, they talked about the Australia of their own youth in disparaging terms. It was, they declared, racist, misogynist, homophobic, puritanical, conservative, boring. ‘Why are they banging on about this?’ I would think to myself. ‘That place doesn’t exist any more.’ Well, perhaps I am guilty of a similar transgression. The progressive, working-class paradise I’ve described doesn’t exist any more either. But I am banging on about it because I think the ardent, radical mood of those days deserves reconsideration. The days of wine and rage that Frank Moorhouse so memorably wrote about, when he and Helen Garner, David Williamson and others created the literature of untidy terrace houses and the restless activists who inhabited them. The days when an Australian dream could be lived by a kid from Bland Street.
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    Back in the first century, when the Romans occupied Jerusalem, two rabbis named Hillel and Shammai disagreed about pretty much everything. Shammaiwas a zealot, Hillel a conciliator. Shammai was strict and exclusive; Hillel was liberal and inclusive. But one thing they did agree upon: no matter how fierce their debate, the argument had to be l’shem shamaymim — for the sake of heaven. You argued, in other words, in good faith and not in enmity, in an honest quest for truth.
    Our political discourse these days is not so heavenly. She says ‘to-may-to’, he says ‘to-mah-to’. Worse, actually. Generally, political opponents can’t even agree that the thing they are naming is a round, edible fruit. And to make a point, they’ll squash it under foot with a big, wet splat. Then they’ll say, ‘See? I told you it wasn’t round and edible.’
    I want to make my case for a reconsideration of the brief, progressive era I’ve revisited in this chapter. I want to do it in the spirit of l’shem shamaymim , an argument