Ape territorialism, or apologetics

I came from a culture which couldn’t have been more different from the one where I moved. The problems were cultural and historical, rather than to do with class status. I was perpetually misread on these bases.

To be a child of a colony isn’t what people thought. There had been a propaganda war fought against us “whites”, so that we appeared to be people who lounged around swimming pools and ordered our black staff to bring us cocktails, whilst we did nothing.

Most of us came from practical classes of Britain — our parents were soldiers or farmers, or in very rare cases, managers of companies. There was no intellectual or artistic strata to our colonial culture. Our society has been a very rustic one indeed.

Also, although my family did have a swimming pool, we lived very frugally. On Saturday at lunch, my father would open one bottle of beer for himself. We would eat a family sized packet of potato chips, which we would only just afford, and share a family sized coca-cola between us. People don’t like to hear that this was all the “luxury” we could afford, because it raises ire and sounds like apologetics. “What about all the millions of black people you personally oppressed? What could they afford?” is the common comeback. Such an angry and resentful attitude shuts down conversation, making it impossible to proceed.

When we came to Australia, in early 1984, we sold everything. We had to start again in every possible sense — psychologically, economically and socially. I didn’t have any new clothes for about five years, although I wasn’t culturally wise enough to realise I needed them. Of course, I had absolutely no social pretensions. I noticed that people were extremely unwilling to help me find my feet, and I later understood this was because I was a ‘colonial’ and so was expected to pay for recompense for that.

I became a little crazy: I turned to fundamentalist Christianity as a way of trying to inject some heart and soul into my new circumstances. This didn’t help at all, as I later discovered so much of the doctrine I’d been learning was intellectually contradictory and at odds with my personality.

I had come from a conservative to right-wing culture and I ought to have stayed in that kind of cultural context where I would have been treated more sympathetically. As I had no idea that I was being discriminated against, and that I was effectively making things worse by not choosing conservative environments that would have welcomed my identity, I gravitated towards liberal intellectual and artistic contexts.

As time went by, I developed chronic fatigue syndrome, a result of not being able to make sense of it all.