Displaced Persons Sydney Writer's Festival. Jan 20-26

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday January 21, 1995

RUTH PARK

HERE are Mr and Mrs Coutts, his name being Chas and hers Mum. Mr and Mrs Coutts sit side by side which, the interviewer senses, is not their habit. Which one is out of place? On the other side of the room is an armchair with a defeated cushion and a dented chrome ashtray beside it. That's what Chas usually occupies. He has come to sit beside his wife because, like her, he feels uneasy, and two on the same side are stronger than one. Who knows what kind of person this interviewer may turn out to be? Old Australian, or new? Mr and Mrs Coutts know what they are. Or they thought they did until they visited Sydney for Australia Day. They thought they were the ordinary kind of Australian. Mr Coutts's family has had long enough to establish what the ordinary kind of Australian is. He is sixth generation and would be seventh if one or two of his great- grandfathers had been quicker to marry and procreate.

When the first Coutts came to NSW, it was 1816. Over the years his first name had been forgotten, but as he was a Peninsular War veteran, his descendants referred to him, though almost never, as "the soldier Coutts". Like so many of his comrades, this 20-year-old received a grant of impenetrable bushland in a country he'd hardly heard about in lieu of a pension. It was as if, in modern times, Chas's grandson were offered a nice little property in the Sea of Imbrium. But that soldier Coutts was in civil life a farm labourer, and out of his mind at the idea of land that would be inalienably his own.

In NSW, it took him eight years to earn, on docks and roads, enough money to buy a plough, tools and a bullock. On his Northern Rivers grant, which he called Salamanca after the great battle, he scrabbled up a wife who came with a cow, a camp oven and a crippled black woman named Lovey who had somehow lost her people and considered the expanding Coutts family her tribe. When she died, along with three of the children when the smallpox came, the soldier Coutts and his wife went apart from each other (for they were stoic, reticent people) and howled like dingoes.

The following generations began imperceptibly to resemble one another and even their neighbours, though many of those were descended from Poles, Germans and other immigrants who had fled persecution and brutal poverty. The country was moulding faces and bodies to suit itself.

Never mind your flash and glitter. The country needed men and women with durable hides, long stringy muscles and big hands. Their life very often beat them to the ground but required that they get up again. So, by the time the soldier Coutts's grandson had grown and was working Salamanca, he and his neighbours did not look English, or German, or anything but themselves. They were hard constructions of bone with mighty little flesh. The climate had burned out the fat and sweated away the juices. Their faces had the look of seasoned timber, self-contained and often severe. Not only the droughts, the storms, the floods hammered out their features but their own dislike of showing emotion. They tried always, as was said then, to keep their countenance. That is what Australians did.

When Mr and Mrs Coutts arrived in Sydney they were met by their widowed son, a good man who looked city dusty and city pasty to his parents.

"You're all right in that retirement village, are you? Comfortable and settled?" And he says something about not hankering over the old place, impossible to run in these days even if his parents were young.

"You may be right," says Chas, and thinks of the long drought which the newspapers keep saying is the worst in a century and certainly is not. What about the drought during World War I, and the one in the 1890s just before the Boer War, nearly a decade of stock famine, crop failure, bank foreclosures, men shooting themselves? But Salamanca survived, as it survived the resumption when the railway was put through, and the Spanish 'flu that killed so many farming people around the riverlands that cattle were turned out to earn their own living on the roadsides.

"Salamanca always paid for itself in the end," says Chas, rather short in tone.

"Sure, Dad," says the son kindly. "If it wasn't for the government needing the property for an airport, well, who knows? But you got a really good price, and now you and Mum are safe and secure for the rest of your lives." "And what kind of swap is that?" thinks Chas obstinately, longing and longing for things other than safety and security.

It is 20 years since Mr and Mrs Coutts were last enticed to the vast, unsettling city. This is a special occasion. Their grand-daughter, Teeny, is going to sing from the Opera House steps. Teeny's birth name is Athena. Their son's late wife was Greek. The grandparents feel for this ivory creature a love both passionate and baffled. She may speak just like everyone else, but she is a visitor from another world. There is not a single thing about her that is Australian, as the Coutts understand the word. Yet she is. She is of their blood, the blood of the soldier Coutts from Dorset.

"Them black eyes!" marvels Chas. "Like a Jersey heifer's." The child, for she is only 17, hugs and kisses them.

"Now, Grandpa, I'm just an ordinary Sydneysider. But if you asked me what place I loved best in the whole world, I'd say Salamanca." "Gone now," says Mr Coutts.

"But I'm here," says the child and she's right. Chas knows that as long as there are Coutts in Australia there is Salamanca.

"I love fireworks," says Mum meditatively, thinking of the Australia Day celebrations at the Quay. And, sure enough, the next evening down at the Quay, surrounded by real far-off stars and their fuzzy reflections in the harbour, Mum goes into a trance of delight as they watch the rockets blooming like unearthly chrysanthemums in the sky. Unlike Chas, she does not notice the crowds that wash around them in erratic tides are composed not only of strangers but of strange strangers, people he would not expect to see in Sydney and certainly not around the Northern Rivers settlements.

While Mr Coutts is pondering this curiosity, somehow it happens that, between the explosion of one chrysanthemum and the next, he is separated from his wife and son. Not at all disturbed, he follows the bush law to stay where he was last seen. He has a splendid view of the Opera House steps where Teeny and other musicians will shortly appear. In the meantime, he surveys with amazement what he supposes are his fellow Australians. They are a vital, easily amused company, clothed in wonderful colours and variety. There is no uniformity at all. Some are long and bendy, flinging back their hair in a manner Chas regards with suspicion. Others, whom he thinks of as Oriental, are very small and built of steel, or brown-faced, nuggety and cheerful like those mountain people on TV, Sherpas.

"What would Sherpas be doing here?" asks Mr Coutts of himself, jerking out of the path of a vast Tongan in a back-to-front baseball cap. Chas can't see a single person who looks like himself. Even if he took off his broad-brimmed hat and good suit and shined-up boots, and put on long shorts like bloomers or short shorts like the devil knew what, or grew fatter, or tattooed his ears, or donned a singlet with "DO ME" on the front, he still wouldn't look as if he belonged here. His face is wrong, like everything else.

"Where you from, Invader?" asks an Aborigine with blue eyes and a faintly brown skin decorated with a great many white dots of paint. He bustles onwards, waving a bright flag. Mr Coutts is so taken aback he spends 10 agitated minutes thinking up a reply. I've been here a damned sight longer than you, sonny. And: Invading what, you squirt? He stops only when he hears the last two bars of Waltzing Matilda and realises that Teeny's magpie-like voice has been warbling all the while. Mr Coutts is sick with disappointment. Then Teeny makes herself tall and straight and sings a verse of the song again, this time in another language. He guesses it is Greek.

"Well, that's fair enough," he comments to the man standing next to him, a handsome fellow with an aggressive moustache. "The Greeks were on our side. Game as fighting dogs they were. You Greek?" "No," says the man. "Turkish." Chas never thought he'd ever be speaking with a Turk. His lifelong view of that race, gained from his father, has been that Turks wear flowerpots on their heads and carry sickle knives with which to lop valued pieces from their enemies. The man, however, is so civil-spoken that Chas feels he must establish some common interest.

He blurts: "My father fought at Gallipoli." The Turk nods soberly. "My family also. Three killed. It was a bad business. But we had to defend our land against your invading army. All men do that." Chas feels trembly and dislocated. He's never been silly enough to think that Anzac Day commemorates a victory or defeat or war, just the dead boys, who first of all lived for the nation and then died for it. But that 99-per-cent white man dressed up as a black, he thought that the soldier Coutts and all the others were thieves, invaders. Chas is shocked. But more shocked about the other. That noble, never-to-be-forgotten landing, the wonderful madness, the young blood spilt like water, was it in truth an invasion? Did the fishermen of Suvla Bay, seeing the warships, leave their nets, boats, catches, run for the hills, herding their women, goats, children before them in dismay and terror? Ghosts, thinks Mr Coutts, when am I going to think this out? Mum's never been a talker. That night she says to Chas: "I didn't like it much. I felt outside things. Some people looked at me as if I was a ... a relic. They didn't mean anything but that's how it was." Mr Coutts doesn't like to think of his missus as a relic, a shred of rag, a broken cup, a bone splinter that by rights should be deep in the earth. She's imagining it, he says. But she's having none of that.

"That was Australia Day all right," she says. "But it's a different Australia. It's our turn to vanish like those extinct animals." She can't even get excited knowing Teeny has gained an overseas recording contract. That's what the interviewer is here for. She's doing a piece on the new star Athena Coutts, what's she like really, her loves and ambitions. Mr and Mrs Coutts do the best they can.

The interviewer is a stocky, fairish woman, very pleasant.

"What's your name again, miss?" asks Chas.

"Jenny Abdullah." Mum is amazed, remembering the Afghan pedlar who used to make the rounds of the outback properties four times a year. He had a white horse and a cart full of everything needful from tin plates and gumboots to remedies for flyblow and backache. Very tall, thin and dark was that Abdullah, with a piercing gaze. The interviewer reads Mum's mind.

"I'll bet you knew my grand father. He was around the Northern Rivers for years." She tells Mr and Mrs Coutts of the first Abdullah, camel man, who came by invitation to Australia in the 1890s to help break the great teamsters' strike. All Abdullah knew was that he was to haul wool. It was a cruel, violent time. Along with other camel men, Abdullah was rubbed with pig fat and tossed into the Murray where some of them drowned. The camels were shot or turned loose into the inland wastes. Abdullah dug irrigation ditches for years, saw that there was room for pedlars in this country with five days' ride between neighbours, eventually sent for sons and brothers and opened general stores in parched, hungry towns. He had an eye for land, that old man, and bought or selected where he could.

"We've always farmed," says Jenny Abdullah. "Hard grains, stock feed, turnips. Still farming out Manning River way." Mum longs to say: "But you don't look Afghan. Nobody would ever think - you just look and sound ordinary like." But the interviewer forestalls her by saying: "Of course, there weren't any Afghan wives, so with a little Aborigine blood here, some English there, a bit of French and Portuguese: well, 90 or more years is a long time for life and environment to work on people." She laughs. "I can feel that independent unbeatable old ancestor of mine stirring sometimes; I can tell you he's still around. He's not in the past for me even if I do have blue eyes." Mr Coutts sits in his armchair, thinking things out. Past, present, future. Words people are always using, putting the whole of your own history, a nation's history, in a straight line. As if that can be done. Shoving Mum and me into the past. Can't be done because there isn't any.

We felt we were displaced people, on the outside of things, because that Australia Day was different from ones we remembered. Everyone has to be different because the people change, grow, think differently, upset old traditions. That doesn't mean they aren't Australians, same as we are, same as old Abdullah was.

"That little girl, that Jenny, she'd say is," he remarks to Mum, but she's snoozed off.

Chas thinks in pictures, and in his head he sees not a straight line but a circle. That's it, he decides. The word he needs is a continuum but even if he knew it he wouldn't use it. Too highflown.

"Well, maybe it began in the Dreamtime," he ponders. "But what's the future but another Dreamtime? Or maybe the same one?" Funny, he thinks, how we believe we're shaping the country. And all the time the country is shaping us, no matter who we are or where we come from. Treating us rough more than often, but getting what it wants in the end. Creating its own heirs.

The original typescript of Displaced Persons will be deposited with the Manuscripts Collection of the Mitchell Library.