Father's Day 2010

My father passed away last year, and so I found that bitter truth that as our lives had intersected, he had never lifted a finger to be of help to me, or to be a father. He had his excuses .. he was protecting the dignity of his wives, but really poor excuses.
A student asked to write an account of my coming to Australia to live .. and I decided it was worth posting.

I came to Australia to live in 22/6/1978. I was eleven years old. My mother and my older sister and brother came with me. We left behind my dead sister, she had been 13 yo. We had left our old home on Winant road, Princeton NJ, and travelled through Europe, visiting family on our way to Australia. A few days in London, Amsterdam, Paris, Athens and Malaysia. We also stopped over in NZ before touching down in Sydney. My father was here, with his soon to be wife, who was almost the same age as my oldest sister. But we didn’t know that then. My parents were returning to Australia so that they could divorce. To get us used to that idea, they took us (my brother, sister and I) to see Kramer vs Kramer, a Dustin Hoffman movie about divorce.

I didn’t know Australia. I didn’t know family. I didn’t feel accepted because of my US accent, I remember being pulled over by a big kid in High School and being told that I had shot John Lennon. I was beaten up by an Aboriginal boy in the school change rooms for being an American imperialist .. ironically I have Aboriginal ancestry too, and was merely born in the US to Australian parents, but the boy didn’t know or care. I had left behind a best friend in the US, but I didn’t write letters or stay in touch, partly because I didn’t know his name. I called him ‘Sander’ and I had to wait until I was 42 years old before he got in touch with me on Facebook .. his name being Alexander, and he has two children, a son who looked just like he did when he was 11.

Australia is different to the US, and very similar too. They have Baseball and we have Cricket. The accents are different. Food products are different too .. ask for lemonade in the US and you will be surprised if you are Australian. Australians call it Lemon Squash, or Americans call the Australian Lemonade ‘Sprite.’ US shopping malls are special, making the Australian variety looking pedestrian and small. Breakfast cereals for the US are far more sugary and less wholesome .. I missed them (‘Captain Crunch’ and ‘Crunch Berries’). In Princeton NJ we had 17 free to air tv channels, and in Australia there were only 4. The US showed old tv shows for kids, like Ultraman, and Johnny Sokko and his flying Robot while Australia struggled to show one decent kids show at a time .. possibly Dr Who, or Blakes 7.

I felt isolated and alone, but then that was how my family raised me. We were atheists, and my family praised independence and strength, and devious backstabbing attempts were praised when they were successful. I was the youngest, fat and suffered from an undiagnosed sleep apnea which had me waking a measured 103 times an hour. I didn’t sleep until I got a CPAP machine when I was 36. My brother was a fit and athletic child and he took to running and tennis to maintain fitness. I resembled my father, which disgusted my father, an opinion which went lower when I embraced Jesus at age 18 when I was at university.

My father was a college professor. He had initiated Sesame street in the ‘60s as an educational expert (Jim Henson was the talent). When my sister died, he left his work for the UN and became a professor of Education at Sydney University, and he was the original adjudicator of The Sale of the Century with Tony Barber. My mother was a former primary school teacher, having met my father at work at Condell Park public school in the ‘50s. She embraced atheism as a child and this expressed itself in how she chose to administer her family. It is wrong to suggest there wasn’t love, but what love there was, was misplaced to false hopes and idols. More than thirty years after my sister’s death, my mother sleeps with her ashes. She promised my sister that she would be reincarnated in a healthy body shortly before my sister died. Having made her choices, my mother will not accept she was wrong.

We came to Australia seeking family, a new hope and a new beginning. We found a mixture of prejudice and acceptance. We could have gone anywhere else in the world and found something different, but then again, it would never have been so very different. And in some ways, Australia is unique. I am US born, with ancestry that is Aboriginal, Chinese, Russian, Dutch, Irish, English and Scottish. I have Jewish ancestors, Catholic and Protestant. I have taught a student born in Antarctica .. and others from every other continent. And mate, we are all Australian.

n.b

There is a difference between cricket and baseball. In baseball, the pitcher is part of the defensive team. The defense tries to restrict scoring. In cricket, the defender holds the bat. The difference means the game feels different to supporters, although in both games it is the rich tradition through statistics which bring the games to life, tying a game played today with one played a hundred years ago.