Finding My Place Page 3

  The early 1970s heralded a new era of multiculturalism in Australia. Al Grassby, as Minister for Immigration, introduced some pretty radical policy changes that had lasting impacts on how Australia defined itself and how we engaged with our region. Grassby introduced a policy of selective immigration based on merit rather than country of origin and quotas that had been, in essence, designed to keep Australia racially white. Grassby also introduced multiculturalism as a way of recognising ethnic diversity and ensuring that all Australians, regardless of ethnic origin, were treated equally.

  If Australia’s official approach towards migrants was changing in the early 1970s, attitudinal change was much slower in coming. My parents spent their first month or so at Bonegilla. They learned basic English, how to open bank accounts and how to make a life for themselves and their two daughters in Australia.

  Albury-Wodonga was nothing like the home Mahmoud and Hamida had left. For a start, there weren’t many people – not like the suffocating crowds of Alexandria and Cairo. Against the stark heat and expansive fields of Bonegilla, those crowds would have been a comfort for my mother, who struggled with the lack of language and strange food.

  Bonegilla was once an army training camp turned migrant arrival centre. The centre was set up after the Second World War when Australia opened its boundless plains to those who came across the seas. Bonegilla closed for good in 1971. In its early years, the centre was much less welcoming. The blocks were sparsely furnished and had no internal walls. Men and women and children were housed separately in mess halls that accommodated twenty strangers. Two decades before my parents arrived, the centre attracted criticism when thirteen children were found to have died of malnutrition. In the early 1960s, Bonegilla again attracted attention when residents staged protests, leading to riots in the camp, over poor conditions.

  By the time my parents arrived, Bonegilla was equipped with private cubicles for families, a school, bank, churches, sporting fields, a train station and its own hospital. They owed much of this to the generations of Greeks and Italians who arrived at Bonegilla in the 1950s and early 1960s and agitated for improved conditions. My parents were designated a small room with two beds in one of the twenty-four blocks. They ate all their meals in the dining hall with the other residents and spent their days attending English-language classes. Every week they were given a small allowance of three dollars. With their first allowance, my mother took the bus into the small town centre, where she bought coats for Rhonda and me. They were only one of two Egyptian families at the centre – the other being a Coptic family with three children. The eldest daughter, who had studied English in Egypt, acted as interpreter and translator for our family.

  We spent four weeks in Bonegilla before my father was assigned employment at a textiles factory in Gladesville, in Sydney’s north-west. Dad left his family behind and went ahead to set up home and start his new job. He rented a room for us with a Greek family close to his new workplace and then sent for us. My mother boarded the train at Albury with her two daughters and bid farewell to her new friends at Bonegilla. Our short stay was fairly typical for migrants at the camp, though some would wait months before being assigned employment and others would never leave, finding employment at the camp itself.

  While my father worked on the factory floor, my mother found work as a nurses’ aide in Marrickville, in Sydney’s south-west, until she could be considered a fully registered nurse. Eventually, they moved into their own self-contained unit – a granny flat they rented from a different Greek family. When my mother fell pregnant with my brother, Hosam, in 1970, she left the hospital and went to work as a live-in carer for a former patient named Mrs T. Our entire family moved into a room on the second floor of Mrs T’s sprawling home in Earlwood, a suburb next to Marrickville. Mum ultimately quit her job at Mrs T’s when she found Mrs T running after me and trying to hit me with a stick, claiming that I had misbehaved. Just as well. Who knows what that cantankerous old witch would have done! I for one was happy to leave the clutches of Mrs T’s house of horrors and move into our own home down the road from the Catholic school in Earlwood.

  On Rhonda’s first day of school, Mum walked her to the Catholic primary school with my spindly limbs and unruly curls in tow. I was just four years old and would have to wait at least another year before I could join my sister. But one look at Rhonda in her uniform, the nuns, the classrooms, the other children and the playground (that playground was really something) and I decided that this was where I wanted to be. That was it. I’d made up my mind and nothing could change it. I’ve always been that way. I’m not easily dissuaded once I’ve made a decision, though I like to think that I at least try to take all points of view and options into account before I make a decision. Having decided that I wanted to start school that day and not in a year, there were tears and tantrums and a dramatic melee that drew the attention of the head nun. Taking pity on me, or rather on my mother, the nuns made a special exception and accepted me at the school. Mum found a uniform in my size at a second-hand shop in Earlwood town centre and returned to the school later that morning with her second daughter ready to start school. I began school that day.

  My brother was born at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in August 1971. As soon as Hosam could talk, he set about reminding all of us that he was the only real Australian and claimed that was the reason he had straight hair and was better looking than anyone else in the family!

  By the time I was five, my parents had settled into their new roles in Australia, Dad as a factory worker and Mum as a nurses’ aide. It must have seemed like it was all for nothing. The arguments with my grandfather, the tsunami of tears at leaving her family and friends behind, the indignant looks from the old women in Minya, the battles, both big and small, Mum had to fight as an independent, educated woman in Egypt. And after all that, here she was living in a granny flat, married to a factory worker and working as a nurses’ aide.

  There was always somebody to remind her how grateful she should be. Always a nurse or a patient ready with a comment about how lucky she was to even be allowed into this country. There were the bus drivers who would tell her to get to the back of the line, even as she struggled to manage her two toddlers, and then make her repeat the word ‘please’ several times before begrudgingly allowing her to board. There was an aura of racism in this place they called the lucky country. It lingered in my parents’ clothes and in the greyness of their faces at the end of each long day’s work like the malodorous stench of a heavy smoker’s breath.

  And yet, like the hundreds of thousands who had come across the seas before them and the millions who would come after them, my parents understood that this was part of the Australian migrant experience. They held strong to the vision that their sacrifices today would mean that their daughters would have a better life tomorrow. If Australia was not lucky for them, surely it would be for their offspring.

  4

  Rumpus Room

  Those early years growing up in a now expanded family of five, we were fairly isolated. My parents occasionally attended events or gatherings with other Egyptian families, but the family I remember most was that of the woman we called Aunty Moya, who looked after us when my parents worked.

  Rhonda and I were a few years younger than Aunty Moya’s twin girls and we spent many adventurous hours learning about life in Australia from them. I doubt my parents had any idea about the mishaps we got up to with our babysitters. They would take us on long walks through the main streets, where we would stop in and watch little girls around our age practising ballet at the dance school and where I would frequently lose a shoe splashing in puddles, or carelessly leave a cast-off cardigan on a street-side bench. We celebrated Christmas with them and shared chocolate eggs at Easter time.

  As children, we adjusted to life in Australia, the only life we had ever known, easily. My parents continued to struggle with their newfound culture and learning new norms, social expectations and traditions. Hearing that there was a schoo
l that ran on Sundays, my father quickly enrolled us, thinking that we could get a head start on other students by taking extra English and maths lessons on the weekends. Rhonda and I thought it was odd, but I loved school and was happy to spend my Sunday at another school where I could draw, eat lunch, read books, take naps and talk to other children. I still remember my parents’ faces when we arrived home from Sunday school with our new children’s Bible and a Jesus colouring-in book. We didn’t go back to that school, much to my dismay.

  Navigating life as ‘new Australians’ provided many more comic stories. Mum once came home with ten cans of baked beans that she had found on sale at the local supermarket. She was so pleased with herself that she had got in early and managed to buy all the cans of baked beans that were marked down to twenty cents, until my father looked at the cans and read the label and revealed that all ten cans were baked beans in ham sauce. We ended up giving them all to our elderly neighbours.

  My mother still calls herself a ‘new Australian’. For at least two decades I’ve been telling her that she stopped being a new Australian after five, maybe six, years tops. At eighty-five, and having spent the majority of her adult life in Australia as an Australian citizen, Mum is most definitely an ‘old’ Australian.

  When I was six years old my parents made a decision that would change our lives forever. Their application for immigration to the United States had finally come through. My father would be working at a textiles factory in Texas. They sold up everything and prepared us all to leave the wide brown land that had been a transient home for the past four years. Instead, at the last minute, they decided that Australia had more potential than the United States. Much of this was due to the arguments of the Egyptian consul general at the time, who had become a close family friend. He convinced my parents that Australia was a better option for them and for their children. So instead of Texas, my parents packed their three children and all their remaining belongings in a second-hand station wagon and headed north to Bris-Vegas.

  Our very first home was a three-bedroom house in the inner-city suburb of West End. Dad got work in the cutting department of The House of Jenyns, making women’s torture contraptions called corsets for the global brand Triumph. Mum worked shifts at the Mater Hospital and they continued building their Australian dream complete with house, a dog named Lucky (Mum always got to name the pets, so growing up we had a dog named Lucky, followed by a poodle named Honey and a bird named Sweety), and two and a half kids, the half-pint being my little brother – the Aussie one.

  Rhonda and I loved our new house on stilts with its undercover garage and front stairs. We shared a bedroom with a big window that overlooked the side yard. Hosam had a nursery with a bay window and there was something that my father called a rumpus room. I had no idea what that meant, but it seemed like a big room that I could make lots of mess in by rumpusing and other such activities. If we were good, we were allowed to walk down the street to the corner shop, where we could buy bags of lollies for five cents. There were black cats, Red Skins and packets of bubble gum. Every morning bottles of milk would magically appear at the bottom of the stairs and every evening we would leave the empty bottles out for collection. Our neighbours were Mr and Mrs Davis and they looked after Hosam during the day when my mother worked. They had a big mango tree in their backyard and two grandchildren around my age who would come and stay with them during the school holidays. We spent our days building makeshift traps out of cardboard boxes, tree branches, old string and breadcrumbs to catch Willie wagtails.

  Dad took up painting and created portraits for people on the side to make extra money. I was in awe of his talent and thought he must be the best artist in the entire world. I would sit and watch him for hours, watch his hand load the brush with colour and flick it onto the canvas. I begged him to let me paint too, but he told me that I had to learn by watching first and that one day, after watching and learning, I would be ready to paint my own canvas. I’ve never been very good at waiting and watching patiently for anything much at all, but the promise of one day being able to paint like my father kept me going.

  Rhonda and I started school at West End State School. I still remember my first day there. I was going to love this school. I loved my teacher, who was kind and beautiful and tried to pronounce my name right. At the end of our first day of school, Rhonda and I waited at the front gate for my father to pick us up as we had been instructed. We waited until all the other children had gone. We waited until the last teacher walked past us and smiled goodbye. We waited until the clouds started to form in the sky and the sun sank low. When we could wait no more I decided that we had misheard the instructions and that we should walk home. My six-year-old self took control of the situation and directed us to walk in the course of the traffic. We walked for what seemed like hours. The rain started pelting down and my sister started crying. I comforted her and told her that someone would find us or that I was sure the next street was our street. We walked in the rain till we were both soaking wet, hungry and scared.

  Even at that young age, I couldn’t bear to let my sister know that I had no idea where we were or that I was as scared as she was. Every time she cried, I resolved to smile, to be stronger and to reassure her. We turned left, turned right, crossed roads and tried to backtrack, but we were lost. I had lost us. I tried to get the attention of some adults, but it seemed like we were invisible. Nobody looked at us, nobody saw us, nobody noticed us.

  When an old lady crossing the road stopped briefly and said something about it being late and rainy for two little girls to be out, I ran after her. ‘Please, please,’ I screamed, ‘we are lost.’ The old lady stopped and turned. ‘We are lost, we are lost, please help us.’ For the first time during the entire ordeal I cried, my tears mingling with the rain. The old lady took us to the local police station, where they kept us warm and dry and asked us for our address. I guess with the moving and all, our parents probably forgot to ensure that their kids knew what the address was. I knew it started with D and that we lived in a big house with stilts and something called a rumpus room. But that wasn’t much help to the police.

  We weren’t there long before my father arrived, frantic. He had been driving around all this time looking for us and had gone to the police to report us missing. When we finally arrived home, Mum had a warm bath and dinner ready for her prodigal daughters, and a stern word or two for my father, who had apparently forgotten that he had to pick us up from school that day.

  I hate baths. The idea of immersing oneself in a stinking vessel of hot water and soaking in one’s own filth making a big pot of germ soup has never appealed to me. My husband (the second one) once insisted on running a bath for me to help me ‘relax’. I played along and sat in the bath surrounded by the warm glow of candles. When I finally emerged from the bathroom, my husband said, ‘Honey, you’ve been in there three minutes. Three minutes.’ Really. It really did seem like I’d been sitting in that stinking vessel for at least thirty minutes. But that day after I had finally broken down in the pouring rain and returned safely to the embrace of our new home with the big rumpus room, I loved that bath. I loved that bath and I loved my parents and I loved our home more than I had ever loved anything in my entire short six-year-old life.

  I spent much of my childhood thinking and feeling that my family certainly was not ‘normal’ and just wishing that we were. For a brown girl growing up in the suburbs of Australia in the 1970s with no real role model and no Barbie doll to relate to, my yardstick of normality became an American TV show. My six-year-old self imagined the Brady Bunch as the quintessential Western family and everything that my family was not: family meals around the dining table; parents who kissed each other hello and goodbye and who actually discussed punishments with their children instead of hurling shoes at them were my cues.

  My mother could not throw or catch a football to save her life, but backchat her and she could hurl a shoe at you with such athletic prowess that it would qualify her for Oly
mpic gold. She didn’t even have to look at you, she would just pick up the nearest thong and fling it boomerang-style in your general direction. I spent much of my youth dodging the occasional thong that came at me like a precision-guided missile. To readers of non-Arab backgrounds, this form of discipline might seem odd or even cruel. But to Arab mums around the world, shoe hurling is more than just a form of discipline, it is an ancient martial art that has even attracted the attention of cultural anthropologists who have written on the subject – I kid you not.

  For the uninitiated, the Brady Bunch followed the Bradys’ antics as they navigated life as a blended family with six kids. Mr Brady was an architect and Mrs Brady did Mrs Brady–type things, which meant she actually didn’t really do much at all now that I think about it. They had a dog named Tiger (not Lucky or Honey or Sweety), a live-in housekeeper named Alice and even a family butcher named Sam. But it wasn’t all fun and games, and the show explored some pretty serious topics like middle-child syndrome, teenage dating and even gender equality.

  The fact that my touchstone for the traditional Western family actually represented a non-traditional family was lost on me. It’s ironic that my early notions of ‘a normal family’ were formed watching a show about a blended family in a time when society saw such families as anomalies. It is only in reflecting on some of the episodes now that I can see how the show actually challenged social norms and traditional family structures. Perhaps that’s why I was drawn to it so much.

  I would have been around six or seven when I started thinking about why and how we exist. Had I been raised in a particularly religious household, I probably would have diverted to the story of creation – though it’s hard to say now if Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden would have satisfied my childhood curiosity. What about the inevitable questions, like how did Adam and Eve manage to populate an entire planet of different races? And most importantly, where did they buy their clothes! As my mother stood over the kitchen sink peeling onions or chopping garlic or washing dishes (I don’t quite recall exactly what she was doing, but I honestly don’t remember a hint of onion or garlic in my mother’s cooking, which consisted mainly of processed hamburgers, overcooked peas and the occasional salad), I pulled at her dress, determined to share with her my own matrix-like theory of life. ‘Mama, I’ve been thinking. I think we are asleep. The real us – we are all asleep and we are dreaming and this is the world – it’s us dreaming. Because we are not real. We are just dreams.’