Finding My Place Read online

  I was so proud of my little self, having come up with my very own multiverse explanation for the existence of all humankind. I had hoped my mother would scoop me in her arms, declare that I was the genius child she had always wanted and shower me with kisses before calling all her friends to brag about her daughter, who had cracked the meaning of life.

  Not missing a beat, Mum cocked her head, glared at me sideways and said, ‘Don’t think too much. You go mad and nobody marry you.’ As I walked out of the kitchen she added, ‘And don’t stare in the mirror all the time and talk to yourself. You go crazy.’ (How on earth did my mother know that I was doing that?!) I chalked this up to just one of my mother’s many old wives’ tales like, ‘Don’t whistle at night, you call bad spirits’, ‘Don’t leave your shoe upside down, you bring bad luck’ and ‘Don’t eat fish, you get sick’.

  It’s funny what we remember from our childhoods. That interaction with my mother has been held in my memory all these years. There are so many other moments – moments where my mother probably did scoop me into her arms and declare me her special little genius – that don’t make it into this story. I guess you could put it down to fading memories and the passing of time, but I think it’s interesting what we remember and what we don’t. I’ve always believed that happiness is not a state of being but a series of moments. I’m happy today because the moments of happiness I can recall, though many of them faded, outweigh the inevitable moments of sadness or frustration or just plain nothingness that make up a life. The sum of my childhood memories are, I guess, generally happy, although punctured by events, happenings and moments that sometimes make me ache with shame and sadness. But never regret. I hope that my own children remember more about their childhood. I hope that their moments of happiness outweigh their moments of sadness. And I hope that when they are asked if they had a happy childhood at the very least they can say yes or no with some kind of conviction.

  Walking away from my mother that afternoon (or it could have been morning), I came away with a keen sense of what my life was supposed to mean. It was not for me to ponder the mysteries of the universe. No, no, I was destined for something much greater than that: marriage. So from then on, I set about fulfilling my life’s destiny to find a suitable husband. For the value of a girl child born on the Naksa, when war marked time, is measured only by her ability to attract a suitable partner.

  5

  Of Droughts and Flooding Rains

  In the early 1970s, Australians were coming to terms with the changing face of the nation. Large numbers of non-British immigrants, the disintegration of the White Australia policy and the introduction of multiculturalism were like a match to a flame, igniting simmering fears that bubbled under the surface.

  Since settlement, Australia had grappled with its developing identity as a Western outpost in a predominantly Asian region. As new settlers in an ominous, unpredictable and unfamiliar land, white settlers were faced with having to define their relationship with land and space. The contradictions and uncertainty of the landscape – tropic and desert; wet and dry; rain and drought – underscored a latent neurosis about Australia’s ability to sustain cultural and racial homogeneity, and birthed a lexicon of tidal images and natural disaster. Those who came across the seas were variably termed a peril, menace, evil, wave, tide or influx poised to invade, inundate, swamp or flood Australia and annihilate, oppress, obliterate or penetrate the invisible rabbit-proof fences of racial or cultural homogeneity.

  The persistent imagery of an Australia vulnerable to immigrant waves flooding her shores and inundating her lands was as much about the infiltration of physical borders as it was about the imagined cultural boundaries of racial and cultural purity that was once the vision of a white Australia.

  While Australia’s cultural anxieties remained anchored in the imagery of immigrant floods, it was the threat of tropical rains and breaking riverbanks that kept my parents anxious. In 1974 the floods came. The Brisbane floods over the Australia Day long weekend that year are forever etched in my parents’ memories. It was the first time they had ever seen rain so heavy it hovered like low pregnant clouds bounding off the road. As the waters reached our ground-level garage, flooding the laundry, they began to get a sense of just how devastating the floods would be.

  We lost everything. Everything my parents had worked for, everything they had accumulated, everything that transformed an existence to a life in this unpredictable land. It was all gone. The flood waters reached the second storey of our home and our family of four and a half-pint became a historic statistic. We were all evacuated to a church hall, where we were left to rely on the mercy of those for whom charity towards strangers gives their existence meaning.

  How ironic that floods – one human and the other natural – can swell the tides of hatred and division or merge the muddied waters of cultural difference into the heart of a river of humanity so clear and crisp and strong in its purpose. Out of the tragedy of the floods, my family forged friendships with the church and its members, who helped us without prejudice or fear. They became a permanent fixture in my childhood and adolescent years. And despite the frequent experiences of racism and bigotry that have peppered my life, it is the love and compassion of her people that define my Australia.

  I didn’t know that my fifth year of school would be my last year at West End State. I loved the school, the teachers, the students and even the principal, Mrs Muldoon, with her short dark crop of hair and heavy bosom, who carried around a yard stick she called ‘Wally Whacker’. Back in the day when corporal punishment was allowed, many a mischievous young thing felt the wretched sting of old Wally Whacker on their unruly behind.

  I always did well at school. I enjoyed the challenge of getting good grades and would often top the class in all academic subjects. Sport was another thing altogether. Although I did once come second in a race. There were only three runners and one kid fell over. Once I saw him down that was it. I ran like my life depended on it. I could taste victory with every stride, I could hear the crowd cheering me on. For once I was not going to be last.

  I learned very early on that I would always be picked last for sport but first if there was an argument to be won. I was the teacher’s pet, the class captain, the smartest girl in my year and the ‘blackie’. In a school where the majority of the students and staff were, for want of a better word, white-skinned, even my dark golden complexion qualified me as black. Too black to be ethnic like the Greek and Italian kids, most just assumed that I must be Aboriginal. That assumption led to my friend’s parents barring her from playing with me. Maria’s parents were themselves Greek immigrants, but when they saw their daughter holding hands as young girls do with her best friend, they chided her and told her she could no longer befriend the dark Aboriginal girl.

  At just seven years old, I had no idea why my bestest friend forever had just stopped talking to me; why she no longer wanted to sit with me or why she turned and walked away from me in the playground. At the end of the day, Maria’s older cousin stopped me on my way home and told me to stay away from Maria. ‘She’s not allowed to play with you blackie, okay.’ As she turned on her heel and walked away all I could do was silently mouth, ‘But I’m not black.’

  Aside from my short-lived friendship with Maria, my best friend both in school and out was my sister. We were so close in age, and due to my starting school early were only a year apart in class. We spent our recess and lunchtimes as well as every waking hour outside of school together. Because most of our lives were spent in each other’s company, my siblings and I communicated in English. We never learned to speak Arabic, and though we understood when our parents spoke to us, we always responded in English. Rhonda and I would spend hours talking about our futures – mostly our future husbands. She would tease me and tell me that she would marry a handsome rich doctor, while I was destined to spend my life with a fat boring accountant with no hair, beady eyes and heavy-rimmed glasses. Although I was the smart one in the fami
ly, Rhonda often outsmarted me and I was left with the short end of the stick whenever something neither of us wanted to do, like cleaning up after my brother in the toilet, had to be done. At times I thought Rhonda was cleverer, even shrewder, than she let on. She had a way of exploiting her big sisterness to get me to do things that I should have been too smart to do. Perhaps that’s what all big sisters are like or perhaps it was just middle-child syndrome, in which case I am perfectly justified in being a bitter, whiny wallflower because my parents favoured my older sibling, spoiled my younger sibling and totally neglected me. I once went to school with my pyjama pants under my uniform. Surely that’s a sign of neglectful parents!

  As the children of working migrants, we developed an independence that was typical of growing up Australian and working class. From the time I was seven, we were self-sufficient enough to get ourselves and each other ready for school in the morning, organise lunch orders, go to school and back. My father worked during the day while my mother worked shifts – mostly in the afternoons and evenings. We were typical latch-key kids. Rhonda and I both wore a house key around our necks tied with a crude piece of string. Every afternoon we would collect Hosam from the junior school, take the bus home, collect the mail, unlock the front door, change out of our school uniforms, heat up the food that our mother had left for us in the electric frypan, feed ourselves and Hosam, do our homework and then wait for my father to get home.

  We grew up in a different world, before stranger danger and Constable Care. A world where families gathered around just one television set in the entire house every evening for the five o’clock news. There were no 24-hour news cycles, no social media, no window locks, alarm systems or CCTV. I’m not sure that I would have trusted my own two sons to do what my siblings and I did. When I was forced to let them stay home alone after school or during school holidays because I simply could no longer afford after-school care, I spent every minute worrying about them. I rang them every hour, often pretending to be someone else so I could test how they would respond to a stranger. Sometimes I would come home early, just to see if they followed my instructions about not opening the front door to anyone.

  My cunning plots to catch my children unawares always failed. They were much smarter than me and could always tell it was my voice on the other end of the line or recognise my high heels echoing on the driveway as I tried a knock-and-run. Of course, it could have had something to do with the fact that I always pretended to be the same someone else when I rang – an old lady named Mrs Maguire, who spoke with a high-pitched broad Australian twang and, now that I think about it, sounded strangely similar to Pauline Hanson. Mrs Maguire would ring home and test the boys with various questions designed to catch them defying their mother’s house rules. My boys were under strict instructions to always answer the phone (in case it was me) and to always tell callers that I was in the shower and would return their call in thirty minutes. The elaborate ruse involved them then calling me at work, giving me the caller’s details so that I could then return the call, all the while pretending that I had indeed been in the shower when they rang and was now calling them from home. Genius! I like to think of it as creative parenting.

  We had just started the new school year in 1977; I had a new teacher and gleaming new exercise books, newly sharpened pencils, pens with all their caps still on and a new name. I had hated my birth name for so long and pleaded with my parents to let me change it. They finally gave in when I came home from school in tears because nobody could pronounce Azza properly with a guttural ‘ah’ instead of a sharp twangy ‘a’. When people called my name it always sounded as if they were calling out at the cricket – ‘Wazzaaaaaa’.

  There was not much different on the first school day of the new year – we went to school, came home and waited for my parents to finish their work day. But that evening something was different. Something was wrong. Very wrong. My mother told Rhonda and me to take Hosam and go play in the backyard. We never played in the backyard in the evening. We were at the farthest end of the yard, near the back fence, when we heard a car pull up, and we ran to the back of the garage and peered through the fence palings to see uniformed police officers get out of their car and walk up the stairs to our front door.

  Rhonda and I sat cross-legged on the back-door landing with our profiles up hard against the door, straining to hear the conversation inside. Hosam sat squirming in my lap, calling for my mother. Between my brother’s shrieks and my sister’s interruptions, I managed to hear some of the conversation.

  My mother: ‘I don’t want to go back to him.’

  Strange woman: ‘Mrs Aly, that’s up to you. But what would you like us to do now?’

  Strange man: ‘Mr Aly, you understand that your wife can make a charge?’

  My mother: ‘I won’t stay. Look, look what he did.’

  The back door opened and my father took Hosam. We went to bed and slept in a house heavy with a muted friction, and I dreamed about my gleaming books and sharpened pencils and pens with caps. It might have been a week or even a few days later that I was called out of class just before morning recess. I was told to go to the front office where my mother was waiting with my siblings.

  I never got to say goodbye to West End State, my teacher, my classmates or Wally Whacker. As my mother piled us into the car she explained that she had bought us all plane tickets to Sydney. We were going to get a small apartment near a place called Roselands, where my mother would take us shopping and swimming and to the movies. We would start at a new school and my mother would get a job in a hospital and there would be plenty of people to help us and we could stay with them. We could stay with all the people my mum knew before we moved to Brisbane, where the rains took away everything and where the police came at night.

  ‘But what about Dad?’ I asked.

  He wasn’t coming. It was just going to be Mum and us – just the four of us starting a new life and it was going to be fine. It was going to be more than fine. It was going to be fun. She made it all sound so adventurous and even magical. I don’t blame her. I would have done the same to protect my sons from the ugliness of the truth. When I closed my eyes, I imagined Roselands as an enchanted garden with rainbows of flowers and crystal-clear swimming pools dripping with chirpy giggles.

  At first, we stayed with some friends while my mother looked for a place for us to stay and a nursing job. We moved into our new home, a two-bedroom apartment in Belmore, close enough to our new school to walk. We slept on second-hand mattresses on the floor and ate from brightly coloured plastic plates with brightly coloured plastic forks and spoons. I didn’t understand then what my mother had done or why she had done it. But even at the age of ten I knew the enormity of it all. I couldn’t imagine life without my father. How were we supposed to be a family? How were we supposed to be ‘normal’ if all we had were mattresses on the floor, coloured plastic and no father?

  We lived that way for a month or maybe a few weeks. Then my mother, who probably had no one else to tell, came to my sister and me one night as we were sleeping. ‘I’ve spoken to your father. I had to. Just to let him know where we are. He was very worried. He was crying. He kept saying he’s sorry. He kept apologising. And after all, the shade of a man is like the shade of a wall.’

  Like the shade of a wall. It was the first time I heard my mother utter those words. My mother has a corpus of traditional sayings that she occasionally draws on to rationalise the world for those around her and for herself. I never found many of them to be expressive of any kind of obvious truth or profound wisdom. Rather, they were reminders of just how much I would never, could never, fully comprehend how my parents’ generation saw the world and what it meant for me. But from the first time I heard those words that night, I knew what the shade of a wall meant.

  From that early age, Mum would sternly remind me of my blossoming vulnerability and the need for shelter whenever she sensed me reaching for the sun. Each time I would slink obediently back into the shade, to li
ve in the refuge of male protection as she had and as her own mother had done so many times before her. And all the while, I dreamed of turning my face to greet the warm sun. But Arab women were not made for the sun. They must shield their faces, their bodies and their souls in the darkness. They cower at the light and retreat passively from the heat. They heed the words of their mothers, their sisters, their grandmothers and their aunts, who tell them they will wither and burn alone in the sun. They live like pale ghosts in the shadows until they fade into the dim because ‘the shade of a man is like the shade of a wall’.

  And so, after a few weeks or it might have been months, my father packed up the last remains of our life in Brisbane and joined us in Sydney.

  Our coloured plastic plates and knives and forks were exchanged for the kinds of wares people have when they are setting up a home. Unable to find work in his field, Dad took a job as a bus driver. We stayed on in the two-bedroom flat in Belmore and my siblings and I continued at the local school.

  6

  My Australia

  I’ve spent a good part of my life trying to understand hatred and violence, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I still don’t get it – why people can be consumed by so much hatred that it drives them to kill, maim and terrorise. I do know this though: children have to be taught to hate. They say kids are cruel. I’m not so sure about that. Walk into a room of six-year-olds and ask them what they want to be when they grow up. They will tell you they want to be doctors, and ambulance drivers, and nurses, teachers, footy players, dancers, performers and hairdressers. They want to be good; to do good things. No kid says they want to be a mass murderer, commit crimes against humanity, become a terrorist or a psychopath (or a politician, for that matter). No. Children have to learn that shit. They have to learn about hate and violence and all the crap that we adults insist on fucking up the world with.