Inside Outside Read Free

suburb of a large city. The flat itself was nothing much to speak of, no more than the perfunctorily converted servants’ quarters of a handsome liver-brick bungalow, but in those days of acute housing shortages finding it represented a piece of extraordinary good fortune. One of its three rooms had no window but contained a large and entirely unusable fireplace. There was a kitchen and a lean-to, as well as a bathroom of sorts. The choko-covered dunny under a superb jacaranda proved a source of constant terror on account of its thriving colony of red-back spiders, which we were taught to disperse in the approved manner with a rolled-up newspaper. Nevertheless, securing that flat through the good offices of an acquaintance who had settled in Sydney some time before the war was the one bright spot in the otherwise bleak and depressing beginning of our life in the new land.
    Nowadays Epping is a shrine to middle-class affluence. Its streets are paved and guttered; dunny-men no longer trot down its driveways with fragrant cans balanced delicately on their shoulders. Outside the primary school, where in the late forties one or two children still rode to school and tethered their horses to a hitching-post, a line of Volvos, Saabs and four-wheel drive monsters waits each afternoon for the classrooms to disgorge their well-clad and properly shod youngsters. The shops nestled around the railway station display those heathenish goods—garlic-laden salami, capsicums, strange smelly cheeses—which, when I lived there, were almost entirely unknown: their gradual advance was greeted as the vanguard of the forces of darkness. Epping in the forties was, in other words, an example of an Australia which has disappeared entirely from Sydney, though I suspect that it survives in isolated pockets of Greater Melbourne.
    To our European eyes it gave every indication of village life. In retrospect it is possible to be nostalgic about its sleepy charm, a quiet place where cows grazed in the paddocks behind several of the streets, a world where front doors were rarely locked, where you walked to school barefoot on hot bitumen, or in a sea of paspalum, wearing your threepenny imitation pith helmet. It was, nevertheless, a dreary place. Most of its handsome turn-of-the-century bungalows and two-storey houses were encrusted with fibro, corrugated-iron or timber excrescences: a verandah boarded up here, a lean-to added there. Elsewhere, weatherboard cottages leaned in various states of disrepair, victims of crumbling foundations, dry rot and termites. Only the gardens showed any signs of care and ownerly pride. And everywhere paspalum: the mile-long walk to the railway station (or at least as far as the few streets with properly made footpaths) had to be negotiated through acres of the weed which threatened to ruin your clothes with its burrs and oils, and harboured, besides, such dangerous nasties as ticks and snakes. The locals walked on the road; we had been too much regimented in our previous life to dare to do that.
    Epping was at the time (and may well be still) the heartland of the nonconformist bible-belt. There was, it is true, a solidly constructed Church of England not far from the shopping centre, but the true spiritual aspirations of the place were represented by the Methodist, Baptist and Congregational establishments. One neighbouring family seemed to spend its entire Sunday walking back and forth between their place of worship and their house-cum-chicken-run at the bottom of a very deep battle-axe block. Sunday schools and youth fellowships flourished. The School of Arts in the shopping centre represented the secular arm of this firmly entrenched tradition: it provided a venue for various Lodges and Orders, into one of which I was briefly inducted as a teenage aspirant, in a ceremony that bore some resemblance to an amateur performance of
The Magic Flute
.
    To us outsiders, all this appeared homogeneous and harmonious in its