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spent most of the day pottering around in the backyard, tending his ducks and bantams. We did not know and never found out (such was our isolation in this world) whether he ever had an occupation. One of his three children, the eldest, lived at home (mostly in a chenille dressing-gown) because she suffered from ‘nerves’—the consequence of an unfortunate marriage. They were an orderly family. Voices were never raised, speech never strayed beyond the laconic. Their days were largely governed by the wireless:
The Lawsons,
the news (for the war had established habits that proved hard to break), Mo and young Harry, and the Sunday night play.
    One day our landlord knocked on the glazed door of the kitchen, the only entrance to the flat, having been no doubt egged on by his wife, a lady of much stronger personality, to remonstrate with my mother over the defilement of their Protestant paddock, if not home and hearth. For, of course, the Dunnicliffes were Catholics, as were most of the people who lived beyond the bitumen. My mother’s surprise—once she understood what it was all about, after I had been fetched to do a spot of interpreting—was genuine, especially since for Hungarians (at least in our usage) the word ‘Catholic’ was barely if at all distinguished from ‘Christian’. We knew that our landlord and his family were churchgoers, so what could all the fuss be about? At length my mother understood: being Catholic here was not all that different from being Jewish in Mitteleuropa. She accepted, it goes without saying, our landlord’s ultimatum: either I was to tell the Dunnicliffes to stop coming around, or he would have to ask us to find somewhere else to live. As it turned out we did not have to do anything: the word must have travelled down the grapevine, for the Dunnicliffes never came again, and by the time we had gone back to school, they had found someone else to play with.
    I have dragged this anecdote out of a confused array of memories not in order to draw analogies between Australian and European instances of intolerance and prejudice—for this minor comedy of bigotry pales into insignificance beside the brutality of the world we had left—but rather to illustrate how my first tentative and largely unconscious steps towards assimilation inevitably put me off-side with the dominant force in this little society. I had, entirely unwittingly, begun to align myself with people who were not acceptable to the tight proprieties of nonconformist Epping—families, like the Dunnicliffes, of Irish-Catholic ancestry, whose forebears had come to Australia as convicts, as seekers after gold, or else, like us, to escape a desperate and brutal world in search of security and immunity from persecution. The Protestant population of Epping, as of most parts of Australia, prided itself on descent from free settlers. Many years were to pass before it was chic to have convict blood running through your veins. In attempting to penetrate the social fabric of a world where my parents and I were considered outsiders, I had been attracted to a group within that community which was, for very different reasons, also excluded from full membership—they lived, after all, beyond the end of the bitumen.
    In this way the doctrine of assimilation was given the lie (as retrospect clearly tells me) at a very early stage of my halting attempts to become a paid-up member of Australian society. People like us were urged on all sides to try to become good Australians. But one fundamental question was left unasked: what sort of Australians were we to become? What would being a New Australian (the cant phrase of the sixties) entail? Should you attempt to align yourself with Irish-Catholic Australia and its (to the newcomer) largely incomprehensible mythology of ancient wrongs? Or should you try to throw in your lot with what Manning Clark referred to as the Protestant Ascendancy? Should you