As a new migrant, Clive James helped me feel welcome in Australia
As a new arrival to Australia more than 20 years ago, Clive James’ memoirs were the most useful guide James Morrow read in those first years to help him understand who and what his new country was all about.
NSW
Don't miss out on the headlines from NSW. Followed categories will be added to My News.
Being a generally enlightened and welcoming sort of place, we give newcomers to Australia lessons in everything from how to survive being caught in a rip to avoiding drop bears.
But the one thing no one ever tells you about is the Christmas beetles.
So there I was, barely landed in this country from America, sitting in a stinking hot one-room bedsit in the basement underneath the Vinnie’s aged care hostel on Queen Street, Woollahra – talk about worst house, best suburb – in the middle of December when suddenly I saw a black blur smack itself into the wall:
ZzzzzzzZZZZZ-IT! Crack.
The thing collected itself, and tried again.
ZzzzzzzZZZZZ-IT! Crack.
“What …. What the hell was that?”, I asked my then-partner, the Australian nurse I’d followed out to Sydney who lived in the staff accommodation below the old folk’s home.
“Christmas beetle”, she said.
“What … what’s a Christmas beetle?”, I asked.
She looked at me as if I had just started to turn into one myself: Surely everyone has Christmas beetles?
MORE BY OPINION
Calm down, it’s Santa — not Satan
Beware jumping on the Westpac bashwagon
This was nearly 20 years ago, long before the days when you could just look things up on your phone, so I went back to my book, which I had earlier picked at random off her shelves.
It was Clive James’s Unreliable Memoirs, and by some miracle I just happened to be reading his recollections of his sweltering childhood Christmases in Kogarah (which I pronounced in my head as Ko-GAH-rah, not knowing any better, and which I still struggle to say correctly) when the insect entered the stage.
And here was James to explain it all: “The Christmas beetles and the cowboy beetles held jamborees around the street lights, battering themselves against the white enamel reflectors and falling into the street. They lay on their backs with their legs struggling. When you picked them up they pulsed with the frustrated strength of their clenched wing muscles.”
Well, there you go!
From that moment James’ memoirs were not only my constant companion but the most useful guide I read in those first years here to understanding who and what my new country was all about. It was an amazing stroke of luck, like being shipwrecked on a desert island with only a copy of How To Build Ships for company.
But even as literature, I knew I was in the presence of genius.
Here was a guy who could have been broken by impossibly sad childhood story, as he relates in his memoirs. He was raised alone by his mother, his father having spent much of the war in a Japanese POW camp only to die in a plane crash on the way home.
Except that instead of giving into despair (there are moments, of course, particularly for his mother), he gets on with life and studies and adolescent fumblings with everything from sex to religion, all the while observing and describing the world around him.
And the stories were riotously laugh out loud hilarious.
Importantly for this reader, though, through this one work I learned about everything from the emerging post-war multiculturalism to the dunny man (something we definitely did not have in my old Manhattan apartment and which was even harder to explain to me than the Christmas beetle).
And amid descriptions of neighbours marvellous (he eventually “enlists” himself with a raucous local family and goes on all sorts of adventures) and awful (you’ll find all his characters living on your street today, if you look hard enough) he develops a fine moral compass.
Having become used to one terrible jerk’s habit of cruelling tormenting his daughter, he writes, “watching these performances, I woke up early to the reality of human evil. News of mass political atrocity has always saddened me but never come as a surprise.”
While I think James described himself as a man of the left, he was no fan of the excesses of what would today be called the woke progressives who think there’s nothing to learn from the past: One of my favourite works of James’s is his collection, Cultural Amnesia, which deals with characters ranging from Louis Armstrong to Adolf Hitler.
The message is clear: This stuff’s important! Don’t forget about it!
Nor should we forget about Clive James, who in his 80 years packed in and produced more than most of us will in ten lifetimes. His working life was spent as an absolute multiple-threat content machine pumping out poems, prose, and television.
Thanks for the memories. And explaining the Christmas beetle.
ZzzzzzzZZZZZ-IT!