If you don’t have the keys to cross the threshold into the system, how do you enter?

Helping hand: crossing the threshold into the system isn’t easy

So, who gets to enter the professional class in this country? Can you imagine the loneliness of that path in a family that doesn’t know a way into the otherworld of educated privilege? Doesn’t know that existence. If you come from a house of books, from a family of the tertiary educated, then perhaps you can’t imagine what it’s like.

Radio National broadcaster Beverley Wang ruminated about this question over a series of tweets. “(That Feeling When) I figure out that a journalist is offspring of a prominent journalist, married to another prominent journalist, and close friends with another family of high-profile journalists and I marvel at how any of us without those connections even manage to get a job in this business.” She continued, “All that to say, to everyone who’s the first generation of their family to pursue a career with none of those privileges in place, be proud. We’re champions. The odds are massively stacked against us. Yet we’re here.” She concluded, beautifully, “…slyly building our own destinies.”

Slyly, yes, because the headwinds are strong; there can be forces of suspicion and denigration around you; familial traditions sending you another way, as well as ignorance. There can be blindness from employers at the way you look and sound. And there can be a certain lack of ambition because, well, why would you? That world isn’t for the likes of you, surely.

Growing up as a kid in suburban Wollongong, I never knew ABC Radio existed. We listened to the local commercial music station and only watched ABC TV for Countdown. In our street of raggle-taggle kids there was one family that was different, because they were considered “smart”. They kept to themselves. Had vast shelves of books. We had Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs, a few by Judith Krantz. The smart people were seen as different. Weirdos. They had a piano in their house and a foreign-sounding surname. We were conditioned to think they were odd, beneath us, daggy. What a great Australian ugliness that was.

A few things helped me cross the divide into their world. A restless, thinking mother who secured elocution lessons and applied for a scholarship for me at an elite Catholic school. I was mortified at her choice of referee for the application: the guy who owned the local bottle shop. Because we didn’t know anyone, socially, in the professional class. No doctor, no lawyer, no one from that rarefied world. As I was leaving school no one told me about uni scholarships, or the college system. I had no idea colleges existed, no idea you could get scholarships to them. When kids around me went to schoolies I was out in the world, working, because that’s what you did in my world. Worked. No one from my family had been to a graduation ceremony before my own.

Bri Lee, in her book Who Gets to be Smart, says education is a “rare and expensive passport”, a privilege kept for the few. Many Australians are still denied that “rare and expensive passport” to privilege and power. I think about that when I pass an elite private school while out driving. It’s undergoing major renovations and has put up hoarding with pictures of its smartly dressed pupils doing their elite private school thing.

I find the choice of photos deeply unsettling. Not one face of diversity among them. I know Asian boys who go to that school, but they’re not showcased to the passing parade. And so the question is: who made the choice not to include a single one of them? Was it deliberate? To speak to a certain type of person, a code?

If you don’t have the keys to cross the threshold into the system, how do you enter? It never ceases to thrill me when I look at Australians like Wang who make it across the divide. The wonder of them. How much harder they had to work to get where they are – because the headwinds can be so very strong.