Women of Letters, 1st May, 2011

On Sunday afternoon I was honoured to be a guest of the splendid Sunday afternoon soiree, Women of Letters (curated by Michaela McGuire & Marieke Hardy) which celebrates the lost art of letter writing with a show each month based around a theme. You can read more about the show on their website or also via the facebook. 

Sunday's show featured Helen Razer, Christa Hughes, Jess McGuire, Pip Lincolne & myself, & all their tales were funny & sweet & sharp & dirty & enthralling, & such a huge pleasure to hear in the 70's ballroom surrounds of the Thornbury theatre. I can't recommend the show more highly - if you get the chance, do yourself that favour, much like Molly Meldrum would want you to. 

Since it's been so long since I've written & also since you might not have made it along, I thought I might post my letter here, too. The theme of this months' was: The moment I knew it was time to go home, & while I was rather tempted to write about the BBQ punching incident of Comedy Festival 2007, here's what I wrote instead.

 

Hey you,

Sometimes when my parents go away on holidays, I like to borrow their car and take it for a drive back to the home where I grew up. I grew up in Nunawading, which is an Aboriginal word for “home of crime and boredom”. Though Nunawading hasn’t been my home for over fifteen years, it’s still the place that I’ve always returned to by instinct, to remind me where I came from and where I belong. 

When was little, there weren’t any factory outlets in Nunawading, aside from the Chinese grocery where my mum would buy huge bags of rice to make her special Chicken Chinese dish – which entailed chicken, definitely, and rice, which perhaps was meant to account for the Chinese element. Though less distinguishable in their meaning to the dish were the celery and pineapple. As you can imagine, it was an incredibly multi-cultural suburb, where I was honoured to be the only tall, awkward white girl included in the traditional Cambodian dancing demonstration on Australia Day. I can still speak a little bit of Mandarin and Vietnamese – ee, er, sahn, suh, woo, liou, chi, bah, doh-mah, which means one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, motherfucker. The most exciting school excursion we had at primary school was when we were all herded out onto the school oval while a gunman held some people hostage in the nearby commission flats.

In my mind, Nunawading was that kind of working class, egalitarian suburb that Bruce Springsteen would have written about if Bruce Springsteen had grown up in Forrest Hill. We lived there until I was about fifteen years old, when we moved further in to be close to the girls’ school I’d been admitted to. I never felt like I fit in once we moved – amongst all those kids with money and entitlement and that disturbing combination of all the opportunities in the world and all the indifference, as well. I gave raging yet shaky orations about female genital mutilation in the third world to groups of teenage girls who thought feminism was some sort of fungal infection that their mothers had warned them about. I wrote furious treatise about Pauline Hanson and the benefits of multi-culturalism for girls who came from second-generation English, Irish, Scottish parents – quite literally all the colours of the white rainbow. I also wrote a lot of bad poetry about Paul McDermott, but that was the teenage pants-love talking.

I always felt like an outsider – someone who knew what it was to go without, who longed for my old home where no one cared whether I had the right PE shorts or whether I was in the rowing team or which of the boys at the local boys’ school talked to me on ICQ. I hated my parents for sending me there. I felt like the underdog in a room full of bitches. My empathy for people who are unlucky or disadvantaged is still a huge part of my character. But who am I kidding? I’ve always had an incredibly lucky and privileged life. I’m a white middle class girl with a voice and brain and both arms and legs aren’t painted on. But I still identify with the underdog. And even though the teenage years are all about struggling to find who you are, how to exist and what clothes you can wear to look attractive next to your best friend who has a huge rack while you have a chest blank enough to paint art on, even once you finish all those years and think you’ve finally survived and thrived… where are you then? Where does that leave you?

Back in Nuna, I walked to the shops where my brother used to piggyback me around until it was time to go home and watch Magnum P.I, and past a restaurant where I could see three generations of the same family sitting and having (having is the word - they were certainly not ‘enjoying’) a meal. They all had the same facial features, the same disinterested look on those features and they all sat in a row, pulling the same face into the very same face reflected before them. It looked like a really shitty Saturday night out. A bit further up the street, I picked up a newspaper that was littered on the road and put it into a bin. A woman walking past said “Tut, tut, that’s not a recycling bin, is it?” and I said, “Sorry”, though I immediately wished I’d said “Fuck off”, but finding the honest yet civil point between those two phrases is ever the bane of my existence.

I went past the main road where there used to be a tyre shop and a petrol station and now there’s a giant Harvey Norman and a Bunnings and a McDonalds that’s so big that there’s a well-designed garden set up around the drive-through where the kid who set the dental van on fire used to live. I went into the local fish and chip shop and mid-step into the doorway knew just what it was like for those movie stars as they step into a western saloon and music stops. Everyone, literally, the cook, the lady at the counter, the bored guy reading the local paper and the woman with her kid (and the kid) all stopped to stare at me. Perhaps I was hypersensitive, but I felt so out of place. Not as though all my years away had changed me so much that I obviously no longer belonged, not that, but something else. I could finally see why my mother had been so desperate to get me out of there. She very kindly describes me as “a bit eccentric”, and perhaps becoming a bolshy smart-arse political comedian isn’t necessary what she always dreamed of for me. But my mum always fought to give me the opportunities she never had, and the importance of a good education can’t be underplayed in that. She was never allowed to read any books other than the Bible when she was a girl, and she somehow raised a daughter who, sometimes, when the going is good, is able to write for a living.

Driving home again I wondered if this is what being an adult is about; some kind of final “the grass is not greener” realisation? An end of that need to shine a torch down all those paths not taken? The final moment of clarity when you realise that your hometown is much more Bryan Adams than Bruce Springsteen? But I don’t think so. I came away from that last trip to Nunawading strangely free of that old nostalgia. What I truly miss and had been searching for were not just memories or an actual place where I belong, but the sense of belonging that I felt back then. Of feeling at home without ever having to question where I fit – even as a tall, gawky white girl dancing amongst half a dozen delicate, beautiful Cambodians. And I’m still looking for that. I feel as though I’m on that strange part of the path that’s too far between my origin and my destination to feel anywhere but very far away. Bob Dylan is an incredible artist but also an unbearable wanker. But I think he explains it best. He said once, “I was born very far from where I’m supposed to be, and so, I’m on my way home, you know?” Yeah, Bob, I do. Guess I’ll see you out there.  

Love Courteney x