Australia always seemed to be a far-away country, filled with endless possibilities. It’s much grittier than America: Australia is hard and sun-baked, threatening and on a grand scale, whereas America to me represented a kind of soft entertainment. After falling in love with Heather, it became clear that Australia was a country of impressive people, different from the English; tougher, unadorned and somehow — as Heather indicated — more honest. Some Australians think of England as the home country, and that they belong to England, but many other Australians feel that England has exploited Australia long enough and the time has come to pull the plug. Heather is definitely in that category — the ‘blessed Commonwealth’ was not at all the way she saw things. I realised that Australia could be quite a ‘bolshy’ place, a nation of people with unusual attitudes, possibly slightly uncouth. They had a different sheen from the English: Australians don’t bother with superficial politeness. They dislike ‘bullshit’. They provide more honest social encounters, although you can find the most absurd pretensions in the suburbs.
I made my first trip to Australia with Heather to meet her parents in 1980. She has a sister, Sandra, who had disappeared from the family. This was a source of sadness for Heather. There had been a rift: Sandra had been going to get married, but, at the last minute, she called it off because she’d fallen in love with somebody else. Heather remembered Sandra throwing the wedding cake out of the car window; it rolled down the road in front of them like an iced spare tyre. There was a huge row, Sandra didn’t want to be in touch with her family, and so she left the continent and went to live in California. I was curious to see where Heather came from, who her people were.
My first greeting on landing in Australia was when the immigration clerk said to me, painfully slowly, ‘Can… you… read?’ I looked at her, and thought, ‘What the fuck is this all about?’ I said, ‘Y-e-s,’ quite slowly. She had in her hand some documents and, pointing to one of them, she said again, ‘Can you read?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied, again slowly. ‘Can you read this?’ I looked at the document and said, ‘Yes!’ Then I got a bit irritated and said, ‘Look here, is there a problem? I’ve actually got a degree in English from Cambridge University!’ The woman took a step back and said, ‘Ahh, sorry, miss. You haven’t signed your form. I thought you was an ethnic.’ That was my welcome to Australia. And of course, she was right, I AM an ‘ethnic’.
We went to stay with Heather’s parents, in the entirely invented city of Canberra. It had been designed for civil servants to bring up their children in safety and comfort, by an American architect, Walter Burley Griffin. Heather’s father, Traill, was the retired professor of mathematics at the military college of Duntroon (Australia’s Sandhurst), a pleasant, cultivated man; her mother, Beatrice, always called Bea, was known as a ‘party girl’. I didn’t know then that she was an alcoholic. I saw no signs of it, but her habit had caused havoc in the family. They had no idea about our relationship. I had told my parents that I was a lesbian, but Heather’s parents didn’t have a clue — and this visit was definitely not a ‘coming out’ occasion. Heather had impressed on me that that was not to happen. Indeed, when her mother did find out, some years later, she was furious; she felt I’d seduced her daughter and taken her away. Consequently, relations between her and me were icy for a very long time. To Heather’s mother and father, therefore, on this first visit to Australia, I was just Heather’s ‘friend’. I had my own room, and they were terribly nice to me.
I loved Australia. I felt at home immediately — I didn’t have to think about it at all. The first thing that strikes you is the quality of the light: more blinding than you can imagine. It simply astonishes you. It’s so bright that most people’s eyes are crinkly from continually squinting against the glare of the sun. And then there’s the mind-boggling vastness of the sky, bigger than any sky I’d ever seen.
After our stay in Canberra, we spent some time in Sydney with friends of Heather’s. Sydney was glorious then; it hadn’t become too crowded, dirty and busy like it is now. Recently, I was trying to cross the Harbour Bridge from the Eastern Suburbs to the North Shore. The psychological divide is similar to that in London between north and south. There are pockets of Jews right across Sydney, and I’ve got relatives on both sides of the bridge. My cousin, Ann Sarzin, a renowned cook, had invited me for supper on the North Shore; I was desperate to eat her famous fried fish but I couldn’t get across the bridge. I waited in the traffic jam for two and half hours, and then I went home in despair. After that, I fell out of love with Sydney.
Back when I was young, Australia felt full of promise, excitement and confidence. It was all the positive things that you could imagine. The people looked beautiful; all the young Australians were physically gorgeous, blond and blue-eyed and slender and athletic. And Sydney was gay-friendly; that’s an understatement. I’d never seen such outrageous campery, such glittering, gorgeous drag queens shopping in the streets around Kings Cross.
In Australia, I know that Man is young, and it is Nature that’s old and powerful. You feel the power of the land in the red rocks, you marvel at the huge, twisted trees. When you’re in Europe, by contrast, you feel that Man is ancient and has created timeless works of art and built great churches and cities, that Man has been around for a long time. Not in Australia; it’s another dimension of existence, and it’s had a profound effect on me.
I get angry now when I see unchecked racism in the current right-wing government. They are following the sad trends in the rest of the world. The socialist legacies of Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke are being whittled away by greed and corruption.
I returned to Australia in 1984, when I brought Gertrude Stein and a Companion to the Sydney Festival and I realised this was a place I wanted to know much better.
In 1993, I bought a two-bedroomed, Federation semi in Bondi, a sweet little bungalow with pressed tin ceilings and a mantel over the fireplace, and then in 1998, after I worked on Babe, Heather and I and her sister, Sandra, built our dream home in Robertson, NSW, where the film was made. It’s a country town, unspoiled and genuinely rural. We clubbed our finances together and hired an architect, Mark Jones.
Yarrawa Hill is our dream home. It’s built on steel poles, with glass instead of bricks, and the material much used in Australia, Colorbond, which is painted corrugated steel and looks terrific. We furnished it with antique Indonesian furniture and had the best fun going to Indonesia and finding old things in warehouses and getting them shipped over. Heather and I have gone back and forth — until the 2019 pandemic locked us in and curtailed all movement.
On Australia Day in 2013, I became an Australian citizen. I stood, with about a hundred other people by the lake in Canberra, and heard my (then) prime minister — Julia Gillard — say, ‘This is your new country. You will never want another. Welcome to citizenship. Welcome to Australia. Welcome home.’ I blew a grateful kiss at the PM. It was a day of supreme happiness and real joy. It also made me realise how little I’d seen of the real Australia.
I wanted to travel outside my little bubble of people who think like me and sound like me and so, in 2019, as an overweight, unfit, but extremely gung-ho seventy-eight-year-old, I embarked on a 10,000km, two-month journey across the country to make a documentary, something I love doing.