More Musings...
                                                 

Ten years ago I was in the warm embrace of a comfortable high profile career as a well-paid senior public servant—a world of personal assistants, business class, Qantas Club, and government cars. I participated in international conferences, sat on advisory bodies to the Prime Minister, worked side by side with like-minded people and I told myself that I was an agency for social change. My trophy cupboard was filled with interdepartmental committees and media occasions.

Ah! I hear you say, but was she happy?

Was I really an agent for change or was my predominantly male environment changing me into something else? Was I drifting away from the people and causes I once belonged to?  These questions troubled me.

After nine years I walked away. Becoming "one of the boys" was only just one problem. I recognised that I was becoming part of a conservative government agenda where human rights issues were more rhetorical than real, where harmony was emphasised, but never understood, where people were told to be nice to each other and racism was denied.

Adding to my woes my irreverent tongue was always getting me into trouble and so—to cut a long story short—one fine day in 1994, I reinvented myself as a writer—where I could say what I wanted (within the laws of libel and defamation) and not have to live with the consequences.

But now, when I look back at the 80s and early 90s, I realise that these were really the "good times", when we were a far more generous society and less mean-spirited than we are today.  Where we hadn't yet learnt to put men, women and—worst of all—children, out of sight and out of mind behind the razor wire in remote desert camps for the crime of seeking asylum from countries we were planning to either one day bomb or invade. What I saw as rock bottom in 1992 was only a promise of things to come. But this I didn’t know that at the time and so I moved on with my life.

The business of reinventing myself as a writer did not represent an abrupt change—I can see that now—it was more a work in progress. I started out as a primary school teacher when there were few choices for women, and for a young woman from a lower middle class background this was the only escape route that I could see.  I stayed with teaching for about nineteen years. They were good years i.e. moving into high school teaching and adult migrant education. I spent nine years in Germany teaching before returning to Australia and finding myself on the dole, which lasted until I found six hours of teaching a week.

I then worked on a contract basis as a research officer at Curtin University and became more and more immersed in ethnic politics and multiculturalism. In search of tenure I became a public servant and remained loyal to the world of immigrants and ethnic affairs for ten years.

The transition from teacher to public servant was not an easy one. At my job interview the Minister for Ethnic Affair’s ( Victoria ) political advisor observed that I had no management experience. This was in 1983. My response won me the job, but could just as easily have had me thrown out of the room—ministerial advisors like to wield their power.

But back to my interview.... "No management experience?" said I.  Good heavens!  Nineteen years of teaching, designing curriculum, liaising with parents, controlling testosterone pumped-up adolescents, counselling the suicidal, the pregnant, examining, administering, working under stress, prioritising, assessing, communicating -- "I have an immense range of management skills-- all forged in fire."  I got the job.

If I were ever to write a memoir—which believe me—I will never do, I would lock myself away, tap into my stream of consciousness and pursue my inner monologue by looking for early traces of dissatisfaction with my lot.  And if I was a writer of fiction and couldn’t find any—why I’d invent them!

But a writer of non-fiction is not at liberty to invent events and characters; your interpretations may be subjective—in fact you soon learn how to harness subjectivity—it’s part of the power of the narrative.

Even as a young girl, I told myself that I would never define myself through my relationships with men: not for me the tragedy of an Anna Karenina nor the transitory defiance of an Elizabeth Bennett in the Austen tradition.  I would be my own central character in a world of my own making. If that sounds narcissistic, you’re probably right but it’s a trait common to many writers.

And yet ironically the person most responsible for my transition into a radical feminist determined to reinvent herself and remove herself from what she saw as her "Destiny"—before she became the object of an "arranged marriage" for instance—the person I must thank for this was a man: it was my Muslim father who showed his affection through constant teasing. "Two girls equal one boy" he loved to say just to enrage me and make me yell back at the top of my six-year-old lungs. "No! Two boys equal one girl! Two boys equal one girl!" And of course I spent the rest of my life proving just that to my father.  

Yes, I grew up listening to Punjabi folktales, Qur’anic homilies about how girls should or shouldn’t behave and how boys were the centre of the universe. By the time I’d reached adolescence I stopped screaming but never gave up protesting.  Now I understand how spoilt I was and how my father allowed me enormous latitude.  

My poor father was a failed alchemist, for he could never turn me his base metal of a daughter into the silver and gold of his dreams. After another of our circular religious debates he could be heard muttering to himself, "this is what you get for bringing them up in this country." The lament of most first generation immigrant fathers whether Italian, Turkish, Vietnamese, Greek, Lebanese or Pakistani.  

Like many rebellious daughters I was determined to interpret the world’s narratives for myself and not through the eyes of men—fathers, brothers, husbands, mullahs; I would escape the politics of control and if my parents did not see education as a worthwhile investment for me, then I would steal my education a piece at a time. I was decades ahead of "Educating Rita."

So in spite of being urged to be an obedient, devout little girl, I grew up in Australia admiring disobedient, dissenting women—women I could identify with who had metaphorically broken their bangles and stepped outside the circles of custom and tradition which encircled their lives like the bangles they wore on their wrists.  

Like many writers I have a weakness for metaphors and I often use the metaphor of the bangle.  Many of you will be familiar with the bazaars and stalls in the Subcontinent where hundreds of glass bangles of every imaginable colour are on display. They dazzle, they distract and they bind. In my books I tell of a world where women break their bangles and step into a new freedom where they have the space and the resources to reinvent themselves.