With Jerusalem and Australian Embassies very much in the news late last year, I was reminded of the spring of 1960 when I successfully applied for my first ever passport in preparation for a daring expedition into the northern hemisphere in the following year.
Like any given change of decades, much was happening in the wider world that we were planning to enter: during 1961, in Berlin, Checkpoint Charlie at Friedrichstrasse was closed and the wall was built; in Israel, Eichmann was tried and convicted; Khrushchev and Kennedy met at Versailles amid rising world tensions; Stalin was removed from his tomb in Red Square leaving Lenin to tough it out alone into eternity; and Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space.
The extent to which the atmosphere, constraints and assumptions of the 1950s bled into, so to speak, the first years of the 60s is worth pausing to reflect on. The received wisdom is, of course, that the 50s in Melbourne were famously dull. This is by and large true, though constantly mitigated by the testimony of people whose personal experience of those years was exciting.
I am one of those. As the first person in my entire known family ever to have gone to a university, and coming from a close, colourful, rather riotous but intellectually narrow working class background, I was overwhelmed by the rush of liveliness and creativity that swamped me when I first walked into Melbourne University in 1954. Admittedly, I was green, wide-eyed and entirely without confidence so I was to be impressed by almost anything and anybody.
As always, the great issues of the day — the Twentieth Party Congress, the Hungarian uprising, the Suez Crisis — came to us exotically from elsewhere, another hemisphere, almost another reality. And it is true that 1950s Melbourne was a place of such imperturbable smugness that most of these events and dilemmas seemed to bounce off the city and the suburbs.
The comfortable anglocentric, middle class, faintly puritan, faintly callous arrogance projected by Prime Minister Menzies when he wasn't giving dire warnings of communist threat, were ingredients of Melbourne's suffocating self-satisfaction throughout the 1950s and at the start of the 60s. But things were changing, restlessness was becoming palpable. If you could have taken an aerial view of the youthful exodus at the turn of the decade, it would have looked like the rabbit plague: not just local patches, but whole