We are all exiles, even those who never leave home. So wrote Australian David Malouf, who did indeed leave home for both England and Tuscany. I left home, too, but when, long ago, I first read those words, they were not clear to me. I think they are now, at least in one sense. Exile obviously involves separation, most obviously from home, but the inexorable march of time, with its almost inevitable complications, also separates us from the self we knew and were. The past can be a deeply strange land. Mainly because the passing of time produces change.
Change often hurts or is at least hard to adjust to. Sometimes I quite yearn for a simpler way of doing things, for a period when people’s expectations were more modest, and when the average person was not as materialistic as he/she seems to be now. Thomas Keneally has pointed out that the metaphor for the world has changed: it is no longer Shakespeare’s stage but has become a market. And while once upon a time we could also feel fairly confident about accuracy of information and the slippery concept of truth, now we no longer can.
However, it has to be conceded that we have made progress in some areas, and that some changes are for the better. One of those changes involves freedom from stereotypes such as women and men’s roles. I was fortunate in having parents who were not bound by traditional expectations. Of course I didn’t realise until later how lucky I was: when I asked my mother, decades after the event, why I had been given an Australian Rules football for my third birthday, she replied in matter-of-fact fashion, ‘It was the only thing you wanted, dear.’ (My father had been a nifty little rover in a country league team.)
Other sections of society were not so tolerant. I can well remember being summoned to the Head Teacher’s office along with a classmate. We were in the fifth grade, and in trouble for playing football with the boys; the HT, a fearsome figure who growled at us while peering threateningly over his horn-rimmed glasses, told us precisely what he thought of us, and included the shaming idea that we had disgraced our fathers. My father was a high school teacher, while my mate’s Dad was the Shire President. But time marched on, attitudes changed, and forty years later my Australian niece became an enthusiastic member of an all-women’s university football team.
Way back when I was young, girls were not permitted to run more than 220 yards in competition sprints, and their anatomy was thought not to permit them to do push-ups. But my daughters-in-law are keen on exercise, with the middle one being particularly so: she has just run the Authentic Athens Marathon for at least the fourth time: she has lost count of the number of marathons she has run. This time she finished in just over four hours, a very respectable performance. But it is sobering to recall how recently women have been permitted to run long distances, for it was not until the Seoul Olympics in 1988 that women were permitted to take part in a 10,000 metres event.
When my eldest son was about four, I bought him a doll, but was not prepared for my Greek husband’s reactions, the mildest of which was ‘My son! A doll!’ Never mind that it was an educational sort of doll that was supposed to teach the child about zips, buttons, pockets and shoelaces. I didn’t like to mention the fact that our boy, having started kindergarten, simply loved playing in Dollies’ Corner.
'When I was a new chum in the village, I rebelled against many of the traditional patterns, but now I am aware of more loss. Another exile.'
The Greece that I first visited on holiday was very different from today’s Greece, as the Colonels’ dictatorship had only recently ended, and the traditional way of life was still dominant in what was a largely rural society, so that men and women had their very set roles. When I came to live in the village I was the only woman who could drive a car. She drives like a man, said my mother-in-law. For my still young children the lines in the town’s toy shops were rigidly drawn: dolls for girls and cars and guns for boys. The owner of the biggest toy shop had never heard of Lego.
When Greece became part of Europe in 2000, the inexorable process of change began, and now I worry about my grandchildren with their multitude of toys, their tablets and phones and their wonderment at the fact that my childhood was spent pre-TV.
When I was a new chum in the village, I rebelled against many of the traditional patterns, but now I am aware of more loss. Another exile.
Gillian Bouras is an expatriate Australian writer who has written several books, stories and articles, many of them dealing with her experiences as an Australian woman in Greece.
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