When I have the chance to come to Australia from the States I always like to check out what's on television. The last few weeks I've been watching the recent Annabel Crabb-helmed history-meets-foodie reality show, Back in Time for Dinner on ABC iView.
Over seven episodes the Sydney-based Ferrone family is asked to live, eat and dress the style and customs of the past, from the 1950s through the 2000s. Crabb is always value added as far as I'm concerned; whether she's interviewing politicians while they make her tea or talking to Leigh Sales about books and The Americans, she brings a keen mind wedded to a merry subversiveness.
As for watching some suburban family struggle over the lack of a microwave or wifi, well, it all seems very much the purview of the privileged. You want a reality check, try asking your family to live seven weeks with the refugees on Nauru.
But amid the frothy wonder of it all, as the family experiences moments like the 1956 Olympics — they listen to Dawn Fraser's race on the radio with Fraser herself — or the advent of push-button telephones (which the children have to be taught how to use), come unexpected moments of pain and dislocation.
Mother of the family Carol knew she probably was going to be stuck in the kitchen for at least part of the 1950s, but in fact her entire existence is spent in the home, cooking and cleaning using devices that remind one more of medieval dentistry than modern housewares. It's actually quite brutal on her. Meanwhile husband Peter is also frustrated, as he's forced to eat by himself, the kids having been fed earlier and Carol with hours of cleaning still to do.
In the 1960s daughter Sienna is told it's time to leave school and get a job, as at age 15 girls' schooling was considered unnecessary; time to find a man. And oldest son Julian is reduced to silence as he struggles to understand the idea that young men his age were forced to go to war on the basis of a random lottery.
Again and again, the Ferrones' struggles lead us to the same question: How could people have ever thought this was a good idea? How could it be, within living memory, that women could be afforded so little independence? That people would slather themselves — or worse, their children — with oil and lie in the sun all day? That school canteens were filled with junk food?
"Again and again, the Ferrones' struggles lead us to the same question: How could people have ever thought this was a good idea? But what has really changed?"
But what has really changed? Sifting through the daily news these days, similar questions arise. How is it that workplaces even to today have allowed women to be harassed, made to feel unsafe and far worse? Equally, those familiar with the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church might wonder, how could any decent person have thought moving abusive priests could solve the problem, or that sexual contact with a minor could be 'gotten over'?
The immediate instinct is to write the persons of the past off as deeply deficient, if not monsters. And yet, to take up the latter example, these days I so often hear Catholics confiding how things used to be, that you just never questioned Father or Bishop, or that sometimes you saw things, knew things but couldn't quite get your head around them. We use the term 'blind spot', but more than an area we couldn't see, it was something so foreign, so outside our frameworks that we couldn't comprehend them. Our imaginations had no place for what we found before us.
In Chicago where I grew up abuse was not an unknown phenomenon in the 1980s. But our references were oblique and clouded; we knew, but we didn't really know, and our parents were much the same. Now the paradigms have shifted so dramatically that the past seems in some ways like an entirely different world, and thank goodness. But to conclude that we now have the full picture is dangerous.
Yes, the Church might now understand matters more clearly, proceed more justly. But the broader insight is, stigmatism is a part of the human condition. We are always in the process of seeing and becoming.
In the earliest decades covered by Back in Time for Dinner, the three children are more or less constantly together. In a moment alone, unaware of the implications of what she's saying, ten year old Olivia confides to the camera about how happy she is; in their normal present-day lives her older siblings never do anything with her.
As the television eventually shows up in their house, then the computer, then mobile phones, it's fascinating and sad to watch the family structure start to fray at the edges. And much of the time no one even seems to notice.
Jim McDermott is an American Jesuit and screenwriter.