WHAT COMES TO MIND … DEBORAH CONWAY AND LESSONS FROM MOTHERS, KIDS AND BARRIERS
- 4 hours ago
- 5 min read
Here we have the next instalment in What Comes To Mind, an alternative series in the Wind Back Wednesday space, based on the work of the brilliant photographer Stuart Spence.
Each time, he will dig out a photo from his archives going back almost 50 years and challenge me to respond with what comes to mind when I look at that image. It might be serious or ridiculous, personal or historical but it will be inspired by a photo I’ve not seen before, and maybe even unseen by anyone beyond Stuart himself.
This week, Deborah Conway sends me back to class.
_______________________
MUM WAS A TEACHER into her 60s, almost a decade of it in Mauritius then four more decades in Australia. Taught in primary schools in Campsie and Villawood, two parts of Sydney little known to most in the city beyond turning up in the TV news for some miscreant or escapee, or in a history of the Easybeats. Two parts of Sydney which captured and were transformed by the waves of immigrants like us that landed here in the post-war years.
Which war? The always war: the hot one in Europe in the ‘40s, the cold version in the ‘50s and ‘60s, Vietnam and Lebanon and Argentina and Nicaragua and Palestine and Sudan and …. you get the picture.
(“There's a muzzle arm at sunrise, it wants my attention/But my legs are pins and needles and my fingers are slow/Too slow.” Do Re Mi – Warnings Moving Clockwise)
Though English had not been her first language growing up, she spoke it better than a good number of her colleagues and taught several generations of “new Australians”, and almost as many whose histories here went back a bit, how to speak it, write it, think it. Her accent might get her mocked sometimes, she didn’t always get the cultural references, couldn’t get her head around the beer thing, the pet thing or really the sport thing, despite living with a husband and a son for whom sport mattered more than was healthy.
And she dined out for years on stories of turning up for her first parties in the ‘70s perplexed but determined to be the good guest by bringing, as requested, a plate – empty, but the best quality she had, and very clean – then being offended (not that she’d show it) by guests who brought a dish or wine when they were invited to our house for a meal. What, they don’t think we can afford to feed them???
She didn’t necessarily fit in, but she committed.
Part of that was she was in so many ways without real prejudice: as each new lot of migrants arrived she’d just adjust, try to work out how to make this lesson connect, this community connect. Hell, they didn’t even need to be Catholic, though she only ever taught in the Catholic system and brought us up through it, because that wasn’t really the point was it? Kids were kids.
(“A long time ago/When my mother's hands were all my world/She taught me everything there was to know about/Holding and being held.” Deborah Conway – String Of Pearls.)
Mind you, I say she was in many ways without real prejudice, but not all ways: she was after all a creole Mauritian, the mixed-race and much poorer minority population who always thought themselves mostly French with a smattering of British and if really pushed, maybe, just maybe, a bit of African. A tiny bit ok? But nothing else. One way to guarantee a rise in her was to suggest that our family clearly – come on Mum, look at us, look at your siblings and cousins, look at what we’re eating – had a portion of our DNA allocated to the majority, in power and richer, Indian-Mauritian population. Oh boy, how very dare we!
Luckily, because you know I would have tripped in to see her with a huge grin bearing this news, dementia had got her pretty well by the time I did a DNA thing (“It’s only the beginning/But I’ve already gone and lost my mind.” Deborah Conway – It’s Only The Beginning) and found – well, der! – that we had loads of South India and Bantu in our lineage, with a bit of France and Britain and even eastern China. Now that’s a melange you won’t find in Debretts.
Racism, by the way, is such a weird thing in the Mauritian context and particularly galling when expressed by some of our family or older generation friends who had grown up feeling like they had secondary status – though there was always someone you could look down on, I guess.
Like many “coloured” communities from America to India to Brazil, lighter skin denoted a higher status, showing up in education and income and chances of rising up through society. Or rising as far as you could go as creole. Darker skin had you marked, internally as much as externally, and Mum spoke of feeling judged – and maybe even thinking that might be justified – when she married into the lighter-skinned family of my father. Not judged by his immediate family, who were welcoming, but wider circles, higher-ups, others.
But defiant pride also rose up. Often when we were growing up, and almost all the time in the early, voluble, stage of dementia when her childhood was more vivid than anything since, she proudly relayed her well-read father’s educational qualifications and position as a senior teacher who was loved and respected by former students who always called him Monsieur Thomasse. Following in his footsteps to become a teacher was her proudest claim, a path trodden by two more generations after her.
As a teacher, as a mother, as a daughter who saw how poverty rose up threateningly after her father died when she, the fourth of nine children was in her mid-teens, and as someone who knew what it meant to be viewed in a different harsher light because of the actions or prejudices of others, Mum held to a simple ethos: kids were worth saving, no matter which side of a divide. Kids were kids: malleable, impressionable, vulnerable, but not marked already, not irrecoverable, not other.
(“It's been a long time, a long time … A long time since anyone meant what they said.” Deborah Conway – Alive & Brilliant.)
SEE MORE
Find more work by Stuart Spence on Instagram @stuart_spence
READ MORE