Family Services

If there is one set of societal “facts” today which seem to be firmly established, they relate to families. From my own clear recollections, now going back nearly ninety years, we don’t “do” families half as well as we used to.

Decay in the central firmness of families imposes horrendous costs: some are monetary—billions of dollars in taxes to finance “social services”, many of which might more realistically be called social swindles. Other costs are paid through the disappearance of much social amenity from our day-to-day lives: trains no longer safe to travel on; the horrible table manners of teenagers; the need to don galoshes to negotiate vomit-deep pavements outside juvenile “venues”. (You will find, if you look, that many contributions to these foetid flows of filth are regularly supplied by truly sophisticated little girls of thirteen.)

Late last September the Australian carried a story which perfectly depicts both the evil and the absurdity of our present-day manners. Harkaway is a tiny, idyllic rural precinct close to the edge of Melbourne. The Harkaway Community Hall is (for country Victoria) a very old building. Its traditional timber construction has been lovingly restored and maintained by truly public-spirited residents.

Such simple structures in country communities do much to preserve a living thread of continuity: even an isolated old pub that still pulls a friendly beer; an enduring ancient school house, built to shelter a sterling old “one-teacher” bush school; a simple sculptured memorial to troops who fell in some long-ago war.

Halls like the one at Harkaway make it possible for the social rites to be celebrated locally—weddings, engagements, christenings, funeral services. But the hall trustees have now decided to refuse future bookings for eighteen- and twenty-one-year-old birthday parties. Fed up with the all-too-frequent “next morning” state of befoulment and vandalisation, they’ve called a halt, and good on ’em. But what can we say about that now-ageing generation of failed families and feeble parents who launched upon civil society their spawn of late-adolescent louts?

I have been told that certain of Harkaway’s sulky and disappointed party-goers now contemplate proceedings under the anti-discrimination laws. In this pear-shaped world of “progressive” views and rampant political correctness which we now inhabit, this may not be just a joke: think of Andrew Bolt!

In my boyhood, a “family” meant simply a mother and a father, married to each other, and living under one roof with their offspring. A family was a fortress against the worst that fate could hurl against any member of it. Too simple? How would we have handled today’s more exotic couplings (and triplings) of good mates of various sexes, with actual parentage not only a matter of conjecture, but sometimes due to the helpful interposition of a test-tube and a surgeon’s delicate fingers?

When I was growing up, if trouble struck a family, first recourse was to the family’s own extended resources; it was certainly not an appeal to some vast bureaucratic taxpayer-funded government apparatus of “social services”, which barely existed. Our most ambitious effort in such directions was made in the cruellest years of the Great Depression, when “the dole” was offered to men who were close to the point of starvation. Public works projects were started to create “relief employment”. (How many Melburnians or tourists driving today along the splendid scenic Yarra Boulevard reflect that its grand embankments and sheer cuttings were made by the picks and shovels and the calloused hands of “the unemployed”, working for a few shillings a day?)

But the vast bulk of the real relief work was every day being shouldered quietly by families themselves. True help rallied round from grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins and in-laws. It carried with it the warmth of personal understanding and the attachment of accepted family obligation. How much of those do you get from Centrelink, even if you get a cheque?

I was born in 1923, in the front bedroom of our little house; it stood (indeed it still stands) in Glen Iris, then a just-developing lower-middle-class eastern suburb of Melbourne. My father was a lowly-paid accounts clerk in what we would now call a “global” oil company. He had served in the First World War, and retained a small scrap of minor celebrity as a former League footballer—a strong six-footer. Mother, small but resolute, left her secretarial job to be a full-time mum. They made a sterling pair, and indeed our little house was a fortress against the worst the world could do. Funds were very tight indeed. Some weeks Dad could afford one bottle of beer—other weeks, none. They could just manage the monthly repayments to the State Savings Bank on the house mortgage. But—what the hell! Dad might get promotion; the Depression couldn’t go on for ever—could it?

Disaster struck when I turned thirteen. Dad—and there never was a better one—died of cancer. Leave aside the desolation of grief and loss: our house now had no income at all.

This is what the family did: two unmarried aunts who lived nearby swiftly made their house a sort of auxiliary “drop in” home for us kids. An uncle—who had himself a family of daughters to feed—at once made my mother a very small weekly cash allowance to tide her over while she went back to business college to brush up her shorthand and typing. Then she got herself re-established in a clerical job in town—no small feat in itself during the Depression. The allowance she spent largely on part-time housekeeping help from a good old lady who was very kind to my brothers and me. Every source of extra income was squeezed. Mum and Dad had cultivated a large garden patch of lily-of -the-valley: every Melbourne Cup time I used to pick the blossoms, and sell them for a penny a stalk to the local florists for corsages.

I suppose it’s natural that a lost little boy should recall in particular the kindnesses of his uncles. They were my father-substitutes and role models for proper male behaviour. One was a commercial traveller for a softgoods firm in Flinders Lane. Every school holidays he would take me in the car with him as he called on his country customers. I saw Victoria from Ballarat and Bendigo to Orbost in the far east of Gippsland. It thrilled me enormously to dine and sleep in good (not “flash”) country hotels, and to be taken after dinner into the then sacred “commercial” room, where a fire burned, and the knights of the road took their post-prandial ports.

Another uncle used to take us all away every summer for several weeks seaside holiday. He “kept an eye” on me as adolescence relentlessly advanced, and I remember even today some of his tactful advice. At the extended family Christmas dinner, when I was fifteen, my mother (always strict about “alcohol”) insisted that I should have only the conspicuously infantile raspberry vinegar. Some cousins no older than me were allowed a small beer. A quiet word from Uncle Lou to Mum made her relent. A trifle, no doubt, but important to my pride at the time. The next year I got my first job—a junior clerk in the Victorian public service. Uncle Lou thought my prospects might be helped by the gravity imparted by a hat. (“Get ahead! Get a hat!”) I hadn’t the money to buy one, so he had a “pork pie” of his own cleaned and re-blocked for me, and coached me in how to wear it with style.

Would even the best Department of Social Services in the world have done any of that for me?