The Idea of Home Read Online Free

remember is music and singing, and adults whosegreatest pleasure was to get a little bit tipsy and recite their favourite verse. My grandmother favoured a romantic, melodramatic set piece titled ‘Laska’. My Uncle Ed could be relied upon for standards such as ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, or ‘The Man From Snowy River’. My mother could passionately deliver Portia’s mercy speech. I remember, also, my grandmother’s 78s, the arias by Caruso and Callas, huge voices expanding the walls of her little house. I still have a few of the works of Eastern philosophy that spoke so ardently to my grandfather, as well as my grandmother’s well-thumbed and heavily annotated poetry anthologies. ‘Learn a poem,’ my grandmother urged. ‘No one on Earth can ever take it away from you.’ Decades later, when I was briefly jailed in Nigeria, my books confiscated, it was the poems I’d memorised that filled the hours and sustained me. Nan was right: the secret police could not confiscate those.
    I’m not sure where her passion for poetry sprang from. She grew up in rural New South Wales, the daughter of a semiliterate stockman and a self-taught midwife. She had little formal schooling. My grandfather was an immigrant, coming from Holland as a nineteen-year-old and working as a fruit picker until he mastered English. My point is that my grandparents were not outliers, merely average suburban Australians of their era. But despite Dame Leonie’s grim diagnosis, their cultural heartbeat was strong.
    And I don’t remember Patrick White ever making reference to the Sarsaparilla Public Library. Yet the local library stood at the centre of our life. The Saturday pilgrimage there was as much an embedded rite as the Sunday trip to mass. My parents’ bedside tables were always piled high with works of literary fiction. ‘Read this,’ my mother would say, shoving another classic into my hands. Then we’d discuss it. Sometimes, her acid, iconoclastic critiques shocked me, even as they taught me to interrogate everything I read. ‘Nobody on Earth is such a goody-goody as that Marmee,’ she told me dismissively of Louisa May Alcott’s saintly and idealised mother in Little Women . Years later, when I researched the Alcott family formy novel March , Mum’s words came back to me, and shaped the direction that my novel took.
    My mother had little time for a woman like Mrs March, perennially serene, utterly devout, who never raised her voice. A woman who had learned, Alcott tells us, to fold her lips tightly together and leave the room rather than show her anger. My mother was not inclined to leave the room. If someone angered her, she let them know. Neglect of children, cruelty to animals, wanton tree felling, industrial pollution and any kind of racial or religious discrimination called forth her wrath. Raised at a time when bigotry between Catholics and Protestants was the norm, my mother became intensely intolerant of intolerance. And as our neighbourhood filled up with ‘New Australians’ my mother became their staunchest advocate. The sound of her voice, polite yet relentless, was the background noise of my childhood as she worked her will on various bigots, bureaucrats and bosses.
    Much later, when my mother came to visit my home in the United States, she brought her astringent eye and her flawless moral compass with her. On onevisit, she became ill with a bacterial chest infection, an ailment that often plagued her and for which she knew the treatment. But there is nothing simple in the convoluted and crazily expensive private enterprise mess that is the US health care system. The doctor she saw would not prescribe her usual antibiotic without sending her off for a costly chest X-ray. When we returned to his office (two visits, two bills) he confirmed Mum’s self-diagnosis and gave her the prescription she’d asked for, several hundred