Romulus, My Father

  Raimond Gaita was born in Germany in 1946. He is a professorial fellow in the Melbourne Law School and the Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne, and professor emeritus of moral philosophy at King’s College, London.

  OTHER BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR

  Value and Understanding (ed.)

  Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception

  A Common Humanity: Thinking About Love & Truth & Justice

  The Philosopher's Dog

  Why the War Was Wrong (ed.)

  ROMULUS,

  MY

  FATHER

  RAIMOND

  GAITA

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William St

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  www.textpublishing.com.au

  Copyright © Raimond Gaita 1998

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by Text Publishing in 1998

  Designed by WH Chong

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Gaita, Raimond, 1946- .

  Romulus, my father / Raimond Gaita.

  ISBN 9781876485177

  Gaita, Romulus. Gaita, Raimond, 1946- . Gaita family.

  Immigrants—Victoria—Biography. Yugoslavs—Victoria—

  Biography. Political refugees—Psychology.

  304.8940497092

  Ebook ISBN: 9781921921162

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  When my father died I gave the eulogy at his funeral. Afterwards, I showed it to my friends, Barry Oakley and Robert Manne, to whom I had often spoken about him. They urged me to publish it, which I agreed to do, at first with misgivings, in Quadrant, then edited by Robert. The response to its publication persuaded me to try to write a book about my father and especially about our life together at Frogmore, near Baringhup. Barry and Robert encouraged me in this and their appreciative responses to the first draft, together with those of other friends, notably Anne Manne and Christopher Cordner, made me understand better what I was doing.

  I am also grateful, for different reasons, to Peter Coghlan, Denis Grundy, Bernard Holiday, Neil Mikkelsen, Susan Moore, Tony Skillen and Konrad Winkler. Margaret Connolly, my agent, was the first stranger to read the manuscript and her enthusiasm for it gave me heart. Michael Heyward, my publisher, gave very helpful advice and thought of the title when all my efforts to do so had failed.

  To all these people I am very grateful, but to no one so much as my wife, Yael.

  Palm House, Maldon, October 1997

  For Katie and Eva

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  To protect their identities, I have changed

  the names of several people in this book.

  He stood behind the front door of his grandfather’s house, with a pitchfork held tightly in both hands, knowing that he would probably kill his uncle if he forced his way into the room. To ensure that he would not do so he jumped through the window just before his uncle broke down the door, and he fled, to return only for a month five years later.

  It was the last of many times that his habitually drunken uncle had driven my father to desperate defences. Not long before, in order to protect his grandfather from a beating, my father threatened to shoot his uncle with two revolvers he had just repaired and which were hidden in his overcoat pockets. On the night he fled, he stayed with his mother, with whom he lived only occasionally, and in the morning set out across Yugoslavia to find work. He was thirteen years old.

  Born in 1922 in Markovac, a village in a Romanian-speaking part of Yugoslavia, my father, Romulus Gaita, always considered himself a Romanian. His father died when he was an infant. When his mother took another man, he lived sometimes with her but mostly with his grandparents. He knew only poverty, having one pair of shoes each year which he wore in winter, and not much in the way of clothing.

  From an early age he worked hard, as did other children, before and after school, helping with the harvest and caring for animals. Meat, sugar, white or brown bread made of good flour were luxuries; sweets or ice-creams were enjoyed once or twice a year. Vegetables and fruits were freshly available only in season; thereafter they were stored and eaten over the remainder of the year. Childhood as we now know it, a space apart from the adult world, a life of its own, did not exist in that part of the world at that time. As soon as they were able to, children contributed to the maintenance of their families and to the welfare of the village.

  Learning—book and other kinds—came easily to my father. He enjoyed school, finishing his set work quickly and then reading storybooks which he held under his desk. When he was caught doing this, he was often beaten with a stick over his body, head and face— wherever it landed. Bruised though he was by these beatings, his enthusiasm for reading under the desk was undiminished, and all his life he loved to hear and to tell a good story. Many were Bible stories and their memory nourished his deeply religious spirit throughout his life. As did church music. His grandfather had a good voice and sang in the local choir; he also had a fine writing hand in which he slowly wrote church and municipal records. His pious attitude to these tasks instilled in my father an instinctive reverence for the solemnity of church ritual and artefacts, even when he later became suspicious of institutional religion and prone to anti-clericalism.

  Primary school lasted only four years after which few children in villages went on to secondary school unless they were sufficiently gifted to win a scholarship. His teacher encouraged my father to sit the scholarship examinations, assuring him of success; an inefficient postal service, however, prevented his application from arriving on time. He cried bitterly, not because of lost employment prospects, but because his love of learning would never be fulfilled.

  When he fled from home in 1935, my father made his way to a village about one hundred and fifty kilometres away and there sought out a blacksmith to ask if he would engage him as an apprentice. He was granted a trial period and proved himself more than satisfactory. It is difficult now to believe how hard he worked during his three-year apprenticeship. Work started for him at 1 a.m. and continued with breaks only for meals until approximately 4 p.m. when he had often to tend to his master’s animals. He had nothing we now call free time because almost anything he might do after his duties were completed would deny him much needed sleep.

  Primitive lodgings came with the apprenticeship, as did poor and sometimes inedible food, cabbage or potato soup, mostly water, or silver beet with sand in it so thick that it formed a mud paste at the bottom of the bowl. To earn money, for my father was not paid throughout the entire apprenticeship, he used the skills he had acquired in his village to weave baskets, make brooms and repair revolvers, the last being the most lucrative. With this money he bought clothes—most importantly, a warm coat for the harsh winters.

  My father was not merely skilled, he was a man of practical genius, and during this time his genius flourished because of his joy in having a hammer and steel in his hands. Then he developed the distinctive rhythm of his hammering—tap tap bang, tap tap bang— although of course the sound was that of a hammer ringing on the anvil. I guess the taps gave him time to assess what to do and to gauge his accuracy. He was able to make almost anything to the most exacting standards, and his work was unsurpassed in quality and speed. Because he worked so fast he was able to indulge his love of reading, not under the desk now, but in the lavatory where he would so
metimes read for more than an hour. When his boss complained, my father worked furiously, doing in an afternoon the work it normally took two men a full day to complete. As neither his master nor the other blacksmiths could dispute this proof of his superior workmanship, he was permitted his indulgence.

  When my father finished his apprenticeship at the age of seventeen his master implored him to stay, offering his daughter in marriage and the blacksmith shop if he did, but my father was anxious to move on. He went to Germany where he believed he could best further his talents and practise his trade in the most rewarding circumstances.

  When war broke out my father was conscripted into an army of foreign workers who lived for the most part in labour camps and whose skills were exploited in factories geared for war production. Sent in 1944 to Dortmund in the industrialised and heavily bombed Ruhr Valley, he met and fell in love with my mother, Christine Anna Dorr. She was only sixteen years old and he was twenty-two.

  Slightly shorter than average, she had black hair, a good figure, an open face with intense dark eyes and a musical voice in which she spoke an educated High German. Men found her attractive beyond her physical features because of the way she combined vivacity and intense, haunted sadness. She was well educated and was studying chemistry when she met my father. Fond of the theatre, she read Shakespeare in translation and also liked opera. Despite his love of reading, and feel for church ritual and music, my father cared for none of these and mistook my mother’s enjoyment of them for snobbishness, a fault he detested even then, but indulged in her because he loved her.

  He had grown into a handsome man. He was dark but not tall, standing at 175 centimetres. A little embarrassed by his dark complexion, he called himself a gipsy and later, in Australia, an Aborigine. His face was as open as his character. Everybody noticed his eyes, almond-shaped, hazel and intense. One was drawn to them straightaway, although they made many people uneasy. He brushed his blue-black hair, which receded from his temples, straight back. His nose was slightly askew, the result of having been broken when a horse kicked him in his early blacksmithing days. As a young man, his features were soft and his mouth sensual. His body was that of a blacksmith, hard and muscular. He often sang, with a good crooning voice which could be detected even when he spoke.

  At the time my parents met, my father was involved in a minor way in the black market. This enabled him to purchase bread, milk, cigarettes and occasionally clothes, all of which were strictly rationed. I suspect that, as much as anything, this comparative wealth made him acceptable to my mother’s very German middleclass parents, who would have looked down on the foreigner with his Slavic features and have been anxious about his romance with their daughter. They had reason to be anxious, for if my mother and father had been discovered together by the Gestapo they would almost certainly have been shot, victims of Nazi racial policy.

  Therefore they rendezvoused secretly, often in the cemetery where, my father believed, I was conceived. No doubt the danger and his black marketing activities, his occasional consequent imprisonment and beatings by the Gestapo, made the relationship seem especially exotic to an intense, romantic and rebellious girl of sixteen. During the later war years when Dortmund was devastated by bombing, the intoxication that comes from the violent destruction of the symbols of order and continuity inspired a passionately anarchic way of living which the pressures of responsibility could not touch.

  Their relationship was intense and fraught. She was prone to tempestuous jealousy. Years later I overheard my father remind her that he did not marry her because he loved her. Despite the fact that she responded by saying that she knew this, other things he said later contradicted it. At the time, he felt strongly enough to have her name tattooed on his forearm and to try to shoot himself when she left him, early in their relationship. He pointed the gun to the side of his head and pressed the trigger, but the bullet grazed only his cheek bone and part of his nose. Such was the roller coaster of wild emotion at the time.You could run for your life to a shelter to escape the falling bombs during the night, take a revolver to your head the following day, and the next night run in fear of your life again.

  At the end of the war, now married and with a baby, all that changed, especially for my mother. After she gave birth to me, she showed signs of an illness that was to become increasingly severe in the coming decade. She seemed incapable of taking care of me, ignoring my elementary needs of feeding and bathing. My grandmother told the story that just before she gave birth to my mother she dreamed of Jesus who appeared to her bloody and showing the wounds of the crucifixion. When she awoke, she said to her husband, ‘This child I am carrying will suffer.’ Later she told the story to my mother, and it is hard to believe that it did not affect the way she brought her up. It may account for the haunted intensity of my mother’s eyes even at a young age, as though she feared she was doomed.

  My mother’s neglect of me was more than compensated for by her family. Her sister Maria, although she was almost two years younger than my mother, bathed and often fed me. My grandparents doted on me, joyful in their unexpected gift of a grandchild. I lived with them as much as with my parents. Times were hard, with severe shortages of everything. In the winter of 1946, when I was six months old, people often stayed indoors for there was little food to buy and no fuel to burn. My father would walk up to eighty kilometres for a litre of milk or for a small sack of beans or potatoes. Exhausted by his efforts to get food for us and because he denied himself so that I would have more, he fainted from hunger on more than one occasion. Ersatz coffee became a symbol of that time in Germany, but ersatz liver sausage, made of pulped wood, is a symbol closer to the reality.

  Eventually my father found the work he always wanted to do, making fine iron gates, stairways, balustrades, and smaller furniture such as beautiful, beaten-iron ashtrays supporting stylised birds. He looked forward to a rewarding future in post-war Germany, but my mother, restless and now stricken with asthma, looked elsewhere. At first to America, but when she was unable to get there as quickly as she wanted she settled for Australia, where she was told her asthma would improve. My father did not want to go, but the severity of her asthma convinced him that they must find somewhere better for her health.

  In 1950, when I was four, they emigrated on an assisted passage on the migrant ship SS Hersey. On the eve of their leaving a woman read my father’s future in her cards. Throughout his life he was disturbed by her prophecy and often referred to it. She said he was destined for a journey across a large water, that he would lose his wife and suffer greatly.

  We arrived at Port Melbourne in April 1950 and were immediately transferred to Bonegilla, a migrant reception and clearing camp in north-eastern Victoria. Migrants who came on assisted passages were required to work for two years wherever they were sent, on jobs of the government’s choosing. My father was sent to Baringhup in central Victoria to work on the construction of Cairn Curran, a reservoir being built to dam the Loddon River. My mother and I stayed in Bonegilla.

  We could not go with him to Cairn Curran because the camp to which he was sent was for immigrant men only. There was an adjacent family camp, but only Australians could live in it.

  Baringhup is a village on the Loddon River eleven kilometres from Maldon to the east and twenty-four kilometres from Maryborough to the west. It was the site of large Aboriginal camps as late as the 1860s, and a local historian claims, improbably, that its name is the corruption of an Aboriginal name which means ‘river running uphill’. It is surrounded by low, rounded hills rising on the one side to Mount Tarrengower above Maldon, falling on the other side in gentle folds towards the volcanic plains of Moolort, then rising again at Carisbrook, past Maryborough to the Pyrenees. The hills are mostly bare of trees, but covered on the Maldon side by granite boulders, some almost ten metres high, as rounded as the hills on which they lie.

  Baringhup lies almost exactly on the divide between the granite country to the east and the volcanic country to the west.
The camp was on a small rise which hid the river. It flowed on the other side through plains into a small area surrounded by two hills. This became the main catchment area, the site of the main dam wall. On a hill immediately to the east of the camp is the old Baringhup cemetery, with graves going back to the 1870s, bearing the names of men and women whose families had farmed the land for over a century.

  In its heyday in the late 1800s Baringhup boasted a hundred children at the school, a free lending library and many fine bluestone buildings. Its fairs were host to the produce—wines, cheeses, jams and fruits—of many localities near and far.The Baringhup Agricultural Show was a notable show in what was then the colony of Victoria. Baringhup cheeses won many prizes.

  By 1950 Baringhup was reduced to a village of approximately ten houses, a school, a Presbyterian church, and the Loddon Hotel, which was a general store and post office converted from the old Cobb & Co hotel where coach travellers rested between Maryborough and Melbourne during the gold rush. The camp swelled the numbers in the school, but there was little for the newcomers to do when they were not working. A large hall housed a market on Saturday afternoon, screened movies on Saturday evening and occasionally hosted dances.

  Whenever they could arrange transport, the men of the camp sought out the attractions of Maldon, Maryborough or Castlemaine. Keith Laity and his wife Myra ran a taxi service from Maldon, and befriended many of the immigrants, including my father. Young, pretty and classically Australian though she was, Myra was never afraid of the exuberant young foreigners who filled her taxi and who asked especially for ‘the lady chauffeur’. No one looked for trouble. Everyone was joyful that the war and hard times were over.

  Though the landscape is one of rare beauty, to a European or English eye it seems desolate, and even after more than forty years my father could not become reconciled to it. He longed for the generous and soft European foliage, but the eucalypts of Baringhup, scraggy except for the noble red gums on the river bank, seemed symbols of deprivation and barrenness. In this he was typical of many of the immigrants whose eyes looked directly to the foliage and always turned away offended. Even the wonderful summer smell of eucalyptus attracted them only because it promised useful oil.