Jewish Settlement in Australia – The Aunt’s Mirrors

Settlers with Jewish religious or cultural backgrounds have been part of Terra Australis since the First Fleet landed in 1788. As early as 1844 the first synagogue was formed in York Street, Sydney using rented space. Since that time, Jewish Australians have become a significant part of multicultural Australia, developing institutions and contributing in ordinary and extraordinary ways. In The Aunt’s Mirrors, Dr Damien Freeman draws together disparate strands to build a picture of his extended family that goes back to the mid 1850s when the first of these ancestors began arriving in Victoria and New South Wales. For Emeritus Professor Suzanne Rutland OAM, with her ground-breaking work Edge of the Diaspora: Two Centuries of Jewish Settlement in Australia, the history of Jewish settlement in Australia is a vast canvas. On Tuesday 24 April 2018, to gather together some of the threads of this great story, Damien Freeman and Suzanne Rutland addressed The Sydney Institute.

JEWISH SETTLEMENT IN AUSTRALIA – THE AUNT’S MIRRORS

DAMIEN FREEMAN

It’s good to be back at The Sydney Institute.  A couple of weeks ago, I brought Jesse Norman MP to speak here, during his few days here, which were very busy and full of engagements.  Gerard Henderson had organised for us to have dinner at the Union Club after Jesse’s talk here.  It had been a long day for all of us.  As we were walking up the stairs, Gerard said to me, “Of course, in the good old days, when Jews and Catholics weren’t allowed in the Union Club, you and I could have gone home early.”

This remark came back to me when I was thinking about Anne’s invitation to speak here tonight about my memoir, The Aunt’s Mirrors, because that book was launched at the Union Club.

At the end of the launch, a great thespian, Terry Clarke, remarked that it would have been unimaginable, once upon a time, to think that the memoir of a Jewish family would be launched in the Union Club, let alone that it would be launched by an Aborigine.

Noel Pearson kindly agreed to launch the book as a kind of thank-you for the work I had been doing to support the movement for constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians.  That work resulted in my editing The Forgotten People, a book which Julian Leeser and Shireen Morris discussed at The Sydney Institute.  My interest in this topic stemmed from a critique of one of my first books, Roddy’s Folly.

I discussed this at The Sydney Institute, and I specifically focused on Roddy Meagher’s approach to political correctness and his remarks about Aborigines in my speech to the Institute.  Roddy’s Folly was launched by Tony Abbott, and the last time I spoke at the Institute, it was with Tony, to discuss my most recent book, Abbott’s Right: The conservative tradition from Menzies to Abbott.  It was thinking about both Abbott’s attitude to Indigenous affairs and Meagher’s that led me into this work.  And it perhaps should not be surprising that it was Catholics whose ruminations on Indigenous dispossession and discrimination should resonate with a Jew – indeed, there is no shortage of Jewish lawyers who have busied themselves with Aboriginal land rights and constitutional recognition.

Dyson Heydon quoted from Ludwig Windthorst in his inaugural PM Glynn Lecture on Religion, Law and Public Life last year, and Jesse Norman repeated this quote in his second PM Glynn Lecture this year, “Anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the intellectuals.”  It is worth dwelling on that thought.

There’s much that’s good about the world that we live in, but not everything gets better.  Anti-Semitism still colours much of how Jews respond to the world in which they find themselves.  It is endemic to their story.  It connects them with the plight of Aborigines and Catholics, each in their own way.  Yet it is also curious that it is not a significant feature at all of the story that unfolds in The Aunt’s Mirrors.

The Aunt’s Mirrors is a family memoir.  I gave it the subtitle “Family experience and meaningfulness”.  The idea came to me when I was housesitting for my aunt.  She had suggested that I look at the family history material that she and my great-aunt had collated over the years.

I had written a biography of Roddy Meagher, and as I looked through this material, it occurred to me that my own family had a story that was worth telling.  So I started putting it together.  As I did so, I was also captivated by my aunt’s home in Cammeray.  It was a small workman’s cottage that she had renovated in an idiosyncratic way, the most notable feature of which was the eclectic collection of mirrors, one of which dominated each of the rooms in the house.

So I settled on a device which saw each of the chapters open with a description of one of my aunt’s mirrors, and then moved on from there to discuss one of the branches of my maternal family and the connections that I saw between this family and the objects in the house.  The various branches of this family made their way to Australia in the nineteen century, mostly from that part of what is now Poland, but which was then under the domination of Russia.  They were Jews who came to Australia and who remained committed to the faith of their fathers for six generations in Australia.

My book is a memoir not a history.  I am quite conscious that my aunt and my great-aunt were actively engaged in family history, whereas I was reflecting on their activities.  I was interested in what made the lives of the people they researched meaningful, and indeed why they thought it was meaningful to research them.  It seemed to me that this involved a commitment to a shared form of life.

Recently, Paul Kelly wrote in the Australian about the selfism that has taken over Australia.  That is not to say that everyone is selfish, but people are increasingly self-absorbed – which can lead to selfishness.  More importantly, it also leads to people becoming convinced that what makes their lives meaningful is to be found within themselves.  This book is about an earlier Australia; an Australia in which selfism had not yet taken hold, and one in which the meaningfulness of many ordinary people’s lives came from the shared form of life in which they participated.  For most people, this meant family life.  This idea of a shared form of life is perhaps captured by the German word Geist, which suggests a spirit in which people participate, and which manifests itself through the institutions of a tradition.

Sometime after the book was published, my publisher sent me a box of remaindered copies of The Aunt’s Mirrors.  So when I started at Australian Catholic University’s public policy think-tank last year, I thought, “Why waste good money on Christmas cards, when you have remaindered books?”  I sent copies of the book in lieu of Christmas cards to various people including Anne and Gerard Henderson.  Anne was kind enough to write back commenting on the book after she read it.  So I thought that tonight I’d like to say something about four themes that seem to have caught Anne’s attention:

• The way I bring to life a story from fragments
• The Jewish contribution to Australia
• The comparison with the Edmund de Waal’s famous Hare with Amber Eyes
• The entrepreneurial spirit of this family

A story of fragments

Anne wrote to me, “I was engrossed at your managing to bring to life such a family and its story from the fragments you had.”  I think it would have been fair to say that it was not obvious from the fragments that there was much of a story to tell.  When my aunt returned from her holiday to find the first draft of the memoir that I had put together from the fragments I had found in a box on the top shelf of her wardrobe, I think she would have been surprised that they had much of a story to tell.  Ours was not a family that boasted about its forebears.  Yet it had preserved fragments, and these fragments of memory told a story about what mattered to these people.  It was not some grand narrative, but it was an expression of value.  The fragments were witness to the values of ordinary people – the scraps of memory that they thought were important to remember; the bits and pieces they couldn’t bear to part with.

Jewish contribution to Australia

The Jews have given Australia Sir Isaac Isaacs and Sir John Monash.  We are yet to give Australia a prime minister – but I turn my mind fondly to the Member for Berowra and hope springs eternal.  My family’s contribution to Australia is not of that order.  But I think Anne is right to suggest that, “the Jewish European contribution to Australian genes is a marvel”.  It is a marvel because of the contribution that it made to all aspects of society, and it did so without undermining the meaningfulness of the shared Jewish experience.  So you find that these were people who were well known and respected within their local communities, despite their difference – and this in much more sectarian times, when there was little in the way of appreciation of difference.

The Hare with Amber Eyes – “albeit without the grand connections”

The epigraph to my book is taken from The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal.  He writes, “Objects have always been carried, sold, bartered, stolen, retrieved and lost.  People have always given gifts.  It is how you tell their stories that matters.”

There’s no doubt that de Waal is excellent at telling the story of objects.  His book is structured around the story of a set of netsuke that have been owned by his family for generations.  He is a potter, and he is at his best when he is describing the tactile qualities of these netsuke.  I admire his ability at telling the story of objects, and in some sense that is the inspiration for my book.  But there is also a real difference.  His strike me very much as personal stories: the significance that an object has for an individual.  My book is very much about shared stories: the significance that an object has for a family.  Central to The Aunt’s Mirrors is the idea that the objects in the story reveal the shared values of a family, which give expression to shared forms of meaningfulness.

There is, however, a much more obvious difference between my book and his.  De Waal rejoices in his family’s connection with Proust, in particular, and I can’t say that I blame him.  As my publisher, Veronica Sumegi, said, when comparing the prospects of my book with his, “We can’t pretend that nineteenth-century Grafton is turn-of-the-century Vienna.”  It is true that this book is about out-of-the-way places that did not have any significant effect on the course of human history.  Anne was kind enough to suggest that my memoir reminded her “in an Australian way – of other memoirs of family like” The Hare With The Amber Eyes “albeit without the grand connections which of course is the Australian part!”  It’s true that a memoir lacking in such grand connections is unlikely to sell as well as de Waal’s, even if it is written as beautifully.  But it is true that the whole point of the book is to capture something about the meaningfulness of ordinary lives, and if having done so makes it all the more Australian, I’m glad about that.

Entrepreneurial spirit

It is notable that in every generation the people in this family felt most comfortable running small businesses.  They were dealers in jewels, curios, shmatas, and cardboard boxes.  They were tailors, but never professionals.  They had little formal education, and my mother was the first in her family to take a university degree.  With the notable exception of Samuel Lasker, who rose up through the ranks of the Department of Education, their success, such as it was, lay in their commercial ventures.  My grandfather, in particular, went from being little more than a rag-and-bone man who collected used cardboard boxes for resale after the War to running a plant that manufactured corrugated cardboard and employed over 100 people.  He enjoyed considerable success, but what strikes me is that this was success that was very much within the spirit of the family.  It was a family that understood what it meant to set up your own business and to make your own way in life.  As Anne observes, they believed that “to make a living one must create a business of some sort. No public payroll mentality there.”

The meaningfulness of life

These are just a few reflections on the book.  I hope that what I have captured this evening is something of the Geist of these people.  I look forward to hearing what Professor Rutland can tell us about the history of Jews in Australia, both in terms of their contribution to Australian society and their experience in Australia.  What I have tried to capture here is something a bit different.  It is an impression of the meaningfulness of the life of a Jewish family in Australia.  It was a commitment to a shared form of life that was sustained by an entrepreneurial spirit and which found expression in ordinary everyday objects to which the family had a sentimental attachment.  But, first and foremost, these were people who believed that there was a right way for them to live as a family.

The former Chief Rabbi of the Commonwealth of Nations, Lord Sacks of Aldgate, paid a great compliment to Paul Johnson’s History of the Jews, when he said that no gentile historian has ever understood the Jews as well as Johnson does in his book.  Johnson writes, “No people has ever insisted more firmly than the Jews that history has a purpose and humanity a destiny.”

Those words greatly inspire me, and I am proud to think that I belong to such a people.  If I am honest, I will admit that selfism has become the plague of my people in Australia no less than it has the rest of Australian society.

But The Aunt’s Mirrors is a reminder that there is another way of living, and that it flourished in Australia for well over a century, and that we owe it a great debt because it was the spirit of the pioneer generations.  It is a reminder that there is another way of living in Australia.

In the Book of Deuteronomy, Moses tells the Children of Israel:

It is not in heaven, that thou shouldest say: “Who shall go up for us to heaven, and bring it unto us, and make us to hear it, that we may do it?” Neither is it beyond the sea, that thou shouldest say: “Who shall go over the sea for us, and bring it unto us, and make us to hear it, that we may do it?”  But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.

The people in this book are just ordinary Australians.  They did not go up to heaven in a chariot of fire like Elijah.  Nor do I believe that God revealed Himself to them as he did to Elijah in what the King James Bible so beautifully calls “the still small voice”.  But they came from beyond the sea and they brought something precious with them, and I hope that my memoir might enable us still to hear it – a still small voice of a kind.

They understood that the meaningfulness of our individual lives comes from living together through hard work that enables us to support one another, and through the shared values that imbue individual lives with shared meaning.

The selfism that Paul Kelly has so eloquently spoken of elsewhere is a real threat to the fabric of Australia.  But if we only return to our forebears, we might find that in their mouths and hearts lies a way of life that has enabled people to flourish together in Australia, and which might enable us to do so once again.