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tasmanian_bibliophile's review
5.0
‘Memories of an Australian girlhood.’
Kathleen Fitzpatrick (1905-1990) first published this account of her childhood and growing up in Melbourne in 1983. Her memories cover a twenty year period, from 1908 until 1928. Ms Fitzpatrick’s memories are centred on the ‘solid bluestone foundations’ of her grandparent’s home, an Italianate mansion known as ‘Hughenden’, the centre of family activities. Her grandfather, John Buxton, was the founder of a Melbourne real estate firm.
‘We were at liberty to ruin our teeth by taking whole handfuls of loaf sugar from an earthenware crock.’
Ms Fitzpatrick writes of a time which some of us remember through the perspective of grandparents or great grandparents. Australia was still a very new country in 1908, and Melbourne was the home of the federal government until Canberra was established – the Australian Parliament sat in Melbourne until 1927. Ms Fitzpatrick does not write of these events though, she writes of her world. Of her mother she wrote:
‘She felt that unless you could do a thing superlatively well there was no point in adding to the ugliness of the world by doing it imperfectly.’
But its ‘Hughenden’ and its occupants (her maternal grandparents, aunts and uncles) that occupies much of the first part of her memories. It provides a solid centre in contrast to the more peripatetic life she, her siblings and parents lived. At least until her grandfather’s death:
‘And then, one day, he dies. I could hardly believe the news. ‘Hughenden’ had fallen’, the solid bluestone foundations had betrayed us, we were a homeless scattered people. ‘Hughenden’ as an institution really came to an end when Grandpa died.’
Ms Fitzpatrick writes of her education at the hands of nuns, of her experiences of boarding school, and of some of the challenges. Education was largely rote learning, which is good for acquiring and retaining some facts but not ideal in other ways. I wonder whether convents have changed much since.
‘Convents, in my day, were not child-oriented institutions: they were dedicated Ad Marjorum Dei Gloriam.’
But beyond school, Kathleen Fitzpatrick progressed to the University of Melbourne. University education was far less common in those days, especially for females.
‘The concept of a right to university education did not exist in my time because it did not correspond to the facts of life as we knew it.’
But then, like so many other members of the middle-class, who still referred to Britain as ‘home’ (even though many had never been there), Kathleen Fitzpatrick her mother and siblings travelled to Europe by ship (the Nestor) to spend a couple of years. In the period after the Great War, the roles of females were becoming less fixed. And on the Nestor, the Captain had the following notice installed in the smoking room because of the changing clientele:
‘Ladies who use the smoking-room are requested to behave like gentlemen.’
The world has changed quite a lot since then!
Kathleen Fitzpatrick studied at Oxford before returning to Australia and her later career as an academic. She observed, of her time in Britain, that:
‘Most English people, in those days, still liked having an Empire, but they did not like its inhabitants much and had little or no curiosity about the places on which the sun never set.’
Kathleen Fitzpatrick was 78 years old when this book was first published. It’s a beautifully written and perceptive account of a childhood in times long past. I recognise in her account echoes of the time in which my own grandparents lived; a time of optimism associated with the establishment of Australia; of the destruction of the Great War; of religious sectarianism; and of a rapidly changing society.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
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