I came from a culture which couldn’t have been more different than the one into which I moved.
The problems were cultural and historical, though, rather than to do with class status. I was perpetually misread on these bases.
To be a child of a colony isn’t what people thought it was. There had been a propaganda war fought against us “whites”, so that we appeared to be people who lounged around swimming pools and ordered our black staff to bring us cocktails, whilst we did nothing.
In actual fact, most of us came from practical classes of Britain — our parents were soldiers or farmers, or in very rare cases, managers of companies. There was no intellectual or artistic strata to our colonial culture. Our society was very simple, indeed.
Also, although my family did have a swimming pool, we lived very frugally. On Saturday at lunch, my father would open one bottle of beer for himself. We would eat a family sized packet of potato chips, which we would only just afford, and share a family sized coca-cola between us. People don’t like to hear that this was all the “luxury” we could afford, because it raises ire and sounds like apologetics. “What about all the millions of black people you personally oppressed? What could they afford?” is the common comeback. Such an angry and resentful attitude shuts down conversation, making it impossible to proceed.
When we came to Australia, in early 1984, we sold everything to pay for the trip. We had to start again in every possible sense — psychologically, economically and socially. I didn’t have any new clothes for about five years, although I wasn’t culturally wise enough to realise I needed them. Of course, I had absolutely no social pretensions. I noticed that people were extremely unwilling to help me find my feet, and I later understood this was because I was a ‘colonial’, and was expected to pay for my sins.
I kind of became a little crazy. I turned to fundamentalist Christianity as a way of trying to inject some heart and soul into my new circumstances. This didn’t help at all, as I later discovered so much of the doctrine I’d been learning was intellectually contradictory.
I had come from a conservative to right wing culture and I ought to have stayed in that kind of cultural context where I would have been treated more sympathetically, but as I had no idea that I was being actively discriminated against, and that I was effectively cooking my own goose by doing so, I gravitated towards liberal intellectual and artistic contexts.
As time went by, I developed chronic fatigue syndrome, as a result of not being able to make sense of it all.
I also developed paranoia about being misread.
Nowadays, I’ve rectified all that by only associating with the sorts of people who will not be inclined to misread me. I find Japanese people wonderfully normal, black African people from my original culture generally very tolerable, and I associate with kick-boxers, who don’t care for cultural pretensions.
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