In 1963 I applied for a lectureship at the University of the West Indies. When I got to Jamaica, I found the process of decolonisation was under way. Departments had tipped out non-Jamaicans and even excessively pale Jamaicans – all except Medicine and English.

The University operated as a college of the University of London. Then one day a plane arrived carrying the Queen Mother, who was Chancellor of the University of London, and the Duchess of Athlone, who fulfilled the same office for the University of the West Indies. On a stage raised in the green grounds at Mona, among magenta-flowering bougainvillea and fibro buildings, these two ladies – some sort of cousins, I think – exchanged rolled documents with tassels, establishing the autonomy of the University of the West Indies. They then flew back to England, and the resident Rastafarian who stood over university staff to make copies of his tirades, wrote a splendid satirical description of the ceremony. 

In the Department of English, we taught with booklists that could have been and probably were studied in London. There were interesting responses. I remember middle-class students telling me that Jane Austen described exactly the social problems they had, growing up in Jamaica. Like the kids in my own class growing up in Brisbane, they had never seen a specimen of Wordsworth’s daffodils. They did not understand Dickens at all. They were taught the novelists known as the English moralists for the morals, but the smoky cities of the Industrial Revolution were a closed book to them.

Meanwhile Jamaican novelists were writing on campus, responding to their new-won independence with stories of social farce amid racial friction and colour politics, novels that used Jamaica’s history as they knew it in their bones and skin, the graves of their forbears and the lore of oppression that was carefully told otherwise in the official records. This was about the time of Naipaul’s first couple of novels out of Trinidad. Not a scrap of all this in the course. The Professor was a Shakespearean scholar who looked in vain in the Caribbean for people as graceful, docile and intelligent (that was how he put it) as the Burmese from whom he had been forcibly parted by the events of World War II.

Most distracting of all was the consciousness that, taught by English sons of vicars and other colonial ring-ins like me, the students had to speak and were expected to write the English English of their contemporaries in Russell Square and High Holborn, or rather, perhaps, the BBC. Outside and at home, of course they talked Jamaica Talk with its African syntax, which I could barely understand – the rich idiom which the braver new novelists were using in their dialogue.
The question was constantly present to me: in independent Jamaica, were these Jamaicans being taught as Jamaicans, the new professionals of their country, or were they simply imitation English students? Inevitably, some would go on to research at the University of London. As things stood in the mid-1960s, all the students were tortured with linguistic unreality and literary alienation more severe than if it had been in a foreign language, to keep the best students within reach of whatever might follow the degree they would win 18 degrees from the equator, sweltering in their red St-Andrews style academic gowns.

I was most unreasonably chuffed when one of the tortured told me twenty years later, “We always remembered how you told us we ought to be studying the books of our own writers.” By then, of course, that’s what he was teaching in the same department. All the avuncular English were long gone, though several of them long outlasted me. I decided that Jamaica ought to get on with going where it was going, and departed after two years.

The reason I was very clear about an issue that the Burmese-lover and the vicar’s sons couldn’t see, was that I could have said the same at the University of Queensland. Despite a very forward-thinking prescription of some Australian poetry in part of the first year and an Australian literature Honours course, most students glided through on solid English and a few Americans. Most lecturers would have argued the mother-culture’s excellence as against the colonial third-rate.

Yes, there’s some common cultural ground, our dealings with the imperial powers. If it weren’t so serious, some of it would be worth a belly-laugh. Like the time I walked down from the hotel to the Maidan in Calcutta, and found there the Nigerian poet from our World Poetry Festival group. We watched the scene of half a dozen cricket teams in action for a minute or so, then turning to one another at the same moment said, “That was quite a drive.” The British Empire, with its unpainted shutters hanging crooked, beamed down on two of its step-children.

Nearer 64 than 24, I spent a few months a year for four years teaching an MA class in Chennai, at the University of Madras. The course was cunningly called “Australian Literature: Texts and Contexts”. This didn’t prescribe anything in particular and left the teacher free to work with what the students didn’t know and what books were available in the mouldering tower room overlooking the Madras beach road. I could also decide what, in the context of today’s Australia and the Chennai I was getting acquainted with, I wanted to swap for their ideas.

Over the four years, of course I was able to change the shape of the one-semester course. My Tamil students were taking other courses taught in a post-colonial framework, and I found them very concerned at the conflicts and injustices associated with British settlement and the convict system. But above all, they were interested in Aborigines. Never mind that no responsible ethnologist links Tamils and Aborigines, my students believed that Aborigines were close racial relatives, though ‘primitive’, and felt a duty to them accordingly. If their writing could have righted the wrongs done by brutes and bigots in the colonies and then since federation, they’d have achieved it. I am not at all sure I was able to disabuse them of the idea of white men walking round today with whips, beating Aborigines regularly in the equivalent of cotton-fields; but I was very pleased with their sensitivity about this. I was interested when out of some 70 papers delivered at a conference, 29 were on Aboriginal subjects. Not that the conference papers needed to mirror the proportion of Aboriginal to the national population – about 2% - but they were certainly ignoring fine and meaty oeuvres for very thin slight volumes in some of these papers. Another display of concern – which actually became an excellent opener for a vital and close-argued discussion – was the display they devised with Dr Azagarasan, comparing the lot fo Aborgines with that of Dalits, or untouchables. To be told that the comparison needed much more care and to work out the huge distinctions, was a valuable exercise for them.

In all this they and I were of course finding common ground – what we knew and didn’t know, what we each felt to be vital points, concerning the imperial vehicle that had overrun our countries and in which we still, differently, felt an interest.

I was actually delighted to be able to give them my conviction that in the twentieth century, despite this novelist’s stylistic beauty and that poet’s fineness, the significant writing had been precisely that which went against the grain of comfortable appreciation by stirring the muddied waters of racial friction, and disturbing the self-satisfied appreciation of family life in Australia. In short, that cranky old Xavier Herbertt, the disturbing communist writer Kathleen Susannah Prichard, and Patrick White himself, followed by the underappreciated Thea Astley, were the major white writers because they confronted injutice towards our indigenous people and in their various ways challenged the suburban torpor that passed for an Australian ethos. I felt that my Indian students went to these writers dutifully, not with devotion (except when the reading made them laugh) but I also felt that, via the students, I had reached a conviction myself about relative values.

I suppose common ground insists on the local. Virtual communication may be the saving of our togetherness, but it can be really formed only face to face. Let’s visit. Let’s find the ocean and the coasts opposite, and together explore ocean, the fears of tsunami and disease, the problems of social inequality – and admit our own problems, not put ourselves on a different plane.

Problems extend even to the assemblies whose business is the common ground. PEN Congresses, for instance, have English French and Spanish translation. Not Chinese yet, not Arabic. At home multiculturalism falters, but the SBS translation project has done a lot to retain and hone skills despite obvious underachievement in this field in Australia.

What elements of language that we can share? Isn’t this the biggest separation? How dare we start to find out? Isn’t unthorough possession of another language the richest ground for misunderstanding?

We could look at amazing strokes: Willard Trask’s great anthology of world oral and popular poetry; the Berndts’ translation of Aboriginal song-cycles in Love Songs of Arnhem Land; Les Murray’s imaginative adaptation of seasonal celebration into The Buledelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle. The Asia-Pacific Triennial art exhibition pioneered by the Quenesland Art Gallery. Visual language seeking understandings.

I remember D.H.Lawrence’s essay on Melville’s Moby Dick. Lawrence explaining how necessary it was that a gods for the Pacific should be the supreme sea-creature, and Other – a white whale, SO BIG.

We should know one another’s biggest and best fictions. We could start with one another’s tales and poems about – let’s try nine things, not necessarily in this order:

- home
- food
- owning things
- parents and children
- death
- snaimals
- saints and heroes
- the sea
- dreams

That would be a start.

Judith Rodriguez