Reminiscing and Resonating with Doctor Blake and A Place to Call Home

I am hooked on the Doctor Blake Mysteries and A Place to Call Home. Both series are set in Australia in the 1950s where I grew up.

One of the Doctor Blake episodes is about a murdered Aussie pop icon. There’s a scene where the doc and his housemates are watching Six O’Clock Rock on the telly, hosted by Johnny O’Keefe. Oh, my! That brought back memories, for our family used to watch him every Saturday night at – you guessed it – six o’clock. The show was similar to Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. In fact, we had a knock off Australian Bandstand, ours hosted by Brian Henderson who also anchored the local news broadcast.

One of the themes of A Place to Call Home is the relationship and friction between Italian immigrants and the English descendant Australian gentry. The rich daughter falls in love with the neighboring Italian farm boy. The discrimination is overt and startling – the name calling “Whop,” “Dago,” – the belief amongst the privileged that it was okay to beat up and belittle at any opportunity. The bigotry in Australia included not only Italians – it spread to other immigrant populations: Poles, Greeks, and my Hungarian compatriots. The blanket slur was “bloody new Australians,” and I, at a young age, fully felt the impact of that ignominious title.

It occurred in 1955, on my first day of kindergarten when some girls cornered me in the schoolyard lifted my skirts, and taunted, “let’s see if bloody new Australians wear underpants like we do.” The horror of that moment was forever etched into my psyche.

The nationalities didn’t mix. My parents didn’t get invited to Australian homes. On occasion, when they asked Aussies over, they didn’t have their invitation reciprocated. Us kids did go to Aussie classmates houses – mostly later when we were older, and usually to birthday parties.

A Place Called Home also delves into the religious divide: between Jews and Christians, but even more subtly between Church of Englanders and Catholics. The Italian family in the series is, of course, Catholic, and the upper-class family is, of course, Church of England. The jabs and put-downs occur in the series at several levels.

My older sister went to a public grade school, and the after-school religious instruction for the Church of Englanders took place in a lovely classroom. My sister, along with the handful of other Catholics slinked to a rundown shack in the corner of the schoolyard.

These are just a smattering of the issues that resonate with my experiences growing up.

I honor how the series deal honestly and sensitively with issues of Asian and Aboriginal racism, sexism, socialism, fascism, homosexuality, and war traumatization.

I am appreciating the beautifully created, produced, directed and acted series.

I am delighting in the nostalgia of the fifties and all things Aussie.

At the same time, I am integrating what I experienced growing up in that complex society. I have confirmation that the discrimination and isolation that I experienced and wrote about in my memoir Lonely Refugee did actually happen. 

It wasn’t a figment of my imagination.

                                 Hungarian roots. Folk dancing in Sydney at age 8.