Changing Tracks: Reg and Melbourne grow up together – On Drive with Rafael Epstein

Source:ABC

These are particularly personal tales charting a turning point in someone’s life with a song to match. There’s no hard or fast topic for the stories featured on Changing Tracks, just “a song that was playing when your life changed tracks.” Send in yours.

This week’s Changing Track is for Reg:

During the time of the White Australia Policy, some Not-Quite-White people came to Australia. I was one of them. No one here knows much about us Burgher people of Ceylon (a country now known as Sri Lanka). We are half-castes, descended from Dutch, German, English and Portugese who mixed with the local Sinhalese women. After doing one of those genealogy tests, I can tell you that I am about 35% Singhalese, 45% Dutch and the remaining 20% is English, Irish, German, Portuguese and Jewish.

I like to think that we burghers are the people of the future – a little bit of this and a little bit of that – because in a hundred years or so, everyone will be like us. We had European ancestry, British style schooling and are not particularly “dark” skinned (bear with me here, this nonsense was considered very important in the 50s & 60s) – so, many burghers were allowed to migrate to Australia during the strict White Australia period.

So I came here on a boat as a 10 year old with my family. I mainly remember the sea sickness and endless sea, the anticipation. The horrendous cold of Melbourne hit me like a sledgehammer – used to the tropics, until summer arrived I felt that I would never be warm again.

For a small ethnic group, the burghers have produced several local identities – Keith Potger of the Seekers, a recent Victorian Governor Professor David De Kretser, and then there’s Jamie Durie, cricketer Ashton Agar and Holly Hughes, the lovely wife of Dave Hughes, who each have one burgher parent.

But we burghers, with our scrambled ethnic roots, still confuse people. In Australia we tend to think of people as belonging to one culture, only one ethnic background. It’s as if you cannot be mixed – you have to identify with one or the other. We still like to put people in boxes.

Melbourne was so very “white” back in the sixties, and so very small and parochial in its world view. Everywhere we went, people stopped, stared, treated us like idiots, asked us if we could speak English (it was our only language – we’d never spoken anything else). Everywhere I went, people looked at me closely. “Are you Greek?” they said. “No? You must be Italian then.” No one could work us out. We didn’t fit into the established migrant tribes, as these were understood in Melbourne then.

I’m much older now, but in some ways it hasn’t changed. The burgher woman on the ‘Real Housewives of Melbourne’ was subject to such racism (“she’s a real mongrel of a woman”, one of the women said on air). My wife felt ill and had to stop watching.

As time went on, I settled in and I was so glad to be here. From the seventies onwards, more migrants arrived from all over the world, and people stopped staring at us. I embraced the sixties, the ideas, the protests and counterculture. I grew my hair, went to university, made friends, fell in love, marched up Swanston Street with a banner, protesting against the Vietnam war. I lost the accent I had as a child.

I became thoroughly enmeshed in Australian life – as did most of the burghers we knew. Having so many different cultures in our bones makes us – I think – less likely to hold on to old traditions, and more likely to embrace and adopt the traditions of the countries we migrate to.

There is one late 60’s track that has become my life’s soundtrack. For me, it represents journeys, the rhythm of life, great change, hope, embracing the future – it’s all there. Now that I am nearly 70, when I remember that time – coming to Australia, slowly becoming part of this country, growing up in the extraordinary 1960’s – I always hear this track playing in my head. 

Everyone has heard the tune, and every half-decent guitarist has given it a shot. You may not know the title, or have heard of the musician – but as soon as it starts you will know it. 

It’s a mighty piece of music.

And Reg’s Changing Track is ‘Classical Gas’ by Mason Williams