Today is the 75th anniversary of my parents’ wedding in Eastwood, NSW. They had been evacuated from Hong Kong in the middle of the previous year, just months before Pearl Harbour and the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong and the Christmas Day surrender.
Dad was 21 and Mum still 19 when they left with her mother, Lucia and her de facto husband Robert Forrest who was called Robin in the family.
It’s a suitable opportunity to think about marriage and my family.
Right now Australia is in the midst of a national poll of people’s opinion about same sex marriage. In spite of consistent public polling revealing a strong majority in favour the conservative government has declined from enabling the change. They have preferred to spend over $100 million on a poll that they have already declared will not necessarily compel any change. As predicted it has unleashed a load of ugly hate. Here in Sydney there’s discussion of how the conservative Sydney diocese of the Anglican Church, while it has spent some thousands of dollars to campaign against domestic violence, has managed to allocate one million dollars to the vote No campaign!
In fact we’re past the ‘midst’ of the campaign. Two-thirds of us had sent in our votes weeks ago but the local Taliban are still keen to pay for the two letters N & O to appear written in the sky. As one Twitterer said they’re clearly targeting the group of people who get their guidance from the sky!
As I consider my grandmother’s situation and what her thoughts might have been 75 years ago today, I recall she had separated from my grandfather in Macau some years before. She had moved over to Hong Kong to live with Robin who was quite senior in the civil service. She was still married to my grandfather and Robin had been married as a young graduate of Aberdeen University and there was also apparently a second wife who was living in Melbourne.
My father’s father meanwhile seems to have married my father’s mother, at least that’s what his birth certificate implies, but I’ve not been able to find their marriage certificate yet. Dad’s father appears to have left the colony while he was quite young. He also appears to have married (again?) in London in 1930 and then died in 1936.
It’s hard to get a solid sense of the nature of that relationship and what it might have meant to all involved. The strongest element I take from it is my grandmother Isabel’s energetic entrepreneurial spirit. She seems like the embodiment of the main character in Austin Coates novel City of Broken Promises set in Macau, but that’s probably my over-heated imagination.
By coincidence, earlier today I happened across an article on the South China Morning Post website in their series of features about old Hong Kong which talked about how long and slow the path was to legislating away the practice of concubinage within the Chinese community. Another example of how the state stumbles around regulating the personal lives, freedoms and rights of its subjects.
But of more interest to me is the nature of the relationships between the sojourning Europeans and the local young women, and how these liaisons were viewed by all the communities, European, Chinese and Eurasian.
My parents were still so young when they married. Dad was about to turn 25 and mum was not yet 21. It’s hard to imagine the pressures of the time from each other as well as family and a war. And they would still have been coming to terms with living and working in Australia where they must have seemed a little exotic and unusual even in Sydney.
Mum seems to have felt more comfortable with the bohemian set around the national art school (NAS) in Darlinghurst. Dad had enlisted and was training and serving in New Guinea and later to start at the language school at the Coogee Bay Hotel learning Japanese to be an interpreter interrogating Japanese prisoners of war.
Sylvia went on to feel family life and raising children had robbed her of the opportunity to develop her artistic skills. She also would say she married below her emotional level! It must have been a source of irritation to see the successes of her NAS contemporaries who she saw as her equals artistically.
Dad meanwhile sometimes felt family life and settling in Australia had denied him opportunities his fellow language students were able to take advantage of as part of the post-war occupation of Japan.
But they did choose the date because it would be auspicious.
Update: Wednesday 15 November 2017 – the Same-Sex Marriage poll reveals 61.6% of Australians nationally voted Yes and that in all states a majority also voted yes. But it also revealed some fierce variation. While the Yes vote was high in inner city electorates – the Prime Minister’s electorate Wentworth (80.8% Yes), where I live in Grayndler (79.9% Yes) and highest in the region Sydney City (83.7%) – it was a different story in the west and north west – Blaxland was the highest No vote in the country at 73.9%, with Lakemba (69.9%) and McMahon (64.9%) as the top three No voting electorates in the nation! Early analysis equates electorates with high No votes with high rates of declared religious affiliation at census time and larger proportion of people born in “non-English speaking countries”. But some of the Bible-belt electorates failed to deliver this same level of No votes with Mitchell where Hillsong is based delivering a notch over 50% similar to Bennelong. Even arch No campaigner Tony Abbott’s seat Warringah delivered 75% Yes! – tenth highest in the country. I suspect this will not silence him however!