1967 is the year I was born.

My parents were both Australian: my father, Peter, from Sydney; my mother, Lesley, from Brisbane. They were raised Catholic, which was a significant factor in much of what they were to become. Peter trained to become a priest. Fortunately for me, he didn't.

From what I can gather, Australia in the 1960s was a pretty appalling place: a kind of dismal provincial English backwater gone mad. It was profoundly conservative and racist. There were brilliant and progressive people there, but they were not the majority.

Some of this -- probably less than is now convenient to imagine -- can be laid at the door of the notorious Australian Prime Minister, Robert Menzies (Ming the Merciless, as he is sometimes known), who was adamant that The Lucky Country should be more English than England itself had ever been, and thus -- in the 1950s and early 1960s -- vastly more English than England would ever be again. Menzies was a key proponent of the White Australia Policy, which attempted to build up the country's caucasian immigrant population and keep out the wogs and the japs. Brits in particular were encouraged to migrate to Australia on very favourable terms, and a great many Ten Pound Poms arrived as a result.

But this was the sixties, and the times they were a-changing, and all sorts of radical ideas were starting to take hold. For a lot of the young people caught up in those changes, getting out of this dreadful, conservative, hillbilly nation probably seemed the only option. I admit I'm projecting here, but I'm pretty sure this was the case for my parents. When my father got the opportunity for post-graduate study in Cambridge, the pair of them, Lesley already pregnant with me, upped sticks and relocated gladly.

I can only imagine that England in 1967 came as something of a shock.

I was born premature, at home. I don't know very much about it, except that I didn't breathe, and was pronounced dead, and my father (probably already fairly lapsed by then, but trained as a priest, remember), not only baptised me in extremis, but also administered the last rites. I have heard that I didn't breathe properly for 45 minutes, but since I am alive now that seems unlikely. It's clear, though, that the whole episode was a bit of a crisis.

As befits a Catholic child, I was provided with godparents (though I have no pictures of either of them). My godmother was a woman called Pat Mackenzie, who still lives in Queensland. My godfather was a man named Colin Higgins, now dead. He was a friend of my father's from his days at the seminary. Seeing as he and my father were both gay, I can't help wondering if they were lovers back then. It's not something I'm about to ask Peter, though, so I'll probably never know.

Colin went off to become a Hollywood screenwriter and director, and I met him only a couple of times that I can remember. People's lives diverge. At the time he must have seemed like someone who would always be around; with Harold and Maude, he was gone. I last saw him in about 1982, when we stayed in his house in Beverly Hills (with a hot-tub built by Harrison Ford, who made a living as a carpenter before Star Wars kicked his acting career into orbit), and watched all his films on the projection TV, and he showed us the soundstage set of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Next I knew, he was dying, and then dead, of AIDS.

Peter eventually moved back to Australia, and has a Brazilian boyfriend half his age. Lesley still lives in London and I had dinner with her tonight. I love these photos partly for the glimpses they afford of my parents' youth, and partly for the glimpses they afford of my own. But mostly because, really, even decades later, after the world has changed so much, they are still recognisably these people. Aren't they great?

And no, I have absolutely no idea what's going on in that first picture :)
Posted by matt at September 8, 2003 02:57 AM