STATE LIBRARY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA

J. D. SOMERVILLE ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION

OH 759

Full transcript of an interview with

MERRION FRANCES FOX

on 02 December 2005, 21 Marh 2006

by Rob Linn

for the

EMINENT AUSTRALIANS ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Recording available on CD

Access for research: Unrestricted

Right to photocopy: Copies may be made for research and study

Right to quote or publish: Publication only with written permission from the State Library

2

OH 759 MEM FOX

NOTES TO THE TRANSCRIPT

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J.D. SOMERVILLE ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION, STATE

LIBRARY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA: INTERVIEW NO. OH 759

Interview with Merrion (Mem) Frances Fox conducted by Rob Linn on 2nd

December 2005 and 21st March 2006 for the Eminent Australians Oral History

Project of the National Library and the State Library of South Australia.

DISK 1

This is an interview with Mem Fox who will be speaking with me, Rob Linn, for

the oral history collection conducted by the National Library of Australia. On

behalf of the Director General of the National Library, Mem, I’d like to thank you

for agreeing to participate in this program and interview. Do you understand that

the Library owns copyright in the interview material, but disclosure will be subject

to any disclosure restrictions you impose in completing the form of consent?

I do understand this.

This being so, may we have your permission to make a transcript of this recording

should the Library decide to make one?

Absolutely.

We hope you’ll speak as frankly as possible, knowing that neither the tapes, nor

any transcripts produced from them, will be released without your authority. This

interview is taking place today on Thursday, 29th

September 2005, at Brighton,

South Australia.

Mem, to begin with, you were born in 1946 to Wilfred Gordon McDonald[?]

Partridge and his wife, Nancy. Tell me a little about these two wonderful people.

The longer I live, the more I hear about my parents, the more I realise that they were

even more remarkable than I thought they were. It’s very hard for children to be

objective about their parents – you don’t realise that your parents are anything

special, even if you’re living with giants of people, you don’t realise who they are

really until you leave home and you’re able to look back and be objective. And they

were sensational. My father was a very fierce pacifist, a South Australian who had

come from a family of bohemians, and he met my mother at a Student Christian

ovement convention in the 1940s, I think, and they married after my mother’s first

husband was killed in Papua New Guinea and went as missionaries to Zimbabwe

where they were adored. They were adored.

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My father had the kind of charisma that, you know – I know this won’t mean

anything to future (laughs) listeners, I’m trying to think of a way of saying it: I was

going to say that he had the kind of charisma, as an educator, of Mr Chips1 or the man

in the film, Dead Poets’ Society. But because that won’t mean anything to future

generations, and I know it will be future generations listening to this, let me say that

he had the kind of charisma of a Gandhi, I suppose. It was a little quieter than that,

but he was mesmerising; and yet – sometimes people with charisma have nothing else

but charisma, they’ve only got charisma but they don’t do anything with it – and he

worked tirelessly to educate Africans in Zimbabwe to be teachers between the years

1946 and 1992.

Mem, tell me a little bit about his mother, Amy Morgan Brock – she seems quite a

character.

She was pretty feisty, I think, from everything that I’ve heard. This has not been

verified by me because I haven’t had the chance to verify it, but family lore has it that

she is the only woman in the photograph of the 1911 ALP2 Conference in South

Australia. And so that in itself says something, it’s an amazing piece of information

for me and I’ve hung onto it with pride for a long time. She also was not married to

my grandfather, which was extraordinary for the time, because we’re talking now – I

think my great-aunt was six years older than my father, so she must have been born in

1906 – so we’re talking the very early years of the [twentieth] century. My

grandparents were not married because they felt it was bourgeois and unnecessary

and so on. So she taught Montessori in South Australia as Montessori’s work was

coming through from Italy, so she was amazingly ahead of her time as an educator,

and as far as I know she had schools in Port Augusta, in Port Pirie and also almost on

the block of land that we’re recording this on: just across the road, across the railway

crossing, where the Baptist church now is, she had a ‘dame’ school. And there are

still people alive who went to that dame school and I’ve spoken to some of her now

very elderly pupils, they showed me her handwritten reports: incredibly moving,

really, incredibly moving. So she sounds marvellous.

1 Mr Chips is the main character in the film, Goodbye, Mr Chips, which traces the career of a much-loved

(fictional) schoolmaster in an English boys’ boarding school.

2 ALP – Australian Labor Party.

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She then married a man called Somebody Morgan Brock, and my father used to

call him ‘Pate’, short for pater. So Pate, I think my Dad got on quite well with him.

Pate taught my father things like plumbing, electricity, carpentry. On the mission

there wasn’t a thing that Dad couldn’t do – you know, if drains were blocked he was

able to unblock them; if electricity needed to be done he could do it – he was just

amazing as an all-round person who loved music, loved art, loved literature, loved

politics, loved God obviously, and just incredible person.

Very well-educated, Mem?

Very well-educated. He had been to Scotch and was re-employed by Scotch in South

Australia, Scotch College, the year after he stopped school. So he taught

immediately after he’d finished school because it was the Depression and I think he

must have been without funds – how his mother put him through Scotch in that case I

don’t know, I’ve never quite worked out why he was so short of funds and had to be

employed immediately, but he was. He then went to Adelaide University and the

[Second World] War interrupted his studies, obviously. He did a BA3 over many

years – I don’t know, but I think he must have done it part-time – but he completed

his MA4 in 1946 and I remember him – his telling me that – I’ve just corrected the

‘him’ to ‘his’, by the way, because it’s a gerund – I remember his telling me –

because my Dad’s grammarian brain is in my head saying, ‘Tut, tut, tut, gerund,

gerund.’ I remember his telling me that he typed up his MA in the bathroom of my

great-aunt’s house, (laughter) to get away from me because I was between one and

six months old. And he presented that thesis, which was on the electoral system in

Australia, to Adelaide University before they left for Rhodesia, which is now

Zimbabwe.

He served in the RAAF5 in the War?

Yes, he did, yes. And he was a reluctant flight lieutenant, which is what he was in

the Air Force. He had been a pacifist, a very famous pacifist, and I think that he

realised in the end that his pacifism wasn’t helping anybody; so although he didn’t

3 BA – Bachelor of Arts degree.

4 MA – Master of Arts degree.

5 RAAF – Royal Australian Air Force.

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want to fight, because he felt – and he has inculcated this in me – that fighting

doesn’t get you anywhere, that talking is by far the best thing to do to solve a

problem, because of that pacifism, when he went into the Air Force it was as an

education officer. I’ve seen gorgeous photos of him in uniform so he must have had

to go through military training, he must have. I mean he must have had to do that

kind of thing. But he was really there, I think probably teaching literacy to people

who were putting in – this is a story that he told me – putting in ‘danger’ signs upside

down because they couldn’t read so they didn’t know that it was upside down, so

people must have been deeply illiterate. So I think he was there teaching, in the Air

Force. Weird. I could be wrong.

Quite likely. And, Mem, your mother, Nancy, is also a remarkable person.

Do you know, my mother was flying around Australia in the 1930s. Flying. In the

’30s and ’40s. Because she was the travelling secretary of the Student Christian

Movement and so she’d becoming down in sort of – you know, it wasn’t long-

distance flight then and she’d have to come down in the desert in the middle, between

Western Australia and South Australia and so on. And she met Daisy Bates once on

one of these, coming down. I’ve even forgotten who Daisy Bates is, I’m ashamed to

say, I can’t remember who she is: please don’t look so horrified, Rob. I know she’s

a very, very famous woman in Australia! (laughs) My mother was also the daughter

of a woman, my grandmother, who had been to university, Sydney University, in

1910 which, once again, for women was remarkable. So I come from a long line of

women who have broken the mould, who’ve been different, who’ve stood out,

who’ve been educated, fascinating people. And my mother was at university in

Sydney in the 1930s and was, at one point, taught by Margaret Mead at Sydney

University –

Is that right? Okay, yes, yes.

– because she did Anthropology. Mum majored in Anthropology. She also met

Emmeline Pankhurst – no, what was the daughter – Christabel.

Christabel.

Who was the mother? The mother was Emmeline Pankhurst, the daughter was

Christabel. Christabel Pankhurst was on a tour – she didn’t need to come to

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Australia, actually, because of course everybody had the vote by that time – but she

must have been on a speaking tour of Australia and at one of – my grandfather was a

Methodist minister, so it must have been at one of the manses – Christabel Pankhurst

stayed with my grandparents and my mother met her. And I think all of these things,

all of these women that she met, made her a very fierce feminist before feminism, the

word, had ever been been coined.

Now, Mem, your grandparents on your maternal side were Methodists?

They were. They were Methodists going back to George Whitfield. George

Whitfield was the right-hand man of John Wesley, so really, if there’s such a thing as

a ‘true-blue’ Methodist – which there isn’t any longer, because of course Methodism

has gone the way of the Uniting Church – but, you know, I’m it. I go back to the

beginning of Methodism. So the whole kind of work ethic of Methodists, the social

justice thing: you can’t get away from it, really, it’s in the genes, it’s in the blood,

it’s in the heart, it’s in the mind.

It’s a terrible affliction for those of us who share it.

It’s a shocking affliction! (laughs) It’s a shocking affliction! (in a strangled voice)

‘You’ve got to help out, you’ve got to serve, you must serve, you must not hide your

light under a bushel.’

Takes decades to get rid of it. (laughter) So, Mem, with a George Whitfield in the

family and with a mother schooled as she was and with a father so deeply

passionate about teaching, it’s not surprising perhaps that you have a fervent

passion for public speaking.

(laughs) Not at all, not at all! I adore public speaking, I absolutely adore it. My

grandfather – my maternal grandfather, who was the Methodist minister – was a

superb preacher of sermons. Even I can remember his sermons, specifically I

remember his sermons for children which were gorgeous, just really, really lovely.

And I think part of the public speaking thing is because I always wanted to be an

actress. But acting is not that close to public speaking, actually, because when you’re

public speaking the role that you’re playing is yourself; when you’re acting you’re

playing a role of somebody else. But the public speaking is when you are able to get

your passion across to other people. So I don’t extemporise as a public speaker, I

dislike extemporising; I like to prepare to the hilt. I always have my speeches written

8

word for word, but I know them so well because I’ve crafted them for so long to get

them right, to get the paragraphs flowing for a speaking thing – because it’s different

from reading, where you can go back and say, ‘What was she saying again? How

does this follow through?’ You have to have it very clearly on one straight line, your

thought process, when you’re speaking. And so I like to do that word for word, but I

know it so well that people are surprised when I say I’ve written it word for word

because I seem to be speaking ex tempore. But I’m pretty well reading it. Because I

write ‘speech’, I don’t write ‘writing’, when I’m giving a speech.

Mem, coming back to that in a little while, with all your skills, I’m interested in

these two parents of yours coming together to be married in 1946.

’Forty-five, ’45.

’Forty-five. After the death of your mother’s first husband, which is a tragedy in

itself. But what caused them to go to Rhodesia? You said to me earlier that at one

stage they were hoping to go to China.

They were all set to go to China, they had been assigned China by the London

Missionary Society, which was a Congregational Church missionary society. For

those people who don’t know the London Missionary Society, the people who are

listening to this tape in time to come, it was the society which ‘hired’, as it were,

David Livingstone. He was not only an explorer but a missionary of the London

Missionary Society. And so it was a famous society, very famous in India, in Africa.

And my mother and father wanted to go to China so badly that when the communist

revolution happened in China and they were suddenly, quite suddenly, told, ‘You

can’t go to China; you have to go to Africa,’ I don’t think Mum ever got over that

disappointment.

Really?

I really don’t. I think she so badly wanted to go to China. Dad got over it

immediately, he got to Africa and identified immediately and loved it. I think the

reason why my mum wanted to go to China was because she had been a missionary

briefly in Rabaul, in Papua New Guinea, which I don’t think is there any more

because this shocking earthquake quite recently wiped it out. But I think that might

have been where she met her first husband, whose name was Ralph Fletcher – he was

a Queenslander – and he died in Papua New Guinea, perhaps on the Kokoda Trail,

9

I’m not sure of the details of it, fighting, I mean he died fighting for Australia. And

they’d only been married for six months. But in Rabaul there were a lot of Chinese,

with whom she was in contact until she died. I mean, some of the people from

Rabaul, some of the Chinese people from Rabaul, she was in contact with until a few

years ago. She loved them, and perhaps it was because of the Chinese people in

Rabaul that they had wanted to go to China so badly, and that going to Africa was for

Mum perhaps subliminally second-best. She was always enthusiastic about

everything, she would always throw herself into everything, she would never dwell

on anything, she would never be a victim – neither of my parents would be a victim

about anything, they’d always let something go and forgive and get on with it. But

that’s how they came to go to Rhodesia and not China.

In the meantime, you’d come along.

In between 1945 and 1946, yes, (laughs) Mem Fox was conceived and born on March

5th 1946, and they left in September ’46 with a six month-old on a six-week trip by

boat and a two-day journey by train to Cape Town and then up, from Cape Town by

train, by steam train –

To Bulawayo?

– to Bulawayo, which has got one of the longest train platforms in the world for some

reason: it was such a train hub, Bulawayo was such a train hub – and my nappies

were washed in the handbasin in the sleeper of the train and held out of the window

to dry in the wind. But unfortunately, because it was a steam train, often there would

be flecks of ash, (laughs) so keeping the nappies dry was fine, but keeping them clean

– either out of the window or on me – was rather more difficult. We did that train

trip several times as children because we would go once every three years to the sea

for six weeks, paid for by the London Missionary Society, we would go on a holiday.

To the coast?

To the coast. And it would take us two days to get there by train. And it was

magnificent, it’s one of the train journeys of the world, and of course we took it

completely for granted, going through Botswana, down through the Drakensberg

Mountains and beautiful, it was beautiful. But you needed a lot of books and a lot of

10

crossword puzzles and games and card games and so on to play, to keep yourself

occupied for two and a half days’ journey.

Now, once they got to Bulawayo, where was the destination, the mission?

The destination was Hope Fountain Mission, which is only eleven miles out of

Bulawayo, and Bulawayo is still the second major city in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, so

when I say to people (laughs) ‘I was brought up on a mission in Africa,’ it’s very

naughty of me to say that because – it’s absolutely true; but the vision that people

have of being brought up on a mission in Africa is of exotica extremis, you know?

Basically, I was eleven miles out of somewhere like Adelaide. (laughs) So there

were symphony concerts, there were department stores, there wasn’t anything you

couldn’t buy or get done in Bulawayo, it was just a city, it was just a normal and

rather beautiful, rather elegant city and still is very elegant: gorgeous gardens, very

wide streets, divine, it’s absolutely divine.

Did you have mambas as well?

Black mambas and green mambas. I was terrified of them, I never saw one. I never

saw one. I did see a puff adder going under my sister’s pram once, and I knew what

it was because we could – I don’t know how, I don’t know why, but even as children

we could identify all the snakes, all the different kinds of snakes. And I saw this

snake and I couldn’t cry out because I was so frightened that this snake would go up

into the pram. But puff adders are not like that, they’re not that kind of snake I don’t

think, because they’re shorter and squatter than other snakes. But they’re deadly; and

it was only when the snake had gone out from under the pram that I was able to tell

my mother that it was there. And we kept a crowbar at the back door – my dad had

made a little kind of container, like for walking sticks, and so there were walking

sticks there but there was also a crowbar – which my mother loved to use on a snake,

she used to beat them into a green pulp. It was hysterical. And I remember, because

I spoke the language fluently when I was a child, I can clearly remember saying,

‘Nyoga, nyoga’, which means ‘Snake, snake’. It’s one of my first memories, I’ve just

realised, of me calling out, ‘Nyoga, nyoga’ because I had seen a snake under the

swing this time, under my swing.

So is the native language, indigenous language, Zulu?

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It’s very close to Zulu, Zulus can understand it: it’s Ndebele, it’s called Ndebele.

But it’s very close to Zulu. I met a Zulu nurse in a hospital when I was visiting

someone, in the last week, and she was being very kind to this friend of mine and we

were talking about Africa and I said, ‘I’m so sorry I can’t remember a thing to say to

you except siyabonga kakulu kakulu kakulu,’ which means ‘thank you very, very,

very, very much,’ you know, that just (clicks fingers) snapped back into my brain.

Remarkable stuff. Mem, your parents were the only Australians on the mission,

and I guess the whole Society, the Missionary Society, was very ‘colonial’, in the

English sense.

Oh, God, it was.

But your friends were black, weren’t they?

Yes, they were. All my friends were black. I played black games. Black people

came to dinner at our house, black people stayed in our house. I think that’s part of

the Australian ethos, you know: I’ve just been recording something earlier today to

be recorded on Australia Day in 2006 about what it means to be an Australian, and

one of the things, one of the big differences on the mission was so obvious that I saw

it as a child – and it’s hard for children to be objective, you know, it’s very hard for

children to be objective. But I could see that my father and mother had an ease with

Africans, an acceptance of them as equal human beings, which the English

missionaries from England didn’t have. They couldn’t, they couldn’t, the English

character just didn’t allow them – they were kind, of course they were very kind to

Africans, I mean that’s what they were there for; but they were kind in a kind of ‘I

will help you, you poor thing’ way, whereas Mum and Dad were just easy with them,

which has meant that I can be easy with anybody. I don’t care what colour anybody

is or age. They gave me the Australian gift – it feels like an Australian gift, I know

you can’t generalise about an entire country – but the Australian gift of just being

able to go up to somebody and start talking to them.

But your parents were very strong personalities.

Yes, they were, they were, but that doesn’t stop people from being kind and treating

other people as equals.

So your father’s position on the mission, was he principal?

12

Yes, he was what was called the principal of the teachers’ college part of it, so he was

there to train teachers, he was there to train teachers. At that time primary teachers:

he was there to train teachers to teach in primary schools. One of his innovations,

which now I’m not sure was a good thing but it was applauded at the time and may

have stood the current Africans who are, say, in their sixties and seventies in good

stead, it may have stood them in good stead – actually they’d be younger than that

because they’d be younger than I am and I’m sixty next year – but there were some

Africans who started school – because there was a school on the mission as well as a

college, there was a dairy, there was a whole heap of stuff going on, educating

Africans in agriculture as well as in literal education – and one of the things that my

dad with was to start a program called ‘English from the start’ where children were

taught in English from their first day of school. And I know why he did it: because

English was the language of power, and I think that what he wanted most of all was

for Africans to have power over their own lives, and if they had fluent English with a

large vocabulary and complete fluency, that would stand them in good stead. As an

educator a generation later, I know that that probably made it difficult for little kids to

learn to read, because learning to read is as much about language as it is about

making sense of the print on the page. If you’re trying to make sense of the print on

the page in a language that’s not your own it’s very confusing. They were taught

Ndebele as a subject, little kids were taught Ndebele as a subject, but to a large extent

they were taught in English. That was after I had been to the school – I mean, I

started at the mission school myself, because it seemed sensible, it was there, I had to

walk down the hill and I was in a class, I could walk down the hill at four and a half

and be in class three minutes later so it seemed sensible to be at the school – but of

course I was discovered. (gasps) I was discovered – I was a white child at a black

school, and this was in probably about 1950, ’51, and oh, this could not happen, this

was dreadful, and ‘you can’t have a white child in a black school’. I was barefoot –

why would I wear shoes? There’s no necessity. Nobody else wore shoes, my feet

were as tough as nails, I was happy, I was with my friends, I spoke their language, I

spoke English with an African accent. (with African accent) You know, when I was

speaking English this is the accent that I was speaking because this was the way that

Africans talked English. (changes to Zimbabwe accent) I wasn’t talking with a

Zimbabwe accent like they do now, it wasn’t that kind of accent. (reverts to usual

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accent) That’s not how I talked English. I might have had slight accent like that

when I left, because of course then I moved into a white school and I might have

talked (Zimbabwe accent) a little bit more like this.

So was that the Boer character?

(usual accent) It was, except the hilarious thing was that we in Rhodesia felt we were

very much a cut above the white South Africans, of both English and Afrikaner

heritage, very much a cut above the South Africans, and that our accent was –

(clipped accent) no, we spoke much more nicely than the South Africans spoke and it

was quite a clipped accent, but we tried to make our vowels sound a little bit more

English.

Obviously the Afrikaners didn’t cross the border, did they?

No, they certainly didn’t! (laughs) We would have shot them back over the border.

We were dreadful, you know. You know how the Czechs have jokes about the

Russians and the English have jokes about the Irish? Zimbabwean whites had jokes

about South African whites, and they were called the ‘van der Merwe’ jokes, and

every joke was around a kind of redneck farmer called van der Merwe. And they

were honestly, when I look back, they were probably one of the most racist things in

my childhood: not me against Africans, but me against white South Africans – I was

dreadful about them. The funny thing was that even though we lived in a police state

towards the end of my time in Zimbabwe, we lived in a police state, we always felt

that South Africa was a dreadful place, even though Rhodesia wasn’t that much

better, especially under Smith, Ian Smith, it wasn’t that much better; but somehow we

always felt that we treated Africans more kindly, we gave them more opportunities.

A lot of white Zimbabweans were really horrified about the way blacks were treated

in South Africa. It was very, very, very different. It was very different.

One of the things that you’ve recorded on a number of occasions is that growing

up at the mission with your parents’ attitudes and your closeness to the African

children and adults gave you a perception of racism that you wouldn’t have had

otherwise. Would that be correct?

Absolutely. I am able to, I hope – you know, Rob, I mean it sounds as if I’m

(strangled voice) perfect, of course I want everybody listening to me to think that I

was a saint while I was alive – (usual voice) but I think one of the things that I can do

14

is to see through colour. I can see through it. So I can see an African and loathe him

because I know he’s a shyster, he’s a wife-basher, he’s a creep, he’s ripped this friend

and that friend off, borrowing and not paying back and so on; and I can look at an

African woman and I can say, ‘Oh my God, you’ve got a PhD in Plant Pathology,

you’re sensational; my God, this is incredible, what interesting work you’re doing;

fancy, I didn’t know that you’d got this maize growing that is resistant to such-and-

such a germ, incredible,’ I can look to who the person really is. One of the most

racist things that drives me nuts, and you just see it again and again with well-

meaning whites talking to anybody with a black skin or a brown skin, where because

they’re so anxious to not be racist they’re more polite, they put on this kind of polite

voice when they’re speaking to Africans, and the Africans must just cringe and think,

‘Just talk to me normally, you know, I’m just a human being. Just be normal, don’t

be so damned polite, because I’m a normal person.’ I mean Mum, bless her heart,

she could talk to anybody and she wasn’t always that kind of nauseating polite person

to black people because she too did know that there were – you know, same as in any

race, Indian, whatever – there are good and bad people and revolting people and

creeps and inspiring people; but I did catch her in London once smiling at a black

person in a bus queue, and there were lots of white people in the bus queue. (laughs)

I was saying, ‘What are you smiling at him for, Mum?’ I said, ‘Did you know that

you were smiling at that black man?’ He was probably Jamaican. And she said,

‘Yes, I was smiling at him because I wanted to be nice.’ I said, ‘You didn’t smile at

any white people.’ I said, ‘I call that racist.’ But she did laugh, she had the grace to

laugh. Because I think it was, I think it was, it’s a reverse racism and I don’t like

racism of any kind. But that’s very easy for me to say, Rob, because I’ve had

opportunities that many people haven’t had. For some people it’s so unusual to meet

somebody of a different race and colour that they are unnerved and they’re polite

because they’re unnerved. But I’ve met so many people from different races in

different worlds that I’ve lived in that I don’t – I like people, I just like people: if

they’re interesting and they’re nice, I love them.

Mem, the Hope Fountain Mission, what was that like physically, and in terms of

your family life what did it provide for you?

15

Physically, it was built down a series of hills, and at the top were the men’s

dormitories, at the top of the mission, because they boarded – everybody who was a

student boarded; the primary school kids came from the surrounding area, they didn’t

board; but the male and female teacher-education students boarded – I remember that

those men’s dormitories were behind a grove of gum trees that my father had planted

the year he arrived at Hope Fountain because he was homesick for gum trees, a huge

grove of gum trees, beautiful. So then the next thing that was on the mission was our

house. Then you went down the hill and sort of in a little valley there was another

missionary’s house. Then you went along an avenue, a beautiful avenue of

jacarandas, and on the side of that, on one side of that avenue, were staff houses for

African members of staff – quite nice houses – and another missionary’s house. Then

there were the girls’ dormitories. Very close to the girls’ dormitories – when I say

‘very close’, not so close that it was revolting – was a dairy, which supplied

everybody on the mission with milk – straight from the cow, unpasteurised, for the

whole of my life, can’t believe I didn’t die; and we used to drink it also straight from

the cow sometimes, we would go down to the dairy as kids and drink spoonfuls of it

out of the big milk cans, still warm. And then beyond the girls’ dormitories was the

church, and below the church there were other missionaries’ houses. So there were

quite a lot of missionaries’ houses. As a kid, there were lots of missionary kids to

hang around with; but I was the first child on the mission so when I was little all my

friends were African. As I grew older, I mixed a lot with the missionaries’ kids.

These are timber-framed buildings?

No, they were brick, solid brick, stone as well – they were made of stone, as a matter

of fact. Yep. Lovely grounds, old colonial buildings, gorgeous, so gorgeous. Quite

comfortable, you know. I mean, really, pretty comfortable.

But your parents wouldn’t have been well-off financially, I wouldn’t have thought.

Not at all, no, no, not at all.

But the shelter was great.

The shelter was great, we never lacked for food, I never lacked for things I needed. I

think that my mother’s first husband came from a quite well-off business family, and

I think that in the back of my life there was always this kind of nest-egg that my

16

mother’s first husband had left, which could be drawn on for emergencies. And

sometimes Mum actually taught – she taught in white high schools, I remember her

teaching Religion once for some years in a white boys’ high school – so that was also

some money into the family. My grandfather, my father’s father, was quite well-off,

I think probably very well-off –

Their true father, or – – –?

No, his real father, yes: Wilfred Partridge, his real father, was very well-off. And I

don’t know whether he sent him money or what. But I can remember having a

transistor radio, not given to me for a birthday, when to be a teenager and to have a

transistor radio – which was quite large, you know, they weren’t the tiny ones that

we’ve got now, they were quite big, more the size of today’s ghetto-blaster, of

course, which will mean nothing to people in the future: let me say it was about a

foot long and nine inches high – and it was your heart’s desire as a teenage girl to

have one of these things.

So what about the garden and such: did you grow your own food at all?

Huge garden, five acres, I lived on five acres, and in that garden there was

everything. There was everything. There were tomatoes, there was mulberries,

avocadoes, guava – so this is we’re living sub-tropically I think, just sub-tropically,

and so there weren’t things like pears and plums and so on – but I think Dad grew

strawberries. We did not self-provide, I remember Mum buying things as well, but

there was a big garden. And if cows got into the garden Mum would go absolutely

berserk. We’d all have to run out – you know, we’d leave a meal, the middle of a

meal, because somebody would see a cow in the garden and we’d rush out and all be

shooing this cow. It was gorgeous where we lived, it was very lovely. It was a

lovely, lovely – it was a nice house, it was – – –.

And climate-wise?

Climate was very cold at night in the winter, sometimes even down to freezing, and

then in the daytimes, even in the middle of winter, temperatures of twenty-two and

twenty-three degrees – a bit like Darwin; the same latitude as Townsville, so the same

climate as Townsville in Australia. So very big storms in November, December,

January, February, huge storms, only in the afternoon, tin rooves, snuggling up after

17

school because school was from quarter to eight in the morning until quarter past one,

and then the afternoons – you came home at that point because it was too hot,

especially in the summer it was too hot to concentrate. So in the afternoons I

remember we always had a rest because we had to get up so early in the morning to

get to school, we always lay down in the afternoon before we did our homework, and

read, all of us, just lay down and read. And to be curled up on a bed in the middle of

a storm, reading: my childhood was fantastic.

But were you encouraged to read by your parents?

It was just a given. (laughs) The house was full of books, absolutely full of books.

There was, in red leather bound, the entire works of Dickens in red leather; lots and

lots of poetry books, which I read for pleasure and some of whose poems I learnt for

pleasure –

Nineteenth-century poets, or – – –?

Palgrave’s [Golden] Treasury; I remember – oh, and I loved him so and his name has

just completely gone – he wrote an amazing poem about a patch of France that is

‘forever England’ because some soldier had died there, I don’t know which poet it

was I can’t remember. Elroy Flecker, Elroy Flecker, it’s come to me. And I just

picked up this volume of poems of Elroy Flecker – one of the minor war poets, First

World War poets, not very well-known – and I was probably about fourteen and there

was a line drawing of him in the book, and it was so beautiful, he was so beautiful,

that at fourteen I fell in love with him, I adored him, and I decided to learn some of

his poetry by heart. And I think I must have had an ear for language at that point

because I was astounded – I had not really been taught this ever – that words could

sound like what they were supposed to be saying. Like you could have a lot of

words, if they were written in such a way sounded like platitudes. This is one line I

remember about a young guy – obviously, Elroy Flecker, The Gorgeous, sort of lying

on some green sward in peace and meditating on the beauty of the surroundings and

on his life – and then a girl comes down and sits beside him, and the poem says, ‘And

she quacked in flat platitudes beside me’. (deliberately) ‘And quacked in flat

platitudes’, you know, that at-at-at. I heard those words when I learnt them off by

heart: ‘Isn’t that amazing how somebody can do that.’ Now, that’s the kind of

attitude to poetry that you normally get when you’re studying poetry at university,

18

but I was fourteen, fifteen and was amazed by their use of language. So that’s

interesting.

Did you talk to your parents about these insights?

I probably did, yes, I probably did. As we speak, you and I, today, people listening

will be able to look this up on newspapers and radio transcripts, but as we speak

today there has been a very sad event occur of a drug trafficker in Singapore, an

Australian called Van Nguyen, who was this morning hanged. And I couldn’t sleep

last night for this, I couldn’t sleep for it – not that the man was not guilty, not that he

had not done a dastardly thing in trafficking drugs – but my horror, my horror over

the death penalty, I think goes back to my childhood which was, now that I look

back, highly-privileged – not materially privileged, but intellectually privileged – and

I was sitting beside a big radiogram, with golden veneer wood, and they had

wonderful children’s programs, probably from the BBC6 – and wonderful adult

programs as well – and I can’t remember the Shakespeare play that I listened to for

two and a half hours, just lying on the floor beside the radiogram. And at the end of

it either Richard II or Edward II, both of whom came to an absolutely horrific end,

but it was the death penalty that – I think I was eleven, and nothing was censored: I

mean, in our house if you picked up Madam Bovary at the age of twelve you read it –

and here I was as this innocent, listening to this horrific thing, completely

understanding it because it was so well-acted. I didn’t think that listening to

Shakespeare was odd because you could understand it, it was obvious what was

happening so why wouldn’t you listen to Shakespeare? And I remember rushing to

the kitchen and absolutely – I was hysterical. I was hysterical, and I could hardly

explain to my mother what I’d been listening to because I was so distraught about this

capital punishment. The fact that it had happened to a king was neither here nor

there, it was the fact that it had happened. And that’s how I felt all night long last

night.

Do you think many of the attitudes that you’ve come to hold have developed from

your childhood?

6 BBC – British Broadcasting Corporation.

19

Do you know, Rob, do we develop attitudes beyond our childhood? I can’t answer

the question, because my childhood was so filled with what Brendan Nelson, in his

lack of wisdom, calls ‘values education’ – (laughs intensely) for those listening in the

future, Brendan Nelson is our current Federal Member of Parliament, he is the

Federal Minister for Education, and he says that public schools don’t teach values,

which is such a load of codswallop. I know this is going down in history so I’m not

going to swear – I could say something else – but anyway, he talks about ‘values

education’. And my parents – it wasn’t just Christianity, it goes beyond Christianity

because cowardice and courage and all of those things are universal, they’re in every

religion – we almost discussed values. They were not superficial things, we

discussed them. My parents were frantically interested in politics, and the national

news on the radio was at six o’clock every evening and then after that came the BBC

news, after the national news came the BBC news (sings theme tune) –it’s still the

theme tune of the BBC international news. It’s hysterical: my whole childhood

comes back when I hear that little tune. So we’d listen to the national news then the

BBC news, so that was probably twenty minutes, and we’d listen to it on the dining

room table having our meal. We would eat at six, which is quite early, looking back.

But then we’d sit around until seven discussing everything. We’d have major

discussions about what we had heard on the news. So there was a tremendous

amount of conversation about world things, about living in a state which we did live

in, a country, which was vile for blacks to live in.

I had a fight once in school, I had an actual fistfight, a hair-pulling fight, and I was

in a girls’ high school, only girls, only white, and there had been riots – absolutely

legitimate riots – in the African townships over some dastardly wrong done to the

Africans. And the police had gone in there with what is called a sjambok, which is a

whip, a very cruel whip, they’d gone in there with sjamboks and dogs. Very kind of

– the Alsatian now, when I look back and I see these Alsatian dogs attacking

Africans, you could almost put that picture into a concentration camp in Germany.

You know, that kind of horror. And I did see some of this treatment of Africans, I

actually saw it, it was horrific to see that at the age of fourteen. And one of my best,

quite close friends at school – a girl called Rusty Russell, I can’t remember what her

real name was because we always called her Rusty – but Rusty Russell’s brother was

a policeman and she said that he had done a great job the day before. And most of

20

the time I was quite quiet about politics in class – you know, it’s hard for kids to fit in

if they’re very, very different and I came from a very radically different family from

most of the families of my classmates – so on the whole I didn’t do much about

(laughs) – I didn’t stand up a huge amount politics. But that day I lost it, I just lost it.

I actually sort of leapt across a desk and we started fighting. It’s the only fight I’ve

ever had in my life, the only physical fight I’ve ever had. We were kicking and

screaming.

So by this time you were at school in Bulawayo?

Yes.

Off the mission.

Oh, yes. At six I had to leave the mission school legally, because I couldn’t be a

white in a black school, so I had to go to a white school where I was teased

mercilessly because I spoke with a ‘black’ accent. I was as miserable as sin in that

first year, couple of years, at white school: I hated it.

What was the school called?

Leander Primary School. Still exists to this very day. I hope there are black kids in

Leander Primary School now, I bet there are. And from Leander Primary School I

went to Hillside Primary School – I don’t know why I switched schools, can’t

remember – and then from Hillside Primary School – all of these schools were white:

Hillside Primary School was mixed boys and girls – and then I went to Townsend

Girls’ High School which was only white and only girls, and when I look back it was

run very much on public school lines in England – not state school but ‘public’

school, which in this country is ‘private’ school: you know, hymns in the morning,

assemblies, houses, prefects, deputy prefects, head girls, teams, house teams, .....,

school songs and so on and so forth, it was just hysterical. (sings) ‘Among the

kopjes of our land/ Grows our emblem lily grand/ So from ruggedness comes beauty/

To guide us on our paths of duty.’ Et cetera, Rob, et cetera, I won’t go on.

Hysterical, really hysterical. (laughs) So that was the kind of school it was, you

know?

Very much on the English model.

21

Very much on the English model. Kind of posh, really. And all our exams at the end

of fourth year of high school was ‘O’ level – which is ordinary level – and our exams

at the end of sixth form were advanced level, ‘A’ level, and those two sets of exams,

eight subjects at ‘O’ level and three subjects at ‘A’ level, were marked in England.

And we wrote those exams on air mail paper, our writing pads were air mail paper,

because that was cheaper to post to England; but we wrote in the height of summer so

the sweat on your hand on the air mail paper meant that they were sort of bubbled,

each page was sort of bubbled with the sweat, because the sweat went into the air

mail paper. God, I can remember it so clearly. Wow!

Did any of your teachers inspire you?

I had a teacher called Joh Smith – J-O-H: female, of course, they were all females –

Joh Smith, who taught me from the age of fourteen to the age of eighteen, English.

Had I had a bad teacher for four or five years of my life it would have been a tragedy.

I think my French teacher was not a good French teacher, and I had her for the same

amount of time. But my English teacher was inspired: she read aloud to us a lot; she

never thought that a particular piece of literature was too difficult for us; we would be

reading at the age of fourteen, I remember her introducing us to The Mayor of

Casterbridge, and here we, we’re in the middle of Rhodesia, we’re all white girls,

we’ve never been to England, most of us, and why would we be interested? And I

remember her sort of leaning forward and she had her fingertips together and she

said, (in solemn voice) ‘Girls, a man piddles against a wall and his whole life

changes: this is what this book is about.’ Well! You couldn’t wait to read it! And

because she had said that you didn’t think that the nineteenth-century language was

difficult; it was just you were in there like Flynn. If she thought it was difficult she

read it to us. She read the whole of The prisoner of Chillon by Shelley or Byron, I

can never remember who wrote it – I think it’s Byron – and you know we wept over

The prisoner of Chillon, we just couldn’t believe that a man could be imprisoned – in

fact, to such an extent did I love that poem that when I was working in Geneva many

years later, on the edges of Lake Geneva, I went to Montreux to see the Castle of

Chillon, to see where the prisoner had been chained to the wall, to see that chink of

light in the sky myself, because I loved that poem so much. And it was such a strict

and old-fashioned regime: we had certain days where we would do grammar and

22

certain days when we would do précis and certain days when we would do

comprehension; and then every weekend – God knows how the woman ever survived

the marking, looking back – we would write an essay. Every weekend we would

write an essay.

That’s formidable, isn’t it?

On a topic that she would set, okay, or a short piece. But an essay, she called it an

essay. And very often she read mine out and she would say, ‘Girls, listen to this, I

want you to hear this.’

Mem, can I just ask you something –

Yes.

– sorry to interrupt – were you hearing language at this stage of your life?

Yes, I was. I was hearing it because, I think, of my church background. Fortunately

for me, I lived in an era when the St James Bible was still current, in use. It has had a

phenomenally-important role in my writing for children – notice the gerund: ‘my

writing for children’ – because every full stop is in the right place, every comma is in

the right place in the Old Testamen, it’s exquisitely written, it’s exquisite. You hear

the phrasing, and it was not overt, my understanding of how to write was not overt – I

mean, I was told when to put commas and so on by Miss Smith, she did teach us all

of that stuff – but most of it I truly think that I can write because I heard it:

(chanting)

‘Now it came to pass in the days when the judges ruled, that there was a

famine in the land. And a certain man of Bethlehemjudah came to

sojourn in the country of Moab, he, and his wife, and his two sons.

‘And the name of the man was Elimelech, the name of his wife Naomi,

and the name of his two sons Mahlon and Chilion .... And they came into

the country of Moab, and continued there.’

Now I’ve got gooseflesh, saying that, got gooseflesh. It’s the beginning of the story

of Ruth. It’s sensational, it’s divine. It is magical. So yes, I was hearing it. And

because I must have had some kind of dramatic flair as a child – you know, I was in

plays at school, I was Alice in Alice in Wonderland and I was Aunt Em in The wizard

of Oz and things like that – and because I seemed to like learning poetry and so on

my mother had me reading things in services. I once learnt, almost by heart, a story –

23

a very, very long story – called The story of the other Wise Man, and he was the

fourth wise man who never quite made it. It’s a stunning story, quite famous I think

– I still have a copy of it: I don’t know where I found it by I was so excited to find it.

John Oxenham7?

I think it is.

Yes, I do, too.

Yes. The story of the other Wise Man, I think that’s what it’s called, and I remember

reading that to a church service when I was fourteen because Mum made me do it.

And I think that – perhaps it was even a telling of it: I spent hours rehearsing it – but

the telling of it – and you asked me to be honest, Rob, you asked me to be honest on

this tape, no holds barred – the telling of it mesmerised the audience. Sorry, it was a

congregation; I forget (laughs) now that it was a congregation, it wasn’t an audience.

But the audience that was a congregation was mesmerised. I mean, what people said

to me afterwards about it was just amazing, and if I hadn’t had my mother to make

me pull my head in and not get big-headed I could have thought I was really

something. But I think she knew how good it was because she didn’t praise me for it.

Mum was terrified of my getting above myself – oh, she was really scared of it. I

could never please her. Not until I wrote a book called Whoever you are did my

mother ever say, ‘Fabulous, you’ve done so well.’ Whereas Dad would say it for

anything, he would say it for anything. So yes, I was hearing language and loving it.

Good old Miss Smith, yippee, she did so much for me.

END OF DISK 1: DISK 2

This is the second session of an interview with Mem Fox for the National Library

of Australia on the 2nd

December 2005.

So, Mem, we’ve talked about your hearing the language, and that’s something I

wanted to come out into the way that you evolved as a writer in the years to come;

but I also want to know at this point why, after all you’d had in Africa, you chose

to go to England, to the Rose Bruford College – Rose Bruford College? I’ve got a

blank – the drama school is what I’m thinking of.

Yes, it was called the Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama.

7 Henry Van Dyke was the author.

24

That’s right.

Mm, still exists. It was one of the three or four good drama schools in London and

by the time I’d finished school I was completely stage-struck. I had been in so many

plays – I was nearly always cast as men because my voice was so deep and I was at a

girls’ school so I nearly always played blokes, but that didn’t matter. I remember

being the bourgeois gentilhomme in The bourgeois gentilhomme – in English, of

course; we didn’t do it in French. I remember being in Restoration plays at high

school – can’t remember which ones, but things like School for scandal and stuff like

that. And I loved, I loved acting, and I knew I could do it and I wanted to be an

actress. Now, the archivists who are listening to this in the future will not know that I

am not the prettiest person in the world – you know, I probably could act, but you

also have to look quite pretty – and basically, without my makeup, I would say that I

was pretty ugly. Well, that’s how I feel about myself. And really also, after a while

at drama school – I loved drama school because it was in the 1960s, it was ’65 to ’68,

I was in London, I’d come from the mission – well, I’d had a hiccup in between then

which we haven’t talked about which we might talk about later – but drama school

was fantastic, I adored it; but somehow, towards the end of it – and of course we’re

talking years of education that end in July because of the Northern Hemisphere, and it

was probably about May in my last year at drama school, after almost three years – I

wrote in my journal: ‘I don’t want to be an actress. It’s boring. I’m going to be a

writer.’ So it was that time ago that I wanted to be a writer. I wrote that in 1968, that

I wanted to be a writer.

Mem, did you not want to go to university?

Oh God no, I badly didn’t want to go to university. I don’t think at that – many

children are not; I mean we send children to university so young – and of course,

because my grandmother had been to university, which was very unusual, my mother

had been to university, which was privileged even in the 1930, it was very privileged

to be able to go to university, and so it was assumed – I mean, it was just assumed –

that I would be there. I couldn’t not go to university. My family was very into the

education of women and so on, and the only big fight, the really biggest fight, that I

can remember having with my parents – I had lots of irritating fights with my mother,

but that was just teenage stuff – but a really big, blow-up row, was at the dinner table

25

when they said that I had to go to university. And I remember pushing aside the

plates, the forks, the spoons, and putting my head on the table and crying and beating

my fists against the table and saying, ‘I absolutely refuse to go to university, I will

not go, I hate studying, I hate – – –.’ Because the last two years of school, when

you’re only studying three subjects at a great depth – really, ‘A’ level is quite hard,

it’s very hard, there’s a lot of study – – –. I just had a good time at school, I loved it:

I was in the Debating Society, I was in the Drama Society, this and that, I was in the

Public Speaking Society, I was in the Public Affairs Society; but studying, I just

wasn’t a natural student, I didn’t want to go to university.

Would that have been at Salisbury then?

The university would have been in Salisbury, yes. My friends went either to

Salisbury or to Cape Town or to Witwatersrand, which is the big university in

Johannesburg, so they all went – and it’s called ‘Wits’ for short – they either went to

Wits, to Cape Town, or to Rhodes, which is another very good university in South

Africa, or Harare – it’s now Harare, it was Salisbury. I think it’s called the

University of Rhodesia. Anyway, I decided I didn’t want to do that, I wanted to go to

drama school, and my father was looking through – we looked through all these

books of what sorts of drama school you could go to, and I had known – I think that

I’d known even at ‘O’ level – that I wanted to go to drama school, even at ‘O’ level

which was at sixteen, because I failed Latin at ‘O’ level and I wanted to go to Bristol

University to do Drama and you couldn’t get into Bristol without ‘O’ level Latin. So

I was coached: my parents got me private tutoring and I was coached in Latin until I

passed – I mean, I only did it once more and passed the second time – because I

wanted to go to Bristol University to do Drama. But my father, in despair, was

talking to the Vice-Chancellor of the university in Salisbury, in despair about this

daughter of his who wanted to go to drama school of all things, what was he going to

do? And by chance the Vice-Chancellor’s daughter had been the same and she’d

gone to Rose Bruford. And my father said, ‘Well, why Rose Bruford and what is it?’

And he said, ‘Well, it’s the one drama school in England that has a very fine

reputation as a drama school, but the kids who go there have to do compulsorily the

teaching of drama as well so that when they finish they have an ordinary teaching

diploma, they can teach, they can be employed as teachers immediately.’ And so

26

Dad thought, ‘Well, if she’s going to have two strings to her bow, if she’s going to be

able to have the day job of teaching at least, I’ll let her go there.’ But who was going

to pay for it? Who on earth was going to pay for it, because my parents didn’t have a

brass razoo? And it was accommodation as well as fees, as well as holiday

accommodation because I couldn’t come home because it was too far. So Granddad,

my dad’s adored, adorable – to me; not so much to my father – but my dad’s

wonderful father, for whom I came back to Adelaide –

This is Wilfred?

– this is Wilfred Partridge, for whom I came back to Adelaide in 1970 – paid for me

to go to drama school.

I have to say at the time, Rob – and this is a little naughty – at the time, and still –

perhaps not quite so much in England now – but then, English counties gave grants to

students so that they had free tertiary education and their accommodation was paid

for by grants. Now, my husband was always very poor at drama school because he

came from a poor county, the County of Lincolnshire, which didn’t have a lot of

money, so his grant wasn’t very big. But people who came from rich counties like

Kent or something like that had quite good grants and were able to pay for their digs

and so on and live well. Everybody was living frugally but nobody was starving or

anything, nobody had to have a job in order to survive: nobody had a job, nobody

would have been allowed to take a job at drama school, you wouldn’t have been

allowed to have a job. So I looked at this and I was – of course, by this time, we had

had the Unilateral Declaration of Independence by Ian Smith in Rhodesia, where he

had declared himself independent of the Commonwealth, which was an illegal act –

and I wrote – the Rose Bruford College is on the edge of London in Kent, and I wrote

to the Kent County Council an impassioned letter saying I couldn’t go back to

Zimbabwe – I keep calling it ‘Zimbabwe’ because that’s what it is now – ‘Would you

like me to go back to Rhodesia? You know the Prime Minister is illegal, blah-blah-

blah, it’s not safe for people who are radical, so-and-so, I don’t want to go back, I

never want to go back, I want to live in England forever, I’m applying for a grant.’

I’d never lived in England. ‘I’m applying for a grant.’ The power of words, you

know. The ability to write is power. It is, it’s power.

Did you get it?

27

Yep. So Granddad paid for one year and Kent paid for two. I’ve only just

remembered that. Cheeky!

Very.

Very cheeky. Thank God I could put two words together, saved him a lot of money.

Mem, just prior to your going to Rose Bruford there’s a six-month gap you had to

fill in.

Yes.

And this is a fascinating time, to me.

(laughs) I loved this.

Absolutely fascinating.

Well, I say I loved it, Rob; I hated it, actually. I sort of loved it and sort of hated it.

(pauses) It was the gap between the end of the Southern Hemisphere year, academic

year, which is – as we all know here – December, and the beginning of the academic

year in the Northern Hemisphere, which is October. So I had six months, nine

months to fill in. And my parents knew about, or found out about by accident or

somehow, a conference centre outside Geneva near a little village called Céligny –

which is C-E-L-I-N-G-N-Y [sic], Céligny – and Céligny had near it two châteaux, a

little one and a big one, and they were called the Châteaux de Bossey – B-O-S-S-E-Y

– and the Château de Bossey was the international conference centre of the World

Council of Churches, whose headquarters, like so many things, was in Geneva. And

so every week or every two weeks of the summer, which is when I was there, there

would be a new conference, a live-in conference. So you’d have people from the

Greek Orthodox Church in their flowing robes and their wonderful beards and their

funny hats – funny to me, not funny to the Greek Orthodox; you would have Russians

– God knows how the Russians were there because of course religion was suppressed

under Communism, but the Russians were there. And you’d be – I was there as a

servant – I forgot to say why I was there: I was there as a servant. The whole place

was run on volunteer labour and the cleaning and the cooking and the laundry and the

fruit-picking was done by six girls from many different countries in what is now

known as the ‘gap’ year in between school and university. When I was there there

were three Germans, two Dutch, one English girl and me. I can’t add up so I think

28

that’s more than six, it could have been seven. (laughs) But six or seven girls, okay?

We wore blue, we did it for nothing except accommodation and food, and we were

called the ‘blue angels’ because there was a film, a famous film, which had just

passed by a few years before that called The blue angel, so we were called blue

angels because we were so kind because we did this for nothing, nothing. We were

slave labour!

Did your parents know it was to be this?

I don’t think so. You know, some weeks it was six and a half days a week that we

worked and then the off week was five and a half days. So one day every two weeks

you had a full day off and a half day, and then one week you only had a half-day off.

And it was hard labour. We had a château to clean. We had enormous numbers of

sheets to wash and hang out, either in cellars among wine barrels – you know, huge

lines in between wine barrels where we hung sheets, or in the gardens in sunlight

when the sun was shining; we picked cherries; we picked plums; we cleaned toilets;

we waited at tables; we set tables; we washed up. It was killingly hard. But I had

grown up with servants, which I haven’t mentioned. We had servants in the garden

and servants in the house, and basically I’d never done anything except help with the

washing-up, which we were always forced to do – I think so that my parents didn’t

think that we were totally indulged: we did help with the washing-up. But for me it

was a sensational training because – – –.

I was already very tidy, I was terribly tidy, I became fanatically tidy at the age of

thirteen – I don’t know what happened: the onset of puberty was also the onset of

tidiness, which has been an affliction that I’ve suffered ever since – and this place

was so tidy because it was run by the Swiss and the Dutch and the Germans; it was so

clean because it was Swiss. I saw dirt everywhere, I see dirt everywhere now. I see

untidiness everywhere. And I can stand it in other people’s houses, strangely, I can

bear it in other people’s houses – I sometimes find myself cleaning the area around

the bottom of the taps in other people’s houses, but that’s only when they’re not

looking – but I myself live in pristine cleanliness and in appalling tidiness. And I’m

saying that because I think that there’s an impression of writers, because we’re artists,

that we are somehow totally out of control, that we’re all kind of penniless alcoholics

living in attics, in absolute filth and squalor, and untidy so that we can never find

29

anything, our finances are to hell and gone. You know, I am a very organised,

professional, normal – well, not quite normal because I think the tidiness is abnormal,

I think it’s almost a sickness – but I’m just saying that you can be creative and neat at

the same time. It’s possible. And organised.

And the ‘blue angel’ phase of your live enhanced that?

Sensational training, sensational training.

Was it like that at home with your sisters, Jan and Alison? Were they tidy?

My mother and my sisters – well, let me give you an example. I love to talk in

‘anecdote’. My sister, who now lives in Italy, lived in London, for most of her life

she lived in London. And, poor girl, we would often go and stay with her of course

in the Christmas hols because it was free accomm, you know, it was just wonderful.

And I went to see her once when I was much older, when I was a really professional

person – I was a university lecturer going to conferences and things like that – and so

I went to see her in July because I was at a summer conference in the Northern

Hemisphere. And on the floor outside her bedroom was a kind of little paper bird

that had fallen off a perch – you know, it was a little birdcage that was a pretend

birdcage and the bird had fallen out of the cage, it was made of paper, and it was on

the floor outside Jan’s room. And I just thought to myself, ‘I wonder if it will still be

there in December.’ And it was! And it was. Isn’t that amazing! I think that says it

all, really. The other thing is, of course, because Mum had servants in Rabaul, she

had servants in Africa, when she did come to live in Australia as a by then elderly

person, sometimes she would say – no; because I’ve got an ironing lady now so she

wouldn’t have been doing my ironing because I do have somebody who does it for

me, it’s one of the things that I have allowed myself to (laughs) ‘outsource’ – but

when she used to come and stay, when I was young and married – I’m still married –

but a young, married mother, she would say, ‘Can I do some ironing for you?’ And I

would say, ‘Oh, it’s fine, Mum, I can manage, I can manage,’ because she couldn’t

iron. She couldn’t iron so that you could wear it. You’d have to secretly go over it

again because she just – – –.

She was the true missionary.

30

I mean she just couldn’t do it. She could cook, because she never let anybody do the

cooking, she was a wonderful cook, but – oh, it’s very, very funny. They weren’t

tidy at all. My dad was fanatically tidy so I must have got it from him.

So the ‘blue angel’ period definitely taught you – – –.

It was seminal, it really was. It was a very, very strong and important influence in

my life.

What did Rose Bruford teach you, then: if the six months in Switzerland taught

you tidiness, what did Rose Bruford teach you?

Rose Bruford taught me that you are part of a team. Because acting is teamwork and

if you come – say you’re in a play and you don’t turn up, the play can’t happen, the

show can’t go on. Say you’re feeling a bit miserable and you don’t want to work that

day, you can’t not; you have to go on because you’re part of a team and the team

can’t work unless you’re in it. And if you’re not there for your first entrance the team

doesn’t work because the play can’t go on because you’re not there to make your

entrance in the play at the time when you should be entering onto the stage. So

punctuality was one of the things that she inculcated into us, not just because of the

teamwork of being an actress in a play – and, by the way, I loathe the term ‘actor’ for

women, I will never use it until the day I die, it’s so confusing. I cannot bear the

word ‘actor’ for women, I’ll never use it or refer to myself as someone who had

wanted to be an actor. I never wanted to be an actor, thank you: I don’t have balls

and I never intend to have them. I’m a female actress. Anyway, she said, ‘If you are

ever late for a class, you will be thrown out.’ You will be thrown out. It wasn’t the

warm and fuzzy universities that we have these days where if you’re feeling a bit low

and you don’t want to do your assignment on time you go to the university counsellor

and say, ‘I need more time.’ There was none of that. You turned up, you did the

work, if you didn’t do it you were out. Well, I couldn’t be out because I was an

overseas student with nowhere to go. (laughs) I mean I had to. And so punctuality

is another of my – it’s kind of bad, really, because punctuality can lead to road rage,

you understand, because if somebody is driving slowly and you’re late, the hand

gestures and the screaming and so on can get pretty frightening. So I love to be on

time, can’t bear not being on time. Which is also not very artistic, you know, because

31

artists just sort of wander in when they feel like it. But I’m not that kind of wafty,

whimsical – – –. I’m much tougher, I’m much more steel-like.

You were an asthmatic at the time you were at college, is that right?

Yes, I had developed asthma as a thirteen year-old, around the time of the onset of

tidiness – I’m always thinking that if I stop being tidy my asthma (laughs) might be

cured! So at thirteen I had a terrible asthma attack – no, twelve, I was twelve and we

were in New South Wales – and I remember thinking I was going to die. So I had

asthma, quite serious asthma, from the time of twelve or thirteen. Now, I did have

pills, I was by then on a pill called Amesec, I remember, while I was at drama school

which I took daily – A-M-E-S-E-C – and I did take it every day; but I don’t know

whether it was fear or the fact that I was so physically active – because drama is very

physical, and I walked to and from my abode, my digs, or rode a bike, depending on

the weather, so I got a lot of exercise – but I didn’t have an asthma attack for three

years because I was too scared to.

What part of London was Rose Bruford in?

Sidcup, which is very famous in a Pinter play: ‘I’ve left my papers in Sidcup.’ It

was in Kent. It’s sort of Greater London, really, it’s on the edge of London.

And your digs were nearby?

My digs were in Sidcup, yes. Most of us lived in Sidcup.

And were the classes you took very much about the voice and verse and that type

of thing?

Yes, we had Voice classes probably three times a week, we had Verse Speaking

every week for the entire time that I was there. I remember being taught storytelling,

which is something that I’ve used enormously in my later professions. That’s why I

know the story of Ruth by heart, by the way, because we had to learn a Bible story,

that was one of the things we had to do in storytelling was to learn a Bible story by

heart. And people knew that I was a missionary’s child and they’d say, ‘Oh, Mem,

Mem, what’s a good Bible story, what’s a good Bible story?’ (laughs) And I’d be

giving them all the Bible stories that I knew that were full of blood and thunder and

guts and really interesting.

David and Bathsheba?

32

Oh, gosh, they were fantastic: Samson and Delilah. Oh, they were wonderful, they

were terrific. Some of them were too long – the story of Esther is one of my

favourite stories in the Old Testament but it’s too long, but it’s very dramatic. Don’t

know why they haven’t made a movie out of it. Anyway, so then there was a lot of

movement, a lot of movement classes – Greek dance, an enormous amount of mime.

And then on Wednesday afternoons a horrific class that we all dreaded called Acting

Exercises, in which you often had to do things in front of the entire rest of the year,

and there were fifty students in each year level. So in my year – in my year, actually,

forty-eight of us ended up finishing the course; in Malcolm’s year, which is my

husband’s year, I think only thirty-six people out of the (laughs) fifty completed the

course. It was pretty tough. But we would have to act in front of fifty people, with

everybody watching with a critical eye – a somewhat sympathetic eye, because they

knew how ghastly it was – with Rose Bruford herself, she was the person who taught

us Mime and Acting Exercises and Verse Speaking and Storytelling, so she did a lot

with us. She wore green and would sweep in, in a long green cloak; she wore green

leotards, she had a long green cloak, and she would sweep into the Mime class and

our hearts would beat with fear. It was sort of like ballet school, I guess, she was

very much like a ballet teacher. God, she was terrifying, that woman was petrifying,

she was petrifying.

Even to the fellas?

Terrifying to the fellas, absolutely terrifying to the fellas. You’d get these big, boofy

blokes from the North of England with North of English accents, coming off farms

and out of factories and so on – my God, did she pull them into line. Strewth. She

had us all speaking proper English in a moment. Sometimes she would even – she

would see things like – we had a meeting once a week with all of the three years

together, and she would say, ‘I have seen some of you in the street eating fish and

chips out of newspaper. If you insist on doing this, will you please stay inside the

fish and chip shop, or take it home. I don’t want you eating fish and chips in the

street.’ (laughs) I mean, for heaven’s sake! When I arrived at Rose Bruford I still

had six months – no, sorry, some miles left on an international plane ticket, okay,

which was unused; and I met this man almost within minutes of arriving at drama

school who later became my husband, and he said, ‘Oh, this can’t be wasted. I’ve

33

just spent a year in France, I must take you to Paris.’ Not because he liked me but

because he just couldn’t stand the fact that this air ticket wasn’t completely used.

And so we went to Paris one weekend on a very cheap trip and stayed with a friend of

his – I remember sleeping in the same bed as she did, it was gross – and she was –

The friend or the bed?

– oh, it was awful. And Malcolm slept on the floor and it was ghastly. But we went

to Paris together and came home. And the worst thing at Rose Bruford that could

happen to you was that you would be ‘called up’, and if you were called up it meant

that Rose Bruford wanted to see you, okay? So after Malcolm and I had come back

from Paris we were called up. Singly. Because she thought that we had gone on

some kind of romantic weekend. And of course the college was in loco parentis,

there was a sense that they were our parents and they had to care for us, and that if

two of us went gadding off to Paris they would feel liable – I mean not legally liable

but certainly morally liable – for anything that happened.

It was 1966 also.

It was 1966. Somebody got pregnant, by the way, and they were thrown out. If you

got pregnant you were out. I remember a girl getting pregnant and not telling

anybody, because we were coming up to the end of third year, and I saw her getting

changed for an end-of-term production and I thought, ‘Oh, my God, she’s pregnant.’

She never told anybody because she wanted to finish the course. There was just no

hanky-panky. This is the mid-’60s, Rob, this is the mid-’60s and there isn’t a drug-

taker amongst us.

So you were terrified of discipline.

You know, over a hundred students in this institution and nobody was drug-taking, I

can honestly say that. At this point of the ’60s we were not doped off our heads.

In London.

In London. It was a remarkable institution.

Mem, you’ve mentioned Malcolm yourself. The relationship builds up over the

period that you’re in college together.

34

It certainly does. He was crazy about travel because he had started – he was from a

working-class family in the North of England but he had been on a paper round, and

his ambition was to leave his little village as often as possible. (laughs) And so he

went to France at the age of fourteen, by himself, and crossed France to stay with a

family that he had somehow contacted through school and kept going back to France,

I think, as often as he could. And so that began a travel bug that has lasted until now.

He has just come back this week from Eritrea, can you believe it?

So he likes travelling; I have travelled myself because I have been in Australia and

England and Switzerland, therefore I like travel too; and he says to me, ‘You must do

this thing in – – –.’ Oh, how did we meet, I have to tell you that! I must say – have I

got time to tell you that story?

Of course.

Good, because this is so adorable. Well, isn’t it always adorable when you meet the

love of your life by accident? There was a woman called – oh, gosh, I told you her

name when we talked earlier and I can’t – – –. Joan[?] Nelson. Joan Nelson was a

lecturer at a teachers’ college in Hertford – it might have been called Hertfordshire

Teachers’ College, I can’t remember – and at that college teaching also as a lecturer

was the mother of Malcolm’s best friend from high school, a girl called Jill Lucas.

So Mrs Lucas and Joan Nelson were working together. Joan Nelson had been to

Zimbabwe, she was probably a religious person highly-interested in education and

had gone to observe what my father was doing in Africa –

She’d met your father?

– oh yes, she’d been to Zimbabwe. Yes, she’d been to Zimbabwe because she

wanted to see what he was doing. What he was doing was quite innovative, okay, a

well-known educator. So she had stayed with him, and you know Dad was the kind

of person that, even though he was married to my mum, I think a lot of single women

fell in love with him, to tell the honest truth, he had that kind of thing about him. But

he would never have reciprocated, but they kind of admired him to the point of

almost adoring him. And I think Joan Nelson was one of those people. Anyway,

Dad said, ‘Mem is going to Rose Bruford. It would be great if she could come and

stay some weekends with you and just keep an eye on her,’ and somehow this had

come up in conversation with Jill Lucas’s mum. Jill Lucas’s mum said, ‘Oh! My

35

daughter’s best friend is at Rose Bruford, his name is Malcolm Fox.’ So she said,

‘I’ll tell him to contact her’ – he was a year ahead of me, so he was in second year

when I started – and he and I met. I couldn’t stand him. He was so arrogant, also

wildly camp, there was no way of knowing whether he was gay or straight, and camp

in a theatrical way – I now could probably tell that he wasn’t homosexual, I couldn’t

tell at that point. Anyway, and he treated me with some disdain in the way that

English people treat Australians and anybody from the colonies, and I was of course

from Rhodesia with a white South African accent. Oh, my God. So this was

hysterical. And Jill’s mother, Mr and Mrs Lucas, were the wardens of George

Bernard Shaw’s house in Ayot St Lawrence and they lived there, they lived in one

section of the house, and looked after it on behalf of the National Trust. And in the

garden were statues of Joan of Arc; there were in the house photographs, the albums

of Lawrence of Arabia because he was a very close friend of the Shaws’, I think they

treated him like a son; there was an Augustus John line drawing on the mantelpiece

of Lawrence of Arabia; there was an exercise bike belonging to Shaw which we used;

we could sit at his desk, we could read the postcards that he used to send to people –

it was an amazing experience, it was wonderful. And because I knew a lot about

Bernard Shaw, because I was just that kind of child, I just knew a lot about him

probably from the Fabian stuff as well as the theatrical stuff, I was beside myself, I

was so excited to be there. But I didn’t like Malcolm very much. But he realised that

I liked travel.

Jill, his best friend, married an Egyptian – they met at university and went to Cairo

– and in 1966, in April – was it ’66 or ’67? I think it was in my first year at drama

school. In April, Malcolm said, ‘I’m going to Egypt to see Jill, I’m going to Cairo, in

the April break. I’m going to Alexandria by train and then I’m getting a boat across

to’ – sorry – ‘I’m going to Brindisi by train, I’m getting a boat from Brindisi to

Alexandria, and then a train from Alexandria to Cairo, but I’m hitching back because

I haven’t got enough money to get back. From Italy I’m hitching back, from

Brindisi.’ And he said it would be – he was absolutely open about it – I had dyed

blonde hair then – he said, ‘I would get lifts more easily if you came with me.’

(laughter) ‘Do you want to come to Egypt and see Jill?’

You knew Jill by this stage?

36

I think I must have met – yes, I must have met Jill. I think I met Jill before she went

to – I must have met Jill, somehow. Anyway, so we went to Egypt together, which

was interesting because we spent a lot of time together, and things that I believe that

– I mean, I’m ashamed to say that at that point I believed in National Service, because

a lot of my boyfriends had been in National Service in Zimbabwe, in Rhodesia, and

I’d seen them shape up, frankly. (laughs) I had seen them shape up. And it wasn’t

very long in Zimbabwe, I think it was only about six months. I remember having a

blazing row because Malcolm was very against National Service, he thought it was

disgusting and that it had ruined his brother – which it did; made his brother almost

into an alcoholic – so he was raving about it. We had huge fights about major things

of value – value judgment things – and on the way home we had some humdinger

fights. And you’d drag yourself on and one night you’d be sleeping in a vineyard, the

next night you’d be sleeping in a half-built place in Thessaloniki, the next night you’d

be crossing the border at Domodossola in Italy, we had flip-flops on – you know,

thongs – from Egypt and we found ourselves crossing the Italian–Swiss border in the

snow in these damn thongs. I mean, we were such pathetic children, looking back.

At this time I was probably twenty.

We ran out of money in Switzerland, completely ran out of money, but we hitched

to Bossey because there were still people at Bossey who knew me from when I’d

been a blue angel, and I borrowed money and they gave us accommodation,

showered us, washed our clothes, overnight – just one night – and we got a train to

somewhere then and then got out of the train and hitched the rest of the way. And I

remember one night in France, it was raining, we knew we must have been very close

to the border, to Boulogne – and when I say ‘the border’, I mean somewhere where

we could then get to England – but I had no idea where we were. I was wet, I was

cold, I was livid, I was miserable, and we were on a dark country road, there were no

streetlights – I don’t know who dropped us off there, some farmer probably – and

there was a sort of bus shelter, that was all, and we walked away from the bus shelter

thinking we might get a lift. We didn’t get a lift and I mentioned Modigliani, the

artist, but I called him ‘Modig-liani’, and Malcolm said, ‘The “g” is not pronounced,’

in such a patronising, arrogant, Pommie-bastard kind of – – –. ‘Oh!’ I thought,

‘you’re so revolting, who could give a shit about the “g” in Modigliani when we’re

out in the middle of France and we’re wet and cold and there’s no lift in sight and it’s

37

the middle of the night?’ So that was another blazing row and I sulked and he walked

off. But there was only the bus shelter – and it didn’t turn out to be a bus shelter, as it

happened – but it was a roof and three walls and it was a cement floor and it was

cold; and he put all the maps that we had and all his extra clothing under my sleeping

bag, and that was the first time that I knew he was kind and that he cared, he did care

about me as a human being – not me as a girlfriend, because I wasn’t his girlfriend

for ages.

I saw him from time to time as a girlfriend towards the end of his life at Rose

Bruford, but it was really in my last year, when he had been a volunteer in Tunisia

with the VSO – Voluntary Service Overseas – he was in Tunisia and I was in my

final year, it was the final summer, and I was in Greece with a very good friend of

mine called Adrienne, we were on that kind of holiday, that student holiday, where

you didn’t have any accommodation so you slept on the beach, you washed in the

sea, you ate watermelons and cheese and yogurt – oh, it was divine looking back. It

was rough as anything, you washed your hair in well water: it was amazing, it was

divine. And I had had all my mail from my parents and everybody else directed to

the American Express office in Athens, and to this day, Rob, to this day, I can see

myself sitting inside the American Express office, at the top of a flight of stairs, with

a big fat pile of letters in my hand which the woman had given me, laughing when I

said my name, because there was so much mail. And most of the letters were from

Malcolm. And he adored me. And I thought, ‘This man has perfect taste, I love

him.’

It’s interesting how I didn’t really love him until he loved me, because there’s a lot

to dislike about Malcolm. Even our friends would say there’s an enormous amount to

dislike about him. He’s terribly rude. He’s the most loyal friend that you could have,

if he’s your friend he is the most loyal friend. If anybody criticises me he’s literally

ready to kill them: you cannot criticise me, you cannot say anything bad about me in

front of Malcolm because he’ll kill them. But he’s violently rude, he is so rude, and

he’s also frank. I often say to him, ‘Malki, you don’t have to tell people what you

think, you don’t have to tell them the truth. It’s quite possible to sugar the truth or to

keep your big, fat opinion to yourself.’ But he just tells people what he thinks, it’s so

embarrassing. It’s just dreadful. I was in Canberra once – this is about two years ago

– and Malcolm happened to be with me, and he came face-to-face with Philip

38

Ruddock as they came out of the toilet in the airport. And my heart sank, for Philip

Ruddock’s sake. Philip Ruddock at the moment of our speaking is the Attorney-

General, the federal Attorney-General in this country, and for left-wing people like

me he is the biggest bastard in the country at the moment, he is the most evil man in

the country – he’s about to pass anti-terrorism laws that are going to make Australia

into a police state, he is appalling – and I found myself feeling sorry for Philip

Ruddock because he was face-to-face with Malcolm. Fortunately, Malcolm was so

staggered by the fact that he was face-to-face with Philip Ruddock that he didn’t

speak, he was so amazed that Philip Ruddock got off lightly. But for me, it has been

a marriage made in Heaven. He has been the most devoted, loving, supportive,

encouraging husband that a woman could really ask for.

Mem, you married in 1969 –

In Zimbabwe.

– in Zimbabwe.

Which was then still Rhodesia, (laughs) yes, it was still Rhodesia, yes.

Just.

Yes, just. Oh, that was hysterical – do you want me to tell that story?

Please do.

You know, this is embarrassing, Rob, I have to say, because one of the things my

mother said to me was ‘Never talk about yourself. Don’t talk about yourself.’ And

I’ve been talking about myself for two hours, I think.

I’m asking you to talk about yourself.

It’s a sort of Australian thing where you don’t want to live in Wanker’s World and

think yourself so important and be really precious because you’re important enough

to be interviewed by the archives of the National Library – I mean, it’s embarrassing.

So let me go on with the talk anyway, let me go on, because I’ve put that behind me.

Malcolm at the time of our marrying was in Rwanda as a volunteer with – it was his

second year as a VSO with Voluntary Service Overseas, an English organisation. His

first year had been Tunisia, his second year was Rwanda, and I was in Zimbabwe

teaching – voluntarily, at that point – African ‘cripples’, as we called them then.

39

Okay, kids with physical disabilities. I was teaching a Year 7 class English, and I

loved it. Malcolm and I could barely communicate between Rwanda and Rhodesia

because of sanctions against Rhodesia, so letters went via Belgium, they couldn’t

come directly from Rwanda to Zimbabwe, they had to go via Belgium, so mail was

very, very slow; and phoning was extraordinarily difficult, it could be done but it was

very, very difficult. Anyway, he was able to communicate that he was going to come

for Christmas in ’68, the last – he was going to be able to arrive a week before

Christmas – no, the day before Christmas he would arrive, and would be able to stay

for two weeks. And he was going to fly to Zambia, because he couldn’t fly to

Zimbabwe, he was going to fly to Zambia to Lusaka, because his best male friend

from high school was then – had been to Oxford, was a lawyer and was doing some

work in Zambia, and his name was David Hallett – is David Hallett, David is still

alive and still a friend. His nickname was Maize. So Malcolm and Maize drove from

Lusaka to the border at Victoria Falls, the border of the two countries. When

Malcolm got to the border the immigration people asked him what means of support

he had and what money he had and so on, and he said he didn’t have any because he

was going to be staying with his fiancée and her family, and they wouldn’t let him

into the country because he had no visible means of support. This is like probably

eleven o’clock on Christmas Eve. Now, I have forgotten to tell in the story that

because I knew he was coming for Christmas and coming for two weeks I decided

unilaterally – this is unbelievable – I decided unilaterally that Malcolm and I would

marry on January 2nd

, which was the halfway mark. We would have a week before

and we would have a week after the wedding.

And you hadn’t told Malcolm?

I had no way of telling Malcolm that I was going to marry him, had no way of telling

him. I told his parents that it was happening – they couldn’t get there because it was

all so quickly organised, it was all organised within three weeks: catering, dress,

everything, it was hysterical. And so I was weeping and wailing and just howling,

and Dad – because he’d been in the Air Force in Darwin during the War – sat on the

veranda steps, I remember, while I was sobbing and saying, ‘Oh, we were going to

get married and he can’t get into the country and it’s Christmas Day tomorrow,’ and

he said, ‘Memzi, darling, when I was in the Air Force in 1942 in Darwin and things

40

went wrong, you always went to the top.’ He said, ‘I think I’ll go to the top.’ And I

don’t know whom he knew at the top. This was Christmas Eve, and he found some

official in immigration, through a contact, and said to this guy, ‘I will be the

guarantor of my prospective son-in-law if you let him into the country. Could you

phone the border and tell them so?’ And Malcolm was allowed in, and they arrived

at four o’clock on Christmas morning, at which point I said – oh, no, I told him on the

phone: ‘My darling,’ I said, ‘we’re getting married in eight days’ time.’ He said,

‘Are we? Wow! Great!’ (laughs) So we married at Hope Fountain Mission, which

was exciting, because there was lots of African dancing and African music and it was

my childhood church and it was lovely, and there was a beehive as usual in the corner

of the church and all the bees were buzzing, and oh, it was divine, I loved it.

Malcolm can’t really remember much about our day because he had tapeworm, he

had picked up a tapeworm which is a dreadful thing to have in your stomach – he was

rakishly thin, he looked gorgeous, because of course the worm was eating everything

that he was eating and more – and so he had gone to our family doctor, who had

given him some very fierce medicine, and eventually Malcolm was going to evacuate

this worm, he was going to poo it out, and all he was worried about was that this

would happen (laughs) at the moment that he was saying, ‘I do!’ ‘I do want to go to

the toilet!’ So we married, and I was not going to see him again for six months until

his tour in Rwanda was finished, because by then I had a job at the Zambian

Broadcasting Corporation. But when he got home his co-worker from England had

just got jack of being a volunteer in Rwanda and had cleared off, gone back home to

England – hitched home from Rwanda to England: can you imagine that journey?

That’s a trip.

And so the American boss, whom Malcolm was working for at the University of

Rwanda in the city of Butare – ‘city’: one street – said, ‘Who’s going to replace

Michael?’ And Malcolm said, ‘My wife could do it.’ And this guy said, ‘Your wife?

I didn’t know you were married. And Malcolm said, ‘As of eight days ago, yes I

am.’ (laughs) So I joined him in Rwanda. Which was for me not a happy

experience. Zimbabwe, Rhodesia as I keep meaning to call it because that was what

it was called at the time, was moderately wealthy. You didn’t see starving Africans,

you didn’t see poverty-stricken people – well, you saw people in poverty, but not

41

poverty-stricken, not starving. And of course they were starving in Rwanda.

Rwanda was a very Catholic country because it had been colonised by the Belgians,

like the Congo, and there was no contraception really, it was that kind of complete

absence of contraception: far too many people, dreadful – children with kwashiorkor,

the malnourishment disease, with their black hair going brown and falling out, their

stomachs distended. Oh, it was very, very sad. To be clothed in Rwanda in 1969 was

to be wealthy. And I found it nerve-racking, I was quite nerve-racked by Rwanda. It

was a very big culture shock to me to be in that part of Africa.

Were you there for long, Mem?

Six months. And, as usual, as continues and continues and continues and had been

prior to our arrival, there was this huge division between the Tutsis and the Hutus.

The Hutus were small people, they were not very pretty people, they were squat and

they had been in their history overtaken from the north by very beautiful people, very

tall people whose posture and elegance was just amazing to watch. I don’t know why

their posture was so incredible. But the Tutsis were king-like, they were tall and they

were beautiful, and needless to say they treated the Hutus abominably and in many of

the wars between the Tutsis and the Hutus, including the most recent shocking

genocide in Rwanda, the Hutus would – one of the things they did was to literally cut

the [Tutsis] down to size, they’d cut their legs off at their knees so that they’d be the

same size as the Hutus. It was awful, oh, it was so awful.

So Malcolm and I were young people; our students were young – because we were

only in our early twenties, our students were eighteen and nineteen – so we would

invite them round to our house but we would only invite Tutsis on one night and

Hutus on another, because we as whites could mix with both lots, but they didn’t mix

with each other. It was amazing, it was really an amazing experience. But I was glad

to leave that and we went back to England. And when we were in Rwanda, towards

the end of our time, we said, ‘Well, what are we going to do now?’ Because we were

penniless. ‘What are we going to do now?’ Penniless adventurers in life. And I said,

‘Malcolm, you know what?’ I said, ‘I’ve heard of a thing called a ten-pound migrant.

We could go to Australia for ten pounds. You only have to stay for two years, but it

would be a new country, it would be a new adventure,’ and he said, ‘Oh, that would

be great, and then we could go to Canada after that.’ I said, ‘Oh, well, let’s do that:

42

we’ll go to Australia and then we’ll go to Canada, and we’ll end up living in Canada,’

because he didn’t want to live in England again. And so we went back to England

and I worked in an export company which exported belts and ribbons, which I was a

packer for, I just packed them up and tied them up in parcels and took them to the

mail room – it was a terrible job, but it was much better than teaching in London at

that time, which is what Malcolm did for a term: he taught in a very, very, very

tough school where he locked the kids in, he locked them in with him – and we

applied to be migrants – well, he applied to be a migrant.

But they found out that I’d never lived here, that even though I was Australian and

I had an Australian passport, and I’d been to Australia for extended periods of like

nine months or a year when my parents were on holiday – on ‘furlough’ as it was

called, when they had to come back here and try and drum up more people to be

missionaries, so it was a working holiday for them – I’d never lived here. And

because I was a trained teacher and so was Malcolm and they were short of teachers,

they let me come as a migrant. I emigrated to my own country.

So when we got to Sydney Airport – and here I have to reveal my own ghastly

name, of course – all these pale migrants – you know, because this was when we

began to come by plane instead of boat, because this was the beginning of 1970,

January 4th

we arrived in 1970. (laughs) It was such good fun! All these pale

migrants from the depths of winter in England came out into this staggering sun,

beautiful. We must have looked like worms – eugh! – coming out from the earth.

And the guy who stamped my passport looked up before he stamped it and he said,

‘This is an Australian passport.’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘But this is a migrant plane,

everybody on this plane is migrants.’ I said, ‘I know, I’ve never lived here, I’m

coming back, I’m going to live here now.’ And he held out his hand – an

immigration officer held out his hand, shook my hand and said, ‘Welcome home,

Merrion.’ Well, I wanted to sob. I wanted to sob. And from that moment to this, I

have adored this country.

Not a bad greeting.

I have adored it. See, that’s what I mean about Australia and the character, the ethos.

It’s so beautiful, this country is so divine. We’re so nice. We’re so ordinary, we’re

so natural.

43

Hard to top that one, actually, Mem. Mem, is it just over a year later that Chloe’s

born?

That was January – yes, she was born in February –

Nineteen seventy-one.

– thank you, 1971. I’m already in the 2000s because that’s where we’re living. Good

grief!

Were you in Adelaide by the time – – –?

We were in Adelaide. We came through Adelaide because my grandfather was here

and he’d been so kind to me, that’s why we chose Adelaide because Granddad

Partridge was still alive, he was living in the Helping Hand Home for the Aged in

North Adelaide, but he wasn’t demented, he was a very sparky person. I saw him at

least once a week and adored him and had lovely conversations with him, learnt a lot

about my own family, about the history of South Australia and my family’s part in it

– you know, the Yalumba-Smiths[?], the Murtho group – Patagonian mad people

who went from South Australia to set up communist settlements – The Murray

Pioneeer: all of that I learnt from Granddad after I arrived here, and I thought, ‘Oh,

my God, I’m really South Australian, this is so exciting.’ On my mother’s side of the

family were judges who came out to judge the convicts, but they were from New

South Wales and I didn’t know much about them. So I feel very much more South

Australian than I do feel like a New South Welshwoman.

So yes, we came to Australia and halfway through 1970 – I’m teaching English as

a foreign language at this point part-time to various students, I’m also teaching in a

tiny Catholic school called Our Lady of Fatima, I’m also teaching at Cabra; all of

these things are part-time, some of them are teaching English and some of them are

teaching Drama, had about four or five part-time jobs. Malcolm was teaching at

Strathmont Boys’ Technical High School – my God – he said, ‘I want a tough school,

I don’t want anything easy, so they sent him to Strathmont, which he loved, because

he just loved a challenge. And halfway through the year – we had a couple of friends

who had a little girl who was three who was brilliant: precocious, hilarious, pretty,

interesting to talk to, lovely child – and we said, ‘Let’s have a baby.’ Neither of us

really has any idea what this implies. ‘Let’s have a baby.’ ‘Wow, wouldn’t that be

great!’ So because we’re dramatic, Malcolm and I, we got the Pill – you know, the

44

kind of little foil thing of the Pill, the contraceptive pill – cut it up into its individual

days and threw it over our heads like confetti, and that was it for the contraception:

gone. And Chloe was born on February 22nd

1971, the best thing that ever happened.

END OF DISK 2: DISK 3

This is the third session of an interview with Mem Fox on 2nd

December 2005, 2nd

December 2005. Mem, the remarkable Chloe is born.

Why, of course, every parent – there are books for children written about this, where

every parent says that their child is the most beautiful and the brightest and most

gorgeous. But she has turned out to be lovely. She’s now thirty-four, we can skip all

of that. She’s thirty-four, she’s a French teacher at Loreto Catholic Girls’ School in

Adelaide, and she’s standing for Parliament in the upcoming South Australian state

election on March 18th in 2006, she’s standing for the seat of Bright. The seat of

Bright is where her great-grandmother had a dame school, so the kind of South

Australian connection of Chloe and politics – she was a journalist at The Advertiser

for three and a half years, my grandfather had been a journalist at The Murray

Pioneer, my grandfather had owned and run a newspaper in Stanley in Tasmania so

journalism ran in the family and runs in her. And she is single at the moment, but I

am so pleased I had her. She’s funny, she’s rewarding to be with, she’s a very good

citizen, she’s a fine citizen, Chloe.

Mem, apart from having Chloe, were the 1970s a pretty remarkable decade? Was

the 1970s – – –?

Yes, it was, because when she was six, which was ’77, in ’77 I had a malignant

melanoma diagnosed, and for a while I thought I was going to die. I didn’t know

enough about it and I thought that I was going to die. In fact, even in 1977, if you

caught a melanoma in time you didn’t die of it. I mean, even now, people can die of

melanoma now and many people do, I think thousands of people die of melanoma in

Australia every year, but I found mine, it was on my back, when it was in the second

stage of cancer and I was in hospital for some time because they had to dig a massive

hole in my shoulder to make sure they had everything out. But she was only six and

it was just dreadful to think that you were not going to live to see your child grow up.

And I think that that experience of thinking that perhaps you’re not going to be there

the next day shows you that you’ve got things to do. It shows you that you’ve got

45

things to do. And after having lots and lots of part-time jobs, one of which was

teaching English to migrants, perhaps, at SAIT, which was the South Australian

Institute of Technology – so in ’70, ’71 and ’72 I had lots and lots of part-time jobs

and I had Chloe, and I had Chloe; Malcolm went to university full-time in the year

that Chloe was born for four years, and he had lots of part-time jobs as well.

But I thought you already had your teaching degrees from England: weren’t they

accepted here?

Well, he, at Strathmont Boys’ Technical High School, saw the pay cheque of a first-

year-out teacher, a colleague of his, a young man – who was a useless teacher,

useless; and one of the things I can say about Chloe and Malcolm and me is that we

know how to teach and we love it, all three of us – and he was horrified by the

difference in pay between his pay packet and this guy’s which he happened to see,

and the difference was that this guy had a university degree and Malcolm had a

teachers’ college diploma. And so he decided that this was ridiculous and that he

would have to get a degree because he couldn’t stand being paid less than somebody

who taught more badly than he did. So that’s why he went to university and that’s

why I went to university eventually. But a job was advertised at the Bedford Park

Teachers’ College for a tutor in Drama, and I had taught Drama at Cabra and so on

and Malcolm said, ‘I can’t apply for this because I want to study full-time, I don’t

want this to hang over us, I want to get it out of the way so that I can then earn proper

money and so on; you have to apply, you’ve got to do this job.’ And I said, ‘I can’t, I

can’t, I don’t know how to do that, I don’t know how they teach teachers how to

teach Drama.’ And he said, ‘You went to the only place in the world that taught

people how to be teachers of Drama as a key component of the course. If you don’t

know, you have wasted three years of your education.’ So he applied and made me

sign the application form. And at the end of ’73 we were in Rhodesia, Chloe was

two, and a telegram came through, which we still have, offering me a position as

tutor at Bedford Park Teachers’ College at a salary of $4,300 a year. Which at the

time was less than the cleaners earned at the college, it was a very low salary. But I

got the job, started in February ’73, and I was immediately where I should be. I was

in paradise. I loved it.

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So I started in ’73. They sort of made moves on me around ’75, I think – ’75, ’76

– and said, ‘Mem, really, you know’ – and I can’t remember all the details of this, it’s

in my cv somewhere – ‘you do need a degree, you’re teaching in a tertiary institution,

you can’t not have a BA.’ And I said, ‘But I’m doing a brilliant job at what you have

employed me to do. You didn’t employ me to be a brain’ – once again, that was the

thing, the whole self-esteem thing, about I didn’t want to be a student – ‘You didn’t

employ me to be a brain, you didn’t employ me to intellectualise about drama, you

employed me to teach people how to teach Drama in primary schools, which I know

how to do backwards, which I’m doing very well, and I’m also teaching Drama to

these students for their own sake. And you yourselves have acknowledged that I’m

doing a fine job.’ And they said, ‘But you know you need to have the qualification.’

So I went to Flinders as – yes, it was Flinders then – I went to Flinders and studied

English and Drama. I got a lot of status for the Drama work that I’d already done, but

I did do three years of English, which I loved, and that – had the college – – –. I have

to tell people who are listening that Sturt – it became Sturt College after it was

Bedford Park College – Sturt College was at the bottom of the hill, Flinders was at

the top of the hill, the university and the college were on the same piece of land; and

so I could judiciously, with timetabling, work full-time and study full-time. I literally

had a full-time study load and a full-time teaching load, and a young child and a

husband. But in your thirties you can do anything. You can achieve mountains in

your thirties. And I’m not saying it wasn’t stressful: I remember once going to

Victor Harbor by myself for a weekend to get a couple of essays written because I

just didn’t have the time to do it at home. But I loved it.

And one of the things I studied at Flinders was Children’s Literature. I was taught

by a magical, strict, no-nonsense, Northern English woman called Felicity Hughes,

and she had taught me Paradise lost in the term before, which was extremely

challenging, we’d had to read every book of Paradise lost and discuss each book in a

group of merely six – my dear university students listening to this: in the 1970s a

tutorial was six people, not forty, you poor buggers. And six people, you couldn’t get

away with not reading the book of Paradise lost that you were supposed to have read.

So when we’d finished it I said, ‘Felicity, you know there are car stickers that say “I

crossed the Nullarbor”. Can we have a badge made that says, “I have read Paradise

lost”?’ (laughter) And she was fabulous and I got ‘80’ and a distinction and ‘It’s

47

been my pleasure’ and all of this kind of stuff – we didn’t have ‘high distinctions’ in

that time, there were only distinctions – and I got a distinction and she loved my

essay on Paradise lost. The next term I did Children’s Literature with her.

When one of the first assignments was set, which was to write a children’s book, I

thought that she had lost her mind. Because standards had been so high with the

Paradise lost stuff, and I was speaking Milton in my dreams because we’d had to

study it so hard, that I thought less of Felicity when she set that topic. I actually

thought less of her. She went down in my estimation. I am saying this with shame

all over my face, because the reason why she wanted us to write a children’s story

was to come to that realisation that writing for children is phenomenally difficult, and

that the people we were about to study deserved our utmost respect. So we all went

home and tried to write a children’s story and, my God, we realised how difficult it

was.

I loved the course, finished the course, did the assignment, handed in a story which

I liked very much called Hush the invisible mouse, in which a mouse’s grandmother

had made it invisible to save it from snakes, and then the mouse wanted to be seen

again and the grandmother said, ‘Oh, I can’t remember what food it is but something

will bring you back, something will bring you back into visibility again and I can’t

remember what it is.’ So they travelled round the world and ended up in Australia

eating all the foods along the way. Nothing worked, nothing worked. They arrived

in Australia and – lo and behold! – various parts of the mouse appeared as they ate,

respectively, a Vegemite sandwich, a pavlova and half a lamington, because I wanted

to write this tremendously Australian story. Because I was tired of the ‘cultural

cringe’: I arrived here thinking Australia was God’s gift to the world, and

Australians didn’t think that at the time, they just didn’t think it. I was so angry with

Australians when I arrived here because I loved this place before I came here because

I’d been imbued with a love of Australia by my parents, and Australians were saying,

‘Oh no, we can’t do this; no, we’re not very good at that; no, we can’t do that; no, we

can’t do that.’ It was so irritating. In the Arts, in Science, in inventions, in all sorts

of ways, Australia was saying we couldn’t do it and I thought, ‘Well, we can.’

That book was rejected nine times over five years. Felicity loved it, and I had

asked a colleague at Sturt if he could recommend an illustrator because I didn’t think

the story was good enough and I was an over-achieving, crawling, mature-age student

48

and I wanted to get a very high mark for it. So he said, ‘I’ve got an ex-student of

mine in Sydney called Julie Vivas, I think she’ll help you out.’ So I sent the story to

Julie Vivas and said, ‘I’m hoping to get this published but at the moment it’s a

university assignment: do you think you could do some illustrations for it?’ You

should never work like that, because if it’s never published that person has worked

for three months for no money. There’s just no reward for them. So Julie did half the

book, because a picture book is thirty-two pages, she did enough artwork for half the

book, based on the mouse. Sensational, the pictures are sensational, I still have two

originals hanging on my wall. That story was rejected nine times over five years. It

was finally accepted by Omnibus Books and, as they say – especially when it’s a

historian you’re talking to – the rest is history.

The mouse becomes a possum.

The mouse became the possum, the book became Possum magic, it became and still

remains the best-selling children’s picture book ever in this country.

Who transmogrified the mouse?

I was looking through catalogue cards – this will also be interesting to people

listening later, when now we do everything digitally in a library, but we were looking

through catalogues: books were on cards in little, long drawers, and you’d flick

through the cards to find the book that you were looking for.

And it was fun.

And it was good fun. And all the cards were grubby because lots of people had

looked at them. And then you’d pull out the card and it would tell you where to find

it on the shelf. And I was looking for something when I was a college lecturer –

because it was still Sturt College then; it became Flinders University afterwards, it

was amalgamated; but it was still Sturt College – and I was in the library and I was

very excited because a book of mine called How to teach Drama to infants without

really crying had been accepted, okay? For publication. It was a textbook, still in

print. And I said to a colleague of mine whom I adored, John Palmer – sadly passed

on – I said, ‘John Palmer, I’ve got some very good news’ – because I knew he was a

sweetheart and I knew he’d be pleased for me – and I said, ‘You know, I’ve just had a

letter this morning to say that my first book is going to be published, and God knows

49

whether I’ll ever write another but it’s called How to teach Drama to infants without

really crying and Scholastic is going to publish it’ – or was it Heinemann? I can’t

remember. And he said, ‘Fantastic.’ He said, ‘If you ever write a book for children,

a friend of mine has just started a publishing company called Omnibus Books.’ I

said, ‘Really? I happen to have a manuscript.’ So he gave me their address.

Was it at Kent Town then?

Yes. That’s why it was called ‘Omnibus’, because it was opposite the bus station.

And is still called Omnibus, even thought it’s no longer opposite the bus station. And

they said they could see that I could write, it was obvious in the manuscript that I

could write; it was obvious in the manuscript that there was a story there, but it was

four pages or three and a half pages and a picture book is typically a page and a half

of double-spaced writing. And that was a Friday, and they said did I think that I

could come back on the Monday and over the weekend do these things: change it to

another animal, which we decided there and then through discussion would be

possums, because I had possums in my roof, so it would be possums – because

they’re adorable, you know, couldn’t have a koala because we’d got Blinky Bill,

kangaroo doesn’t suit the story, wombat didn’t suit the story, possum was perfect, so

we would change the animal because there are lots of mice in stories, change the

mouse to a possum; cut the story by two-thirds; and make the language lyrical. So I

did.

Over the weekend.

I mean basically what they said was, ‘Rewrite your crap completely and come back

next week!’ (laughs) So I did. And of course there was further editing, but that’s

how Possum magic was born. And, you know, yesterday I was in a school, Braeview

Primary School, where my great-nephew, Mackie Partridge, is a student, and I was

talking to the Year 6–7 kids, and my heart was in my mouth – not because I was

nervous about being in front of kids of that age, even though I know that those

children have changed over time and 6s and 7s are not what they used to be when I

was teaching; but I was nervous because I thought, ‘I can’t read Possum magic to

kids who are ten, eleven and twelve. It’s going to be humiliating for them and they’ll

think it’s so uncool.’ But it was a surprise visit to the school, they didn’t know I was

coming, and I spoke to four different groups and was introduced as ‘Mem Fox’ to

50

each group, and the level of hysteria among some of the kids was just wonderful. It

was extremely affirming, I have to say. (excited, shrieking voice) ‘Mem Fox, she’s

Mem Fox, omigod she’s Mem Fox!’ (gasps for breath) ‘I love Mem Fox, I’ve loved

Mem Fox for years, omigod it’s Mem Fox!’ (usual voice) You know, it was that

kind of reaction. It was so wonderful, it was like being a superstar, I was so excited.

And I read Possum magic to these children yesterday. Boys – I mean these boys

were sort of getting to be puberty type, because you know they’re older now in that

age group than they were because we’ve got more time in junior primary – they were

just, they didn’t move a muscle. They didn’t move a muscle. They were hypnotised

by the story. I think it’s because it’s a quest. I think it’s because the illustrations are

beautiful. I think it’s because it’s about food. But also the beginning of Possum

magic – which I did not realise at the time; I only realised it some years afterwards –

the beginning rhythm of Possum magic is, beat for beat, the rhythm of the beginning

of Ruth. And I know lots of Bible stories, but I chose to learn Ruth by heart as that

assignment at drama school, which is why I knew the story so well, which is why the

rhythms of Ruth have always been in my brain. Now, the story of Ruth starts ‘Now,

it came to pass’, and Possum magic starts ‘Once upon a time’; and Ruth goes on ‘in

the days when the judges ruled’, and Possum magic says ‘but not very long ago’.

And the who, the what, the when and the where is all in the same beat, in the first

paragraph of Possum magic, as it is in the first paragraph of the story of Ruth,

without my realising it until years later. Now, when I told you the story of Ruth it’s

beautiful. You want to know the rest of the story. And the rhythm of the language

captures us, perforce, it’s irresistible, we can’t not be captured by such beautiful

language. So by chance I did write a first page that, once read, I think, was like a

soothing hand across a forehead in its peace, in its calm. And anyway, for some

reason or another, that book is iconic in Australia now.

And you know how I’ve got this bad feeling about how I look and I don’t feel very

pretty or anything, when I get up in the morning and look at myself in the mirror, or

when I’ve taken off my face at night and I’m in my old blue nightie and my dreadful

dressing gown and I look at myself, I just find it truly heart-warming that I wrote

such an elegant book as Possum magic, because it’s beautiful and it’s all the things

that I’m not: it’s elegant, it’s poised, it’s just gorgeous. And sometimes it’s so

successful, its success has been so great, that I can talk about it as if I hadn’t written

51

it, I can divorce myself from it, because it’s a phenomenon and it’s out there and it’s

written by somebody called Mem Fox whom I have a slight acquaintance with, but

it’s not me. Because how could it be me? How could I have done that? I still find it

– I’ve got tears in my eyes – I still find it really, really exciting that I am the person

who wrote Possum magic, it seems unbelievable. I’ve been so lucky.

END OF DISK 3: DISK 4

This is an interview with Mem Fox for the National Library of Australia and the

State Library of South Australia, a continuation of an interview on 2nd

December

2005. Today is 21st March 2006 and interviewer is Rob Linn.

Mem, there were a number of things left over from the last interview that we

wanted to talk about. And one that you’ve reminded me about was that there were

a couple of matters you wished to correct before we went any further.

Indeed. The last time we talked was on December 2, 2005, and it was the afternoon

of the night before, a night when I hadn’t slept at all because of a young man being

put to death in Singapore for drug possession, and it had upset me terribly. So I was

very tired; not only was I tired from that but I was tired from really a very hectic life

in the prior six or seven weeks. I was so exhausted, I hadn’t realised how exhausted I

was, that I was then in hospital for five days before Christmas 2005 with stress-

induced, wheezeless asthma, which is called ‘pseudo asthma’, so I was very ill and

had not realised how tired I was. So I made some silly mistakes, Rob, I have to say,

which I’m really embarrassed about. Fancy my thinking that Shakespeare had

written Edward II – I was so mortified when I heard that when I was listening back to

the CD: I thought, ‘Oh, this is terrible.’ I couldn’t remember the name of the poet

that I had quoted who talked about ‘she came and sat beside me and quacked in flat

platitudes’ – I called him Flecker, then I called him Elroy Flecker, and actually his

name is James Elroy Flecker, (laughs) which is really, really embarrassing. And I

talked about the ‘St James’ version of the Bible instead of the ‘King James’ version

of the Bible, and I think I mistook James Elroy Flecker for Rupert Brooke as well.

So this is totally – I mean, I was just beside myself. But I am together, I’ve had a lot

of rest, I would like people who listen to know that we are recording this two days

after our thirty-five year-old daughter, Chloe, was elected for the first time to

Parliament as a member for the Labor Party in the seat of Bright, South Australia, and

now I’m ready to begin.

52

I didn’t know we were going to have the advertisement as well, Mem.

(laughs) It’s history, Rob! It’s living history.

It is a continuation of that Chloe we mentioned in the last interview, also, and it’s

the way her life is shaping.

Mem, where we were heading towards last time was very much the focus that

you’ve had for some years now, in literacy teaching; and – as I see it, at least – it’s

very much a continuation of the new graciousness that you brought to children’s

books. I’m not sure if I’m seeing it right; would you like to take over?

The teaching came before the children’s books. Rather than being a continuation

from the children’s books the interest in literacy came before the children’s books

started. I was astounded by the way Chloe learnt to read – and I think we mentioned

that perhaps in the last lot of tapes, that she learnt to read without any lessons at the

age of four and a half – and I couldn’t understand how it had happened; so that

awakened in me an intense interest in literacy learning, as much as literacy teaching,

which is a little bit different. And I was fortunate in 1980 to be allowed to retrain by

the University – College, as it then was, Sturt College – for a year in Literacy, and

that was just a year that changed my life. What I learnt from that was that the more

language children acquire prior to their beginning to learn to read or showing an

interest in books, the more language they have the easier it is to learn to read. So I

realised how very, very important it was that children were read aloud to before they

went to school, because if they were not read aloud to before they went to school they

didn’t have that familiarity with language, with the world and with the print that they

needed in order to be able to learn to read. Some children read aloud to learnt to read

automatically; some children not read aloud to – most children not read aloud to

found learning to read more difficult; and it made me sad that that was the case,

because reading aloud to children is such an incredibly joyful activity for parents and

children, it’s just so delicious – you know, the smell of the children, the giggles of the

children, the delight of the children as they turn pages themselves, the wonder of a

parent watching as a child says a word before the parent says it, finishes a rhyme and

so on: it’s just a delight. And really over the last I would say probably – where are

we, 2006; anyway, we’re almost coming up to, we’re over twenty-five years of my

intense interest in literacy – so I’ve been working very hard in that time either

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teaching teachers how to teach reading and writing or talking to parents about the

importance of their reading aloud to children prior to the children going to school.

Now, Mem, is this part of what you do in the college lectures in America as well?

Yes, it is. Yes. In fact, it’s most of what I do in America. Very little of what I do in

America is book promotion. People think that I’m there – I think when I saw you last

I’d just come back from my ninety-first visit, I think it was, and I’ve now been there

ninety-two times – and really I’m talking to teachers or parents about literacy.

Obviously when I’m talking to them and I’m using examples of ‘as if’ or ‘for

instance’, then I’m going to use one of my books; and if the example can’t be found

in one of my books then it’s somebody else’s book. But people do want to hear from

me as a writer in those speeches, so I often do a major speech – a keynote speech to

teachers – and then a ‘choice’ type speech later in the day that people can choose to

come [to] when I’m there as a writer. Really, my life is much more about my

teaching than my writing, and I think that comes from this thing that poor Chloe has

inherited in spades of having to serve. If you’re a writer, obviously you’re serving

the community, but you don’t have that sensation of giving and being there and

improving people’s lives and helping out and making people happy and making the

world a better place: you don’t get that from writing – well, I don’t get that feeling,

that intense feeling, of helping out. And so I love this stuff when I’m talking to

teachers and parents, I love that stuff. I adore it.

Where would you begin, Mem?

Where would I begin? Well, one of the places I begin is by talking about how

children learn to read most easily. Because parents have it in their minds, and right-

wing newspaper columnists in particular and ignorant politicians – and why should

they have any knowledge of this? My saying ‘ignorant’ is not being derogatory, it’s

just stating a fact: why would a politician be aware of what was happening in literacy

and how children learn to read? They haven’t had any special training or knowledge,

they haven’t been through teachers’ college to learn how to do it. But right-wing –

no, not right-wing; all politicians – and right-wing commentators also, and many,

many, many parents, misunderstand what reading is. Now, my explanation of it is

that when you’re reading you’re making sense of the squiggles on the page. The

‘opposition’, as I would call them, thinks that reading is making sounds from the

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squiggles on the page. So the people who think that it’s making sounds are very keen

on something called Phonics, because phonics is the ability to say ‘k-æ-t spells cat’,

okay? But unfortunately, in the English language, that ease of sound-to-symbol,

symbol-to-sound relationship happens only fifty per cent of the time. The word

‘nice’, for example, you can’t do it with ‘nice’: you can’t go ‘n-I-k-e equals nice’, I

mean it just doesn’t come out (laughs) right, it doesn’t come out right. And the

interesting thing, of course, which all of these – what I’m loosely calling the

‘opposition’, who loves the phonic method – the interesting point is that the Japanese

and the Chinese don’t use phonics because they have pictographs so they can’t use

that method, and yet billions of those people learn to read; and the other interesting

thing is that deaf children learn to read – stone deaf children, profoundly deaf

children learn to read – so it’s not to do with sound. They can actually learn to read

as other children learn to read, which is that they learn language in their own way,

deaf children learn it in their own way, and they come to make sense of these

different symbols. For them it must be like making sense of an art form. But the

battle – which, since I spoke to you, I’ve given up, by the way –

Oh, really?

– yes – the battle for phonics in the classroom is so great, the politics of it is so

vicious – – –. I have been working in it for so long – really, my interest in it is as old

as Chloe, of course, almost – but it has been my life’s work for the last twenty-five

years, but the forces are so strong, the ignorant forces are so strong, the money to be

made by people who print phonics programs is so great, that fighting that battle has

caused me the greatest tension. It has caused me the greatest tension in my life, and it

was really as the result of that battle that I ended up in hospital before Christmas.

Every time somebody mentioned ‘literacy’ while I was in hospital, I sobbed, I just

burst into tears and howled. So I knew that that was – you know, I was very tired for

many reasons, but I knew that that was really the cause of my ending up in hospital.

So has literacy become about ideological camps, has it?

Absolutely. It’s always been about ideological camps. They’re called the ‘literacy

wars’: they’re a little bit like the culture wars in history, or the ‘black-armband view’

of Aboriginal history as opposed to the other view of Aboriginal history. So there are

huge camps across the English-speaking world. And in fact England – in The

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Guardian this very day on the internet – the English have taken up Phonics in a big

way. It is absolutely heartbreaking, because I know from a lifetime of study, a

lifetime of combing through research, a lifetime of personal experience, that they’re

on the wrong track. And for them not to listen to people like us is so heart-breaking,

I’ve literally given up that fight. Because the asthma specialist became a counsellor

at the same time, and he said, ‘There are certain things you’ve got to give up and you

can’t go on like this. You can’t be a writer, you can’t be a teacher and you can’t be in

this political world; you have to give one of them up. Which one is causing you most

distress? Because you’re not indispensable.’ And I know I’m not, I know I’m not. I

was vilified in the newspaper in December after I spoke to you in Sydney, a whole

page about me being a Pollyanna and a danger to the community, quite literally:

Miranda Devine, D-E-V-I-N-E, a vicious, vicious woman, took a whole page to vilify

me in December. And yesterday, Sunday week ago, did the same – actually libelled

me Sunday week ago – but I’m not prepared to become a victim. I’m not a victim,

I’m not going to take her to court because it’s just too much bother and it’s a bore,

but it is a huge, huge, huge problem. And in fact I’m not going to bite on that one

because if I do I’ll backslide into my own work habits, my old work habits, which

I’ve promised myself I won’t do because I’m not Jesus Christ and I’m not a terrorist.

And the cause of literacy is not worth dying for. And I nearly died: two nights

running I nearly died.

So, Mem, the cause you’ve had with literacy, though, is not just a cause that you’ve

espoused, but something that’s come after a lot of research; and, more than that,

after really thinking very deeply indeed about why children read –

Yes.

– and how they best learn to read.

Exactly. And all of that thought and all of that experience is encapsulated in the book

that I wrote called Reading magic – in America it’s called Why reading aloud to

children will change their lives forever, and in Australia it’s called Reading magic:

how your child can learn to read before school and other read-aloud miracles. Now,

the second title, the Australian title, sounds like a hot-housing title: you know, ‘If

you do this, you can get your kid advanced’. But in fact the main message of

Reading magic is, if you love your children and you adore being with them and you

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love interacting with them over books and you read aloud with joy and you point out

things, aspects of the text to them just as a game and let them finish rhyming bits and

let them read pages even if they don’t get it right but they’re excited and they want to

do it: you know, all of that is really the message. It’s a message of love in Reading

magic, it’s much more about love, and in fact in Reading magic I begged parents not

to teach their children to read. I say, ‘If you do it with duty and if you do it with a

kind of “teacherly” attitude, it’s not going to work, that’s not the point of it. The

whole point is loving your children and loving being with them.’ So that book was –

is, I hope – going to be the most important book that I write; that and Radical

reflections, which is the book for teachers. But Reading magic I think is the book

I’m most proud of, and it was republished last year in a new edition with two new

chapters, one of which is specifically about phonics, because I realised that people

were madly interested in it and that very few people understood it. So I had to take

off my academic hat and put on my writing-for-the-general-public hat and explain it

in one-syllable terms. It’s very difficult, but great fun. And I also added a chapter on

reading and boys, because the assumption in the community, for some weird reason,

is that boys aren’t as keen on reading as girls are, which is complete nonsense.

Everybody who’s ever read to a little boy over and over again, who has then become

hooked on books, knows that there’s no difference between girls and boys if we start

from the very beginning: they love reading just as much as girls do. And I think it’s

that we’re such a sporting nation, we can’t believe that little boys actually like books.

Mem, you once wrote that good teachers are remembered, not good methods. Is

that what you’ve been saying, that it’s the way in which it’s brought, with love and

affection, that inspires, not just the ideology?

I think so, I think so. Because one of the pieces of research that is sobering – which

actually comes out of one of what I would call the ‘opposition’, whose name escapes

me but he was the instigator and the sort of chairperson of the national literacy8 report

at the end of last year; it’s driving me mad that I can’t remember his name, it’s Ken

Somebody – one of his pieces of research said it’s actually teachers that make the

difference and not the method, that most children learn to read, but the best teachers

8 The committee of the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy, chaired by Dr Ken Rowe, released

its report, Teaching reading, on 8th December 2005.

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are the ones who teach reading best; it’s not necessarily the method, it’s the best

teachers who teach reading in the most effective way. I just happen to know that if

we’re using the Whole Language method rather than the Phonics method, children

learn to read with more zest, (laughs) with more life, more vitality, they can see the

point of reading. And when they’re reading a book that’s been read to them over and

over again they’re not going to read like this – (haltingly) ‘Here, is, the, blue, sheep.

Here, is, the, red, sheep.’ – they’re going to read with the expression that the teacher

or parent used, which is (with childlike expression) ‘Here is the blue sheep, and here

is the red sheep.’ They’ll never want to do that kind of slow stuff because they know

that that doesn’t get you anywhere, doesn’t get any meaning out of the text.

I was going to say something else about the phonics stuff. Oh, yes: I have to say,

Rob, for people who are confused about this in later years when they’re listening,

there are two camps, or there have been two camps, which are a little bit outmoded.

But the major camps have been, probably, in the last twenty-five years, the camp of

Phonics and the camp of Whole Language. Whole Language talks about the

connection between the teaching of reading and the teaching of writing, that you have

to teach them both together because little kids who are learning to read take from

their reading a whole lot of knowledge that they put into their writing. But the exact

reverse is the same as well: they take from their writing, from struggling to make the

sounds mean something in symbols on the page, they take that back into their

reading. So the to-and-fro between reading and writing is very important; and you

cannot learn to write unless you’ve got phonics. So for the Phonics people to say,

‘Oh, Whole Language doesn’t teach phonics,’ is complete nonsense because you

can’t learn to write without phonics; you have to be able to make sound–symbol

relationships when you begin to write, and then you learn your correct spelling after

that. I mean, I have letters from children – I’ve had many, many letters from children

– saying ‘I lik your books’, okay, because when they’re writing the ‘lik’ you can just

see their little hands, their tongues are sticking out, their heads are down and they’re

going ‘l, aI,’ and they make the letter ‘I’ – ‘l, aI, k’ and they put the ‘K’. And that’s

all they need at that point, at the age of five, because they’ve sounded out ‘l, aI, k’:

that’s phonics. Spelling is correctly spelling ‘like’ as L-I-K-E, which is the teacher’s

job to teach them. There’s so much joy in the Whole Language approach, there’s so

much vitality.

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If you do phonics only, what we’re doing, if we’re doing phonics only, we’re

asking children, before they get into a car – I don’t know whether I said this before –

before they get into a car and drive it, which is like learning to read and loving

reading, okay? Before they get into a car and drive it they have to take that entire car

to pieces. They have to lay (wearily) all the pieces of the car, one by one, along

Anzac Highway in Adelaide, and with very dull, very repetitive, very meaningless

instruction which just doesn’t make sense to them at all, they can’t kind of see where

anything fits, because all the car’s in so many pieces. They then have to put those

pieces together before they’re even allowed to read a sentence, let alone a book. In

fact, in America – I had a terrible message on my website last year from someone

who was distraught in America, a teacher who had read my work, and she said, ‘I’m

just so upset because somebody in my district said that she wouldn’t read aloud to her

children until she had finished teaching them phonics in case they “cheated” in

learning to read.’ The fact that – – –. (laughs)

It’s not cheating for children to hear a book over and over and over again and then

make meaning out of it themselves; that’s exactly how Chloe learnt to read. That’s

why I was so excited, because we read her The foot book and lots of other Dr Zeus

books over and over and over again – there’s a lot of rhyme and rhythm and

repetition, which is tremendously important in books for young children – and blow

me down, she came home from school after two weeks and she was four and a half –

she was at Cabra, four and a half – and she said she could read. And she rushed off to

get The foot book, and neither Malcolm nor I believed that she could read because of

course we’d read it to her thousands of times, and we were dreadful, we were

shocking parents. Because she read it, but we thought, ‘Well, she starts at the

beginning and she just keeps going and she’s’ (snaps fingers, speaks rhythmically)

‘memorised the “Left foot, left foot, left foot, right/ Feet in the morning, feet at night”

and just gone through it.’ So we opened the book at random because we were so

distrustful of her assertion that she could read, and said, ‘What does this page say?’ It

was all a game, it wasn’t a test – I mean, it was a test to us but we made it a game for

her. ‘What does this page say?’ And she read it and we thought, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah,

yeah, yeah, yeah,’ and so we started pointing to individual words and she knew them.

But then most exciting on that day was that I’d been shopping on the way home from

school, from picking her up from school, and there were items [like] cornflakes

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packets and things like that, and she started to read off the cornflakes packets and I

didn’t know how it had happened, I had no idea. I went to the teacher the next day

and said, ‘How did this happen? My daughter can read; what’s your method? She’s

only been at school for two weeks, she’s only four and a half, she can read, this is

amazing,’ and she said, ‘Did you read to her?’ And I said, ‘Well, of course we did,’

and she just turned away and said, ‘Well, there you go, then.’ And that was the start

of it.

Mem, the way you’ve been describing things to me sounds like, okay, you’ve got

academic camps – and I’m not trying to deride what you’ve been saying –

No, no, no.

– there appeared to be academic camps on the one side, on the other you’ve got the

children.

Yes.

And I can’t quite understand why it is that the academics are, if you like, warring

over what a child is to read and how they’re to read. Surely the aim is for them to

read –

To read.

– and enjoy.

To read and enjoy.

So on this side, then, with the academics, is there a money thing behind this? You

intimated earlier on there was, there was a lot of money to be made out of

publications, I suppose.

There’s a huge amount of money to be made out of workbooks for Phonics. There

isn’t a huge amount of money to be made out of Whole Language because it’s got

nothing to sell, Whole Language has got nothing to sell, except to say to parents,

‘Please go to libraries and if the children adore a book, then, if you can afford it, buy

it for them so that they can re-read it many times.’ The Americans have made

billions and billions and billions of dollars out of failing to teach their children to

read. The McGraw–Hills, who publish most of that stuff, also publish the tests that

children are given in the States, so if you haven’t been through the McGraw–Hill

program you may not be able to answer the McGraw–Hill questions because the two

are so closely allied. It’s well-documented in research papers in the States by highly-

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respected academics that the McGraw–Hills and the George Bush family have been

friends for generations. So the whole push by George Bush for this method of

reading is really in support of a mate who will [make] and has made billions out of

this method. This week, I think, there’s a huge meeting at the National Kennedy

Library, I think, in Washington, which is called a ‘Literacy Ideas Meeting’, because

they’re bringing people from all over America for this round table, I think, because

literacy is just not being – the standard of literacy is falling drastically in the States

and they’re now realising that they might have to do something different. But the

money-makers, their lobbying is so strong it’s very, very difficult for the others not

to – – –. Because you know what it is: if you can lobby in the States – I mean, we

know that from the Abramov Scandal occurring in the States with that lobbyist,

who’s come clean – – –.

No, I’m not sure what that’s about. Abramov?

Abramov. It’s too complicated, but he is one of the chief lobbyists in Washington

and he had corruptly got legislation through by being paid inordinate amounts of

money. And in order not to go to jail, or in order to decrease his jail sentence, he’s

spilling the beans about this massive corruption. So all I’m saying is that the

McGraw–Hills will have very, very important lobbyists in the halls of Washington, in

the White House, and that this method of teaching reading is wrecking America. It’s

about the wreck England and I was very fearful that it was about to wreck Australia.

But we are so far ahead in Australia.

Is that right?

Yes, we are the third-highest, we have the third-highest reading level in the world,

after Finland, and we jockey for position with Canada and New Zealand all the time.

It’s Finland, Canada and New Zealand or/and Australia. All the time, at the top.

We’re also, I think, per capita the highest book-buying nation in the world, or we

were.

That apparently is a furphy.

Is it?

Yes, everybody says that about their countries. I’ve been told. I thought we were as

well, I’ve always thought that as well. But an email came through yesterday from the

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Ministry of Education about the latest results for Australia, and we are, we’re at the

top. So we are so strongly on the right track in Australia that teachers and even

department heads in different states will resist very strongly this federal push, which

has come from a right-wing minority that caught the ear of the Minister last year –

actually, caught the ear of the Minister at the end of 2004 – which culminated in this

huge literacy report at the end of 2005, which caused me to end up in hospital

because I saw Brendan Nelson, the Minister of Education, after I had my interview

with you last and it was very awkward because I wanted to kill him for what he was

doing in literacy education; but I wanted to kiss his feet for his co-operation on

working towards getting a message out to parents of children from babyhood to five

year-olds being read aloud to prior to school, he’s wonderful on that. But now he’s

been ‘promoted’, in inverted commas – it’s enraging to education people that he’s

been promoted out of Education to Defence: we would see that as a demotion

(laughs) ourselves, of course, because of our viewpoint. Promotion, be damned.

Now, the thing is that the Opposition in Australia is based mainly at Macquarie

University in New South Wales. The head honcho of that movement, as it were, is a

man called Max Coltheart – C-O-L-T-H-E-A-R-T – and his group is a group of

psychologists, not teachers, and they see everything in starkly scientific terms, the

emotional psychology of learning to read is being taken out for the cold scientific

science of it. The science of it cannot be pinned down because so much of reading is

from the affective; it’s not from the intellectual side of the brain, it’s also from the

affective – A-ffective, not E-ffective, from the affective side of the brain – and you

can’t, it’s very difficult to research the way children learn to read because each

situation that a child is learning to read in is unique, it can never be replicated,

because the child’s in a different mood, the book is different, the teacher’s different,

the room is different, the child is tired, the child is hungry, the child’s in a good

mood, the child likes the book, doesn’t like the book: it’s very difficult to research it.

I’m not saying it’s unresearchable at all, that would be ridiculous because a lot of

research has been done; but the messages that I have had on my website from people

who’ve read Reading magic just confirm and confirm and confirm. The sceptics

write to me and say, ‘I read your book and I thought, “Oh, yeah,” but in fact we have

read aloud to our son since he was born and now at two and a half he can recognise

this word and that word, and he loves books and he jumps up and down and demands

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to be read [to] and likes books.’ Somebody yesterday on my website said, ‘My child

of’ – I think he’s five – ‘loves books more than most children love television,’ which

is just lovely. And if that’s the only contribution I’ve made, if I had never written

Possum magic, if I’d never written a children’s book, to have changed some people’s

lives as a result of having Reading magic written, as a result of having written

Reading magic – well, Mum and Dad would be pleased with me.

I was just going to come to that. It just seems to me that that’s really – as you’ve

been talking I’ve been thinking about your mother and father and what we talked

about in the last interview and just how much their lives have really impacted on

what you’ve been doing, and how that experience that you had growing up with

them has really shaped why you feel it was worth fighting for that for twenty-five

years. Would I be right in saying that?

Absolutely. Absolutely. I often say that my parents were missionaries of religion

and I’m a missionary, too, of literacy. Because when I’m standing and I’m talking to

people I’m very often standing at a lectern, which is very like a pulpit, (laughs) really,

in its making and its shape, and I hear myself preaching. I am preaching and I am

persuading, and sometimes I know that I’m persuading so well that I feel guilty – I

think I’ve said this before: that you can use an ability to public speak for very bad

reasons as well as good, and when you realise you’re having an effect you think,

‘Mm, now, I must be careful here that I’m doing the right thing because I could so

easily do the wrong thing.’ And in relation to that, yesterday at the supermarket I met

an elderly woman whom I know by sight, I see her over and over again in Foodland

in Brighton, and she came up to me and she said, ‘I want you to know that without

ever having met her, or even having read the stuff that she has put out over the

election campaign, I voted for Chloe on the basis of the fact that your parents were

such fine people’ – that’s my mum and dad – ‘whom I loved and admired so much.

Your parents were such fine people that I knew their granddaughter would be a safe

person to vote for,’ which was very, very moving. It was very, very moving. I was

so touched. So it’s gone down, it’s gone beyond me, which is such a relief. Well,

you never know with your kids, do you, Rob? They could go off the rails! They

could be drug addicts and ghastly people and monsters – – –.

Mem, it’s been fascinating for me not just to interview you and to be able to share

with you your life, but to sense the passion you have for these things, because – as

with your parents – you too are impelled, almost: that’s how I’ve sensed it.

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It’s true, it is, I am impelled. I love that word, I haven’t used it for years – you forget

words, you know, if you don’t use them – ‘impelled’ – yes, it is, I was. And so you

can imagine, as a long-time Methodist/Uniting Church person the guilt that I’m

feeling in saying I cannot be involved in that any more because it will kill me.

Because I know that I’m doing good work in other areas – you know, I’m not doing

the political fight any more because there are other people doing it and I’m not

indispensable – so I’m only being a writer and I’m only being a talker to parents and

teachers. But that feeling that I’m impelled to serve makes me feel guilty about

giving that side of my life up.

And yet, Mem, perhaps the books that you’ve written speak as loudly as any

arguments would in the public sphere.

We can only hope so, Rob, because that’s the only option I have left now.

Mem, I’m not sure, but maybe – do you think we could tie it up there?

Perfect. I think you have (laughs) wonderfully captured the essence of the person

called ‘Mem Fox’. I don’t think I’ve been quite as cheerful today as I was on our

first recording, because this matters to me so much. You know, when I get serious I

get less amusing and I think I’ve been very serious today. But you’ve talked about

why I’m here, today –

That’s right.

– and that was it.

Well, thank you very much, Mem.

Thank you.

END OF INTERVIEW.

J.D. SOMERVILLE ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION, STATE

LIBRARY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA: INTERVIEW NO. OH 759 part 2

Part two of an interview with Merrion (Mem) Frances Fox conducted by Rob Linn

on 2nd

December 2005 and 21st March 2006, for the Eminent Australians Oral

History Project of the National Library and the State Library of South Australia.

DISK 1

This is an interview with Mem Fox for the National Library of Australia and the

State Library of South Australia, a continuation of an interview on 2nd

December

2005. Today is 21st March 2006 and interviewer is Rob Linn.

64

Mem, there were a number of things left over from the last interview that we

wanted to talk about. And one that you’ve reminded me about was that there were

a couple of matters you wished to correct before we went any further.

Indeed. The last time we talked was on December 2, 2005, and it was the afternoon

of the night before, a night when I hadn’t slept at all because of a young man being

put to death in Singapore for drug possession, and it had upset me terribly. So I was

very tired; not only was I tired from that but I was tired from really a very hectic life

in the prior six or seven weeks. I was so exhausted, I hadn’t realised how exhausted I

was, that I was then in hospital for five days before Christmas 2005 with stress-

induced, wheezeless asthma, which is called ‘pseudo asthma’, so I was very ill and

had not realised how tired I was. So I made some silly mistakes, Rob, I have to say,

which I’m really embarrassed about. Fancy my thinking that Shakespeare had

written Edward II – I was so mortified when I heard that when I was listening back to

the CD: I thought, ‘Oh, this is terrible.’ I couldn’t remember the name of the poet

that I had quoted who talked about ‘she came and sat beside me and quacked in flat

platitudes’ – I called him Flecker, then I called him Elroy Flecker, and actually his

name is James Elroy Flecker, (laughs) which is really, really embarrassing. And I

talked about the ‘St James’ version of the Bible instead of the ‘King James’ version

of the Bible, and I think I mistook James Elroy Flecker for Rupert Brooke as well.

So this is totally – I mean, I was just beside myself. But I am together, I’ve had a lot

of rest, I would like people who listen to know that we are recording this two days

after our thirty-five year-old daughter, Chloe, was elected for the first time to

Parliament as a member for the Labor Party in the seat of Bright, South Australia, and

now I’m ready to begin.

I didn’t know we were going to have the advertisement as well, Mem.

(laughs) It’s history, Rob! It’s living history.

It is a continuation of that Chloe we mentioned in the last interview, also, and it’s

the way her life is shaping.

Mem, where we were heading towards last time was very much the focus that

you’ve had for some years now, in literacy teaching; and – as I see it, at least – it’s

very much a continuation of the new graciousness that you brought to children’s

books. I’m not sure if I’m seeing it right; would you like to take over?

65

The teaching came before the children’s books. Rather than being a continuation

from the children’s books the interest in literacy came before the children’s books

started. I was astounded by the way Chloe learnt to read – and I think we mentioned

that perhaps in the last lot of tapes, that she learnt to read without any lessons at the

age of four and a half – and I couldn’t understand how it had happened; so that

awakened in me an intense interest in literacy learning, as much as literacy teaching,

which is a little bit different. And I was fortunate in 1980 to be allowed to retrain by

the University – College, as it then was, Sturt College – for a year in Literacy, and

that was just a year that changed my life. What I learnt from that was that the more

language children acquire prior to their beginning to learn to read or showing an

interest in books, the more language they have the easier it is to learn to read. So I

realised how very, very important it was that children were read aloud to before they

went to school, because if they were not read aloud to before they went to school they

didn’t have that familiarity with language, with the world and with the print that they

needed in order to be able to learn to read. Some children read aloud to learnt to read

automatically; some children not read aloud to – most children not read aloud to

found learning to read more difficult; and it made me sad that that was the case,

because reading aloud to children is such an incredibly joyful activity for parents and

children, it’s just so delicious – you know, the smell of the children, the giggles of the

children, the delight of the children as they turn pages themselves, the wonder of a

parent watching as a child says a word before the parent says it, finishes a rhyme and

so on: it’s just a delight. And really over the last I would say probably – where are

we, 2006; anyway, we’re almost coming up to, we’re over twenty-five years of my

intense interest in literacy – so I’ve been working very hard in that time either

teaching teachers how to teach reading and writing or talking to parents about the

importance of their reading aloud to children prior to the children going to school.

Now, Mem, is this part of what you do in the college lectures in America as well?

Yes, it is. Yes. In fact, it’s most of what I do in America. Very little of what I do in

America is book promotion. People think that I’m there – I think when I saw you last

I’d just come back from my ninety-first visit, I think it was, and I’ve now been there

ninety-two times – and really I’m talking to teachers or parents about literacy.

Obviously when I’m talking to them and I’m using examples of ‘as if’ or ‘for

66

instance’, then I’m going to use one of my books; and if the example can’t be found

in one of my books then it’s somebody else’s book. But people do want to hear from

me as a writer in those speeches, so I often do a major speech – a keynote speech to

teachers – and then a ‘choice’ type speech later in the day that people can choose to

come [to] when I’m there as a writer. Really, my life is much more about my

teaching than my writing, and I think that comes from this thing that poor Chloe has

inherited in spades of having to serve. If you’re a writer, obviously you’re serving

the community, but you don’t have that sensation of giving and being there and

improving people’s lives and helping out and making people happy and making the

world a better place: you don’t get that from writing – well, I don’t get that feeling,

that intense feeling, of helping out. And so I love this stuff when I’m talking to

teachers and parents, I love that stuff. I adore it.

Where would you begin, Mem?

Where would I begin? Well, one of the places I begin is by talking about how

children learn to read most easily. Because parents have it in their minds, and right-

wing newspaper columnists in particular and ignorant politicians – and why should

they have any knowledge of this? My saying ‘ignorant’ is not being derogatory, it’s

just stating a fact: why would a politician be aware of what was happening in literacy

and how children learn to read? They haven’t had any special training or knowledge,

they haven’t been through teachers’ college to learn how to do it. But right-wing –

no, not right-wing; all politicians – and right-wing commentators also, and many,

many, many parents, misunderstand what reading is. Now, my explanation of it is

that when you’re reading you’re making sense of the squiggles on the page. The

‘opposition’, as I would call them, thinks that reading is making sounds from the

squiggles on the page. So the people who think that it’s making sounds are very keen

on something called Phonics, because phonics is the ability to say ‘k-æ-t spells cat’,

okay? But unfortunately, in the English language, that ease of sound-to-symbol,

symbol-to-sound relationship happens only fifty per cent of the time. The word

‘nice’, for example, you can’t do it with ‘nice’: you can’t go ‘n-I-k-e equals nice’, I

mean it just doesn’t come out (laughs) right, it doesn’t come out right. And the

interesting thing, of course, which all of these – what I’m loosely calling the

‘opposition’, who loves the phonic method – the interesting point is that the Japanese

67

and the Chinese don’t use phonics because they have pictographs so they can’t use

that method, and yet billions of those people learn to read; and the other interesting

thing is that deaf children learn to read – stone deaf children, profoundly deaf

children learn to read – so it’s not to do with sound. They can actually learn to read

as other children learn to read, which is that they learn language in their own way,

deaf children learn it in their own way, and they come to make sense of these

different symbols. For them it must be like making sense of an art form. But the

battle – which, since I spoke to you, I’ve given up, by the way –

Oh, really?

– yes – the battle for phonics in the classroom is so great, the politics of it is so

vicious – – –. I have been working in it for so long – really, my interest in it is as old

as Chloe, of course, almost – but it has been my life’s work for the last twenty-five

years, but the forces are so strong, the ignorant forces are so strong, the money to be

made by people who print phonics programs is so great, that fighting that battle has

caused me the greatest tension. It has caused me the greatest tension in my life, and it

was really as the result of that battle that I ended up in hospital before Christmas.

Every time somebody mentioned ‘literacy’ while I was in hospital, I sobbed, I just

burst into tears and howled. So I knew that that was – you know, I was very tired for

many reasons, but I knew that that was really the cause of my ending up in hospital.

So has literacy become about ideological camps, has it?

Absolutely. It’s always been about ideological camps. They’re called the ‘literacy

wars’: they’re a little bit like the culture wars in history, or the ‘black-armband view’

of Aboriginal history as opposed to the other view of Aboriginal history. So there are

huge camps across the English-speaking world. And in fact England – in The

Guardian this very day on the internet – the English have taken up Phonics in a big

way. It is absolutely heartbreaking, because I know from a lifetime of study, a

lifetime of combing through research, a lifetime of personal experience, that they’re

on the wrong track. And for them not to listen to people like us is so heart-breaking,

I’ve literally given up that fight. Because the asthma specialist became a counsellor

at the same time, and he said, ‘There are certain things you’ve got to give up and you

can’t go on like this. You can’t be a writer, you can’t be a teacher and you can’t be in

this political world; you have to give one of them up. Which one is causing you most

68

distress? Because you’re not indispensable.’ And I know I’m not, I know I’m not. I

was vilified in the newspaper in December after I spoke to you in Sydney, a whole

page about me being a Pollyanna and a danger to the community, quite literally:

Miranda Devine, D-E-V-I-N-E, a vicious, vicious woman, took a whole page to vilify

me in December. And yesterday, Sunday week ago, did the same – actually libelled

me Sunday week ago – but I’m not prepared to become a victim. I’m not a victim,

I’m not going to take her to court because it’s just too much bother and it’s a bore,

but it is a huge, huge, huge problem. And in fact I’m not going to bite on that one

because if I do I’ll backslide into my own work habits, my old work habits, which

I’ve promised myself I won’t do because I’m not Jesus Christ and I’m not a terrorist.

And the cause of literacy is not worth dying for. And I nearly died: two nights

running I nearly died.

So, Mem, the cause you’ve had with literacy, though, is not just a cause that you’ve

espoused, but something that’s come after a lot of research; and, more than that,

after really thinking very deeply indeed about why children read –

Yes.

– and how they best learn to read.

Exactly. And all of that thought and all of that experience is encapsulated in the book

that I wrote called Reading magic – in America it’s called Why reading aloud to

children will change their lives forever, and in Australia it’s called Reading magic:

how your child can learn to read before school and other read-aloud miracles. Now,

the second title, the Australian title, sounds like a hot-housing title: you know, ‘If

you do this, you can get your kid advanced’. But in fact the main message of

Reading magic is, if you love your children and you adore being with them and you

love interacting with them over books and you read aloud with joy and you point out

things, aspects of the text to them just as a game and let them finish rhyming bits and

let them read pages even if they don’t get it right but they’re excited and they want to

do it: you know, all of that is really the message. It’s a message of love in Reading

magic, it’s much more about love, and in fact in Reading magic I begged parents not

to teach their children to read. I say, ‘If you do it with duty and if you do it with a

kind of “teacherly” attitude, it’s not going to work, that’s not the point of it. The

whole point is loving your children and loving being with them.’ So that book was –

69

is, I hope – going to be the most important book that I write; that and Radical

reflections, which is the book for teachers. But Reading magic I think is the book

I’m most proud of, and it was republished last year in a new edition with two new

chapters, one of which is specifically about phonics, because I realised that people

were madly interested in it and that very few people understood it. So I had to take

off my academic hat and put on my writing-for-the-general-public hat and explain it

in one-syllable terms. It’s very difficult, but great fun. And I also added a chapter on

reading and boys, because the assumption in the community, for some weird reason,

is that boys aren’t as keen on reading as girls are, which is complete nonsense.

Everybody who’s ever read to a little boy over and over again, who has then become

hooked on books, knows that there’s no difference between girls and boys if we start

from the very beginning: they love reading just as much as girls do. And I think it’s

that we’re such a sporting nation, we can’t believe that little boys actually like books.

Mem, you once wrote that good teachers are remembered, not good methods. Is

that what you’ve been saying, that it’s the way in which it’s brought, with love and

affection, that inspires, not just the ideology?

I think so, I think so. Because one of the pieces of research that is sobering – which

actually comes out of one of what I would call the ‘opposition’, whose name escapes

me but he was the instigator and the sort of chairperson of the national literacy9 report

at the end of last year; it’s driving me mad that I can’t remember his name, it’s Ken

Somebody [Rowe] – one of his pieces of research said it’s actually teachers that make

the difference and not the method, that most children learn to read, but the best

teachers are the ones who teach reading best; it’s not necessarily the method, it’s the

best teachers who teach reading in the most effective way. I just happen to know that

if we’re using the Whole Language method rather than the Phonics method, children

learn to read with more zest, (laughs) with more life, more vitality, they can see the

point of reading. And when they’re reading a book that’s been read to them over and

over again they’re not going to read like this – (haltingly) ‘Here, is, the, blue, sheep.

Here, is, the, red, sheep.’ – they’re going to read with the expression that the teacher

or parent used, which is (with childlike expression) ‘Here is the blue sheep, and here

9 The committee of the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy, chaired by Dr Ken Rowe, released

its report, Teaching reading, on 8th December 2005.

70

is the red sheep.’ They’ll never want to do that kind of slow stuff because they know

that that doesn’t get you anywhere, doesn’t get any meaning out of the text.

I was going to say something else about the phonics stuff. Oh, yes: I have to say,

Rob, for people who are confused about this in later years when they’re listening,

there are two camps, or there have been two camps, which are a little bit outmoded.

But the major camps have been, probably, in the last twenty-five years, the camp of

Phonics and the camp of Whole Language. Whole Language talks about the

connection between the teaching of reading and the teaching of writing, that you have

to teach them both together because little kids who are learning to read take from

their reading a whole lot of knowledge that they put into their writing. But the exact

reverse is the same as well: they take from their writing, from struggling to make the

sounds mean something in symbols on the page, they take that back into their

reading. So the to-and-fro between reading and writing is very important; and you

cannot learn to write unless you’ve got phonics. So for the Phonics people to say,

‘Oh, Whole Language doesn’t teach phonics,’ is complete nonsense because you

can’t learn to write without phonics; you have to be able to make sound–symbol

relationships when you begin to write, and then you learn your correct spelling after

that. I mean, I have letters from children – I’ve had many, many letters from children

– saying ‘I lik your books’, okay, because when they’re writing the ‘lik’ you can just

see their little hands, their tongues are sticking out, their heads are down and they’re

going ‘l, aI,’ and they make the letter ‘I’ – ‘l, aI, k’ and they put the ‘K’. And that’s

all they need at that point, at the age of five, because they’ve sounded out ‘l, aI, k’:

that’s phonics. Spelling is correctly spelling ‘like’ as L-I-K-E, which is the teacher’s

job to teach them. There’s so much joy in the Whole Language approach, there’s so

much vitality.

If you do phonics only, what we’re doing, if we’re doing phonics only, we’re

asking children, before they get into a car – I don’t know whether I said this before –

before they get into a car and drive it, which is like learning to read and loving

reading, okay? Before they get into a car and drive it they have to take that entire car

to pieces. They have to lay (wearily) all the pieces of the car, one by one, along

Anzac Highway in Adelaide, and with very dull, very repetitive, very meaningless

instruction which just doesn’t make sense to them at all, they can’t kind of see where

anything fits, because all the car’s in so many pieces, they then have to put those

71

pieces together before they’re even allowed to read a sentence, let alone a book. In

fact, in America – I had a terrible message on my website last year from someone

who was distraught in America, a teacher who had read my work, and she said, ‘I’m

just so upset because somebody in my district said that she wouldn’t read aloud to her

children until she had finished teaching them phonics in case they “cheated” in

learning to read.’ The fact that – – –. (laughs)

It’s not cheating for children to hear a book over and over and over again and then

make meaning out of it themselves; that’s exactly how Chloe learnt to read. That’s

why I was so excited, because we read her The foot book and lots of other Dr Seuss

books over and over and over again – there’s a lot of rhyme and rhythm and

repetition, which is tremendously important in books for young children – and blow

me down, she came home from school after two weeks and she was four and a half –

she was at Cabra, four and a half – and she said she could read. And she rushed off to

get The foot book, and neither Malcolm nor I believed that she could read because of

course we’d read it to her thousands of times, and we were dreadful, we were

shocking parents. Because she read it, but we thought, ‘Well, she starts at the

beginning and she just keeps going and she’s’ (snaps fingers, speaks rhythmically)

‘memorised the “Left foot, left foot, left foot, right/ Feet in the morning, feet at night”

and just gone through it.’ So we opened the book at random because we were so

distrustful of her assertion that she could read, and said, ‘What does this page say?’ It

was all a game, it wasn’t a test – I mean, it was a test to us but we made it a game for

her. ‘What does this page say?’ And she read it and we thought, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah,

yeah, yeah, yeah,’ and so we started pointing to individual words and she knew them.

But then most exciting on that day was that I’d been shopping on the way home from

school, from picking her up from school, and there were items [like] cornflakes

packets and things like that, and she started to read off the cornflakes packets and I

didn’t know how it had happened, I had no idea. I went to the teacher the next day

and said, ‘How did this happen? My daughter can read; what’s your method? She’s

only been at school for two weeks, she’s only four and a half, she can read, this is

amazing,’ and she said, ‘Did you read to her?’ And I said, ‘Well, of course we did,’

and she just turned away and said, ‘Well, there you go, then.’ And that was the start

of it.

72

Mem, the way you’ve been describing things to me sounds like, okay, you’ve got

academic camps – and I’m not trying to deride what you’ve been saying –

No, no, no.

– there appeared to be academic camps on the one side, on the other you’ve got the

children.

Yes.

And I can’t quite understand why it is that the academics are, if you like, warring

over what a child is to read and how they’re to read. Surely the aim is for them to

read –

To read.

– and enjoy.

To read and enjoy.

So on this side, then, with the academics, is there a money thing behind this? You

intimated earlier on there was, there was a lot of money to be made out of

publications, I suppose.

There’s a huge amount of money to be made out of workbooks for Phonics. There

isn’t a huge amount of money to be made out of Whole Language because it’s got

nothing to sell, Whole Language has got nothing to sell, except to say to parents,

‘Please go to libraries and if the children adore a book, then, if you can afford it, buy

it for them so that they can re-read it many times.’ The Americans have made

billions and billions and billions of dollars out of failing to teach their children to

read. The McGraw–Hills, who publish most of that stuff, also publish the tests that

children are given in the States, so if you haven’t been through the McGraw–Hill

program you may not be able to answer the McGraw–Hill questions because the two

are so closely allied. It’s well-documented in research papers in the States by highly-

respected academics that the McGraw–Hills and the George Bush family have been

friends for generations. So the whole push by George Bush for this method of

reading is really in support of a mate who will [make] and has made billions out of

this method. This week, I think, there’s a huge meeting at the National Kennedy

Library, I think, in Washington, which is called a ‘Literacy Ideas Meeting’, because

they’re bringing people from all over America for this round table, I think, because

literacy is just not being – the standard of literacy is falling drastically in the States

73

and they’re now realising that they might have to do something different. But the

money-makers, their lobbying is so strong it’s very, very difficult for the others not

to – – –. Because you know what it is: if you can lobby in the States – I mean, we

know that from the Abramov Scandal occurring in the States with that lobbyist,

who’s come clean – – –.

No, I’m not sure what that’s about. Abramov?

Abramov. It’s too complicated, but he is one of the chief lobbyists in Washington

and he had corruptly got legislation through by being paid inordinate amounts of

money. And in order not to go to jail, or in order to decrease his jail sentence, he’s

spilling the beans about this massive corruption. So all I’m saying is that the

McGraw–Hills will have very, very important lobbyists in the halls of Washington, in

the White House, and that this method of teaching reading is wrecking America. It’s

about the wreck England and I was very fearful that it was about to wreck Australia.

But we are so far ahead in Australia.

Is that right?

Yes, we are the third-highest, we have the third-highest reading level in the world,

after Finland, and we jockey for position with Canada and New Zealand all the time.

It’s Finland, Canada and New Zealand or/and Australia. All the time, at the top.

We’re also, I think, per capita the highest book-buying nation in the world, or we

were.

That apparently is a furphy.

Is it?

Yes, everybody says that about their countries. I’ve been told. I thought we were as

well, I’ve always thought that as well. But an email came through yesterday from the

Ministry of Education about the latest results for Australia, and we are, we’re at the

top. So we are so strongly on the right track in Australia that teachers and even

department heads in different states will resist very strongly this federal push, which

has come from a right-wing minority that caught the ear of the Minister last year –

actually, caught the ear of the Minister at the end of 2004 – which culminated in this

huge literacy report at the end of 2005, which caused me to end up in hospital

because I saw Brendan Nelson, the Minister of Education, after I had my interview

74

with you last and it was very awkward because I wanted to kill him for what he was

doing in literacy education; but I wanted to kiss his feet for his co-operation on

working towards getting a message out to parents of children from babyhood to five

year-olds being read aloud to prior to school, he’s wonderful on that. But now he’s

been ‘promoted’, in inverted commas – it’s enraging to education people that he’s

been promoted out of Education to Defence: we would see that as a demotion

(laughs) ourselves, of course, because of our viewpoint. Promotion, be damned.

Now, the thing is that the Opposition in Australia is based mainly at Macquarie

University in New South Wales. The head honcho of that movement, as it were, is a

man called Max Coltheart – C-O-L-T-H-E-A-R-T – and his group is a group of

psychologists, not teachers, and they see everything in starkly scientific terms, the

emotional psychology of learning to read is being taken out for the cold scientific

science of it. The science of it cannot be pinned down because so much of reading is

from the affective; it’s not from the intellectual side of the brain, it’s also from the

affective – A-ffective, not E-ffective, from the affective side of the brain – and you

can’t, it’s very difficult to research the way children learn to read because each

situation that a child is learning to read in is unique, it can never be replicated,

because the child’s in a different mood, the book is different, the teacher’s different,

the room is different, the child is tired, the child is hungry, the child’s in a good

mood, the child likes the book, doesn’t like the book: it’s very difficult to research it.

I’m not saying it’s unresearchable at all, that would be ridiculous because a lot of

research has been done; but the messages that I have had on my website from people

who’ve read Reading magic just confirm and confirm and confirm. The sceptics

write to me and say, ‘I read your book and I thought, “Oh, yeah,” but in fact we have

read aloud to our son since he was born and now at two and a half he can recognise

this word and that word, and he loves books and he jumps up and down and demands

to be read [to] and likes books.’ Somebody yesterday on my website said, ‘My child

of’ – I think he’s five – ‘loves books more than most children love television,’ which

is just lovely. And if that’s the only contribution I’ve made, if I had never written

Possum magic, if I’d never written a children’s book, to have changed some people’s

lives as a result of having Reading magic written, as a result of having written

Reading magic – well, Mum and Dad would be pleased with me.

75

I was just going to come to that. It just seems to me that that’s really – as you’ve

been talking I’ve been thinking about your mother and father and what we talked

about in the last interview and just how much their lives have really impacted on

what you’ve been doing, and how that experience that you had growing up with

them has really shaped why you feel it was worth fighting for that for twenty-five

years. Would I be right in saying that?

Absolutely. Absolutely. I often say that my parents were missionaries of religion

and I’m a missionary, too, of literacy. Because when I’m standing and I’m talking to

people I’m very often standing at a lectern, which is very like a pulpit, (laughs) really,

in its making and its shape, and I hear myself preaching. I am preaching and I am

persuading, and sometimes I know that I’m persuading so well that I feel guilty – I

think I’ve said this before: that you can use an ability to public speak for very bad

reasons as well as good, and when you realise you’re having an effect you think,

‘Mm, now, I must be careful here that I’m doing the right thing because I could so

easily do the wrong thing.’ And in relation to that, yesterday at the supermarket I met

an elderly woman whom I know by sight, I see her over and over again in Foodland

in Brighton, and she came up to me and she said, ‘I want you to know that without

ever having met her, or even having read the stuff that she has put out over the

election campaign, I voted for Chloe on the basis of the fact that your parents were

such fine people’ – that’s my mum and dad – ‘whom I loved and admired so much.

Your parents were such fine people that I knew their granddaughter would be a safe

person to vote for,’ which was very, very moving. It was very, very moving. I was

so touched. So it’s gone down, it’s gone beyond me, which is such a relief. Well,

you never know with your kids, do you, Rob? They could go off the rails! They

could be drug addicts and ghastly people and monsters – – –.

Mem, it’s been fascinating for me not just to interview you and to be able to share

with you your life, but to sense the passion you have for these things, because – as

with your parents – you too are impelled, almost: that’s how I’ve sensed it.

It’s true, it is, I am impelled. I love that word, I haven’t used it for years – you forget

words, you know, if you don’t use them – ‘impelled’ – yes, it is, I was. And so you

can imagine, as a long-time Methodist/Uniting Church person the guilt that I’m

feeling in saying I cannot be involved in that any more because it will kill me.

Because I know that I’m doing good work in other areas – you know, I’m not doing

the political fight any more because there are other people doing it and I’m not

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indispensable – so I’m only being a writer and I’m only being a talker to parents and

teachers. But that feeling that I’m impelled to serve makes me feel guilty about

giving that side of my life up.

And yet, Mem, perhaps the books that you’ve written speak as loudly as any

arguments would in the public sphere.

We can only hope so, Rob, because that’s the only option I have left now.

Mem, I’m not sure, but maybe – do you think we could tie it up there?

Perfect. I think you have (laughs) wonderfully captured the essence of the person

called ‘Mem Fox’. I don’t think I’ve been quite as cheerful today as I was on our

first recording, because this matters to me so much. You know, when I get serious I

get less amusing and I think I’ve been very serious today. But you’ve talked about

why I’m here, today –

That’s right.

– and that was it.

Well, thank you very much, Mem.

Thank you.

END OF INTERVIEW.