My family was always faking it. In fact, they behaved like a modern day Cathy McGowan or a Mascotte Brown of the early 1950’s. People who claim to be independent when they are really of a conservative bent.
I was brought up in a ‘caring family’ that encouraged me to ‘be a good boy’, whatever that was? My mother had told me that I had done a good job whatever task I had taken on, such as getting my homework done on time; putting out the bins on a Thursday night; making sure the garden and surrounds were neat and tidy and bringing in the bins after the rubbish truck had been on Friday morning. It was all done to put on an appearance of a home maker with a perfect family in a perfect suburban home.
Time went on and I kept up the routine chores and lawn mowing but, all in all, my contributions to the workings of the family seem now to have been based on the pretext of looking good and putting on a show. Yet both my parents had to work. They never owned their own home but sent both their children to private schools and moved in circles that were far above our financial and social status.
I guess you could say that suburban families are faking it all the time, that the whole of suburbia is a fake – lawns mown, hedges trimmed, roses dead headed. Residences go into debt to ‘keep up appearances’—to buy equipment such as whipper snippers to discipline the lawn, paths and walkways.
When we were young my father needed to change over his car because my sister made it unbearable about being seen in a Morris Oxford.
The Morris was a gravity fed petrol engine, so could not be parked facing up a hill. The crank mechanism was a crank handle arrangement, similar to the stationary engines I happily took to ‘like a duck to water’ later in life in shearing sheds
.
But not so my sister, who needed a mode of transport befitting her perceived status. If and when we went out at night my sister would see that the Morris was parked out of range of a street light or other piece of kluminary equipment such as a brightly lit shop front, all because girls from my sister’s school didn’t have family cars with a crank handle. In other words it was obsolete, it was all about looks. If you didn’t have the latest you were obsolete also. The image was shattered.
My mother struck up a relationship with Ms Mascotte-Brown who stood for Federal Parliament for the seat of Higgins as an independent Liberal, similar to Ms Cathy MacGowan. My mother helped Ms Brown by staffing polling booths on Election Day. I guess by now the reader of this piece will see that my mother would need to compromise, or it could be said to fake her position with the friends and neighbours, in an endeavour to match Ms Mascotte-Brown’s financial and social status. Ms Mascotte Brown’s address after all was two doors from the Stonnington mansion, which was the substitute accommodation for Victoria’s Government House in Victoria’s early days.
I did not subscribe to such faking it as it could not be supported indefinitely. Sooner or later the whole scene would be revealed. My parents went along with this façade because it was an image that they liked, irrespective of whether they could sustain it. Both my parents are deceased and have taken these images to their graves.
Godfrey Marple
June 2016
I was brought up in a ‘caring family’ that encouraged me to ‘be a good boy’, whatever that was? My mother had told me that I had done a good job whatever task I had taken on, such as getting my homework done on time; putting out the bins on a Thursday night; making sure the garden and surrounds were neat and tidy and bringing in the bins after the rubbish truck had been on Friday morning. It was all done to put on an appearance of a home maker with a perfect family in a perfect suburban home.
Time went on and I kept up the routine chores and lawn mowing but, all in all, my contributions to the workings of the family seem now to have been based on the pretext of looking good and putting on a show. Yet both my parents had to work. They never owned their own home but sent both their children to private schools and moved in circles that were far above our financial and social status.
I guess you could say that suburban families are faking it all the time, that the whole of suburbia is a fake – lawns mown, hedges trimmed, roses dead headed. Residences go into debt to ‘keep up appearances’—to buy equipment such as whipper snippers to discipline the lawn, paths and walkways.
When we were young my father needed to change over his car because my sister made it unbearable about being seen in a Morris Oxford.
The Morris was a gravity fed petrol engine, so could not be parked facing up a hill. The crank mechanism was a crank handle arrangement, similar to the stationary engines I happily took to ‘like a duck to water’ later in life in shearing sheds
.
But not so my sister, who needed a mode of transport befitting her perceived status. If and when we went out at night my sister would see that the Morris was parked out of range of a street light or other piece of kluminary equipment such as a brightly lit shop front, all because girls from my sister’s school didn’t have family cars with a crank handle. In other words it was obsolete, it was all about looks. If you didn’t have the latest you were obsolete also. The image was shattered.
My mother struck up a relationship with Ms Mascotte-Brown who stood for Federal Parliament for the seat of Higgins as an independent Liberal, similar to Ms Cathy MacGowan. My mother helped Ms Brown by staffing polling booths on Election Day. I guess by now the reader of this piece will see that my mother would need to compromise, or it could be said to fake her position with the friends and neighbours, in an endeavour to match Ms Mascotte-Brown’s financial and social status. Ms Mascotte Brown’s address after all was two doors from the Stonnington mansion, which was the substitute accommodation for Victoria’s Government House in Victoria’s early days.
I did not subscribe to such faking it as it could not be supported indefinitely. Sooner or later the whole scene would be revealed. My parents went along with this façade because it was an image that they liked, irrespective of whether they could sustain it. Both my parents are deceased and have taken these images to their graves.
Godfrey Marple
June 2016
The Age, January 16, 1961
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