Language

So I've just watched and immensely enjoyed this movie[^] I listen to the Philip Glass soundtrack sung in French. I'll talk about Philip Glass in another post soon.

It seems, even to me, that of late I've been watching a lot of foreign language movies. Everything from 'I am Cuba' (a very interesting 1964 Soviet/Cuban co-production borrowed from the Phoenix Public Library) to 'Wozzeck' in German and 'Mishima' in Japanese. Don't get me wrong - I also enjoyed 'Dude, where's my car' and 'American Pie'. It's just that of late I'm feeling drawn to the outre (I know the last letter of outre ought to be accented - but I don't know which accent to use).

Which is the point. I grew up with English as my native tongue in an English speaking country which divided education (at the time) into two main streams. Those who would become blue collar workers and those who would become white collar. The blue collar stream (the one I was in) taught technical subjects - metal working, wood work, 3D geometry etc; the white collar stream taught 'humanities' including a choice of foreign language. The choices (I'm talking the mid 60's in Australia)? French or German. Both excellent languages but of doubtful relevance to a country at the bottom of the world. I'm told that these days the choices include Indonesian and Japanese. The stream I was in taught two languages - English and Filth .

But it went a little deeper than that. The Australia I remember from the late 1950's was very intolerant of languages other than English. Our history was of migration from Britain until the late 1940's and very little immigration from elsewhere. Heck, the first law passed by the brand new Australian Parliament (every member of which was either an immigrant or the son of an immigrant) in 1901 was a restriction of immigration to the white races. This isn't a part of my heritage I'm particularly proud of (and let's not even go into the way my ancestors treated the Aborigines). After World War 2 the 'yellow hordes' doctrine took over and the government encouraged migration from the 'white' countries. Thus thousands and hundreds of thousands of immigrants from not just Britain but from Europe. They were called reffos (refugees) and other less complimentary terms. I've mentioned before that my father has been dead 44 years and not much loss to humanity. His term for them was the term used by many - anyone who came from anywhere other than Britain was a 'wog'. The presssure on those immigrants to learn and speak English and only English was immense!

Be that as it may. Somewhere along the line I forgot I was supposed to be a blue collar worker and developed an interest in Opera. I have very clear (to me) memories of the transition from an Electronics Geek to a classical music and opera geek but I'll talk about that another time as well. Anyway I found myself listening to a lot of German Opera. I started with the 'classics'. Wagner et al. By 1977 I'd started listening to Kurt Weill and Bertholt Brecht with a style characterised by Songspiel (literally, spoken song). By comparison with Wagner, Songspiel was understandable at the level of making out individual words. I didn't know what the individual words meant - hell, they were German. But it wasn't difficult to follow what was spoken in a foreign language and correlate it to the English in the bi-lingual libretto that was packed with each LP. Und so ich versteht eine kliene Deutsch. You're allowed to laugh at that clumsy attempt .

Which led me to take a course in German in 1979. I passed!

Since then I've not taken another course in a language other than English. We won't count computer languages. Time the eternal enemy and all that!

Now we fast forward from the late 1950's/early 1960's to 1993. In that year I moved back to the suburb of Melbourne I'd grown up in. Ah, West Footscray, how I love thee! In 1993 the Sunrise Hotel on the corner of Geelong Road and Williamstown Road was still in business. If you've ever read a novel called 'A Bunch of Ratbags' you've read about it. Remember we've jumped from the early 60's to the early 90's. In that 30 or so years the Vietnam War came to prominence (the war itself dates back to the year of my birth, 1954), caused street violence and augmented the population of Canada and came to an end. (Parenthetically, I've found that most Americans don't remember the date it ended - April 30th 1975. I remember watching the newscasts of that day, the helicopters over the US Embassy in Saigon and the last to leave climbing up the rope ladders from the roof of the embassy to the helicopter. And I remember the flickering footage taken from those helicopters of the invading army overrunning Saigon. Somehow that time seems innocent nowadays...). And in 1975 Vietnamese boat people made their way down from Vietnam to the northern coast of Australia. Those new refugees made their homes in Sydney and in Melbourne; in Melbourne they found their way to Springvale, Sunshine and West Footscray.

In 1993 most of the Vietnamese refugees had been in Australia 15 or more years. I moved back into a suburb I hadn't lived in for 14 years but knew well. Now you have to understand that until the late 1980's Footscray was a low rent low income entry suburb. It was the place you started out in and hoped for something better. When I lived there from 1954 until 1966 it was a slum area. We moved out of Footscray in 1966 and went to St Albans. At the time it was roughly equivalent to moving two social levels upward.

In 1993 I moved back into Footscray. I found myself frequenting the Footscray Market on Saturday mornings; I could buy chinese cabbage, green prawns and hear 20 languages spoken in the space of 20 minutes. Russian, Polish, Estonian, Italian, Greek, French, Vietnamese, Chinese.... you get the idea. And in 1993 I remember seeing white Australians showing anger at the presence of Vietnamese immigrants. More, I remember being shocked and disgusted by the anger shown by those White Australians.

And the delicious irony was that by 1993 West Footscray had become an up and coming suburb (it's 7 KM's and a 10 minute drive from the CBD and thus, these days, desirable property).