‘Happiness hides in the humdrum.’ Paul Lynch
Or as Hugh McKay argues, let’s not seek happiness so much as wholeness, by which he means a person who can carry all emotions, hold them together, comfortably.
Moments of joy and transcendence, a rare treat, while everyday contentment lies in the humdrum, and all the sorrows filter through the everyday and extraordinary.
Rushall Crescent floats through my mind. A road winding through Northcote that I often travel between places, between my home in Hawthorn and the spaces occupied by daughters further away in the north.
It’s now a prestigious street though wasn’t always so. Once the home of migrants, particularly Italians, now the home of the rich.
In my community-based placement as a student social worker, I travelled daily by train to Northcote. Two trains and a bus or tram. It wasn’t an easy place to reach and in the late 1960s was under resourced.
The Northcote City Council asked the University of Melbourne to provide two students who could visit local charities and draw up a booklet of welfare resources within the community.
Ron Tiffen, red haired and tall, married to Karma, and with one small son, a mature age student of sorts and me were given the task.
In those days I lived in Caulfield with my immediately younger sister, her friend from school, Kris Honey whom we called Honey.
The three of us comfortable in a second storey flat perched over Dandenong Road not far from what was then Chisholm Institute of Technology.
On cold winters and to spare heating bills I sometimes took my frozen body over to the student library and studied there. Or should I say tried to study. In those days me and academic books were not a comfortable partnership.
I read words on pages but could not take many in, not as they were intended. Instead, my mind wandered to things I’d prefer to be doing. Mostly time spent with my then boyfriend who was initially ambivalent – or so it seemed to me – to share a lifetime with me though I had fallen for him hook line and sinker.
It’s painful to slip into love when you’re in your early twenties and follow all the tropes you’ve seen on the television and read in books, only to find they make no difference.
A person cannot be made to love another. They will not be coerced. And Paul was like this though he was willing to bed me down as often as the impulse hit him and to accompany me to student parties or share restaurant meals, especially after he won at the races.
He and I went in the evenings to Ron and Karma’s to play cards, gin rummy and canasta. We played for hours while their small child slept. Ate potato chips and drank. Beer for the men, Pimms and lemonade for us women.
While by day during the long three month break over Christmas from the university during my third year, Ron and I traipsed to Northcote. The council offered us two chairs and a long desk at the far end of a concert hall. No actual office as such. It felt as though we were excess to requirements but otherwise they were kind.
As in all matters then, I did not have a clue as to what we were doing but followed Ron’s lead. He was mature age after all, somewhere in his thirties, a decade ahead of me. He seemed to know. Sometimes we visited local agencies together and at other times we went alone.
To Co As It, the Italian support community, well-resourced given the glut of Italian families in the area, to maternal welfare centres and even to then social welfare departments.
At one of these I met Duré Dara, who came to fame as apprentice cook to the famed restauranteur, Stephanie Alexander. Duré then she was a social worker in the grip of Primal therapy.
She gave a talk at one time to her department and Ron and I were invited to join. All about the idea that people took time off work, went on some type of sickness benefits, care of the endorsement of a few local and agreeable doctors, then found a room somewhere.
A dark room whose walls and floors they could pad with cushions, and people sat around. Somehow some inspiration whether from therapists they visited or from within, they were then thrust into the trauma of their birth. Where they could relive the ordeal.
I read Arthur Janov’s book The Primal Scream and stuffed down my scepticism behind a wave of awe that someone should be so bold as to take time off work at the government’s expense to advance their mental health.
After all Ron and I were tasked to locate all the resources for people in the community of Darebin, Northcote Thornbury, and surrounds, and our focus was on people’s well-being.
Not that anyone talked of well-being in those days. In those days, the focus was welfare. For the sick and needy. Those lesser mortals who fell on hard times.
In my first year at university all the students in the social work department made a trip to the housing commission towers in Flemington, the ones that overlooked the city to the south, racecourse to the north.
My boyfriend’s grandmother lived in one of the small flats in this monstrous high rise and I wondered that anyone could bear such a life, stuck up there high in clouds, freezing in winter and roasting in summer with lifts from floor to floor that reeked of urine from the night-time drunks who couldn’t wait. More often than not the lifts mal functioned.
In those days, the days of Ron Tiffen, of studying to become the best social worker I could, book talk bothered me, because it was often too academic, though I remember reading Durkheim on anomie and something there resonated.
Along with all the voices from case work.
Only in my final year did we get to experiment with actual counselling and interviewing. In a new laboratory set up on Royal Parade. Where a man from Britain, newly arrived, taught us the gentle art of interviewing. We role played and taped ourselves in action.
The tilt of my head as I listened intently to my fellow student who concocted a role for my benefit. And the place of my hands when my turn came to raise a respectable issue for her to tackle in front of the video camera.
The days when I first considered the impact I might have on other people. My small diminutive me. Not so much on happiness, but hell bent on avoiding pain.