Memory, Love and its Discontents

Rod Myer

Description

There was a foundation myth I craved connection to as a child that had a kind of quiet but powerful hold over me. At times I would look beyond those granite hills, seeking the Russia my paternal grandfather had come from, which an instinct told me contained some reality that would help form me. I wondered what the villages, fields and forests would look like…
Rod Myer has had an unusual and interesting life. A member of the celebrated Myer family, he had an adventurous spirit and explored his identity through travelling and research. A farm kid born in Kelly country, he had premonitions and yearnings which led to mustering cattle with Aboriginal people in the Top End. He worked in politics and journalism, and discovered family secrets which led to revelations about his Jewish roots in Eastern Europe, something that altered his life completely.
That past, I believe, stays with us, as life is not a linear progression. It is more a series of spirals drawing on a spiritual world to nourish our progress through our own reality. That reality is built on the past and the present concurrently, and at times I feel the honour of my forebears touching and inspiring me now.

Sujets

• Love
• Love (disambiguation)
• Autobiography
• Biography
• Jewish

Informations

• Publié par: Hybrid Publishers
• Date de parution: 01 février 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781922768094
• Langue: English

Extrait

Memory, Love and its Discontents
Rod Myer was born on a farm in North Eastern Victoria in the 1950s and he moved with his family to Melbourne in the early 1960s. After leaving school, he travelled and worked in the outback before studying economics, then working in politics and journalism, and eventually discovered family secrets which led to revelations about his Jewish roots from Eastern Europe that altered his life completely.
He is the author of six books, including three biographies of businesspeople.
Published by Hybrid Publishers
Melbourne Victoria Australia
Rod Myer 2023
This publication is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests and inquiries concerning reproduction should be addressed to the Publisher, Hybrid Publishers, PO Box 52, Ormond, Victoria, Australia 3204.
www.hybridpublishers.com.au
First published 2023

ISBN: 9781922768087 (p) 9781922768094 (e)
Cover design: Gittus Graphics
Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander peoples should be aware that this book may contain the names and images of people who have passed away.

For my parents Rod and Judy
Also by Rod Myer
The Story of Victor Smorgon: Living the Dream
Richard Pratt: One Out of the Box (with James Kirby)
In Full Stride: The Life and Times of Baillieu (Bails) Myer
Contents
Family trees
1: Myth and history
2: World War Two
3: Life on Allanvale
4: What drove the love of country?
5: Moving to the city
6: Learning the urban ropes
7: School days
8: Dad s connections to sport
9: My parents and their marriage
10: Mum s identity
11: Premonitions, prospecting and historical yearnings
12: Silk family adventures
13: My teenage years
14: Leaving school
15: Travelling times
16: Heading home
17: Dad s death
18: Wollogorang - over Borroloola way
19: Lingo and origin stories
20: Back to the Top End
21: Hitchin a ride
22: Uni days
23: Life in politics
24: Life as a journalist
25: My mother s death
26: Digging up the past in Poland
27: Who s a Jew?
28: Family secrets
29: Searching, searching
30: The tough stuff
31: Wrestling with the rabbis
32: In Melbourne again
33: My new old world
34: Victor Smorgon, Kapitalista
35: What turns up when you don t expect it
Author s note

1
Myth and history
In the granite hills of Kelly country where I was born, the sky can hang heavy with mystical intent. Some moonless summer nights you d swear you glimpsed the silhouettes of four horsemen as the spectres of the Kelly gang pass on their eternal round. Or perhaps that muffled sound on the night breeze is the distant ringing from the hammers of the bush blacksmiths beating ploughshares into armour, a mad-Irish transformation vision before their eyes.
That vision saw the heirs of the potato famine, colonial oppression and transportation rise up from their hungry bush blocks and, led by the Kellys, invincible in their steel suits, emerge victorious from some apocalyptical battle that would usher in a world of equity, justice and humanity. The manifestation of that vision died amid bullets and flames at the siege of Glenrowan but it smouldered on in hearts for generations, as hope dies harder than bushrangers.
That was one of the foundation myths that took hold of me, giving me a kind of structure and meaning from which to live my life and create a place in which I could function. Even in the 1960s the Kellys were still big news in their home town of Avenel, Victoria. Their leader, Ned, and younger brother Dan had attended Avenel s state school where my two siblings and I began our schooling. I remember a young girl saying she had found the stub of a lead pencil on the floor with N Kelly written on a shaved space at the top. But that, I assumed, was wishful thinking, as I think the school cleaners would have come upon it in the ninety years that had intervened since Ned got what little education was available to him.
Ned also famously went to the gallows in 1880 wearing a sash he had been given as a boy after saving the life of another Avenel lad named Shelton who had fallen into Hughes Creek, which runs through the town. Young Shelton was the great-grandfather of Ian Bluey Shelton, an Australian rules football star who played for the AFL club of Essendon until an eye injury caused his early retirement. Bluey s family had a service station in Avenel called Shelton and Baker, and I remember him as a humble man who would serve us petrol in his overalls in the days when being a football star came without the big money lavished on champions today.
I can also vaguely remember Bluey playing for Avenel in the local league when we made one of our rare visits to a game. Footy was a passion in the district and, rather than sitting in a grandstand, locals preferred the comfort of their own cars, which were parked around the ground facing the boundary fence. Doors were often left open and people would walk to friends cars for a chat. When Avenel kicked a goal, everyone would toot their horns in an expression of joy and support.
Stories and imaginings were vital, because something in my personal reality eroded my ability to be a happy and active participant in the world in which I found myself. Even from a very young age I would often live in a fantasy world of events known only to me, and I often played alone.
There was another foundation myth I craved connection to as a child that had a kind of quiet but powerful hold over me. At times I would look beyond those granite hills, seeking the Russia my paternal grandfather had come from, which an instinct told me contained some reality that would help form me. I wondered what the villages, fields and forests would look like and how the townsfolk dressed and acted. But the imagination of a boy from the grey-green bush had nothing to go on in conjuring that world, and my grandfather, who died when I was two, was not there to tell me about it.
Home to our family then was a 1400-acre farm called Allanvale, about eight kilometres out of Avenel into the hills. Avenel is situated on the Hume Highway nearly 130 kilometres north of Melbourne. Although I left there when I was about seven and a half, I remember it quite clearly. Today it is a small town, and when we were there in the early 1960s it was smaller, with probably about 200 people. On a trip back there in the 1990s I was surprised to see that it had some substantial public buildings, including a court house and an impressive old Victorian hotel by the railway line. It apparently grew from the 1850s, when it served as the rail head for a gold rush at Beechworth in the mountains to the north-east.
But when the railway was extended to Albury on the New South Wales border, Avenel began to languish, a process that continued until a double-lane freeway constructed in the 1970s put it within cooee of Melbourne, bringing some economic stimulus. Today, with telecommuting and the COVID-inspired move away from the cities, there are even a couple of small housing developments around the township. That being said, it s still a small town.
Ironically, the extension of the railway in the 1870s led to the demise of the Kelly gang, as a special contingent of police was railed north to lay siege to the outlaws at their final stand at Glenrowan in 1880.

When I think back, we were a weird collection of farm people because my parents backgrounds were as far from agricultural life as imaginable. Dad s father, Norman Myer, was brought out from Russia as a twelve-year-old by his uncle Sidney who had founded the Myer Emporium, which would become Australia s premier department store chain. Sidney trained him and when he died prematurely in 1934, Norman took control, successfully running and growing it until his own death in 1956.
Shortly before he died, the boy who left a Jewish village, or shtetl in Yiddish, as a penniless orphan was dubbed Sir Norman by the English Queen. Such an honour and life of wealth and achievement would have been absolutely unimaginable for him as a boy from a poor Russian village under the totalitarian and antisemitic rule of the Czars.
My grandmother, Norman s first wife Gladys, was a fashion plate and socialite who, until the 1940s, would be let loose on the boutiques of London, Paris and New York, with Myer staff using her purchases as models to make up new ranges to stock the store after her return. She had a remarkable sense of taste and style that stayed with her all her life.
When I was a small boy my grandmother would dote on me, buying me How and Why books that answered my unending curiosity about all kinds of subjects. She would affectionately refer to me as Rodney Diddle eye . I also remember her telling me stories about how in communist Russia, families would share apartments and kitchens and live with great deprivation. Thinking back, those stories must have originated from Norman and his connections with the state of things in the old country he had left in 1909, shortly before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution overthrew the Czars. The revolution also meant freeing Jewish villagers from the strictures of the Pale of Settlement that constrained where they could live, their livelihoods and travel. It had held them in poverty through lack of opportunity and in an endless cycle of terror through pogroms, the anti-Jewish riots that took a vicious toll during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
My mother Judith s people were also tycoons. Her father, Abe Silk, along with brother Hymie, turned a handcart at the Victoria fruit and vegetable markets into a massive wholesale greengrocery, a major property portfolio, a stud farm and a string of winning racehorses. At one point they even had a nightclub called Zeros in Melbourne s CBD. Abe and Hymie were born in Melbourne to Jewish migr s from Poland. Abe s wife Grace, of Irish stock,