Melbourne Club Annual Members and Daughters Dinner

Let me begin by thanking you for the opportunity to speak to you at this special dinner for members and daughters.

I would also like to acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the lands on which this building stands – the Wurundjeri people of the Eastern Kulin Nation – and pay my respects to their Elders, past and present.

I am the first-born and eldest daughter of Donald Maxwell Gardner and this gave me a reason to think about the relationship of fathers and daughters, in its real and imagined forms, and its importance.

Imagine we were at this dinner in the year this club was formed, 1838, in the Victorian era.

We can all immediately conjure a more formal and restricted setting in food and dress.

And we know that notions of the role of the father and that of his daughters were very different from those we currently hold.

In middle class families, the Victorian father was held to be the undisputed authority in his family, the protector of that family, and in that role the provider of resources and gift-giver.

Daughters of middle-class families were expected to remain in the home until marriage – although over the course of the Victorian era, increasing formal education of women meant for some the opportunity to step outside the family.

We can count the many ways in which these expectations of family life have changed, but particularly the role of daughters.

In the middle classes, the expectation is now that a daughter will have a tertiary education, and most commonly a degree, and with that all the possibilities of an independent, professional career.

I am sure there are many fathers here tonight who would question whether they are ever treated as the undisputed authority in their family.

And I can predict that no longer does any child, daughter or son, refer to their father as 'sir'.

So, we know there is much that has changed in the relationships of fathers and daughters.

Tonight, I want to reflect on the one undeniable factor that hasn't changed – that in the relationship of father and daughter lie the deep possibilities of much of that daughter's future.

There are many ways of talking about the relationship, and rather less research than I would like to make me confident to pronounce on its effects.

So, in the spirit of this night in this club, I want to reflect a little on our cultural heritage and the insights it might bring to thinking about this relationship.

I would love to say there is a piercing Australian image of father and daughter, but I can't think of one.

There are nineteenth century family portraits and Russell Drysdale's 'The Rabbiter and his Family' in which the father stands with his arm protectively around his young daughter, but it is the lone figure, the landscape and abstraction that come to mind for Australian painting.

In film one must turn to the sketchy, scratchy and difficult relationship between the lively and rebellious Judy and Captain Woolcot, her father, in adaptations of the Australian children's classic, Seven Little Australians or to the different but equally difficult relationship between the rebellious Muriel and her rather gruesome father, Bill, in Muriel's Wedding.

I'm not sure that any of us would find much comfort in these Australian portrayals of father-daughter relationships.

Except that in each case they speak about the courage and independence of the daughter.

However, some of our most significant Australian literary works are the works of daughters writing about their fathers.

If we think of great Australian novels then Henry Handel Richardson's (or to use her correct name, Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson) The Fortunes of Richard Mahony has a claim to a special place in that list.

Ethel was born at Victoria Parade, Fitzroy in 1870.

Ethel's father Walter Lindesay Richardson, an obstetrician, died when she was nine. He was 53 years old.

And yet, the elements of his life, on the goldfields, in the early life of this colony, restlessly travelling between Australia and the United Kingdom and Europe are the power of her story of Richard Mahony.

The three volumes of this book, Australia Felix, The Way Home, and Ultima Thule were published between 1917 and 1929, and collected together in 1930.

The character, Richard Mahony, is not heroic; he suffers in his environment, in large part due to his judgments about his world and his lack of judgment about it and his place in it.

The novel is, of course, also a story of the unfolding of Australia through the vicissitudes of this immigrant and his family.

If this were a portrait of a living father, it were neither kind nor comfortable.

It is a bleak but truly powerful rendition of this man's life.

As Ethel Richardson lost her father when nine, it is difficult to credit the portrayal as really her father in fictional guise – even though she is reputed to have said that a writer's life material is gathered by the age of ten.

However, it does convey the dominant presence of her father in the life of her imagination. And this was the foundation of what can be called the great Australian novel.

His daughter wrote these novels aged in her fifties, almost half a century after his death.

Turning some elements of Ethel's life story on their head is the early life of the novelist Christina Stead, born in Sydney not Melbourne.

Christina's mother died when she was two, and so her father, David George Stead, an eminent naturalist and conservationist loomed large in her life.

One of her most celebrated novels, and another of Australia's great novels, The Man Who Loved Children, was published in 1940.

This novel, capturing the story of Sam Pollitt, 'Sam the Bold' as he calls himself, or the 'Great-I-Am' in the words of his wife, and his six children, draws on the daughter's view of her father.

"Pale as a candle flame in the dusk, tallow-pale, he stalked along, holding her hand, and Louie looked up and beyond him at the enfeebled stars.

Thus for many years, she had seen her father's head, a ghostly earth flame against the heavens, from her little height.

Sam looked down on the moon of her face; the day-shine was enough still to light the eyeballs swimming up to him". (Stead, 1965, 159)

It is the story of a dysfunctional family in which the father is the larger-than-life tyrannical centre.

The portrait captures the way he both enthrals and frightens his children.

And the daughter is also there in this novel, writing and using that to pull away from the family to her own future.

We have again a truly great and powerful novel, drawn from the relationship of a daughter to a father.

In Stead's case her father was still alive to read the novel, which used parts of his letters.

And Stead after his death wrote of her father in warmer and more admiring ways (Rowley, 1994).

It was written, as was Richardson's, a hemisphere away from him, decades after the intense years of this daughter's relationship with her father and yet there he is larger than life, more potent in her imagination than perhaps he ever was in real life.

These two women became successful novelists, telling stories that speak forcefully about humanity.

It may be no coincidence that these women, two of Australia's great writers, should set some of their greatest stories in the bedrock of such an important relationship and time in their lives.

To the extent that we have research on the significance of the relationship of fathers and daughters, we know that finding independence as a person and respect for yourself, building good relationships with men, negotiating effectively with authority, and many of the foundations of a successful life are developed in that relationship with your father.

For many fathers here tonight, their relationship with a daughter was formed in an era of social and economic transformation.

Changing perceptions of gender roles brought a new idea of a ‘fatherly’ figure, one who was more active in sharing the responsibilities of caregiving with the other parent.

Perhaps the most obvious example of this transition was the accepted right of the father to be present in the birthing suite – a foreign concept before the 1970s.

Yet the fiscal shocks of the latter part of the 20^th century, alongside persistent cultural norms, meant the role of the father as the breadwinner endured through this period, though often now as part of a dual-income household.

Rather than trading working hours for more ‘quality time’ with the children, these fathers sought to find time for both.

Today when so many women have careers, daughters seem as likely to follow in their father's footsteps in their careers, as sons. Still, this is a special relationship.

Unlike mother and daughter, the daughter never can truly become her father, whatever the similarities of behaviour and genetics.

There is always the tension and attraction of difference to fuel the dynamism of this relationship.

In popular imagery, still one of the most enduring romantic images of a father and his adult daughter is of him walking her down the aisle or of them dancing together at her wedding.

These moments fill terabytes of internet storage with movies and song.

These moments carry the symbolism of that Victorian era – of the daughter moving from one family to another, of the father 'giving away' his daughter.

Here is the father in one of our most important events in his role as protector and as gift giver, but also as the admiring and loving supporter.

And in images of these weddings, we capture the pure celebration, as well as the bittersweet elements of the relationship of the father and daughter.

There is no wonder that it is a deeply romantic image for it speaks to what we expect of the relationship.

It is not that we see our lives and relationships as perfect, but that in these moments we yearn for perfection and we see it, even if fleetingly.

As the American poet Anne Sexton said, "It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was."

Unfortunately for me, my father did not live to walk me down the aisle or dance with me at my wedding. And yet the memories of my father, head turned back over his shoulder, laughing as he danced, are as powerful now as when as a young child I saw this glamorous figure dancing and flying across the floor.

He was the man who taught us to swim and to dive, spending endless hours in the local pool; the man who brushed our hair and removed our band aids so carefully, compared to the quicker, no-nonsense approach of our mother; who laughed his way through so many silly board games (as long as they were not Monopoly); who sang endlessly in the car as we embarked on those Sunday drives to somewhere.

And I watched a man who thought and said my mother was a clever woman, who talked of politics and what was right and fair, who told stories of the men (and they were only men) with whom he worked.

I heard from him that getting the job done well was the real goal you strived for and so you were flexible with others if they would work with you to do that.

I heard that you would go to eat in the kitchen of the restaurant that your Chinese mate would eat at, why the Lebanese guy kept getting injured because of that first injury he suffered and carried, and in all his stories that it didn't matter who you were or where you came from but what you did.

I saw him stand up to people when there was trouble and when he told me afterwards he didn't know what he would have done if they'd called his bluff.

I tried it myself once, and it didn't work as well – I guess I was a little shorter than him and didn't look as threatening!

I learnt more from him than he probably ever imagined.

I am sure he knew more about me (as did my mother) than I ever thought they did – or than he ever said.

I wish I had known him longer than I did, but all the years and the memories are precious.

In our minds fed by memory and by the words and images of others, we recognise the deep channels and indentations of that relationship of father and daughter.

We hear its echoes; we work with and against its rhythms.

All of us are a bundle of contexts and possibilities – but this relationship is a particularly significant, and ever-changing, influence on what we make of and for ourselves.

Though memories may remain the same, they too can be seen through a different perspective with hindsight.

If I may offer any advice to the daughters here tonight, the best advice is to try to live life well and that relies on caring deeply about knowing those around you.

There is always much to learn through careful observation and reflection.

Your parents are often the first people you observe closely, and you can’t underestimate how much you absorb from these interactions and experiences.

Whether you are aware of it or not, you will often return to them as you make sense of the world around you, and as you make your own way in it.

Time spent reflecting on the nature of these connections is rarely time wasted.

The relationship of father and daughter is worth much more than a celebratory dinner.

But to celebrate it and remind ourselves of its power in our lives is more than worthy of this moment.

Thank you.