Opinions And Comparisons

Smithfield Hostel was outwardly more austere and primitive than Glenelg, but despite – or perhaps partly because – of that, I loved it even more. We had moved to Smithfield after a couple of weeks in Glenelg because we had been promised a house in nearby Elizabeth West. It was also much more convenient for Dad, who had begun working at the Holden’s factory in Elizabeth.
If the set-up at Glenelg had resembled a holiday camp, Smithfield, with its green-painted hut complexes perched six feet above the ground on stilts, was more like an army encampment deep in some faraway tropical rain-forest – except that the surrounding terrain could scarcely have been less jungle-like. For one thing, there were hardly any trees, and, apart from the lime green of the camp huts themselves, the predominant colours were various shades of yellow and brown. It was – as I would later recite with captivated glee – ‘a sunburnt country’, a land still almost wholly in tune with, and in submission to, the elements.

Which, I somehow felt (if not quite thought), was how things ought to be.

When my dad complained, as he was wont to do, that everything was depressingly barren and parched compared to the lush green foliage of the English countryside, I somehow felt my feelings vindicated. Perhaps, at some level, I was beginning to rebel, but I like to imagine that I was beginning to see that most things in life were open to interpretation, were matters of belief not assurance.

My dad believed that green was an inherently more attractive colour than yellow and brown, whereas I could see beauty in both. However, there was a freshness and a novelty about the scorched Australian landscape that somehow rendered it, for the time being at least, more appealing.