Blackheath mating rituals

About the author

James Gering

James Gering has received various awards for his stories and poems. His writing has appeared in many journals, including Meanjin, Cordite, Rattle and San...

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Non-fictionAmerican sociologists John and Ruth Hill Useem first coined the term ‘third culture kid’ in the 1950s to describe the experience of Americans who were raised abroad in a culture different to their birth culture. This term reflects the way children raised overseas straddle three cultures: the culture of their birth, the culture within which they are raised, and a third, nebulous culture – the culture they create through the way they learn to relate to each other. The third culture is interstitial, not an amalgam. ‘Third culture kid’ (TCK) is a term often used as shorthand. Many TCKs will have experienced more than one cultural shift too. Those with diplomatic, military or missionary families are often raised in multiple countries, and others, like me, will continue their travels overseas as adults too, exercising the global and economic mobility they know well.

Shelf life

Non-fictionEarly in his career, Charles Dickens notably underestimated the reputational risk of library-shelf browsing when he invited the critic George Henry Lewes home for tea. Over steaming cups, Lewes eyed naff triple-decker novels and bland travel books, ‘all obviously the presentation copies from authors and publishers’. He recalled the experience in a waspish elegy published shortly after Dickens’ death: ‘A man’s library expresses much of his hidden life, I did not expect to find a bookworm, nor even a student, in the marvellous “Boz” but nevertheless this collection of books was a shock.’

Home as a weapon of cultural destruction

Non-fictionIt was simply expected that Aboriginal people would accept the values and behaviour of the dominant European culture. The Welfare Board insisted that Aboriginal people not only earn an independent living but show the Board they could save money in a bank account. They had to demonstrate that they were avoiding contact with other Aboriginal people and refusing to participate in community-oriented activities, such as sharing resources with kinsfolk and travelling to visit their relatives and home Country. Over and over again, the Board’s reports criticised Aboriginal people for being among their own kind and clinging together in groups. To achieve their assimilation aims, the Welfare Board implemented a crude ‘carrot and stick’ incentive in an attempt to modify Aboriginal behaviour: if Aboriginal people could convince the Welfare Officers that they had cut themselves off entirely from their culture, family and land, they would be rewarded with an ‘Exemption Certificate’.