A task unfinished: the tyranny of the recurring dream

In 1980, when I did what was then the HSC, the last year of schooling in Victoria, I got good marks. Not top marks, but enough to get into one of the most prestigious uni courses of the time – Arts Law at Melbourne University.

Even after all this time, the two words 'arts' and 'law' when used together summon up for me a magic that is indivisible. They evoke an arcane world of fun and study, of unknown but friendly young men and kind, dedicated tutors, a kind of playground of the mind. I did not see a clear future beyond the course and had no strong image of myself as a fully fledged lawyer. Rather, I believed I was entering an intellectual fun parlour, that everything from now on would be exciting in a way that would require little effort.

Not a small part of this was the prestige of Melbourne Uni and the fact that it was in an almost unknown part of town beguilingly far away, just beyond the city centre.

Unbelievably from this vantage point, university study was virtually free at the time in Australia, apart from a hefty student union fee that subsidised a hell of a lot of drinking and sport (I’m not against student unionism, but that’s another story).

If I was commencing a law course in 2009 and had earned a government-subsidised place (formally called HECS, now changed to Commonwealth Supported Place or CSP) the law course alone would cost me $8677 per year. If my marks were decent but not high enough for the CSP course, I would expect to pay more than $20,000 a year to complete a fee-paying law degree, although the Australian Government is phasing out full fee-paying courses for domestic students. (These figures are for the law course alone; my bill would have been slightly lower as an Arts Law student because I was studying fewer law subjects per year, as well as arts subjects.)

Anyways. The sheen took a while to wear off – Melbourne Uni and the bohemian and gelati mecca of nearby Lygon Street were like fairyland for a while – but in about six weeks disillusionment and social anxiety had well and truly set in.

I don’t want to rehearse my complete inability to cope with the lack of structure of uni life – in those days, there was a great deal of informal orientation from student clubs but nothing structured, no mentoring or buddy programs. All I need to say is that my planning skills were zilch; I was only ever motivated to study when the teachers and the subject matter grabbed me (which had miraculously happened in HSC but didn’t happen at uni in either Japanese or law, and even English was disappointing); I had severe undiagnosed social phobia resulting in emotional retardation and lack of social skills; I had an undiagnosed, garden-variety eating disorder; the fact that there were no fees made me incredibly blasé about the whole thing; and my parents had told me I could live at home but would be responsible for all my expenses. Any fool (except me) could see that the prognosis was not good.

To cut a long story short, I eventually dropped out of law, after barely scraping a pass in first year and failing both subjects in second. And, although I eventually managed a limp Arts degree, I crashed at Jap. In both Jap and law, I was defeated by the severe amount of study and the fact that the work in these areas was difficult and required thought and application – at school I’d mostly gotten away with doing well in subjects that came fairly easy to me.

But – and this is the crux of the issue – I had less nous than a baby ant when it came to actually doing anything about the pile-up of unstudied articles and case law, unlearned vocab and grammar. Once an amount of control had been lost, I did not even try to deal with it. I simply let go, and the balloon of university success bobbed away and became invisible. I did not, in any conscious way, stress about this. Actually dropping out of a subject before failure would have been an active acknowledgement of my dilemma that I was at the time incapable of.

I finally returned to study a decade or so later when I completed a Masters prelim part time at La Trobe University, and then a Masters degree in English at Melbourne Uni, supported by a scholarship. After that I did a diploma in publishing and editing at RMIT. Because I’d written a lot of poetry and attended poetry workshops over the years, I received quite a few credits in the RMIT course, so got the diploma without having completed the required number of subjects.

This is all necessary background for the topic of this entry – recurring dreams.

I’ve had different recurring dreams. When I finally found the twelve-step program that helped with my eating disorder, in my early thirties, I went through a period where I was constantly having birth trauma dreams. In these dreams I was in a confined, tube-like structure, horribly claustrophobic, struggling to move through it to the entrance. Sometimes this structure was a concrete pipe, sometimes a narrow tunnel in the earth. These dreams may have been the symptoms of a primal fear of being stuck in the birth canal. They eventually ceased, so perhaps I worked through this fear.

But in the last five years I’ve started having another kind of dream. In this dream, I have a huge amount of work to do, but have been incredibly forgetful and somehow missed at least a semester and sometimes nearly a year of work. In the dream I realise I have only weeks to cover an entire years’ work. There’s no getting out of the work: I must do it.

The funny thing is that, in the way these types of dreams relate to my life, the chronology of my study history has been reversed. The dreams were originally about the later RMIT course, and my guilt about having received credits for its completion (this guilt was misplaced, because as well as all the poetry experience, in 1985, not long after getting my original Arts degree, I’d done a few subjects in one of the first TAFE writing courses in Melbourne, and never bothered trying to get credits for these subjects).

In the RMIT-related recurring dream I would find myself in some kind of classroom situation (the settings often mixed up with old workplaces). I was hopelessly behind because I’d somehow forgotten that I was doing the course, and was finally turning up to class. A teacher who was a favourite in real life would be presiding over the dream class, adding to my guilt. I’d calculate with dismay just how much work I would need to do in the next few weeks, and then wake up with a delicious relief.

Eventually this version of the dream ceased. By the time this occurred the RMIT diploma had been hanging on my office wall for at least two years and I think it had finally entered my unconscious mind that the course was well and truly finished, credits or no credits.

But I’m now having a variant on this kind of dream. In this variant I’m a post-grad law student, and have been inexplicably absent from the course. In this dream I find myself with mountains of work to do and only weeks to do it in (it’s always assignments, not exam preparation, perhaps suggesting the editing work I do now).

The meanings of this variation of the original recurring dream seems obvious to me.

When I was dipping out on the law subjects more 25 years ago, I was blind to the practical implications, thought little about what my future would be, and didn’t lose sleep. In fact, I’ve always known I wasn’t suited to law. Even if I’d completed the degree, I probably would never have practised. For most of the years after that failure, my lack of suitability to a law career appeared to justify my dropping out.

But while I was slacking off, smugly thinking that the law students who studied were ‘sucks’, underneath the neurosis and my disillusionment with uni life I was probably feeling a perfectly healthy guilt at my laziness, a guilt that the other, stronger feelings were crowding out. Somewhere in an unknown part of myself I knew there was work to be done, and perhaps now these guilt feelings have gradually burrowed out of their hidey-hole and are coming to light.

But as we grow older we view our personal histories with ever more sophistication and understanding, and these dreams also have a cognitive element. Over the years I’ve met enough rich lawyers and law degree holders to come to understand that a law degree, even if never used to practice law, would have done me absolutely no harm and improved my wages in a variety of fields. My older self now understands that I was throwing away a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

The fact is, when I dropped out of law I had no burning desire to do anything else (except, interestingly, journalism – and a law degree would have got me a much better entry position). After three years of low-paid regional and suburban journalism, I ended up doing low-paid work in the community sector, where I watched well-paid social policy officers with law degrees write policy papers.

In fact, I’ve come to believe that the whole RMIT recurring dream was just a rehearsal for the main event – a dawning sense of the unfinished law course. Part of me knows there’s a course I haven’t tackled, a job waiting to be done. I wonder now whether I’ll ever stop having this dream, because I’ll never stop being affected by the lack of a law degree.

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Carlton forever

Yesterday I took a nostalgic trip to an old stamping ground, the buzzy inner city suburb of Carlton. ‘Suburb’ seems the wrong word to use, so intermeshed is Carlton with the city centre it borders. Carlton is awash with the past for me because I inexplicably left this suburb more than seven years ago.

Melbourne loves its inner suburbs but Carlton was one of the first to be gentrified. By the early 1980s, when I first went to the nearby Melbourne Uni, it was already too expensive for some first home buyers, and its bohemians and students were fleeing to the edgier Fitzroy next door, and cheaper suburbs to the north like Brunswick and Northcote (this surge further north has continued for members of Generation X, who can now barely afford to buy in far-flung suburbs like Reservoir).

Gentrified suburbs sometimes suffer a kind of living death and become museum-like. By some miracle Carlton is still alive.

It was an overwhelmingly working class suburb until the 1960s but had always attracted immigrants because of its closeness to the city centre and local factories.

Home to waves of Jewish settlers since the 19th century, it was a Jewish mecca until the 1950s. But in that decade it became known as ‘Little Italy’, the best-known destination of the wave of Italian immigrants who reached Australia after the Second World War. Lygon Street became a vibrant hub of Italian restaurants, cafes, butchers, tailors, delicatessens and culture, and one of the few places you could get ‘real coffee’ before cafe culture took off in Melbourne.

With Melbourne University next door, baby boomer students, academics and artists discovered Carlton in the 1960s and 70s and made its cafes and traditional watering holes their own. The footpaths filled with hippies and Carlton was home to the iconic Pram Factory theatre collective, in which many a now-famous writer and actor first argued over the finer points of Maoism.

In the 1980s the rest of Melbourne and the tourists discovered Lygon and on summer nights the street was thick with suburbanites seeking cheap pasta meals and real gelato, infinitely creamier and more flavoursome than the fizzy, icy stuff we had begged our parents to buy as children from Mr Whippy vans. Hoons roared their Monaros up and down the street into the wee hours.

Carlton's residential streets of humble workers cottages and posher double-storey terrace houses with their cast iron balconies were livelier then. Now these wide, pretty streets with their cobbled lanes have an unearthly quietness, protected by traffic barriers designed to keep cars at bay. There are whiffs of vanished communities though, invisible traces of the village atmosphere that the original subdivision created with its frequent small squares.

A distinctive element of Italian and Greek architecture is also still evident. Before the days of heritage bylaws Italians and Greeks had cart blanche to change their Victorian houses. They painted them in pastel colours like pale blue, and removed ornamentation and often entire verandas from facades. They built new brick fences with wrought iron panels and gates, and planted vegetables in the front yards, parts of which they often concreted. The results often have a stark, almost modernist flavour.

Today, lined with plane trees, Lygon Street still manages to be charming despite being colonised by the predictable 7-11 stores and a Safeway lodged downstairs in Lygon Court. This is a small mall that, though aesthetically sterile, is designed like an Italian piazza that’s integrated with the street. It houses the Nova cinema, which is able to run edgier arthouse films than its rivals because of the student population.

The most tourist-y part of Lygon Street is closest to the city, where waiters stand in front of once-stately terraces that are now overpriced tavernas with stereotypical red-and-white checked tablecloths, and spruik for patrons. The northern end has the bookshops, some upmarket fashion stores, and the crowded cafes with their well-trained baristas; some of the cafes, like Tiamos and the University Cafe, are legendary and still sell a battered ‘authenticity’ that Starbucks could only dream of.

Unwelcome changes continue of course: like the Pram Factory, the famous Carlton Moviehouse with its hard, uncomfortable seating (it was affectionately known as 'the bughouse’) is long gone, its business taken by the Nova. Borders moved in a few years ago like a giant piranha, threatening the hegemony of Readings, an independent bookstore which started small in Carlton during the 1970s and has now become a successful chain.

Thank god Readings maintained its identity, helped no doubt by the frequent author talks and launches it hosts. It’s still lacking elbow room on Sunday afternoons. And miraculously, the tiny, longstanding La Mama theatre, threatened by the twin perils of bureaucratic overreach and rising rent, has been saved due to a successful fundraising drive.

The families who can afford to live here now are likely to be those of corporate lawyers and financiers who want to be hip, and the students living here those whose parents are rich enough to help them out with the rent. But it’s the Melbourne Uni students overall, and the inhabitants of the highrise 'Housing Commission' flats that loom up behind the shopping centre -- from places like Eritrea, Somalia and China -- that keep the suburb lively and diverse.

There are two Carltons for me. The first is the Carlton of my undergraduate days when I could feel the hippies scattering to the four winds and the Pram Factory building was soon to be bulldozed to make way for the supermarket. The suburb felt pagan to me, it smelt of wild sex and adulthood. The second Carlton dates from the time when I moved there in 1995 from a mouldy flat in Northcote to complete a Masters degree at Melbourne Uni.

At the time I romanticised my lonely life, viewing myself as a cut-price Helen Garner because I had a bike and rode around a lot. But what I treasured most about Carlton then was its closeness to everything. It was a five-minute bike ride to the Nova cinema and only another five minutes to uni, a ten-minute bus trip to the city centre, and only a short stroll to Brunswick Street (once a hangout for radical young artists and now a place of rich young hippies and twenty- and thirty-something small business owners).

In a rather delightful coincidence I had joined a 12-step program not long before and the small community room where meetings were held in nearby Palmerston street became a safe haven where I made tentative friendships and started to manage my eating disorder.

It was a fluke that I made it to Carlton at all that second time. I only ‘got in’ because a friend of mine from the 12-step program was living in a small cottage near Rathdowne Street, one of Carlton’s thoroughfares. The cottage was becoming vacant and my friend promised to put in a good word for me. It was a one-bedroom cottage, attached to almost identical houses on each side, with a front verandah, small backyard and outdoor toilet. Much larger than the average one-bedroom flat, it was dirt cheap at $130 a week.

After five years, though, I was sick of traipsing to the outdoor dunny on rainy nights, sick of the rising damp, of the dark and the chill of the inflexible Victorian architecture. A recent fling had left me emotionally distraught and wanting a change. Then I got burgled because I didn’t want to spend what little money I had on security.

Not long afterwards two mynah birds came down the chimney and terrorised me until I shooed them out the front door and I was convinced it was some kind of sign (!) that I should leave. I was getting older, and wasn’t Carlton a young person’s suburb? Why not move back to leafier, quieter Northcote, home to hundreds of settled, dog-owning dykes?

The breathtaking stupidity of this decision still astounds me. While often lonely and isolated in Carlton, I was close to a million distractions and my small circle of friends. And I had just started as a freelancer, working on a large editing project with an experienced mentor and discovering the ridiculous number of hours I would have to work to make a decent living.

I barely had time to scratch myself, yet I decided to forge ahead with the move. I’d found a tiny flat in Northcote, round the corner from where I’d lived five years ago, just past the much more bourgeois Clifton Hill, and it was freshly painted and light, with fixtures that were not decades old. I would find a new me there.

I won’t go into detail about the resulting disaster. The night before I was due to move I quaked in my bed, surrounded by neatly packed boxes, the huge mistake I’d made slowly dawning on me. (I had been warned: so desperate had prospective tenants been that they hadn't bothered to go through the real estate agent but simply knocked on my door in the evenings, asking if they could look around.)

The new flat was tiny, way too small for all my stuff; with the washing machine in the minuscule bathroom, I couldn’t even close the door. Luckily it had a small yard, part of which was covered by an awning, and I stored some of my stuff there.

In Carlton I’d had quiet single women living on either side of me; in Northcote I was stuck in a ground floor flat below a young alpha male who seemed to have bricks for shoes and who talked so loudly I could hear him ordering his Friday night takeaway pizza over the phone. On a nearby highway, traffic whizzed by till the early hours. The Merri Creek, behind my flat, offered up a damp fug that filled the loungeroom on cold mornings and my old Honda finally gave out so I was more isolated than I’d ever been. After about a year I 'accidentally' flooded the place and was forced to leave.

Now I’ve boomeranged back to leafy East Malvern, and live in a large, rundown flat that is creepily close to where I lived with my family during my formative years. A couple of years ago rental prices skyrocketed in Melbourne because of a rental shortage and Carlton prices, always OTT, are now g-astronomical, more out of reach than ever.

Every now and then I go back to Carlton, to wile away an afternoon or evening there and pretend I’m still a resident. And as soon as my car reaches the corner of Rathdowne and Johnson streets, with the familiar service station on my left and Lygon Street just a little way up the hill, something tells me I’m home.

But I can’t really pretend I’m a resident any more. I’m an exile, a refugee from the inner city and no matter how many years I live in East Malvern, I always will be.

Perhaps I'm being unrealistic: perhaps the miracle was that I spent five years in Carlton, that small pocket of the world that so much of Melbourne crowds into, or would like to. For a while I lived in a place that I was sure was the centre of the universe. And it was ace.

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