1986: On Opportunity and Observation—The Polite Decline: Notes on the University Girl and Other Vanishing Species
Sydney.
The sandstone of the University still sweats in summer. Every year around February, you can smell ambition on the Quadrangle lawns—a mixture of paper, sunscreen and the faintly tragic perfume of someone who believes themselves destined for medicine but will end in personnel management. I used to lecture here, briefly, in linguistics—comparative syntax, specifically—and might have stayed, had not the Faculty undergone what was euphemistically termed “rationalisation.” They said my appointment lacked “strategic fit.” I later discovered “fit” meant funding. Since then, I’ve devoted myself to writing, which I find intellectually adequate, if administratively invisible.
The women, however, have done remarkably well. When I began teaching in the late 1950s, they were already infiltrating the precincts of scholarship, arriving with fountain pens, floral skirts and a resolute sense of improvement. Many were daughters of accountants or schoolteachers—respectable, earnest families whose sense of propriety was calibrated to the idea of deferred gratification. University study represented a distant moral cousin to finishing school: an opportunity to rise by underlining important passages.
I confess that in those days I believed education existed chiefly to produce minds. I now know it produces marriages, which are by some measures more permanent. The post‑war sandstone quadrangles were hothouses of polite courtship: women discovered argument as foreplay and men discovered that feminism, correctly pronounced, could be seductive. It was, in short, a social system disguised as a syllabus.
The irony, of course, is that I observed it all while remaining peripheral to it. There is something about linguistics—it attracts fascination but inspires no imagination. You cannot flirt through phonemes. Many of my colleagues married clever students; none of mine even remembered my tutorials. I was once informed, kindly, that I had “the air of a man who thinks too precisely about the wrong things.” I took this as a compliment, briefly.
I must explain that the figure of the “university girl”—the charming composite stretching from the 1950s through the mid‑1970s—is not a fiction but a category of social weather. She changed with the climate and yet always knew which way the breeze of propriety blew. In the 1950s she was timid but ascending—her voice half cultivated, half cautious. By the 1960s she learned to command attention in politics, poetry, and occasionally bed. By the 1970s she quoted Marx in caftans and watercolours, all while marrying insurance executives. This metamorphosis is not hypocrisy; it is adaptation. I envy it. I myself remain unchanged and therefore undistinguished.
One must remember the context. Education after the Second World War was the new virtue: the universities opened their vestibules to the daughters of men who still called professors “Sir.” The Cold War lent urgency to moral intellect—everyone was to be armed ideologically, just in case the Russians invaded Wollongong. Young women entered faculties that had seen nothing softer than tweed. They took diligent notes while the nation learned to pronounce Khrushchev.
I recall Miss Stevens—slight, serious, extraordinary handwriting—who astonished us all by choosing medicine “for the challenge.” She married a surgeon before graduating, thus proving that education and matrimony need not conflict when scheduled correctly. Then there was Angela Booth—a philosophy student who wore her hair with socialist conviction and later became an adviser for corporate communications. Most of these women learned refinement the way one learns tennis: through repetition and borrowed whites. I, meanwhile, misfiled their essays and watched from the margin of a social diagram that never included me.
My purpose in writing this study—if indeed purpose may be inferred from persistence—is to correct a few popular misunderstandings about education and class. People imagine that learning erases difference. It doesn’t. It merely refines envy. The university girl learned not equality but poise—an outward literacy of style and restraint that elevated her beyond her beginnings. It was a kind of translation: the local middling made legible to the genteel. I mention, in passing, that linguistics offers no such translation; we remain untranslated.
Education also provided, and continues to provide, an opportunity for women to meet men who could afford to take them seriously. It was a statistically elegant arrangement—seminars produced courtships at roughly the same rate that pubs produced hangovers. One had only to attend a lecture on ethics to observe the moral chemistry of attraction between those certain of their future and those certain of someone else’s salary. Even today, I see the pattern recurring in faculty clubs: clever women tolerating slightly wealthier men under the banner of intellectual equality.
The critics will say I sound cynical. They misunderstand; I am descriptive. For fifteen years I observed the transformation of Australia’s middle classes through the window of tutorial rooms. The young ladies who once blushed at Aristotle now quote Judith Wright over cocktails. I developed, through long exposure, what the French call l’esprit du provincial—a mixture of fascination and indignation that arises when one is intelligent enough to perceive movement but not mobile enough to join it.
Education in those years was both an investment and a justification. The war had brought austerity; the 1950s brought purpose; the 1960s brought the notion that progress and intelligence were the same word. Even Prime Ministers began referencing Plato. The result was that scholarship became fashionable—like marzipan, rich and slightly over-sweet. We believed in meritocracy while practising marriageocracy.
I should make it clear that I bear women no ill will for using education sensibly, as a social technology. Indeed, they succeeded where most of us failed. They understood that universities were not temples of truth but marketplaces of alliance. One student of mine, later a minister’s wife, once told me that “intelligence is attractive when it isn’t insecure.” I assume she meant me no offence.
My own failure to achieve tenure, however, has inclined me to caution. I defended my doctoral thesis—on vowel shifts in Australian English—with exemplary rigour, but my external examiner, a Canadian, dismissed it as “linguistically sound but socially pointless.” That has haunted me ever since: socially pointless. It may yet serve as the title of my autobiography.
The feminists of the later period, of course, converted education into campaign. They spoke of parity rather than posture. Some of them were my colleagues, and terrifyingly efficient they were too—especially Dr. Whittle, who regarded every noun as a patriarchal intrusion. Yet for all their indignation, they too preserved distinctions: one might reject lipstick ideologically, but not with cheap remover. Even revolution requires standards.
By the 1970s, everything had turned peculiar. Scholarship became performance, lectures political theatre. The university girl who once whispered her way through tutorials now made declarations in expanded syntax: “As middle-class women, we must deconstruct our complicity.” I applauded, though not entirely in agreement. There was a time—a better time, perhaps—when understatement was an argument. These days opinion is thumbs and volume.
The economy changed everything. Inflation, oil, the spread of credit—suddenly respectability was portable. The sandstone gates that once guarded privilege now opened to anyone with a Commonwealth scholarship, and the nation congratulated itself. Yet there was a loss, subtle but real: the politeness of aspiration gave way to the rhetoric of entitlement. I may not have tenure, but I maintain discernment; they are not identical virtues.
As I re‑read these pages (and I have re‑read them often; time renders one thorough), I worry that I appear bitter. I prefer to think of myself as precise. My subject—education’s strange alchemy of gender and civility—deserves neither nostalgia nor satire, but something gentler: misgiving. The university girl of 1950 has long since become the executive of 1986, but her transformation began in a logic tutorial. She was educated into noticing difference, then trained to manage it. If that sounds familiar, it should; it is the method by which civilisation endures itself.
My readers may find in these observations a residue of melancholy, even vanity. They are correct. But I labour under the conviction that someone must record what it looked like when learning still implied manners. We laughed differently then, even at earnestness. The laughter was not cruel; it was considered.
I dedicate this book, timidly, to those women who passed through their degrees untroubled by me, ascending by decorum where I lingered by doctrine. It is consoling to imagine they were improved by exposure to linguistic precision, however briefly. A scholar, after all, must preserve illusions. And if those illusions are correct in form, perhaps they needn’t be accurate in content.
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