Guess Who's Coming To Dinner?

ANXIETY’s shadow flickered briefly across the happy couple’s faces as they paused before the door of her parental home, a moment for fear and uncertainty to be dispelled by a quick squeeze of the hand and a peck on the cheek. It can be an ordeal meeting your sweetheart’s dad for the first time, and by now Julia understood that very well indeed. The memories flooded back and she shuddered.

“So, Bruce, what do you do and what are your intentions,” her Dad had asked Craig’s predecessor.

“Now that you ask,” replied Bruce, that lovable scamp, “I’m a thief and a very good one. As to my intentions, with your daughter to do the legal work my intention is to become the biggest thief, and I do mean the biggest, in any ACTU-affiliated industrial organisation. When my members are earning $10 an hour, it’s wrong, just plain wrong, that the bosses should have it all.”

Julia caught her father’s expression and saw his concern. He was older, still snared in that absolutist morality, unable without a little help to appreciate theft as one those relative and subjective things, which is how she had come to see it during the rough and tumble days of university and student politics. Once you grasped that the personal was political, that it was about you and always about you, that was the first step on the path to greatness.

“Dad, what you need to understand is that those of us on the left are working for a better Australia, and that’s the important thing. How we achieve that, well sometimes it can seem a bit odd, but rest assured that when everyone else is stealing, no one is stealing.”

Her dad had smiled at his pride and joy. She was so very good at helping him to grasp the way things worked in these modern times, and it was apparent Bruce had been cut from the same cloth.

“I’ll tell you how much I want Julia as my chief legal officer,” he had said, pausing just a second for effect. “I want you to know I’ve left the wife and kids in Perth to share a life with Julia in Melbourne.”

THE Bruce thing had not worked out, although the new bathroom, front fence and other renovations to Julia’s modest home remained cherished and practical mementoes of the love that might have been. Now it was Craig’s turn to pass paternal muster, and Julia reached once more for her swain's sweaty palm, but this time it was not there.

As the door opened she turned and saw that Craig had stepped back a metre or two, rolled up his trouser legs and placed upon his head a handkerchief knotted at all four corners. She had told him how her folks brought with them in the family’s ten-quid suitcases many of the Mother Country’s cultural customs and funny little ethnic ways, and this was Craig’s attempt to cross the divide of otherness.

Craig was twitching now, surrendering to the convulsive spasms she recognised as his notion of dancing, clearing his throat for what became a song that rose, bass and brave, from that cute little tubby-bubby paunch below his diaphragm.

"Men of Harlech, stop your dreaming,
"Can’t you see their spearpoints gleaming…"

Craig was bellowing, but she could just catch her father’s words.

“Your new bloke is an idiot,” he said.

“No denying it, Dad, but he has the makings of a fine Cabinet minister – and he really does love me.”

“Has he left a wife and kids in Perth as well?”

“No, Dad. In Brisbane.”

The father nodded and once again he smiled. It was wonderful to have a daughter who could see virtue when others might not, the girl who had swotted those uni courses devoted to personal entitlement and the right of a modern woman to make her way to the top of the machine by any means necessary, as so many men before her had done.

He didn’t understand it, the new rules that made black into white and ambition the trump of honesty.

But what he did understand was that Julia understood the new world's new rules and he admired the grace with which she had made honesty, fidelity and truth the subordinate satellites of ambition.

He could never be ashamed of someone who had made herself the mistress of such a thoroughly alien universe.

No, he would never be ashamed. And woe betide anyone who said otherwise.