10_Mary_Street

In “10 Mary Street” the emphasis is on another aspect of allegiances, of loyalties, of belonging. Here “belonging” is to the Sydney suburb, Strathfield, where the poet’s family settled after their time in the Parkes Migrant Camp. It is the place Skryznecki spent most of his childhood and all his adolescence. If he “belongs” anywhere it is here. Instead, in the poem’s powerful closing image, Strathfield represents an incomplete belonging: Naturalized more Than a decade ago We became citizens of the soil That was feeding us— Inheritors of a key That will open no house When this one is pulled down. It is this temporary quality, rather than the kinds of conflict Maalouf refers to, that we see here. To the Skryzneckis every belonging, except the ones the parents began with, seems somehow unreal. The parents tend plants “like adopted children”, that simile stressing the lack of a real sense of belonging. Only by keeping “pre-war Europe alive/With photographs and letters” and by eating and drinking what they grew up with do they find any sense of belonging, but it is not a belonging to their present surroundings, though outwardly they conform and “assimiliate”. The son, however, has known little else and observes every detail of his environment with a clear, even loving, eye, revelling “like a hungry bird” in the garden’s strawberries and peas. Yet the house is doomed, the garden has now gone, and in a telling aside the poet mentions that “The whole block/Has been gazetted for industry.” http://neilwhitfield.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/microsoft-word-hsc-english-standard1.pdf