I STILL THINK YOU’VE GOT TO HAVE SOME INPUT INTO IT”

Rose lived on Melbourne’s wealthy rural eastern fringe. Her father had been retrenched eight years ago but was working again. Rose’s mother did voluntary work in a local non- profit making organisation. Rose was a first-generation student.

On phoning the family to confirm an interview time, I spoke to Rose’s father whose accent I recognised as being similar to my own English accent and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that he had lived in the same town as my maternal grandparents before he migrated to Australia. We laughed with each other about the coincidence and I felt an immediate geographical and in turn, emotional connection, to the family, a connection which was to increase as each interview went by.

While Louise’s experiences of university were marked by good fortune, Rose’s family’s experiences, like Francesca’s, were marked by struggle. Despite living in a wealthy area, on entering the home, I was struck by the minimal lighting despite it being dark outside and the sparsely furnished lounge room. I was soon to understand its significance. The family told me that Rose’s father had been retrenched eight years earlier and although he was working again in a different place of employment (Rose’s mother did voluntary work) Rose’s mother described her family as “the poorest” in the area:

financially we’re her total (Rose’s mother, Interview 1).

Rose’s father earned $30 a year too much for Rose to qualify for Austudy. Adding to the financial strain and in turn emphasising an Alternative student experience narrative in which families struggle financially, was the fact that Rose could not earn money in a part- time job because of the two and a half hour train journey from university to home:

it’s very hard for her to get a job when she’s got to get here to home…financially it’s a drain and books and things like that, I mean she’ll

say to me, oh hi mum I’m home, I just want a book for $60 or you know I just want a book for $120 and you’re thinking you know and you’ve got one out there saying Mum I need new shoes. And you know a lot of money. We’ve seen lots of roll-over money that we shouldn’t have used in the sense we haven’t really left a lot for our old age (Rose’s Mother, Interview 1).

Travelling so far each day was more than a mere inconvenience. It was a signal to Rose’s mother that a turning point had been reached in both Rose’s and her mother’s lives. Rose’s mother felt that this turning point marked a shift from being able to protect her daughter in a sheltered, caring world to one where her daughter would have to protect herself. So great were the pressures that they were enough to make Rose’s mother consider releasing her daughter, and in turn herself, from the pressures of going to university at all. The shock of urban life and financial strains are similar to the culture clashes in the Alternative student narrative. However, the clash of cultures in this instance concerned not a shift from a poor to a wealthy area as might be traditionally expected but rather from a wealthy rural area to a poor inner city area:

a lot of things happened to her in primary school and just trying to make her go into the real world someone that had virtually not walked down to the school bus on her own, because I used to walk down in the mornings and keep walking and go for a walk. Somebody that had really never been anywhere on her own, for all of a sudden to have to come and go on public transport…She phoned me one day…she’d seen that person brought out in a body bag…she phoned me, she said what am I going to do mum? I don’t know if I can cope with this, what am I going to do? And I, I really my, I wanted to say all right come home we’ll lock the doors, we’ll forget about it, you won’t get a job anywhere, we’ll just, your father gets $30 a year too much for you to get Austudy, I mean a year, $30 a year and that’s because he does overtime (Rose’s mother, Interview 1).

Despite her mother’s concerns, Rose’s father was more comfortable with the location of the campus as he had worked in the area for many years. Similarly and despite the story above, Rose was also more relaxed about studying in the suburb as she had visited her father’s workplace many times. In a twist of the Alternative student experience narrative made possible through the massified system of higher education in which university campuses were built in working-class suburbs, Rose’s working-class background and

knowledge of working-class suburbs, helped rather than hindered her adjustment to university. Rose knew she had this advantage:

With dad always being in the engineering field, and always going down to the factory and seeing everyone in the factory and engineers all the time and everything it just sort of, I knew what it was all about before I went in there and knew what basically everything entailed. So that was about all…Dad had a lot of experience going down there and working with the different types of people down there, because it’s so multicultural down there, and just going down there some of the things that have happened when he’s been around, just in the factory itself where he works and just walking along…just had to expect these things (Rose, Interview 1).

So different was the location of the campus that Rose’s father emphasised its difference by contrasting it with where they lived and in a graphic fashion:

(you’re) going to the real world Rosie, this isn’t the real world, this is Disney Land (Rose’s father, Interview 1).

Although Rose’s contemporaries had many financial advantages, knowing and

understanding the city or its people was not one of them. The following story highlights the contrasting worlds in which Rose’s peers lived and wanted to study:

I have a friend she used to live round here and Rose and her daughter were friendly when they were very small…and she took her to all the different universities and when she didn’t get the marks to do what she wanted and she went to (names a university) and she came back and she said to her mother, she said oh I’m so glad I’m going there, because the majority are blue-eyed blondes like me (Rose’s mother, Interview 2).

Reflecting on the importance of university attendance, Rose’s father described working- class life in England and in so doing unravelled an Alternative student experience narrative in which university is seen as an escape route from a life of otherwise limited options:

You’re probably the first one in both families that’s actually made it to university. So if you like, the working-class cycle, if you want to put it that

way, could be broken….It’s (the working-class cycle) the fact that you go to work, and you work in a factory, and a few years ago parents used to pull levers all day, and you finished pulling your levers and you’ve got enough money to go to the pub Friday and Saturday night, and Sunday you lie in bed and Monday you’re back and you pull levers all week and that’s all it consisted of. Twice a year, once a year you were allowed to go to a little seaside resort for a holiday and you got there, and usually your mum and dad spent it all in bed, exhausted, so they could go back and do another twelve months pulling levers (Rose’s father, Interview 1).

Although Rose’s parents were not able to pass on any understandings of what it was like to be at university, other people they knew through school or the neighbours were able to share their knowledge with them. For example, Rose’s experience of a ‘junior’ university had prepared her:

The two junior universities I’ve done and friends that had gone off to uni. I was very friendly with a big group of kids that were two years ahead of me, and they warned me a lot as well. And a friend, a good friend of mine he’s doing engineering at (names a university) and he said this will happen, that will happen and you’ll have these subjects and it will be like this and everything. And he’s done a lot of warning (Rose, Interview 1).

Similarly, Rose’s mother was able to call on a friend for greater insight to help her understand what it would be like during Rose’s university years:

A friend of mine is a lecturer…I’ve always talked to her and she sort of said this and that and she said to me look you know, she can’t, she’s at university now and she’s really got to be an adult now, there’ll be no taking care of her. And she’ll say to me try and encourage her to tell you all the funny stories, you know try, and then you know we’ve had the pig on the train4…she said we should tape, funny you should be doing this, because she said you should tape everything, it would make a marvellous thesis, I think that’s what she said. She said it’s just fabulous and she’s always sort of said to me, you know encourage her to talk and tell you things (Rose’s mother, Interview 1).

Although the family was living an Alternative student experience narrative, this was complicated by those around them expecting to experience something more akin to the

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Rose told of how on the way to university one day, a passenger got on with a dead pig “and started talking to it in Chinese”, an experience she found quite shocking.

Archetypal student experience narrative with parents in the local area expecting their offspring to attend one of only two universities, despite there being many others. As a result, Rose and her parents experienced not cultural or intellectual clashes within their own family but instead they experienced inter-narrative clashes with other families which served to emphasise their different financial circumstances:

I know of one or two cases where the parents have just gone, ‘do you need a house to live in, close to uni? Here’s some money, off you go, here’s a car to park in the driveway in Toorak’. (Rose, Interview 1)...There’s another boy down the road…but he only has three contact days I think and they’re extremely wealthy and have a family flat in the city…plus he drives, the family have bought him a car (Rose’s mother, Interview 1).

Rose’s parents told of how their social status had been determined by others through Rose’s father’s previous employment. They felt that this social snobbery would not have occurred had they lived in the western suburbs:

In primary school…they didn’t want their kids to mix with someone who made ammunition where maybe it would have been different if we’d lived over the other side because she wouldn’t have been the only one whose father worked and made ammunition…there was a lot of people, they were very blunt about it (Rose’s mother, Interview 2).

Not only had they been affected by occupational snobbery but the anticipated class metamorphosis as described by Rose’s father had been potentially hindered by the locals’ attempts to downgrade the university Rose attended as not being ‘real’:

Different people have sort of said to me, oh you know she’s at (names university), do you think she’s getting, do you think she’s getting a real academic sort of, you know is it really, is it really real, will she get a job because she’s there (Rose’s mother, Interview 1).

Suggesting Rose’s experience might not be a true one, exemplified in the phrase “is it really real?” is a clear attempt to shed doubts on the authenticity and validity of the university her daughter attends and in turn to diminish what she has achieved. In so doing, Rose is denied the status of being a ‘real’ university student. Rose’s parents, and

academics within the so-called unreal university itself, are vulnerable to people’s

anxieties about the supposed ‘realness’ of universities. While Rose’s mother rationalised the situation as “it’s just snobbery really isn’t it” (Rose’s Mother, Interview 3), the construction of ‘the pretend’ university is also a way to revitalise and reassert an elite hierarchical system of university education within the massified system.

Despite attempts by others to diminish Rose’s experiences, Rose saw her combined knowledge of a local private school and her knowledge of factory life and inner suburban life as advantageous within a massified system of education, giving her confidence to embark on her chosen field at university:

With Dad always being in the engineering field, and always going down to the factory and seeing everyone in the factory and engineers all the time and everything it just sort of, I knew what it was all about before I went in there and knew what basically everything entailed…all of Dad’s family were basically engineers (Rose, Interview 1).

Rose also recognised how the protected school and home environments that her peers experienced before they went to university could be problematic for them when they went to university:

A lot of the kids that did go (to university), they were usually very popular people and they’ve gone in and they’re just a tiny little nobody, whereas they were like the big fish at (names her high school), they were it and a bit and everybody loved them sort of thing, whereas I’m so and so. That’s nice and off they go. They don’t really care who you are and what you are. Whereas you used to go around and have on all your regalia and everything, your pocket or everything on, or your captain’s uniform, and all your badges you’ve got so far and everything. And everyone used to say you had so much authority, then you’ve gone to uni and you’re just one of the crowd (Rose, Interview 2).

Her father agreed commenting:

It’s a bigger puddle when you get to somewhere like (names two universities), where there’s thousands of kids. Like you only had seven hundred, eight hundred kids down there…but when you go to (names a

university) they’re all as good as you, if not better (Rose’s Father, Interview 2).

Rose’s mother’s expectations of her daughter’s life at university were situated squarely within the Archetypal student experience narrative in which students are ‘way out’ and are left to look after themselves. Like the images of students referred to by Sivier (1997) Rose’s mother expected her daughter to have a different sort of student experience and she expressed surprise that this narrative had not occurred:

I suppose I’m surprised...Maybe I sort of expected that if she went there she would be faced with, you know to fit in, she would have to smoke dope…this sort of thing…but I mean because we are so isolated here, I thought perhaps she either wouldn’t cope. I mean you live somewhere, where you’ve got, you’re on tank water. You’ve only got electricity, you don’t have gas…I was very, very frightened that she would go in and because her marks were low she wouldn’t be able to keep up, she wouldn’t be able to make the grade and she would perhaps be asked to leave or she would have to leave. And I thought who picks the pieces up? You know who picks the pieces up now?…We’ve got all these books and a devastated eighteen year old and what does she do? Where does she go? (Rose’s mother, Interview 2).

Instead, Rose was experiencing a narrative of Continuation in which her university experiences were similar to her high school experiences, specifically that she was looked after in a small, friendly environment. It came as a great relief to Rose’s mother to discover that when her daughter went to university she did not seem to be lost there:

I honestly think that because it’s small, she’s not lost in the crowd. I’ve even had someone ring me here, the guy you see on a Tuesday afternoon, because he wasn’t going to be there…and I sort of feel you know that there’s at least some sort of contact (Rose’s mother, Interview 1).

Rather than living an Alternative student experience narrative in which she felt distanced from her daughter, Rose’s parents were surprised to feel more involved with their

daughter’s education than ever before:

You know it’s strange. I find that she’s actually more talkative and tells me more now than she did when she was at school. (Rose’s Mother, Interview

2)…we usually get some sort of report each day on what’s happening…It’s not too long after it’s happened that we find out (Rose’s father, Interview 2). Other involvement in her daughter’s life included looking after the domestic space, particularly her daughter’s bedroom:

She was doing an assignment or whatever it is…she had bits everywhere and everything and I went into that bedroom and I really cleaned it up, I spent days cleaning this bedroom up (Rose’s mother, Interview 3).

Her desire to be involved at this level of her daughter’s life arose from what she felt she had learned through the year as a parent of a university student who lived a long way from university:

I really feel you’ve got to be organised, you really have. As the mother, if you’re in the house, you’ve really got to make sure, you can’t expect them to