You Don't Belong Here by Elizabeth Becker

Author:Elizabeth Becker [BECKER, ELIZABETH]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781541768208
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2021-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

WEBB WAS BORN into a prominent New Zealand family. Campbell West-Watson, her grandfather, was a Cambridge-educated English cleric sent to New Zealand, where he became archbishop and was honored by Queen Elizabeth.13

Webb’s English-born mother, Caroline West-Watson, was raised as a teenager in New Zealand but returned to England for graduate studies at the London School of Economics, a rare woman student at the time. She was intrigued by modern politics and traveled as a New Zealand delegate to a conference in Kyoto to discuss Asia’s incipient independence movements. She attended debates on similar issues at the League of Nations meetings in Geneva. Then she got married.14

The 1932 wedding of Caroline West-Watson to Leicester Chisholm Webb, a promising young journalist and college lecturer, was a major New Zealand society event. Webb was already marked as a future leader. Educated at Canterbury College in Christchurch and Cambridge University in England, Webb was a lecturer in history at Canterbury and wrote his first book on government in New Zealand. During World War II, he worked at the Economic Stabilization Committee, and in peacetime he was appointed head of the New Zealand Marketing Department. Somehow, he managed to continue writing on contemporary issues.15

In the small world of the region, Webb’s work was noticed by neighboring Australia. He was recruited to head the new political science department at the Australian National University in Canberra.

Catherine Merrial Webb, always known as Kate, was born in 1943, the third of four children born to Leicester and Caroline Webb and their second daughter. Theirs was a rarified household: their mother read Latin for pleasure, and their father was regularly interviewed on the Notes on the News national radio program, discussing national and international affairs. In photo albums the four children—Nicholas, Rachel, Kate, and Jeremy—play in English-style gardens, ride ponies, and glide on rowboats, squinting into the harsh Australian sun.

Church and Sunday school were de rigueur, and education was an absolute priority. Kate excelled in academics, the best of her siblings. Languages and the social sciences came easily. Her passion, though, was drawing and painting, one reason she was considered eccentric. She was also the good child, the least likely to act up.

Although their parents held back on physical affection—no hugs or kisses—they inculcated their children with their deeply held views. At dinner, their mother and father explained why Australia and New Zealand needed to accept that their larger community was Asia and how they should support independence for their Asian neighbors and not side with the European colonial nations. Just as often, their father would discuss the meaning of the ecumenical religious movement and its belief in the dignity of all peoples and races. They were progressives by the standards of the times, although her daughters noticed that Caroline suffered for having given up her career to raise the children and support her husband.16

In 1956, Leicester Webb was given a year’s paid sabbatical to study the politics of postwar Europe. He and Caroline budgeted carefully to bring their two daughters with them for a rare educational opportunity.

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