The house that roared

THE space is anointed by a golden light in this, the witching hour, but it's the curtain around it that's wondrous.

It's a curtain of sound. On this balcony with its little colt of a writing desk and its old, split cane day bed covered by a worn Irish quilt methodically hand-stitched. Across the road is the great roar of the wind in the trees, which could be the sea pummelling nearby cliffs, you cannot tell, and later, quieter, will be the talking dark of crickets and frogs and then in the morning, obscenely early, will be the great raucous cram of birdsong, the shrills and trills and shrieks. "Get up lazybones," it all seems to be saying, "there's so much life to be seizing."

I gravitate to this space to meander with thought and work and to sleep. As do the kids. As soon as I saw it, heard it, I knew I finally had the room of my own. But like everything else in this jostling, cacophonous, brimful life, the rest of them had other ideas. The tin lids gravitate to my little sliver of a sanctuary; take turns to sleep on the old daybed every night, I think for its canopy of stars and its curtain of lovely sound.

Geophony, it's called. The great spill of sound in the natural world. How dreamy to invent a word that enters the lexicon, and soundscape recordist Bernie Krause has done just that. He can hear environments in detail; his new book is The Great Animal Orchestra and as I lie on this balcony I think yes, it is an orchestra, and how strange and terrifying it must have been for those first British settlers, like an alien god had created this world to astound, to terrify; it sounds like it hurts to be in this place. They came from a place of soft days, soft rain, soft light, where the morning quietly clears its throat.

Australia's not like that - it's a full roar into the day, at least where I live. I dreamed of that roar all my years in England; sounds imprinted like acid on the childhood psyche. The insistent shrill of cicadas in a wall of summer heat, the whipbirds' duet, kookaburra's glee; currawongs and magpies and cockatoos. The wind scouring the granite boulders of the high country, rain pummelling tin roofs, bush taut with sound. And the scarier stuff. A sudden rustle in an edgy dark, a growl from a tree, a koala or something else, stumbling badly into a wombat hole with heart thudding, that primal Aussie myth always close: there's something out there. The apprehension was never felt in the benign English forests.

Yet, achingly, I needed something wilder, tougher, untamed over there - there were houses and buildings too soon all the time in the countryside - wanted again a world of grand scale and melodramatic skies and spareness. In the Northern Territory I'd seen Aboriginal people who'd felt sick when they left their land and I knew something of that, too, a corrosive yearning for my land, for the geophony in my blood. I realised it's not just the blackfella who holds a monopoly on a profound and spiritual connection to this land; the craving can addle any of us. The landscape is a vast seduction. Within it I feel more like myself, the person I once was, perhaps a freer, lighter, childhood self; I'm stilled, strengthened, recalibrated.

So to this little balcony with its wondrous curtain of sound; the calm when I'm on it like a candle lit. Observing the moving heft of the seasons I'm reminded of Philip Larkin's luminous The Trees: "Begin afresh, afresh, afresh." As I have. This journey is my most beautiful and strange because it's about coming home. Seeing it, listening to it, with fresh eyes and ears. It's about paying attention to detail with an outsider's eye yet a heart born in this place. I've always been a neophiliac, hungrily seeking the new, yet now, bizarrely - all change. I'm content. Finally. With this, just this.

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