Home is where the heart is. For me, it’s the Australian landscape
This geography, this topography, shapes all of us who lived their childhood in this land. The response to nature is collected in our bones and it calls to us all our lives.
This geography, this topography, shapes all of us who lived their childhood in this land. The response to nature is collected in our bones. It is in how I walk, stomping through tall grass in thick heat. How I squint my face into the hurting blue. It is there, still, in the urge to climb trees and strip a paperbark of its tongue of powdery softness. It is in the cupping of a cicada shell’s brittleness in the nest of my hands. It is there as I hold my head high to the smell of distant bushfire, all senses alert. In my ducking at a magpie’s swoop. In my ouch across squeaky sand in high summer and the bodily exhalation as I stand on a deserted country beach, shirtfronting the might of the surf.
This land holds us fast. Childhood, the great Aussie childhood, is imprinted on so many of us and won’t let us go. “The roots go deep,” explains Robyn Davidson, the camel lady who wrote Tracks and lived a gypsy life of wandering, all over the world, but is now home. The roots of an Australian childhood in the bush, in Queensland, are seamed deeply through her.
And now Robyn is back after all her years away. Germaine is back, Anne Summers, too. Clive wanted to be. Cate spoke of her homesickness earlier this year, saying she’s been “profoundly homesick over the last four years … I’m very obsessed, as [are] most Australians, obsessed by water. I want to be by the water, in the water.”
What is it about expats wanting, needing to come home, in their later years? Home, home, home is the thrumbeat of yearn throughout their days in other places; it was mine, increasingly, in the London years. It is the severe clear light, the smell of the bush after rain, the desert at dawn, the salt on the air near the sea, the lull of the ever-folding surf. Memory crouches, waiting for us. And growing older, to some extent, is about finding the child again. Shedding skins. Finding that uncomplicated simplicity we had in childhood; the wonder, again.
Robyn Davidson was my landlady once, when I lived in her house in Alice Springs in the 1990s; her base back then was London. And as we yak now about her luminous, bravely honest memoir, Unfinished Woman, she tells me why she’s finally come home: “What’s always drawn me back here is that sense of place. Of landscape, for want of a better word. That feeling of being at home in the bush in a way that’s really very deep.”
Does that come back to childhood – that our lives somehow come full-circle? “I do think those early experiences of light and smell and sound, it’s almost a physical thing, they’re really strong,” Robyn says. “When I’m in the bush, I just feel … there’s something about the Australian bush, even though it’s so varied, that a deep part of me recognises.”
Recognises, yes. You step back into the smell of childhood, being home; it wraps you in familiarity. It’s related to a deep, deep peace, the returning, divorced from ambition and thrust. Could I bear to be apart from Australia for too long again? Not now, as I age. Coming home means picking at the scab of old hurts, misunderstandings, ghostings, yes – but I returned to these shores stronger, to face them or ignore and move on. You can always come home. It is the place where your heart is at peace. As Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz said, “Home is not where you were born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease.”
For Robyn, it’s about gratitude. “There are some things that are absolutely wonderful. I’m deeply and profoundly grateful to live in a country that’s more or less functional … I’m very glad to be out here. It’s a very easy, comparatively easy existence here … Generally speaking, bloody hell, we have it pretty easy.” Comparatively speaking, oh yes, we do.
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