The call of Australia is like a siren song to its expats

Like many before me, I developed a thirst to return home after 14 years of living in London. I didn’t want to die under England’s glowering skies; or be buried in its dark, damp earth.

The thought of dying far from home galvanises the minds of many ageing expats. Picture: Supplied

Do you know where you want to be laid to rest or scattered? That wish for a specific burial or flinging site is telling, revealing so much about the person. A yearn for home, perhaps, for land and light and love of place, a yearn for family or connection; for love, in death. What matriarchal or patriarchal force in the air or the earth pulls you to a certain locality; what love for another veers deathly thoughts? Or perhaps you couldn’t care less (I know a few).

And if you do care, have you actually told someone? Making your specific wishes known feels crucial. Practical. There should be an acceptance of the idea of a Death Plan in our lives, in the way that expectant mothers are encouraged to write a Birth Plan to clarify their thoughts and wishes.

Irish author Edna O’Brien said she was born “ravenous for life”, but in death she wanted the homeland that had shunned her. She passed away in London after living there for decades but requested an interring in sacred soil on Holy Island, in Ireland’s west, because her mother’s people were buried there “in the shadow of ancient churches and graveyards of saints”. O’Brien had renounced Catholicism but wanted to be lowered into the ground among her ancestors, after being exiled because of the explicit, deeply honest nature of her writing. Her own father declared she deserved to be “kicked naked down the street” for writing her first novel, The Country Girls, which was banned and burned in her homeland. Yet as O’Brien neared death there was a hankering for Irish soil. “I don’t own a home,” she had declared. “I don’t own a motor car. I don’t own a bicycle. But I do own a beautiful grave.”

Edna O'Brien, pictured here in 2016, scandalised Ireland after the publication of her book, The Country Girls in 1960. Picture: Awakening/Getty Images

The esteemed Australian writer and columnist Clive James died at Cambridge, England in 2019. Picture: Supplied

The thought of dying far from home galvanises the minds of many ageing expats. Clive James died in England, unable to return home after illness felled him, yet he wanted his ashes scattered at Dawes Point on Sydney Harbour. He was one of those blazing Australians, far from home, whose childhoods he described in the line “we, who learned to breathe the brilliant air”. In his poem Sentenced to Life, James wrote, in longing, “The sky is overcast/Here in the English autumn, but my mind/Basks in the light I never left behind.”

Germaine Greer and Robyn Davidson are back in the light, following writers like Miles Franklin, Elizabeth Harrower and Charmian Clift, who all eventually returned to Australia after years in other places. Shirley Hazzard didn’t come home, nor Madeleine St John, and they feel somehow unanchored because of it; that final allegiance undeclared.

I had a thirst to return home after 14 years of living in London. It was a craving that developed into almost a sickness for the tall Australian light, rain dancing on tin roofs, the raucous hullabaloo of birdsong as day broke and the smell of the earth out bush at dawn and dusk. I didn’t want to die under England’s glowering skies; didn’t want to be buried in its dark, damp earth that felt like it would never completely dry out. It was a tugging for home that grew in intensity the longer I was away; Come home, come home, return became the siren song to all my days.

I’ve let slip to dear mates that I want my ashes scattered at the far end of the beach bookended by green where I now swim every day, my stilling place that calms me and centres me ahead of the push and pull of crammed days. The death plan: a wicker coffin and wild joy at the funeral, a celebration of life vividly lived, abundant colour and dancing in church pews if we can. You? It’s worth articulating your thoughts on whether you want the big shebang or not. We need to disentangle Death Plans from awkwardness and shyness because it’s not macabre to talk about your wants. It’s helpful, practical, clarifying. And reveals so much.