November 26, 2003
homecoming
Everyone who travels knows that coming home after living overseas gives you an intense sort of perspective on your own country. Reverse culture shock, clear-eyed alienation, a curious sort of detachment. The joy of rediscovering your home, family and friends, of unpacking boxes and walking down the streets that have appeared in your dreams for so many months - these are overtaken by that slowing down of time and experience, the inevitable depression and drop in blood sugar. Each time I come home, my perspective on my home seems to get a bit clearer, or perhaps I'm just getting better at expressing it.
Surely everyone has a bit of a love-hate relationship with their home town, and the country where they were born. Australia is an interesting place to call home - not necessarily any better or worse than any other place, but nonetheless I'm pretty happy that I was born here. We have a big and beautiful island, and are busy with the exciting task of defining our still-soft identity, a young nation with an open future.
The main problem I have with Australia concerns our strange defensive form of national pride. This tendency to repeat over and over and over the mantra that we have a great country, a lucky country, full of culture and nature and adventure and diversity and perfect weather and open-mindedness. Nobody I have met anywhere overseas disputes this (except perhaps the culture part :), and yet we still continue to act as if we live in the shadow of the mother land and Europe and the US. Surely a good country has confidence enough not to keep going on about its excellence.
Peter Carey, one of our best writers (himself an expat), attributes Australia's 'incredible narcissism' to our 'fragile sense of self'. He says we have 'a community seeking a mirror that is sometimes approving, sometimes used to scourge itself with for being second-rate but sometimes to preen in front of'. A recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald questioned why there are a million Australians living overseas, and came to the conclusion that expats are either moving away because they earn higher salaries overseas, or because they're just a bit 'up themselves'. This is beyond my comprehension - I don't believe anyone really needs a reason to travel - it seems to me that it is an obvious choice, to explore the incredible planet we all find ourselves on. And as for me, I've never had any damn money when travelling, yet I've visited and lived in some amazing places.
Rantings aside, Australians are generally good travellers, I think. We seem to have a good way of looking at things - a flexible attitude, spontaneity, an open approach to difficult situations, a built-in bullshit-detector. Someone recently referred to the Australian approach to life as 'laconic apathy', which is all good and well unless it flips over into bored complacency.
I sometimes think the hardest part about coming home is showing people how you've changed in the time you've been away. It's a lot harder than showing people a bunch of photos and regaling them with stories of crazy jeep trips through the Gobi desert involving six foot snow drifts and lots of vodka. And if you can't express to people how much you've been changed by your time away, the feeling of being back-at-square-one and all-left-behind is overwhelming. Since the things that have changed in you aren't necessarily tangible or able to be expressed easily, I suppose people will only see the difference in your actions. That's the hard part.
Steven Heighton wrote that "home is wherever you’re used to the eyes around you so that habit disarms their menacing heat. Home is somewhere below you on the dark plains – a dry nest, blazing. The breast of a lover is home. A scar, a photograph. Home is if your mother still lives, and where."
What's home to you?
PS - my thanks and admiration to Mig and all at Lost in Transit for your tales.
What a fabulous entry, Christiane
I firmly believe that travel is the best form of education there is. And what better way to learn about your own culture than to experience others.
I came to the UK (from Australia) in 1998 with nothing more than a backpack and an open-ended air ticket. Five-and-a-bit years later and I’m still here. Over the years I’ve visited some amazing countries, progressed up the journalistic career ladder, made some wonderful friends, worked with fantastic people, met and moved in with "Mr Right" and have just purchased my first London property. I often dream of returning "home" for a much-less hassled lifestyle where the weather’s better and my family and friends are based, but then I think about my happy life here and can’t quite bring myself to leave.
When I went back to Oz in March for a three-week holiday it was the first time I’d set foot on Australian soil in two years. I felt incredibly dislocated and alienated, I couldn’t believe how strine everyone sounded (apparently I sounded "like a pom"), I didn’t recognise any of the talk-show hosts on TV and didn’t know half the songs being played on the radio. There were new buildings, new roads, new bridges, new stadiums, new shops, new everything *everywhere*. It was a culture shock with a capital S. How on earth would I cope if I decided to repatriate?
I know that one day I will return. But I also know that it will be the most difficult decision of my life. I’ve made compromises and sacrificed a lot to be here, but in doing so I hope I’ve become a more worldly-wise, open-minded and richer (and I don’t mean money) person for it. I’ve experienced so much more here than I could have ever envisaged when I left Melbourne on that winter’s day in August 1998.
I have been trying to say, a lot of that post in one of my own. And I think that you did it better.
Thanks.
Posted by: Emma at November 27, 2003 02:16 AMWhen I was a child, home was where my mother was.
When I was a teenager, home was always "one town back". I was never happy where I was, until I left it, and then realized that I'd loved it.
When I was a young adult, home was where I'd first gone to college. And even now, I fantasize about settling down there, owning a house, watching the college kids come and go, talking of Michelangelo.
Right now, home is where my friends are. When I get homesick here, it's not for familiar houses and familiar streets, it's for familiar faces. My ultimate late-night-depression fantasy is packing up two or three of my close friends, and all of us finding a place to live here, and experiencing this life together.
Whenever I come back to Jiangyan after a bus trip to someplace else in China, I always smile and think, "I'm home." I don't know why. Yet.
Posted by: Anna at November 27, 2003 04:16 AMThanks for your comments guys.
I just found this paragraph in Chatwin's Songlines -
"The country to the east of Derudeb was bleached and sere, and there were long grey cliffs and dom palms growing in the wadis. The plains were spotted with flat-topped acacias, leafless at this season, with long white thorns like icicles and a dusting of yellow flowers. At night, lying awake under the stars, the cities of the West seemed sad and alien - and the pretensions of the 'art world' idiotic. Yet here I had a sense of homecoming."
The idea of home seems to me very complex. Home is where the hearth and heart are, but you can make a hearth anywhere and hearts are scattered big things.
I forgot to put in my post that one of the things that I think makes a place home, or at least indicates the presence of 'roots', are the little everyday signifiers - I see a train go past with yellow windows and know that it's the express from Epping. I know there's a pool in Hyde Park where bats drink at night. Those little pieces of knowledge you carry around with you all add up to constitute a feeling of being home. But it's more than that. As Bruce says, you can feel at home in a place you know nothing about, where everything is new and beautiful, a place which echoes inside and arouses some inexplicable sense of belonging.
christiane says:
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As Bruce says, you can feel at home in a place you know nothing about, where everything is new and beautiful, a place which echoes inside and arouses some inexplicable sense of belonging.
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I was 15 years old before I finally made it to London. I remember being on the coach from the airport, looking out the window as we drove through London, and thinking, "I'm home". I just felt like I belonged there, even if I had been born and raised thousands of miles away.
Posted by: wildsoda at November 29, 2003 12:52 PM