The Idea of Home Read Free Page B

country, on this lovely planet, our only home.

TWO
A HOME ON BLAND STREET
    W here do you live?
    Such a pedestrian enquiry, one that any moderately verbal toddler is schooled to answer briskly with a street address, a house number, the name of a city or a town. Some of us will live in only a few places in our lives; others, like me, are the kinds of people who mess up your address book, constantly sending out change of address notices. When I make a tally of the places which I could, at various times, have given in reply to the question where do you live, I arrive at nineteen. This, rather alarmingly, averagesout to one move about every three years. There was a Cairo address that I learned to write in Arabic. A street number that was hard to find amid the graffiti tags in lower Manhattan. A house without a number in rural Virginia, a graceful old apartment in Cleveland, a horsehair-mortared terrace in Hampstead … numerous dwellings on four continents. But very few have truly felt like home.
    The idea of ‘home’ is bigger than the floor plan of any given four walls or the mass of any roof line. It cannot be encompassed by rote recitations of suburb or postcode, nation or state. In the previous chapter, I mentioned the various definitions that dictionaries give for that small, heavily laden word, home. Here I would like to explore some of them: home as ‘a place of origin, a native habitat’, home as ‘an environment offering security and happiness’ and home as ‘the place where something is discovered, founded, developed or promoted. A source.’
    My place of origin was the vast sprawl of red tile and liver brick that comprised the Australian suburbs of the 1960s. The sprawl despised by Patrick White,satirised by Barry Humphries. The first address I was schooled to give, as a toddler, was for a Victorian terrace house in Bland Street, Ashfield, an address Patrick White probably wishes he’d thought of. Bland was how they characterised us, White and the other intellectuals who looked backward from their self-exile in London or Oxford and found ordinary Australians slightly embarrassing: dull, uncreative, petty and repressed. These men — and in that era, the pundits were mostly men, although Jill Ker Conway and Leonie Kramer also had a go at us — understood some things about Australian suburban life, but vastly misconstrued others. They accurately described the unglamorous surfaces — the chipped enamel, worn linoleum and bindi-infested buffalo grass; the weathered grey fences and weathered faces of adults who moved tight-lipped through dull chores or commuted dutifully to mundane jobs.
    They saw a mean and unaccommodated material existence, but did not grasp the emotional and imaginative richness of the lives played out against those frugal backdrops. They deplored the conformity,but they did not see that its corollary was a sustaining solidarity. They did not grasp that the bedrock value of that time and place was an enduring and defining Australian sense of shared community. Living in the United States, as I have done, off and on, for almost two decades, I have experienced a society in which the defining ethos is precisely the opposite: the individual’s rights are always and everywhere ascendant, success is assumed to be self-earned and bootstraps are an indispensable item of attire. This constant background noise has worked, for me, like a chisel on stone. Over time, it has thrown the very different lessons of my Australian home into bright relief.
    â€˜The cultural dead heart’ is how Dame Leonie Kramer described the suburbs of my childhood. I’m pretty sure she had, in her mind’s eye, some place very like my grandmother’s home: a little bungalow in Hammondville, south-west Sydney, where freshly poured concrete kerbs butted right up against bushland at what was then an outer rim of the city’s advance. When our clan gathered there, what I