Half a World Away

Sixty years ago, after a five-week journey which for a ten year old was nothing short of one continuous adventure, my family disembarked the P&O liner SS Strathaird and set foot in Australia to start a new life. Leaving our home had not been a great wrench for me, and trekking half way around the globe was simply another part of the adventure, for I was an adaptable, laid back kid, and looking forward to where this huge move would take us.

Having devoured many Famous Five and Secret Seven stories that confirmed my life as a tomboy was well and truly on the right track, my brother and I spent those five weeks exploring every nook and cranny of the ship that we could find, a favourite of mine going down to the deck at water level where you could get up close to the ocean looking through the porthole.

My brother had turned 14 just before we’d left England, and my sister turned 17 somewhere between Fremantle and Adelaide. Arriving in Melbourne we ended up at the Holmesglen migrant hostel in the south-eastern suburbs, where we spent the next eighteen months. Living in a Nissen hut, divided lengthways with one family on either side occupying three rooms, was an education in itself. No toilet, no bathroom, no cooking facilities. 

Coming from what had seemed to me a comfortable life in our neat semi-detached suburban house, we were now living in what was essentially a giant army camp where everyone ate together in a much larger version of our housing accommodation, a massive mess-hall style dining hall. Toilet, bathroom and washing facilities were also communal in ablution blocks, stark and rather unpleasant, and not your preferred destination when you needed to go to the loo after dark.

In hindsight, I wonder how my parents coped with it all. Both were almost fifty years old when we left, and I have to admit the thought of doing the same thing at the same age increases my level of respect for them. Mind you, the unlimited opportunities broadcast far and wide back in the 1950s and 60s of this sun soaked land flowing with milk and honey proved to be a magnet for all and sundry wanting to create a life for their families far better than they were accustomed. We joined the mass migration as ten-pound Poms along with thousands of others and wondered what lay ahead.

For most immigrants, moving to the new country is an act of faith. Even if you've heard stories of safety, opportunity, and prosperity, it's still a leap to remove yourself from your own language, people, and country. Your own history. What if the stories weren't true? What if you couldn't adapt? What if you weren't wanted in the new country?
                                                                              Nicola Yoon – The Sun is also a Star

Migrating not only forces you to explore and come to grips with a new, foreign environment to see how it works and what it has to offer, but it also forces you to discover who you are within it. At one level, when we move, we take all our attendant baggage with us, and I’m not referring to our material goods, but there is scope in removing ourselves from one place and taking root in another, that the clichéd ‘new beginning’ really does have possibility. You are in a state of expectancy. Like any adventure there is both fear and excitement, doubt and resolve, as you prepare to launch yourself into the unknown. How you deal internally with the external changes can either make you or break you.

Finding jobs quickly was the easy part. Adjusting to this new environment though, that was something else. Any new arrival in this country will tell you the same thing. The light is different, the colours are different, the smells, seasons, birds and animals, even the stars, and Christmas in summer, well that just felt really weird. I love eucalypt trees, that muted bluey grey-green which makes them so distinctive, but when we first arrived they all looked dirty to me. Where was the green I was used to? And why did it take so long to get anywhere? We were accustomed to riding pushbikes and catching buses and trains wherever we went, no one we knew owned a car, but once in this country with its ‘tyranny of distance,’ it was obvious purchasing a car was a necessity, not a luxury.

My parents flew back to England on a couple of occasions for holidays, but after my Dad retired he grew restless and at a bit of a loss. They decided to head back to England and spend up to two years there as residents, not in holiday mode, in order to make the final decision in which country they would spend their retirement and final years. Unfortunately, it was back in the turbulent Margaret Thatcher era when the economy was not in a good state. Dad’s dream of a peaceful retirement in his homeland went out the window as they discovered accommodation bearing any resemblance to what they had in Australia was far beyond their means. Here they were, approaching seventy, and having to rely on the goodwill of friends for a roof over their heads. Suffice to say, they were back here within months, feeling fortunate to be able to ‘come home’ to what was familiar.

Do we have to ‘migrate,’ wander, to discover more of who we are by removing ourselves from what is familiar.
                Bruce Chatwin – The Songlines

I wonder at times why I watch so many episodes of Escape to the Country. I only spent the first ten years of my life in England, and being working class there was precious little opportunity to travel, so apart from summer holidays on the Isle of Wight we didn’t see much more than what was on our doorstep. But the country of my birth is embedded in my DNA somehow, for the green rolling hills and country lanes, rural villages and ancient architecture, wild landscape and misty mountains, affect something right at the core of who I am.

I am now also on the verge of retirement of sorts, and have my own level of restlessness, but realise I am not in a position to go zotting back to England to rediscover my roots, and in this Covid affected world neither would I want to. Maybe that’s why I live in Tassie which at least bears some resemblance to a more temperate climate, for a chaser of the sun I am not. 

The attraction of what we don’t have, the promise of what could be, has a habit of lurking at the back of our minds, or in some corner of the heart, niggling away, causing us to feel unsettled or displaced. The grass might seem greener elsewhere, but when it comes down to it, it’s simply just another patch of green with as many advantages and disadvantages as where we currently are. I guess as you get older you feel time is running out to do those things you promised yourself all those years ago when you were up to your ears in work, but funnily enough as I’m nearing that point my ageing body responds with ‘Nah, not doin’ that.’ Somehow your priorities change.

I’ve spent sixty years in my adopted country. It would be another twenty three years after arriving before I took on citizenship, a conscious decision of setting aside my allegiance to England and affirming that this was now my home and where I intended to stay. I have never regretted the move, but sometimes wonder where I would be and what I would be doing, how the life I didn’t have on the other side of the world might have panned out.

But then I look at where I am now, in a comfortable house in a very small village on a little island at the bottom of the world. I have good friends right on my doorstep, and am surrounded by farmland on one side, mountains on the other, and natural bushland in which I can wander to my heart’s content. In essence I’m living my very own escape to the country, so how could I possibly be anything but thankful. 

No Regrets

I’ve started transferring all the quotes I’ve written in my journals over the years on to the computer, realising in the process I need to catalogue them somehow in order to find just the right one for whatever subject matter I have in mind. I came across this one which I’d written about eleven years ago on my previous blog; it jumped out at me then, and it did so again.

 There’s no if. There is only what is. What was. What will be.

﷒     Nafisa Haji – The Writing on my Forehead

 

That little word ‘if’ carries a heavy load. It can come at the start of an idea, the birth of a train of thought, a motivator to look outside the box and come at something from a different angle. Or it can come in the aftermath of a tragedy or upon reflecting on one’s own life journey, where it either bears the blame for one’s circumstances or is tainted with regret for what might have been.

 

We’ve all seen and heard stories from whatever is the latest disaster, be it natural or man-made or at the hand of terrorists, where those caught up in the horror who come out the other side either severely injured or mentally traumatised or both, have gone over the unfolding events of the day and pondered “if only I’d caught the earlier train, or later train…” or “if only I’d gone straight to work instead of stopping for a coffee…” or “if only I’d stopped for a coffee instead of going straight to work…”

 

Somehow, by rewinding the clock and re-imagining the day, they could picture themselves in another place, with a different outcome. None of us have that luxury, but most of us don’t have to deal with such catastrophic consequences resulting from the difference between heading out the door at 7.30 or 7.45.

 

There are politicians and people in powerful places who have come under the spotlight in recent years for either their appalling behaviour or lack of insight into how their actions or inaction appear in the eyes of us ordinary folk. Prime Minister Scott Morrison attracted the ire of the nation when he was found holidaying in Hawaii while catastrophic bushfires raged on Australia’s east coast just days before Christmas 2019, and not seeming to be in any rush to get back home. And then there’s the current furor over the toxic workplace culture at Parliament House that has found his leadership yet again far from exemplary. As misdeeds and misdemeanors are being exposed all around him, the queue is growing longer every day of people ducking for cover, sending in the spin doctors, trying valiantly to cover their tracks, and I would hope berating themselves with “if only I hadn’t done that..” or “if only I’d done this…” then I wouldn’t be in this sticky mess.

 

But you didn’t, so you are.

 

I could probably produce a very long list of ‘what if’ and ‘if only’ decisions which could have changed my entire life, if only I’d made them. But I didn’t, so here I am, just little old me. I’ve lived an unremarkable life, and have wondered at times whether my life might have been very different had I been braver.  

Nafisa Haji goes on to say…

…No story worth telling should ever be about blame or regret.

 

I look back and consider whether many of my choices were the safe option. We all have those moments when we wonder how things would have turned out had we done things differently, said things differently, gone down this career path instead of that one, married instead of staying single or stayed single instead of getting married, moved interstate or overseas instead of staying put, taken a risk instead of playing it safe.

 

That’s the beauty of hindsight. We can replay any situation, take out the parts we’d rather forget and put it back together how we think it should have happened, but it’s a pointless exercise. Finding others to blame for our misfortune or dwelling on regrets is about as useless as repeatedly hitting the replay button and expecting the outcome to be different each time. However important or insignificant have been our choices along the way, they have still been our choices. Or maybe we held back and didn’t choose what we wanted. Even then, the not choosing was a choice, and when it boils down to it, we will eventually regret more the things we did not do rather than the things we did.

 

‘What if’ can be filled with sadness for what might have been, but I love the idea of ‘what if’ being the initiation of something completely new. Thomas Edison himself said “I have not failed. I have found 10,000 ways that won't work.” Every time his experiments failed to produce the desired result, he had to stop, think again and approach the next step with ‘what if I tried this…’ and because of his perseverance more than a thousand inventions were attributed to him in his lifetime. Without responding to the possibility of a different outcome, no inventions, no progress would ever be made. No one would ever entertain the idea that things could be done any differently than they have always been. Scientists and engineers and architects and so many more innovators are the embodiment of ‘what if,’ stepping into the realm of the unknown to explore the possibility of what might be. 

 

Our circumstances are not always of our own making, and the past is not in our power to change, but our lives are littered with moments which can propel us one way or the other, and it’s not always the big decisions which hold the most promise or bring us unstuck. Even those annoying little everyday decisions and reactions and responses can leave their mark and determine the type of person we become and the life we lead. We can talk about making right or wrong choices, good or bad decisions, but in the end we have to own those choices and the consequences they bring. No ifs or buts or maybes can change the reality of the path thus far. 

 

Every experience in life brings us to the present moment, for we are the sum of the parts, whether good or bad, that have made us who we are. Our whole lives are not predetermined though, and no one wants to drop off into the hereafter filled with regret, so I much prefer the idea of looking forward with a what might be attitude rather than looking back with a what might have been one. Even at this stage in my life, I wonder where that approach could take me if I truly believe it’s possible.