Home: centres and peripheries from Australia

I'm away from home at present, in fact just about as far away as I could get on this planet, apart from a trip even further to New Zealand. (I wish, but the world is full of lovely places, and you can't see them all, even if you were prepared to ignore the environmental consequences of long-haul flights.)

Looking out over the ocean at Coogee Beach, past a few offshore islands, there's nothing between me and South Africa, and behind me the nearest city with more than 100,000 inhabitants is Adelaide, over 2000 kilometers away.

So you could say I'm peripheral to my home at present. 

Australia can seem very like home - they speak English, with an accent we're familiar with in the UK. You find familiar brands on the supermarket sheves, HMQ adorns the banknotes, etc etc.

Links are strong - there are loads of recently-arrived Poms in the Perth area, and for the less recently-arrived, there's still links with home. Grandparents ("grandies") visit, links are maintained with families ("rellos.")

 These family links are not just a Brit thing of course; there are very many different home countries amongst first and second generation Australians. 

 So although this place can seem quite familiar to first-time visitors from the UK, there are all the cultural generalisations "we" and "they" indulge in, with regard to social interactions and norms. We poms are tentative and over-polite; we say sorry when we needn't, we over-complicate simple things, and we whinge when things are more different  from expectations than we think they should be. (I think that might be less likely now than it used to be.) 

And yet poms can also seem brusque and unfriendly with strangers, in shops etc. We don't say "Hi, how're you goin'? Or "how are you today?I'll have a...." We just say "A flat white please." Uptight, hurried. Such things are fairly easily dealt with, though a nicely-brought-up pom, especially a female one, might need to work a bit at being assertive enough.

Here's a big difference - the approach to town planning, and the results of that. Huge areas of single-storey detatched houses each on a fair-sized plot stretching out for miles around cities and towns. Such suburbs, if spacious and quiet, can look lovely, especially in gentle early-morning sunshine. Looks like a good life could be lived here, a very different life from anywhere in the UK.

And then there's the environment. Early arrivals (intruders) from Britain looked for similarities, and didn't find them. Early landscape painters tried to do Australia in the  subdued colours of the Italianate style. In the later 19th century and early 20th century, people started painting Australia rather more in its own terms. It looks quite sudden, in the National Gallery of Australia. Artists like Walter Withers and especially Tom Roberts, who painted outback scenes, let the sun burst through; hot colours rampage under a blinding blue sky. It's dusty and sweaty in the sheep-shearing shed. They didn't want their pictures to look European. 

All the time, of course, Aboriginal artists were painting their dream-time visions, as they have been doing for many, many thousands of years, but that is - another story. 

Australian birds are splendidly different - fast, noisy, many are brightly-coloured, and they are surprisingly difficult to spot properly. Even the crows mock more harshly than back home. As for the red-tailed black cockatoos, as they sit scrawking and screeching up in a eucalyptus, cracking gum-nuts open and chucking the leftovers down around your feet....a punkish sort of dandy.

This is wildflower season, and it's been a late wet spring, so now the wildflowers are splendid. It's not the soft green setting of spring flowers back in the UK though; it still, even in a park or a reserve, looks like Aussie bush, though with spectacular flowers.

 Feeling at home in Australia in one sense is easy for us, with family here, and after eight or nine months living here spread over 18 years, there's a degree of familiarity that overcomes most of the superficial confusions of focus. 

But many of these thoughts arise from comparisons; they may be  enjoyable and interesting to me, but they won't of themselves make me feel at home. The way to feel a quite different at-homeness comes from a few minutes meditation. Let the comparisons and the challenges to the emotions die away. Even amongst family here, it is possible to feel a  brief longing for the familiar.

Being in the moment here is the same as being in the moment back home, or anywhere. The present is the present wherever you are, and it's in that mode of being that I feel in the place, part of everything around me. Then the eucalypts sway in an always familiar breeze, and the ocean - salty and bouyant, fierce like every ocean - sparkles now and everywhere.