Friday 29^th June

I have been reading about the concept of home; how deeply attached we are, mostly, to a certain place.  For me that is Tasmania, most specifically Hobart, although I have a sort of atavistic longing for the cold, bleak, beautiful Central Highlands.

This morning Kirsty Rice (Shamozal) wrote on her blog about her mother going to a party in Renmark as a teenager.  As the bus came over the hill crest, she looked out at the vast, empty expanse and thought, with, one would imagine, some horror, “Where am I going?  There was just nothing.  NOTHING!”  This nothing place, little did she know it, was to be her home, because she met her future husband at the party.  Her offspring don’t see it as a nothing place; they love everything about the wide open spaces, vast expanses of nothing. 

I can remember a similar reaction from my adopted grandmother, Laure Wefers-Bettink.  She arrived for a holiday from Holland, where she had always lived in big crowded cities.  We picked her up from the ferry in Devonport and drove her across the Lakes Highway.  We stopped at the top to admire the view of the majestic Great Lake and I can still remember her stunned reaction – I would have been about eight years old… We were all burbling away about the beautiful view, while she stood there, not impressed at all.  “What is the matter with that lake?  Why are there no boats??”  What she saw was…just NOTHING.

Many years later – 1988, in fact – I took a Dutch cousin, Janneke, to the Tasman Peninsula on New Years Day.  It was a glorious day – birds tweeting, sun shining.  We all leapt out of the car and frolicked on the long white sandy beach at the Neck, and plunged into the sparkling sea.  Janneke scanned the horizon, looked up and down the beach, and said, with deep suspicion.  “What is the matter with this beach?  Where are all the people?”  Way out of her comfort zone!