‘He was alone, three million light-years from home.’ So concludes the first chapter of the novel of the film E.T. Packed between ‘alone’ and ‘home’, those three million light-years express the vast and tender emotions carried by the concept of home, the place of origin, the place of belonging, of comfort, of relationship: the haven. Home is the place each human being (and each extra-terrestrial) seeks with the heart. In 1982 Steven Spielberg gave the world the imperative ‘E.T. phone home’. This unlikely little clump of words went straight to the core of the matter. Connection with home is the genesis of hope.
In this collection of essays ten writers have taken ten personal approaches to the meaning of ‘home’. All the essayists are established Australian writers, writers who have had a great deal of time and experience on which to reflect. They sometimes locate their home in the country of origin, in the town, in the house, but almost all move into some examination of relationships with others, and also into the nature of the self. ‘Home’, it seems, is bound up with identity. Exploration of identity frequently takes the writers into recollections of their early selves, and ‘home’ sometimes lies very close to the places and relationships of childhood. Contemplation of home leads back to the mother and forward to the grave, such a trajectory bringing writers inevitably again to an examination of the self.
Australia is a continent to which Europeans came in the eighteenth century partly for the purpose of establishing European culture, in an attempt to convert a land they experienced as foreign and hostile into a land they could ultimately consider to be home. The terrible violence and tragedy of this exercise whereby powerful invaders overtook the homeland of the indigenous peoples will forever mark this country. And the invaders carried with them their own tragic underclass, people who were forced into exile from their homelands. The idea of home is horribly scored and burned into the story of this country.
In 1997 a government report on the lives of thousands of Indigenous Australians who had been taken from their families was published. It was called Bringing Them Home. This is a most striking example of the powerful use of the word ‘home’, a word which is used so frequently in speech and writing without necessarily very much reflection. All the emotion of the stories contained in the report is packed into the word. Home. The report contained personal accounts by Indigenous people of their childhood experience of being removed from their families and homes and relocated. I edited and published a collection of these stories in 1998: The Stolen Children—Their Stories.
That is all a long time ago now, and it may seem odd to say so, but as a result of seeing the word ‘home’ in the title of the report, I have been contemplating the word ever since, wondering what it means to people, how writers might explore it and describe it. This present collection is the result of my contemplation. The writers here are all people of principally European heritage, all originating from migrations at various times up to the middle of last century. A collection of ten essays implies a small selection, and I have confined this selection particularly to writers who work with images. I believe it is images that can give writers the power to carry their understanding of the word ‘home’ into the hearts and minds of readers. The word itself is an abstraction, and requires the solidity of imagery in order to come to life.
In February 2009 bushfires in rural Victoria killed 173 people. Pictures of burned-out houses are the graphic symbols of those lost lives. These houses were homes; they were repositories of possessions, hopes and dreams. They were the fragile havens, the places of supposed safety and nurture, the locations where the people placed their identities. The word ‘homeless’ has a terrible, terrible ring. When you are homeless, where is your identity?
Since long before 1788 Australia has been a place of migrations, from the arrivals of pre-history, to the people who came here in search of a new home in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to those who still today make their way here in the hope of a better life, a hope that is sometimes frustrated and dashed. Home; they are all looking for their home. The place they once called their own has in many cases become a place of danger and fear rendering it no longer truly ‘home’.
The essays in this collection address in various ways the question of what ‘home’ might mean. It is my hope and expectation that readers will take the essays as inspiration for further contemplation on the meaning of the term.
I am sometimes visited by the memory of a dusty pink rose that bloomed in my garden some years ago. In the hollow centre of the rose lived a bright green praying mantis that seemed very much at home. In the end, the rose lost its petals and died. I always wonder where the insect went. And a most moving and potent use of the word ‘home’ can be seen on the World War One memorial in the Sydney Botanical Gardens. The reference is to the horses that were, at the conclusion of the war, shot by the soldiers who loved them. Rather than see these faithful animals fall into the unloving hands of local traders, the men destroyed them. On the memorial is the statement: ‘They did not come home.’