If you’ve been brought up on Enid Blyton and, a little later, Shakespeare, as I was, with Sartre and Tolstoy thrown into the mix in late adolescence, then the Australian landscape will be as alien to you as the moon. Now and again, I caught glimpses of gum-trees and dry paddocks from train windows, but I belonged somewhere else.
I wasn’t against gum-trees or “the wide brown land” as such, but longed for something else entirely. Forests, for example, not bush, fields, not paddocks. What I yearned for were precisely the things Dorothea MacKellar dreamily disdains in her poem My Country: England’s “ordered woods and gardens”, her “coppices”, her “green and shaded lanes”, or anybody else’s.
I dreamed of villages nestled amid green fields. Ancient castles, glades, snow, the Matterhorn, but above all villages. There were no proper villages in Australia, not in the English sense – or even the Lego sense (Lego made me what I am). All we had were clumps of weathered dwellings here and there, sometimes with a pub on the corner and rusted chassis everywhere. To this day in Australia, “village” means “community for the aged”, as in the expression: “I’ve just moved my mother into a village and she loves it.” I wanted Grasmere, where Wordsworth lived. Or Bourton-on-the-Water. I wanted countryside with roots.
As soon as I could, I got out of Australia and went to Europe. I really liked it. I went over and over again. In the end, back home for a visit, I got stuck here.
Then one day, 15 years ago, when I was almost ready for a “village” myself, on the pretty but not breathtakingly beautiful east coast of Tasmania – hardly Norway, hardly Greece, not even Hungary – everything changed.
After picnicking with my partner, Peter, and the dog on the beach at Orford, with views across the water to pretty Maria Island (no cafe, just a wharf and wombats), we drove up into the hills behind the town, coming across a bushy block for sale at a ludicrously low price. If you live in Hobart, you need to get away – Bangkok, Byron Bay, anywhere, really, even Orford. We bought it on the spot. We make all important decisions on the spot. It’s the trivial decisions that drag on for years.
That summery afternoon, at 2.15pm, unexpectedly, among the blue gums, blue-tongue lizards and dianellas, everything changed for ever. In the blink of an eye, I became somebody else.
It was quite big, this block we’d bought – bigger than Vatican City, a quarter the size of Monaco – and from the ridge where we soon built our shack you could see south across hills, mountains, forests and cliffs halfway to the bottom of the island, with not a single house or road or sign of life to mar the view. Just trees. Countless trees of every hue. And ravens calling, eagles plummeting, parrots flashing, even black cockatoos squawking sociably. And at night we had an indigo dome for a sky, ablaze with billions of brilliant stars, and one owl hooting unseen behind the house.
No ordered woods at all, you see. No castles or glades. No people. Yet what I looked out on from our veranda was alive in a way Europe now never is and never will be again. Here on our block there was simply an infinitude of living plants and animals being themselves. Some I did not love – the leeches down by the creek and the odd tiger snake, but for the first time in my life I felt oddly at home among them – wary, always on the lookout, but just another living thing among a multitude. I do not love the devil or the quoll, either, to be honest, and don’t much enjoy the sight of eagles diving to kill prey, but I accept this world now in its profusion in a new way, a respectful way that is not sentimental. I am an infinitesimal, heedful, part of it. That afternoon I began to belong to it for the first time in my life.
Time was different, too – there was no railway-station time, as there is in the city or even the smallest village in Europe. In a way, Europe is time, it’s story. Walking with the dog on one of the tracks we built through the trees (admiring the tree-trunks, the endless variety of shapes and hues), I felt time passing differently, history just an echo. You’d have to do it yourself to understand. From the moment we arrived, time reshaped itself. The Australian bush is beyond time, I think, although it dances joyfully to the seasons in reds and yellow and whites.
In advanced old age, in Orford, I was (if you’ll permit this word) reborn.
