W
hen I think of home, I think of a place of
belonging. Home, to me, is where it is enough
to simply be as I am. Home is where I might
seek sanctuary from the demands of the outside
world and its questions, the bright chaos of its
expectancy or judgment. It is a place of restoration and peace,
and it is something that can be created – and treasured – in
strange and transient places, as much as it can be fostered
through permanent residence.
My understanding of home has changed over the years. As a
child, home was only ever Broad Oak, the house my parents
built amid three hectares of sloping valley in the Adelaide Hills.
Home was the dam we’d sometimes swim in during the summer,
the colour of tea, smelling of mud. Home
was blackberry picking, sticky hands
prickled with thorns, and the oak tree that
my sister would climb and get stuck in.
Home was the wood fire I’d stand too close
to, and the early morning vista of frost and
fog, and a fox slipping through the white.
Pine cones and holly trees, eucalypts and
yabbies and clay soil. A house with a roof that drummed with
rain, creaked with heat in summer, and the loving family it
sheltered – this was my home, and my only home, for many years.
But when I was on the cusp of adulthood, I learned that home
could be, and indeed, is, something much more than the beloved
abode of childhood.
When I was 17 years old, I left Broad Oak and arrived in a
small town in northern Iceland as an exchange student. Isuffered, immediately and without warning, from a
homesickness of such magnitude that I found it difficult to
do anything but cry and sleep. Life in Sauðárkrókur was unlike
anything I had ever experienced: the winter days were
filled with long hours of darkness, the language was an
incomprehensible babble, I felt disconnected from everyone
around me and my feelings of alienation were acute. Desperate
for familiarity, I spent my days reading and re-reading books
only so that I might spend time with the same characters, the
same friends. Home, I thought, was the return address waiting
for me at the end of my 12 months abroad.
And then a strange thing happened. I began to learn Icelandic,
and that made friendships possible. I joined the local
theatre group. I found myself working at
the local cafe, babysitting kids, taking
music lessons. About six months into my
exchange, the town organised their
National Day celebration parade and, in a
gesture of inclusion, I was given a monkey
costume. I strode down the main street
as Herra Níels, Lína Langsokkur’s (Pippi
Longstocking’s) ape, and as I was greeted by the townspeople
I realised that I was now a part of their community. And with
that sense of belonging came the twin discovery that I was, on
the other side of the world, at home.
Since my year in Iceland, my adult life has been filled with
constant movement between sharehouses, rental properties
and unlikely accommodation in foreign places: I’ve never had
a permanent address. There was the old mansion on RoyalFrom an Adelaide Hills cottage to Melbourne share houses and darkest Iceland,
this bestselling Australian author ponders the meaning of home.ON HOME
by Hannah Kent
‘Home was the wood fire I’d
stand too close to, and the
early morning vista of frost
and fog, and a fox slipping
through the white.’Ghost Gum50x76cm photographic print by Kara Rosenlund, $490; http://www.kararosenlund.com.H G InsIder
74 | AUSTRALIAN HOUSE & GARDEN