We arrived in Perth late on Saturday night after a 33 hour journey that started in Vancouver at 2 am Thursday morning, with one day “lost” as we crossed the International Date Line somewhere on the Great Circle route from Vancouver to Hong Kong. Four hours’ wait there, then a Singapore Airlines flight to Singapore, and then the final leg, again with Singapore Airlines, that brought us into Perth just before midnight.
The disorientation that rapid transportation from continent to continent, and from one hemisphere to the other, to say nothing of the interruption of circadian rhythms, often means that the first sight of a new place occasions a feeling of dispossession, of a loss of centre that can be distressing. One factor that contributes to this malaise is change in the apparent path of the sun. When the sun shines in Newfoundland, it rises in the east, moves through the south-east quadrant of the sky, then the south, south-west, and finally sets in the west. In the southern hemisphere, the trajectory takes the sun from the east to the north, before setting in the west.
In spite of this unsettling of patterns of behaviour, I immediately feel at home here. It is not only the warm welcome of my in-laws, nor the fact that this is not my first visit to Australia; rather, everything feels right. The quality of light, the scent of vegetation, even the fact that we drive on the left-hand side of the road, everything opens up a place for me to be in.
I have a similar feeling each time I return to St. John’s, but there the individual factors are more difficult to identify as they have been blurred by 43 years of habit.
But when I return to my birthplace, Fenton in Stoke-on-Trent, nothing seems familiar or welcoming, nothing that says this is still my home. I went to the house where I was born, took photographs of the places that had not physically changed since my childhood, but I still felt like a tourist. Even visits to close relatives had the feeling of encounters with strangers.
So where is my home? It is not where I was born and grew up. And yet it is not exclusively St. John’s or Perth. Perhaps it is now time to re-examine what the concept of heimlich means, especially since its opposite, unheimlich, has such an important role to play in the dynamic of our psyche.
