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| Wednesday, January 11, 2006 |
| Home Again |
Ata is feeling thoroughly familyed.
Today we returned from Victoria. "We" consisting of Ata, Mr Ata, Ata's Mother (AM), Ata's Father(AF), and My Little Sister (MLS). Ata and Mr Ata flew across on Friday night to meet the others, who had driven over. We visited with three uncles, four aunts, a great-aunt and great-uncle, two grandmothers, one grandfather, four cousins, two step-cousins, a second cousin and her daughter. On the drive back, we visited Ata's childhood home of two years, preschool and primary school, with running commentary on What Ata's Parents Did and What Has Changed. Then we toured through the town Ata's parents lived in at the time they married, before stepping even further back into history with the town Ata's father spent much of his childhood years. This last was a place Ata cannot remember having visited before.
It is a small rural town. Driving through with Ata's father pointing out landmarks and telling stories was a little like seeing double. There is the house Ata's father used to live in. That's where the orchard was - now a caravan park. Ata's father pointed out a flattish area next to the used-to-be-an-orchard.
That's where the circus used to pull in. It was the flattest piece of ground, so they stopped there. And the wagons and cages would be parked along there. We used to go after school and look at the animals - elephants and monkeys and lions.
The building down the road was the butchers shop. Now it sells craft and offers tarot readings. A little further down is a small park with a large gun mounted in it. We did not stop to find out why it had a gun.
That's where the Squatter's Arms was - until it burnt down, anyway. We reckoned our neighbours had something to do with that. The property went up for auction, and our neighbours had the losing bid. It burnt down mysteriously just after that.
We drive down a street that dead-ends at a wide creek. Once the town swimming hole, charred logs that once supported diving boards and a jetty still stand stoically in the water. The hole is rimmed with reeds or grasses of some kind, and tall gums shade it. It seems like a painting. Ata feels certain she has seen it in a movie. She wishes she had brought her camera. The tour continues.
This was our property, and all up here. In there was the dump, we spent hours in there. We cleared all this land, it was hard work, although there wasn't a lot of bracken fern. Just in through there, that's where I got bitten by the snake.
It is speckling with rain and the air smells clean and cool. MLS is listening to her CD player. AM remembers the area also. "Wasn't that where that man lived, who had the monkey that drove a tractor? He banked with my father."
No, he was out the other way. He had this monkey that would drive the tractor, he'd just put the monkey on the seat and it would steer while he worked from the trailer on the back. When he came into town, he'd have the monkey on his lap and it would be steering the car.
Ata wonders what it would be like to grow up in a place that held not only her history, but some of her fathers history, and her mothers, and her father's fathers. On the way out, we cross Scholfield Creek. The bridge, now cement and bitumen and two lanes wide, used to be a narrow wooden single lane affair.
Scholfield! Scholfield was a drunk. The pub closed at six, and at five past six you'd see him driving out of town, weaving all over the road. Until he got to the bridge, then he'd be
straight as a die until he was on the road again - then he was back to being all over the place.
Would Ata be a different person, if her family history was held all within a two- or three- hour drive? What if her parents had never left that country town they married in? As a child, Ata always pitied her southern-city-dwelling cousins. To her well-travelled mind, their world seemed very small. Ata was content to miss out on stable schooling and calisthenics in favour of beaches and tropical thunderstorms and climbing mango trees. On visits south, it seemed that there was little to do that didn't need Arranging, and the weather was always cold. The houses had too many fences around them. The air smelt of exhaust instead of seawater and frangipani. As an adult, however, Ata can see the attraction of stability and roots. To be able to say, this is my place, to be attached to one area. Ata has always felt Arnhemland to be the true home of her living soul - but she sees now that pieces of her belong to different places. Up north, in the tropics, she feels in place - but it is to the climate and countryside she feels attached. In Adelaide, her adult self seeks bonds and ties with the people she knows. In Victoria - especially rural Victoria - there is a quieter, smaller part of herself that feels tied to her family's history and the contributions they made to the people and places there. In a similar way, she desires to visit the homelands of her older ancestors - England and Scotland and Norway - to feel the connections her family has to those places. Would they seem more or less like home than the place she lives now, because there is Family History there? If she tracked down her Distant American Relatives, would she feel connection to the places of their own personal history?
Is this sense of seeking history the reason people research family history and painstakingly document their family tree? To decide where their ties are, which places they belong to, which people they belong to? Surely it is not only Ata who feels scattered across not only the country, but half the planet? |
posted by Ata @ 7:39 pm  |
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