The Migrant landscape

Last week I went with a couple of friends to hear three writers talk about the migrant experience. Screenwriter, Jan Sardi (of Shine fame) talked to Raimond Gaita, Arnold Zable and Amra Pajalic.

Much of the discussion focused on how place defines and shapes us. Raimond Gaita was born in Germany, moved to Australia when he was four, and now lives in London, his favourite city. Seemingly confused, he admitted to feeling very much a European and part of the European intellectual scene, but at the same time a Victorian. He spoke movingly of returning to Central Victoria while writing his memoir, Romulus My Father, and falling in love with the landscape.

Amra Pajalic lived in Bosnia for four years as a child, but the place she lived is now part of Serbia and only lives on in her dreams and imagination.

Born to Polish parents in New Zealand, Arnold Zable’s stories are infused with Jewish and European references. While he has returned to Poland with his young son, Zable believes that wherever you have solitude and community, you can feel at home. One of his favourite places is Curtain Square in Carlton.

A migrant myself, I recently returned to England to visit family. After five years – happy years – in Australia, I still feel an umbilical connection to the landscape of my birth and, every time I prepare to fly back ‘home’, dream of stepping off the plane and, Pope-like, kissing the earth. Thankfully, the fog, queues and general drabness at Heathrow soon knock this rose-tinted dream out of me. But the minute I catch a glimpse of greenery – I feel the pull.

Perhaps a connection to our native landscape is hard-wired into our psyche. Watching a recent ABC documentary on Sydney Nolan, I was interested that following his move to England in 1955, he returned to Australia every year for 40 years to reconnect with the bush. Then, back in Welsh border country, he would paint Australian landscapes. It’s that same hankering after expansive blue skies and straggly gum trees that inspired London-based Aussie author Nicki Gemmell to bring her brood back to Australia for a three-month dose of al fresco living.

For me, it’s not just a deep bond with the countryside, there’s also some inborn sense of the seasons. Arriving in England one spring to sticky buds on chestnut trees, daffodils, primroses and April showers, it was as if I had emerged from a long, northern hemisphere winter and not just flown in from a glorious Melbourne autumn.

It’s true that England is a crowded island – there are too many people and too many cars – but there’s still plenty of glorious countryside to go around – to my mind anyway. Even in counties not renowned for their beauty, you’ll find country lanes brimming with cow parsley in spring and summer, rivers threading through a higgledy-piggledy patchwork of fields and soft, lush greenness everywhere.

I can wax lyrical about the Australian landscape too: the blue, blue skies; the heady scent of gum trees; the carolling of magpies; the hot pinks, reds and yellows of bottle brush, hakea and grevillea; and the dramatic expanses of red earth. The gums trees seem a bit spindly and anaemic compared to a chestnut or oak tree in full summer foliage, but I am learning to acclimatise to the more rugged beauty of this dry and parched land. The difference is that it only evokes and doesn’t (yet) tug.