Home

Photo by Peter McCarthy

Whenever I travel overseas, I’m always glad to return home to my country, Australia. I suppose some of this has to do with being tired of living out of a suitcase; tired of the frantic pace where one feels one must fill every day with sightseeing activities; and the recurring thought that, “this is costing a bloody fortune!”

But I think it’s more than that. In this country of mine that I love, my accent isn’t out of place and I understand the cultural mores that were instilled in me during my formative years. So this is where I belong. But above all, this is where I can appreciate a luxury that most other countries that I’ve visited don’t have ─ the luxury of space. And all of that makes me feel rather privileged to be an Australian.

I can remember reading that one of the highlights for Japanese tourists is to visit the outback in the Northern Territory, where one can look around and see not another living soul. For them, this is a novelty they experience for the first time. I’m only now beginning to understand why they feel this way.

For in every country that I’ve ever visited, with the possible exception of New Zealand, space is at a premium. Yet, I’ve always had that luxury in this sparsely-populated country of mine. In the small Western Queensland town where I grew up, each house was built on its own one acre block. Every summer weekend my friends and I would swim in the waterholes in the river. (Yes, bare-arsed, as I recall. ) We’d go exploring the bush around the town. Sometimes we’d visit the waterhole that bears my grandfather’s name, because he had a dairy farm nearby where he raised his ten children. I used to feel rather important when other kids asked my permission to swim there. I always generously gave it. They were not to know that the little farm had long been sold to a large cattle station nearby.

I live now on a quarter acre block in a city of 90,000 people. Yet I know I can be in the bush within ten minutes drive if I want to. I also know that the only place on this earth where I ever completely relax is in that little town where I grew up. I’ll be forever connected to that little patch of ground in a dying outback town. Because that’s my little patch.

And ever since I’ve returned from overseas, I’ve had a yearning to go back to it. To visit my grandfather’s grave, and to tell him that I visited the little village in Cornwall that he left as a child, and to reassure him that his father did the right thing when he emigrated. Because he gave us more than material comforts. He gave us space. The space that is the soul of my country.

And that is what the aborigines mean when they say that their spirits are linked to the land. There, in that space, their spirits can soar unimpeded by the earthly concerns that enslave those of us of European descent. I think I experienced it in my little outback town, but didn’t recognise it. My aboriginal friends did, but they had forty thousand years start on me.

And all of this makes me feel rather privileged to be an Australian.

photography by Peter McCarthy