Dislocation

My Peripatetic Life

Now 77, I’ve moved on average, every 18 months throughout my life. To date, I’ve set up home in 50 dwellings in three countries — Australia, Japan and Sri Lanka — and numerous towns and suburbs across Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory. I moved with my parents when I was young, with children till they left the nest and occasionally with, but mostly without, various husbands.

My lifetime residential record includes eight hotels, three guest houses, a government hostel, a boarding house, a rooming house, a residential delicatessen and numerous free-standing houses, units and flats, not to speak of the occasional short-term outback donga. I’ve shared places, rented others, owned a few and now live in a retirement village. I’ve even had a stint in a high-rise public housing tower.

A decade or so ago, I compiled a list of my dwellings. I draw on a few below to highlight odd moments as a basis for considering the dislocation entailed in moving. It is sometimes hard to make a home.

Growing Up in Pubs

In bios for poetry and writing, I often say I was born and bred in pubs. It is true. My father was a publican, and I list above the hotels I grew up in. I also worked as a receptionist, barmaid, waitress, cook or housemaid in the last four and, in others in various places when times got tough. Even as a mature university and postgrad student with three kids, I was weekend breakfast cook and housemaid at the Hotel Franklin.

I was a sullen and lonely child, and although I was safe, I was isolated and often alone in Japan and daydreamed a lot. I didn’t like my nursemaid. I wanted mum and was only truly happy when touring with her. However, our Japanese chauffeur Kanamtsu and a bellboy called ‘Micky’ whose Japanese name I never knew spoilt me. I adored them.

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Take a moment to think about the photo of me with two American boys, brothers and children of one of dad’s American counterparts. Nobody considered it wrong to pose children on a statue of the Bodhisattva, Konnan (Chinese, Quan Yin).

My parents took occasional weekend leave in Nikko, where dad played golf with his military friends while mum drank with their wives. I played with naked Japanese children in a nearby rockpool and learned to speak a little Japanese. An old woman my mother inaccurately called mamasan took pity and fed me fluffy steamed rice when I visited her kitchen. I still love plain rice.

In the early 1950s, we moved into the New Albury Hotel. On the cusp of womanhood. I fell in love there with Elvis Presley and had one close friend whose father worked on the railways. Most parents did not approve of my hotel environment. It was in this hotel that my new brother spoilt my single-child status, but a lesbian waitress on staff befriended me and taught me how to play chess. I adored her. One day, she disappeared.

I later discovered that mum had sacked her to protect me. In her defence, years later, when Mum learned that my brother was gay, it made her love him more. In the New Albury Hotel, a fat, female cook took pity on me and allowed me to sit in her pantry to devour two packets of Arnott’s Milk Coffee biscuits after school. Nobody sacked her or the young, foreign kitchenhand who flirted with me before puberty.

Boarding House Life

For me as a child, the boarding house at 7 Redan Street, St Kilda, was my most nurturing home, even though my father, being in the Army, was away a lot. I adored this Redan Street dwelling. We lived here both before, and after my father’s military tour of Japan.

We had an upstairs room where we played a game, calling each other mummy frog, daddy frog and baby frog. After Japan, we sat cross-legged on the floor to eat at our prized Japanese chow table. I remember how big the double bed seemed. I slept on a divan. The building is now up for sale on Realestate.com as an expensive ‘illustrious c1888 solid brick Victorian residence’.

Guest Houses

After the New Albury Hotel, my parents bought a guest house called Tara. A red-headed young journalist staying as a guest made me blush when he wrote this poem in my autograph book for my 13th birthday.

In my late teens, I lived in a couple of other guest houses, one in  Bondi, the other in Rushcutters Bay near Kings Cross. I could write books about both, but I’ll just tell you that I nearly fainted one pay-night in a Bondi fish and chip shop while waiting for my hamburger to cook.

Two Sri Lankan students in Australia on the Colombo Plan kindly walked me home that night and took me on tour next day to see The Three Sisters in the Blue Mountains with their posh friend who had a car. They urged me to return to my violent first husband because, they said, a young woman should not be alone or without a husband in a place like Bondi. Bless them. I did try, but it was a disaster.

Another night, two Bondi cops stalked me in their police vehicle as I walked home on the then mandatory high heels from a bus stop after work in the dark. They invited themselves into my boarding house room. Intimidating, handsome and in lust. Finally, I squirmed my way out of trouble by agreeing to bring a friend on another night. Next day, I moved.

A Hostel in Darwin and the House that Changed Everything

In the early 1960’s I lived in a Government Hostel in Darwin in a group of buildings that extends from Mitchell Street through to the Esplanade. It is now backpacker accommodation.

A decade or so later, hippies invaded Lameroo beach opposite the hostel. While they hung in tree houses on the hill leading down to the beach, swam naked in the sea-baths, smoked dope and horrified everyone, I was busy playing housewife in a new police house in an outer suburb until in 1974, Cyclone Tracy blew it away. Soon after that, my marriage broke up and blew me off with three little children under four.

Dislocation

If we accept that the idea of home is a tale of many mansions: of growing up, love, loss, disaster, recovery and, ultimately a place of belonging, then moving is a story of change. A new location often brings the transformation of identity. A move can also entail a shift in status as in my marital breakup.

But there is more to it. Cyclone or not, whenever we move into a new house, our bodies are extracted from a web of places, people, networks, activities, feelings and attachments. We have to start pretty much from scratch making new networks and connections in a process that we loosely call ‘settling in’.

But moving dislocates. Despite the internet, moving house rips bodies and minds out of their previous environment. It is thus a much bigger deal than many think. Psychologists tell us moving is one of the highest stress factors after the death of a loved one. What they don’t say is that, over time, connections and memories fade; continuity is erased.

Few people think of themselves as organisms out of place when we move, but that is what we are. The first time I sought a visa to travel to Sri Lanka, the question asking who my father was, tickled my sense of the ridiculous but it tells us something about belonging.

Packing cases by the door.

Just yesterday, I read an article in The Monthly, which makes a similar connection to the one I allude to above between Sri Lankan and Aboriginal culture. It may seem a bit off-topic, but it is an insightful read in its own right exploring as it does the significance of the body in space. Drawing on the work of Bas Luhrmann and David Gulpilil in my favourite movie ‘Australia’, the article speaks more broadly about things we often fail to notice.

Displaced People

Millions in this world stand alone to leave with nothing in their foray into the unknown. Their order of terror and courage is hard to conceive.

Despite my discomforts, I hope this short exploration of the dislocation of moving home resonates enough to let you consider with compassion what migrants, asylum seekers and refugees go through. Can you imagine being ripped from the bosom of loved ones, often to become stateless and homeless for years in teeming refugee camps, unable to re-embed yourself in the fullness of life?

In 2018 World Vision wrote that “Most people remain displaced within their home countries, but about 25.9 million people worldwide have fled to other countries as refugees. More than half of the refugees are children. In 2018, 13.6 million people were newly displaced, either as refugees or IDPs (internally displaced people).”

The figure of 25.9 million refugees worldwide is more than the entire population of Australia and, at the risk of repeating, half of these 25.9 million refugees are children.

UNHCR recently reported that 79.5 million people worldwide had been forcibly displaced by the end of 2019. See the details here.

In Summary

What has emerged for me in writing this post is that at worst, I had a safe but somewhat isolated childhood. I was lucky enough to be able to seek comfort in books and, all the while, I dreamed of being a writer. As a young woman, life was not as safe for me, but I always had the love of my family. Having no single place to call home meant that my parents’ deaths cast me adrift. I had nowhere to belong.

One of the reasons I take friendship so seriously I think is that I lack any sense of continuity in time or place. Apart from my children, few people in my life today have known me for much more than a decade. I have led a fortunate but dislocated life. What I have shared here is a mere taste of its diversity.

A Writing Tip

Try going through your life in terms of where you have lived and how. Make a list and see where that takes you as I have here. That would be a pretty good start if you are interested in writing your life story.

If you have a particular period in your life that stands out, write a memoir.

Happy Writing