In a famous scene in English Literature, conventional Lockwood, the outsider unable to find his way home, is doubly displaced when he is forced to stay the night at Wuthering Heights, a house so strange as to be a foreign land. During the night he experiences a dream-haunting: Catherine, dead 20 years, comes to his broken window and begs and pleads to be let in. Lockwood, terrified, rubs her wrist to and fro upon the shards of glass.
Migrants are like Heathcliff's Cathy, tapping persistently at the window of the past. They realise they can never truly go home again, yet their hearts and spirits continue to yearn.
I ought to know, for I am a migrant, a foreigner wherever I go, having left Australia unexpectedly but permanently for the Peloponnese in 1980. Are you Greek now? people of all origins ask, a question that still causes me to stare in consternation before saying firmly, No, definitely not.
Yet my sons say I am not Australian any more, either. But if identity depends on maintaining continuity in the face of dislocation, then my Akubra hat, with its Anzac badge and sprouting of emu feathers, will soon be worn out. I feel Australian, but perhaps not solely Australian, for I suppose it is fair to say that layers have been added to whatever my composition consists of, and other layers have been worn away.
Nor am I sure what I see when I look at Australia. I don't know what my sons see when they look at me: probably just their mother.
These home-thoughts are prompted by the fact that I have returned to Australia, two and a half years after my last visit. How I long for these visits to be more regular, but for various practical reasons that cannot happen. Ah, the tyranny of distance. An Australian I once met in Paris, where he had been resident for many years, said simply: Once exchanged, forever estranged.
And he was right, at least to a certain extent. I know, for example, that I can never be restored to my original family in the same old way, for apart from the inevitable alterations that the passage of time and the incidence of death cause, experience is a great divider of persons. There is a huge gap in understanding between the nomads and the settlers of this world.
I suppose it is