A Yes To Call Home

I was born on the other side of the world, and came here as a primary school kid.

He’s watching you from that old passport photo above, with a scruffy t-shirt and the half-grin of the new kid. He will go through 5 primary schools and 2 high schools, calling 10 houses home by age 11. The half-grin will serve him well enough, but once that mouth opens things will tend to get more…colourful.

My life on this island since then has been spent often wondering whether to open my big mouth and not infrequently regretting it; the Anglo culture of male strength in silence left me feeling like the new kid well into adulthood.

But then, we’re nearly all new kids here on this island of course.

Nearly all of us, hence the referendum.

So I want to tell you why the kid in the passport photo is telling me to vote Yes.

Not for him – just another new kid, another Pom off the plane – but for the kids whose land we landed on.

Because for me, it’s a matter that hits home, a question of where home was and is for me and my family, and how at-home I can ever feel on land that was stolen.

I have returned to England several times since migrating, wondering if I would feel some connection to the old country, and finding I felt less connected with each successive trip.

I grew up feeling I had no country. I barracked for Australia in the cricket, but my accent stood out in the schoolyard, and I was a Pom for years until it mutated sufficiently. 

At primary school in Perth, most kids were white, so I fitted in that way at least. My medical parents slathered us with sunscreen, such that to this day my dermatologist congratulates them for being ahead of the curve. 

But even with full Sun Smartness, the sun still smarted, and now with ever harsher summers here I just feel like my fair-skinned countrymen took a boat here a couple of centuries ago and stole an enormous island we are just not built to live on. 

Mad dogs and Englishmen. What were we thinking? And is that the last of the sunscreen?

I guess I got used to being from nowhere in particular. My folks moved around, we crossed the Nullarbor, and eventually my siblings and I have wound up scattered around Melbourne.  It’s the closest any of us has come to feeling at home, enough to create a generation of half-Poms who’ve never known anywhere else: Melbourne is home, of course it is.

But there’s this niggling feeling, because I know this is not my country. I didn’t steal it, it was stolen long enough ago that those who did are long dead. But they sold it to someone who sold it to someone who sold it to someone, etc…who sold it to me.

I suspect that most if not all of that chain of vendors were white, like me. 

It’s because of my whiteness, that throughout the difficulties of migrating and being a weirdly accented kid from nowhere, I was still way more privileged than kids whose family trees send roots down into this land beyond memory. 

And it’s because of my family, that tree we uprooted from English soil and plonked down here in different soils several times over my childhood, that I always had a home.

No country, but always a home, with my parents and siblings.

What if you lost both? Generations of kids were taken from their parents while I got to stay with mine. I can’t imagine coping with the uprooting I went through without having around me the adults who loved me insanely as most parents do.

Can sorry ever be enough?

I remember the racist jokes white kids told in the schoolyard in the 80s here, how normal that was; I remember reading My Place by Sally Morgan and being gobsmacked by how much shame people could feel about skin colour. Mum was doing it for book club I think.

Do people who consider book clubs their culture have a say here?

Or is it all “I can’t talk, I’ve lived a life of privilege, I’m far too comfortable to have any idea what’s at stake?”

No, hang on.

I think that’s exactly how the naysayers have fought their culture wars, by calling tertiary-educated inner city people like me elites and chattering latte/chardonnay sippers.

What would we know?

What I do know is that I don’t feel I’ve earned it, all this privilege I got for being born white to two doctors Australia let in hoping they’d prove useful. It doesn’t matter how hard I work, I lie down on land that isn’t really mine, which the bank said I could have, and my sleep just isn’t deep like I know it could be.

I long to feel connected to the land in the way I have heard First Nations people speak of, those with family trees with their roots down so deep it’s like the soil is in their skin, whether you can see it or not.

The only way I can see that happening for me, is through justice for the people kicked off their land by people from the land I was born in. 

A Yes vote will only be a step towards justice for our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, but I am pretty sure it will help me sleep deeper, feel a bit less like an imposter, a squatter; a bit less homeless.

Giving the above-pictured small white Pom with the big mouth a better night’s sleep somewhere that feels more like home is hardly top of the list of priorities for the elders and experts driving the Yes campaign.

But it is my reason, the way I’m making it personal.

So that come what may on the referendum day, Yes or No, I at least can make my Yes a step towards a personal reconciliation, towards a deeper understanding of this country and its first peoples.

Towards home, even.

This was written on the lands of Wurundjeri people, who never ceded sovereignty. I pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging.

I would also like to thank all the draft readers who have helped me prepare this piece. Kid in photo did eventually learn that before you open up your big mouth, it helps to listen first! I’ve made a living out of that learning.

Finally, I would love to hear how this referendum is personal for you – feel free to leave a comment.