In search of Country

Two islands on opposite sides of the world are competing for me; fighting for my attention, for my loyalty and filialty, pulling at my heart. 

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I went a walking a week or two ago, near Sheffield, and found myself having lunch on a carpet of fallen leaves in a wood of European beech and pine trees. I searched in vain for a sighting of familiar eucalyptus or wattle trees. I really did feel like I was in a British wood. But the birds were wrong. The raucous conversation of the black cockatoos eating in the pine trees told me I was in Australia. The call of a black currawong, which is a sound that always clutches at my heart, seemed to say 'Remember Tasmania."

My family have been in Australia since the very beginning of white settlement. Some were on the first fleet to land in Botany Bay in 1788, and others came to Tasmania in 1808, just four years after Hobart was settled. A white person cannot get much more Australian, or Tasmanian, than that. For over 200 hundred years, my ancestors have been in this country, but in Britain - in England, Ireland and Scotland, my ancestors go back thousands of years. Is it possible that there something in my DNA that draws me powerfully back to the island of Britain? Is Britain more my 'Country' than Australia? 

I was listening to the radio in the car one day, to a sound bite from a new film called "Carriberrie VR" which is a virtual reality film exploring Aboriginal connection to their Country through dance, narrated by David Gulpilil. He said:

Through our ancestors we are connected to the Country. And through our Country, our body is connected to the ancestors.

To gain just a tiny understanding of that connection to Country that Australia's first people have, through being in the landscape my ancestors inhabited for thousands of years, would be something special. That indefinable but powerful sense of connection and belonging through being physically in a place where is a deep ancestral connection seems to be a possible explanation for the force that draws me back to Scotland and England.

One week until Sheryl and I land in Edinburgh to explore some of the landscapes of our Scottish ancestors.

A snippet from our last trip:

http://jillswanderment.blogspot.com.au/2016/07/landscapes-of-my-ancestors.html