Author Hannah Kent muses on a sense of place.
From an Adelaide Hills cottage to Melbourne share houses and darkest Iceland, this bestselling Australian author ponders the meaning of home.
When I think of home, I think of a place of belonging. Home, to me, is where it is enough to simply be as I am. Home is where I might seek sanctuary from the demands of the outside world and its questions, the bright chaos of its expectancy or judgment. It is a place of restoration and peace, and it is something that can be created – and treasured – in strange and transient places, as much as it can be fostered through permanent residence.
My understanding of home has changed over the years. As a child, home was only ever Broad Oak, the house my parents built amid three hectares of sloping valley in the Adelaide Hills. Home was the dam we’d sometimes swim in during the summer, the colour of tea, smelling of mud. Home was blackberry picking, sticky hands prickled with thorns, and the oak tree that my sister would climb and get stuck in. Home was the wood fire I’d stand too close to, and the early morning vista of frost and fog, and a fox slipping through the white. Pine cones and holly trees, eucalypts and yabbies and clay soil. A house with a roof that drummed with rain, creaked with heat in summer, and the loving family it sheltered – this was my home, and my only home, for many years.
But when I was on the cusp of adulthood, I learned that home could be, and indeed, is, something much more than the beloved abode of childhood.
When I was 17 years old, I left Broad Oak and arrived in a small town in northern Iceland as an exchange student. I suffered, immediately and without warning, from a homesickness of such magnitude that I found it difficult to do anything but cry and sleep. Life in Sauðárkrókur was unlike anything I had ever experienced: the winter days were filled with long hours of darkness, the language was an incomprehensible babble, I felt disconnected from everyone around me and my feelings of alienation were acute. Desperate for familiarity, I spent my days reading and re-reading books only so that I might spend time with the same characters, the same friends. Home, I thought, was the return address waiting for me at the end of my 12 months abroad.
And then a strange thing happened. I began to learn Icelandic, and that made friendships possible. I joined the local theatre group. I found myself working at the local cafe, babysitting kids, taking music lessons. About six months into my exchange, the town organised their National Day celebration parade and, in a gesture of inclusion, I was given a monkey costume. I strode down the main street as Herra Níels, Lína Langsokkur’s (Pippi Longstocking’s) ape, and as I was greeted by the townspeople I realised that I was now a part of their community. And with that sense of belonging came the twin discovery that I was, on the other side of the world, at home.
Since my year in Iceland, my adult life has been filled with constant movement between sharehouses, rental properties and unlikely accommodation in foreign places: I’ve never had a permanent address. There was the old mansion on Royal
‘Home was the wood fire I’d stand too close to, and the early morning vista of frost and fog, and a fox slipping through the white.’
Parade in Melbourne, happily sagging under the weight of years and the lives of my friends who lived in it, filling its rooms with romantic angst and the aroma of cheap-and-cheerful dinners. There was the apartment, glossy with tiles, in Ayutthaya, Thailand, where geckos decorated the walls and I washed my sweat-stained teacher’s clothes in a tiny sink under a wall pinned with sweet and funny letters from my students. There was the sharehouse in Fitzroy where I assiduously hid all signs of my prohibited, stowaway cat who loved me with fierce adoration. The cottage in the Adelaide Hills with unsealed floorboards, which knifed me with cold every morning before I lit the wood stove, and a garden I resuscitated from neglect. A farmhouse surrounded by snow. A swag and a night sky that swayed with moonlight.
All of these places have been home to me, not for where they were or the amount of time I spent there, but because they became places of belonging through friendship, love or the quiet companionship of landscape.
The German writer Christian Morgenstern once wrote that “Home is not where you live, it is where they understand you.” The older I get, the more I recognise the truth of this aphorism. Home is, I have discovered, more often a state of being than a physical place.
We are at home when we may be ourselves, no questions asked. Home is anywhere, any connection, any time where we may be known and accepted and, dare I say it, loved. This is also how, once homed ourselves, we might offer this same gift to others: through understanding, and through letting them know that they, too, belong.