Coming Home – To Canberra

I drive up the Hume Highway towards Canberra and I feel excited. I’ve been meaning to come up all year. Since leaving twenty years ago I have made at least one trip annually to see my friends and reconnect with all that brings me life there. This time years have passed between visits and the pull has become irresistible. I haven’t been up since ‘BC’ other than a devastating trip to mourn a child who never should have gone. There is a sad reason for this trip, too. I’m driving to Canberra to farewell my grandmother.

The long slow drive through Albury used to be a natural break in my journey north but on this flood-prone trip the bypass is even slower than the town centre route used to be. There are potholes everywhere and we drive in a single lane at 40km/hour for most of the way. Workmen in high vis nod at me solemnly when I lift my fingers in the salute of driver to road worker. The slow pace suits me as I am wide eyed and distracted, staring all around at the unfamiliarly high water levels. The Murray River has taken back much of the low lying land and the river bank is no longer evident. I see new lakes and expanded wetlands the entire journey. I feel the change in landscape from the moment I cross into New South Wales. After Albury the mountains are my constant companions; on the horizon, alongside the highway, in front of me. Already I see in the quality of the light that summer is coming. 

I turn off on the Barton Highway and am surprised by the buildings at Murrumbateman. It’s not a sleepy village any longer! I note the growth of the roses along the fences, I remember them being planted! The roads are familiar and I am determined to navigate without the map. And then I see traffic lights where there never used to be any. There is a six lane road crossing from north to south where I only recall fields of kangaroos. I wait for a light rail to pass. Perhaps the world has moved on while I wasn’t looking? I take the back streets that I know well still and reintroduce myself to the town. I’m back!

The big topic at our place recently has been about ‘taking the next step’. Whatever it might be to wherever it might be. The tricky bit has been… how do I work out what is the ‘right’ next step? Ah. Now that IS a tricky question that, in my experience, can be answered only in hindsight!

When I first moved to Canberra in 1994 it was not the destination of my choosing. My final clinical placement in Hobart fell through a week before and the team at The Woden Valley Hospital graciously offered me a last minute place with them. I was grateful, truly I was. On that cold July day as I drove slowly through all the towns that have long since been bypassed on the Hume Highway, I grimaced and resented every kilometre and, on that day, I did not believe I was on my way to a city I would come to call home. 

Nope. As far as I was concerned I was on my way to the centre of politics and the public service, a place where people lived with their heads in clouds of privilege, a city where I intended to learn what I needed to learn and get back out to reality as quickly as I could. Does that sound like a familiar description? It’s certainly still one I hear bandied about even by those who live there. I heard it just today on a podcast described as an ‘enormous university campus’. Brought up on a diet of such slurs about the ACT I could not have anticipated what I actually found. I found incredible people and a country town vibe with big city resources. I found some of Australia’s beautiful countryside where I learned to hike and bike and immerse myself in nature.

I am home in this place where the heart of me resides. Canberra, despite its own growth, is a time capsule of my 20’s and I am more than happy to remain, psychologically at least, in that age bracket! My friends there still see me not just as I am, an active participant in conversations about superannuation and work exit-plans, but as the person I have always been. The me who was ambitious and adventurous. I’ve always been both versions of me but in Bendigo only the working mother has shown her face. It’s so good to be both again, just for a little while.

I never visited Grandma in Canberra. She lived there with my uncle for the last few years of her life and those were the years that I didn’t make it up the highway. Strange to think that she was there, that she made it her home, but that I never knew her as a part of the place I love so much. I listen to stories that tell me that perhaps she, too, found something in this place that brought out a version of herself that she loved. She found friendship in fellow residents who shared her enjoyment of music and story telling. She found companionship in the family at her side. She found her people. Our celebration of her long life was meaningful and full of love. Canberra turned it on for her – we shivered in icy wind straight from those glorious snow-covered mountains incongruously framed by blue sky and regular flyovers by jet planes that so perfectly captured the exquisite character of the ACT.

Driving back home feeling refilled I listen to podcasts. As is so often the case, the topics serendipitously reflect my mood and I find myself in a whirl of discussions about grief for place and the phenomenon of the diaspora, how migrants often recreate the life and culture they’ve left behind in their new place. 

I was struck by Kari Gislason’s explanation in a discussion on The Bookshelf. His area of expertise is Norse story and he described how when people migrated to Iceland they tried to recreate their home culture. The first thing they did once they got to Iceland was work as hard as they could at preserving the country they’d left.

I was just as guilty of falling into the temptation of protecting the culture and life I had left behind. Distance from home can harden tradition into an inflexible thing (Michaela Kalowski) and, for me, that reaction helped keep me balanced in that time of transition. It gave me security and and a sense of predictability. It took me years to move on and allow myself to actually live in Bendigo, to look forward instead of looking back. My inability to let Canberra go seems overly dramatic now but I am comforted by the acknowledgement that I am not alone in the compulsion to hold on to a known life. I recognise that need, I know that feeling! The alternative, facing a life that doesn’t feel like yours, is really scary. The unknown and unfamiliar often is. Meeting change head on takes courage and when we first moved I didn’t have the strength for acts of bravery. I imagine that’s what those early explorers who migrated to Iceland also felt. There is great comfort and forgiveness in knowing I have like-minded company even if they are Vikings from long ago!

I wonder if you have experienced something like this, a translocation that shocked you into stasis for a while until you were able to catch your breath and steady your feet in a new place? It can happen moving house when you set up your bedroom exactly like the old one right down to how the books are on the shelf (perhaps that’s also just me??). Or in the visits my children make back to their Primary School at Christmas time each year to touch base with where they came from. I think there’s a taste of it in our family cake baking and definitely in the traditions of Christmas we are about to begin. We are reconnecting with the person we once were and bringing that self along into the present where we can be whole.

Oh, how privileged I know myself to be to have a place like Canberra as my backstory! Our sense of place becomes more and more profound for us as we age (ouch!). I consider myself lucky. The place that formed me is a place I am still able to go and visit, where I can touch the earth and breathe the air and reconnect with all that matters to me there. It’s safe and it’s accessible.

I hope that my kids will one day look back at Bendigo, the place where they grew up, with fondness and gratitude. When I go to Canberra I take with me the indelible stamp of Victoria on my speech and in my habits and am proud to do so. I am happy to be of both places, a dual citizen of sorts. I’ll be back next year for my annual check on the progress at the Arboretum. It’s a triumph of nature that has to be experienced to believed.

So, on that note, should you go and be a tourist in Canberra? A resounding YES from me. Go! You won’t notice the twenty year old version of me anywhere, I took that with me when I left. What you will notice is a beautiful city worthy of the title of our national capital. See all the things – the museum, the portrait gallery, Questacon, Parliament House and the National Library. Hire a paddleboat on the lake and don’t miss the view from the top of Mount Ainslie. If politics are your thing then, sure, this is the place for you, but there is just as much for the artists, scientists and nature lovers. The coffee and food culture is amazing and the arts and music scene is vibrant. Go back for Floriade and make time for a Spring hike into the mountains. You’re going to need more than a few days. Just do it!