“I have never felt refreshed when I stepped back in my own footprints” (Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun).
Coming back to Bendigo felt like an enormous step backwards and those old footprints certainly did not leave me feeling refreshed!
It wasn’t meant to be that way.
My family moved to Bendigo in 1984. I was in Grade 6, just turned eleven, awed by our move to the big city. I left a week after I turned eighteen for the even bigger city, heading down the freeway to Melbourne with all of my high school friends. In the thirteen years I was away I had gone to University, established a professional career, married. Become a grown up.
Then in a moment of weakness borne of exhaustion and new parenthood and a traumatic diagnosis I chose to leave it all behind me to move closer to my family. I had a baby, a toddler, and a husband desperate for the safety of family. We drove down the highway to Bendigo noting the ominous clouds of smoke as we passed Murrumbateman. Our Giralang house sold on the day of the devastating Canberra fires while we were inspecting potential new homes in the clear air of Bendigo. We won the bid and returned to pack up our lives in a city black with smoke, out of sync with the ACT because we hadn’t been there alongside our neighbours on ‘the day of the fires’, we hadn’t shared that trauma, we couldn’t ever know what it was like. The shape of Canberra had altered. Already we didn’t quite belong there anymore.
We arrived in Bendigo in a flurry of excited welcome. We felt so fortunate. We had bought the house of our dreams. My husband had a twelve month leave of absence from CSIRO, a security blanket to give us time to establish ourselves in our new life down south. Behind me was the life I had worked so hard to build. The friends who were my family. Immediately I missed these friends who knew the independent, confident, professional me, the me before I was a wife and a mother with dark circles around her eyes. I mourned the intellectual conversations I had been a part of, the focus on sustainability and nature and science and nutrition. I couldn’t find it here, not then and not easily and certainly not from the kitchen with two tiny tots at my feet.
Anyone who has ever moved to a new place will know this feeling. But this was different. This was Bendigo. I knew this place. It knew me!!! While it had certainly grown while I was away it was still the place where I grew up. I knew where the shops were. I had been to the schools. There were people who would, should, know me. I felt as if Bendigo had a hole in it shaped just for me and I could step back in and fit perfectly.
Ah, the ignorance of such a thought!
We tried really hard. My family were, and are, so welcoming and, thrilled to have us back in the bosom of life, did everything they could to incorporate us into their daily lives. Our kids revelled in the company of their cousins. My husband, a research scientist, found there wasn’t anything in his professional field to be had so he took jobs because they were available and worked in roles that seemed random, so unrelated were they to the skills and knowledge he had worked so hard to attain. I went back to work because in contrast, as a health professional, there was plenty of work to be had. The teams were glad to have me join them but the social circles in the workplace were long established with very little room for a newcomer. We tried to do all of the things the welcome to Bendigo pack encouraged us to do to fit in. I joined a mother’s group. The kids were enrolled in swimming lessons. On the outside things seemed to look pretty good.
And yet… We felt really out of place. Foreigners in a land that looked familiar and smelled familiar but was a facade for something so different that not even the accent was one that we shared. It was exhausting. We were so lonely.
When the year was up we decided to go home. Back to Canberra and our familiar world. Only to find that that world, too, had moved on without us.
Since the bushfires housing prices in the ACT had tripled almost overnight. We couldn’t afford to buy back into the market and rent was excessive for our little family on a single income. We house-sat for a friend who was on an extended holiday and dipped our toes back into the Canberra waters. In the year that we were away our place in the social systems had subtly altered and reshaped. Ian’s work had moved and the office was not the same as the one he had left before. My friends had other friends with whom they had regular dinners and established social arrangements. I felt as though I didn’t belong there either. I was the interloper again. I was not a happy camper.
Nowhere felt like home except for the past and you really shouldn’t live there.
The movie Sliding Doors captured the concept of how different decisions can have significant and decisive impact on what comes next in life. We use the phrase to describe those key moments upon which we are conscious the future is altered, those sliding door moments at times identifiable as they happen and at others times only in retrospect can we point and say ‘then, that’s when it all changed.” It’s fascinating, isn’t it, the way that sometimes you just can’t see what is right in front of you? I knew very clearly that I wasn’t the same Melinda who left Bendigo in 1991 and went off to explore adulthood. How arrogant of me to think that Bendigo was still the same Bendigo I left behind me in 1991, that it had remained in stasis just waiting for my return so that life could continue again. To think that Canberra was waiting while we lived through our crisis and breathed a civic sigh of relief when we finally came back to complete the fabric of the city? To be fair these weren’t conscious thoughts. I have only been able to acknowledge these in hindsight when the exhaustion and constancy of parenthood and chronic disease management eased enough to allow me the clarity of mind to think beyond the moment I was in.
There is a rhythm in the life of any social setting that is the heartbeat of that life. We all know it. Perhaps, more easily, we recognise it most when we are out of sync with it. When we are enveloped in the tempo it is unnoticeable, appreciated only as a sense of knowing ‘I belong here”. Belonging is, like trust, something that is earned and built over time. It’s a two-way thing. A place creates you a space as time passes and you prove yourself committed to being a part of it. I remember how this used to play out in the ACT when new acquaintances would ask ‘have you bought a house?’. In a city full of temporary residents and transient workers, this question helped people determine if you were going to be there for some time (and therefore worth their effort to befriend) or if you were likely to be leaving again soon. It was too emotionally exhausting to develop deep relationships with people over and over again. As an individual you establish your place by working your thread into the fabric of the town. By turning up at the same time each week for playgroup, walking at the same time each day and greeting familiar faces who share the route, by waving to the rubbish collection driver on Fridays and then by managing the soccer team. You know that you belong when your absence is not only noted but it causes a knot in the tapestry of life.
The one thing I had been far too impatient to give this new life was time. I was so caught up in my own dramas and exhaustion and loneliness that I couldn’t stop for long enough to appreciate the value of what is around me, see its special features, appreciate the individuality of the place. I didn’t have the head space or the heart space to give it a chance. It took me nearly twenty years to lower my defences and realise that I am at home. I only have myself to blame for the extended period of time it took me to wake up to my own stubbornness and allow myself to see this place for what it is.
And so we came back to Bendigo. This time things were different. We knew we had to make this work. Canberra was no longer a backup plan available to us. Ian found a job. I went to work and slowly made friends. We had another baby. I returned to our playgroup and gave those lovely women a proper chance. They are still my friends today and we still call ourselves Playgroup… our gatherings are no longer centred on children but women celebrating friendship borne of a long time together. I returned to work with an open mind and an eagerness to contribute to my profession and found likeminded souls who had been there all along, who challenged me and valued me and continue to hold me up intellectually even now. I hope they will be my friends for life.
During the pandemic my commitment to this region was cemented in a shared experience of community trauma and response. We worked together and the importance of neighbours and fellow citizens has never been so pronounced. My family and I found ourselves trapped isolating on our block on the outskirts of town. We walked the perimeter every evening and drank socially distanced red wine with our neighbours. I stuck a huge map of Victoria on the wall in our pantry and labelled it ‘Let’s Stay At Home”. “Here is our world for the foreseeable future,” I announced to those babies who had become teenagers taller than me in the intervening years since we arrived. When restrictions allowed us to do so we explored places on that map. We loved it. We found exquisite locations so close to home that we never knew existed. We have become regular campers at Leanganook, hike Mount Alexander and surrounds as often as we can, discover hidden gems all within half an hour from our house that deserve to be shared with the wider world. The gift we received from lockdown restrictions was that of our own home.
After all that it may seem counter-intuitive that I then left my hard-earned professional role at the start of 2022. How better to contribute to community than working in health? Well, that’s another story for another time. But it is the safety of belonging that gave me the strength and the support to make such a leap. We have lived in Bendigo now for nearly twenty years. Long time residents will tell you that fact still doesn’t make us local, we weren’t born here after all, but we do belong. There is a pattern in the fabric of this place that is made by me and for me. I value what it has given me and will never give it up lightly. Freedom is the ability to do so, however, and perhaps one day I will walk away. Who knows? Those doors slide open and closed every single day and one day, just maybe, one will slide in a way that sends me off on adventures in other places.
The next time, should it come, I will know that carving out a space that is mine is a job that takes time and patience and effort and courage. I will listen and learn and observe the weave of that new place until I see where I might add my own thread in a way that enhances the material of the town. And then I will join the social fabric with curiosity. Life is too short to do anything else.