The Idea of Home by Geraldine Brooks

ONE
OUR ONLY HOME
    I began to write these words on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, where I now live. It was a warm day in early July. Sunlight dappled the page, filtered through the leaves of an apple tree that was old before I was born.
    Not far away, but unaware of me, a muskrat browsed in the grasses by the brook. Red-winged blackbirds swooped across the water and a goldfinch, like a drop of distilled sunshine, darted through the glossy branches of an ilex.
    The muskrat, the birds and the holly tree are natives here. I am not. Only my dog, a liver-and-tanKelpie, is a fellow exotic. Ten years ago, I plucked him from a paddock in New South Wales and set him down in another hemisphere. He is insouciant about this, as befits his kind. He is the quintessential Aussie canine whose legendary toughness begat the expression, ‘That’d kill a brown dog’.
    So while his warm flanks twitch in a doggie doze, it falls to me to reflect on what it means to live so far from our homeplace, so far, indeed, that the cold winds of July have been replaced by this soft and buttery summer air. I cannot explain to my Kelpie that the Indo-European root of the word ‘home’ is ‘haunt’. Nor can I explain to him how and why it is that I am haunted by absence and distance, by dissonance and difference, even if the alien corn that we will eat for dinner tonight is a sweeter variety than the starchy cobs of my Aussie childhood.
    Nothing is as sweet in the end as country and parents, ever,
    Even if, far away, you live in a fertile place.
    Odysseus said that. Or rather, Homer did. I know next to nothing about Homer — who he was, how he lived — yet I feel he knows my heart. Separated by 3000 years, by gender and culture and geographic space, this ancient shadow is able to put words to the feelings that I have on a sunny day on a little island, as I think of the larger island that is my native home; that sits, like Ithaca, ‘low and away, the farthest out to sea’, where the ribs of warm sandstone push up through thin, eucalyptus-scented soils.
    Home. Haunt. I sit in my garden and look across to the house I have now; a house the first beams of which were cut and shaped a century before the white history of Australia even began. When I run my hand over that rough-textured oak, I imagine the hand that planed it — the hand of a grist miller, himself an exotic transplant, the second or third in a line of English settlers who had come to this place drawn by the power of rushing water.
    If any home is haunted, this one should be. In 1665, the very first miller, Benjamin Church, bought the land from the native people of the place, theWampanoag. He dammed the wild brook they called the Tiasquam, and set his grindstones turning. In so doing, he destroyed the herring run that had fed the Wampanoag each spring, when the fish known as ‘the silver of the ocean’ poured upstream to spawn.
    Benjamin Church dammed the brook.
    It is just one sentence in a long story. The story of human alteration to the natural world. It happened on the Tiasquam brook in Martha’s Vineyard, as it happened in uncountable places. As it happens now, in the Amazon, in Africa, in Western Australia, Tasmania, the Alaskan Arctic and innumerable corners of the world. A choice, a change, and the planet that is our only home reels and buckles under the accumulated strain.
    Often, this story has also compassed stories of dispossession, in which the needs of the newcomers and their industry disrupted the imperatives of the native people. As Benjamin Church built his mill in 1665, an English neighbour fenced pasture for his imported livestock, and the Wampanoag were no longer free to hunt the deer and waterfowl that sustained them. Another settler set his hard-hoofedbeasts loose to trample the clam beds, and a band of Wampanoag went hungry that night.
    War followed, as war so often has followed such acts of dispossession. In 1675, the