Home: Tasmania

This weekend I’m back in Tasmania visiting friends and family. Tasmania has been my home for the last seven years, and now, being back for the first time since moving interstate, I’m thinking a lot about home as a concept.

As I’ve mentioned in another post, I have a mixed race and immigrant background. Over the last couple of years, I’ve thought a lot about the idea of home and how my identity and experience affects the way I make home.

I’d like to share a poem by Singaporean poet Tse Hao Guang that explores the question of identity in relation to place (being “from” somewhere) and subverts expectations by taking us beyond place to feeling and experience.

(photo of the poem from my copy of SG Poems 2015-2016)

I love how this poem portrays place and origins as being more than the sum of its parts. Tse Hao Guang answers the ever-elusive question, “where are you from?” with a series of images, people, and events. Home is never just a place. Where you’re from is usually not as simple as the question appears, and sometimes home has too many names.

Over the last few years, I’ve found a home in Tasmania. Right now, I’m sitting in the lounge room of my parents’ house. Outside the window, there’s a hill covered in the greens and browns of trees and shrubbery, and against that is a backdrop of clear, bright blue sky. It feels like my own little pocket of the world.

In many ways, that perfectly describes Tasmania – an island tucked away from the rest of the world. In this small city, my feet never have to think about where they’re going, because all the streets are familiar. Everywhere I look, I find a memory, an old piece of myself. And of course, there are the people, too. The friends and family that still live here who turn this place into somewhere I can call home.

Maybe home is just a place that knows you as completely as you know it. Maybe home is the memories you grasp at of all the places that made you who you are. Maybe home is visiting a city, changed in so many small ways that it is no longer the same as when you left, and knowing that your footsteps no longer join the hundreds of others leaving their mark here. Maybe home is something you must make again and again and again. And something you must sometimes lose.