Travel Writers 1: Home and Away.

Travel Writers 1: Home and Away

Leaving a Home

Takis and I have just returned ‘home’ to Australia for the thirteenth time since beginning work on the house in Greece.

It’s a mighty long trip and it took a week to get over jet lag. We are at last beginning sleeping naturally at night, and not dozing off in the daytime!

We sadly closed down the Greek house, shutting the shutters, rolling up carpets, putting curtains in drawers. There had not been rain for a long time so I watered the garden well. We will have someone come in to keep an eye on the house and garden for us, but I know there will be a lot to do when we return. I know this as the same happens here in Australia. I leave the house clean and the garden weeded and watered, and though there is someone here to keeps an eye on our Australian home for us there is always a need to refresh things and get the place livable again.

Home Again!

I recently read a review of a new book by James Clifford called Returns. It is a book I must read as Clifford once again tackles the subject of living between cultures. Mark Abbey, the reviewer, says that Clifford takes a positive view of the global world, and that in Returns Clifford points out that in our contempory world ‘the indigenous’ and ‘the diasporic’ are no longer separate; one can hardly exist without the other.

(We’ve seen this in the current story of Ebola outbreak, and of the way in which World Health Organisation helped, and also Diasporic Africans – who particularly knew what was needed ‘back home’. )

But when I think about our lives I ask myself which is our ‘real’ home, which our indigenous home, and which our disaporic home? Its hard to know! England and Greece might be called our indigenous homes as that is where we were born, yet, in another respect, they have become our diasporic homes as they are our home from home, places we return to when we can. Australia however remains our home-base and although for the past thirteen years we have only been there for half of each year it is the place where our children live, and where, before retiring, the place where we both worked for most of our lives.

Writing about Stays and Journeys

Travel books can be divided into reports of journeys, about short stays or long stays. Most is seem to me are about ‘a journey’. One book I want to get my hands on is Robert MacFarlane’s The Old Ways. It is a very poetic discription of walks he’s made in various countries. He definitely writes about Journeys. Another is Carol Drinkwater’s Olive Route. In this book she describes her travels around the Mediterranean trying to piece together the history of olive growing.

Many travel books are also about short stays. For instance, Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi, is a very personal account of stay in Greece and his meeting with Lawrence Durrell, just at the beginning of the 2WW. Bill Bryson is another well known travel writer and two of his books, Neither Here nor There, about travelling in Europe, and Down Under his book his book about Australia, echos some of our thoughts of living here and overseas. He tends to takes a journey to another country stay for a while and then wittily tell his readers about the adventures he’s had and something about the people he’s met. But he also writes about longer stays as he has lived in both England and the USA.

One gets the sense that many travel writers are restless folk, looking at other people’s homes and wondering if they’d like to live there. And some do get to stay for quite long periods in ‘other places.’ Charmain Clift’s Mermaid Singing tells a family story written while living for a year or two on Kalithera, a sponge diving community in Greece. Frances Mayes Under the Tuscan Sun, at home in Italy and Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence both give an account of rebuilding of a house, pointing out the absurd things that can happen when you live in another country.

Home from Home

Pico Iyer in his book Global Soul explores yet another kind of situation, the dilemma of those who live in more than one place, and the need to feel ‘at home’ in more than one place.

Of course we know that many travel writers must live somewhere other than the place they are writing about, and naturally they endevour to keep their real home life private. George Negus, an Australian, took his family to live just south of Florence for a year. In his book The World from Italy while discussing football, food and politics he attempts to get closer to the cultural issues that are at the heart of Italian culture today. We do not get much of an idea about his other life, the one he left and the one he’ll be going back to.

Perhaps Eleni Gage’s book North of Ithaka describes a little more of what I’ve experience, the ‘living in two places’that Pico Iyer writes about. For her there was a the need to go back to her grandmothers village in Greece and rebuild the family house, while also not give up the life she was still happily living, with family, in America.

But, as James Clifford points out, the ‘coming home’, to either place, will always involved a process of ‘re-indigenization’ and ‘re-immersion’. I’m sure that George Negus and family, Charmain Clift and family had to deal with a kind of re-immersion when they came back to Australia after their time away. And, for those of us who do it every year, this is a continuous process.

Thus, each year as we return to unlock the red door of our Lemnos house, we are not looking forward to hiding away in some remote ‘romantic’ spot for a peaceful holiday, we are there to re-engage with local traditions, and with a world away from our other home. 

And, as we come back to Australia and climb the steps to our mock colonial door, we know we will again have to find out what has happened in our local area while we’ve been away. We will have to catch up with family and friends, re-engage, pick up, from where we left off.