Sacred Site by Kim Fleet
Where’s home for you? I get asked this frequently, and my answer is always, “I dunno. I’m a nomad.” I’d lived in four different parts of England before I was seven, went to university in Scotland, and lived in Australia for years. Many places tug at my heart and can claim to have been my home for a while, and yet I also have an affinity with places I’ve only visited. There are times when the pull to go back to the flat red desert of Central Australia is so strong it aches like homesickness. The scent of eucalyptus is particularly powerful in inspiring longing for the outback. Questions about home and belonging thread through Sacred Site. Many of the characters are displaced from their original homes. For some, the relocation is enforced and unwelcome; for others, the chance to live somewhere else is a dream come true. Yet living in another country, in a different culture, no matter how familiar it may seem on the surface, is a recipe for tension, and ripe for the key element of fiction: conflict. Conflict doesn’t have to be people fighting all the time, just people with different motivations, ambitions, perspectives and problems to solve.
Let me draw on some examples from Sacred Site. The protagonist, Esther King, is an English anthropologist working with Aboriginal communities. Though emigrating to Australia is something she’s dreamed about since she was a little girl, she finds it difficult to adjust to Australian attitudes, particularly sexism and racism. Her lover, an Aboriginal man called Kent, is affected by forced removal from his traditional tribal lands. His ancestors were affected by the stolen generation policy, which decreed that Aboriginal children of mixed descent could be taken from their families and raised in children’s homes or fostered with white couples. Several generations later, Kent has only recently discovered his Aboriginal heritage, and is uncertain where he belongs. As an Aboriginal man who has been raised as white, and until recently identified himself as white, he fits comfortably into neither white nor Aboriginal society, and both regard him as an outsider.
Being an outsider is a theme in Sacred Site, reflected in all the historical periods the novel encompasses: the settler family who seek to tame the outback and who embark on a mission of hope to establish a sheep station in a newly discovered area of territory; the immigrants on the £10 passage who build a lifestyle that dazzles their relatives back in Britain; the man fleeing an acrimonious divorce by moving to the other side of the continent. The setting lends itself to this: a remote mining town that draws those on the run from the law, from broken hearts, from themselves. Dislocation is reflected in the Aboriginal stories, too: a Dreaming story about a hunter banished from his tribal territory, and a young Aboriginal woman shunned by her family for bearing a child of mixed descent.
So where does that leave us? Where is home? Perhaps it’s where you want to be, where you feel you belong. Or maybe it’s where you’re accepted for what and who you are. Early in the novel, two Aboriginal characters joke with each other about the insults they receive at the hands of other Aboriginal people who resent the fact they’re educated, have jobs, and want the best for their children. They’re labelled ‘coconuts’: black on the outside and white in the middle. It’s a term that Aboriginal people who strive hard to break from a cycle of poverty naturally find offensive.
There are many Aboriginal people whose families were affected by the stolen generation and who wish to recover their Aboriginal roots. I’ve spent a lot of time with such people; people who don’t know who they are or where they belong, and they explained that they felt like there was something missing. They had been brought up to believe they were white, yet it didn’t fit comfortably. Once they discovered they were Aboriginal, a lot of things made sense to them, and they knew where they fitted in, where they belonged, and suddenly they had an identity they were proud of.
And maybe that answer’s good enough for my original question: home it where it all makes sense.
Until tomorrow, Kim
August 13th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
I’ve been much enjoying your blog, Kim. I’ve noticed startlingly similar themes in your novel to my own (just relieved that yours is set on a different continent!): people’s search for where they belong, reconciling the past with the present, differing concepts of time in different cultures. Looking forward to reading how these work through in your story.
August 14th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
Kim, I like your lightness of touch over the keyboard, the weave of your narrative. Keep the thoughts moving.
I was thinking about where is home. More than twenty years ago my mother’s uncle telephoned from Adelaide, looking for his long-lost niece. He only knew my mother’s maiden name, and by this time she had five grown up children. They had last met during the war, when he came to stay with her in Kalamunda, in the hills in Perth. He was in the merchant navy then, and they had put up in Perth for repairs to the ship. Brave profession, I remember thinking when I was told the story. But the sea ran in his veins, as my mother’s family were Hebridean, from the Isles of Lewis and Uist. She was the fruit of a Protestant and Catholic union, where she was settled on as a Catholic. But that is another story.
My great uncle John had jumped ship in Sydney after the war in 1946, and had lived in Broken Hill for a long time. A big strapping man, he loved a drink, was bold, knew how to look after himself, and more importantly to my mother, he knew how to look out for others. A brawl might start with him taking the side of the underdog, and he would be promptly bundled out the staff entrance out the back when the police arrived. He was now 72, and ringing my mother with an urge to see her again. He was still an illegal immigrant, and for decades, he crossed the street when he saw a policeman. He had married, raised two fostered boys, had a drivers licence, and I guess he received the pension. His wife had long since died.
He arrived in Perth and stayed for a visit over a week or more. He told my mother his burning ambition was to go home to Lewis. He had not spoken his mother-tongue Gaelic for so long, he longed to see where he came from, and see his family. I think he had one sister left, and he might have also had an ailing brother. He had been the youngest in his family.
My mother accompanied him to the Immigration Department for an interview he needed to get a residency, and a passport. I can only imagine all the fear he must have felt that after 40 years, he could be deported. But this was not Howard’s Australia, who had since made children at primary school fly the national flag. I was told that the interviewing officer said reassuringly “it’s ok, there was an amnesty in 1954″, and we have always laughed about that ever since. It seemed he was not for deportation, and they gave him a passport to go home.
He went and returned, and I think he then went again and returned. Then later he went to stay. He wanted to die where he began, to be buried in his own turf. I was moved by that. So then, where is home? Is it the place of our forebears? Is it where our formative years are spent? Is it where our children are? Was it where he was accepted, where he could speak Gaelic and where he felt belonged? It was where he laid his spirit down.
A homecoming. We all wish for a good homecoming.
August 14th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
MESSAGE FOR PHILIP
Although Kim will be blogging again tonight, she is in fact away. I will make sure she replies to you the minute she returns. Thank you for sharing such a lovely memory.
For Picnic Publishing
August 18th, 2008 at 7:09 pm
Dear Philip,
Thank you so much for your kind comments and for your beautiful story about your uncle. He sounds like a real character who led a fascinating life. I like his explanation that he wanted to finish where he began, that after all his adventures he came home, and home was where he started. I’m also intrigued by the idea of language contributing to his sense of home and belonging. It’s a beautiful notion to think of ending your life surrounded by the sounds, the language and intonation that you first knew. Many Aboriginal people die away from their traditional lands because hospital treatment is typically in the cities and not in remote areas. For them, it’s important to die where they were born, and they believe that their spirit is transported back to their traditional country in a rainbow or a whirl wind.
Thank you again for your kind comments, and I’m glad you enjoyed my blog.
Best wishes,
Kim
August 18th, 2008 at 7:13 pm
Dear Andrew,
Many thanks for your kind comments on my blog. I’ll be interested to read your book. Themes of belonging and identity are always current, and I suppose they’re part of the territory of being a story teller. Everyone likes to hear a story, to make sense of the world and their place in it, to find out where they’ve come from and to speculate about what’s to come.
Best wishes,
Kim