South of my Days

Lisa Brockwell longs for the light while hiding from the glare

North Sea. Hang on. No. Brunswick Heads, NSW

Think of all the work the weather can do in a poem: symbol and foreshadowing; metonymy, for the spirit of a place or time; a metaphor for the poet’s inner state; a frame for the poem’s cinematography; an event, a catalyst. Sometimes weather functions allegorically, as a sign of divine intervention. Latterly, in its climate-change variants, it seems sent to punish human stupidity and greed. Weather often signals how little control humans have over our lives. We are at the mercy of this world, not vice-versa.

This house has been far out at sea all night,

The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,

Winds stampeding the fields under the window

Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky

The hills had new places, and wind wielded

Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,

Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

Ted Hughes, ‘Wind’

To talk of the weather is often to describe our quotidian struggle or ease with our ‘circumstances’. The seasons, though, provide a larger frame for understanding what happens when circumstance – landscape and settlement, and all the human endeavour it hosts – meets time and its changes. Can we grow what we need? Will we thrive or be thwarted?

South of my days’ circle, part of my blood’s country,

rises that tableland, high delicate outline

of bony slopes wincing under the winter,

low trees, blue-leaved and olive, outcropping granite-

clean, lean, hungry country. The creek’s leaf-silenced,

willow choked, the slope a tangle of medlar and crab-apple

branching over and under, blotched with a green lichen;

and the old cottage lurches in for shelter.

Judith Wright, ‘South of My Days’

I’m in the middle of a visit back to my native Australia, and this is when the seasonal whiplash is at its most dramatic. I left Angus at the end of January with the landscape hunkered down in its long, wintery sleep. I was longing for the days to lengthen and for the first snowdrops and crocuses to emerge. I arrived in Byron Bay in high summer, stepping off the plane at seven in the morning into full sunlight and a blast furnace. Within just a day or two I began to acclimatise. Humans are so quick to do this – to reset the mid-point of ourselves, and quickly find our physical and psychic homeostasis again.

view from the wing, with Xanax

But those first few days of strangeness provide an altered state of consciousness. Briefly, I felt like a child experiencing things for the first time. The vastness of this continent, for one thing. My plane made landfall between Broome and Port Hedland, in the north of Western Australia, and it still took more than five hours to fly across the country to land in Sydney. It was dark so I couldn’t see much from the window, but I remembered other flights over this strange and beautiful tapestry of desert and ancient mountains and lakes. I watched the map as we flew over Kati Thanda – Lake Eyre, the largest ephemeral, endorheic lake on the Australian continent, covering over 9,000 square kilometres and full for the first time since 1974. An engorged colossus, triggering a massive ecological revival in the desert for its vast ecosystem of birds, fish and flora, and keeping the heart of the continent alive through yet another seasonal cycle of flood and drought and flame. A wonder of the world entirely independent of anything humans will ever do, think or invent.

The oldest landmass on the planet, Australia is a place that makes even geological time look jejune. ‘Old soul’ doesn’t even begin to cover it. Australia’s Indigenous people have been here for something like 50,000 years, and the ratio of people to land mass has always been extraordinarily sparse. It’s a vast place with a modest human footprint. The rocks and rivers and deserts and spirits have had the run of the place since the beginning of time. Indigenous Australia has always understood the immensity of their land, and has tried to share that wisdom with those of us who came later – some in shackles, some as refugees, many as economic migrants of one kind or another, in great waves of humanity, displaced or desperate for a fresh start. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard says that “immensity is a philosophical category of daydream. Daydream undoubtedly feeds on all kinds of sights, but through a sort of natural inclination, it contemplates grandeur. And this contemplation produces an attitude that is so special, an inner state that is so unlike any other, that the daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.”

intolerable heat plus Scottish headcold

Sydney airport is only a couple of miles away from Sydney Cove, where the first fleet landed in 1788 to establish a penal colony, bringing a human cargo in chains and dispossessing the indigenous Gadigal people, who – despite all they have been through – remain here in Sydney or Gadigal Country. Now the airport is one of the busiest in the world, bringing more than 17 million people into and out of Australia each year, many of them descendants of generations of prisoners, refugees and desperate migrants. A nation with a 96% migrant population and so far away from the rest of the world has an intense and somewhat hysterical relationship with its ports and airports. (Our nearest neighbours, Indonesia and New Zealand, are seven hours’ flight north or five hours’ flight east from Sydney. It took me almost forty hours to travel from Angus to Byron Bay.) Instinctively, I always rush through the international gate without stopping to soak up that very particular atmosphere, or else I will be overwhelmed by its tableaux of separation and reunion and homecoming: adult children coming home after years and years away, grandparents meeting already-toddler grandchildren for the first time, long-lost relatives from the old country on their first visit to this new world. And almost all of them dressed for the wrong weather.

I stood at the departure gate for the first time more than thirty years ago with a one-way ticket to late autumn in New York, beside two bewildered parents who had never been overseas in their lives. They were terrified at the prospect of my disappearance into a city so vast and foreign; one they knew only from Hollywood and the news, and from where our only communication would be a weekly reverse-charges call from a phone box on the street. They were relieved when I later arrived in damp, grey London, though they only knew it from family lore. My mother’s mother was born in Portsmouth and married in the cathedral there to an Irish sailor from the Merchant Navy, between the wars. Her decent working-class parents heartily disapproved, and so the couple soon left for Australia, never to return. My father’s people had deeper roots in Australia, out Hill End and Bathurst way. One branch of his family were Ayrshire farm labourers, another, convicts transported from London. The young woman originally from Belfast, transported for stealing a clock from the pub where she worked; her future husband a stable boy of seventeen who had stolen two horse blankets. Both sent to Australia in chains, never to return home.

No matter our background, all Australians share a strange, splintered and sorrowful relationship with the concept of home. Dispossession and displacement are common themes, whether our backgrounds are Indigenous, convict, migrant or refugee. Every non-Indigenous family holds the stories of our strange elsewhere, often suppressed and subterranean. For Aboriginal Australia the trauma has been magnified by unimaginable horrors whitewashed in unforgivable ways: massacres, forced adoptions, deliberate and calculated extermination (in Tasmania), and the terrible injustice of not being considered citizens until 1967. All compounded by the shameful failure of the country to come together in reconciliation and grant a symbolic voice to the Aboriginal experience in the Australian parliament.

For those of us who are not Indigenous, the strangeness of being both from elsewhere but at home here leaks out in all kinds of ways. When I was a child, I didn’t think twice about the fake snow sprayed on windows at Christmas time, the Christmas trees decorated with robins and candles and reindeer, the Christmas cards showing thatched cottages in the snow, the roast dinner with all the trimmings that my father slaved over in 30-degree heat. It wasn’t until I experienced my first snowy Christmas in London that I understood how the Christmas I had always celebrated was meant to feel in my body – and during Advent, in my soul, with its yearning for the light. We had we lit our Advent candles at mass, still ducking the summer glare.

Arbroath High St

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, my husband tells me that Aberdeen has experienced zero hours of sunshine since the 21st of January. He tells me this, and I long for home. In high summer in Australia, I could do with a lot less light. It’s relentless and brutal and blunt. And there’s no roomy, languid twilight or gloaming as there is in the Scottish summer. In sub-tropical Australia (which is very different to Scotland-like Tasmania – again, this country is vast) the sun comes on hard and fast, then disappears again with as little fanfare. Last night we went out for dinner at six. I asked for a table inside, because it was too hot and bright for the verandah. By seven the sun had dropped like a stone, and by eight the last light vanished as if somebody had flicked a switch. No dog-walking twilight to enjoy; you better take your torch. Either you’re shielding from the glare or sitting in the dark fending off mosquitos. There’s nothing in between.

The seasons in Angus match those from the literature I grew up with and love. It shaped the way I see the world and constructed my idea of myself. Keats’s mists and mellow fruitfulness, the spring and summer of Shakespeare’s sonnets; the liberation of spring for young women in Austen novels, now freed from the tyranny of the drawing room and able to walk out late in the day. The fog of Prufrock. The burgeoning hope of the Whitsun Weddings. Adlestrop.

Thinking about growing up with bushfire season in January and short June days, I was reminded of the wonderful talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on The Danger of a Single Story. It’s a powerful polemic against the over-simplifying effect of identity politics – dangerous in all walks of life, but anathema to writers and artists. Adiche grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria, the precocious daughter of academics, and began reading and writing stories at a very young age. Her first stories were populated by white children with blue eyes eating apples and drinking ginger beer and wondering when the sun would come out. Sounds a lot like Enid Blyton: how strange and stultifying to be colonised by a foreign reality so far from one’s daily experience and family history. But Adiche is clear that merely replacing one set of stereotypes with another isn’t the answer. The best writing comes from an original and individual place, a perspective confident enough to invite transformation and ambiguity, not flattened to champion an identity. That has always been human experience. We are, and should be, free to imagine life outside of the confines of our birth and circumstance. That’s the gift that artists are supposed to bring to the cultures they enrich. All artists have dual citizenship and access to other, stranger seasons.

Kirriemuir cemetery with Arctic poodle (winter coat)

For me, the most comforting thing about the northern seasons is their slow cycling; here in sub-tropical Australia we merely flip between extremes: the wet and the dry. But at this stage of my life, I take a lot of consolation in watching the wheel turn, the trees awaken, the flowers do their thing, independent of all our human complications and sorrows. I know I’m not alone in sensing that winter might be coming, with all its White Walkers of war, economic volatility, climate collapse, political unrest and alien intelligence. With all that weight and darkness, I look forward to waiting for the snowdrops and crocuses. The first leaves budding on the birch and beech, and the sun finally waking up with me.

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local tour guide with ancient Pictish toilet