Tasmania: observations
I went to Australia, for my brother’s wedding. Some observations:
There is something good about being with a whole bunch of Australians, that I apparently can’t remember now from America. Without being able to directly remember the feeling, I can still relay that it is the kind of thing that makes you cry when you walk down the aisle of the first airplane full of people being Australian everywhere. And that makes you say to yourself that you feel warm in a place that you had forgotten could be warm. My guess is that this is to do with Australia being my homeland of sorts, rather than its being an Australian-specific phenomenon. I worry that my life is just constantly impoverished by being a foreigner everywhere I spend time, but on net I did feel like coming back to America soon enough, so if it is very impoverished on net then I am also bad at making choices, which is probably a bigger issue.
There are really a lot of details of things that are different between places. Somehow I didn’t notice this so much when I came to America, or when moving between America and England, though I doubt that Australia is much more different than those places. Maybe when everything is strange one has less of a sense of many specific differences, whereas seeing familiar things after a long break, each one stands out— ‘Oh that! And that! Oh my god, I remember that!’ I got some The Natural Confectionry Co squirms, and smelled the women’s magazines, and saw Darrell Lea chocolates and ate quite a few cherry ripe bars, though honestly I’m not sure that’s a thing I ever used to do. (Ok, I can mostly remember instances of this that relate to candy, but I think it was more general.)
There are even more details of things that are incredibly familiar in my Grandmother’s house, and the restaurant where I grew up. For instance, the shape of the corrosion on the mirror in the little bedroom. The sight of my bare feet stepping carefully on flat brown stones of the path in the front garden. Spots on the floor that feel like I look at them practically every day, which is probably true minus the last twenty years. Streets that smell like how it used to be to ride my bike around alone before dawn.
Tasmania seems to actually just go on existing, the whole time I’m over here, in spite of the fact that it clearly belongs in the ancient past, not just on the other side of some water. For instance, I left the flounder game in the old dresser, and closed the drawer, and grew up, and came to live in a different world full of computers and work and casual acquaintances, and the whole time that flounder game is just sitting there, smelling like the old dresser, and I can go back there on an airplane and touch it.
Tasmania is wildly beautiful. Like, not just the bits that make it onto calendars and posters. Even driving along the highway, it seems like a totally different kind of thing to normal places. I photographed some trees where my family was hanging out at the Arboretum, to illustrate this, but I don’t think photography captures it (see below anyway).
Beyond Tasmania’s beauty, it just generally seems kind of weirdly too real to me. I don’t know what I mean by that now, but it troubled me when I was there. Maybe in America the ground near my feet seems like some shapes and colors—dead information. Whereas in Tasmania it feels somehow alive and rich and engaging. Probably I imagine this.
