Without doubt, writing this post has been difficult. I began some three weeks back, in the public library in the charming coastal town of Robe. I had been visiting my family (I get to see them once a year). Going back is quite an experience. For one thing, it involves about 21 hours in airplanes. Despite that I have not a few hours flying small planes and gliders, I do not enjoy commercial flights, especially long flights cooped up with several hundred others. I have come to understand that it is the spiritual aspects of the return that attract me almost as much as the pleasure of being with my family.
One of the very early settlements in South Australia, Robe is a four hour drive south-east of Adelaide. It has quite distinctive architecture that I think may have been influenced by early Cornish miners.
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The picture will give you some idea. In those days, there was no nation called Australia; just several British colonies, each started by different groups. Of course, New South Wales is best known for its beginnings as a penal colony that, in turn, spawned a penal settlement in Tasmania. No convicts were involved founding the other states (possible exception being Western Australia).South Australia was settled in much the same way as the earlier colonies in America, being founded by religious dissenters, mostly Baptists from England who, In turn, encouraged persecuted Lutherans from Germany to join them. The discovery of tin and copper attracted Cornish miners who were Primitive Methodists. It was not long before the colony was a hotchpotch of different beliefs and the eventual capital, Adelaide, soon had as many churches as public houses! The town has quite a history. For example, between 1856 and 1858, some 20,000 Chinese were offloaded from ships at Robe and made their way to the goldfields some 280 miles to the east, because the ship owners wanted to avoid the head tax imposed by the state of Victoria, where the gold was.
I had a great time with my daughter, her husband, and two children. This included a visit to fossil bearing caves some 70 miles distant. A World Heritage site, the fossils displayed were deposited between one million and forty thousand years ago. The entrance to the caves is surrounded by typical Aussie Bush.
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As you can see, it is dense, almost impenetrable in many places. It is hard to imagine those Chinese folk of yore trudging their weary way through this stuff to seek their fortune.People came from all over to join in the great digging for gold, including many from Californian still seeking riches once the gold rush there had ended. One outcome of the gold diggings around the towns of Ararat and Ballarat was the rebellion by the miners against the British soldiers enforcing taxes. This culminated in an act of rebellion known as the Eureka Stockade. Despite being put down, this was one of the early stirrings of nationalism but becoming a country in its own right was some 50 or so years in the future. Australia remained very British right through to mid-Twentieth Century. Of course, it still has the Queen of England as its titular head, represented by the Governor General and the State Governors, and the Parliamentary system of government. Since the 1950s, the population has been swollen by waves of immigration from Europe and Asia. The population growth rate is the second highest in the world and 60% of this is due to immigration; some 24% of Australians were born elsewhere, and only 37% give their ancestry as Australian.
However, it is the land of my birth and I have been witness to the tremendous changes related to the power of massive immigration, from a very 'British' country (when England was the 'Mother Country') to a polyglot, multicultural hotchpotch where folk from very many nations get on amazingly well. I think the multicultural mix is one element that leads me to be proud to be Australian. Being multicultural seems a strong strand in the sense of being 'Australian'. Other powerful threads are the value of leisure, interest and participation in sport, and 'mateship' (the willingness to help others overtaken by hardship); this is not the land of 'dog eat dog, catch as catch can, and the devil take the hindmost'.
It usually takes me a couple of days to decode the current Aussie ' lingo' which seems to be born of a desire to keep visitors from other countries in the dark even when appearing to speak English. Occasionally, when excited, I have been known to drop into Aussie vernacular becoming, in that moment, almost incomprehensible! Certainly, there is a kind of spirituality (hardly Christian since less than 1% of Australians attend church) and kinship that requires a deal of living in the Land Down Under to understand and acquire.
I felt this very much that sunny afternoon in the library at Robe, while my family were off hunting native orchids in national parks. Later, in one of the local pubs, standing before a friendly, warming fire place and holding a glass of the local red, conversing with perfect strangers, I felt another, particularly Aussie kinship. From home grown Aussies, recent Brits, folk from the Baltic states, the Mediterranean countries, through to the most recent migrations from Asia, one can find oneself next to someone from almost any country in the world
In that little coastal town, Robe, I had the strongest feeling of the Land Down Under. Australia is a long way from America and Europe. On the other hand, it is quite close to Asia, China, and Japan. Not so far from India either! Australia is increasingly drawn into Asia. Did you know that Perth is closer to Singapore than to Sydney!
So there is quite a sense of history around this little coastal town. Then it was back to Adelaide for several days before returning to Sydney to rejoin my son and his family. He and his lovely partner have two sons, so I have four grandchildren in Australia.
The journey back was broken by a pleasant day in San Francisco, spent with two good friends, that included a visit to the recently refurbished Academy of Sciences in the Golden Gate Park. I confess that I found the 'red-eye', the mid-night special to Philadelphia more than a little wearying, as I had had little sleep and got little on that flight. However, I perked up after breakfast at the airport. How nice it was to catch the commuter plane to Elmira and to be once more 'home'. It is said that one who has lived in more than one country is ever homesick. I find this to be so; nonetheless, it is good to have two homes.
