I’m leading something of a double life. Every week, a few days in Murwillumbah, and the rest in Mullumbimby – my former place of residence. It’s a kind of transitional bridge between the familiar and the new. No doubt, it’s a crazy idea that will prolong my sense of being lost in space.
When back in Mullum, I keep bumping into friends and acquaintances who offer up quizzical, confused looks, as if I’m some sort of anthropological curiosity. ‘I thought you’d left?’ they ask. ‘Yes’, I say. ‘So, what are you doing back here?’ they inquire, almost accusingly.
I’ll admit, this here-there gig feels a tad surreal. It’s like finding yourself in a limbo-land where confused and dislocated strangers and oddballs lurk. Or perhaps it’s a spiritual halfway house awaiting some sort of resolution; a commitment to place. (apologies for all the metaphors!).
As you’ll surmise, these are the angsty utterances of the privileged.
After all, I haven’t been displaced by war or subjected to violent colonisation.
Nor am I poor, or without family and friends. And I have a secure roof over my head. Still, I feel dislocated. That’s my current lot.
To make sense of all this, I’ve plunged into a trove of surveys relating to peoples’ experiences of what we might term place relocation. It turns out that the vast majority of Aussies who move to a different place experience some level of trauma. Most eventually settle. They accept where they are, and all that follows. A significant cohort, however, a third or more, never do. They remain dogged by deep unease, sadness and grief, often resulting in what the psychologists refer to as ‘relocation depression’.
All the supports and reassurances count for nought as these unfortunates sink into despair or decide to flee. And they do so at enormous financial and personal cost.
Sometimes they move to other places that feel equally alien.
If the emotional attachment to their original habitat is strong, the tendency is to constantly compare and contrast, to idealise, to forget why they chose to move in the first place.
And because they feel so unsettled, so transient, they’re reluctant to invest in place. You can see where this merry-go-round leads, can’t you?
Yep, to an emotional abyss.
What this speaks to is life. What passes for ‘home’ as a felt experience is complex and wildly elusive. Our sense of belonging is as mysterious as it is obvious.
I was surprised by what I missed in Mullum. Friends, familiar faces, places, country – yes, of course. But I also missed the cruddy, irritating bits. I most grieved the energy, soul, spirit – call it what you will – those deep, enduring affinities that ground us in time and place.
It’s these amorphous qualities that reflect our deepest sensibilities, expressed most vividly through storied accounts of the past and present.
Now don’t get me wrong. Murwillumbah is a fascinating place, full of surprises, and nestled in one of the most scenic parts of Australia. It’s got an amazing (and thriving) arts scene, one of the best regional art galleries in Australia, a top-notch aquatic centre and excellent cafes and restaurants.
The people I’ve me have been wonderful. The main supermarket could do with an upgrade, but hey, nowhere’s perfect.
What I’m talking about here is difference and the shock of leaving a place in which I felt enfolded – sorry, I can’t think of another word. I belonged, didn’t have to think twice about my attachments to people and place.
That’s the crux of my grief.
I don’t claim to understand the ins and outs of relocation blues. It’s complex, right? But if I’m going through this rather unpleasant experience, just try and imagine what it must be like to be a refugee, a Palestinian, anyone in fact who is torn from place. Brutalised, humiliated, subject to the cruelties of the powerful: how on earth do such people cope, if in fact they do?
We know enough from the literature on such matters how resilient such people can be, even though they carry the weight of untold trauma. Do they forget everything that has happened to them? Not at all. But as Garbor Maté observes in The Myth of Normal, without a binding sense of attachment to others, to place, we run aground on the rocky terrain of trauma. For the million or more Palestinians who have lost everything – their homes, family, friends, schools, universities, hospitals, places of worship etc – the scale of suffering is unimaginable; the ongoing cruelty by an occupying power, unconscionable.
The ethical duty of all humanitarians is to keep telling the stories of those who suffer so grievously at the hands of the powerful.
Why?
Because these are the stories the powerful want us to ignore as they claim moral virtue and human decency. It’s anything but.
The upshot of all the above? Well, my attention is now even more focussed on the suffering of those impacted by war and conflict.
Milan Kundera’s remark that: ‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’ should prompt us to constantly remind ourselves and others of what death, destruction and displacement mean in actual human terms.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
