Farewell 2008, AKA Facebook isn’t working

Posted on | December 27, 2008 | No Comments

Cleaning the mussels

The next few days I’m sitting out the remainder of a month long stint in my home town, Hobart. Today I got back from Bruny Island, where I grew up, having spent the best part of a week there with my family sampling the delights of Cloudy Bay Lagoon. Thanks to William’s culinary skillz, fresh pipis, mussels and oysters were on the menu, which is a long way from the meat and three veg we were used to as kids. Succumbing to my hayfever, we packed up a little earlier than I would have liked today given that my little niece had just learned to say “cuddle”. Now we are back in Hobart, although we brought with us some amazing cheese and chocolate that, apart from oysters, are now the main things Bruny Island is famous for.

The whole time I’ve been in Tasmania I’ve been ruminating that things seem to have reversed since I left. Now the local city council is apologizing for discriminating against gay advocates, at the same time that others are retreating so spectacularly on this front (I will need to write about the Pope’s attack on gender theory – the vocation I chose over Catholicism – another time). Meanwhile Bruny has gone from being an embarrassing place to take my friends to a gastronomic and recreational wonderland. The hire cars and 4WDs that populate the island these days seem to be the antithesis of the rusty old utes I rode in as a kid, singing “Take Me Home, Country Road” and “Road to Gundagai” into the wind. Now I have to line up and pay the same ferry fare as all the other tourists. Not to mention the $20 pass to go to the lighthouse and the beach that my property backed on to for the past 30 years.

I feel alienated by a lot of these changes, even though in the wider scheme of things they are trivial. On the way back to the city today we visited a very sacred site honoring the memory of Truganini, and I remembered again the horrors that have been conducted in the name of territory and sovereignty on that island, in this state, and the country more broadly. The signs at The Neck might describe in detail what we now know about Truganini’s life, but that knowledge doesn’t help me know what to do with the potential that my direct ancestors may have been involved in these acts on land I also feel history through.
View towards south Bruny Island
Clearly, these changes compel me to come to terms with the reasons I left home and the reasons I continue to stay away. I think some of the answers come from the fact that I’m writing this because Facebook is seriously compromised tonight, and I can’t read a message that’s waiting there about something not very important but from someone who has become very special to me in the past year. The function lag I can only assume is due to the number of people all over the world that are using Facebook this holiday to share their special moments with others. That, combined with the parlous state of regional broadband that I will bore you with another time.

Catherine and I have already written about the special kinds of intimacy that social networking and online culture allows. It offers a sense of connection between a range of people outside the normative arrangements of family backgrounds when this need for escape is pressing. This strikes me so much the greater when I am here, removed from the speed of the inner city. Even though I struggle to tell them exactly how much, there are so many people I miss when I come to Tasmania because they are the ones who have only known the side of me that could develop after I left home. Often these are the people who value things about me that my family do not or cannot ever know or see.

But for precisely the opposite reason, I love coming home because my family know those things that the rest of my life can never remind me of, or find the time to reveal. Until now there have been few opportunities to blend these two histories – but the last few weeks have made me very grateful that they can and do combine. Now I can at least tell Dad how popular his miniature donkey is on Facebook (!) and for Christmas I was spoiled with some selections from the Amazon wish list I added to this blog a while ago.

The wishlist exists not because I assume there is a huge crop of generous long tail donors out there, but because I’m about to move to a much slower broadband area, and I wanted to ask some of you without restrictions to help me stay on top of the TV I want to write about in future! On this… stay tuned to New Matilda this week for another Underbelly piece. I have been trying to display the Amazon list and my All Consuming badge here on the blog for some time now, but have been stumped by the new design layout, so if anyone reading is able to help me get the badges to fit my new design, I would love to hear from you.

When I get back to Sydney next week I’m finally moving in to a brand new house. After a lot of thought and hesitation, those in favour of a seachange have convinced me to live in Austinmer – about an hour and a half south of Sydney. There are lots of reasons for this, including what Genevieve Bell described to me as ‘the two body problem’ in academe. But mostly it’s time to start practicing what I preach, and put my work life in perspective. Waking up with the sun rising over the ocean should certainly help with that! Here’s to a happy 2009 for all of you as well – and to many more connections, online and off. xx

Category: Saturn Returns, Travel

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