Almost an Island

Somewhere in the world there must still be at least one book, probably a school textbook from the 1960s, with my first-ever address on the flyleaf:

Box 31,
Curramulka,
Yorke Peninsula,
South Australia,
Australia,
The World,
The Universe.

What I liked about this address was the way it zoomed in and panned out between two extremes of darkness. At one end there was the small cube of black air behind the thirty-first locked door in the wall of post-boxes in the foyer of the Curramulka Post Office. At the other end, there was infinite space.

Of the terms in between those two extremes, all but one seemed an inexact way of saying where we actually were. ‘Curramulka’ was somewhere that we were not, a couple of miles away, for we lived in an outlying farmhouse and not the town itself. ‘Australia’, and even ‘South Australia’, were much too big and abstract to grasp all at once; I knew them only as shapes and maps that we drew at school again and again, using little plastic templates and spending careful hours shading in the blue fringe of coast. The World was a massive and shadowy idea.

But if you went to visit the farmer up the hill and climbed onto the roof of his barn on a clear day, you could see the blue lines of ocean on either side: the east and west coasts of Yorke Peninsula.

Sixteen years ago David Malouf published an essay on Brisbane, his home town, called ‘A First Place’. Each of us, he says, has one place, our ‘first place in the world’, that we know better than any other, ‘from inside, from my body outwards’. Starting from this premise and from the idea that it might be an appropriate time for Australian writers to move beyond the idea of ‘Australian writing’ and to look more closely at their own personal bits of the landscape, he argues that the unique features of your first place in the world – its topography, its architecture, its weather and colours and cosmic mood – can shape personality, and ways of seeing, and habits of thought.

Malouf was and is fortunate in the luxury of his location, in the tropical colours, dramatic landforms, unique architecture and material density of detail that go to make up urban and suburban Brisbane. But to try to think in such a way about Yorke Peninsula is to address yourself much more to absence and lack: to think about place-names (Curramulka, Warooka, Koolywurtie, Minlacowie) recalling the Aboriginal people who are no longer there; to divine the varied and implicit meanings of fence-lines and tree-lines dividing one space from the next; to consider the drama of a single farmhouse dwarfed by a wide sweep of wheat. No city, naked or otherwise, with or without a million stories; no river deep, or mountain high, or any other geographical sublimity to provide a map for the scope of Gothic emotions.

Only distance, and eventually, always, the sea. The people who get their living from the sea or the shore watch the ocean, and every direction is seaward but north. The farmers, and the townspeople whose businesses and professions support the farmers, watch the weather, or the horizon, or the weather on the horizon; the finely tuned timing of rain or the absence of rain can mean disaster. Yorke Peninsula people aren’t much given to extremes of feeling; more to the watchful appraisal, the considered observation, the long-distance sailor’s stare.

Yorke Peninsula is boot-shaped, roughly thirty five kilometres across at the ankle and one hundred and fifty from boot-top to heel: not the elegant high-heeled high-arched pointy-toed boot of Italy, but a large square-heeled flat-footed working boot. It does not lie at Italy’s elegant angle but stands upright and foursquare, its foot firmly on the ground, its toes pointing west, as though Italy has been shrunk to a quarter of its original size and rotated clockwise through forty five degrees.

Yorke is the middle peninsula of the three that form the fringe along the South Australian coast. To the east there’s the smallest: the fertile, populous, Tuscan-looking Fleurieu, Adelaide’s rich hinterland, with its French name and its world-class wines and its Impressionist colours and light. To the west, there’s the biggest: the harsh and mysterious Eyre, named for a reputedly murderous colonial adventurer turned vice-regent. This is an isolated, rugged peninsula shaped like a fat India with a hammer head, its colours the grey-green of scrubby bush and the bronze of ripe grain, known for heartbreaking droughts in the summer and fabled monster sharks in the surrounding waters. Yorke Peninsula is like the middle child, a mediator with the characteristics of both siblings. Its eastern coast is bounded by the Gulf of St Vincent, a calm and sheltered triangle of water across which, on a clear night, you can see the lights of Adelaide as a soft bright glow on the horizon. The western coast, the Spencer Gulf side, is wilder and stranger and more dangerous.

Our place (in the country you say ‘our place’, not ‘our house’) was in the middle, halfway up and halfway across, as far inland as it was possible to be. Yorke Peninsula wasn’t a map, or an idea, or a town you didn’t live in. It was the real thing, a landform on a human scale: something on which the body could locate itself, and a sight that the eye could take in. From the barn roof on the hill, you could see the lines of its parallel coasts and look at the shape that it made on the map, the shape that it made in the world.

The peninsula at its southern end is stony, salty, ancient, bleak. Rock-coloured, rock-shaped sheep graze there, but not much grows. The unsealed roads really are made of rock, top-dressed with dust and rubble. Near the southern coast, at the boot-heel, you’ll see the occasional black and stunted tree, permanently bent over at the waist like a witch in a fairy tale from the endless wind off the sea. Down here it’s windy all the time: the struggling little trees, the stoic sheep, the secret beaches at the bottoms of cliffs, everything is pounded by the gales off the Southern Ocean and the unrelenting sea-light. You should come here alone, or with someone you don’t mind seeing your face the way it really looks, because there’s nowhere here that a person could hide any kind of secret.

But drive north over the ankle and up the shin, and the land gets rapidly richer and less rocky. The sheep look softer and happier and the wind feels more benign. The paddocks roll more gently, under the ripe wheat. My home town lies in the shelter of a hollow – nothing as definite as a valley, more just a sort of saucer – in this landscape. If in January, after harvest, you drive over the crest of the hill on the road from the sea, you will find yourself looking down at the little town with its coloured roofs, surrounded by paddocks full of stubble bleaching in the sun: an egg with coloured speckles in a nest of straw.

When we inscribed our addresses on the flyleaves of our schoolbooks, did we write down our exact, elaborate locations in infinite space in order to reassure and steady ourselves? Or was it the expression of a childhood confidence, now long lost, that we knew exactly where we were? I miss the days when I didn’t yet know that ‘Curramulka’ might not, after all, mean ‘emu water-hole’, depending, like so much else, on what it was that the founding fathers had thought they were hearing the Aboriginal people say. I miss the days when I didn’t yet realise that the border of South Australia was an arbitrary phenomenon and not a natural one, a geopolitical entity whose shape could yet be altered or destroyed. I miss the days when I didn’t yet understand that no coastline ever stops changing.

But while I was still living there, none of these things had yet come unstuck, and there were further points of reference and anchorage. One set of grandparents lived in Adelaide, the other set in an idyllic little town called Arcadia Vale, on the central coast of New South Wales. Paradise, and the City: these were the two places on the globe, apart from home, that my body understood. They put the peninsula in perspective on a map of Australia for which my coordinates were family, a map built up around the routes of those two seasonal grandparent journeys: one made every spring and autumn, up the coast to the top of the Gulf of St Vincent and then back down the other side, south towards Adelaide and through its maze of coloured lights; the other – always in the clear heat of January, in the days before air-conditioned cars – over to and through the Riverland, across the blistering Hay Plains, up the steep winding roads of the Blue Mountains and down again, east to the sea.

Other, older features on that family map: the bones of my great-great-grandparents, resting under weathered white headstones in the Curramulka Cemetery, a pretty, tree-sheltered little place a mile out from the town in the middle of the wheat. They emigrated in 1847 from Cornwall, itself a peninsula only half the size of the one I think of as mine, and, like mine, sticking out an adventurous toe into a cold wild ocean. After a few years of work on the waterfront and a string of babies, they moved to Yorke Peninsula as pioneer farmers, two decades before Curramulka was surveyed and named.

And I wonder, thinking about them now, whether they missed the sea-light of their own first place, and found themselves in quest of geographical heimlichkeit, unconsciously heading for the kind of landform that reminded them of home. Is there such a thing as a psychogeographical comfort zone? After I first saw Tuscany, I used to say that from now on my two points of reference on the map of the world would be Florence and Curramulka. This was usually offered and always taken as a joke about ludicrous contrasts, but in fact it was a serious private observation about towns in the middle of sunny, fertile, boot-shaped peninsulas: about feeling instinctively at home at certain points on the face of the earth.

After we moved to Adelaide in 1966, my new friends at high school would tell of having been taught as toddlers to recite their street addresses in case they got lost. As a child living on a farm I had had no street address; but in and around Curramulka everyone knew who you were anyway, and outside the town where the land had been cleared all round for wheat and sheep and barley, a lone child in the landscape was visible for miles.

Our address cited no house number, no street, no suburb. It was silent about our house, and about the road that ran past it, a hundred yards up the track. It was a classic Australian farmhouse, and all the houses of everyone we knew were variations on the theme: a stone box, with four rooms of equal size and a wide hall or passage down the middle. That was the original core; everything else had been added later, usually one addition at a time. New rooms were built on at imaginative angles, in whatever shape and style the builder fancied and whatever materials happened to be available, sometimes up or down a few steps. There were inner outbuildings, like the stone laundry and garage built onto the side of the house, and outer outbuildings, like the sheds ‘down the back’ that housed poultry and pigs.

I lived in that house for the first twelve years of my life but could not now draw even the roughest floor plan of it; the spatial relations between some parts of the house always remained mysterious, as though there were secret passages and I was not allowed to know where they were. The best diagram I could manage would be only a coded cognitive map that might hint at emotional currents and undertows. Arrows, say, might show how I would be drawn into the privacy and quiet of my parents’ room, with its bright north-facing window and high wide bed and the faint smell of Elizabeth Arden’s Blue Grass. Or how I would come when called, taking my seat at the green laminex kitchen table, to a hot lunch and the trumpet fanfare of the ABC’s midday news, music I associate to this day with corned beef and carrots. Or how I would drift for no good reason past the piano, across the lounge-room and on through the door with the bookcase on it, down the three steps past the vague and looming shapes of my father’s banjo-case and my grandfather’s travelling-trunk, into the bright room for sewing and ironing where my mother taught me to read.

Like so many of the houses in the district and the township, ours had a high, wide front verandah and a heavy ceremonial front door that was never used: it is a defining characteristic of Australian farmhouses that strangers never quite know where or how they are to be broached, what path or track to follow, which gate to go through, which door to knock on or call at through the fly-wire. Our house had three different ‘back’ doors, two of which were actually ‘side’, facing south off different chunks, from different architectural eras, of the house. The third was the main traffic thoroughfare; friends and family knew it, and other locals found it easily by instinct. These, too, were standard Yorke Peninsula arrangements; perhaps farmhouses throughout Australia, or indeed the world over, are the same.

David Malouf muses about the typical Brisbane house, the breezy Queenslander with its mysterious and suggestive ‘under-the-house’ spaces and the sorts of psyches they might produce in children who grow up there. If, as he hypothesises, Queenslanders visualise the unconscious itself as the space under the house, full of stored belongings, sexual mysteries and animals nobody recognises, perhaps the farmhouse psyche is one firmly centred in foursquare stone, but otherwise unknowing of its own haphazard architecture, and boasting an embarrassment of ambiguous doors. And what of the difficulty encountered by strangers in broaching such a house, after it looked so easy and straightforward from a distance? Might that shape the pattern and direct the flow of relationships and communications with other people, or require that there already be a sense of shared community understanding about the conventions of visiting and the inner lives of houses?

And out in the country, if the house (or the self) was in an ongoing state of haphazard expansion, there was no surrounding suburb to contain or circumscribe it, to colour it with connotations and assumptions. In conversations with urban friends about growing up in cities, the discussion turns again and again on suburbs. You need to have lived in the city concerned to understand what is really being said when someone says ‘I grew up in Marrickville’; what micro-nuance of vowel sound and plosive will identify an ingrained Medindie accent to an Adelaidian; why either a childhood spent in Peppermint Grove (on the one hand) or a childhood spent in Altona (on the other) might produce an adult in whom certain kinds of anxieties cannot be allayed. Suburbs, like all nations but the island ones, have borders, and the self is defined by identification of its difference from what lies across them.

But the word ‘peninsula’, says the OED, means ‘almost an island’. ‘A piece of land that is almost an island, being nearly surrounded by water; hence, any piece of land projecting into the sea so that its boundary is mainly coast-line.’ And islands have no borders, only coasts. An island produces a strong clear sense of identity, of the boundaries of self, but without the aggression and rejection implicit in the identification of difference. As the islander’s skin is to the body, so the beach is to the sense of local identity; ego boundaries are benign and clearly drawn, and the associations are with peacefulness and play.

Peninsulas, as the dictionary says, are almost like this. But you’re not quite ‘insula’, never actually cut off. It’s a pleasantly ambivalent state, a balance of security and independence; you have those clear aquamarine boundaries and that autonomy of being, but you can still claim to be mainland. It’s like being a breathing newborn babe whose umbilical cord has not yet been cut. To get to Adelaide from Yorke Peninsula, you follow the clear black line on the map that marks the coast road north to the apex of St Vincent’s Gulf, and then you turn around and head back the way you came, down the other side of the gulf.

And, as with the hidden mysteries of farmhouse doors, there’s something inherently comic about having to drive over two hundred kilometres in order to get to a place less than a third of that distance away across the water. A clear and secure sense of absurdity, I sometimes think, is Yorke Peninsula’s defining legacy. You grow up safe in the knowledge that you are firmly connected by that strong black thread of road to your fellow beings, to the city, and beyond that, to the great world. But that security is coloured by a cheerful acceptance of the fact that you’ll always have to go the long way round in order to get where you want to go, and that, when you do arrive, you may not be able to get in.