Belonging

14 June 2021

I trundled my luggage through Melbourne Airport at 7 pm on a Saturday. Completely empty. The flight from Perth had been empty too: in the middle of a lockdown, who wants to come to Melbourne except for people like me, workers returning home.

I had thought long and hard about catching that plane. Perth, 19°, sunny day after day. Why not stay by the beach for another couple of weeks? The Leeuwin Current was still running, and I had settled back into the swim from Cott to North Cott, a good long swim with the swell of the ocean under me.

4pm Cottesloe Beach

 But Cottesloe is not my place now, and those well-groomed, pleased-with-themselves people drinking coffee at Il Lido, they’re not my people. I took a cab up to the edge of the ranges and overcast, rainy Riddells Creek. This is my home, my place, where my people are.

 A little town, people getting away from the big city and those that did the same 40 or 20 or 10 years ago, who look warily at the newbies, and sigh, and know it’s the way of the world. Riddell, where the post office people know me, where I drop in on friends who put the kettle on and say ‘how are you then – have you been away?’

 I’ve been listening to Stephen Jenkinson on Youtube. He's a Canadian with a lot to say about the mess we’re in. He says its hard work to repair the world when we’re broken ourselves.  Don’t know our ancestors, lost our traditions, left our neighbourhood, always on the move to the next big thing, chasing comfort.  Watching a Zoom conversation with him (search Youtube for Jenkinson and Bodhi Be), there’s a couple of old guys shooting the breeze, and then around 18 minutes in, my ears perked up.

 ‘The ability to belong’, says Jenkinson, ‘is the willingness to sit still long enough to forsake all the other options but the one that’s before you. Take up the work of occupying a place, not the entitlement of doing so.’

 I hear the Shire is putting gates across the roads of Barrm Birrm. There’s weed trees in there that need cutting, but it’s hard to get started. What’s happened to the traffic management study of Riddell the Shire said they were doing? And yes, the Amess Road developers will be back with something that suits them. We’ll win a bit of ground, but not what really suits the coming times, just the tired old game of profit and growth.

But that’s the work of belonging, of occupying a place.

Ross Colliver, Riddells Creek Landcare, ross.colliver@bigpond.com