Being a person of place

Letting those ghost ships sail

We won’t save places we don’t love. We can’t love places we don’t know. And we don’t know places we haven’t learned.

This week I’ve been thinking about places. Specifically, this place.

I have always been one to hear the siren call of different places. I’ve lived briefly in Alice Springs, for years in Darwin and also over in California. Then Adelaide, back to Melbourne, and five years ago we landed here in the Adelaide Hills.

My husband always laughs when we arrive in a new place and I immediately begin imagining what life would be like if we lived in that new spot. I see us in Hobart, with a little wooden boat, sweet Tassie blueberries at the farmer’s market and leaving on Friday’s after work for a weekend camping at the ferns and alpine lakes at Mount Hood. I imagine life in Brisbane, where we would live in a house on stilts like in Bluey, and peddle along the river and have one of those indoor-outdoor type kitchens. If we moved back to Melbourne, we would eat falafel on Sydney Road, take the tram to Savers and the girls would go to a super cool bilingual school.

I do the same imaginings with work. All the jobs I could have, all the things I could do and be. I met a lady who is moving to the Congo to study bonobos. What would it be like to move overseas with the girls? I have an alert on Ethical Jobs for international roles. Fiji. PNG. Timor Leste. I also have alerts for Melbourne, Tasmania, rural NT. I could go back and study. I think I’d like to be a doula. Or an outdoor ed teacher. Or work on a summer camp in Maine. Or run a travel company.

These towns, these jobs, these lives. They’re all the ghost ships, the phantom sister lives alongside my own. 

The life I am living here, in and around Uraidla, is a very good one. It’s also the one I am living, and, of course, presents all the daily realities that don’t exist in my sister lives. In my dream of Brisbane, I’m not taking the bins out. In the life I imagine in Maine, I don’t go to meetings. These phantom lives are devoid of paperwork, sickness, difficult people, meal planning, answering machines, tantrums, vacuuming, sorting socks.

But in this real life, this life in the Adelaide Hills, there are lots of beautiful realities. There’s knowing that November is when the yellow tailed black cockatoos return to screech in our pine trees. Waiting for the lilacs to bloom in September. Not having to bring ID to collect a parcel at the Post Office. Always knowing someone in the line at the bakery. Christmas picnics where the CFS put on a slip and slide for the kids. A local bookshop where they know me so well that I never read a bad book.  

Being known. Knowing others. Knowing a place.

You can spend a long time looking at the horizon, thinking about what other lives you could be living. I’d like to live this one. This imperfect and gorgeous one, right here.

I still listen to the information I get from my imagined lives. Sometimes it tells me that I should go have yum cha. That I need to pencil in some time in Melbourne. That I need a new challenge. That I want the kids to grow up with a sense of adventure.

And yet…

I’ll never know and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.

It’s not always time to pack my bags for somewhere where the grass is greener. I quite like it here.

Other things

• I loved this article about being a person of place. Keen to read more of this Substack in general.

• Rapture by Emily Maguire! Rapturous! I adored this book; I’ll be thinking about it for years to come.

• This article about volunteering. I’ll write more about this in coming weeks.

• Super exciting news- Imagine Uraidla has just announced 2 years of funding from SA’s Fay Fuller Foundation. What an opportunity.

Until next week,

Jess