A Tourist in Melbourne

Last Saturday marked my sixth time flying to Australia from North America, and can I just say how wonderful it is to be the one picked up from the airport and looked after? I have been welcomed with cuppas, spoiled with smashed-avocado-and-eggs-on-toast for breakfast, plied with delicious coffee, and put to bed when my eyes will no longer stay open. Perhaps it is not surprising that I want to make visiting Melbourne an annual event in spite of the distance involved.

This quick trip of mine is not about sightseeing---it is about dipping back into the experience of living here. I know full well that I will soon have to leave, but in the meantime I am indulging in all that I have loved about this city--the cafes, the trams, the cross walks, the urban parks, the gum trees, and even the oversized, squawking, obnoxious, "notice me" Australian birds. How I have missed them and everything about this place. Walks with friends, morning tea, beetroot-feta-and-cashew dip, meandering through laneways and arcades, lingering over a coffee, dodging the raindrops on Glenferrie Rd. I love it all.

There are many reasons to avoid going back to visit a place that is part of one's history--whether that be a former place of employment or a place that once was home. The potential for disappointment is great. I remember going back to an office in which I had worked for nearly two years in Toronto. I expected my previous co-workers to be happy to see me, but instead they asked, "Why are you here?" I walked away more than a little crushed and a whole lot wiser than I had been five minutes before.

I was not really worried that this would be the case if we ever returned to Melbourne, and thankfully, it has not been. The bonds of friendship have stood the test of time thus far. Indeed, it feels in so many ways as if I had never left.

In her 1980 book Tracks, the Australian author Robyn Davidson writes about the homesickness that one can feel for a previous life or experience. Her experience, recently portrayed in a beautiful movie of the same name, was that of walking across the Outback with three camels and a dog. The changes from the past to the present can be very upsetting, she explains, when one tries to revisit them, and then she suggests that sometimes it should not even be tried: "[My] homesickness is for an experience that could in any case never be repeated, and for people and ways of thought whose rightful place is in the past."

We cannot repeat our Melbourne life, and I recognise that it is in the past. But I have been so very happy to dip back into it for a few short days, to embrace cherished friends before catching up face to face over coffee and gorgeous food. Davidson also writes in Tracks about the unique bonds of friendship in Australian society, something that she thinks has to do with "the old code of mateship . . . the fact that dissidents have had to stick together, and that competition and achievement are not very important aspects of the culture." "Whatever it is," she claims, "it is extraordinarily valuable." I cannot help but agree.