Published: 1 October 2019
Last updated: 5 April 2024
“I AM FOR HOMES” is one of the many powerful statements of inclination contained in Sydney writer Miriam Hechtman’s recent poem I Am For. The pluralisation is important, lifting the affirmation beyond the personal, to a wider quest for the universal urge for belonging.
Jewish relationships to the idea of home are, of course, particularly fraught. My own father, an escapee from occupied Prague in 1938, would say that he never felt at home again, at least not until he arrived in Perth as a skilled migrant in the mid-1960s. The hoarding and piling in which my Dad indulged to a fault were perhaps an effort to bulwark a renewed sense of security.
I privately wondered, but never asked him, if the stacks of old architectural journals, heaps of newspapers and boxes of empty polystyrene containers were like a physical echo of the shelves of our family’s pre-war haberdashery between which he had sometimes lurked as a child.
In contrast to private experience, the environmentalist’s conception of home is often expressed as a reference to planet Earth. We must, we say with honesty, “save the Earth” because “it is our only home”.
But the abstraction of a whole planet washes superficially over the fabric of the day-to-day. Home at human scale rests on familiarity comprised of a set of physical and emotional feelings that, with luck, are signs of the cozy satisfaction of material and non-material needs.
The last time I walked through my childhood home, I ran my palms along the surfaces of the door frames, wanting to absorb the texture of dark jarrah of the entry to the place where I grew up. Some part of me will always be there, walking out through that doorway, down some brown concrete steps to a grey sloped path that leads to a small clearing under two old plum trees, where in the lightest of rain I once buried a small Alsatian, Sonsie, whom I loved. The intimate nature of home is embodied in such memories.
Global warming is an existential threat to the stability of our shared home, the biosphere of the Earth, but it is the quotidian manifestation of the climate emergency that is now rupturing individual lives. Already there are more people displaced than at any time since World War II; the multiple crises that have sent this mass of humanity fleeing in search for sanctuary are often linked to global heating. But as the climate emergency deepens, cause and effect are becoming more immediate and obvious.
