The matters of migration and exile haunt me continually. I’ve always had great sympathy for post-war displaced persons, and how people manage to survive detention in today’s Australia is simply beyond me. In my case six months’ holiday became a lifetime when my Greek husband, desperate to return to his home village, unexpectedly secured a job nearby.
I had it easy: no leaky boats, people smugglers, pirates, internment, court cases, piece work in factories or dire poverty for me; I also had certain civil rights, as well as being entitled to work and to reside permanently in Greece.
But even though I tried to count my blessings and to avoid my besetting sin of self-pity, migration was hard. And decades later I still think it was hard. Sometimes I wonder how I survived it. Migration, after all, is a premature kind of death: a rehearsal. You cross a border, the passport is stamped, and you eventually learn there is no turning back. Your old life has gone, and your essential self is sliced in two, divided into before and after.
In fact as a migrant you cross more than one border. I was 35 when I migrated: half the Biblically allotted span and all that. An immature, heedless woman, I gave little thought to culture shock. Still less did I consider misogyny and the subtleties of village society, with its complex web of in-groups and out-groups, with its reliance on and enjoyment of gossip. I had not bargained for my children rejecting me simply because I was foreign, a fact they learned with all due speed, and I had been over-confident about the state of my Greek. Nor had I realised that I was crossing the border dividing youth from maturity, but I soon learned that being in Greece was making me grow up. At last. And fast.
I had to adjust to an entirely new way of being, which, paradoxically, was really very old: nothing much had changed in rural Greek villages for hundreds of years. I also had to learn about a different past, and realise that Greece resembles places such as Scotland and Ireland, where to endure is all.
I crossed all sorts of other borders as well: the city-country divide, class barriers, and those involving religion and education. My inherited pioneer mentality of inventing each day did not sit easily with the peasant one of repeating a centuries-old pattern. Then there was the yawning chasm between orality and literacy. My mother-in-law, the completely traditional woman whose house I shared for sixteen months, could sign her name, and that was it; she also knew about patterns so instinctively that every day had complete certainty and a detailed programme. But her mind, despite or because of its lack of book-learning, was a veritable treasure-trove of geneaology and folklore, and so I learned a great deal in most unexpected ways.
'I used to speculate: what would it be like if I went back? But I don’t do that any more, for Australia has changed, and so have I.'
I also learned that one’s view of migration and exile changes over time. Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro left Japan when he was a child, and did not return for 30 years. He says that his idea of Japan before his return was based on memories, speculation and imagination. Even though I have not been away from Australia for nearly as long, I certainly understand what he means.
I’m clinging on to my memories for as long as I can, and my imagination summons up the landscape easily: those huge skies and never-ending wheat fields, the rivers and the sea, the threatening bush. So far. I used to speculate: what would it be like if I went back? But I don’t do that any more, for Australia has changed, and so have I. The person, the self that migrated all those years ago is not the same one.
Paul Scott wrote that the migrant is always knocking at the window of their past, and in a sense that is so, for time plays its usual tricks, and takes over from memories of home and family, from familiarity. On my irregular returns, Australia often seems quite strange: it has evolved, and in the process, has left me behind. I suppose I’m still an exile, but now that condition consists of separation from the past, that land of long ago.
Gillian Bouras is an expatriate Australian writer who has written several books, stories and articles, many of them dealing with her experiences as an Australian woman in Greece.
Main image: People walking between Australia and Greece (Chris Johnston illustration)