Now I think I’ve got a lot of political stuff off my chest and I want to move on to something that’s grumbling within my skull. Identity. Yesterday I was listening to Fay Weldon on Radio National and she mentioned the problem of how to decide what identity is and why bother anyway.
Well it matters, and I want to bother, but I have yet to work out why. This is probably because I’m all over the place and don’t feel I really belong anywhere. And this raises the question of whether I need to. I’m an Australian, but I live in Austria. Oz is home when I’m here, but it’s nothing like the home I left in 1969. And then things come back at you and they’ve stayed just the same. The street I grew up in. Some of the people who are still around. The bush down the back. Home is also back in Vienna, a city I hated in the early seventies when I first lived there. Now I’m at ease there, comfortable, although it’s just been three years since I settled there. I call it home when I’m about to go back there from here. The upside of all this is perhaps that I’ve never been homesick. So it seems that identity is somehow linked to “home”. To be continued …
