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JENNIFER COMPTON
New Zealand Citizen, Resident in Australia
I thought the Canberra would glide under the Coat Hanger.
She made a sharp left turn and stopped by going backwards.
I had an inner ear problem and could not get my land legs.
For a week I lurched and rolled as Australia tilted under me.
Perhaps I had assumed, as I didn't need a passport,
that this wasn't another country, that this was nothing
new, and you spoke English. I felt my own country
on my body and in my mind like hand-hot water.
I could not feel it. I sensed Australia like the smell
in a migrant's house, spicy, fermented with dander
and hot breath, prickling, lavish, unexpectedly sweet
and shrill. But I was the migrant. This was not my house.
This was not my house. The mistake I made.
(stanza continues)
The Canberra made her final voyage shipping soldiers
to the Falkland Islands. She was decommissioned.
I understood there was no way home, inchoately.
I understood that I could never go home in the way
one remembers the memory of a waft of perfume
that will always mean a voyage. Duty free Ma Griffe
which I bought on board the ship that was sold for scrap.
And you spoke English. I understood what you said but not
why you said it. Thirty three years later I can be marooned
in a room of bright-faced, angular people, agreeing together
with a patter of hands like a grove of poplars, a lonely tree
planted in a cleft in rock, where the wind does not carry news
of the seasons, whatever trees get their heads together about,
the nourishment. I was fed at home when everywhere I was
was home, and I did not like it much, but it was nourishment.
Home. A word. If I had not packed my trunks, gone on board
following my husband, because he was choking on the bone
he gnawed, if I had stayed and found a way of staying I would
not be encamped here, halfway to the world, half enchanted
by the storm that springs the mineral oils dormant in the earth,
half tormented for the lull of the Hungaroa River, her idiolect.
I gave birth to Australians, who squinted at the edgy hills
back home, turned aside to snigger at the flattened politesse.
"No Australian will ever say sorry or return a phone call."
My husband pontificated in our early years and it became
a given. Time proved "sorry" was a mouthful for the natives.
But although I vote, and I vote as I should, I am not sure.
I am not sure enough of where it comes from, where it goes,
to speak my mind. Even if I knew it. I could say sorry to myself
if my great-great-grandfather did sign on, or was pressed,
sailed away from Tasmania, leaving a story that is still unfolded.
Perhaps I have more right to be here than many of you.
I relish the generous welcome, the way you put me straight.
Recently, I sensed, that although you had never needed me
but just made room for one more Trans-Tasman refugee,
and thanks for that, if I took the oath, signed the paper,
planted the indigenous tree down by our back fence,
that there might be things I could usefully address
if I could express them well, if you would listen to me.
Previously published by Island (Australia), The Rialto (UK), and jaam (New Zealand).
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