I grew up in the Hawkesbury suburb of Windsor, an hour north-west of Sydney’s CBD. Known as a ‘historical town’, Windsor is home to the Dharug and was one of the first areas to endure British invasion.
While happy to leave , an unrelenting homesickness consumed me in the years that followed. The trouble was, there was nothing left to mourn, no dwelling or place of residence to go back to.
By the time our mother had died, we’d lost our family home to hospital bills. Mum’s husband had already skipped out and my brothers and I – then in our early 20s – had dispersed to friend’s couches, relatives’ houses and cheap rentals. Each forging precarious life threads as best as we could.
Author Cheryl Strayed famously , “we aren’t supposed to want our mothers that way, with the pining intensity of sexual love, but I did, and if I couldn’t have her, I couldn’t have anything.”
Hers is a tale of anguish I recognised. Once I ‘got out’ of my hometown and collected myself, I longed for my stomping ground with a deep and painful yearning I am reminded of in Strayed’s words.
Known for its heritage buildings, cemetery ruins, and the Hawkesbury river, Windsor is the kind of place where until a decade ago, you were pressed to find a latte in town - rather, a cuppa and a sandwich. Shopping centres were once modest malls, and you’d have to drive a few suburbs to get drive-through takeaway.
It’s a flat place that boasts glimpses of a beautiful landscape, particularly as the sun sets late in the day. On any given weekend, flocks of Harley Davidsons would roar up and down the main street; locals with young kids in tow, quietly looking on from their pub lunches.
As kids, my younger brother and I spent our weekends and summer holidays riding through the bush in search of bike tracks. Beaches were out of reach, so we swam in the local eel-infested dam. We made huts out of reeds and built flying foxes. We turned the local playground into a ‘pirate ship’ until the streetlights came on, scuttling back home before dark.
And the heat. We had moved to Windsor from Valley Heights when I was seven, bringing with us a half-inground pool which we’d dug up and re-installed from one house to the next. Mum scraped together enough to buy a small place in a quiet cul-de-sac, arranging palm trees and a pool-side daybed where, for a moment, she seemed happy.
My homesickness, a gaping wound of varying laceration, taunted me throughout my 20s. I longed for somewhere to return to at Christmas. Somewhere that had a dining table decked out with the soft jangle of crockery and household banter. A hallway with awkward family photos that hung and smiled back at you. A place to lay my head for a bit in between rentals. A fixed address for when everything else unravelled.
Theories on homesickness and nostalgia can be dated back as far as the 17th century. French physician Johannes Hofer in his 1688 dissertation, though he pathologised it as a disease rather than an existential hallmark for attachment and humanness.
Since Hofer’s thesis, homesickness has long been dissected around attachment theory. Clinical psychologist and academic Joshua Klapow , posing a case for complexity that transcends psychological symptoms alone.
Those with volatile family backgrounds, including poverty, will often yearn for their roots also.
Klapow’s work also highlights that those with volatile family backgrounds, including poverty, will often yearn for their roots also. He argues, “We’re longing for something that in our minds is known, predictable, consistent and stable.”
A few months ago, I took my nephew (my brother’s stepson) out to Windsor for a drive. I showed him the different houses we lived in and watched him happily skate off down the pathway of our beloved dam. On the way home, I humoured him with childhood tales as he pointed out streets named after colonisers. I asked him how long he thought settlers had been here for.
Not very long, he said.
What about Aboriginal people like your little brother? I asked.
Fifty thousand years, he said.
Longer, I told him.
He reminded me of what my brothers and I had built on the back of a foundation loaded with loss and trauma. We’d each cultivated families and communities of our own, binding back together and throwing each other our last dollar on pay week.
We made homes out of rentals, embodying our sovereign right to belong. Not through a tangible place that we can always return to, but as a verb. Home is something we do, something we foster, nurture and give back to.
It is our life work and in spite of a rocky start, it is a notion I will never take for granted.
Laura La Rosa is a proud Darug woman, originally from Western Sydney, now living on Wurundjeri land. She is the founder of creative collective, , a writer and graphic designer. Her work has appeared in Eureka Street, Kill Your Darlings, Running Dog and The Age.
