Writer's Block: Home sweet hometown
Sep. 13th, 2011 05:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12[Error: unknown template qotd]
Ah, Canberra. The best of places and the worst of places. What I love most about it is also what I think needs to change. Let me explain.
Canberra, the capital city of Australia, is a small place by Australian standards. It has a population of about 350,000, most of whom work in the public service or for the government in some way. And there's a strange sort of transience about the place. Almost everyone I knew, growing up there, were the first generation in their respective families to grow up in Canberra. Their parents had all moved there for work. And very few of my group of friends remain there: they've all moved to Sydney or Melbourne or Brisbane or overseas. Even those who do live and work there spent many years after school or uni travelling the world.
So there is a certain instability. People aged between, say, three and 18, the sons and daughters of public servants and journalists and political staffers and diplomats, live among an unchanging crowd of the children of other middle-class professionals, all attending the same public schools, the same gymnastics clubs, the same summer music camps and cricket teams. This continues on, to a certain extent, during university (although I left for Sydney then), and, suddenly, everyone leaves. The young workforce I encountered upon returning to Canberra aged 22 was almost entirely comprised of people from out of town, bright young university graduates from Melbourne and Sydney and Perth and Newcastle or Wagga, keen to make their mark quickly so that they could move on to brighter lights, bigger cities.
The older members of the workforce were all friends of my parents.
Growing up in Canberra, everyone knew me, from the owner of the organic butchery my family frequented to the Duke of Edinburgh's Award coordinator at my highschool who just happened to be the mother of my former gymnastics coach. To this day, if I meet someone who lived in Canberra between the years of 1988-2005ish, if I talk to them for a while, I can usually find a connection, some friend or relative or former teacher in common.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lucubratae, who is seven years younger than I am thus never attended an educational institution at the same time, has a Facebook friends list full of the younger brothers and sisters of people I know. That's just how it is.
The closeness, the familiarity, the sense of being a big fish in a small pond is at once joyous and suffocating. I am proud to be a Canberran, and I look back on my childhood there with great fondness. It is a source of great strength to me that I grew up being known. That everyone from my piano teacher to the staff at Silo Bakery, from my friends at school to my mother's coworkers had some sort of conception in their mind of who and what 'Ronni' was. They knew who I was and who was around me and where I came from. And it was wonderful.
And it was terrible. It was constraining and frustrating and inhibiting. When I went to university I felt like the rug had been pulled out from beneath my feet. How could I function when nobody knew what school I'd gone to (and what it meant to have gone to such a school?), where my parents worked, what subjects I'd done well in at school? (I admit that almost everyone experiences this at university, not just people from small, close-knit communities.) And knowing these things myself, knowing how I was known and expected to behave put constraints upon my behaviour and made it very difficult to try to change and be different. I spent undergrad (and, indeed, the first year of my working life) struggling to come to terms with both Canberra's presence and its absence. I didn't know how to be without it, and how I was with Canberra affected my ability to become.
It took travelling halfway around the world for me to figure out who I really was, and for me to come to terms with all these things. I love Canberra. I love that I was and am a Canberran. It is no longer a restraining and constraining legacy, but rather something I wear comfortably, a component part of a fragmented identity. I wouldn't change Canberra's insularity for the world, but if I had my time over, I would see it more clearly for what it is: a mixed blessing.
Ah, Canberra. The best of places and the worst of places. What I love most about it is also what I think needs to change. Let me explain.
Canberra, the capital city of Australia, is a small place by Australian standards. It has a population of about 350,000, most of whom work in the public service or for the government in some way. And there's a strange sort of transience about the place. Almost everyone I knew, growing up there, were the first generation in their respective families to grow up in Canberra. Their parents had all moved there for work. And very few of my group of friends remain there: they've all moved to Sydney or Melbourne or Brisbane or overseas. Even those who do live and work there spent many years after school or uni travelling the world.
So there is a certain instability. People aged between, say, three and 18, the sons and daughters of public servants and journalists and political staffers and diplomats, live among an unchanging crowd of the children of other middle-class professionals, all attending the same public schools, the same gymnastics clubs, the same summer music camps and cricket teams. This continues on, to a certain extent, during university (although I left for Sydney then), and, suddenly, everyone leaves. The young workforce I encountered upon returning to Canberra aged 22 was almost entirely comprised of people from out of town, bright young university graduates from Melbourne and Sydney and Perth and Newcastle or Wagga, keen to make their mark quickly so that they could move on to brighter lights, bigger cities.
The older members of the workforce were all friends of my parents.
Growing up in Canberra, everyone knew me, from the owner of the organic butchery my family frequented to the Duke of Edinburgh's Award coordinator at my highschool who just happened to be the mother of my former gymnastics coach. To this day, if I meet someone who lived in Canberra between the years of 1988-2005ish, if I talk to them for a while, I can usually find a connection, some friend or relative or former teacher in common.
lucubratae, who is seven years younger than I am thus never attended an educational institution at the same time, has a Facebook friends list full of the younger brothers and sisters of people I know. That's just how it is.The closeness, the familiarity, the sense of being a big fish in a small pond is at once joyous and suffocating. I am proud to be a Canberran, and I look back on my childhood there with great fondness. It is a source of great strength to me that I grew up being known. That everyone from my piano teacher to the staff at Silo Bakery, from my friends at school to my mother's coworkers had some sort of conception in their mind of who and what 'Ronni' was. They knew who I was and who was around me and where I came from. And it was wonderful.
And it was terrible. It was constraining and frustrating and inhibiting. When I went to university I felt like the rug had been pulled out from beneath my feet. How could I function when nobody knew what school I'd gone to (and what it meant to have gone to such a school?), where my parents worked, what subjects I'd done well in at school? (I admit that almost everyone experiences this at university, not just people from small, close-knit communities.) And knowing these things myself, knowing how I was known and expected to behave put constraints upon my behaviour and made it very difficult to try to change and be different. I spent undergrad (and, indeed, the first year of my working life) struggling to come to terms with both Canberra's presence and its absence. I didn't know how to be without it, and how I was with Canberra affected my ability to become.
It took travelling halfway around the world for me to figure out who I really was, and for me to come to terms with all these things. I love Canberra. I love that I was and am a Canberran. It is no longer a restraining and constraining legacy, but rather something I wear comfortably, a component part of a fragmented identity. I wouldn't change Canberra's insularity for the world, but if I had my time over, I would see it more clearly for what it is: a mixed blessing.
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no subject
Date: 2011-09-14 02:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-14 03:17 pm (UTC)I found Canberra constraining, but I think that I would've found any highschool experience constraining, to be honest.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-15 05:13 am (UTC)I do agree that it is HARD to get that understanding though. It is so easy to fall into the rut, the little secure cocoon of comfort that life here is. And it can take big things to shake you out of that cocoon.
For a long time I think I've had this Canberra vs. not Canberra mentality. But that has been the wrong way to think about it. It's not Canberra that is the problem, but me.
Your comment about transience intrigued me actually Ronni. Because the word I think that best describes Canberra is stability. And it seems strange that it could be both stable and yet also have that transient nature at the same time. But it does. It's always same, same, same, and yet it's not. I think the hardest thing about Canberra is that it seems like it stays the same, and yet it doesn't. Within a short space, everything you know, everyone you know, can be gone and then you have to create a new space, a new world, a new life for yourself.
I think you expect it more in a bigger place. Because somewhere big (for example Shanghai - I'm using as an example because it's rather perfect for this and I've also lived there!) you expect change. You see it every day. From the tall buildings that seem to miraculously grow from nowhere seemingly overnight to the millions of different faces that you see every week. Places like Shanghai ARE change. They're dynamic and never seem to stay still. And so you don't expect them to. Books like Lonely Planet Shanghai become quickly out of date. So much so that the internet is a truly fabulous thing because you can get up to date information all the time.
But in Canberra, things look the same for a long time. From the construction work down King's Avenue bridge (feels like it's been there forever) to the annual Floriade (which, as much as they try to have a different theme each year, always seems largely the same regardless) to the constant buzz of politicians and politics during sitting weeks, there's an illusory sense of sameness. But you get underneath the surface of that and it's not the same.
Coming back from somewhere I'm always surprised at this. You carve out a very comfortable niche in a short time in Canberra. But when you go away, even for a long weekend, the little space you created has partially closed over. And when you go away for longer, it's even more pronounced.
Maybe that's the case where ever you live. But my experience is mostly with Canberra and I think that you don't expect it to be the case as much here. You think that because, on the whole, it looks the same from the outside, a pretty little postcard city, that nothing ever changes. But it does.
I found this quote online and I think it's amazing and although I think it's intended for romantic relationships, I think that it could be used to describe how you could possibly make a "relationship" with Canberra somehow seem a little more palatable.
"The secret of love is seeking variety in your life together, and never letting routine chords dull the melody of your romance. -unknown"
no subject
Date: 2011-09-15 05:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-15 06:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-15 06:30 pm (UTC)I think you've captured the sheer weirdness of the place well. It's transient and static. A lot of the problem for me was that when I left Canberra, in my head it symbolised stability and endurance, and then I'd return and find that it had changed in spite of my best intentions. But now that I look back on those years, it wasn't Canberra that was changing per se but the people - my friends, and much as I fought against it, myself. I found that extremely confronting and distressing and it seriously messed me up for pretty much all of my early 20s.
Coming back from somewhere I'm always surprised at this. You carve out a very comfortable niche in a short time in Canberra. But when you go away, even for a long weekend, the little space you created has partially closed over. And when you go away for longer, it's even more pronounced.
This is exactly how I have felt about Canberra since graduating from high school. It used to really upset me, but I am at peace about it now, because I am at peace with the idea that people change and that this is a good thing. I had to go to the other side of the world to get that peace and acceptance, but it's obviously possible to get it without such drastic action.
All of this is a basically a very roundabout way of saying, 'Canberra: it's not you, it's me'. I was the messed up one, and Canberra just happened to be the place in which I was messed up.