The Idea of Home: Autobiographical Essays by John Hughes
Artarmon, NSW: Giramondo, 2004 (2012 reprint) ISBN 1920882049
You've got to love Giramondo Publishing. While I don't like everything they do or all the directions they go, they continue the great tradition of independent Australian publishing: how we mourn the demise of McPhee Gribble, Duffy and Snellgrove, and others along the way. May Giramondo go from strength to strength and not suffer takeovers or other indignities. For if it does, gems such as The Idea of Home may never come to see the light of day.
John Hughes has written five meditations on what it means to be at home, what it means to dream of home, what it means to remember, and what it means to forget. These meditations are based around the stories of his Grandfather and Grandmother, his Mother, his Father, and his own journey through life. I write journey, because it's a physical journey, undertaken by his grandparents and mother, that form the basis of Hughes' idea of home, and what it means to be who he is. His grandparents and his mother walked, during World War Two, from the Ukraine to Naples, from where they came as refugees to Australia. Hughes grew up within the stories of that walk, surrounded by it at the same time that his grandfather in particular was busily trying to forget much of his earlier life. Hughes desperately wanted to understand what his family went through, while at the same time enjoying the exotic-ness sprinkled on him by having such a family in Cessnock. He muses on his Grandfather's desire to discard his past, refusing to read anything in Cyrillic script, and his Grandmother's obsession with collecting and storing everything from her life, whether it had any use or not. Differing reactions to the trauma that they had lived through.
Hughes ends up at the University of Newcastle studying literature, and he chafes at being stuck in a provincial city, imagining that everything was happening somewhere else. When he is awarded a scholarship to Cambridge he heads off to fulfill his dream, only to find that what he was looking for was actually a construct inside his head. What was in his head was a confused idea of his Russian-ness, and the belief that he was living his life in Russian literature, believing himself to be a character in Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky as he went about his life drinking, talking, reading and writing.
The whole time he can't - and doesn't want to - break his connection to his family, much as he wants to leave the provincialism of his youth, he finds himself drawn back to his "roots". For eventually that is where Hughes ends up - back in Newcastle, teaching at the University. He had come home, and realised where his home was. He realised that his dreams of Cambridge were also his Grandfather's dreams - for Hughes it was the dream of heading to the centre of things, for his Grandfather the realisation of the dream that his family had "made it".
In the final essay, Hughes writes about this realisation - walking through the streets of Newcastle and Sydney, he discovers that his dream of re-living his Grandparent's journey can only ever be that: a dream. He has re-lived their journey in his mind many times over, listening to his Grandfather: in fact he feels that by the end of his Grandfather's life that he knew the story better than the old man. So it was not possible to actually undertake the journey on the ground, as that would almost be a betrayal of the original journey. One can never go back, except in the mind. As he writes " [m]emory is like an excess of life, it allows us to relive what has been lived:" it can also distort the present through its prism.
This is a wonderful book - a meditation on migration, remembering and forgetting, and growing up. I am not surprised that it is a multi-award winning book. Highly recommended.
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