On the unfamiliarity of home

When I was 18, I moved to Poland. It wasn’t the first time in my life that I’d spent a significant amount of time away from Melbourne but it was the first time I’d left without my family. I grew up in the middle-class inner south-east, and spent a lot of my childhood years in around Brighton, Caulfield and Moorabbin, somewhere on the bus lines between Chadstone Shopping Centre and Southland. Trips to the CBD were rare until I got old enough to go nightclubbing, at which point I found the bright lights of the skyscrapers, the honking of car horns, the late night the rattle of trams a balm for whatever late-teen angst I still harboured.

When I moved overseas, however, I felt like I’d lost something. The familiarity of the streetscapes, the rhythmic rocking of the Frankston train, the unpredictable splashes of sunlight and even the graffiti in the city alleys – all of this had been like an anchor for me, but I had never really noticed it as such. Met with the stripped facades of the old communist-era buildings, filthy snow on the Wałbrzych roads, and the bitter cold of the Polish winter wind, I started looking back home again, seeing it clearly, I felt, for the first time. Perhaps that realisation that you know nothing at all about your own city, your own country, is jarring for everyone. For me, faced with such new landscapes, the fact that I knew nothing about the origins of that place I called home made me feel ashamed.

It’s a strange relationship that people have with places. That idea of ownership – of allocating segments of concrete and dirt and air – is baffling on so many levels and yet so much of our lives is controlled by the administration of property, by the occupation of it, the purchasing of it – or the stealing of it. By the struggle for control over objects, over our own space, over that of other people. The places we grow up in shape us so much and yet so often we wander through them glaze-eyed, myopic, only half awake.

Or perhaps I’m just talking about myself. 

In any case, there’s nothing quite like having your eyes opened to those familiar places, gazing on them anew, rediscovering them, or finding hidden parts of them for the first time. There are nine different walks around Melbourne happening as part of MWF2012, and all of them represent a unique opportunity for you to get to know more about this history-rich, fascinating and complicated city:

• Melbourne’s Bohemia with Tony Moore
• When We Think About Melbourne with Jenny Sinclair
• JJ Clark and the Australian Renaissance with Andrew Dodd
• The Natural Origins of Melbourne with Dr Gary Presland
• Melbourne’s Street Art Tours with various local street artists
• Finding Melbourne’s Heart and Soul with Sophie Cunningham
• Street Fashion with Badaude

And the always popular:

• Melbourne’s Hidden Dragons with Carole Wilkinson
• Eclectic Bookshops (East) and Eclectic Bookshops (West) with Shelley Cohney

For extra dates and times other than those linked direct above, please see the full list of Food, Wine and Walks events.