Where history lives.

My partner and I recently made the radical decision to move interstate. We bought land in Tassie and plan to leave Victoria in October when our house lease ends.

Contemplating the big shift from mad, bad, dangerous to know and open 24/7 Melbourne (Smelbourne to its mates) down to small, cold and islanded little Hobart (Slowbart to the bitter 30-something expats that make up half of Melbourne's population - or maybe just to me!) presents me with various issues and emotional hurdles to be overcome. I grew up there after all, and you don't leave your home-state without good reason.

One such pang hit me today when walking home from the supermarket, with my little glassy-eyed, spittle-blowing, Melbourne-made son in tow. I passed a guy who reminded me vaguely of someone I once knew, a friend of an ex-Clifton Hill housemate, and I suddenly realised that in returning to Hobart, the run-ins with people from my past will no longer be with people I have met and known as an adult, but more likely people I went to school with (a whole other kettle of blog-posts!). These incidental meetings serve as reminders of my various other incarnations. I see someone I knew during my undergrad and remember that I spent the best part of the late nineties taking drugs, drinking beer, dancing in my bra at the Evelyn, and other such niceties. A friend from my Dip Ed last year brings me out of my spacey maternal reverie to remind me that I am a qualified teacher. Someone from the creche I worked at years ago passes me in Northland (I look the other way like the scumbag snob I am) and I am transported back to the days of plastic bowls of macaroni cheese, snotty faces and heated disputes over the dress-ups.
What I'm leaving behind are the tangible remnants of my history as a grown woman. I came here at the age of 21, and feel very much that I have lived my whole adult life here. I think on some level I am afraid that by leaving the place I also leave behind my history and therefore my actual self. But these are all just memories after all, and I take them with me wherever I am, regardless of the faces from the past swimming up out of the crowds to remind me. It's not like I have my memory wiped when I cross the Bass Strait... they stopped doing that years ago!

In a way, it's fitting that I am coming full circle and returning to the place of my very happy childhood with a happy child of my own. And what real loss is there in not chancing a run-in with my ex-boyfriend and showing off how far I've moved on since him?! That would really just be an empty and narcissistic exercise anyway!

Though having said that, I'm sure there will times in Tassie when I try and impress new friends with my past as a life model or raver or illustrator (HAH!), because at the end of the day, I actually am just a little bit empty and narcissistic!