My Island Home

Watched Remote Area Nurse on SBS last night. It was captivating. It makes me want to drop everything that I'm doing here in the "big smoke" and move to the Torres Strait.

It has always had a special place in my heart, that place. My mother grew up on Thursday Island and I have a tonne of family there. Every couple of years we would go up to see my grandmother and uncles and aunties and loads of cousins. I loved it. Christmases were always spectacular... My mother has seven brothers and in the early eighties they all still lived on T.I. There are over 30 grandchildren on that side of the family. My grandmother used to live above the General Store which my grandfather (and then my uncles) used to run. He passed away when I was two. There was this HUGE central living room upstairs. And when I say "huge", I mean "massive"! It was bigger than a church hall. There would be a table along the wall adjacent to the staircase and it would be piled high with presents. There was lots of yummy food and kids everywhere. Brilliant! Unfortunately we didn't go up every year. It was expensive and my parents didn't have a lot of money for travelling. Usually it was just my mother and I that went. As a kid I used to wish that my mother had stayed up there instead of moving to Melbourne when she was 20. Of course, then she would never have met my father and I wouldn't be here, but that's beside the point. My cousins in Sydney are all a bit older than me whereas I was surrounded by cousins my age when I went up north. They were all so close and I envied them for their lifestyles.

Of course, now things have changed. I have a husband and two children, a house (actually a large mortgage), a job. I can't just pick up and go. Well, I guess I could, but then I'd be denying my kids the opportunity to be surrounded by their own cousins and to live closely with their grandparents. I took Dan and Dante up to T.I. a couple of years ago to show them the place and to meet everyone. It was okay, but Dan is a city boy - he needs people around him. Plus the internet connection would probably be slow. He didn't mind Cairns too much, it being slightly bigger. If we sold our place here in Sydney we could buy a pretty nice mansion in the hills around Cairns, five minutes from the city centre, and still have money left over. Too bad that there probably wouldn't be many IT jobs there.

But still, I can't help feeling sad when I watch shows like RAN. Not sad, but wistful, I guess. My cousin KK was born on T.I. but her family moved to Cairns when she was quite young so she never experienced life there. Last year (or was it the year before) she was lucky enough to get a transfer from her AQIS job in Cairns to T.I. Now she is living and working there and experiencing the island life. She even gets to travel to the outer islands which is something I'd love to do, too. In all the years that I've been going up there I've never been to any but the main southern islands. Even my mother has never been to the other islands (a lot of them are protected - you need to get permission to go there). Another cousin of mine used to live in Brisbane and met her husband there. But the islands called her home and her husband got a job with the Dept of Education. Now even he travels around to all the islands. *sigh* There are so many stories like that - people from down south moving up there. All I can do is dream.