Nomadic Life

Some family members like to tease me about how often I have moved over the years. They joke that it's because I'm on the run from someone or some agency. To an outsider, this might seem like a plausible reason for all the moving. Who in their right state of mind, would volunteer to move so often, after all? Since moving out of home, I've had the following addresses:

Fortitude Valley, QLD
Burleigh Heads "
Palm Beach "
Miami "
Currumbin "
Currumbin Waters "

Marangaroo, WA
Mt Lawley, "

Tokyo
Takarazuka
Korigaoka
Hoshigaoka
Shinsaibashi
Migunigaoka
Imazato

Redondo Beach, CA

El Paso, TX

Sierra Vista, AZ
Bisbee, AZ

Cairns, QLD
Elanora "
Mudgeeraba "
Burleigh Heads "

6 months of continuous around-the-world-travel

Palm Beach, QLD

Everton Park "

Merrimac "

Kenmore "

The longest that I've lived at any of these addresses, is Mudgeeraba, which was for 3 years. We bought the house and enjoyed making a vegie patch and raising chickens and guinea pigs and having a dog. It was an idyllic time, when we home-schooled 4 year-old Sophia and she and Sage played for hours in the back yard sand pit, with all the pets.

They say that if a person moves around a lot as a child, that this sets them on the path of moving around a lot, as an adult. For me, this is true.

As a child, I lived in:

Cannon Hill, '69
Bulimba, '69
Hawthorne, '69
Hemmant caravan park, '70
Queanbeyan, '71
Capalaba, '73-'75
Belmont, '75-'77
Manly West, '78-'79
Wynnum, '79
Cannon Hill, '80-'90

I think there may have been other places when I was only a baby, I'd have to check with my mum again, to be sure.

Some might look at this pattern and feel sorry for me, to have been constantly on the move. All that moving around doesn't create a settled environment, with a sense of belonging to a place, or the contentment that comes with having roots.

I'll agree that it is really stressful when moving a whole house-load, so often. The most frequent moving pattern has been over the last 5 years, when we have moved every 12 months, or in one case, 9 months. Having kids and pets makes it hard to keep the possessions down to a few boxes and pieces of furniture, like when I was a single woman.

I have certainly felt sorry for myself at times, when faced with the incredibly daunting prospect of yet another move and all the cleaning and hard physical work that is involved. I've scrubbed walls and windows until my hands didn't work any more, for days afterward. I've battled with landlords and agents in and out of court, when they tried to unfairly take our deposit from us. In a word, the experience sucks!

Just recently, I've been studying about nomadic cultures and it has turned my thinking around completely, about what constitutes a sane lifestyle.

After I did the 23 and me DNA test and discovered that I have the H6a haplogroup, I became interested in learning about the regions and the lifestyle of the people whom I am descended from. H6a is a subgroup of European people, who after moving out of Africa, travelled north-east, lived in Central Asia for about 30, 000 years, then migrated west, into Europe, about 3, 000 years ago.

30, 000 years is a long time to stay in one region. You could say that those people were indigenous to the area, but what's amazing about their long habitation of the region, which is made up of steppe and desert, is that the only sane way to inhabit it, is as a nomad. The lands are not rich and lush. It can be harsh and barren, depending on the season, with -40C temperatures in winter and up to 40c-50c in the summer. The people who have lived there most successfully, have been herders of animals such as camels and goats and the main animal which has helped them survive, is the horse. Only a small percentage of people who live in Central Asia today, have maintained the nomadic lifestyle. They live in yurts, like peoples have done for thousands of years, which are warm in winter and cool in summer and which can be easily dismantled and carried by camel or horse, to the next location.

They rely on an intimate knowledge of their natural landscape and the seasons, to ensure survival, as well as their skill in raising and caring for their herds. Their doors are open to all travellers, because without this cultural practice in place, owing to the great distances between people and the harsh conditions, their survival would be precarious.

In contrast to this open sharing nature, is the typical attitude of urban dwellers, which is the general mistrust of all who approach our door, if they even make it past the iron gate, or the security entrance.

Following the disastrous policies of the Soviets when they first took control of Central Asia, nomadic people were forced to live in collectives and farm crops. The soil was completely unsuitable and very quickly, crops failed. People were forced to eat all their animals to survive and when those supplies ran out, they starved. Most nomadic communities were completely wiped out, through starvation. There were many rebellions, when people refused to follow the insanity of the Soviets and these people were shot.

Australia is a lot like Central Asia. We have deserts, harsh temperatures, and droughts, with added natural disasters of fires and floods. The environment has suffered from the insane practices of previous and current governments and agriculture, who have farmed extensively, where there is little to no topsoil and limited water supplies. This has left a land further degraded and water sources ruined by salinisation.

Australia too, was inhabited by nomadic peoples, who were robbed of their livelihood and forced to live on missions.

Now our population is crammed into coastal areas. I think about 80% of the country lives in urban regions. People here wouldn't know how to survive, if they were forced to live away from the coast, in the harsher interior. Urban dwellers would never volunteer to live a nomadic lifestyle, because aside from not knowing how to survive as a nomad, they could never relinquish their attachment to real estate.

I'm thinking of a line from Cat Stevens: " I wanna live in a tree house. I wanna live in a wig wam." It's too idealistic to think that we could solve our environmental problems, if we adopted a nomadic lifestyle in this country, but unless we do something about our wasteful use of natural resources and our harmful agricultural practices soon, we may find our current quality of life, slipping away, before our eyes.