Home and be longing: Our attachment to place can be a primal feeling

There is a sense of the land in me, as much as me in the land

A few years before COVID, when I was still gallivanting around the world as if the meaning of life was to be found somewhere else, I wrote about the best part of travel: returning home.

“I love that moment navigating some vaguely hostile airport halfway around the globe, when I get to my gate and see the koru,” I wrote. “And I know at the plane door I will be greeted heartily by a bloke with enormous hands and a sense of fun.

“And after a nasty egg omelette I will arrive early over the craggy hills of my country on the fringes of the earth, safely do a dawn walk along a green line across an airport and smell damp earth.

“Home.”

I have thought about this a lot recently while meandering around whakapapa, colonisation, belonging and home. At a noho marae, with manuhiri who were Pākehā, tauiwi immigrants and urban Māori affected by migration from ancestral whenua, I was reminded that belonging involves longing. Longing for home, for land, for connection.

I had that same feeling last week flying along the Southern Alps/Kā tiritiri-o-te-moana towards Central Otago where I lived for 20 years. I was coming home.

Our attachment to place can be a primal feeling.

Hāwea Flat is situated on the borderlands of tourist destination, a small rural settlement with a school and a hall and a church. I come back to a hot afternoon, a broad-winged kāhu drifting on the thermals above the clothesline by the house where I used to live. At dusk the belly of Mt Grand/Kahuitamariki glows.

At night, the Milky Way drapes over us. It is so quiet. Home.

We take a trip up to Kidds Bush, travelling along the edge of Lake Hāwea. We pass the Neck, also known as Manuhaea lagoon, a kainga mahinga kai (food-processing site). I have only just learned this, even though I have driven this road many times: as a child; with my own children; on the night my brother was drowned. I have biked it, taken babies for walks in backpacks, piled kids into cars for camps.

But now, to be back in the bush, the mountain beech red-laced with native There is a sense of the land in me, as much as me in the land mistletoe, the birdsong, and that ridge above the bushline looking back along the length of the lake; that blue. Home.

After our walk we swim in the mighty Clutha River/Mata-au, floating along in the chilling clarity of it.

There is a sense of the land in me, as much as me in the land.

I have recently had a minor experience of migration, moving to live in the North Island. Migration can be a great adventure, but I have this disconnected feeling; I am in a land that is not in me.

Today we went up the Matukituki Valley, where my son is working on the Aspiring hut renovation. I first went to this hut as a six-year-old wearing Bata Bullets that blistered my feet. My mother consoled me with Chesdale cheese triangles wrapped in foil and Sunshine rice risotto for dinner.

Half a century later, Tititea/Mt Aspiring still towers over us. I recall an English GP locum, who was working in Wānaka and took a Sunday drive up the Matukituki’s long gravel road to the start of the track. His response: “I can’t believe you can drive 50km and end up nowhere.”

I guess it depends how you define somewhere.

Home is a kind of somewhere. A somewhere that we long for.

My relationship with place has strengthened in the past few years of the pandemic. I seem to have re-fallen in love with my homeland, perhaps because I have not been able to leave it; gallivanting around the world has been on hold.

I now have a strong sense of not needing to go somewhere else, over there, to find a better something else. I would rather spend a month just being, perhaps this summer in the land between Waiatoto and Heretaniwha.

I am back at the noho marae with my pepeha wondering about colonisation, migration, belonging and home.

Ko tititea te maunga, ko mata au te awa, nō Hāwea ahau.

Lucy O’Hagan is a medical educator and specialist GP working in the Wellington region