No Place Like Home: How Nostalgia Paints Over Violent Histories

In class we’d learned the Australian flag was blue to represent the sky and ocean both, our collective identity shaped by that constant hue.

Tell a kid to sketch out a landscape and notice the hues of their ground and sky. If that kid was me in the early 2000s, I’d have snatched up a fistful of blues and swept down the paper in teeming strokes. My favorite book through elementary school was Robin Klein’s All in the Blue Unclouded Weather, which the librarian had called “Australia’s Little Women” as she lifted it from the shelf and into my hands. The book is the first in a series about four sisters from Wilgawa, a small and sunburned town in a dusty region of Western Australia. I was an only child living in the city on the opposite side of the country and shared little with those Mellings, who were all freckled and flaxen-haired. But their unclouded blue was the sky of my childhood, not just the backdrop but more so the mood: In class we’d learned the Australian flag was blue to represent the sky and ocean both, our collective life and identity shaped by that seemingly constant hue. I eventually moved to Michigan for college over a decade later, where I felt I’d adjusted smoothly to life on the other side of the world. But then the winter eventually hit, and with it a sense of the distance. From my dorm room I’d look out the window and daydream of bluer skies in Sydney—the hue more brilliant in memory only because I felt so far from home.

All that the sky really is, to roughly paraphrase the science, is light interacting with air—though in a way that’s what I miss most. I used to think this was delusional, but now that I’ve met more Australians abroad, I’d venture to say the feeling is shared. Whether it’s the hole in the ozone layer or for some other reason entirely, light just feels and looks different back home—brighter, clearer, and harsher than anywhere else I’ve known. So different, in fact, that when the first European settlers tried to paint it, they struggled to do so accurately: In their landscapes the light looks too cool and too soft, prone to blurring over harsh edges. I’d first seen these paintings on a grade school excursion to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Shuffling in twos with our vision still mottled from the blinding light of day, we passed bluish, teeming greens, muted browns, and washed-out grays, in arrangements more suited to Europe than to the climates we lived in at home.

Art historians have framed this brief period—from first European contact in the late 1700s to about 1850—as a shift in understanding light. It was during this time that the British began to settle Australia as a penal colony, with their First Fleet of ships arriving near Sydney in 1788. Once the settlers stepped ashore, it seemed that “[the] air, the sky, the land, [were] objects entirely different from all that a Briton [had] been accustomed to,” wrote Thomas Watling, a Scottish artist convicted of forgery, in Letters from an Exile at Botany Bay. I imagine him sweltering, pale shoulders starting to pink, as he wrote that the sky was “clear and warm” and “very seldom overcast from any haze.” This was no adulation, to be sure, but an expression of alienation: Freshly and forcefully exiled, convicts like Watling were suffering homesickness. They mourned the loss of familiar habitats and the identities they’d formed within them; without the rush of metropolitan life and the angles and colors of the English countryside—Watling yearned for “rising hills” and “azure distances” in particular—the transplants felt disoriented. “Our longest day coincides exactly with your shortest and vice versa,” he wrote to his aunt back in Dumfries, of seasons diametrically opposed to all they’d known. Perhaps this is why, as the historian Patricia R. McDonald notes in The World Upside Down, no coherent artistic vision emerges from this period, only “the struggle by artists and writers to come to grips with this new, totally alien environment.”

In their struggle, the painters resorted to artistic license. They portrayed the Australian environment in a way that appealed to British taste, adhering to narrow European ideals of “productive” and “picturesque” land. On their canvases, bush was cleared into pastures as if the soil had been farmed for decades; hills were boldly sloped and rearranged at various angles; horizons were softened by trees and bathed in a golden, gentle light. These landscapes, as a result, end up looking like some place in between—not quite Australia but not Britain either. This kind of painterly vision denoted a broader way of seeing, which viewed Australia as generally inferior to Britain. The settlers deemed Australia uninhabitable, the land “monotonous,” “infertile,” and “dry,” assessments that reflected their Eurocentric point of view—Indigenous peoples had, at that point, lived on the continent for over 65,000 years. Rather than consider these other ways of seeing and inhabiting the land, the settlers clung harder to what they knew, distorting the land through their art in the process.

That early landscapes depicted the continent as unpeopled and uncultured only helped the settlers set this fiction down as fact.

Within these idealized landscapes, Indigenous peoples are mostly absent. This, too, reflects a distinctly European gaze: On a British expedition in 1770 to survey the Australian coast, Captain James Cook noted the land appeared “in the purest state of nature,” and that “the industry of Man has had nothing to do with any part of it.” Cook’s naturalist, Sir Joseph Banks, corroborated his account by adding that the coast looked “thinly inhabited even to admiration.” Their perspective was later enshrined as the legal doctrine of terra nullius—“land belonging to no one”—which upheld British ownership of the country and their ongoing possession and extraction of it. That early landscapes depicted the continent as unpeopled and uncultured only helped the settlers set this fiction down as fact. So what ostensibly looks like beauty is really a mask for abject brutality—though you wouldn’t know it in a marbled gallery, where these scenes are framed by gilded wood and equally flattering theories of light. Which strikes me as the problem with nostalgia more generally: that it often conceals destruction beneath various sheens of romanticized remembering.

*

Like how a pilot narrated the approaching coast as we descended to land in Sydney. “This is Cronulla,” he announced through the overhead speakers, “which I’d recommend if you find Bondi too touristy.” Some tourists strained beside me to look out the porthole as he spoke, and I joined them at this mention of the beach I’d grown up on. I could feel myself swooning, ever so slightly, at the familiar sight below; things always looked simple enough to love from a high-enough altitude. I agreed in part with the pilot’s assessment before he added, “I tend to prefer it anyway—it’s sort of retro, like Australia in the ’60s or ’70s, as if you’re traveling back in time.” It took me a moment to register that he meant this as a good thing, by which point he’d already cut to the standard refrain: “If you’re new here, welcome to Sydney, and if you’re from Sydney, welcome home.” This line is always the highlight of the almost daylong trip. But the excitement it evokes in me also exposes an uneasy thought: that I feel more secure calling Sydney home now that I’ve left it. In the States, where I’ve lived since college, I am everyone’s Australian friend and my “home” is mostly understood as such—perhaps notions of foreignness cleave to my accent rather than to my physical features alone. Since growing up in Australia as a child of recent immigrants, that alignment of Sydney with home was never as neat. My parents assumed things would be different for me, given that I was born in the country; yet I, like them, have fielded the timeworn threat to “go back to where you came from.”

Perhaps no place reminds me of this more than Cronulla where, in 2005, race riots erupted in the streets and on the shore. Organized through a chain text by Anglo Australians to “show them this our beach and they are never welcome back,” their aim was to “reclaim the beach,” particularly from immigrants of Middle Eastern descent. At ten years old I mostly registered that the beach was inaccessible for as long as it was on the front page of the paper. I still remember one of those images: a shirtless brown-haired boy, maybe seventeen years old, Australian flag fastened around his neck like a noose and, written in ink down his sunburned chest: WE GREW HERE! YOU FLEW HERE! 2230. I’d met boys like him before, ones who proudly recalled the crimes of their convicted great-great-great-great-grandparents—as if this made them more authentically Australian or “true blue,” as the saying goes, which itself has been passed down through those same generations: initially adapted from British English to describe a quintessential loyal Australian; then lyricized by John Williamson in the ’80s, into the unofficial anthem of the national cricket and rugby teams; later adopted by the violent far-right extremist group the True Blue Crew in 2015. For the rioters playing their part within this nationalistic tradition, to be “true blue” fundamentally hinged on a terra nullius logic: They believed in their birthright to the land and sought to defend it accordingly.

This violence, too, is a product of nostalgic remembering. The 1970s brought about rapid social change in Australia, in which marginalized groups—Indigenous peoples and immigrants amongst them—sought increased recognition and legal protection. When the progressive Gough Whitlam was elected prime minister in 1972, he amended a group of laws—formally the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, though commonly known as the White Australia Policy—which made it easier for people like my parents to live in Australia for the first time. That the Cronulla of the present could feel like the Cronulla of the ’60s suggests its resistance to such change is a deliberate form of racism; to in turn idealize this “retro” Australia only glorifies a whiter time. While longing for some bygone, barefoot era might seem innocuous, the relation of this longing to racism—of which the riots were just one example—means that we need to consider which kinds of memory enable violence.

*

I visited Cronulla on a trip home years later, during a summer called “unprecedented”: a bushfire season longer, hotter, and more destructive than anyone could remember. The visit was a first for my boyfriend, Connor, to whom Sydney was just an idea. I’d spent much of our relationship trying to paint it in his mind, the blues of the ocean and sky I aligned exclusively with “back home.” But when we finally arrived, the smog was too thick to spend much time outside. In the way that a period of your life might feel sepia-toned, most of the photos from that summer are infernally blushed. It’s the type of unsettling hue, I realized, scrolling through my camera roll one day, that producers apply in post to signal a distant, impoverished country—except that my iPhone notes the time and place as December 2019, Sydney, Australia.

Ten days into our stay, the smog finally receded from the city. I suggested we go to Cronulla, buoyed by the memory of summers past. I packed lots of water and books out of habit, as if we would spend all day on the sand. But by the time we got to the beach it was already too late. The wind, having changed its course, sent the smog careening in our direction. The pines and palms that lined the shore started to bend at sharper angles. In our swimsuits, prone on our towels, we were lashed and then crumbed by the stirred-up sand. The smog blurred the yolky sun, like it was suddenly evening in the middle of the day. Sensing my anxiety, Connor said gently, “This is all still really nice,” like the dog in the dumpster fire meme. We finally resolved to leave as some windborne sand hit him in the eye.

Though we tend to think of nostalgia as a flattering form of memory, it is more accurately a form of willed amnesia.

In 2007, the environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht tried to find words to describe the particular kind of “homesickness one experiences when one is still at home.” Albrecht had spent years researching the Hunter Region of New South Wales, known to most as the state’s wine country but to him as a site for studying environmental destruction and its effect on mental health. Residents of the region had reached out to him in distress since the coal mining industry had carved up the earth; they’d lived on that land for decades, but now there was no place like home as they’d known it. Many of them talked about the feeling of acceleration, like a quickening line of dominoes: Development had worsened pollution and the cost of living alike, driving up the rate of neighbor turnover and eroding community ties. These changes were manifesting, too, in higher rates of asthma, cancer, birth defects, and suicide, all of which contributed to a difficult realization: The place they thought of as home was not just unhomely, but barely habitable.

The lexicon for connecting psychological and environmental states was still lacking. In the entirety of the English language, only one word—nostalgia—distinctly acknowledged the pain of longing for home. That year, Albrecht coined the word solastalgia, giving it a similar structure to nostalgia so that the latter might exist as a “ghost reference”—his words—an echo of the understanding that psyche and place are intertwined. He defined solastalgia as “the pain or sickness caused by the loss of, or inability to derive solace from, the present state of one’s home environment,” a “feeling of dislocation” despite physically remaining in place. Albrecht noted that the solastalgic subject doesn’t necessarily long for an idealized past, only to sustain whatever in their environment brings them solace. But to me those symptoms aren’t mutually exclusive if the nostalgic who longs for the past seeks to sustain it in their present—like the settler artists from Britain who painted Australia to look like back home.

I was taught growing up—maybe when looking at these paintings—that “critical distance” is a part of fair engagement: that removal from a subject allows you to see its nature more clearly. Yet I’ve found since moving from home that my critical distance from it can dissolve; that distance is in fact a critical element of nostalgia—specifically distance from patterns of violence that work to preserve colonial order. Though we tend to think of nostalgia as a flattering form of memory, it is more accurately a form of willed amnesia: a remembrance set on strategic forgetting that prolongs its own version of the past.

This thinking has always entailed a range of catastrophic costs. Whether through racism, climate change, or some combination of both, the legacies of colonialism have long made the earth an uninhabitable place, disproportionately so for Indigenous peoples and other marginalized groups. But as the climate crisis accelerates, even those people historically untouched by it will have to reckon with these effects. Since part of colonialism’s project is to obscure its devastation, the vast extent of ecological change—and our increasing inability to gain distance from it—might help us cast this history in a more critical light. As with that smoldering sky above Sydney, the blue of its past now a hazy-hued present: in the red tint of disrupted nostalgia, devastation can clearly be seen.