Homecoming
First half 2025 // Yoga Nidra, Herbs, Home
To begin the practice of Yoga Nidra, find a comfortable spot lying on the floor. You may wish to cover yourself with a blanket. Try to adjust yourself and get comfortable now, so you won’t have to move later. Start by releasing tension. Release tension in your feet. Do you feel any tension in your legs? If you do, let it go. Move up to your stomach, and release the tension there. Move onto your chest, your jaw, your forehead, both arms, the back of your head. Is there tension there?
This is the story as I know it, as has been passed down to me, from my grandmother and her grandmother before her. Sometime around 1800, a man, presumably desperate with poverty, steals a leg of lamb. Once caught, prosecuted, and incarcerated, he is shipped on the long journey to the ‘newly-discovered’ Van Diemen’s land. Oceans he’d never seen before, land he’d never seen before, suffering he’d never seen before, on his way to the bottom of the map. His brothers follow shortly behind and in Steinbeckian fashion are granted land together in the more inhabitable north of the state, where they wait for their incarcerated brother to be released. Huge swathes of it, for nothing, dispossessed as it already was from its rightful owners. When their brother is released from his servitude they give it all up anyway. My family is always giving up the long game. They take to the islands. I’m not sure which one except eventually they wound back around to Flinder’s and stayed, until a few generations ago. They hunt and kill seals for fur. They are some of the Straitsmen, men who stay when the sealing industry ends. They take Tyelelore ‘Island Wives’, Aboriginal women stolen or bought from their elders, passed around for their skills in hunting and trapping, and for their company. They have children with these Aboriginal women. Their children have children, each generation a step further from the knowledge of their forebears. Each generation both whiter and less British, culture-less, blended, tabula rasa. Until my great grandfather leaves Flinder’s for the mainland of Tasmania in search of work. Now we are born not of the Islands but just of the Island. Just Tasmanians.
Why do people emigrate? When my Great Grandfather left Flinder’s Island for the mainland between the first and second world wars the population was less than eight hundred people and his parents were relatives. The population today still sits below 1000, and is at least 15% Palawa (Tasmanian Indigenous), one of the highest concentrations in the state. When I left Tasmania ‘for good’ in 2018 it was for more complicated reasons. My parents weren’t related (I think - though my father’s family has been in the State long enough to have hunted Tasmanian Tigers). But, much like my Great Grandfather and like so many other Tasmanians, I left for opportunity. More than that, I was suffocating. I was always remembering. I felt I could feel what the land here remembers. I still do. And there was tension in my whole body, all the time. So I left.
The thing about home is that it’s always waiting for you. It’s always there somewhere. And you can come home whenever you want. At Christmas, enticed by a job and the near-future of becoming an aunt, and terrified of another year in Melbourne and how that might change me, I came home. You can come home whenever you want but getting there is a long journey. This was my second attempt after a rocky landing and brief stay in 2023-2024 before I returned to purgatory (Melbourne) for my uncompleted lessons. But this time I was ready. My lessons were learned, new friends made, new religion found, new job finished. We shut the doors for good on the wine bar I worked at on my very last night I lived in Melbourne. I wrote ‘CALL FOR GOD’ in the phone booth I’d spent six months staring at, because that was what I had done during my time there, that was what I had learned to do. We drank the last bottles of wine the establishment would ever serve, I walked our seventy year-old regular home and peddled my bike home for the last time and flew home six hours later.
I had some time to spare in January between Christmas and the new job and I had made friends with herbs during my two month course at a community garden in Melbourne. Other than finding God, finding herbs was one of the things that I had done during my year of purgatory. So I emailed an organic herb farm 45 minutes from my home town and I went there, into the mountains, for five days that turned into two weeks. I stayed in their little guest cabin and lit fires at night and looked at the stars and read a book on constellations. And I got horribly, violently ill from a virus passed on kindly from the volunteers that came before me. For a week I convalesced, mostly. My new friends, Greg and Libby, healed me with the root of the elecampane plant. With elderflower syrup and twelve milligrams of vitamin C a day. I lay about looking at the mountains from the window next to my bed and listening to Braiding Sweetgrass. By the time I left I could tell my new friends how relieved I was to find out that this all lived just above me, just above my home, my whole life. I left with a newfound faith in humanity, a book on plant spirit medicine, kilos of potatoes, garlic and herbs, and a recording of a meditation practice called Yoga Nidra.
Yoga Nidra or ‘yogi sleep’ is a guided restorative meditation practice. To begin the practice of Yoga Nidra start by finding a comfortable position on the floor. Think about your right thumb. Form a mental picture of it if you can. Now your pointer finger, middle finger, ring finger, pinky. When I was nineteen, a doctor heard my family history and prescribed me 10 mg of Escitalopram. Then sertraline. I became so numb I would spend weeks doing little else but staring at the white walls of my boyfriend’s apartment and my doctor would call this a ‘depressive episode’. He didn’t know how to diagnose homesickness. Think about your right wrist, do you feel any tension there? I always feel pain during this part, something my brain usually filters out when I’m at rest. When I was 23 I stopped taking the sertraline and I almost killed myself because every time someone spoke to me it would feel like they were really really really far away so I would just go to my room a lot and think, because it felt more real than talking to people, and eventually I took valium to sleep for three days and would wake just to eat chocolate cake and then I ran out of valium and chocolate cake and my psychologist had me committed. You can always come home but the journey won’t be easy. They let me out of the psych ward after twenty-four hours because I told them I changed my mind and didn’t want to kill myself anymore and I went to Thailand with my best friend and fell of a bike and permanently injured my right wrist. It hurts to write now but I still do it, I am still trying to write myself home. Think about your elbow. Your right shoulder, if there’s tension there, let it go.
After the herb farm I head to the city. To the big smoke. I last two weeks. I start a job I quit a job I start uni I start a new job. Such are the rhythms of my life, my family is always giving up the long game. Aries season hits me hard and I am go go go, hot headed, impulsive, childish. At the end of March I quit psychoanalysis because I am doing so much living I don’t have time for introspection anymore. For the first three months of 2025 I hike and I swim and I learn and I study and I work and I pray and I try to love everything. I quit analysing my dreams, analysing my life, analysing my quiet thoughts. I just let it all be for a while. 2+0+2+4=8, was the year of the soul, but 2+0+2+5=9, is the year of letting go. I replace tarot cards with flashcards on anatomy and physiology. I learn the process of gas exchange in the oxygenation of blood. I learn the history of nursing registration. I go back to the herb farm and learn the uses of yarrow, liquorice, verbane. I learn that good people still exist somewhere, that I am going to have a beautiful life. I come back and I learn how to make apple cider vinegar. How to make perfect compost. How to talk to my mother. How to read the Bible. How to stop thinking about It all so much.
I swear off offices for good and I start working at my new city’s Very Cool Bar. Line-out-the-door bar, TikTok-famous wine bar. Everyone is beautiful and from somewhere else. Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Sydney, all bigger places with less charm, less funk, less history, less loneliness. They all looooooove Tasmania. I’ve just come back, I tell them, a thousand times a night. But my family has been here forever. This is so cool to them. They are the very cool bar in the very cool state having a very cool time, and they are talking to someone who has been in such a cool place forever. I don’t tell them that my family once owned much of the land that now forms the heart of Tasmania’s wine region, that supplies all the very cool wine they drink. But we gave it up. That my family is always giving up the long game. So now we don’t produce anything, and I pour wine for a living.
In the story that was passed down to me I was told we were once royalty. This is the family yarn. This is just the story I was told of Home. That we were the descendants of a ‘chief.’ I get curious, I can’t help myself. I get a 14-day ancestry.com free trial and I see what I can find. Thirty minutes and there it is - the Chief Elder of the ‘Oyster Bay Group’, the largest group of Aboriginal people in Tasmania at the time of European invasion, is my 6th Great Grandfather. Between him and me and to all sides, is mostly renegades, sea captains and convicts, sealers and boat thieves. The story is not as I’ve been told it, not exactly, at least not to Ancestry. Which one of us is wrong, who knows. But there are plenty of convicts, plenty of Palawa and Wurundjeri ancestors, births and deaths all over the Furneax group of islands.
At the end of March I tell myself my nightmares have gone away. That I can quit psychoanalysis. That I can quit thinking about it all so much. That I’ve come Home. But really instead of looking inward I am looking back. I look at myself naked a lot, analysing, emotionless. I think about my body like the smallest matryoshka doll in an endless stream of matryoshka dolls, spanning back into eternity, walking this land forever. Where did my hands come from? My gait? The way all my thoughts go around and around and around? Around and around and back. I neglect my uni work for Ancestry.com. I become rabbid, obsessive, devoted totally to the task of sorting through my distance past. Jewish goldsmiths in Sydney. Lighthouse keepers on Cape Barren Island. Sheep thieves at Georgetown. So many deaths at sea. Sailors, captains, boat builders, boat thieves (pirates?). Kidnapped brides from the coast of Victoria, Wurundjeri women, kidnapped brides from Tasmania, Palawa women. First people of Tasmania. Lutrawita. First people, first people, first people. First home. You can always come home.
Late April, Holy Week. The light changes. Strange happenings haunt my life. The nightmares come back, worse somehow than before. The only time I get real rest is during Yoga Nidra. I fly to Melbourne to collect the last of my things - a sewing machine, my books, my winter coats, my boy. The chain of my cross breaks on Good Friday. I tuck it in the coin pocket of my jeans and catch the Spirit back the next day. I watch the Bob Dylan biopic as the ship sways. I ask my mother to pray for me. I drive off of the boat on the north coast and suddenly remember why I left, why I took that first prescription, that first plane - to escape the cold, the long dark. To get away from how real everything feels to me here. It’s so nice to be tied somewhere, to revive old nicknames; Ad, Addy, Paddle. But in Melbourne for seven years I just got to be Adelaide. I drive off the boat with my boyfriend and my broken cross and I think about God and how I will get home to him this far south. Can he hear us down here? I start googling again. I ask my mother to pray for me. I message all the Catholics I know (friends in high places) I pray for myself, for peace.
Winter, I head back to the herb farm for the third time. I head back cold and confused and a little sore of heart. It is hard being Home. My friends take me to pick Hawthorn Berries at a neighbouring farm. By the middle of winter long limp branches hang heavy with fruit and completely bare of leaves. The plants were brought here a long time ago, with the convicts, and form hedges across the dry Midlands and beneath the Western Tiers. The berries are protected by long spiky thorns that tear up my wrists as I labour for hours in the blue winter sun. Back in the cabin, warming by the fire, I macerate them in a mortar and pestle the size of my head, hundreds of teeny tiny hearts, and when I add them to alcohol they bleed copper red, the colour of blood. The notes I scribble between summaries of my restless nightmares and guilty thoughts are as follows: books say to make the tea with leaves and flowers, but Libby believes the heart benefit must come from the berry - the tiny hearts. Warming, bitter, treatment for cold people with poor circulation, low blood pressure, high blood pressure, ‘food for the heart’.
At the herb farm it is suggested to me that I might try being ‘here’ more, that’s what the Yoga Nidra is for. I’ve spent most of my life trying not to be here, trying not to be Home. There are a thousand and one ways to escape one’s body, one’s fate, one’s home. But you can always come home. You can swear off home and then you can come home. It’s always there, you don’t even need to go anywhere. Find a comfortable spot on the floor. Think about your body, where do you feel tension? Try to release that tension. Think about your body. Think about your whole body lying on the floor. Think about home. You are home lying on the floor. You can always come home. You can always come home. You can always come home. Start the journey now.
In mid June I meet my nephew, named after my great grandfather from Flinders - beautiful blonde baby, the first person I have ever met who is Palawa on both their maternal and paternal sides, a true Tasmanian. I hold him and stare at his tiny face, a perfect kaleidoscope of people I love, an optical illusion of memory, and I think perhaps it is not such a bad thing to be like one’s family. I decide to head Home. Whole body drives. Whole body listens to the Charlies Angels soundtrack CD and pulls onto the highway. Whole body changes from first gear to second gear, all the way up to fifth. Whole body parks by the road, parks 2000 Toyota Corolla by the side of the road, on the dirt. Whole body removes sandals and walks through dirt tracks and scrubby ferns to the open ocean. Whole body feels the cool wind, sees the sea stirring darkly, uninviting. Whole body invites self anyway. Whole body walks then jogs then runs then swims. Whole body is swimming. Whole body dives under a wave, gets up, dives under another wave. Whole body in the water, head tipped to the sky. Whole body thanks God, thanks God with the whole body. Whole body is Home, Home is the whole body, is the whole body in the ocean back Home. The practice of Yoga Nidra is complete. Whole body is alive. Thank God, Thank God, Thank God.