When it comes to new beginnings there’s nothing like an engagement. So what better time to celebrate one than at the dawn of a new year? That’s what’s happening this New Year’s Eve (it’s December at the time of writing) when our family will head to Natchez to attend an engagement party for my wife’s cousin (and our son’s godmother), Madeline. Brilliant, adventurous, and fuelled by a lifelong passion for science, Madeline has earned a Master’s of Public Health in Epidemiology, spent time in Uganda researching the relationship between modern and traditional healers, and today works for the University of Alabama’s School of Public Health. She is, in other words, not a dingbat. So I choose to take it as a backhanded compliment that the man our clever Natchez cousin has chosen to spend her life with has turned out to be … another Australian! Mark is a genial, cerebral young lawyer who grew up in Western Australia and met Madeline in Birmingham while touring the US a couple of years ago, setting in motion the sort of long-distance, trans-Pacific romance that launched my wife and I on our own journey a couple of decades back. Since getting engaged the couple has settled in Birmingham, where Madeline is working at UAB while Mark follows the time-honored Aussie expat tradition of being supported by his fiancée until the INS gives him a work visa. I’m exaggerating. As a highly qualified solicitor (what they call lawyers in Australia), once Mark has passed the American bar exam he seems far likelier to make a meaningful impact on the United States economy than I must have done when I was admitted twenty years ago, with marketable skills that included washing dishes and tending a different kind of bar. But they’re deliriously happy together and I’m certain that Mark’s introduction to American life will be seamless, cushioned by the warm embrace of the dear family into which he is welcomed.
They say lightning never strikes twice in the same place but you have to wonder. What are the odds of one small-town Southern family attracting (or contracting) two Australians in a generation? Never mind that Natchez and Perth—where Mark was raised—are separated by eleven thousand miles of desert and ocean. Never mind that there are fourteen Americans for every Australian. There aren’t that many of us anywhere, much less wandering around America picking up reconstructed Southern belles. There are advantages to being the sole representative of a country for which most Americans express fond feelings. People buy you drinks for no apparent reason. They assume that you’re manlier and more interesting than you actually are on account of having survived childhood without being killed and eaten by a lethal reptile. And they gently forgive the myriad social transgressions you inevitably make during the years it takes to grasp the subtle differences between the culture you were raised in, and the one that has adopted you. There’s also the fun fact that, when you’re the only Australian for miles around, you can make up anything you like about Australia without fear of contradiction. So from now on I’ll have to watch myself at Thanksgiving.
One of my favorite authors, Tim Winton, wrote a book named Island Home. Described as “a landscape memoir,” the book is Winton’s exploration of his relationship with the wild, beautiful, largely unpeopled and frequently hostile landscape of the Australian west. As a successful author with the wanderlust that seems baked into the Australian national character, Winton has spent long periods of his adult life traveling through and living in Europe, Asia, and the United States. But he always returns to Australia, because as Island Home describes, he finds his relationship with the living landscape that raised him is as vital, as sustaining, and in some ways as difficult, as family. “The regions I know best are particularly challenging …” he writes, “and after some visits I often feel as spent and dismayed as any guest at a Christmas lunch, wondering why the hell I bothered. But homecomings are partly about submitting to the uncomfortably familiar, aren’t they? Like a hapless adult child, you go back for more, despite yourself, eternally trying to figure out the family puzzle. Even so you get sustenance, just from trying, by remaining open to the mystery, suspecting that if you give up on it you’ll be left with nothing.” That thought resonates, and despite the fact that I’ve lived in Louisiana now for longer than I did Australia, I still feel the pull of that other “home” keenly at times. Of course Australians aren’t the only ones sustained by the living, breathing landscape that surrounds them. I meet born-and-raised Southerners who feel the same deep connection with their home range all the time. After twenty years among them a fair bit of this place has rubbed off on me, too. I’ve come to love it here, so I feel fortunate to be part of the family welcoming Mark as he and Madeline set out on the long, surprising, sometimes bittersweet, always evolving journey towards understanding what, in the end, “home” really means. We wish them every happiness along the way.
Speaking of new beginnings, how do you like our redesign? For months our staff, led by Mike, our fearless production director, has worked to create a lighter, airier visual signature, without losing sight of the unique cultural subject matter that Country Roads has chronicled for almost thirty-five years. This “new beginning” is what I was thinking about when I started writing about Mark and Madeline. But sometimes when I wander off on a tangent it takes me awhile to wander back. Anyway, I hope you like what you see and read within these pages. The mission: to know our “home” better, remains the same. Happy New Year, one and all.
James Fox-Smith, publisher —james@countryroadsmag.com
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