Free The Idea of Home by Geraldine Brooks Page A

Wampanoag on the mainland rose up against the English colonists. Benjamin Church, grist miller no longer, became a captain in the English army.
    His principal foe was the Wampanoag leader, Metacom. For six months, Metacom had the English on the run, destroying a dozen settlements. The colonial enterprise in New England teetered. It was Church, the former miller, who devised a way to turn the tide of battle. He enlisted Indians at odds with Metacom to teach the English their guerrilla tactics. On a humid summer day in 1676, Church led the force that trapped Metacom and shot him dead. He regarded Metacom’s dead body and declared him ‘a doleful, great, naked, dirty beast’. He ordered the corpse drawn and quartered and had the quarters hung from four trees. Church kept the head, which he sold in Plymouth, at a day of Thanksgiving, for thirty shillings. It was placed on a tall pole to overlook the feast.
    Everyone knows the story of the first Plymouth Thanksgiving, in 1621. Metacom’s father, Massasoit, attended that one, offering help and friendship to the hapless, half-starved English Puritans. Few know the story of the Plymouth Thanksgiving of 1676, presided over by Massasoit’s son’s decapitated, rotting head. We like that earlier story much better. Let’s not do black armband history. Pass the turkey. Let’s we forget.
    But I can’t forget. Though Benjamin Church’s mill was torn down, this land bears his imprint. The Tiasquam brook remains dammed, the herring absent. And the grindstone is still here, set as a doorstep at the entrance to my house. Two metres in diameter, almost half a metre thick. When my foot lands on its notched ridges, words from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem echo in my head:
    Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
    and wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell …
    Benjamin Church’s mill was built a hundred years before the Industrial Revolution that dismayed Hopkins. But it industrialised this landscape. And now I live where he lived, in an American home on Indian land, haunted by ghosts who lived and died unaware that my land, my homeplace, even existed.
    I did not mean to become part of this story, to know, so intimately, all this history so very far removed, and yet so sadly similar, to our own. Metacom has much in common, after all, with Pemulwuy in Sydney or Yagan in Perth, guerrilla resisters whose heads also ended up on display — Pemulwuy’s pickled in spirits and Yagan’s shrunken and smoked. But that’s black armband history, too, and, as a schoolgirl in 1960s Sydney, I did not learn it. In those days, I could not have told you that the home I lived in stood upon Eora land, nor any details of the dispossession that occurred there. I only knew that I was happy, growing up there.
    I am not part of that earlier Australian generation who set off on a deliberate search for fame and fortune in distant lands. My generation was the firstthat didn’t need to. By the 1980s, when I left home, our culture had grown deep enough and wide enough to encompass all but the most rarefied of ambitions. I meant to leave Australia for just a year — a standard student adventure. But way leads on to way. Like Odysseus, I went to war — although as a writer, not a warrior — and then found my homeward journey diverted by quests and siren songs. What was to have been my brief foreign fling has become, by unplanned stages, my life.
    In dictionaries, definitions of ‘home’ are various. It is both ‘a place of origin, a starting position’ and ‘a goal or destination’. It may also be ‘an environment offering security and happiness’ or ‘the place where something is discovered, founded, developed or promoted. A source.’ In these lectures, I will examine each of these definitions. I will revisit my ‘place of