Islands and Belonging: A Reflection on the Islands of Ibiza and Tasmania

The first moment: From the desk in my study perched in the gable of a Swiss-style chalet, I look through a tracery of white-limbed eucalypts across layers of wooded hills to the shoreline. Turquoise sea glistens in the afternoon sun, the houses of Opossum Bay mere dots against the bleached paddocks of the South Arm Peninsula. Beyond, the dark hump of Betsey Island rises from the water, while in the far distance the shadowy outline of the Tasman Peninsula looms blue. The scene shifts constantly: clear and shimmering in one light, diffuse and hazy in another, all soft pinks and purples at sunset, sometimes just a dense cloud curtain. The house (a temporary haven) is itself perched on the lower slopes of Mt Wellington and I have landed here like a bird of passage, resting while I familiarise myself with the surrounding terrain before flying on to my home. But, unlike the huge kelp gulls that fly past the window from the coast towards the mountain every morning and which seem to know exactly where they are going, to be perfectly in place, I feel disturbingly homeless and out of place. My move to this island was by choice, so I am neither displaced nor dispossessed. Alternately exhilarated and despondent, or simply confused, my mood switches are mercurial and intense. My partner and I did not 'fly' from the mainland, but arrived by ship with our car loaded with belongings. We must now go through the process of finding some sort of 'belonging' here for ourselves. The woman who handed us the new number plates for our car smiled brightly and said, 'Well, now you are real Tasmanians.' If only belonging was that simple, the 'natural state' that our number plates promise.