The concept of becoming local still amuses me. I can contribute, serve, know the roads, recognise faces and accumulate stories, yet some longer-established resident may still introduce me as the accountant fellow who moved up from Sydney. That does not need to be an insult. It may simply be the community’s way of acknowledging that belonging develops through repetition rather than announcement.
I cannot now remember everything about the singing contest at that university in-house session in Bathurst. I remember standing up to sing in a blue tee short with an “Up You” motif as a reflection of defiance, although whether I volunteered enthusiastically or was encouraged by people who had already decided I needed encouraging has disappeared into the usual fog that gathers around old stories. I remember choosing Take Me Home, Country Roads,¹ because it was already one of those songs that required no rehearsal in my head. Most clearly of all, I remember winning, which was a sufficiently unusual outcome for a singing competition involving me that memory has sensibly preserved it.
I doubt the victory launched tremors through the Australian music industry. No record producer rushed forward with a contract, and John Denver’s position in the market remained secure. It was an in-house session rather than the Tamworth Country Music Festival, although I suspect I accepted the result with much the same quiet dignity that Slim Dusty might have shown after another gold record. Still, for those few minutes, the song belonged to me, and perhaps that mattered more than whether I sang it particularly well.
It has remained my karaoke song ever since, partly because I know it and partly because karaoke is not really the place to begin an ambitious program of personal reinvention. There is comfort in a song whose direction is established before the first line has properly left the mouth. The road knows where it is going, the singer knows what he is asking for, and the people listening usually recognise the chorus soon enough to offer assistance. Even my internal radio station, which has occasionally demonstrated the musical judgement of a drunken disc jockey at a country wedding, understands that Country Roads is difficult to ruin completely.
What I did not understand in Bathurst was why I had chosen it so readily. I may simply have liked the song, and memoir becomes dangerous when every childhood or youthful preference is later promoted into prophecy. Sometimes a song is only a song until life gives it further employment. Yet Country Roads has followed me for too long, through too many physical and emotional departures, for me to dismiss its continuing presence as nothing more than a convenient tune with a memorable chorus.
The song appears to know exactly what home is. Home is somewhere behind the traveller, waiting at the end of roads that remain capable of carrying him back. It is a landscape, but it is also a certainty, a place that knows the traveller sufficiently well to recognise him when he arrives. That certainty is what makes the song so comfortable to sing and so difficult for me to believe.
My earliest version of home was Mt Buffalo, on Wargeila Road near Rye Park. It was the place of the first years, the family landscape before the family began dispersing and before all the meanings later attached to childhood had properly formed. The road, the surrounding country and the physical distance from other people were not scenery added to the story after the event. They were the story’s original boundaries, the first map from which I attempted to work out where I stood in relation to everybody else.
The call sign I later used on the CB radio was the Wargeila Wanderer. There is a certain teenage grandeur in giving oneself a name that suggests both geographic importance and purposeful movement, even when the wandering may have consisted largely of driving along roads known to almost everyone listening on the same channel. I liked the identity, though, because it allowed me to belong to a place while also declaring that I was moving away from it. I could carry Wargeila in the name without promising that I would remain there.
My mother later adopted the Wargeila Wanderer idea when she arranged a set of simple screen-printed T-shirts for us as we began to scatter from the family home. I do not remember the shirts as pieces of sophisticated design, and they were probably not intended to survive as sacred family artefacts. They were a small acknowledgement that the children who had belonged to that road were beginning to travel along others. Each shirt carried the place outward, as though home could be printed onto cloth and taken with us when the family itself no longer occupied the same ground.
There was affection in those shirts, but also recognition. Families sometimes understand that an era is ending without having the language or courage to announce it directly. A T-shirt can say what the family is not yet prepared to discuss: this is where you came from, this is what once connected us, and you may need something visible to remind you when the roads begin separating. It was not a formal farewell, but perhaps that made it more accurate.
The Wargeila Wanderer became more than a CB call sign because wandering eventually became one of the ways I understood myself. I moved through places, careers, rooms and groups with enough confidence to appear as though I belonged in each of them. I learned how to speak the local language, identify the expectations and make myself useful. What I did not always learn was how to stop feeling like a visitor who had been issued a temporary pass.
That feeling was not confined to geography. I could stand inside a group and still remain outside the assumptions that bound its other members together. Often I was the youngest person there, expected to listen while experience announced its authority, or the oldest, expected to supply the certainty that age apparently provides. The centre of the group always seemed to have formed somewhere else, at another time, among people who had agreed upon the rules before I arrived.
I wanted to fit in, which is different from wanting to become the same. That distinction caused more difficulty than I understood at the time. I wanted the comfort of belonging without surrendering the parts of me that questioned the group’s direction, reasoning or convenient certainties. Groups are generally enthusiastic about welcoming difference provided the difference agrees to remain decorative.
Perhaps that is why the gatherings in John Denver’s songs have sometimes made me uncomfortable rather than envious. The images of friendship, shared experience and people gathered in uncomplicated companionship appear warm from the outside. They offer a world in which nobody is calculating whether he has earned his place beside the fire. My mind does not enter those scenes easily because it begins looking for the unspoken history, the established friendships and the rules that everyone else seems to understand.
I have never been naturally comfortable with the campfire mythology of belonging. Someone always appears to know when to add another piece of wood, when to pass something around and when the conversation has reached the point at which everyone should stare meaningfully into the flames. I would probably be wondering whether the fire complied with local restrictions and whether anybody had brought enough water to extinguish it properly. The analytical Jeff can turn even an expression of natural fellowship into an elementary risk-management meeting.
The humour in that is genuine, but so is the discomfort beneath it. Around many real and imagined campfires, I have felt that everybody else received an instruction sheet that failed to arrive in my mail. They knew the shared stories, the accepted jokes and the correct emotional temperature. I could participate, sometimes successfully, while remaining conscious that participation and belonging are not necessarily the same thing.
Rocky Mountain High² reaches much further into that discomfort than its open landscapes initially suggest. I once heard it mainly as a song of nature, freedom, introspection and release from the pressures imposed by other people. It seemed to offer altitude as an escape from the noise below, somewhere the mind could expand without continually colliding with the walls of expectation. That interpretation still belongs to me, even though age has made the song’s deeper invitation harder to avoid.
The words that trouble me describe someone coming home to a place he had never previously known. That may be one of the most beautiful ideas in the song, but it lands in me almost as an indictment. To recognise home in a place never inhabited suggests that all the places already inhabited failed to provide that recognition. Discovery becomes inseparable from the knowledge that something essential had been missing.
The rational response is that home can take many forms and may be discovered more than once. People move, change, marry, create families and find landscapes that better suit the people they have become. There is no legal requirement that the location appearing on a birth certificate must remain the emotional headquarters of a life. The human response is less orderly because it asks why the first places were not enough and why belonging has so often arrived as a possibility rather than a possession.
Mt Buffalo should have been home because it was the beginning. Boorowa should have been home because it became part of the country through which my life was formed. Bathurst, workplaces, family houses and all the other addresses should have contributed something permanent enough to answer the question. Yet when I try to identify the place that remained unquestionably mine, the map begins moving under my finger.
The sharpest disruption came after I had left Mt Buffalo. My sister suggested that, once I had gone, I should not return. It was said in anger and later withdrawn in an apology, and fairness requires that both parts of the story remain together. An angry sentence should not be treated as an eternal legal instrument merely because it found its target.
Unfortunately, fairness does not always control what the body remembers. Words spoken in anger can be retracted intellectually while remaining lodged in the emotional record. The apology may repair the intention, but it cannot guarantee the sentence will never be heard again. Somewhere inside me, the road back to Mt Buffalo acquired a gate that had not previously been there.
I do not blame my sister for creating the entire uncertainty of home. That would place too much weight on one sentence and allow me to avoid examining everything that came before and after it. The remark hurt because it landed on ground already prepared to receive it. It confirmed, for a moment, the fear that a place might stop being mine as soon as I ceased being physically useful to its continuing story.
Leaving a family home is supposed to be an ordinary act of movement rather than an expulsion. Children grow, work calls, relationships develop and the original household changes because that is what households do. Yet “you cannot come back” carries a different meaning from “you have moved on.” One recognises growth while the other threatens removal from the map.
Perhaps the Wargeila Wanderer shirt became important for that reason. The name preserved the connection after the right to return had become emotionally complicated. I could remain from Wargeila even if I no longer belonged at Wargeila. The wanderer could carry the road without needing the road to offer him a bed.
There is both freedom and sadness in constructing identity that way. A wanderer cannot easily be rejected by a place because he has already declared that he is passing through. He arrives with his independence established and leaves before anyone needs to decide whether he should remain. The defence is efficient, but like many efficient defences, it can protect a person from receiving the very thing he claims to be searching for.
Condobolin complicates the map further because I never lived there, yet it may be the place that comes closest to being a spiritual home. It belongs to my mother’s side of the family, to stories, relationships and an inherited sense of connection that does not depend upon my having occupied a particular house. It should be less mine than the places where I slept, worked and built routines. Instead, it has sometimes felt more deeply connected to me than addresses supported by rates notices, electricity accounts and years of physical presence.
That is difficult for the analytical Jeff, who prefers ownership to have evidence. A home should be measurable by time lived there, responsibilities accepted, improvements made and memories accumulated. Condobolin does not win that calculation. It enters through another door, one built from family inheritance, recognition and the feeling that part of me was already known there before I arrived.
Perhaps spiritual home is the phrase we use when the paperwork cannot explain the attachment. It is not necessarily where life happened, but where life seems to connect with a story larger than the individual version of it. The place contains people whose memories began before ours and whose relationships give us a position that does not have to be earned from the beginning. We arrive not as strangers seeking admission, but as continuations.
That does not make family belonging simple. Family history carries its own silences, exclusions, misunderstandings and hurts, and Condobolin cannot be turned into an imagined sanctuary where all contradictions disappear. I have no interest in painting a heritage town in sentimental colours merely because the present sometimes feels uncertain. What matters is that the connection exists despite the complications rather than because there were none.
In Condobolin, I am attached through my mother to people and stories that preceded my own attempts to prove usefulness. I do not have to produce a set of accounts, solve a problem or entertain the room before the connection can be acknowledged. The relationship may be distant, inherited and imperfect, but it is not entirely dependent upon performance. For someone who spent much of life confusing usefulness with belonging, that difference is significant.
Boorowa carries another version of home because its country is closer to the landscape of my own formation. It belongs to roads, distances, family associations and the habits developed when movement between places was never merely a short drive through anonymous suburbs. Country towns teach geography differently. The spaces between them become part of identity, and the road itself is often as important as the destination.
Yet country towns also maintain their own measurements of belonging. A person can live in a place for years and remain the fellow who came from somewhere else. Families who arrived two generations earlier may still be discussed as newcomers by those whose own ancestors had the foresight to arrive three generations earlier. Local status is not always hostile, but it can be administered with a precision that would impress the Australian Taxation Office.
The Mid North Coast, where retirement has now placed me, is as close as I may come to the home I have spent a lifetime trying to identify. It has the physical elements that settle something within me: the openness, water, trees, roads and space to let thought move without immediately striking another obligation. It offers enough distance from earlier versions of me for the present one to breathe. It also places me among people whose histories in the area began long before mine, which means I may need another twenty years before anyone risks calling me local.
There is humour in that calculation because twenty years is a substantial probationary period at this stage of life. By the time full local status is considered, I may be required to attend the ceremony through a medium or provide evidence from beyond the grave. Country communities do not rush these decisions, and perhaps they are right not to. Belonging that arrives too easily can sometimes be no more than marketing.
The retirement place is not home because it has removed every uncertainty. Depression did not consult the real-estate photographs before deciding whether it would move with me. The Black Dog has never shown much respect for coastal scenery, and it is perfectly capable of lying in the shade while everyone else admires the day. A beautiful place can offer room to breathe without guaranteeing that breathing will always feel easy.
Nor has retirement transformed me into a man entirely at peace with stillness. For most of my life, place was attached to purpose, and purpose was measured through work, family responsibility, service or the next problem waiting to be solved. A house became home partly because people needed things from me there. Once the demand changes, the question becomes whether I belong to the place or merely performed a useful role within it.
That is one reason the family home with Robyn must be part of any honest answer. Home is not only geography, heritage or the romance of a road returning through familiar country. It is the accumulation of ordinary presence with another person, the repeated decisions through which two lives continue alongside each other. Those decisions are less dramatic than mountain discovery, but they may be more durable.
Robyn and I have built home through routines, disagreements, shared concerns, family movements and the practical negotiations that rarely attract songwriters. Home can be the room in which each person knows the other’s silences, including the difference between a silence requiring intervention and one that should be allowed to sit undisturbed. It can be the knowledge that someone is nearby without the demand that every moment become a declaration of devotion. For men of my generation, and perhaps for me particularly, love has often been expressed through remaining, providing and attending to what needs to be done, even when the plain words struggled to arrive.
The family home does not erase the longing attached to earlier landscapes. A marriage should not be required to repair every uncertainty that existed before it, and a spouse should not have to become an entire geography. Robyn can be home without being made responsible for every occasion on which I felt homeless. That distinction matters because love becomes unfair when it is asked to fill every empty room created across a lifetime.
The children also changed the meaning of home. Wherever they were, part of my attention travelled with them, and the idea of return became less concerned with my own childhood landscape than with whether they would continue returning to us. Parenthood creates a strange reversal in the old song. The road no longer exists only to take the traveller back; it must also remain open for the next generation, without becoming a chain around their movement.
I understand now that a home can become less welcoming when those within it cling too tightly to its earlier form. Children need to leave without being accused of abandonment, and they need to return without being required to become the people who departed. That is easier to write than to practise. Every parent keeps private versions of the family in which certain years remain available for replay, even though the cast has aged and the original set has long been dismantled.
Perhaps my search for home has sometimes been a search for a time rather than a place. Mt Buffalo is not merely land on Wargeila Road; it is the earliest family configuration before departure complicated the picture. Condobolin is not simply a town; it is access to my mother’s family line and to a belonging that seems older than my own uncertainty. The Mid North Coast is not only where I live now; it is the possibility that retirement might allow a different relationship with myself.
That possibility is where Rocky Mountain High returns. Its discovery is not just of spectacular country, although the landscape carries the transformation. It is the recognition that a person might encounter a place where the self no longer needs to contract to fit the available room. The freedom is not merely from society but from the exhausted performance of acceptability.
I have spent much of life entering rooms and rapidly assessing which Jeff would be most useful there. The accountant could explain, the adviser could steady, the performer could entertain, and the competent man could carry what others did not want to carry themselves. Each was genuinely me, but none was the entire answer. A place that feels like home may be one in which the selection process is no longer required.
That may explain why landscape has mattered so much. Trees, mountains, roads and water do not require me to reduce a complicated thought into something the room will tolerate. They do not become restless if an answer needs qualification or complain that reflection is delaying the meeting. Nature can be brutal and indifferent, but it is rarely intellectually insecure.
Even so, I should be cautious about turning solitude into a perfect form of belonging. Escaping the demands of people is not the same as learning how to live among them without disappearing. The lonely child can become an adult who calls isolation freedom because freedom sounds healthier. The Wargeila Wanderer may have travelled partly because movement prevented anyone from examining how uncertain he remained about staying.
There have been times when the road between places felt more like home than either end of it. Driving creates a temporary identity with a clear purpose: I am the person going somewhere. The landscape moves, the internal radio supplies the soundtrack and no room expects me to fit its established arrangements. For a while, transition itself becomes sufficient.
The danger is that a person can make permanent accommodation inside transition. There is always another destination, another project, another role or another version of life beginning just beyond the next turn. Arrival is postponed because arrival carries the risk that the promised place will feel no more secure than the one already left. A wanderer can preserve hope by never remaining long enough to test it.
Country Roads offers the opposite assurance. It says that somewhere already exists to which the traveller can return. I have sung that assurance in Bathurst, at karaoke and inside my own head while knowing that my personal geography was less certain. Perhaps I kept singing not because I had found the home in the song, but because singing allowed me to rehearse the possibility.
There is no dishonesty in that. Songs often lend us emotional structures before life has built them for us. We sing of certainty while living with doubt, of courage while frightened, and of belonging while standing near the edge of the group. The borrowed words do not prove we possess the feeling; sometimes they help us recognise what is missing.
When I sing Country Roads now, I do not see one road leading to one house. I see Wargeila Road and the family beginning that became impossible to preserve unchanged. I see Boorowa, Condobolin, Bathurst, the places where work and family carried me, and the Mid North Coast where retirement is trying to teach me that a life need not justify its address through constant production. The road has become a network rather than a single route back.
That may be the only honest version of home available to me. It resides partly in childhood landscape, partly in inherited family country, partly in the house and life shared with Robyn, partly in the continuing surprise of the children, and partly in places where the mind is briefly allowed to stand at its full height. None of those locations is sufficient alone. Together they form something less certain than the song and perhaps more real.
The concept of becoming local still amuses me. I can contribute, serve, know the roads, recognise faces and accumulate stories, yet some longer-established resident may still introduce me as the accountant fellow who moved up from Sydney. That does not need to be an insult. It may simply be the community’s way of acknowledging that belonging develops through repetition rather than announcement.
I have sometimes expected a place to declare me home before I had learned how to remain there without proving myself. I arrived ready to be useful and then wondered why people valued the usefulness before they understood the person. That arrangement was not imposed entirely from outside. I taught many rooms how to receive me, then quietly resented them for following the instructions.
Retirement has begun removing some of those instructions. There is less professional armour, less urgency and fewer opportunities to confuse being needed with being known. That can feel like release on one day and disappearance on another. A new home must therefore contain not only the man I have been, but the man who remains when fewer people are waiting for him to solve something.
Perhaps coming home to somewhere new is not a single discovery made beside a mountain or at the end of a country road. It may be the slower recognition that home is where I am no longer required to audition for my own place. It is where the Wargeila Wanderer can finally put down his call sign without losing the road that formed him. It is where returning and discovering become the same movement.
I still do not know whether I have fully arrived. The part of me that has spent a lifetime scanning the room continues to look for the exit, the next responsibility or the sign that my temporary admission is about to expire. Yet there are moments on the Mid North Coast, in the home shared with Robyn, when the search becomes quieter. The road does not disappear, but it no longer insists that I must immediately follow it.
When Country Roads comes on, I will still sing it, because some habits deserve to survive their own analysis. I will probably sing it at karaoke with greater conviction than technical merit, drawing upon the authority granted by that long-ago Bathurst victory. When Rocky Mountain High follows, I will hear the more difficult possibility that home can be recognised rather than inherited, and that its newness does not make it less true. Somewhere between the remembered road and the undiscovered mountain, the wanderer may finally be learning that coming home is not always a return.
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