Venturing Across Oceans
Drawn to a story arose from me venturing across an ocean, well, a few actually.
It was an adventure with expectations of wonder and a feeling that I was really grabbing at life. Moving from Australia to southern England seemed familiar in that I knew England well, having visited several times before, but I also felt a sense of something new and unknown, just as Jean Batten describes beautifully:
“Every flier who ventures across oceans to distant lands is a potential explorer; in his or her breast burns the same fire that urged adventures of old to set forth in their sailing ships for foreign lands.”
– Jean Batten 1979 ‘Alone in the Sky’
The opportunities and experiences of different cultures, of meeting new people, of trying new foods, watching different TV programs, learning new social ‘rules’ and local traditions, is incredibly enriching and enjoyable. However, it is also a particularly strange experience. You naturally evolve. It’s a constant change, so subtle that you’re almost not aware of it – you use a different word here and there or the foods you start to hanker after shift slightly. And then you go home for a visit and you realise that you don’t quite fit there anymore….and you start to question.
Who am I? Where do I fit? What does it mean to be Australian? What does it mean to be British? or English? Complex thoughts and feelings running through me in ways I couldn’t verbalise. At the same time I was very grateful for the conflicting thoughts as it’s through this discomfort that the best thing comes…….personal growth.
I always been fascinated by stories and people and how people make meaning, how they cope with difficult experiences. As a young adult I thought I wanted to be a historian, but I realised it wasn’t so much what happened that interested me, but why and how people coped…and so then I found myself in the hot seat…away from ‘home’ wondering how to cope with challenging thoughts and feelings around identity, culture and belonging. And it is here that this story begins…… picking up a pencil, and over the course of a year, creating a set of drawings that utlimately became a book about life ‘elsewhere’.
But it’s not just about me. It’s about all of us who live elsewhere, all of us who love it, but also who are equally challenged by it. I am excited about having created Drawn to a Story to explore all our stories – to inspire, to support and to break down walls of ‘the other’, whomever that may be. After all our similarities are more than our differences.
Next time you meet a stranger, why not start up a conversation and find out their story?
You might find that it’s not too different to your own.
