Home Is Where the Heart Is, But Where Is Home?

WHILE sorting through some of my mother’s belongings recently, I found a small piece of my childhood. It was a wall hanging I’d made when I was about 10: a piece of mustard-yellow cloth, a white heart stitched into the centre and the words Home is where the heart is.

It was hardly a masterpiece. But for years it hung on the lounge-room wall of the old workers cottage where I grew up in Barcaldine, a house that had been moved to town from the Pine Hill/Bogantungan area in 1886 as the railway pushed west from Rockhampton. It was already carrying plenty of stories before our family added its own.

At some point, long after I’d left home, my little cross-stitch disappeared. I hadn’t thought about it in years. Then, there it was again among Mum’s things, preserved for reasons she probably never thought necessary to explain.

And suddenly those simple words seemed much less simple.

I have lived in 15 houses so far. There were moves associated with my late husband’s work, moves dictated by circumstance and others made by choice. Each time, belongings were packed into boxes, transported somewhere else and unpacked into another collection of rooms.

Perhaps that is why I’ve tended to think of houses as simply bricks and mortar rather than something to become too attached to. Give me somewhere to put my books, photographs and familiar things, and I’ve generally believed I could make a home almost anywhere.

I started practising early. As a child, I built cubby houses; some rather more structurally questionable than others. A few involved digging holes in the ground and putting sheets of corrugated iron across the top. Building regulations were apparently fairly relaxed in my corner of Queensland in those days, particularly when the developer was 10.

Since then, my definition of temporary accommodation has broadened considerably.

I’ve house-sat in other people’s homes and spent extended periods camping, when canvas walls and a zippered doorway marked the boundary between home and the outside world. I’ve slept in ship’s cabins and train sleepers, motels and hotels. More recently, Airbnbs in places as different as Toowoomba and Japan have briefly become home base.

Somewhere along the way, I came to believe that home was something we carried with us. I still believe that, mostly.

Moving frequently has scattered my memories across a surprisingly wide map. Certain houses belong to certain stages of family life. Friends and neighbours belong to particular towns. A kitchen can remind me of one period, a garden of another. There is no single building that contains the full story of my adult life.

But the older I get, the more I think there is another side to that childhood saying. Home may be where the heart is, but the heart needs somewhere safe to call home.

There is enormous security in knowing the place where you sleep tonight will still be yours tomorrow. Home ownership, when it is achievable, offers more than an asset on a balance sheet. It can provide stability, autonomy and the freedom to shape a place around the way you live.

Perhaps we don’t fully appreciate that security until we consider how easily it can disappear.

My younger brother, Harry, has worked in homeless shelters and has seen people arrive there whose lives had once appeared perfectly secure. Homelessness is not always the culmination of years of disadvantage. Sometimes life simply turns with frightening speed.

An accident. A head injury. An illness. A job lost because someone can no longer work. Mortgage or rent payments fall behind. Then what?

Harry has often talked about the importance of family in those moments. Someone with people around them may have a spare room to retreat to, a couch to sleep on, help navigating paperwork, or simply someone prepared to say, Come here until we work this out.

For people without that network, the same crisis can have a very different ending. It makes me think differently about community, too.

We tend to talk about homes as individual possessions: my house, my unit, my property. Yet none of us really lives within four walls alone. We live in streets, apartment buildings, townhouse complexes, neighbourhoods, towns and communities. The quality of those connections matters.

Perhaps creating better homes, then, isn’t only about designing beautiful interiors, although I remain firmly in favour of comfortable chairs, good lighting and a splash of colour. Even simple changes can make everyday surroundings more enjoyable, as these resort-style coastal apartment ideas demonstrate.

It is also about creating communities in which people can afford to stay. Housing that is secure, appropriate and within reach at different stages of life. Neighbourhoods where people know one another well enough to notice when something is wrong. Families and friendships we

continue to nurture even when distance separates us.

And perhaps it means recognising that a home doesn’t need to be grand to be precious.

The old cottage of my childhood certainly wasn’t grand. Nor was the little mustard-yellow cross-stitch that hung on its lounge-room wall. Yet more than half a century later, Mum had kept it. Now it has come home with me.

I suspect I’ll hang it again, not because it suits any particular decorating scheme, but because somewhere between that old cottage and the 14 houses that followed it, those rather wonky childhood stitches acquired a meaning their 10-year-old maker couldn’t possibly have understood.

Home is where the heart is. But perhaps home is also where we feel safe enough to put down our bags, close the door and know that, for tonight at least, we belong.