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WORDS BY KATIE STEDMAN.
What makes a home, and reasons people might choose to call Adelaide their home.
There’s a unique feeling when you return home after time away.
It might have been a short business trip, or the best holiday of your life, but hardly anything can beat being under your own roof, and sleeping in your own bed once more.
What makes ‘home’ so special, though? As the saying goes, ‘A house is not a home’. What’s the missing ingredient that turns bricks and mortar — a regular building — into something different? There are so many differences in connotation between the word ‘house’ and ‘home’. For some, ‘home’ is a person, not the four walls that surround you at the end of the day. Home should feel safe, it should feel familiar, and it should feel as though it’s yours. There should be the opportunity to express yourself and be yourself, and your identity should be reflected in the way your home looks.
When we’re separated from our home, there’s an itchiness, a longing that we feel to just get back onto familiar ground. We can become sick with the desire to return home. This was never more relevant than during the pandemic. While most of us were all being told to stay home and could follow those orders, there were people stuck away from home, trapped in a foreign land, a different state, or with no home to go to. Even if you were safe at home, the thought of Covid managed to threaten those feelings of security. During Covid, it became apparent where our home was, but not all of us could get there.
There seems to be a shared sense among Australians that the Land Down Under is home, either because it’s where we’re born, or because it’s where we choose to stay. Qantas has been using Peter Allen’s 1980 hit I Still Call Australia Home since 1987, to tug on the heartstrings of travelling Australians. The song expresses the idea that wherever we might go in the world, Australia will be the place that calls to us, urging us to come back home.
Adelaide is not perfect by any means, but to me, it’s home. Adelaide has been described as a small town, and more often than not, is overlooked. It might be a bit behind the times, but is life in Adelaide being compared to that of a small town really a bad thing? Adelaide is a city where you can have time to make connections, plant roots, take it slow and just breathe for a second. You can be seen as an individual, and not just become an invisible member of the rat-race like some of the more densely populated Australian cities. Many fellow Flinders students said, just a few pages earlier, that coming to Adelaide felt like coming home.
So, life might be a bit slower-paced in Adelaide, but that doesn’t stop it from feeling like home. People even see it as a positive, rather than a negative.
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EDITORIAL NOTE: This article has been reuploaded and was originally published in 2023.