“Where are you ladies from?” the barman asked.

It was an obvious question. Here we were with our American accents deep in East Gippsland, one of the more isolated parts of an already remote area of rural Australia. My mother and I were the only customers on a Friday night at the Bellbird Hotel, a pub that sits on the road between Orbost and Cann River—two very small towns in the midst of a temperate rainforest in eastern Victoria.

As we drove across from Bairnsdale, the closest proper city (by “city,” I mean a place that has a hospital and a population of more than 10,000 people; by “close,” I mean 90 miles away), the land became more intimate, wetter, more verdantly claustrophobic. Tree ferns and a towering grove of eucalyptus trees hugged the two-lane freeway. Cell service became spottier.

We had driven the six hours from Melbourne the day before, stopping in each small town along the way. We were retracing a journey my mother had taken more than 40 years earlier. She met my father in New England, when he was living there in the early 1970s. Eventually he convinced her to come back to Australia with him, where he owned a farm in remote East Gippsland, in a place called Club Terrace.

“Does the house have a kitchen?” she asked him. He assured her it did.

When she arrived, the roads were mostly unpaved and the forest encroached onto the rudimentary freeways even more than it does now. Club Terrace was nothing more than a postcode that catered to a few farms and four sawmills. Its anchor was a tiny, one-room general store, which also acted as the post office, alone in the forest at a crossroads just off the main (unpaved) highway. You knew to start looking for the turnoff about 10 minutes after you passed the Bellbird Hotel.

“To Americans, I sound Australian. To Australians, I sound American. Wherever I am, I sound like I’m from somewhere else. Wherever I am, I feel like I’m from somewhere else.”

The kitchen he promised her was a large room with no floorboards, next to a three-room house heated by a wood stove. There was a bungalow out back, where they slept. It was as far away from New England as a person could possibly be. My father called the farm “Narnia.”

But the land! Narnia lay between a river and a creek and a hill, with paddocks and brambles and a modest orchard beside the small wooden house. There were more birds than my mother had ever seen or heard. The land felt almost oppressive, but also wonderful and strange.

I was born the year after she arrived, in the bungalow where they slept. My mother didn’t like her doctor at the Bairnsdale hospital, who kept trying to convince her that her hips weren’t wide enough for childbirth. So my father—who had started but not finished a medical degree before going on to earn a PhD in something else entirely—bought an obstetrics book, and they decided to go it alone. My mother claims that I may have been the first planned home birth—once you discount the generations that did it this way before hospital births were the norm—in the state of Victoria.

My father delivered me. No one else was present, except a goat named Trilby. My parents had no scale, so two days later they drove up the road to the Club Terrace post office/general store and placed me on the postal scale. It only went up to nine pounds. Healthy and happy, I weighed more than that.

My earliest memories are split between the farm and Cambridge, Massachusetts, where we lived for a couple of years when I was very young. But it was Narnia where my sense of self took shape. I clambered up trees in the orchard, I saved lizards from our pet cats, I chased the cows, I picked fresh fruit from the trees and strawberries from my father’s long strawberry patch behind the house. In springtime, a dip in the paddock beside the house filled with rain water, forming a temporary grass-bottomed pond, and lily of the valley sprung up all around it. At night I dreamed I was the queen of the fairies.

And the first pub, the first meal outside the home—hell, the first public space I remember—is the Bellbird. Once, as a three-year-old, I tried to buy a biker a drink at its bar. My parents and I often ate dinner there on weekend evenings and I remember the smell of the beer-stained carpet in that pub as clearly as the smell of the wet springtime in the forest and farmland that surrounds it.

We left for Melbourne when I was almost four. My parents broke up when I was seven, and my mother returned to the U.S. when I was a petulantly resistant teenager. (I was resistant to the move, but also literally anything else you could throw my way.) By the time I left Australia, it had been more than a decade since I’d visited the Bellbird.

In 2017, after spending my entire adult life in the U.S., I moved back to Australia. My mother still lives in Los Angeles. “Where are you from?” is a question I have heard every day for almost 30 years. To Americans, I sound Australian. To Australians, I sound American. Wherever I am, I sound like I’m from somewhere else. Wherever I am, I feel like I’m from somewhere else.

One of my main reasons for returning to Australia, dragging my own reluctant teenage son along for the deeply disorienting and life-altering ride, was to spend time with my father. I got here just in time, or not soon enough, depending on your point of view—or my state of shame. He was a very young 83 when I arrived, and died a year later after a brief illness.

“My father could be the softest, kindest man alive. But he also could be stoic, sometimes to a fault.”

A few days after his funeral, my mother showed up from the U.S. for a visit, only her second since leaving almost 30 years earlier. We decided to hit the road. She was excited and nostalgic, pointing out landmarks along the way, remembering the times she had traveled this road with my father and then with me.

I, meanwhile, was a bundle of stress and grief and shock. I pushed it behind a stony façade just as my father often did when he was feeling uncontrollable emotions. He could be the softest, kindest man alive. But he also could be stoic, sometimes to a fault. I felt inhabited by his resistance to messy emotion; the tides of grief and cold suppression swelled and struggled inside of me as we drove deeper into the forest.

Back when we lived there, the four sawmills in Club Terrace shut down early on Friday afternoons and the workers went straight to the Bellbird. By 4 p.m., the place was packed. When my mother and I arrived at 5:30 p.m. on a Friday evening this past December, we were the only customers. The barkeep seemed perplexed that anyone was there, let alone two American women looking for dinner. A sign out front said the pub was for sale. We ordered food, and two Coopers Sparkling Ales, and asked him how long he’d run the place.

“Fifteen-and-a-half years,” he said. “I think my time is up.”

My mother asked if any of the sawmills were still running in Club Terrace.

“No,” he said. “They haven’t been running for fifteen-and-a-half years.” His first day as publican was the last day of operation for the last sawmill.

“Wow. Good timing,” my mother said in an attempt at humor.

“No,” he said, “it really wasn’t.”

Earlier, when we’d driven in towards the farm, the old Club Terrace post office and general store looked as though it had been abandoned for decades, its small timber frame gutted and infiltrated by the forest. We took the narrow wilding dirt road up from there, past the nicely kept farms of our former neighbors, my mother wondering aloud about each family and their whereabouts.

When we got to the gate to the farm, it was open. We drove down the long slope of the driveway, past the paddock that led down to the river. The old house was still there, but obscured by strange shoddy additions, walls and structures that looked like a child’s cardboard fort, like a shantytown compound. The yard immediately surrounding the house was strewn with old plastic toys, a broken-down car, and a bus painted with peace signs and John Lennon quotes. Dogs barked at our arrival. I stopped the car a good distance from the house, feeling the intense anxiety of our intrusion. This is a place where someone might move if they never wanted visitors.

The fields were overgrown and full of blackberry brambles. We got out of the car and my mother walked towards the house to see if anyone was home. I felt rooted in place, anchored to the ground. Tiny birds flitted around the fences nearby. It was eerie and close and isolated. The dilapidated paddocks felt like they were calling out to me to rescue them. It was so green—more green than any green I’d ever encountered, wonderfully, suffocatingly green. Isn’t there a C.S. Lewis book where the kids, now adults, return to Narnia and find it crumbling and overgrown?

My mother walked around the house calling, but no one answered.

Later, back at the pub, the owner said that someone named Nellie had bought the farm a few years back. When speaking of other people in the area he used last names, but with Nellie he stopped short. He didn’t look at us when he spoke of her, doing the thing that country people do when trying not to speak badly of their own kind to strangers.

“It’s a bit rough out there these days,” he said.

I was relieved when my mother returned to the car. But when we reached the top of the driveway, she jumped out again. “Let’s go down to the river!” In a flash she had disappeared into the brambles, finding her way down the steep slope to the river bank, calling back for me to follow her. At 70, she is still tiny and nimble, and I felt large and awkward and unsure of my footing in comparison. I have always felt this way with her, and she has always pressed ahead, encouraging me to do things I’m scared of, or simply don’t want to do.

“My mother has always pressed ahead, encouraging me to do things I’m scared to do or simply don’t want to do.”

I tried to follow, but it was too much: the juxtaposition between us, my father’s obvious presence and dreadful absence. This had been his land, his life. He loved this place fiercely. And here it lay, uncared for and overgrown, and here I stood trapped in its closeness, its magic, the land of my birth, and I couldn’t even tell him about it because he was gone. I stood at the top of the ridge and cried as my mother splashed happily along the riverbank below.

An hour later, when the Bellbird’s owner asked us where we were from—that question I get everywhere, every day—my brain whirled through my usual responses. It’s complicated. The 2,000 words above are honestly just the tip of the iceberg.

I looked at my mother, searching for an appropriate response, and she smiled at me as she saw the shock spread across my face.

“I was born in Club Terrace, Victoria,” I said. And then, for the first time in my life: “I’m from here.”