ESSAY
SILVIA MARTIN
ISLANDS AND BELONGING: A REFLECTION ON THE ISLANDS OF IBIZA AND TASMANIA.
Picture these: two moments, two islands ...
The first moment: From the desk in my study perched in the gable of a Swiss-style chalet, I look through a tracery of white-limbed eucalypts across layers of wooded hills to the shoreline. Turquoise sea glistens in the afternoon sun, the houses of Opossum Bay mere dots against the bleached paddocks of the South Arm Peninsula. Beyond, the dark hump of Betsey Island rises from the water, while in the far distance the shadowy outline of the Tasman Peninsula looms blue. The scene shifts constantly: clear and shimmering in one light, diffuse and hazy in another, all soft pinks and purples at sunset, sometimes just a dense cloud curtain. The house (a temporary haven) is itself perched on the lower slopes of Mt Wellington and I have landed here like a bird of passage, resting while I familiarise myself with the surrounding terrain before flying on to my home. But, unlike the huge kelp gulls that fly past the window from the coast towards the mountain every morning and which seem to know exactly where they are going, to be perfectly in place, I feel disturbingly homeless and out of place. My move to this island was by choice, so I am neither displaced nor dispossessed. Alternately exhilarated and despondent, or simply confused, my mood switches are mercurial and intense. My partner and I did not ‘fly’ from the mainland, but arrived by ship with our car loaded with belongings. We must now go through the process of finding some sort of ‘belonging’ here for ourselves. The woman who handed us the new number plates for our car smiled brightly and said, ‘Well, now you are real Tasmanians.’ If only belonging was that simple, the ‘natural state’ that our number plates promise.
The second moment: I am sitting in the winter sun on the terrace of Café Sidney, not in Australia but in the town of Ibiza on the island of the same name. One of the Balearic group, the largest of which is Mallorca, Ibiza lies in the Mediterranean, off the east coast of Spain. My companions here are my partner, Lizzie, her sister Mieke and an old school friend of Mieke’s who has joined us for lunch. Ruth lives on the island but the rest of us have taken a cheap flight here from Barcelona. Opulent launches and yachts are lined up on the marina in front of the cafe, some the size of small hotels. (‘Drug money,’ we mutter to each other.) Their gleaming ostentation is a marked contrast to the mellow tones of D’Alt Vila across the water, the walled medieval town that has guarded the entrance to the small harbour for centuries. Its close-set buildings rise in symmetrical tiers towards the bell tower of the stone cathedral at the summit. It is not tourist season, but the occupants of the tables around us are an assorted lot, not predominantly Spanish, yet probably residents of the island for at least part of the year. Snatches of different languages can be heard and our table is no exception. Mieke and Lizzie speak Dutch to each other; Lizzie and I English; and Mieke and her originally German friend Ruth converse in the language they have in common, Spanish. We all use our hands a lot. The two friends, Mieke and Ruth, grew up on Ibiza as children of some of the European expatriates who formed communities there in the 1950s and 1960s. Mieke was brought there just before her tenth birthday when her Dutch mother and new husband retired at a relatively young age to the island; Lizzie was left in Rotterdam with her father and visited during school holidays. For Mieke, Ibiza became ‘home’, and although she has lived in Barcelona for many years with her Catalan husband and son, she revisits the island regularly. Lizzie and I usually spend time there on our trips to Europe.
This piece is a reflection about islands: the literal places of Ibiza and Tasmania and the metaphorical spaces islands occupy in the cultural imagination. Ideas of place and belonging are brought into focus; in particular, how ‘place’ is constructed and how it constructs us. The reflection is prompted by my recent move to Tasmania and is an attempt to explore my ambivalent feelings as I teeter on the threshold of a new life and a new attachment to place. It is also prompted by my renewed desire to take up a personal manuscript that has been put aside for more pressing assignments: my work-in-progress on the two sisters who were brought up in different countries and who now have different first languages and cultural affiliations.
The idea of islands began to impinge on my consciousness before I had been to either Ibiza or Tasmania. It was when Lizzie and I were building a house in the Warrumbungle Mountains in New South Wales.1 Our house was nestled among cypress pine-covered folds of rock in a volcanic mountain range that rises bizarrely from the plains of the Central West. Former coast-hugging city dwellers, we found this endless inland unsettling and would often drive to a high lookout in the National Park where we could watch the sun set behind a distant horizon so flat we could imagine it was the sea. I began to think of our small piece of mountain as an island, a refuge to which relatives and friends travelled long distances to visit us and from which we ventured on our journeys to the alien spaces of Dubbo and Tamworth, or further to the cities that nourished us intellectually. The fact that we could drive there, of course, blurred the borders that distinguish islands, but it was not just the physical distance that produced our feelings of isolation; our ‘difference’ – as city folk and women without men – sometimes made the space beyondour farm gate feel not only alien but almost as dangerous as a shark-infested ocean. Time softened those feelings and threads of connection were made with neighbours and the community, even long-term friendships forged. But the notion of that place as an island remained and, eventually, the isolation proved too strong as our home became both refuge and prison. Such is the paradoxical quality of islands.
As artistic director of the ‘Ten Days on the Island’ festival, Robyn Archer has ruminated on the peculiarities of islands. She remarks that ‘There’s something essentially human that comes into high relief against something essentially of the natural world... somehow islands have a reputation for containment and throwing humans back onto their essential best or worst to make do in the micro-environment’. And ‘then’, she says, ‘there’s the matter of that edge, that ever-present boundary’.2 It is this intense specificity, I think, that characterises islands, that makes their layers of history seem particularly concentrated and brings into sharp focus the paradoxes associated with a sense of place.
Beyond their specificity as contained spaces, size and geographical position help to determine the meanings associated with particular islands. Australia is a continent, but it is also an island, something we often forget because of its vastness, but which has come to the fore in recent times with the government’s emphasis on ‘border protection’. While this engenders a carefully orchestrated fear in the population based on the sense of vulnerability that islands invoke, smaller islands have been simply shed by that same government. Excised from the Australian migration zone, they have become prisons for asylum-seekers, prisons being a time-honoured destiny for small islands. Size matters.
Van Diemen’s Land was found to be an island when Matthew Flinders circumnavigated it in 1798. Earlier explorers’ maps showed it as joined to the mainland. Occasionally, more recent maps leave it off altogether. Located below the southern tip of the Australian continent – ‘at the hem of the world’, as poet Margaret Scott put it 3 – the small island of 68,000 square kilometres has only ocean between it and Antarctica. Tasmania has its own bloody colonial history of massacres and incarceration. What became known as the Black War was perpetrated in the decades after European invasion when the indigenous population was decimated, the survivors being exiled to the smaller Flinders Island in the 1830s. In the 1830s too a brutal convict penal settlement was established at Port Arthur, situated on the beautiful peninsula I see outlined against the sky from my window. The prison colony was secured naturally on three sides by water, the narrow neck of land joining it to the rest of the island guarded by savage dogs. Today, the sandstone buildings in their picturesque setting have been restored and the place is a prime tourist destination, though another layer of its dark history is now also memorialised since the ‘Port Arthur massacre’ of tourists and residents in 1996. A place of paradox indeed.
Unlike Tasmania at the bottom of the world, the tiny island of Ibiza (only 572 square kilometres) has long been identified as a place of passage, situated as it is in the Mediterranean between the continents of Africa and Europe. It was an obligatory port of call on the great trading routes of antiquity; it was also on the direct route between Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. Its often bloody history has resulted in a rich mix of influences – Arab, African, Catalan – and today it has reclaimed its Catalan name of Eivissa.
The island has always attracted artists and writers and, given its situation as a place of passage, for many Ibiza is a brief but memorable encounter. Some have sought refuge there, such as critic and writer Walter Benjamin, one of the many intellectuals who fled the rise of Nazism in Germany in 1932. He lived in a farmhouse in San Antonio Bay for part of that year and the next, where he worked on the Berlin Chronicles as well as writing pieces such as the Ibizan Suite. It was a time of respite for Benjamin, who eventually committed suicide in Port Bou on the border of France and Spain in 1940 rather than be captured. By the late 1940s, ironically, it was the turn of people with Nazi affiliations to seek out the small island, where they recreated themselves behind the whitewashed walls of the island villas. That heritage is part of the dark underbelly of the island today.
New Zealand writer Janet Frame was one who found inspiration on Ibiza when she spent several months there as a young woman in 1959. In The Envoy from Mirror City, the third volume of her autobiography, she compares Ibiza town with her native island: ‘[the] marvel was the light, the sky, the colour of the olive trees and of the buildings thumbed and worn like old stone pages, with none of the restlessness of New Zealand buildings, none of the sensed fear of sudden extinction by volcano or earthquake.’4 When she looked up from her typewriter and out of the window of her room in the old town on the hill, she could see the city of Ibiza reflected in the still waters of the harbour. On walking round the harbour towards it, she felt as if she was trying to walk through a mirror, and her city of the imagination – the ‘mirror city’ in the sea – remained the more real to her. The last lines of a poem Frame wrote about the experience struck a chord with me when I first read them and seem even more pertinent today:
Small are islands, a tyranny of completeness,
A fear of meeting too many selves in mirrors.5Islands with their contradictory meanings held in perpetual tension may be understood as a mix of what Michel Foucault calls utopias and heterotopias.6 Utopias are ‘sites with no real place’ (on a banal level, think of the swaying palms, white beaches and crystal-clear water of fantasy islands) whereas heterotopias ‘are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia, in which the real sites... are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’. Heterotopias are in a sense ‘outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality’. They are ‘capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible’. They are places where many spaces converge and become entangled.
Between the contrasting sites (utopias/heterotopias), Foucault proposes there might be ‘a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror’. This is a utopia, ‘a placeless place’, but, he explains, ‘it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position I occupy’. This kind of double movement is characteristic of islands, which are both sites of desire (or exile) and real places. For Janet Frame, the mirror city formed by the conjunction of land and sea, the real and the unreal, provoked a crisis of identity that was at the same time liberating and unsettling. She came to Ibiza after years of incarceration in a psychiatric institution in New Zealand because of a misdiagnosis of schizophrenia. Such institutions, like prisons, are classic examples of what Foucault calls ‘heterotopias of deviation’. Other examples of heterotopias he identifies are liminal spaces like ships or aeroplanes; still others are linked to the mode of the festival, such as fairgrounds or nightclubs.
Islands may be understood as liminal spaces, spaces in between, thresholds, boundaries between one space and another: they are edgy spaces. How might the islands of Ibiza and Tasmania function as a mix between utopias and heterotopias?
Ibiza today is not the apparently gentle island that Janet Frame found in 1959 – nor indeed the place that Lizzie’s sister and mother moved to in 1963. Even then it was an ‘outside place’ where foreigners came to live a life of ease away from the stresses of the normal world, a dream that inevitably brought its own contradictions. With the rise of package tourism, Ibiza has become a strange mixture of a place: Ibicencan farmers still plough the stony red earth in the inland; the mirror city of Ibiza is still reflected in the harbour, although now fronted by that marina housing the luxury cruisers of the rich. The island is home to huge nightclubs with names like Amnesia: fantastic, lurid constructions set on pine-covered hillsides, often sharing the immediate landscape with the simple white churches that are part of every village. Around the half-moon bays of small coastal towns like San Antonio and Santa Eulalia, shoddy hotels and apartment blocks have sprouted like concrete mushrooms to house the tourists who pour off the planes at five-minute intervals in summer, filled with the promise of sun, cheap booze, drugs, dance parties and lots of sex. The rich also jet into the island periodically; Jade Jagger, for instance, owns a secluded walled complex in the mountainous north of the island. On 31 October each year, tourist season ends abruptly: the nightclubs shut their doors, many of the restaurants and businesses close and the island breathes a sigh of relief. But it is still not an uncommon sight to see young people with luminous hair and multiple piercings sharing the square – the ‘ramblas’ – of Ibiza town with small and squat, elderly Ibicencan couples strolling arm in arm on their evening promenade.
Tasmania appears to bear little resemblance to the excessive contrasts of Ibiza. But think Bali or Phuket. Are they the equivalent for Australians to Ibiza and Mallorca for Europeans? And there are resemblances to the Balearic Islands here. Increasingly accessible and affordable sea and air transport has enabled Tasmania, with its spectacular scenery, to become a place where people from the mainland take their getaway holidays. The island offers a sense of both completeness and variety. The visitors tour the island by car, visiting beaches and mountains with infinite photo opportunities; they sample the produce from vineyards and chocolate factories; they take in the historic sites of Port Arthur and the Female Factory. The fit ones take advantage of the island’s extraordinary range of natural features: they cycle and trek over mountains; they kayak on the waterways and lakes. Huge multistoreyed cruise ships (Foucault’s heterotopia par excellence) dock in Hobart’s small harbour every few days and spill their contents onto the wharf for a few hours; the casino round the corner is another heterotopia. As in Ibiza, transient hedonistic and aesthetic pleasures exist alongside deep conservatism as well as a passionate commitment to place. Environmental concerns are paramount in such unique and fragile places and are passionately fought for: old growth forests here, fresh water in the dry island of Ibiza where the tourist explosion has had a devastating impact. On the other hand, factors like the risk of unemployment on islands create opposite and fiercely fought views. At least on islands there is little room for complacency.
So how might an understanding of the heterotopic qualities of islands enable productive ways of thinking about ideas of belonging and identity? The desire to belong could be regarded in itself as utopian; the ‘longing’ in belonging indicates that it is always a process of yearning and becoming, but it is nonetheless real in the sense that that desire is one most people hold dear. Employing Walter Benjamin’s phrase ‘the perplexity of living’ to characterise the contemporary world, feminist scholar Elspeth Probyn sees the ‘movement of desiring belonging’ to be ‘a defining feature of our postmodern, postcolonial times’.7 For me, Foucault’s postmodern perception of the twentieth century as an ‘epoch of space’ rather than the nineteenth century’s ‘time’ model has been enabling.8 Space and time are not mutually exclusive, of course (think, for example, of the space of memory), but Foucault’s paradigm shift disrupts conventional understandings of belonging and identity as fixed and stable, as singular and hierarchical, understandings in which depth is privileged and notions of authenticity invoked. Length of time in a place, for instance, may contribute to a sense of belonging to that place, but it is not the only factor. Indeed, it is possible to feel ‘out of place’ in one’s place of birth and familial attachment. The surface connections that can occur in the movement across space, including the creative tensions produced by unlikely juxtapositions, allow for a notion of belonging as a process that is multiple and shifting, even contradictory, but never exclusionary.
Probyn situates belonging ‘as threshold: both public and private, personal and common... a very powerful mode of subjectification’.9 To emphasise the in-betweenness of belonging acknowledges that it is not simply individual but relational and social, and with that knowledge comes responsibility: to place, to people, to the complex world we live in. Probyn says she writes in order to remind herself ‘of the ways in which belonging hinges on not belonging, to raise the ways in which the manners of being at the threshold may provide another perspective from which to view the complexities of identity, difference, subjectivity and desire’.10
When Lizzie’s sister Mieke was suddenly transported from the Netherlands to Ibiza and sent to the Catholic primary school in San Antonio, she was desperate to ‘belong’. She set about it by becoming as like her peers as possible: by becoming devoutly Catholic (a temporary state), but also by becoming fluent in Spanish within a month after being handed a Spanish dictionary by her teacher and told to look up words she did not understand. Now Spanish is her first language, not Dutch, and she thinks of Barcelona as her home. Her allegiances, however, are multiple; they include past as well as present places and reach across the family diaspora. When Lizzie and I moved to Tasmania, Mieke’s immediate response was to link us with a place that is part of her belonging: ‘Ah, now you will understand what it means to live on an island.’
For us, the shift from tourists to residents is a challenge that is both liberating and disturbing. My relationship to Australia might be less complex than that of my Dutch partner, but the move here has made me aware that my own sense of belonging to place is not a simple matter. Australian but not Tasmanian, a mainlander not an islander, I need to explore this new threshold of belonging: to travel the island’s varied landscapes, to learn about its history, to get to know the names of its birds and plants and to make connections with its people, but also to take heed of my shifting emotions and heightened senses in order to eventually feel the place under my skin and in my guts. ‘Island meanings emerge from a deeply visceral lived experience’, as Pete Hay says.11
When I flew back to Tasmania recently from my first trip to the mainland since moving here, I landed at the small airport in Hobart and walked across the tarmac in the open air instead of along an enclosed chute, a rare experience these days and one that reminds me of the airport in Ibiza. It was an unusually balmy night and the salty tang of the sea was in the air, that island smell that transports me to the other side of the world. It was both new and comfortingly familiar. And here is perhaps the key to why I feel the need to work again on ‘the sisters book’ now that I am in Tasmania. Understanding belonging as process, a relative state, never fixed or determined, means that loved ones, family and place are all involved in that becoming.
NOTES
1 See Sylvia Martin, ‘Housing Desire’, Meanjin, Vol 60, no 3, 2001, pp 79-87.
2 Robyn Archer, Guest editorial, Island, no 85, Autumn 2001, p 6.
3 Margaret Scott, ‘Shelley Beach’, Collected Poems, Montpelier Press, 2000, p 76.
4 Janet Frame, The Envoy from Mirror City, Paladin, 1987, pp 56-7.
5 Ibid, p 66.
6 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, translated by Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics, Vol.16, no.1, Spring 1986, pp 22-27. The following quotations come from this source.
7 Elspeth Probyn, Outside Belongings, Routledge, 1996, p 20.
8 Foucault, Op.cit., p 22.
9 Probyn, Op.cit., pp 12-13.
10 Ibid, p 14.
11 Pete Hay, ‘A Phenomenology of Islands’, Island Studies Journal, Vol. 1, no 1, 2006, p 16.
SYLVIA MARTIN is an Honorary Associate in Gender Studies at University of Tasmania. Interested in extending the boundaries of auto/biography, she has published Passionate Friends: Mary Fullerton, Mabel Singleton and Miles Franklin (Onlywomen Press, 2001) and Ida Leeson: A Life (Allen & Unwin, 2006), as well as numerous journal articles and autobiographical essays.
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