A Feeling of Community - From Outsider to Belonging: A Life Shaped by Places That Never Fully Claimed Me

Post 1 of 3 - first published 2008

I lived in Alice Springs, Central Australia, for somewhere between three and a half and four years almost twenty years ago. I worked for the Department of Health as a dietitian in community health, surrounded by people who were mostly professional, accommodating and often friendly — but rarely warm enough to invite the new girl in town over for dinner.

There was always a line in the sand, and in Central Australia there was no shortage of red sand to draw it in. That line separated the long-timers from the newcomers, the rooted from the transient, the people “from here” from the people simply passing through — and I was unmistakably in the last category.

As the years went on, nothing changed. I remained an import, a temporary fixture who would need decades of presence before being seen as anything else. Belonging was something reserved for those willing, or able, to stay a lifetime.

As it turned out, I wasn’t one of them.

I left — first back to Melbourne, the city of my birth, then to London, and eventually to Istanbul. And in 2004 I found myself searching again for that elusive sense of home, this time in Fener/Balat, along the Haliç, and to Yıldırım Caddesi.

I never imagined that the feeling I chased in Alice Springs — that longing to be recognised, ‘accepted’, absorbed into a place — would arrive for me in a noisy, colourful, crumbling pocket of Istanbul instead of in my own country.

To be continued…