Extended Response Worksheet

HSC Belonging

Swallow the Air

Passage 5: Text version

The moon tows the tide in and out twice a day forever. When I come home the tide is flowing in, when I reach it, when it draws in across the purple slate beds of the point, through the rain and across the grit sand, soaking under my feet, salt bubbles burst at my shins. Then, I know that I am home.

We don't need words. I can smell it. I can feel it. The raindrops are gentle and cold, the beach is empty, only the salt smell of the ocean air and freshwater clouds fill the space. The wind is blowing nor-easterly, yellow and red flags flutter further down the beach, huddling no one into the safety. Gulls cruise the air, scanning the shoreline and dunes; I'm not sure what they're looking for. They have waterproof feathers, I imagine. I pull my hood down over my face.

The ocean is sad grey, except in the shallows where the water is pearl and when a wave peels up you can catch the beautiful jade flashing milky through the lips. A secret. The shore-breakers tumble up the banks, tossing sand through their whitewash waves. The headland is foggy in the distance. Behind me, the escarpment is just a flat silhouette.

As I walk up toward the beach entrance, across the little raindrop dimples on yesterday’s footprints, and feel the gritty warm-wet sand carry me. As the starburst eelgrass clusters roll like tumbleweeds off the dunes. As all the salt hits me. I know what the word really means, home.

My mother knows that I am home, at the water I am always home. Aunty and my brother, we are from the same people, we are of the Wiradjuri nation, hard water. We are of the river country, and we have flowed down the rivers to estuaries to oceans to live by another stretch of water. Salt.

Even though this country is not my mother’s country, even though we are freshwater, not saltwater people, this place still owns us, still owns our history, my brother’s and my own, Aunty’s too. Mum’s. They are part of this place; I know now that I need to find them.

I could run away again, I could run away from the pain my family holds. I could take the yarndi, the paint, the poppies, and all the grog in the world but I couldn’t run from the pain and I couldn’t run from my family either.

When Billy and me lost our mother, we lost ourselves. We stopped swimming in the ocean, scared that we’d forget to breathe. Forget to come up for mouthfuls of air. We lost trust because we didn’t want to touch something that was going to fall away. Like bubbles, too delicate, too fragile, too brief.

Swallow the Air p193–194

Questions

How does Winch convey the sensory experience of home? Find examples of appeals to sight, sound and smell, discussing their effectiveness.
The reunion with Aunty and Billy is a joyous conclusion to the novel, but Winch adds a note of ironic realism with the news that Aunty is being evicted and that excavators are digging up the neighbourhood. Do these facts detract from the positive notions of belonging presented in the novel?

HSC Belonging: Swallow the Air1