Recently myself and @cediejanson made our way back home to Australia for the first time in four years. Stepping off the plane into Brisbane, the humidity wraps around you, an awkward welcome home, but a reminder that you are home nonetheless. The nights are so quiet, apart from the odd possum on the roof, but the mornings are anything but. No need for an alarm, the lorikeets, hundreds of them, screech from the trees, ready for the day and insisting that you are too. The kookaburras chime in and I’m transported back to my teenage years sitting in my room, hormones raging, feeling emo-tional, thinking of something silly I said at school, wondering if everyone thinks I’m an idiot? Then at that precise moment – the kookaburras would break out in a riotous cackle. Was I in on this cosmic joke or the brunt of it? Still, knowing those feathered friends were up in the twisty eucalypts outside my room made me smile. I think they were on my side. I think. As we made our way further up north, through wound down car windows came the smell of crisp ocean spray, that distinct scent of lantana and red earth after rain. My Mum told me she used to eat red dirt as a kid. She said it tasted sweet. I believe her. We went underground, into caves so deep that if you were to venture far enough you’re certain the only way out would be through another dimension. Perfect hand and body shaped cracks in the rocks call you to stick a limb in. And you want to. In that way you sort-of- kind-of really want to but don’t at the same time kind of way. So you just slide your hand along the rocks instead, you know better than that. Growing up in Australia. Down here there’s ferns growing. Just forty of them, we’re told. The only forty on the planet and the only forty left. Some folks tried to grow them elsewhere but they wouldn’t take, they belong to this land. Like the faces in the rocks, and the streaky clouds across the open skies, like the kookies in the trees and the alleged crocodile in the spit. Like the feeling my body gets when I return home. It belongs here and no matter how far I away I may be, home will always be there, calling me back.