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and everything is dark. But, as Gombrich writes, even in that dark silence, we have not yet reached the beginning of the human story. Behind every beginning, no matter how long ago, there is another beginning. Every generation has its Once Upon a Time. Your grandmother, her grandmother, your grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother … and already we are back several hundred years. Andevery one of these women probably telling stories that started with some version of Once Upon a Time.
    I don’t know why I am, as a novelist, so attracted to the stories of the past. It might be a case of symbiosis. Because I was an Australian of a particular time and place, I yearned to know the world, to travel and adventure abroad. In my travels, I met a man who never wished to leave his own shore, who would have dwelt contently in the archives that can be found in the Boston–Washington–New York corridor. That man loves history. Because of me, he travels the world. Because of him, I travel the past. Moral, if any: it’s fun to sleep with foreigners, but be warned — this can change your life.
    And now, as I make my home in literature, in a particular genre of fiction that explores the places in the deep well that the burning paper has left unilluminated, I think of that mathematician, and her search for a more perfect description of the world’s swoops and curves. What can I know, after all, that is true about these people who lived and died so long ago; lived and died, as Henry James asserts, with aconsciousness different from ours, a consciousness formed when more than half the things that make our world did not yet exist for them?
    But I believe that consciousness isn’t shaped by things. You can move the furniture about as much as you like; the emotions of the people in the room will not change. Consciousness is shaped by fear and joy, hatred and tenderness. This is what I know: they loved, as I love. And that is as good a starting point as any.

COPYRIGHT
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Australian Broadcasting Corporation and is used
under licence by HarperCollins Publishers Australia.
    First published in Australia in 2011
This edition published in 2011
by HarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty Limited
ABN 36 009 913 517
harpercollins.com.au
    Copyright © Geraldine Brooks 2011
    The right of Geraldine Brooks to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000 .
    This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 , no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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    National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Print data:
    Brooks, Geraldine, 1955–
    The idea of home / Geraldine Brooks.
    ISBN: 978 0 7333 3025 4 (pbk.)
    ISBN: 978 0 7304 9766 0 (epub)
    Speeches, addresses, etc., Australian.
    Radio addresses, debates, etc.
    Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
    A825.3
    Cover design by Priscilla Nielsen