Of Course I Came Back (Most of Us Do)
BY LARA CHRISTIE
On leaving, returning, and the pride I had to get over to come home.
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Image: Lara Christie
For most of my early twenties, I felt the pull to leave. Specifically, to leave Hobart - to prove to myself, and to everyone watching, that I was brave enough to make the leap to the "mainland" in search of more than I believed was possible here. I'd convinced myself Tasmania was an opportunityless place for a young person, and that the only brave thing to do was go. I wasn't alone in that. I'd watched older siblings and friends leave like it was a rite of passage, so the moment I could, I fled the nest.
I moved in and out of the state for the better part of five years. I remember one trip home after nearly two years in Western Australia, coming back because I was homesick, lonely and a little lost. As I drove over the bridge into Hobart, I looked up at Kunanyi and felt tiny. Not in a bad way. More like a quiet realisation of how strongly the place still had hold of me, and how small everything else felt next to that.
That was the moment I stopped fighting it. No matter where I chose to live, Tasmania was home, and it always would be, as much as twenty-something me wanted to argue otherwise.
When I started talking to other people about this, I kept finding the same thing. Not just Tasmanians, but people from small towns and cities all over. There's a real tension between leaving the nest and coming back to it, and almost everyone I spoke to had felt some version of it.
It even has a name. It's called boomerang migration, and it covers a few different patterns. One is the "brain gain" idea: young people leave their hometowns in search of opportunity, knowledge or experience, and eventually return with new ideas and a wider view of the world. The other is more practical: the boomerang generation that moves back in with family because life elsewhere is simply too expensive and too demanding to sustain. That one's becoming more and more common by the year.
Not everyone's story bends back this way, though, and I don't think it should. Plenty of people I grew up with left and built whole lives elsewhere, and they're not carrying around some missing piece. For others, the return isn't even a choice - it's the rent, the housing market, a family that needs them. So I'm wary of turning my own homecoming into a lesson for anyone but me. I can only really speak to the pull I felt, and why I stopped fighting it.
For me, it all happened somewhere between the ages of 19 and 26. I'd fly out, run myself ragged in new cities or overseas adventures, and come home to process it all. Returning was how I regrounded. It was how I found myself again. But for a long time I read those returns in the wrong light. I fought coming back. Hard. For years, I treated returning as the thing I'd eventually have to swallow my pride to do, the quiet admission that the bigger plan hadn't worked out. The pride was real. I clung to it. What changed wasn't that it disappeared; it's that I stopped seeing home as the consolation prize. Leaving was never the achievement. Leaving was how I learned what I already had. You can't see the shape of home until you've stood somewhere that isn't it.
There's a difference between living somewhere and feeling a sense of place. I never found anywhere that matched the peace of living under the mountain - that whole, settled feeling I only ever got here. Away from it, I carried a low hum of ennui I couldn't shake, no matter how good the view from wherever I'd landed.
Still, I wouldn't trade the leaving. It was how I grew, and the gift of it was getting to choose home on purpose instead of by default, not because it's the only place worth living, but because it feels like mine.
So, of course I came back. Most of us do. And I couldn't be prouder to be Tasmanian. I think I finally understand what all that 'There's no place like home' stuff is about. Thanks, Dorothy, let's leave Oz and go back to the prairie.
