This was a tradition all through the years on our island. I kept it up long after I got married, but gradually left the old tradition behind.
Rhoda Collins, Memories of Silver Fox Island
When I was a very small boy, aged about seven, I attended a birthday party given by one of my classmates, a young Burmese girl whose name I think I never knew. She had recently pitched up at our school, and her parents, I suppose, were keen for her to fit in, so they had organised a full-blown jelly-and-ice-cream party and invited everyone in her class.
One of the things we did at that party—oddly, on reflection—was watch a slideshow presented by her father. We saw photographs of her family moving house in Burma (or perhaps it was nothing to do with her family; perhaps it was just what they considered to be a typical slice of Burmese life). From memory, the house in question lived on stilts along the lower reaches of a great sluggish river, and for some reason (flooding? opportunity? local dispute?) needed to be relocated, periodically: the whole village would assemble to carry the bamboo structure a few miles up the road, or down the coast, or whatever it was.
This was surprising, I suppose. But small children are not surprised by much. Everything is new, needs to be fitted into a bizarre and incoherent mental picture of the world. At that point in my life my family was constantly moving house—this was already my fourth—and for some reason I believed that when people moved house they just swapped. We come to live in your house, and you come to live in ours. But then I had not that long ago shaken the belief that our family had invented the concept of the weekend and everyone else had followed suit. The world, to repeat, was strangely configured.
At the end of the party we were each gifted a 45rpm record. This had never happened to me at a party before, so was memorable. I received a recording of Flash Bang Wallop! sung by Tommy Steele, from the musical Half a Sixpence. Perhaps we all got the same record. Perhaps it was intended to connect in some way with the slideshow, the distant lost culture. And so home we went, full of new ideas.
...
We think of ourselves easily enough as settled, sedentary; and so we are. But we also think little of moving house, packing our belongings in a truck, and unpacking them again in some other place, a few miles up the road, or down the river. Our houses are, as my infant self intuited, interchangeable.
And it so happens that the boundary between sedentary and mobile populations is never precisely fixed.
When at the end of the 1960s Bruce Chatwin was first contemplating a book about nomads to be called The Nomadic Alternative, he sent a proposal to the publishing director at Jonathan Cape, Tom Maschler, an almost unreadable document which Maschler then forwarded to various experts for their impressions. One of these experts, the zoologist Desmond Morris, who had recently published The Naked Ape, immediately noticed a problem. What is a nomad? He predicted that Chatwin would get lost in the detail when he came to it, because it is not at all clear where the nomadic life begins and the settled life ends. Sure enough, Chatwin wandered like Moses in the wilderness for many years, looking for a thread (a songline, as it transpired) to guide him out.
Nomadism takes many forms, each shaped by fine variables of environment and historical circumstance. In some cases a whole group will move, sometimes multiple times in a year; in other cases still more complex patterns arise, periodic migration blending with extended or local foraging trips, transhumance, semi-sedentism. Nowadays it is more often associated with pastoralism than with whole-scale foraging, and all nomadic populations have contact to some degree with sedentary populations, but this is not a necessary condition.
Our settled worlds are no less dappled, variegated. We move with the best nomads, by or against our wills. No house you live in is your last, until it is your last; and even then, you usually do not know that it is your last.
To say settler, or nomad, is thus to make only an ostensive gesture—we approximately know what is intended. But neither term defines precisely a state of being.
The nomadic world, for example, is conceptualised by some nomads as a form of fixity. Settlement is encapsulated within movement. The Sámi tent, for instance, is a mobile structure which goes along with the Sámi as they follow the reindeer herds, and is pitched as necessary; but it is organised internally in such a way as to make it always the ceremonial centre of the Sámi ritual cosmos. In the same way, to some Polynesian navigators—those of the Carolina Islands, notably—the boat in which they criss-cross the vast oceans is conceived as remaining still, a fixed point, while the world of sea and stars rotates around it. In short, the margins and territorial maps of sedentary people are irrelevant to the perpetual centrality of non-sedentary people; if the whole group moves and I move with it, then here is always here, and home is where I hang my hat, or ritual bone implement.
...
In 1948, Newfoundland (which then included much of the Labrador coast) voted to join Canada rather than assert its independence or become a state of the USA.
In the years that followed, the Canadian government undertook an audit of its far-flung new lands, and found many communities living on tiny islands around the fractal Atlantic coast – so-called outports. And it decided in its benevolence that it could not provide adequate Canadian welfare, or education, or health care, to many of these isolated and economically insignificant villages.
Silver Fox Island, off the northern coast of million-islanded Bonavista Bay, hosted such a community. Its population never reached 100, and life was characteristically hard. The population was encouraged to move.
The story of the forced relocation of Newfoundland's outlands between 1954 and 1975 is not a happy one. Houses were mostly abandoned, often after essential services had been withdrawn, the inhabitants coerced.
A country retreats from its coasts in the same way a faltering body retreats from its extremities—slowly, arthritically. What was once the nation's productive interface becomes a dead layer.
But Newfoundland, perhaps like stretches of riverine Burma, was only ever lightly rooted. A jungle or a forest is a fungible place. Thus some people chose to bring their houses along with them. For most of us, the house we live in is not particularly valuable; the land it is located on holds the value. In Newfoundland, the reverse was true. The house was capital, the land worthless.
To bring your whole house along with you, however, rather than merely a cartload of your furniture and possessions, is to attempt to keep stable the centre of the cosmos. The centre of the cosmos is not Ottawa. Out here, on the Labrador and Newfoundland coast, there is only endless interchangeable land, and your little structure of order. Put it on a boat, float it across the bay, settle it back down on some new foundation. Look out of your window at the same sea, the same forest. You are the point of fixity. All is still well.
But there is no fixity. There is only drift. We are forever moving house. Before you really know it, in time your children will be growing up in St. Johns, in Toronto; you will be living with your youngest in a distant unremarkable country, and showing slides of impossible moving houses to gawping, uncomprehending infants, while Tommy Steele plays on the phonograph.
Clap hands, stamp your feet
Banging on the big bass drum
What a picture, what a picture
Um-tiddly-um-pum-um-pum-pum
Stick it in your family album
