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FLINDERS ISLAND

As I step off the plane, a gust of wind wants my hat. I clutch it just in time. This island—this gorgeous, haunted island—sits square in the path of the Roaring Forties, winds hauled down from the equator toward the South Pole, blowing westerly along this latitude, unobstructed by any landmass. It's February, late summer, and the noontime sun is warm on my face. But it's windy enough to blow the milk out of your tea.

I have been here only once before, with Tony, when I was researching a novel that touched on the island's tragic history—a novel that I never wrote.

We were both struck by the beauty of this island; we both loved the place. But like everything to do with Australia, I loved it more than he did. Tony was American to his core, and while I managed to get him to live in Sydney for extended periods a few times during our marriage, I couldn't make him into an Australian. As much as I expected, then hoped, then longed for him to see things differently, he never came to appreciate the country as I do. In his journal in 1994, ten years into our marriage, he wrote: "A stunningly civilized land next to America but at the same time smug and sun-struck...not a place I want to live, something I can't even discuss with G. without her becoming tearful or angry."

It was one of the few things we argued about, and it was an argument I lost. Marriage is constant compromise. On many important matters Tony was the one who gave way. For years he shaped his career around mine, following me first to Cleveland, then to Sydney, then to Cairo. But on this most fundamental issue, he prevailed. I never fully reconciled to it.

"We imprint like baby goslings, on a type of horizon. On a type of sky," Barbara Kingsolver told a reporter who asked her what she loved about Appalachia. My imprinted horizon is the Pacific Ocean, framed by sandstone headlands and sinuous gum trees; my pellucid sky contains the Southern Cross. But it's more than landscape for me. It's also a national personality. An informal, self-deprecating style of moving through the world with a grin on your face and a hand ready to be chucked back to help the mate who might be lagging. A national consensus that tends to value the good of the many over the desires of the individual.

We each loved our own country, but he relied on his. It was his muse. It fed the work that was his passion. That work was relating the American past to its present, something he did with extraordinary prescience, insight, and wit. My work is mostly in my own head and can be done anywhere. So, I accepted an expatriation I did not want and raised my sons in a country whose values and choices often felt incomprehensible. If I'd never met Tony, never loved him with passionate commitment, I think there is a very good chance that I would have ended up on Flinders Island, instead of Martha's Vineyard, where we'd finally put down our roots after years of vagabonding around the world as foreign correspondents. Most places we chose to live had this in common: the profligate sparkle of water encountered unexpectedly when you turn a corner, crest a hill. The first homes of our married life were on the Balmain peninsula in Sydney; in Egypt, we lived on an island in the Nile; and Martha's Vineyard, eight miles off the coast of Massachusetts, was the island where we finally settled and raised our kids. More than half our married life was spent there.

One reason I have chosen to come to Flinders for these memorial days, and not some other isolated place, is to interrogate the cost of my compromise. If this lovely island was, in fact, the destination of my road not taken, what would that life have looked like, as I raised Australian kids and wrote Australian books? What would have been gained, and what would have been lost? It's not really possible to answer these questions, but they nag me. Returning here is the necessary, if not the sufficient, condition for thinking about this more clearly than my gauzy old memories of the place allow.

Inside Flinders Island's tiny airport terminal, I sign for a rental car that, I'm warned by the young woman at the desk, "has some damage." On the paperwork the diagram of the vehicle has black pen marks indicating dings on almost every panel. It's easy to find; it's the one with the front bumper that's been ripped in half and stitched back together with the auto equivalent of Steri-Strips. Such are the make-dos of a remote rural place where almost every material thing you need arrives on a barge on a Wednesday. I admire this: it's very Australian. Suddenly I have an earworm: John Williamson's anthem, "True Blue":

Will you tie it up with wire,

just to keep the show on the road?

The first stop I make is to pick up food. The shack I am renting is almost thirty miles from the nearest store, and half of that is tricky dirt road, undrivable above about ten miles an hour from dusk to dawn if you don't want to slaughter the nocturnal wildlife—the wallabies, pademelons, and wombats who thrive here.

The woman who hands me the provisions also works for the owner of the shack—that's how things go among the small population here—so I get directions: "Turn right back up by the airport and just keep going." It's unlocked. "We don't lock anything." My kind of place. When we bought our 1740s home on the Vineyard, the doors had never had locks installed.