Romulus, My Father (Belonging to landscape)
Concepts of belonging features in Romulus, My Father due to Raimond Gaita's connection to the Australian Landscape, his mother and father's immigrant experience, their unusual family situation and also the values and beliefs Raimond was raised with. Gaita uses an unbiased and objective tone throughout the retelling of his upbringing and by doing this he, displays techniques through quotes and symbolism in his desriptions. Romulus never fully adjusts to the Austraian landscape, he misses the European green fauna, a feature he shares with Christine, but does become as affected by the physical isolation as she does. Christine, like with the fifties society, is not welcomed with the open embrace of the people of Frogmore. Raimond, However, eventually welcomes and begins to appeciate the beauty of it. Raimond Gaita's connection to the Australian landscape is evident throughout the memoir but more so as he grows older. The landscape offers a contrast between itself and Gaita's unfortunate upbringing. There is one specific moment where Raimond reveals that from that point on he was “really alive to beauty.” This helps him to add a unique perspecitve of the baren Australian landscape in which he grows up in, the imargey Gaita uses to add beauty to the 'scraggy shapes' and 'sparse foliage' shows that there he feels a strong ifinity to Frogmore one that he carries with him. Which is not shared by any of his other family members, especially his mother Christine. Christine finds the Australian landscape extremely hard to adjust to, more so than both Romulus and Raimond. She loses her vivacious nature due to the physical isolation felt when living in Frogmore. Raimond uses the comparison between his mother and the dead red gum to display Christine's feelings of displacment. 'A dead red gum stood only a hundered meters from the house and became, for my mother, a symbol of her desolation.' Christine dislikes the town of Frogmore because her personality flourishes when