Six Months
by Catherine · 18 June 2026 · Biography & Memoir
Six months after moving from Melbourne to western Victoria: quiet accumulating mistake, not yet arrived. Then: autumn light, dry grass, eucalyptus and something she can't name. This is starting to be mine. Five years later: still can't name it. It smells like here.
I moved from Melbourne to a small town in western Victoria five years ago and for the first six months I thought I'd made a mistake. Not catastrophic — the work was good, the people were fine — but the quiet accumulating kind, the sense of being somewhere that isn't yours yet. Everything was slightly wrong in a way that's hard to explain to someone who hasn't done it.
Around the six-month mark I drove back from a call in late afternoon and the light was doing what it does here in autumn — low and gold and somehow personal, like it's landing on the specific landscape it was made for — and the paddocks smelled of dry grass and eucalyptus and something else I still can't name, and I thought: this is starting to be mine.
I've been here five years now. I still can't name the smell. I've stopped trying. It smells like here.
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