No home for Western Man

We are forbidden a yearning for home. The very notion of us even having one is impermissible; we are, after all, 'a nation of immigrants'.

It was reported a couple of years ago that almost 400,000 acres of land in Australia's northern Queensland was 'handed back to its traditional Aboriginal owners'.

The Daintree Rainforest, which is over 130 million years old and stands near the Great Barrier Reef, has been entrusted to the Eastern Kuku Yalanji people.

Upon it being returned to the tribe, the Australian Environment Minister, Meaghan Scanlon, stated that 'this agreement recognises their right to own and manage their country [and] to protect their culture'.

I do not know enough about the history of the Eastern Kuku Yalanji people or the nearby Wujal Wujal community to make comments specific to the case in hand. Nevertheless, the rum deal Australian aboriginals received over the course of the continent's colonisation is widely recognised.

More broadly, however, what the tribe are laying claim to is their land – or otherwise put, their home. They are seeking somewhere to call their own, a place which can be imagined when the pangs of Heimweh strike.

I do not begrudge this instinct. When miles away from home, I have often thought of the green hills of England, and less often of the grimy centre of Northampton. Indeed, such attachment to place is one of the most basic of human needs. The rootlessness of the modern world has led to various maladies of the mind. People seek attachments elsewhere, substituting adherence to a place to whichever crazy idea can provide even a meagre substitute.

It was Scruton, among others, who so beautifully elucidated this idea of the yearning for Heimkehr – the homecoming. After attempting to beat our own path in the world, we are inevitably drawn back to that which gives us structure, order and meaning. Realising that we are as individuals forever stuck out on a limb, our subsuming into something greater than oneself becomes the key to consolation.

Man in the modern West, however, is strictly forbidden from indulging in this line of thought. Any nostalgia for home and hearth is reprimanded amid deceitful claims that the sound of jackboots is growing louder. One of mankind's most basic instincts – that of belonging – is dishonestly distorted and used to beat people into silence.

Perhaps my grandmother makes an inappropriate example. I'm not sure. She grew up in 1930s Germany and lived through the war as a young girl. She remembered endless shortages and the death of her relatives on the front. Her city was bombed, becoming a raging inferno and reduced to rubble. She saw piles of bodies – she feared her sister was among them. Who knows what happened when the Russians came: she certainly never spoke of that time. Eventually, not wanting a life in the GDR, she left.

But Germany never left her, despite the terrible memories. As she got older her attachment to her place of birth never abated. Eventually her faculties waned and she reverted to speaking in her mother tongue. 'Hast du die Schwäne gesehen?' was the last thing she asked me – 'have you seen the swans?' After her death, her ashes were spread in a graveyard in her native Saxon village.

The desire for Heimkehr exists in us all. But when we look at the language used by that Australian minister – protecting their culture and owning and managing their country – we all know no mainstream politician would put their neck on the line and say the same for a Western country.

We are forbidden a yearning for home. The very notion of us even having one is impermissible; we are, after all, 'a nation of immigrants'. Statements to the contrary will see you shouted down and tarred with the same old tired brown brush.

This is because they want you to be rootless and isolated: it is in this state that you are vulnerable and hence liable to become reliant on the largesse of the state and gullible to its falsities. And the further down this path we all go, the harder it becomes to resist.

But, despite their best efforts, the instinct cannot be silenced.