Belonging Essay

Belonging Essay

To belong is to feel as though you are part of something, where you connect with other people, and where you feel a sense of security. Belonging can be individually, within a group, community, society, or the larger world. This sense of belonging can be earned through our family, friends, likes and dislikes, backgrounds and opinions.
Peter Skrzynecki uses various language and visual techniques throughout his poems to portray belonging as being a universal desire and human experience, as does Donna Mehans book “the stolen genetation”
The poem, Migrant hostel,explores the desire to belong, on arrival, people from the various nations sought out others from their own countires, ‘instinctively /like a homing pigeon.’ This simile suggests that this was the natural thing to do. As the bird returns home, so the migrants could find a kind of home among the fellow immigrants. The authoritites in Australia were well-intentioned and migrants were badly needed in post-war Australia, to increase the population and the workforce and to bring new skills into the expanding economy. The way hostels were actually called ‘hostels’ indicates these good intentions. They were meant to provide agreeable resting-places and homes at journeys beginning.
Skryznecki’s perception of his family’s situation is that they were ‘birds of passage’, constantly conscious of their condition of change and apparently perpetual journeying, surrounded by other involved in their own journeys: “always sensing a change In the weather: Unaware of the season, whose track we would follow.”
Trapped in this situation, as the last stanza indicates, they cannot evaluate their situation. In the midst of change, it is difficult to get a perspective on where that change is leading and whether or not it will be for the good. Had their new lives commenced, or were they merely   perishing?
Peter Skrzynecki used techniques, similes, rhetorical questions and metaphors to enhance the desire to...