Lee Morgan

 My earliest memories begin in Weymouth. Along with those first memories something takes deep root in my psyche. The West Country, in the cradle of Dorset and Somerset (according to my DNA analysis) holds my maternal ancestors back to Neolithic times. Born in Eora/Sydney I was taken back to England by my mother, with the intent of staying. Due to family circumstances I was taken back to Australia as a child, and there began the strange back and forth between the two places that was to shape me. Due to the fact my grandfather was able to help us financially to do so, my mother took me back at least every three years. There is something about this in-between status I have, being a dual citizen of both nations, and a regular occupier of both, that I believe gives me a perspective on being removed from a history stretching back to the Neolithic, one that I can viscerally remember the smell of, the eruption of spring bluebells and the whole sensory experience of a land that holds my ancestors, and then being removed from that, back to a land where although I felt exiled from Dorset, I also know I’m part of an ongoing occupation of colonisation. As deeply uncomfortable as this experience is I believe it has taught me how to perform a sword dance between belonging, and learning to belong.

In a world where colonisation impacts all of us, even those back in the so-called Old Country, I feel as if the atmosphere of new-oldness that I bring to my Craft is something of importance. I know what the world feels like where wells, springs, hills, and standing stones have endured, where pathways known as Ghost Roads or Ley Lines are still known and travelled and acknowledged, where the boundary between place and the ancestors is barely non-existent, but I also know what it’s like to be standing on a mountain that I have come to love like an adopted mother, and know that the previous people of this place, the muwinina people were driven off from here through disease, game-loss and murder. It is here, in the apron-folds of kunanyi where I find myself. I find myself here for a number of reasons, many of which I don’t have the power to entirely control, that link me to the dark history of Van Diemen’s Land.

My mother was born in Moreton, Dorset. She is one of the last few people with the right to have her body buried in the cemetery, which also contains the bones of T.E Lawrence, or Lawrence of Arabia, with whom my great aunt used to play tennis. It was my mother with the travel bug who brought us out here. Now this is where I find myself. Having found a new family made of Witch Fire and shared breath that lives on the edge of temperate rainforest in a land full of wonder, mystery and sorrow.

Successfully keeping up not just a Covenstead, but a community of witches living together on six acres has given me further insight into what it means to belong to more than one place. With a composting toilet and rainwater catchment for drinking water we are really part of the watershed of this place, in a way my body has never had the chance to be in Dorset. Every day I attempt to learn from this place, to sit humbly at its feet and find out how it would like to shape me, like a piece of clay in the hands of a potter, I have allowed myself to have this place kneaded and shaped into me. I hope you will enjoy what I have to say here. Although the Work might sound simple, it is a simplicity that has been eked out of me over time. Time spent in what can feel like exile, and the realisation that the Welsh blood that comes to me on my father’s side also tells, and that perhaps hiraeth is my natural condition, where even when I’m back in Dorset there is a part of me that craves to be hiking across kunanyi, or better yet, deeper into lutruwita where you can scream at the top of your lungs and there’s nobody but the Past to hear you.