Susan Johnson, at 62-years-old abandoned Brisbane, and with her 85-year-old mother Barbara, left for the island of Kythera. After nine years working as a journalist, and already having published a slew of books she had enough.

“I suddenly felt too old to be ordered about like a recalcitrant child, sometimes by people I did not respect”, she writes.

The breath of longing

Johnston, like many of us who go back and forth to Greece, is a hostage to Greek light. With $17,000 from the Australia Council, a publisher’s advance, and her mother, she ditched the life she had. Importantly, she wanted to reveal to her mother Greece’s life force.

“Everything was luminous,” she writes, the sea was “an exultant blue”, and naturally she fell “fatally and irrevocably in love with Kythera”.

We know that desire to go back to Greece, to live the instinctive freedom that Greece offers. Where life is not governed by routine, and where one day is – for better or for worse – totally unlike the other.

“There’s a joy and grace that overwhelms me in Greece – nothing else like it, it’s very elemental in a way that other places aren’t,” Johnson says.

Johnson also wanted to show her mother a world she’d not seen, share in a common joy, live a halcyon period, as mother and daughter. The stuff of books. Well, yes, but not as imagined by the author.

They arrived in winter. Kythera was craggy, cold, windswept, and wet. Her mother Barbara was cold, always, not happy. The unhappiness did not fade with time.

“I would go on a vigorous walk, seven or 10 kilometres, she wasn’t doing that.”

The house they had rented didn’t suit her Mum. It was cold, it flooded, and was a haven of all sorts of unwanted critters.

While Johnson excitedly sought to create a new Greek life, her “mother went to Greece to watch Netflix.”

Johnson’s work is about the realization that, regardless of being cut from the same loin, our parents and we, the children, are different. Then there is is a deeper realisation; her mother left a life she knew at 85 to live in Kythera to care for her daughter as she wrote.

“She was going to help me while I wrote the book, she did all the cooking; she did all the housework. She may have been 85 but was very healthy and vigorous.

“She thought she was caring for me and I thought I was caring for her, which is probably, you know, a good thing in a way,” says Johnson.

The sickness of memory

Johnson suffers from a very Greek disease, nostalgia, the algia, pain, of nostos, memory. She wants to recapture the liminal space she found as a young woman in Kythera in her twenties in 1978.

She writes how on “hot nights” in 1978, they “danced down in the hidden cool of the springs at Mylopotamas, which was like descending into a dream, with wine and music and a long line of dancers stretching into the limits of knowable time.”

“I think there’s part of a sort of nostalgia for being young and free but also, because Greece has got such a rich and tragic and wonderful history which is alive in people there – that they live it all the time”…”From the moment you wake up until you sleep, it’s a constant life,” Johnson says.

Johnson wanted her mother to fall in love with the island’s, “limits of knowable time.” Barbara Johnson on the other hand, a middleclass “professional housewife” as Johnson calls her, does not fall in love with Kythera.

The rustic, ethereal, and romantic elements of Kythera fuelled Johnson, but it bore disorder, and loneliness for her mother. Johnson sought to make her mother understand the kernel of Greek life, but the more she tried the more abrasive and intolerant her mother became.

Guilt, penance, and the past became a new chapter of their relationship. From adult and elder, they morphed into teenage daughter and disapproving mother.

“Even as a sixty-year-old woman, I became a teenager in some ways looking for Mum’s approval.”

The first house they stayed in with the vaulted Greek ceiling, “like that of a church” which Johnson saw as bucolic, her mother saw as incorrect “to Mum, everything was wrong.”

Reality as an irritant

Johnson tries to make her mother Barbara see and love the beauty of Kythera, but that irritant, reality, intervenes. A bitter winter, labyrinthine Greek bureaucracy, the overpriced wreck of a car, the absence of Protestant privacy and unannounced drop-ins, the flooding rain, and even a rotting carcass of a dead animal are all symbolic of the mess her mother sees.

Things that Johnson accepted as part of the grist of life on a Greek island, were for her mother examples of economic underdevelopment and unscrupulous Greek flatterers, opportunists.

Even when Barbara began to open to the island, in a new house that she liked, and even enjoyed new friends, and liked the summer, she never loved Kythera. She simply wanted to go home.

“I believed that somehow I had failed her,” Johnson writes.

Johnson, on the other hand, decided to immerse herself in Kythera, “in all its moods, in its glories and failures”.

She harvested olives, learned folk dances, tried to learn Greek, and wrote the journal that became the core of the book.

“I wanted Mum to love Kythera as much as I love it” she says but, “the truth was that she didn’t.”

“But she came, and it allowed me to see my mother as a separate person, as a full person,” Johnson says.

Johnson, in the end, became a local, the xeni, a foreigner, who lives there. Simple things marked that shift, like when she first arrived, as an Australian, a 45-minute drive was ‘nothing’, yet by the end of her stay, she understood how for the Kytherians, the distance between the island’s north and south, as she writes, was “not only geographically vast but also culturally, politically, and meteorologically immense.”

Love shared is not vision shared

Johnson by the end of her mother’s stay on the island realised they were “different, in interests and temperament.”

She was content with that knowledge – there was an impasse, an innate understanding without the need for words between mother and daughter.

“The journey allowed us to see that and to appreciate the things in our lives that we do appreciate.”

In Kythera, her mother Barbara realised that her home was Australia said Johnson.

“She didn’t need to be anywhere else and that’s a blessing if you’re that kind.”

Johnson’s travel with her mother is not new to Greeks, “many [Anglo] Australians said, ‘oh, wow, you know, your mother’s going to Greece, she’s 85, that’s amazing.”

“In Greece no one bats an eyelid, a lot of Greek Australians go with their mothers every year to Greece, it’s nothing.”

Johnson is conscious of her privilege. On that island she had much more than many of the locals. Also, her journey was a choice, a sojourn.

It was not migration; it was not that life-altering journey that Greeks undertook after the devastation of World War II.

“I realise how privileged I am when I think about 13-year-olds, or 16-year-old girls and boys shipped off to the other side of world.”

Kythera’s harsh environment, and the Second World War, “when people were starving”, forced thousands to leave, “under the most horrible conditions and end up in the back of beyond in rural Queensland or somewhere.”

“I know people whose parents experienced the real hardship of migration, so it was hard for me to listen to Mum whinging, and I felt like saying ‘if you only knew how hard it was’,” says Johnson.

Testimony to life

The book is a revelatory memoir, a testimony. For those of us that know Greece, we feel Johnson’s Kythera on our skin, and in our bones.

For those that do not know Greece, her book is one of the most significant responses to Greece in recent times. Her descriptions of the bitter cold of winter, of the waft of new flower scents heralding spring, and the sexually charged summer are all Greece.

The author relays the complexities of the characters they interact with. From friendships to ephemeral meets.

She honestly explores her body and desire as a 62 year old. The internal dialogue of how she too can wear a bikini like other Greek women of her age, is funny and says much about the oppressive and puritanical Anglosphere.

Johnson created friendships on Kythera, she became part of that world, even her mother in the end, had friendships. Yet, Johnson is in the end a visitor, the foreigner, who sat by a fire in winter listening to stories.

“Greeks are storytellers, the myths were oral and go from one generation to another.”

Johnson canvased the ghostly houses emptied by war and migration, the ruins of churches and textures the past with the present.

She has an engaging ability to weave the history, myth, and lore, of the island to real people.

Importantly, Johnson realised that her mother, was a woman that she may never fully know but will always love.

Of returns and grief

Barbara returned home to Queensland, and then Covid hit, and Johnson was one of the thousands of Australians stranded outside Australia. Kythera became a ghost island.

She left the island knowing that whatever she had was, as it was in her 20s, ethereal and intangible. And what she had now, with her 85-year-old mother as a was itself also a new and possibly weightier gift of love. Still a wisp of Aphrodite’s breath.

Johnson ended up “quarantined in Room 1214 on the twelfth floor of the Sydney Harbour Marriot at Circular Quay”.

Finally, the mother she met in Queensland was not the intimidating active and lively 85-year-old. This mother was stooped and shuffled her feet. “I almost cried out of shock”, Johnson writes.

When Barbara died a new endless grief “combined to shrink” Johnson’s “world into a small dark place.”

She nearly gave up writing the book and thought of returning the money she no longer had, back to the Australia Council. However, grief fuelled the book. A grief that has no cultural bounds, a grief we all must feel when our parents pass.

In the end her Kythera became laden with importance, and life’s 20/20 hindsight.