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The Victorian Premier has told us we must stay at home in order to stop the spread of covid-19 in our community. Some modelling suggests that this will need to be in place until July if we are to be successful in stopping the pandemic. The ABC has produced a graph which indicates what might happen if we stop this measure prematurely. "If you can stay hone, you must stay home" is the directive.

Home - what is that? 

• Where my house is built?
• Where my heart is?
• Where my family grew up?
• Any situation in which I feel welcome, appreciated; that is, "at home"?

I have lived in many different dwellings. As I recall them now, I am amazed at their variety and at the range of people with whom I shared them. 

For some time after we are born we have little choice about where we live. Before I turned sixteen, I had lived in five different houses, all of them my "home". When my parents migrated from the Netherlands in the early 1950s, they left not only their family homes but also their home country. Over the first thirty years of their lives they lived in maybe two different houses. They returned only twice, to visit. What a contrast! And what did those return visits mean to them given that they had adopted Australia as their "home". My father even insisted that if he were to die in Holland, he was not to be buried there but in Australia, in the cemetery of his "home town". Since my father's death almost forty years ago, my mother lived in two different houses which became our "family homes" and she now makes her home in an aged care facility and lives independently. Whenever I visited her in those intervening forty years, everything about that dwelling spoke of welcome, motherhood and fatherhood (even in his absence), history, personality, time spent, shared food and laughter, arguments and disagreements, forgiveness and reconciliation. In order to create a home we make investments. These investments provide us with a return which, in turn, depend on the quality of those investments.

When I had my own family, one of the houses we lived in became "home" for our children. While they still talk with real affection about Christmases and Easters at "Oma's place", their own family home is "encoded" in that dwelling in which their childhood was spent, even while they now live in their own individual homes. It is striking to me that all three dwellings are a unique home to them - "Oma's place", "where we grew up" and "where we live now". "Where dad lives" was another kind of home but nevertheless carrying its own investments.

When Daniel Andrews asks us to "stay at home", what is he asking us to invest in? Clearly it is to halt the spread of covid-19. But what else might be happening in these dwellings we are being asked to inhabit full-time? What are we investing in, consciously and unconsciously and what might be the return on this investment? 

Cope's Hut, Alpine National Park, Victoria (my photograph)

Perhaps the building will take on a meaning that may never have been intended. Perhaps, within its walls, we will learn what arguments and forgiveness mean, what truth and lies can result in, what we really need and what we really don't. 

Many more of us are tackling projects that we never had the chance (or made the time) to begin, let alone finish. One only has to witness the increase in visitors to the various DIY outlets to conclude that a home-makers revolution is is full swing. Houses are being re-made into homes with the investment of money, time, creativity and good will.

Many more of us are working from home, traditionally not a workplace. In order for this to be feasible and not result in further stress and mental health challenges, we are being advised to reserve a space specifically for work so that the rest of our house remains a home. As a teacher, I will be expected to engage with my students from home from the beginning of Term 2. As a result, my spare room has become my school office and classroom and I will venture there only for my working hours. I have rearranged the space, installed a table and chair and decorated the walls with my professional qualifications. A plant sits on a pedestal. I can walk out of my home and into work. 

And back again at the end of the day.

We are now being forced to decide "where the heart is" and what we are prepared to do to create it.

Everything is the same but different.