Why We Call It The Keep

The idea for The Keep began with a question about my own family.

What do you take with you when you leave one country and begin again in another?

Both sides of my family came to Australia in the 1960s, each with a large family and a life to begin again.

There could only have been so much room for possessions.

A suitcase. Clothes. Photographs. A few useful things. Perhaps something particularly treasured.

You could not bring the house.

You could not bring the landscape outside it, the familiar shops, the people down the road or everything accumulated over a lifetime.

And yet, somehow, families bring an enormous amount with them.

The music played in the house.

The stories told from the old country.

Household customs.

Phrases and sayings.

Recipes remembered rather than written down.

The particular way visitors were welcomed.

And the heartache for the people and places left behind.

These things take up no room at all, yet they can travel astonishing distances.

They settle into another house, another country and eventually another generation. Children grow up surrounded by them without necessarily knowing where they came from. Years later, they hear themselves using the same phrase, cooking the same food or reaching instinctively for the same thing when someone walks through the door.

And then there is tea.

Usually, there is always tea.

Across countries, cultures and generations, tea has a remarkable way of finding its place in the home. The leaves change. The pots change. How it is brewed, poured and served changes.

But tea turns up.

At breakfast. When visitors arrive. During long conversations. In times of celebration and in times when nobody quite knows what to say.

In my family there was a pot every morning. Sometimes another later. In some homes, the pot simply seemed to remain warm for most of the day.

Nobody announced it as a ritual.

It was simply what we did.

And that was what interested me.

Australia is full of families carrying things like this.

Ways of cooking. Ways of speaking. Music, recipes, table manners, celebrations, gardens, beliefs and small domestic customs brought from somewhere else and gradually made at home here.

Some remain almost untouched.

Others change completely.

And some become so ordinary within a family that nobody thinks to ask where they began.

When we talk about inheritance, our minds usually go to the objects that survive. The silver. A piece of furniture. Jewellery. Photographs with names written carefully on the back.

But inheritance also lives in behaviour.

In gestures.

In standards.

In the way we receive people.

In what we continue to cook, pour, mend, polish, plant or put on the table because somewhere along the line somebody showed us that this was how it was done.

That thought became central to The Merry Wolf.

I became interested in the things from the past that still earn their place in our lives now.

A proper pot of tea is one of them.

So is bringing out the good cups.

Knowing how someone takes their tea.

Making enough food.

Sending people home with something.

Keeping a table open a little longer than necessary.

Every generation changes these things and adds something of its own.

But some things are worth carrying forward.

And that is where the name The Keep came from.

A keep is somewhere things are held safely. The word also appears in the way we speak about the things we intend to live with.

This one is a keeper.

Keep it for good.

Keep it in the family.

Keep the kettle on.

For The Merry Wolf, The Keep is a place for the things we think are worth holding onto.

Stories about houses and the people who filled them. Food and drink. Hospitality. Family habits. Objects made to last. Places with character. The small domestic customs that somehow survive oceans and generations.

Tea will appear often, of course.

It has been travelling with us for a very long time.

But The Keep was never intended to be only about tea.

It is about what remains.

What we choose to carry forward.

And the things we hope somebody else might keep after us.