As autumn settles itself at home, I’m attempting to grasp the fact that here in Canberra, the Australian capital where I moved just last month, Spring is stretching languidly across the mountainous, green-brown landscape.
If you’re new as I am, locals will warn you about the magpies. They’re more than just a bird. They are a gobby, T-rex-esque reminder that I have somehow made the decision to move to another hemisphere, and actually done it. This is wholly out of character. I’m the sort of person who can’t drink an unfamiliar brand of tea, who will only take the same bus route once I’ve decided I know it. I’ll see an intriguing-looking trail off the main path on a woodland walk and happily march on by to get home to a novel.
Risk, spontaneity, adventure — all of these are great. For other people. Yet, somehow, I find myself on an adventure anyway and delighted about it.
They’re like the best-looking girl in your class at school — imperious, thinks she’s better than you but you kind of get it
Despite all the vast change of a new life, the magpies are the strongest signifier that I’m not in Limerick anymore. They look at you like you owe them money. You may be thinking of the spicy black-and-white lads who gawk boldly at you from the damp, misty shelter of a rain-soaked Irish sycamore, the peridot oil-slick sheen of their dark feathers catching the light like mackerel in shallow water. They’re like the best-looking girl in your class at school — imperious, thinks she’s better than you but you kind of get it. Good ankles. You know yourself.
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These Australian lads are another story. They frequent the city’s wide thoroughfares and parks, loitering like bouncers in black and white bomber jackets and at present, they are engaged in the angry work of hatching their chicks and protecting them from threats. These threats include predators, people whose “vibe” they consider “off” and their arch-nemesis, the bicycle.
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They call this swooping season (people in Canberra — I don’t know what the magpies call it) when these big birds will condescend to the earth at speed in the name of protecting their babies. The city is peppered with livid yellow warning signs marked Look out! as though your own human baby could be snatched toward the heavens by a stray pterodactyl at any moment. They’re a bit like the ice-cream-stealing seagulls on Dún Laoghaire pier, except instead of your snacks, they desire the total annihilation of you and several generations of your family, as well as the obliteration of the bicycle as a technology.
As a result, cyclists traverse the city looking like crazed preppers awaiting a nuclear apocalypse, wearing zip ties sticking up and out of their helmets to prevent the birds from going for their ears. “They always swoop you from behind and they will draw blood,” a local cyclist told me in a misty, contemplative tone. “They’ve come after me four times on my route to work this month.” He then peered into the distance, narrow-eyed and pensive like a tired facsimile of Clint Eastwood contemplating the breakdown of human-avian diplomacy.
Ten hours in the future and a hemisphere away, my October looks different to all that came before, and it comes as both a thrill and a challenge to my ingrained fear of change
The birds have more right to be here than I do. But their strange chiming music is, along with the trilling yells of chunky little pink-headed parrots and buxom, waddling white cockatoos, the musical soundtrack of the city. It is a reminder that it this not Ireland or London, not autumn, not the usual lead-up to darker mornings and shorter days.
At home, curmudgeonly children are jostled from their beds by tired, kindly parents on dark mornings in readiness for a fresh school year. Ten hours in the future and a hemisphere away, my October looks different to all that came before, and it comes as both a thrill and a challenge to my ingrained fear of change. I’ve been incredibly lucky to come here to Canberra, where my husband’s job has brought us both. The opportunity arose. I can write from anywhere because writing is — thrillingly — not precisely a grown-up job, and we left London, where we had been for six years, for an entirely new life.
A new continent. A new season. A new kind of magpie.
I would never have ended up here otherwise, and this move wasn’t expected.
Yet, here we are.
While this is hardly a novel move for an Irish person — my own great great-great-grandfather made the trip and his son, who eventually returned to Ireland, was born in Australia — it is big for me. I have no idea what I’m doing. I don’t know anyone in my new home city. Like so many Irish people before me, I am starting all over again. There will be perils along the way — loneliness, potentially. Assimilating into and learning about a new culture.
And yet, I left Ireland for London in my late 20s. Older and wiser, I know how to be away from home, how to adjust
Difficulty in importing Kerrygold butter without it melting in the box. Finding a way not to say, “they’re pretty much just penguin bars aren’t they?” when people ask me if I’ve eaten Tim Tams yet. Potentially, having my bike totalled by a magpie.
And yet, I left Ireland for London in my late 20s. Older and wiser, I know how to be away from home, how to adjust. How to be patient with myself for the countless things I don’t yet know about a new place. Each week, I’ll be here on this page, clueless, well-intended, grateful. Possibly wearing an anti-magpie helmet and letting you know how it’s going.
Australia, that is. Not swooping season.
