After a recent column, an Irish Times reader messaged me on Twitter. Don’t worry – this isn’t the opening sentence of a legal statement. I simply refuse, by the way, to call Twitter “X”. We’ll call it that after it’s dead.
The reader got in touch to make a very good point, saying that I shouldn’t call Canberra Australia’s “political capital”. Canberra, the reader said, is just the capital of Australia. Quite right, too – it is. That loadbearing term, “political capital” suggests that Australia’s real primary city lies elsewhere. That “elsewhere” being approximately three and a half hours’ drive northeast of Canberra and sitting decadently, bikini-clad on the coast – a contrast from Canberra’s mountainous inland location and its decidedly less cool, young image.
I feared sharing my instinct, which would be that in all likelihood most Irish people may not realise that Australia’s capital is not in fact Sydney. There are, of course, some people who will know this. Geography teachers, one would hope. Irish people who have lived in Australia. People who enjoy a pub quiz, taking it just seriously enough to want to win but slightly too seriously for anyone else to want to be on their team.
For all Ireland’s obsession with Australia, we don’t know a huge amount about the place.
It exists in the minds of many Irish people as a sort of utopian escape from places like Limerick, where I grew up. When Irish people think of Australia, they think of sun (Canberra has seasons, including a cold winter – every Irish person I have told this to looked sceptical and one asked openly in a tone of mild disgust if I’d realised this before deciding to move). They think of sea (Canberra is inland – it’s grand, I can’t swim anyway and I’m afraid of sharks). They think of spiders (I haven’t seen a single one yet – snakes are apparently much more of a worry but not so much in the city).
Canberra reminds me a smidge of Limerick. Not in any literal sense – not because it’s Ireland’s real capital, though that would be interesting. We’d need a lot more hotels and a Krispy Kreme before that could happen – not to mention that decades-promised Marks and Spencer. Don’t mention Marks and Spencer to a Limerick person. It remains an open wound. The sprawling suburbs and wide American-style streets of my new home, 110-year-old Canberra, could not look more different from the Irish little city I grew up in, and not just because countless Limerick buildings have stood far longer than this Australian city and absolutely feel every bit of it when you try to heat them in winter.
After six weeks here I can see that Canberrans, like people from Limerick (I’ll call them Limerickians and you can’t stop me), are often both down on their city and yet quick to fiercely defend its merits if they perceive a slight from outside. I know that dissonance of old.
It brings to mind the seismic ripple of resentment that went through Limerick when the movie version of Angela’s Ashes was released in 1999. My searing sociological analysis will naturally be warped by the fact that I was about 10, but I vividly remember my grandmother conversing sniffily with other Limerick grand dames, lamenting how very miserable and impoverished the film made our city look. Everything was grey. Buildings. People (nutrition was bad back then in fairness). The city itself seemed under a waxy tarp of grey rain that drenched and obscured everything.
[ I didn’t expect to move to Australia. I have no idea what I’m doingOpens in new window ]
Despite the fact that my grandmother insisted her marigolds would never have grown if Limerick actually rained like that all year round, I still maintain that the latter was relatively accurate. Even here in Canberra, when it occasionally rains – and it has rained four times or so in the six weeks I’ve been here – the basin in which the city is nestled will fill with greyish-white mist so that the distant mountains disappear and you will be soaked through to your very skeleton in under a minute.
I call this “Limerick weather”.
Walking to school through rain most mornings is my resounding memory of Limerick, though when I go home these days it occasionally doesn’t rain, which naturally helps to keep the bias in check. In Canberra, it’s spring and hot, so the rain brings a sort of astonishing tepidity with it, as though someone has splashed you flirtatiously from a toasty bath. It’s a far cry from the acid cold of January rain travelling up your knee socks by capillary action in the dark of a Limerick morning in 2006.
Limerick city has a cadence you must fit into if you’re going to get anywhere there. You fit into Limerick – it won’t change for you. Nor should it. In Canberra, that grey rain makes me homesick, somehow, and comforts me too. Like Limerick weather, it doesn’t plash. It batters. It horses down.
I’m not living in an Emily Dickinson poem.
No gentle and poetic rain will connect me to home, but the sort that destroys your hair and has you almost crying at the state of yourself will. Sydney might be cool, and perhaps Canberra isn’t (though there’s a bakery called Three Mills here that makes a cherry Danish I’d disown my family for and you can buy the best avocado of your life here for under a euro). “Cool” is transient. It cares who is looking.
I prefer a bit of rain. I don’t recognise myself without it.
