An Irish fish in Australian waters: ‘I read the room for clues as to what I need to do next’

The tiniest flutter of familiar anxiety ripples over me as I realise I’m unsure what kind of place this is. This has happened pretty regularly since my arrival in Australia. It’s like the small anxiety you feel when you meet a person from a different culture and don’t catch their name first time round, so you have to ask them to repeat it. It feels impolite, as though you weren’t listening, when you might just need to hear it twice to get it right or to consciously add this new word to your mental bank of names.

My poor friend Sadhbh, who lives in the UK, gets this a lot. People are trying. The name is a new sound to them. She accepts it as a minor cost of living outside your own majority cultural context.

In this moment, I too am a well intended fish out of water. I’m in this Australian restaurant, and I’m just trying to get it right. I read the room for clues as to what I need to do next. It’s a nice restaurant, but not especially notions or high end. You’d call it more of a cafe, since like many Australian eateries, it specialises in breakfast and brunch. I want to pay for the (pretty excellent) scrambled eggs on toast I just finished. They’re served ribboned into a sort of eggy rosette atop a big crusty piece of toasted sourdough, and served with tender, herby mushrooms on the side.

Delicious.

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While things are generally more straightforward in Ireland, where a place with table service means you ask for the bill and then you pay at your table, while a coffee counter right inside the door might mean “pay here first then take a seat”, it doesn’t consistently work that way in Australia. In some places, you order and pay at the counter. In others, you go up and pay once you’ve finished eating, without asking for your bill first. I’ve been to expensive steak places that work this way and find it baffling. In others, you ask for the bill like you usually would in a similarly positioned Dublin or London restaurant. I still don’t know how to tell which sort of place I’m in through vibe alone, the way Aussies seem to be able to.

It’s a very minor cultural difference, but it’s enough to result in any immigrant repeatedly misreading the correct way to behave. If you don’t know the norm, you don’t have the experience to intuit what you need to do. Living outside your country of birth is full of these sorts of moments. They become less constant with time, as you recognise patterns and learn the norms of a new place. Still, they do happen a lot when you don’t have the built-in understanding that comes with growing up inside a culture and internalising how it works.

In any Australian gym I’ve visited, anyone who doesn’t clean machines after using them will be openly policed by other gym-goers. As a result, most people don’t need to be shamed into compliance. Whenever I’ve witnessed anyone openly being told (usually in a tone of some disgust) that they need to go back and clean a machine, the rule-breaker is usually not Australian. They might be British, or Irish, or from some other culture where cleaning the equipment is theoretically a rule, but not one that’s universally followed.

Australian culture looks cosmetically so similar to our own that it’s easy for an Irish person to presume assimilating will be straightforward, but this isn’t always the case.

When you move between cultures that are similar but have material differences, and where you visually “pass” or blend in and are therefore presumed to just “know” how things work, you realise how much of your life in Ireland is invisibly configured for you if you remain at home. You understand the rules and norms. You’re unlikely to frequently breach them out of ignorance. You know how to read the space between people’s words and their behaviour. You can predict the likely outcomes of certain actions or interactions and you know what constitutes subversive or rude behaviour in most situations.

In Ireland, for example, it’s understood that when you meet an old acquaintance on the street and one of you suggests that you two should absolutely go for a pint some night, that person is lying. It’s a noise we make with our faces to be polite. Anyone who interpreted this as a sincere invitation and sent messages trying to make pints actually happen would be considered guilty of harassment.

When someone you don’t know really well asks how you’re doing, like your accountant or the person at the checkout in Tesco, you’re not actually meant to tell them. The question is a performance of good manners. If you reply that you’re not great because your turtle just died and you’re questioning your sexuality and you’re worried you might have scurvy, they simply will not know what to do. You’ve gone off script by giving a true (if concerningly full) answer to a question which is merely a formality of decent etiquette.

You’ve breached a norm and now – look – things are all weird.

Standard operating procedures cannot run as normal. This woman is just trying to sell you lettuce or amend your tax return. These sorts of transgressions won’t necessarily be pointed out to you overtly. Instead, you’ll just get social feedback ranging from distance to overt rejection, to let you know you’ve done something wrong.

Not being able to deduce the payment system of a brunch restaurant isn’t quite the same as telling someone in Tesco you’re worried about your gum health, but it’s not so different either. When you live outside your own culture, it’s very easy to feel at a loss, to offend or irritate people through very subtle social transgressions without realising you’re doing it, and to misinterpret the environment around you.

Sometimes it’s funny or just very embarrassing.

Sometimes you don’t even know you’ve done it, or you do, because everyone is staring.

We’ll just call it character-building, I suppose.

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