There are many ways to write about the experience of being an Irish immigrant in Australia. You could focus on the political and cultural differences and similarities, which are fascinating. The shared and divergent histories. You could place your emphasis on the job market over here and the pull factors that draw Irish people from home to pursue a new life on the other side of the world.
Some people haven’t been enthused when I have written about that here. I once received an email constituting an ontological defence of Leitrim as a county and a concept. It was peppered richly with expletives. I had made a quip about the county, along with my native Limerick, being less exciting for the young than the idea of Sydney.
You could focus on the diplomatic and economic importance of Hiberno-Australian relations to Ireland. I’ve occasionally done that too, particularly in a column where I went to the Irish embassy for a St Patrick’s Day event and pretended that I was Irish Times columnist and Orwell Prize winner Fintan O’Toole, and not I, who had devoted an entire column to Ireland’s many uses for the word “now” when a lady complained about it making Irish people look unserious. Now for you.
You could easily devote pages to the mere pursuit of myth busting, and I have, since Irish people continue to nurse some misplaced presumptions about Australia. They range from the excessively optimistic or generous – that everyone here lives next to a warm, topaz-hued body of water and is extremely physically attractive – to the slightly begrudging or judgmental – that everything is infested with spiders, great whites divest 14 million people of about seven million legs annually, or that every meal is brunch. That last is almost true, but not quite. More a spiritual truth than a literal one. But we’ll see what happens with the next government.
I am too negative about Ireland and too positive about Australia. I can’t please everyone
Study abroad in the Netherlands and Italy: ‘It all started with a leap of faith’
Education abroad: ‘Moving from Limerick to Dublin as it used to be is now like moving from Ireland to the Netherlands’
A Kerry man in Melbourne: ‘I have not seen any tough, stereotyped behaviour. I see similar senses of humour and levels of respect’
Even for those lucky enough to have the luxury of choosing, emigration is a complex choice to make. A move to Australia is a rejection of the potential life you might have otherwise had at home. It is a conscious choice to step out of your family life and friend network in a way that renders you pragmatically irrelevant to the everyday pleasures and obligations of those relationships.
[ Things aren’t better in Australia than in Ireland, but they are easierOpens in new window ]
Nobody is asking you to babysit because they got Oasis tickets, or inviting you to the birthday party, or including you in the annual family trip to the beach. You’re not the first person they’ll call when they’re stuck, or upset or in need. When there are births or deaths, you are always physically more than 30 hours away. This interval is implacable. When anything is time sensitive, you can’t be included – you might not be able to get back in time, or at all. Everything is experienced at a delay that generates distance in more than a physical sense. When you choose to move, you accept the reality that life at home moves on without you, no matter how much of your heart and mind remain behind.
It has always been this everydayness that interested me most about emigrating. The tiny moments that accumulate to equate a life. The gains and losses you must weigh up, come to terms with and carry forward. The way that the design of an Australian city can feel so very alien to the Dublin or Cork or Galway streets you might love and know by heart. The way that changing the brand of porridge you eat for your breakfast can feel like a tiny betrayal or a bleak little compromise, for all its inconsequential mundanity. The loneliness that can be generated by the enriching, fantastic soundscape of alien wildlife outside your window every morning (I miss the questioning “Who? Who?” of portly wood pigeons but have gained the pterodactyl shrieks of resplendent cockatoos). The way that a phrase of greeting – the Australian one is “How are you going?” to our “How’s it going?” or “How are you doing?” – can have an uncanny sense of familiarity and alienness all at once.
Writing about the small, seemingly mundane aspects of everyday life that make emigration both joyful and difficult has been a personally helpful way of making sense of the very different yet somehow similar life I now live in Australia. That is what it means to pack up your life and move to the other side of the world – there are big, challenging questions of cultural dissonance, national identity and legacy, and economic adaptation. There is also lying in bed in the cobalt-tinged dark of midnight, listening to a city worker with a leaf blower inexplicably out on your street at this Godforsaken Jaysus hour, and feeling like there are subtleties of difference that will never make sense to you. Strange, small things that will make you feel forever foreign.
[ As an Irish person in Australia there is one question I’m always askedOpens in new window ]
Some readers of this column will email me here and there to suggest it’s too negative about Ireland and too positive about Australia, or the direct opposite. A woman wrote to complain that I should avoid tricky questions of Irish identity and just write what people want to read – about the beaches. I live in Canberra. It’s inland. When I obliged her by writing about a trip to Bondi Beach (it’s a bit overrated), a man emailed me in high dudgeon to observe that Spanish Point in Co Clare is very nearly as sandy, and certainly less prone to shark attacks.
This week, a woman sent me a very unhappy email about my last column, which considered how minor, invisible cultural differences can be a ubiquitous reminder of one’s emigrant status. She felt it was insufficiently intellectual. I’m aware, as all immigrants must be, that going with the flow is often not an option. When you are out of your own cultural context, you are constantly engaged in parsing, comparing and considering the world around you. Whether I’m desperately trying to find a spicebag in Sydney or considering how Irishness changes when you’re too far from home to take your Irishness for granted, it’s all an intellectual exercise. Well, kind of.
You can’t please everyone.
Maybe Fintan O’Toole will let me borrow his Orwell Prize.
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