You can try to seem worldly as an Irish person living abroad. You can go to the National Gallery and stare knowingly at a fire exit you have mistaken for a piece of modern art, nodding sagely as people stroll past you and you murmur “challenging stuff” in a serious tone. You can try local dishes and apply notions adjectives to them in the full knowledge that you would never, ever describe a mouthful of fish at home as being ‘delicate and fragrant’. If you did, five people from your town would leap out from some obliging hedges nearby to give you a dead arm (and you’d deserve it).
You can leave home and make fashion choices that are illegal in Ireland. You might even wear a hat unironically. You can finally follow the advice of your ophthalmologist and wear your sunglasses under conditions in which you objectively need them without anyone roaring, “Ah, sure it’s the late Muammar Gadafy just in from Libya so, is it?” the moment they see you. At which point you remove the glasses to fry your eyeballs in UV radiation like every other self-respecting Irish person in the beer garden.
What’s a bit of macular degeneration if it keeps the Gadafy references at bay?
All this is to say that as an Irish person living in the Australian capital, I can attempt to think of myself as suave and well-travelled and “international” if I want, but I’m absolutely nothing of the sort. If you’re Irish, you’re always Irish in every situation. This interconnectedness, which sees us rooted deeply in culture and (damp, peaty) soil, is our blessing. We’re always one point of connection within a wider network. The presence of other Irish people can be a real comfort and means of creating community far from home.
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This interconnectedness is also our curse because we can’t be anonymous anywhere, ever.
In Australia, you can wear the sunglasses. Medically speaking, you really should. Seriously – we are 3km from the surface of the sun here, and Irish eyes are likely to combust, leaving a couple of dusty raisins rattling around your skull. If you wear the sunglasses, though, you will certainly run into someone who is Irish, and they will have played hurling with your brother, or been your cousin’s bridesmaid, or beat you to the distinction at the fourth class Féile 27 years ago.
Here in Canberra, there are not many Irish people, but if you do meet one, they’ll know someone you know, or you’ll have gone to school with them or – the one that makes us all look a smidgen overfamiliar – they will be somehow distantly related to you.
After almost a year in Canberra, I now have enough familiarity with the city to know which part I’d like to live in, so we’re looking for a new apartment to rent. When you first arrive as an immigrant, you don’t know which way is up. You get a sense of what things cost by doing a quick currency conversion in your head for absolutely every transaction. You don’t understand the healthcare system or taxation or even the law, and you sometimes do something such as buy a sandwich and go to eat it on a park bench and think “this probably isn’t illegal here but I hope someone will tell me if it is”. You fret about breaching cultural rules and norms with your big ignorant foreign habits. You commit fax pas without meaning to.
As time passed, I felt sure I’d heard an Irish accent, so rare here in Canberra. Irish people tend to go straight to Melbourne and Sydney
In Australian restaurants, you go up to the counter to pay. Whether the place is the local greasy spoon or a notions restaurant serving conceptual meat on a bed of foam that looks a bit like cat sick, the bill doesn’t come to the table. You go up to pay. I spent a lot of time confusedly sitting at tables and making unbroken eye contact (which in retrospect may have seemed menacing) with wait staff before I figured this out.
This week, as we stood outside an apartment building in Canberra waiting for the late – as in delayed, not deceased – estate agent to turn up, I noticed a young couple waiting nearby. You can always tell who is there for a property inspection. As time passed, I felt sure I’d heard an Irish accent, so rare here in Canberra. Irish people tend to go straight to Melbourne and Sydney, despite the fact Canberra is considered a slightly less competitive place for those seeking a visa to live in Australia.
My brain produced several staccato thoughts in succession on hearing the accent I’ve come to value so much more now it’s less ubiquitous. ‘Pretty sure that’s an Irish accent but hang on just in case (because it’ll look unbelievably provincial if you’re wrong).’ Then, ‘It’ll look just as provincial if you’re right’. Then, ‘If they are Irish, I bet they know the one Irish person in Canberra that I know’. Then, ‘It will be a bit embarrassing if they do’. Then finally, ‘I hope we aren’t related somehow – that would all just be a bit much’.
The couple was Irish.
They had arrived in Canberra the day before, and we did indeed share that one Irish acquaintance. It was lovely to see them, fresh off the plane from home and about to embark on a new life here in a part of Australia where there aren’t all that many of us. Mammies, they told me, had been sending them some of these columns, no doubt because, “Sure isn’t Canberra where you’re going and isn’t yer one in The Irish Times living there writing about how there are magpies the size of pterodactyls trying to kill everyone?” In fairness, the magpies aren’t really trying to kill everyone, they just have the energy of that unstable schoolfriend who worked part-time as a nightclub doorman and everyone thought ‘He might end up in prison one of these nights’.
So we can try to seem worldly, but it doesn’t quite work out.
Wherever we go, we seem to find one another.
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