Next week, we hit our one-year anniversary in Australia. Twelve months since I arrived with my husband, our cat Mabel, a suitcase full of skincare that I worried I wouldn’t be able to buy over here and clothes that were entirely wrong for the climate.
In some ways, we’re still finding our feet. Looking for a new place to live now that we know how life works here, what things cost and which parts of Canberra are the ones we feel most at home in. Now that we know which cafe has the nicest breakfast and where you get the bus to Ikea and we’ve found a dentist and a decent GP. I see the same person each time I go in and she listens to me when I tell her a problem is impacting my quality of life – Australian healthcare is something I still can’t get my head around. After a year in Canberra, we’ve got a grasp of the bread-and-butter stuff of living within the rhythm of the place rather than the dancing dalliance of a visit.
As I prepare to return home next week for my first visit since emigrating, the Australian capital is slouching out the back door of winter and into a tentative spring. Buds are creaking out on the trees and the air is developing that lovely warm, squashed-leaf scent as nature wakes up (in tandem with my hay fever – Australian pollen takes no prisoners). Locals are once again murmuring to one another about the Armageddon that begins when the city’s posturing, thuggish magpies lay their eggs and proceed to “protect” them from every passing bicycle, coming at you in a speedy black-and-white blur like a nun with a metre stick who just caught you talking in class.
The journey home is no joke. About 35 hours in all. Thirty-five hours of restless legs, dry air, fluctuating temperatures and the increasing gassy emissions and body odours of hundreds of people trapped at high altitudes in a metal tube hurtling between hemispheres. It’s one of the least comfortable flights you can do but at the end of it you’re home – if a bit puffy and half insane with jet lag – with friends and family.
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This week, as I prepare for the trip, it occurs to me again that when you make the decision to emigrate thousands of kilometres from home, you’re forced to think about your life and future in a way that you can avoid more easily in familiar surroundings. When we arrived in Australia a year ago, it was in a spirit of open-mindedness. We had grown tired of the life in London – the obscene cost of everything, the almost total lack of access to healthcare, the time spent commuting on expensive, capricious trains and the prospect of that grim pattern continuing in perpetuity.
For a person who has been struggling to stumble by in cities like London or Dublin, Australia is an objectively easier option if you can obtain a visa. Especially a city such as Canberra, which is a little less exciting than places such as Sydney and Melbourne, and therefore easier to relax and get established in.
Life is far less expensive and just generally easier. I left the house at 8.45am for a 9am hair appointment this morning – there is no traffic, no rushing, no significant commute. Food is great, people are friendly, rather than cantankerous or rushing everywhere, and if the gleam of European city life has furred over in your estimation with a patina of constant stress, Australia really does feel different.
It is not a place – at least for me – in which the idea of living here conflicts catastrophically with the reality. It is familiar enough to feature little culture shock but different enough to catch your breath in.
I’m hugely looking forward to going home and very lucky to have a job that will allow me to travel back for a month with my laptop wedged under my arm, but a year into life in Australia, I still can’t quite figure out what the future is going to look like. Whether we’ll stay here, return home eventually, or live somewhere else entirely in the future.
Once you completely upend your life by relocating, you develop an awareness that doing so is an option. Particularly when you don’t have children, you don’t have to settle in one place if you prefer not to, and living in various countries may ironically turn you into a person who struggles to put down roots in one place. I’m conscious that when I get back and sit over tea with the people I care about, they will seek a sense of “the plan” from me. A year in, my family and friends will want to know if we’re staying or coming home.
Because surely a year is sufficient to know if you like a place, right?
It’s enough to give you a sense of whether you might be able to settle there. As I’ve discovered – the answer, at least in my case, is “not really”. Because I don’t know if Australia is for life or just for a few years.
I wonder sometimes if the notion of settling is a luxury my generation can’t quite afford or take for granted. The idea of a lifetime spent largely in one place as part of a solid community might be a fiction for people whose job security and financial stability are subject to a global climate that looks very different from the one our parents came up in. It may be difficult to envisage our own future because the future in general seems so unpredictable.
Under present conditions, uncertainty might be the most rational position (but I don’t know if that explanation will wash with my mother-in-law when she asks me next week when her son is coming home).
