Many Irish people seem to harbour a conception of their potential Australian life, whether or not they ever emigrate. I only really realised this after moving to Australia myself, visiting home and watching faces mist over at the mention of this vast country on the other side of the world. “Ah, Australia!” people would intone breathily, eyes softening as they retreated briefly into some corner of their mind where they appear to have a ready-made set of fantasies about what it might be like to live here.
That or they would immediately start talking about big spiders (I moved here in August 2023 and I haven’t seen one yet, but I’ll keep you posted). The reaction when you tell Irish people you live in Australia tends to be either wistful or begrudging with little in between. On hearing I live here (and I did only tell him because he asked), one man became mildly irate and said that the swimming at Sandycove is just as good as in Sydney, and without any sharks. I was confused because nobody had mentioned the sea, I live inland and have a pretty intense phobia of sharks, but I left him to irately work what felt like a historic disagreement out with himself.
While I was lucky to end up in Australia by accident and through absolutely no merit of my own – happening to be married to someone who was offered a job over here – it had never been part of the plan. Not being big on sun or outdoor sports or the ocean, or wildlife that can kill you, I hadn’t nursed any fantasy of a secret Australian life. There was no mental image of a more tanned, physically fitter, less stressed Australian immigrant version of me living in the back of my head while my hair fuzzed up and my thermal socks chafed in the whirling, misty damp of a Dublin or London commute.
[ The challenges of moving to another countryOpens in new window ]
Yet, the opportunity to move so far from home and experience a different way of life seemed too interesting to pass up. When we talked about what emigrating would mean, there were plenty of negatives – practicalities such as the significant expense just to get to Australia and rent a place to live, horrendously complex and lengthy visa applications, arranging the logistics of the move, not to mention leaving family and friends behind.
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But we also quickly realised that we had no good reason not to leave London, where we’d been living for six years, and where the cost of living had crept up each year without income following suit, leaving us wondering what we were getting in exchange for long daily commutes and constantly escalating food, water and electricity bills. My work, too, had begun to feel a bit flat. I had been doing the same thing for a long time and started to feel that I wasn’t giving it my best in the way I once had. It occurred to me that moving to a new country requires such a leap of faith and imagination that changing your job suddenly begins to feel much less intimidating.
Emigration might primarily be a change of location, but it forces you to re-evaluate the entire landscape of your life. The decision to move to another country is a rare opportunity to stick your head over the parapet of routine and comforting familiarity to think about what it is that you would change if you could. While we are who we are wherever we go, we also respond to the environments we live and work in, and we change accordingly. Under a bullying boss, you can become ungenerous, disinterested and resentful. Working on a supportive team, you can become more compassionate, more innovative and better fun.
We are different versions of ourselves depending on context.
Some people move to a new country for a job, or education, or for a relationship. When you begin again somewhere new, you’re presented with opportunities to reinvent yourself and change the aspects of your former behaviour or life that didn’t serve you. You can detach from all the preconceived ideas that family might have of you and see yourself in new ways. You can make a career change.
Here, I have somehow become a person who goes to the gym three or four times a week
Before moving I had been balancing my other writing work with being a beauty editor. Australia was a chance to set that side of my work aside and focus on what I was more interested in doing. The lower cost of living here and more rigidly respected work-life balance allowed me to finally finish and publish my book, something that hadn’t felt possible during my life in London and Dublin.
We had tired of the mania of living and working in a big city like London. While I could never have imagined a version of my life away from a big city with all its culture and fluidity, moving to Canberra, where everything is slower, cheaper and less oversubscribed, has meant a more peaceful and content way of life. A new version of myself. I had been beating myself up in London for failing to exercise enough when I worked most days until after 10pm.
Here, I have somehow become a person who goes to the gym three or four times a week because it’s a 15-minute walk from my front door and I can stop working without guilt at six o’clock. While it’s not the only way to change your life, and the swimming in Sandycove is indeed lovely (in case that angry guy is reading), emigration is one big, rather frightening way of learning that we are resilient and capable of change, and there is something profoundly comforting in that.
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