Australia will change you. That’s a trivial point, of course, since anywhere you live will do that. Dublin changed me when I first moved there.
Eighteen, off the bus from Limerick with all my worldly possessions on my back, I was shoulder-slammed by a well-to-do looking lady with a bouncy blow dry on Grafton Street during a busy Monday lunchtime. With the force of it and the weight of an early 2000s laptop in my bag, I naturally went over right away, the heft dragging me backwards at speed. I briefly lay there in the street like an overturned beetle until a nice older chap took pity on me and helped drag me to my feet.
I realised then that I was no longer in Limerick, where, if you got turtled on the street by anybody at all, your mammy would know their sister-in-law’s solicitor’s butcher and the story would have slandered its way merrily across the town before dinnertime, gaining embellishment as it went. “Did you hear Imelda O’Donoghue is body slamming adolescents in the street like one of those WWE wrestling fellahs? Mary says she’s been arrested for attempted murder. It’ll be that HRT she’s been on I suppose…”
So Dublin changed me. It felt like the biggest city in the world when I arrived, mostly because, relative to my experience, it was. I hadn’t travelled much, unless you count Cork (which you must always do, lest you incur the wrath of its people). Dublin made me braver, a bit less polite – because any more densely populated urban environment will do that – and gave me more notions. London followed, giving me significantly more notions again, and making me kind of rude, which you certainly need to be if you’re going to fit in.
Dublin and London changed me in different ways. Australia has shown me things I considered impossible, are possible
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To this day, on encountering anyone who doesn’t automatically stand to the right on an escalator, I still feel a deeply programmed urge to scoff and harrumph. I imagine flicking them on the back of the skull with a firm index finger. I’ve never actually done it, but the heart wants what it wants and London public transport accustoms you to a sort of “everyone here would walk over my corpse if I died right now” mentality which is hard to shake off once you move out of London and no longer need it.
Violent ideation is deeply inappropriate on a quiet, slow-moving escalator in a calm, spacious Australian shopping centre, as a couple of pensioners emerge from the tea shop below, fussing softly over who paid the bill when both wanted to get this one. In London, everyone is rushing, worried about work, resentful and on the verge of unravelling. In Dublin, everyone is living in a €3,000 a month mouldy rental owned by someone who bought the property in 1992 for £1,000 punts and a bale of damp turf. In Dublin, everyone is either on the cusp of social revolution or trying to persuade Meta to employ them, but they’re not rushing up escalators. There’s no sense in that.
Each place we live in marks us indelibly, giving us new tastes and habits that we take home with us or carry forward to the next place. It can be difficult to frame the influence of living in a new environment while we are still in it, so I often consider how Australia may have changed me so far. It certainly hasn’t made me more notions – the Australian tolerance for notions is extremely low.
A man at a barbecue once described me as “dressed up” (not a compliment) solely because I was wearing trainers rather than flip flops, which Australians have the unfortunate tendency of referring to as “thongs”. There’s a habit I don’t intend to pick up. If you tried to maintain London-level notions while living in Canberra, where a fleece and shorts are the gender-irrelevant standard garb (ensuring one half of you is always incorrectly attired whatever the current weather), you would likely be committed to a psychiatric institution.
Australia has certainly given me an intolerance for unripe avocados under any circumstances, and for rushing in general. It’s shown me that things I considered impossible in Dublin and London – vaguely (I said vaguely) efficient local government, regular rubbish collection (not a thing in London), a GP who remembers your name or a property agent who actually emails you back when the shower breaks – are possible. Australia is far enough away from home to have helped me reframe the idea that the way things are where I have come from is the only way they could be.
Here, though, you’d have to go to Sydney to get shouldered to the ground by haughty, stylish women, and nobody can match London levels of hauteur anyway. I have to frequent a specific supermarket to buy Galaxy chocolate and have a deeply sad rule that I can’t buy more than one bar at a time because it suddenly counts (and costs) as “fancy” imported chocolate rather than just notions everyday chocolate. Kinder Buenos are common here though, which is a comfort.
Another striking difference is that Australia is a place where working-class jobs are value-neutral. This is more radical than it may first appear. Coming from a generation of Irish people who were incorrectly told that university is the highest goal to which everyone should aspire and the most reliable route to stability, I find this enormously refreshing.
If you are a successful plumber, people here tend to be jealous of the fact that you’re earning more than them rather than thinking you’d be higher status if you’d done a degree in law. That’s how it should be, frankly. In Australia, a plumber can afford more than one imported Galaxy bar at a time. If that isn’t aspirational, I don’t know what is.
