When I came home from Australia for a visit last autumn, my brother and I took a road trip. Siblings in their 30s and 40s will recognise the rarity of this. He has two small children – a five-year-old girl with a vocal curiosity about the world and a secret hope that unicorns are real, and an energetic, water-loving three-year-old boy with severe special needs and a deep passion for blueberries.
My brother and sister-in-law run a business together – their house is full of noise and motion. Like so many people of my generation with a young family, they run at full tilt just to keep up.
A visit home from Australia is costly, time-consuming and challenging to arrange. Because life has carried my brother and me in such different directions, I couldn’t recall the last time we spent a day alone together. It’s just the two of us now. The extended family network we have is mostly one another.
I planned to visit Kerry to do some research for a book I’m working on, and my brother kindly offered to drive me. On the way home, we stopped at White Strand Beach and watched the salty water gnaw at the brooding October landscape.
Every county has its charms, but there is something particularly ancient and morose about Kerry. It’s the green, briny heart of its countryside that captures you – the shaded, fern-furred roads whisper of prehistory. It has a soft, melancholy beauty. A brackish, wind-battered sparseness. A Jurassic menace. Kerry will work a number on you. It will put you in the mood to write a poem or walk off into the wilderness with a flask of tea. It will have you sitting on a rock with your only sibling, telling one another stories and secrets after time and distance have parted you.
It may just be the Irish emigrant’s soft-headed sentimentality. Leaving home will incline you toward its beauty, but I never had trouble noticing that Ireland is beautiful. It has never been challenging to understand how this tiny place seeps into us all like damp through a thin shirt. You only have to look around to understand how the place pumps out so many great writers and artists – people who look around at the verdant, lonely landscape and just sigh their souls out on to canvas or page.
Australia is different. For an Irish person, accustomed to the less capricious cadence of Irish seasons and creatures, Australia is a sort of cosmic shock. Its enormity means there can be no one climate that best encompasses the place, but as an immigrant, I can’t yet even begin to read its rhythms. There is a shocking intensity to this country’s sprawling natural world – a sort of high-stakes feeling of being on a precipice – that could not differ more entirely from the pluvial susurration of rain tickling at a thick carpet of ferns in Kerry.
I keep getting shocks in Australia. I have to wear heavy boots all year round at the animal shelter where I volunteer, because snakes bite, so some of them could kill you while you’re en route to give a blind old pug his breakfast, and nobody wants to go out like that. This is not a scenario I can entirely compute as someone who grew up in Limerick, where a bite from Mrs O’Leary’s unhinged Jack Russell Timmy or a bad brush with some stinging nettles were the most dangerous confrontation with nature an afternoon might present.
Last week on the bus, I looked out the window to see a mother kangaroo nursing her joey. They are shockingly large, muscular animals. Orders of magnitude larger and more polite than Timmy the Jack Russell, they stop what they’re doing as you walk past and observe you meditatively, as though you’re the strange, oversized creature, and they are the interested observer, wondering how something so big is just allowed to roam around like this.
Nature here may be familiar to the Australians who grow up within its rhythms, but I continually encounter it and reel.
I left my apartment as usual last Thursday morning to find hundreds of what I later learned are Bogong moths in the landing. I waited for the lift, horrified, keening softly with my jacket over my head as more of these totally unfamiliar insects flew about indiscriminately, each large enough to be audible – about the size of my thumb. I had no frame of reference for what was happening as I felt them bash stupidly into various parts of my body. I looked around in panic as mushroomy clusters of mud-brown moths clumped thickly on the walls and ceiling, creating their own darkness, like some mycelial network colonising the building.
Apparently, these moths make an incredibly impressive migratory journey past the Australian capital each year, and their numbers had been in steep decline after several consecutive dry springs. Their return is apparently a very good thing if you’re a moth, a moth enthusiast, or a pygmy possum – a tiny, button-eyed creature who relies on a protein-rich moth feast upon waking from a good winter snooze.
While the landing of my apartment building is hopefully not these moths’ natural habitat, there they have been each morning this week. They’ll move on eventually, I’m told.
In the meantime, I try to nurture a sense of awe in the face of Australia’s alien (to me) natural world. But I would be lying if I told you I don’t miss the wet murmuring of ferns in the Kerry rain. I call my brother to tell him about the moths. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” he exclaims, in the tone of fascinated horror with which you might comment on two strangers getting into a fist fight at the cinema. “You don’t get that in Ireland.” he says. “No,” I reply, my mind suddenly back on White Strand beach, watching the tide come in.
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