When you’re an Australian lucky enough to live in Ireland for an extended period of time, you tend to have the same conversations over and over again. Which is fine because your nationality is often the handiest ice breaker that people can reach for. Nature abhors a vacuum and Irish people abhor a silence. It is their national duty to make conversation, to find that point of commonality. They are always probing for the craic, in any given situation. They can mine it from the driest of shites. It’s a God-given talent.
Sometimes they go straight in with the big guns and start talking about Home and Away or Neighbours – the two cultural soft power players piped into Europe by the Australian government. Other times it’s feeding the Irish compulsion to find and identify at least one person we have in common. Come from the other side of the world? No bother. I had a fella I used to work with who moved to Sydney in 1996. Peter something ... can’t remember the last name. Do you know him?
I truly wish I did. I always try my best to decrease those six degrees of separation. But Sydney has the same population as Ireland and an urban sprawl roughly double the size of Galway.
One of the less enjoyable conversational fallbacks is telling me that, “Sure the Aussies must hate us. The people who move there give us such a bad name. The worst Irish seem to go over.” It’s wrong for a couple of reasons. The first being that anti-Irish prejudice is extremely passé when there’s so many new and inventive forms of racism to partake in these days. The second is this persistent and icky shared assumption that “only the worst” move to Australia. It’s implying that only people who weren’t “good enough” to make a go of it in Ireland have had no choice but to take to the seas and take their chances in Van Diemen’s Land.
[ Things aren’t better in Australia than in Ireland, but they are easierOpens in new window ]
There’s a hint of something there, maybe it’s classism. Maybe it’s jealousy. But it gets at me. Like wearing flip-flops over the tops of freshly sun burnt feet. For some, coming to Australia was not a choice. It was survival. It was desperation. It was the chance to get away from the things holding you back in a country you loved to create the life you deserved.
I am thinking about all this standing in a wedding dress on one of Sydney’s main thoroughfares. There is no groom and I am starting to well up. I look the picture of sanity, a woman overcome with emotion, in a full-length wedding gown who is not getting married. Luckily I’m surrounded by dozens of men and women in ivory and lace. The Sydney Queer Irish float in this year’s Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras is celebrating a decade of gay marriage in Ireland. Jon and Rob, two members, have donated more than 70 gowns from their bridal business, enabling all of us to put the “ride” in “bride”. We’ve just heard Sydneys’s consul general of Ireland, Rosie Keane, give a moving speech about how far Ireland has come in a short time. Like her predecessor, she’s giving a hand in the marshalling area, an official from a government in a country that only decriminalised homosexuality in 1993 attending a pride march with her citizens. We have come so far.
Marching with the Sydney Queer Irish makes me swollen with pride for the contributions Irish immigrants have made
But that is not why I’m blubbing. I am remembering the men in the Sydney Irish community I knew when I was little. The nebulous “uncles” you would meet at various dos who would give you money for crisps and ask how school was going. I remember asking one, who “lived with his best friend, Rodge”, why he just didn’t go back “home”. “I can’t,” he said simply. It took me years to work out that he wasn’t talking about the flight schedule.
Standing off to my right in an orange kaftan number is Panti Bliss, the Queen of Ireland, who felt she had to leave her country as a young person in order to become herself. She leads the parade, the corner of a Tricolour of drag performers.
Irish activists campaigned for gay marriage in Australia. Irish health professionals helped us through the worst of the Aids crisis. Marching with Loretta and Brian and the rest of the Sydney Queer Irish makes me swollen with pride for the contributions Irish immigrants made and continue to make to this country.
The Irish who come here are not the “worst”, when so many have made the best of their lives here and Australia is the better for it. Sure who else would be responsible for being the best craic float in Mardi Gras despite sweating in beaded tulle on a 40-degree night?
