February 22nd, 2009

Sometimes it’s a struggle to get my head around the fact that I live in Australia now. I mull it over as I drink my morning coffee and contemplate the azure sky arching over the northern reaches of Sydney Harbour. The yellow and green Manly ferry chugs by below, passing a white yacht in full sail and a speedboat tugging a swooping paraglider. A brightly coloured butterfly dances above the terrace. It’s hard to believe, but this is where I live.

I cannot imagine what it is like to be in Ireland now because I’m so far away, geographically and mentally. I know it’s grim. Every article and e-mail I read conveys an unrelenting hopelessness, but when you’re 12,000 miles away in the sunshine, it’s difficult to appreciate the enormity of Ireland’s meltdown.

A friend recently returned home after a stint overseas. “It is worse than I thought,” she tells me. “On the news we are now watching images I know we will be seeing on Reeling in the Years in a decade.” I gulp as this sentence flashes up on-screen.

It resonates more than all of the news articles I have read. Things are that bad? Reeling in the Years bad? Oh dear.

I didn’t plan to emigrate; I planned to travel. Having blazed a glorious trail through my savings, I needed to stop in Sydney for a while. Under normal circumstances I would stay a few months, then move on, and slowly head for home. But I’m starting to feel like an accidental emigrant. The message from everyone is “don’t come home”. Even my mother says it: “Things are terrible. Just dreadful. Whatever you do, don’t come home.”

It’s odd, this sense of having escaped just in time. It’s as though I’ve been picked up by a passing freighter and am standing on the deck with a blanket around my shoulders, keeping a white-knuckled grasp on the handrail and watching the good ship Ireland list horribly in angry seas.

This discomfiture is compounded by a vague feeling of guilt. A fairweather citizen, I enjoyed the boom in Ireland and am staying well away during the bust. I see that Brian Lenihan says Ireland is “fighting for its economic future”. Shouldn’t I be there, fighting away alongside everyone else, bailing water or patching the gaping wounds in the hull? Would one extra set of hands make any difference?

On the Irish Times website an unhappy returned emigrant who “believed in the miracle” of the new Ireland, says he is desperately disappointed by the parlous mismanagement that has sent the country towards ruin. The article gets a big reaction, both from other returned emigrants and those who have stayed away. All are angry and sad. The newspaper calls them the “disillusioned diaspora”.

It dawns on me that I’m becoming one of them. I pay rent in another country. I have an Australian tax file number. Every time I open my wallet, the yellow and grey edge of my Commonwealth Bank ATM card reminds me that I’m not in Kansas any more. I have paid AU.50 (¤6.80) for a box of Barry’s tea bags — if that doesn’t make me a paid-up member of the diaspora, I don’t know what could.

Even though Ireland seems like a miserable grey blob viewed from here, since I’ve stopped travelling and put down some roots (admittedly little more than tendrils at this stage), I’ve started to feel a little homesick. It’s not a heartfelt, poetic homesickness for mountains shrouded in mist and dew-drenched green fields. It’s a prosaic, day-to-day sort of homesickness.

I get frustrated and cranky in the supermarket because, despite tramping grumpily up and down the aisles, I can’t find rashers or tomato puree. This is a typical supermarket in an English-speaking country and these are basic food items, so where the hell are they? It’s all I can do not to throw my shopping basket on the floor, get a bus to the airport, fly home and go to Superquinn or Supervalu or Tesco, where I will be able to find rashers and tomato puree with my eyes closed.

Turns out the rashers are in the barbecue section, hiding behind the pseudonym Short Cut Bacon. They prove a poor imitation of rashers as we know them. As for tomato puree, Australians call it tomato paste and it is sold only in tins or small yogurt cartons. “That’s a clever idea, selling it in tubes,” says an Australian friend. “Isn’t it?” I say, through gritted teeth.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Australia. It’s both staggeringly beautiful and breezily fun. And I like Australians, even if their disarming directness occasionally makes me long for that peculiarly Irish habit of verbally waltzing around a topic without ever getting to the point. When the magnitude of the bushfires in Victoria became apparent, I was deeply upset in a way I wouldn’t have been had it happened when I was living at home. I live here now and I took it personally.

But it’s not home. Still, I’m here for the time being and I just have to get used to it. From now on, you’ll only be getting occasional dispatches from Down Under. I know there is only so much Australiana people can take. So I’ll check in from time to time, and meanwhile the best of luck keeping the ship afloat.