The hard yakka of going walkabout: why young people leave Australia
It’s getting cold again in London.
The shift is distressing in its seamlessness, the city sliding effortlessly from the gleeful throes of summer into a land of stiff, grey mornings and brittle cold. Oddly, I always feel caught out at this time of year, as if the dissipating heat and looming dark are somehow unexpected house guests, when in fact I, along with every other Londoner, have been bemoaning their eventual arrival for months.
It’s also around this time that I start to desperately miss Australia.
The first time the cold and dark led to pangs of homesickness, I brushed it off as a weird, vestigial quirk. Sharp wind and plummeting temperatures were obviously just unknown phenomena to my Antipodean blood, which was yearning for the warmth of climates past. But the more I’ve considered it, the more it’s become apparent to me that my disdain for winter weather forces me to confront the strange self-flagellation that comes from moving to a country with a climate that I find so difficult to temper. In essence, I don’t like the cold because it clumsily reminds me that I don’t have a convincing answer to the question ‘why did you leave home?’.
But of course I do have an answer, several in fact — a rolodex of delightfully vague concept-words that I squawk hysterically upon being questioned by incredulous Brits (“but why did you move from there to come here?!”). Words that mean everything and nothing at the same time like ‘adventure’ or ‘opportunity’ or ‘something different’. All of these answers seem to be trying to make sense of the lopsided mess that is the internal logic of the expat, where the word ‘home’ starts to unhinge from its meaning and the prospect of returning to your loved ones feels both deeply necessary and largely unfeasible. But, more importantly, none of these come close to conveying the actual answer, which by comparison seems banal and uninspiring:
I just felt like I should.
A fellow expat shared an article with me recently by the writer and television personality Clive James, a beautifully nostalgic meditation on his youth in Sydney and his decision to move abroad. As is sometimes the case, I was struck by an otherwise ordinary sentence, huddled within the rest of the piece:
Why did I ever leave it? I still don’t know, but the impulse must have had something to do with a desire to see the real world, and that desire must have had something to do with an instinctive realisation that the real world couldn’t be as good as this.
I had the same realisation myself recently, in a glum, tipsy conversation with a friend who asked whether I’d just come to London to reinvent myself. “Not really,” I said, in a bumbling fit of honesty and deflection, “I think I just wanted to reinvent my world a bit”.
Growing up in Australia, my friends and I sometimes felt like we were being punished with paradise. Behind every sweeping beachscape was a small hint of our geographic isolation; hiding in perpetual sunshine was a reminder of our startling naivety to the ugly bumps and blows of the world. And this latent uneasiness wasn’t the angsty by-product of adolescence — we revelled in our good fortune and were acutely aware that this ‘problem’ we faced was born out of privilege. But being young and Australian and aware of the enormity of the world around you, it’s hard not to feel embarrassingly green. And I really felt it.
And so, in a vain effort to right an imagined wrong, we leave in droves. Sometimes for a moment, sometimes a while, always with the sincerest of intentions to try and understand what it feels like to live in the ‘real world’, where winter actually happens and people are more often strangers than not.
For the hordes of Aussie teens who rage through the European or Asian continents in a frenzied rumspringa, this tryst with the ‘real world’ is brief and flirtatious, dulling their curiosity just enough for the next hit.
But those of us who choose to make a home abroad find ourselves tasked with something much more perplexing, as we perch perilously between a longing to return to our isolated paradise and to remain steadfast in the big bad world that although harder feels somehow sharper and more real. And it’s a hard game to keep playing, because although the obligation to resolve a presumed naivety runs immeasurably deep, it begins to falter as time goes on. The urgent voice telling you to go out and see the world becomes much less compelling when you’re finally out there seeing it.
The whole process of young people leaving eerily mirrors the practice of ‘walkabout’, a rite of passage undergone by some indigenous Australian groups, where young males would trek to and live in impossibly remote parts of the outback, sometimes for six months or more. It makes you wonder whether the continent’s original inhabitants, who lived off the land for tens of thousands of years, simply knew that it was important to honour this instinct and suffer through the resulting limbo. Perhaps this tradition is mystically sewn into the sands that make up the majority of the continent. Or perhaps I'm just grasping for a precedent.
A couple of months ago, sitting in Sydney airport awaiting a flight back to Heathrow after a visit home, I rummaged around my phone masochistically listening to as many versions of Peter Allen’s “I Still Call Australia Home” as I could find. As an expat, the song takes on a haunting, prophetic quality, acting as an intoxicating reminder that those who uproot and leave the continent have themselves all felt the same pull and push. I followed the song, verse through verse, twisting my mouth sourly as the boarding call blared over ahead. The music soared into the bridge and I braced myself. The bridge always gets me.
All the sons and daughters spinning ‘round the world
Away from their family and friends
But as the world gets older and colder
It’s good to know where your journey ends
And as the plane ducked lazily across gorgeous, sunburnt Sydney, the hum of the jet engine muting my small, neat sobs, I fixated on another famous bridge and privately admitted something I’d been keeping from myself since the moment I resolved to leave.
I know where my journey ends. My journey ends in paradise.
