I.
I don’t talk about Australia
much because it hurts. Some periods in a person’s life are too painful to
recall, and some are so joyful that they, too, become a type of burden.
Australia is the latter.
From an early age, I only had
two goals: to escape Mississippi and become a successful writer. Everything
else—marriage, kids, friends—took a backseat.
So it’s become a continual
source of amusement to me that everything I put on the backburner would find me
in my years Down Under.
It was in Melbourne where I met
my best friend, Mercedes. Drunk on youth and beauty, wired by caffeine and
nicotine, we’d skip our college classes to hunt for men and drink for twenty.
We’d teach the guys from Supergrass how to shoot pool, dance until the floor
melted, laugh until our sides hurt, and stir a boy’s entire paycheck into our
drinks before wobbling back to her flat on Orrong Road just as the sun was
coming up over Port Phillip Bay. We’d wake up under a large red gum tree, hungover
with smoker’s coughs and creased clothes, laughing and hungry to start over
again.
We’ve maintained our friendship
over two decades and three continents.
I also met the man who would
later be the father of my children. He was beautiful, brilliant, with ambition
larger than life. We barely speak now, but for years, we were inseparable, and
the residual energy of what we had still clings to me, revealing itself when I
find the odd picture or letter tucked in the back of a book with pages browning
at the corners.
I found
my fairy godmother too. Her name was Amanda. A “true blue Aussie,” she and her
English husband Mark hosted me at their home in the outer western suburbs of
Melbourne. The town of Melton was far enough from the city and so sparsely populated
that it could practically be considered the outback. Warning signs of kangaroo
crossings dotted the road every kilometer or so, tucked beside acacia and hakea
bushes and occasionally accompanied by wedge-tailed eagles and skuas scavenging
for roadkill. The city center was often vacant save for the burly, sunbaked men
coming in from the bush, making their way to Mac’s Hotel on High Street for a
round of Carlton Colds and to watch a game of footy on the telly (Melbournians,
above all other Australians, love their footy. There are about 3,000 footy teams
in Melbourne alone. The year I arrived, the Sydney Swans had won the whatever
the Aussie Football equivalent of the Super Bowl was, and I thought there was
going to be a civil war.)
Amanda lived in a Victorian home
off a dirt street, just down the road from a famous retired Australian boxer.
Her expansive house hosted a hodgepodge of everything—Amanda was a
self-admitted shopaholic—and was rarely ever clean (“Houses should be lived
in,” was her reasoning). My favorite room was the only room where I was not
allowed entry—an elaborately furnished parlor just off the kitchen, hidden by a
sliding stain glass door. It had an air of Miss Havisham about it, the way the
dust and cobwebs coated the pink and cream Queen Ann chairs, the velvet
Victorian settee and mahogany demilune tables, the clawfoot ottomans and
Tiffany lamps.
Each morning Amanda’s four
cats—Spit, Terror, Friendly Shorty, and Unfriendly Shorty—left trophies of
their hunts from the night before at my bedroom door—usually rabbit guts (“shit
bags” Amanda called them), but sometimes bird feathers and possum fur, and
occasionally a snake, venomous and non-venomous.
I was accompanied to the bus
stop each morning by flies as large as magpies and magpies as large as horses.
The only time I saw koalas was
at the zoo; they tended to make themselves scarce, especially in Victoria,
where the bush was being depleted at a rapid rate.
For much of the year, Melbourne
weather felt like Seattle, drizzly and perpetually overcast, sometimes four
seasons in one day. But for a few weeks each summer, the wind from the Great
Victorian desert would breathe through the city, coating the pavement and
buildings with a layer of dust. Under a cloudless sky, the sun intensified, its
dilated orange pupil deadlocked on the lone country continent, weltering green
to brown, boiling the streets, eating the air alive.
I think about those summers now
the way I remember childbirth. I knew it was painful, I knew I didn’t want to
experience it again, but to actually relive it is impossible.
And to think how it has only
gotten worse…
II.
My adopted country.
I can’t imagine what you are
going through.
All your Odd. All your Unique.
All your Indigenous. All your trees without shade, your flowers without scent,
your birds with flightless wings, your beasts barely able to walk or walk not
at all but hop on hooved feet. Your sleepy-eyed creatures in the trees who
refuse to eat save for the food that slowly kills them. Your slithering ropes
with enough venom to eradicate an empire with one extended fang. You are the
holy vessel for the children of an adolescent god. He drew you on a napkin and
molded you with paper and paste—his first attempt at scribbling life into
existence.
III.
I wish I had gone to Australia
when I was older, when I wasn’t so ripe with selfish ambition, when I was
mature enough to know that journeys were arrivals in their own right, and that
the one-and-a-half hour train ride from Amanda’s house to the city was just as
important as the hours I would spend in my urban destination, strapped to my
narrow dreams.
Australia is the last unopened
chamber of my heart. I never share her with people, not even Doug. I don’t even
like sharing her with my present self. The Erin who writes this now is very
much embedded in today—her work and kids, her home and cats and the scourge of
current events that blaze through her timeline like a hot Australia sun.
But today, Australia is current
events, and so I allow myself this moment—
I find Crowded House on Spotify.
They are my favorite band, but I never listen to them because they remind me too
much of the best years of my life. But they soundtrack my memories whenever I
want to go back there, and today, I do. I want to go back to Australia…which is
why I skip to “Now We’re Getting Somewhere” and forward to the 3-minute mark,
just to hear Australia’s adopted son Neil Finn sing,
“When you took me to your room,
I swear I said surrender
When you opened up your mouth
I saw the words fall out…”
And I’m there again, in my
foster country. I’m on a Footscray train, squeezed between uniformed
schoolchildren and working men in ratty Billabong sweatpants and gum boots, the
kurrajong and waratah trees making way for great giants of concrete.
“…though nothing much has
changed…”
I’m creeping into Amanda’s
parlor, into the beautiful decay of a paradise abandoned. The cats scratch at
the sliding door, but I refuse to admire their prey.
“…I swear I will surrender…”
I’m at Lorne Beach with
Mercedes. The salt stings my nostrils as we wade through tides, the Southern
Cross watching from the distance of a million years ahead.
“…there is pain in my heart…”
It is a Southern Hemisphere
spring and I am engulfed in my new love. He is picking me up at Flinders Street
station in five minutes. I’m carrying a Les Murray book and I got a pen behind
my ear because I’m going somewhere. My daughter and son are secrets in my
knapsack, and I unknowingly carry them with me down the steps where Flinders
Street and Swanston street meet, where throngs of tourists have lined up, their
heads bent over maps. Some of them speak with American accents, but I don’t
stop to help. I am not one of them now.
“…we can choose what we choose
to believe…”
In a second I’ll stop
remembering and I’ll finish this story. I’ll go online and donate to the young
families of Geoffrey Keaton and Andrew O'Dwyer, and I’ll spread awareness on
social media, But for this moment, this brief moment,Australia is alive within me and
nothing is burning.