I Quit My Job and F*cked Off to Australia in My Thirties
An update on a whole new life one year later
My book, Some of Our Parts: Why We Are More Than the Labels We Live By, will be published on September 19th. If you’d like to read it, it’s available below (Blackwell’s ship internationally). Thank you to every subscriber whose support has enabled me to write it!
Pictured somewhere in Australia
If you read the column I wrote last year, sharing my decision to toss a stick of dynamite into my life and go to live in a country I’d never even visited, you probably deserve an update. Torching your life as you know it — leaving an established career and everyone you know (bar one) behind — to begin again elsewhere is exciting (I certainly enjoy reading other people’s work on this subject) but it feels incomplete without a retrospective from a more measured, settled position. That being the position of ‘you, but a year later’. When you’ve sat in the rapidly cooling consequences of an incredibly risky choice long enough for it to shift from reactionary to reality.
A year later, I’m on the third of three consecutive flights and the man next to me, who is emitting a ferrous tang of sweat and stale cologne, is snoring like a large machine with a loose ball bearing. He’s low to the ground and boxy in shape, like a washing machine, perhaps, or a Volkswagen Golf. His snores emit a vibration that rivals the plane’s as we cruise at impossible speed and altitude in a flying metal tube somewhere between Singapore and Oman. The man, pinched into the middle seat and trying (when awake) to prevent the natural span of his shoulders from taking up more than his equally allotted share of space, can’t help but be a cumbersome presence. I’m caught, as is so often the case on flights, in an exhausting fluctuation between sympathy and resentment. He sleeps upright, like a rogue chicken roosting heftily in a tree, while the boomer woman sitting in front of him reclines her seat back (and will keep it that way for most of the fourteen hour flight) so that the man beside me is in fact snoring more or less directly into the headrest inches before his face.
This time last year, I was the one softly poaching in the middle seat of a flight headed in the opposite direction, having never before flown further south than the farthest tip of the Italian island of Sardinia. The southern hemisphere in general was largely theoretical to me. I was aware it existed, of course — there have been numerous recorded sightings — but having no direct experience I took that information on faith, largely based on the reports of experts. Sort of like the approach most of us take to thinking about Mars or the €42,000 per night Suite Impériale at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. Yes, we have it on good authority that these places exist, and we’ve seen pictures, but I’ve certainly never visited and have no first-hand evidence to prove it. Incidentally, from a casual glance it does appear as though Mars, Australia and the Imperial Suite at the Ritz Paris share similar square footage but that’s probably just a coincidence.
I had grown trapped in a life that likely looked quite good from the outside, and which was quite good in reality but it was starting to pinch at the armpits and I wanted something else. Substack serves as a constant and useful reminder of how lucky I’ve been, being full of writers as it is. Most of us loathe ourselves (it’s decent creative fodder) and are accustomed to a lack of correlation between the effort we put into our work and the interest and remuneration that comes back. Words are, unsurprisingly, cheap and plentiful. Though my income halved when I left my former work, Australia has proved much cheaper to live in than London. I’ve been obscenely lucky to be able to make a living from writing, and to do it here on Substack writing what I want to write for those who care to read it.
I was also lucky before, to have made a career in media, writing things that I didn’t always want to write until I got tired of it and worried that I might, just sometimes and just a bit, be contributing to an online culture that makes life harder for people rather than enriching it for them. So despite the terror, the money stress and the aforementioned obligatory writer’s self loathing, I quit. I quit the work that no longer served me to focus on the work that did, and just hoped doing that wouldn’t cause a life implosion that I would, like the Tiger King (remember him?), never financially recover from.
I don’t intend to be romantic about things. Emigrating didn’t solve a lot of my problems and it created a few new ones because life is like that. Due to its sadistic sense of humour, the only resolution we every truly get is death, which we mostly miss the culmination of anyway when it’s our own. That’s either a kindness or an inside joke, depending on how you look at it. Australia has relieved financial stress and gone a serious way to defrizzing my hair (Irish rain is murder to a good blow dry) but I am still myself, and my flaws emigrated with me.
On the long flights home and the space in between, when I sat on the floor at Changi airport to moulder gently while they aired out the fart-soaked plane from Sydney, I considered two things. The first, why they feed you so much sugary, oily junk on planes despite the inevitable flatulence it causes. The second, how I would respond when, during this five-week trip back to the UK and Ireland, friends and family ask ‘Well, and how’s Australia?’ followed speedily by ‘And what’s the plan? Are you going to stay there?’ Sometimes I wish more of them would read Peak Notions here on Substack — regular readers understand that I can’t ever really definitively answer a question. Almost two decades studying philosophy means I’m good at asking questions, not providing a single incontrovertible answer. Not all questions are engineering problems. Some sit in an unquantifiable place making us all distinctly uncomfortable. I’ve built an entire career on not knowing anything much at all — even my own plans.
Australia is lovely. It is enormously more affordable to live in. The avocados are ripe for more than three minutes before rotting into brown mush. Everything I need is within walking distance (during this week in London I made a three hour round trip just to catch up with a friend over lunch and remembered when that was just everyday life). Australia has medical care, which is an almost incomprehensible new luxury for me and has resulted in less general fretting about my health and that of himself because now we can both just see a doctor when we need to. People are friendly rather than stressed and crabid because London makes people insane, territorial and uncharitable. I love London but you need obscene amounts of money to insulate yourself from the extraordinary suffering and struggle of so many people lingering without support or direction within the skeleton of the city. If you have enough money to insulate yourself from it (and I don’t) then you have to live with the knowledge that you’ve chosen to, and that cost is another kind entirely. If you cannot insulate yourself, you must live within it, and that too can harden people.
Australia has allowed me to write. I left London this time last year and I returned last week because my book, Some Of Our Parts, is released on September 19th. Today I read an article in the Irish Times about Irish people doing three months of mandatory labour on an Australian pumpkin farm in order to extend their working holiday visa. Emigration numbers from my home country to Australia have once again skyrocketed. So many Irish people — especially younger people — are desperate to get an Australian visa, and I understand why. The quality of life is objectively, enormously better. People say that a lot. I used to wonder precisely what the phrase translated into. Now I understand that they mean cheaper rents, cheaper food, cheaper utilities, better weather and the least hostile culture to immigration that I have yet encountered. Though the latter may change with time — I entered Australia as part of a large wave of immigration which remains ongoing.
In so many ways, Australia reminds me of Ireland. It’s self-referential, liking its own culture and traditions despite the strange friction and dissonance that arises from its colonial past. It is more comfortable in its identity than, say, somewhere like the UK which swings pendulously between postcolonial guilt-based self-loathing and extreme colonial arrogance and rigidity. Despite its enormity, Australia has the cosier feel of a smaller place. Like Ireland, it has an allergy to ‘notions’, though I’m not sure yet precisely what the Australian term for them is. Just think ‘notions of grandeur’ and you’ll know what I mean. Britain, on the other hand, invented notions, which is why the Irish police self-esteem of any kind out of the culture.
I left behind my network of friends and family to live and write in Australia, and the truth is that I haven’t established as rich and rooted a life there as I did in Dublin or London. Of course I haven’t. It’s only been a year for one thing, and for another, I’ve elected to write books and work on this Substack, which requires establishing no in-person professional connections. No water cooler chats. There are no team away days at which I might roll eyes in irritation with a likeminded colleague and no group projects which might be a route to making friends. It is a life of splendid isolation. I have seen more people socially this last week in London than I have in the entire year I’ve lived in Australia. But I’m okay with that — it’s a consequence of the life I’ve chosen to live, and generally quite a pleasant one if, like me, you’re a solitary person anyway. I left London in part so that I’d no longer have the safety net of desk cover under fluorescent lights at some newspaper or magazine to supplement my income when I needed it. That safety net made me reliant, and it prevented me from finishing my book. Australia freed me up to do it, and to write the second one, which I’m working on now.
So emigrating was the right choice. I don’t regret it for an instant. Like all choices, it brings its own unique costs and benefits from having to switch your favourite brand of biscuit to accepting that you just can’t be physically present in the lives of your friends. For a long time, I felt trapped in my London life. Now, I feel free. I feel intensely lucky, if far away from almost all of the people I feel the deepest connection to. That’s undoubtedly a high cost to pay.
Will we stay? I don’t know. I also don’t know when I’ll know. Part of living in the world now seems to entail a radical acceptance of uncertainty. There is a feeling of rudderlessness an inconstancy to everything. Sometimes you have to focus on immersing in this moment rather than planning for the next, in the hope that the answer will present itself eventually. Emigration is a powerful exercise in taking control of your life followed by a deeply humbling realisation that you have less control than you thought. The future will come regardless. In the interim, I’ll be writing — it’s what I emigrated to do.
The update on your 'whole new life' brought back memories of my own emigration, albeit a much shorter distance than yours. We moved from Toronto to Phoenix 33 years ago, and while it was difficult early on, it has been a really good home for us. My wish for you is to be as pleased with your new home as we have been with ours. I'm looking forward to reading your new book. All the best.
A great read, as ever. As someone who emigrated to Australia and returned I recognised that shift towards becoming comfortable in the uncertain. I wonder if you also notice a peculiar feeling on your home trips, as though there was this tiny new gap between you and your loved ones?