All good things must come to an end. And so this will
probably be my last blog post from Australia.
I’ll be leaving these shores on
July 12th, seven years and one week since I arrived. Being made
redundant has forced us into making decisions that we’ve been thinking about
but putting off for a long time. My wife and I have discussed leaving this
country often in the last few years. Work was grinding both of us down and our
two year old has cousins in Ireland and New Zealand, but none here.
So we kind of knew that Melbourne would not be our long term
home. But that doesn’t make leaving here any easier. We’re heading to Edinburgh
where I’ve secured a nice contract job for a year. After that we’re planning to
settle down in New Zealand but as the last couple of months have shown me, you
can’t take anything for granted.
Things were pretty hectic for the last few weeks. We sold
our car and all our furniture to minimise our possessions in preparation for
the move. We got one of those self help books that tell you that you should
only have ten possessions and they should all be capable of fitting into
carryon luggage on a plane.
This has been the hardest thing for me. I’ve moved country
four times in my life and on each occasion I’ve bundled all my possessions into
boxes and shipped them to my new home. When I came to Australia seven years
ago, I filled six tea chests with my book, DVD and CD collections. Nothing was
discarded, not even the “Now that’s what I call music 847” CD that came free
with a Sunday newspaper. But we collect possessions for reasons that go beyond
usefulness. I spent a year of my life alone in Luxembourg. Television was
rubbish (although it might have been better if I could speak French or German)
and there was no Internet to keep me amused.
So I spent a lot of time rearranging my CD collection.
Sometimes by Artist name, sometimes by Album name or genre. But more often than not I’d arrange them by
emotional connection. The folk albums from my teenage years when a protest song
would grab me with passion. The CDs I was given as gifts in the early days of
relationships before bitterness made music melancholy. The angry industrial
rock music I bought in my thirties as I reevaluated my early innocence.
This time we’ve decided to be more conservative and brutal
so as to minimise the amount of stuff we’re taking with us, if for no other
reason than we’ll have to move it again in twelve months’ time and it’s a lot
more expensive to ship goods from Australia than it was to bring them here.
The CDs were the first things to go, lovingly collected
since I got my first CD player in 1991. I have them all on my Ipod and to be
honest can’t remember when I last played one. But I was sad to see them go none
the less. I had to send them to the dump because finding a home for several
hundred angst ridden country and western albums is not easy.
Next up was my DVD collection. At least this time I was able
to save the disks and have them now in a single case. The covers and sleeve
notes have also made their way to the dump. This also upset me however. They
used to say that the definition of a working class person is that they had more
DVDs on their bookshelf than books. But I think the advent of classic
mini-series like “The Sopranos” and “The Wire”, not to mention all those
Scandinavian noir programs, has led the middle class to accumulate collections
that rival the 19th century leather bound classics that used to line
book shelves.
However, I don’t want to appear as a complete bogan. I also
had an extensive book collection that I’ve been building up since I was a
teenager. I had these proudly displayed at home, mainly to impress visitors
with my eclectic taste and intellectual prowess. I had to face the reality that
I’ve rarely read a book twice. So these were all boxed up and sent to a
charity. Hopefully somebody in Melbourne will get to enjoy all those books on
the Irish Potato famine and Hurling.
In the last week we sold our furniture and car. I’ve never
been much of a salesman but thankfully the Internet takes care of that. You just have to take a picture of your stuff
and to put it up on Ebay or similar sites and to let it do its thing. It’s fun and
a little weird to watch people bidding on your bed but at least it gave us a
little cash flow for the move.
So we squeezed down our possessions into four suitcases and
a couple of tea chests that are following us by airfreight.
Thankfully the apartment we’ve found in Edinburgh is
furnished because I couldn’t face spending time in Ikea.
So finally it was time to get on the plane and say goodbye
with a heavy heart. Somehow I knew that I would feel this way until we’d
crossed the equator and excitement about our new life would kick in.
While I
knew Melbourne would not be my final home, it is still a fantastic place to
live, with fantastic restaurants, sport and public transport. But all good
things must come to an end. I’ll certainly miss all the great friends I made
but at least I’ll now be closer to all the old friends I had in Ireland and the
UK.
I am a restless soul and want to see as much of the world as possible and
to immerse myself in different cultures. Scotland is next on the list. I’ll
keep posting from there, hopefully more regularly than I have been.
There is a light beyond these woods, do you think that we should go there and see what makes it shine?
