As an Irish person in Australia there is one question I'm always asked
'Are you staying or going?' It's the sort of question someone asks you when you're fretting indecisively inside the half-open door of a pub on a very cold Sunday afternoon. They were peacefully enjoying their carvery, but now they're getting slapped on the back of the neck by a frozen, metallic wind and your indecision is an unpleasant distraction.
It isn't entirely a real question; it's not the sort that seeks an answer.
Really, it is a statement. A nudge. A prompt for you to go out or come in, but to cease loitering in liminal places, letting in the chill and making people uncomfortable.
As an
emigrant
to
Australia
, and an Irish immigrant in Australia, I have been asked this question in countless contexts since the big move. My cat's vet asked, 'Are you staying or going?' when she wanted to know which vaccinations the cat might need. My aunt and uncle asked, 'Are you staying or going?' because they might hope we'd come home, but also because it is anathema to their generation to be always gallivanting over the earth and not settling in one place to lead a meaningful and happy life amid familiar people and familiar surroundings. My brother wonders (but is too polite to ask), 'Are you staying or going?' because he worries, as a good brother generally must, that I'm far away and have lived in three countries in the past eight years. I imagine he wonders whether this scenario emerges from a desire to live in this way, or a necessity to do so.
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As a person living in Canberra, the Australian capital, where politics is done but culture is mostly a government initiative rather than an organic and emergent feature of life the way it is in other capital cities, transience is standard. People in the military are here for temporary postings. They stay a year or so and then they move on. Public servants do this too. Diplomats and politicians, spooks and consultants and journalists and attachés. While it does, of course, have a fixed population, many of whom provide services to and for the more transient inhabitants of Canberra, the city is considered by many Australians as an unexciting place to live.
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Emigration: 'From a distance, I have relearned how to be Irish'
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At a bit over two hours' drive away, Sydney is the place those with time and means escape to at every opportunity. The centre of Canberra empties out at weekends and on holidays. When you meet a new person here, they generally presume you're not here forever.
For this reason, it can be a challenging place to put down roots.
An Irish person I was chatting with once referred to the city as 'a backwater', which I found interesting. 'Who would want to live there?' he asked me, scoffing pompously, asking another question that isn't a question. 'Well,' I considered, 'anyone who perhaps wants to live in decent, affordable rental accommodation without housemates in their 30s. Anyone who is weary of the frenzied overcrowding in big European cities with terrible, oversubscribed public services, or who wants a safe place where it's possible to both work and raise children. Anyone who wants to access medical care when they need it or to see a GP who remembers them each time they go in. Or anyone who wants a quiet, slow pace of life. Anyone like that, really.'
Yet, 'Are you staying or going?' isn't just an annoying question that other people ask you as an emigrant. It's the annoying question that you ask yourself. Unless things at 'home' (wherever a person's home may be) are very bad indeed, nobody thinks to ask a person who has always lived in their native country whether they'll stay there. Most people stay vaguely where they originate unless there's a powerful external reason to go. The Famine did it for us, as have consecutive crises and economic downturns and incompetent governments.
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These days, the emigration experience is both alien and familiar at the same time
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Once you've gone, though, it's another matter. There will always be the people who want you home again, but the act of leaving once generates the possibility of leaving again. If you can leave home, you can leave anywhere. You can, theoretically speaking, live anywhere if you meet the criteria and they'll let you in (easier said than done, of course, but you get my point).
The real upheaval of emigration is the way that it reorients your relationship to where you live and have lived. When my grandfather's father, who was born in Australia to Irish parents, made the decision along with his younger brother to return to Ireland, it was a one-way trip. They would have understood the irrevocable magnitude of that decision.
Then, you emigrated once, and you lived out that decision no matter what it meant for you. The people you left behind were people you would probably never see again.
Now, things are different. Many Irish people who have emigrated to Australia in previous waves have done so with every intention of coming home again, and a lot of them did. We accept a stint in Australia as an Irish rite of passage, but we feel tender about those who don't return.
The present wave going to Australia have little incentive to come home again, sadly.
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Ireland's grocery prices are still soaring. How can that be?
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Modern living offers no permanence. No job stability that resembles anything like that our parents had. A
cost of living
all over the western world that limits people's option to live where they might ideally choose, whether that place is 'home' or not. But I have been long enough in Australia now to feel the question simmering with an urgency it didn't hold before – 'Am I staying or going?'
At some point, if the intention is to settle, then you have to start doing that. If it isn't, then you need to consider what life might look like in two or more years, what you'd like to be doing with it, and what is achievable in your circumstances.
Eventually, it stops being a nudge and becomes a real question in need of a serious answer.
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