The Englishwoman Who Went Up A Molehill and Made a Mountain

It’s that time of year when I like to get philosophical about the whole Being Here question – I don’t mean “on Earth” but “in Australia”. To be truthful it’s not just once a year that this happens, it’s quite a lot. But it’s guaranteed around Christmas, upon finishing a novel and coming up to my emigration anniversary – the latter two are both to blame this time. In May I’ll have been in Melbourne for three years.

From around two months after we moved here, the burning question started to crop up every time I indulged in a little smalltalk: “Are you settled yet?” It’s a nice question; a friendly, concerned question – and one that has always driven me mad. I hate that question. I don’t think I’ll ever give them the answer they want. Am I settled? Well, I rent a house, I send my children to school, I can recommend several restaurants, I have a supermarket reward card, a library card, a bicycle and several appliances with Australian plugs. I sometimes say “no worries” and I almost always say “capsicum”. I have read dozens of Australian novels and watched lots of old and current Australian TV series. I think 36 degrees is a perfectly acceptable temperature. I bump into people I know quite a lot. The postman waves to me from his van. So in many ways I do look settled – I’m doing a good impression of it, let’s say. But despite my huge crush on Melbourne, and Australia in general, settled is not what I feel at all.

And I think the source of it is this: I don’t feel Australian. It has always been a bit of joke in this house – my (Australian) partner laughing at my funny little ways and labelling me: “So English.” (This is usually when I’m being stuck up, obviously.) But I think I can be a bit more serious than that now I’ve thought about it. At my daughter’s school assembly this week I noticed that I wasn’t singing along to their weekly rendition of the national anthem (I’m very observant like that…) – and I wondered, will I ever sing it? Am I even supposed to? Do I look like a prat for not joining in? It’s not as if I’d rather sing God Save the Queen – gawd, no – but more that it feels like something that doesn’t, and could never, belong to me but is very important to others. Examples like this serve as a constant reminder that I am a visitor. I am what all my friends joked I would be here – that slightly eccentric, slightly awkward Pom. I haven’t yet learned how to let myself feel that it’s alright to be that way forever, no matter where I live – that I don’t need to be or to feel like the people I spend time with day to day. I’m halfway there but it’s the same trouble I had as a teenager in an all-girls’ school: I hated the cliques, I rebelled, but I was sad and lonely and secretly wanted to feel a sense of belonging even though every time I felt like I was being drawn towards a clique it seemed to eat me alive from inside and I had to make a run for it.

In my writing life, this feeling of being outside a secret is a source of constant worry. My bookshelves are now bursting with the many amazing Australian authors whose work I’ve been introduced to in the last three years and I’ve had some small glimpses into the Melbourne publishing world (small, mind). I admire the loyalty and respect for Australian writing that the industry seems to have. But although my novel was published here a few months after it came out in the UK, it’s still a British book by a British author who just happens to be camping out in the Southern Hemisphere for an indefinite period – I’m not an Australian author and my books, including the latest, do not have an Australian flavour. Because I don’t, I suppose. That feels more important here than I imagined it would.

I had an idea that I would channel all these feelings of not belonging into my next novel. I may well do that – it’s exciting to think of doing that – but though the huge mountain of words I’ll need to find for that story doesn’t scare me in the least, it’s the wide open space on the other side that does.