Leaving the lucky country
With all the signs coalescing, the message is clear: it's time for something new
Click here to listen to an audio version of this piece, read by the author.
What are we doing? This is the question I keep asking myself. What are we doing? Where is any of this going? What is happening to us? Where have we fled to, and what direction should we take from here? Who do we want to take with us? Who are we anymore, and how can we face up to it all? How are we to deal with a world unwilling?
In truth, they’re all the same question. What are we doing? is the one to ask; it’s the one the world persists in pushing my way. It’s on every broken string, every chipped cup, every creased book. In the recent grey weather I’ve been looking at the wet pavement under my feet, each fresh puddle forwarding that same interrogation: What are we doing and what is this mess and where are you within it? Faced with this question, and its ceaseless volley of derivatives, my only means of response is a heightened sensuality. The intellect is useless here; I can only tune into the signs.
Well, all the signs are telling me: you’re ready for something new. These, of course, being the same signs I’ve detailed with such ambivalence in previous editions of this newsletter. Signs like an engagement breaking off before my very eyes, or utterly empty trams, or a cool change sweeping in at exactly 2:35 p.m. on Grand Final Day, or Geoffrey Edelsten dying. Of late, it’s been even more minute things, even smaller incoherences. My favourite shirts and jeans are getting holes in them. All my shoes suddenly make my feet sore. In fact, I barely fit into any of my clothes anymore, and the ones I do fit into don’t seem to agree with me. They’ve all turned into something cheap and blasé.
Two weeks ago, when I was rummaging around my bedroom cupboard for something to wear, I pulled my backpack out to clear some space. A small sprinkling of weightless black objects flew into the air behind the bag, then dropped inert to the carpet. I looked at the fragments, realised they’d come from the bag itself, then opened the bag’s main compartment and tipped it upside down. More small, black, fabric-like shards drifted to the floor. I knelt down. It was a family of moths. Evidently, they’d tried to make a home in the recesses of my backpack; instead, they’d all died.
Taken as a system of clues, these signs all coalesce into something uniform, an undertow, an outline, a puzzle taking shape. They clear the smoke, revealing the nascent theme which, somewhere within me, I’d known was formulating all along: I am drifting away from Melbourne. A couple of months back, I was walking along Auburn Road and saw a poster advertising the return of Chapel Street’s famously un-self-aware nightlife scene. When my eyes centred on the gaudy neon-blue text which paraded the phrase “DOUBLE-JABBED AND READY TO CHAP”, I felt dizzy with disgust. “Ugh,” I groaned, audibly, before shielding my eyes. Is it the city growing increasingly naff and debased, or am I at fault for expecting more? Why is it that I never used to have to ask these questions and now I do? Maybe the city has moved on; maybe I have moved on; whatever. It doesn’t matter. None of it is in my language anymore.
I knew something was up in October, when I got my second Pfizer shot. Not content to signify such a momentous occasion in the drabness of a GP’s office or the anonymity of a Dorevitch centre, I instead booked myself in at the Royal Exhibition Building. Ritzy, historical, and possessing an appropriate degree of grandeur – from the outside, it seemed perfect. But then I entered, and heard my footsteps ringing cavernously around the mostly-empty and rather soulless hall. Is it just me, or are all these frescoes more of an empty panache than I remember? Is this paint job uglier and slicker than I remember? Is this whole building just not as interesting as I remember, not as ambitious, not as rococo, not as extravagant?
My first vaccine shot, across the forecourt at the Melbourne Museum, had been a thrilling experience. Row after row of super-hot nurses and orderlies were on hand to guide you through to the jabbing point. You didn’t need to do anything. They even read your Medicare number out to you – no need to scrounge around to find it in your wallet; all you had to do was listen and say yes.
Well, that was then. Now, I’d replaced sitting beside a suspended whale skeleton waiting for my jab with being ushered into the front row of an utterly empty assemblage of chairs. Of the few places which had been taken, not a single person could be seen reading a book, or taking in their surroundings, or even twiddling their thumbs. It was completely transactional, without further meaning. Nobody smiled, nobody joked, and the nurses were decidedly less hot. What are we all doing here? I couldn’t help asking. But then, as if gifted from a gossamer, a saving grace. Just as I was about to have my fifteen minutes ticked off by the moody attendant, a tall and graceful woman strolled into the waiting area. She initially reminded me of Jane Birkin, without the infantility. As she exchanged words with the orderly I could hear, without question, a French accent. And now she definitely reminded me of Jane Birkin. Then I saw that she was wearing a knife-pleated jacquard miniskirt, and now she definitely reminded me of Jane Birkin. That chicness, that precision, that unfettered beauty which levitated above the empty air of the bureaucratic ritual taking place. It was just so French, and it awoke something in me, and all I had to do was say yes.
It was about a month and a half after this that I decided to move to Europe for the foreseeable future. The news, when shared with friends and family, was met with an initial mild shock tempered by what seemed to be an innate foreknowledge that, really, it’s what I should have been doing all along. No one was really that surprised. Perhaps most taken aback of all was my rabbi Michel, who himself was born in Belgium, has Francophone family heritage, and had previously lived in Paris for a number of years. “You know it’s COVID-central, right?” he queried me dubiously. But then, even Michel wasn’t overly astonished. He knew that I should get out of here, in the way that he knew I was probably just another uneasy young adult who feels an intense desire to unearth the triumphant and dismal secrets of the wider world. It was a role he’d seen countless others play; now it was my turn. Perhaps this is why his next query was equally predictable: “Okay, but have you thought about going to Israel?”
At this point, it seems, any country will do. In the introduction to his seminal book The Lucky Country, Donald Horne tells the story of encountering a young Greek at the foot of the Acropolis. The young man nods towards the towering structure before him, which we can only imagine is glistening, unwavering beneath a softly swelling cerulean sky. The young man says to Horne: “That is all the past. We love Australia here. Australia is the future.” Now, on the precipitous edge of a new year, I could not feel further away from that kind of thinking. I used to believe that Australia had it all; then a pandemic came, and all the most unassailable tendencies of the Australian character came to the fore, and my veneer broke beneath an untenable weight of incoherence.
But beyond the Australia-specific, what Michel is picking up on is, admittedly, a well-worn cliché the full implications of which I am certainly aware. Young person must find himself. Young Australian feels alienated from his faraway idyll. Young restless wanderer must roam the earth to know that life isn’t all about Paddlepops and kangaroos. But however facetiously we want to frame it, something about the last two years has raised a number of pertinent questions that can’t simply be dismissed with ribaldry and presumption. The Great Resignation, Freedom rallies, young people moving away – it all points to that same intractable quandary: what are we doing?
On one level, QR codes and vaccine mandates necessarily imply a set of multifarious questions regarding capital-F Freedom. But I contend that it’s an implication which strikes young people differently, especially given that such multifarious questions are of a nature with which young people in particular have yet to have to truly contend. Now, for the first time, we find ourselves affronted by the demand that we actually take responsibility for our own freedom. That we define it, take its measure, allocate a certain amount of value to it, and then enact that allocation, embody it.
Travel has traditionally constituted a means by which our pontifications about personal freedom get realised, filtered through an adolescent yearning for exploration and new experience. Consequently, travel has a kind of aura around it, enshrining it with powers otherworldly, perhaps akin to the story of St Paul who, while traversing the road to Damascus, saw the light and was converted. But I think that this historical preponderance is, in important ways, misleading. As know those who have been fortunate enough to do it before, travel is not the universal panacea, and the conversions by light are few and far between. If anything, it can worsen an interior crisis; heightens the stakes, amplifies the feelings, imperils the equilibrium. Travel is, in fact, most propitious on the small scale, meaning that we set ourselves a rubric of very particular gains to derive from it. Achievable yet meaningful developments. Wanting to use one’s French. Wanting to live somewhere colder. Wanting to meet people who have no idea what Triple J is.
Many of my friends are feeling the same way. Indeed, one very close friend confided in me that he hoped, as a kind of softly formed resolution for 2022, to be more “agentic.” To stamp some degree of authority on the world, to take the sails and steer the ship a little. At this point – with another year of online learning on the cards and an endless media discourse surrounding booster programmes and aged-care gaffes thundering out from every megaphone – maybe swerving into a completely new lane doesn’t sound like the worst thing in the world.
But the more pertinent aspect of my friend’s resolution transcends all of that, the swerving, the decision-making, the agency. It’s not just about getting on the plane; it’s living with the knowledge that you can get on the plane, at any time. That’s the true grace – or, for some, the true terror. For me, it’s the true freedom. Earlier this year, as I strolled along Exhibition Street on my lunch break, I spotted – caught the whiff of, actually – an old skinhead. His face was weathered, his black tank top was anonymous, his old Rivers shoes were crumbling, his faux-leather army-green satchel was slung over his neck like an oversize ribbon at the county fair. He was speaking into his Nokia, loudly. “If you wanna know how the job works,” he said as he passed me by, “come out and score with me.”
I suppose you could say that it’s now my time to go out and score. To attain a little more hard knowledge about how the world works, about how men and women rise and fall, about how people can succeed in this strange and tragic little life we all inhabit. There’s, of course, the distinct possibility that I’m here again on January 15, 2023, writing these same words to you from a house in Blackburn, or Fairfield, or Hawthorn, or Footscray, or Windsor, or Cremorne, or Clifton Hill. What’s preventing me from ending up exactly where I started? But then I think of how Jewish tradition speaks of accessing God: while reciting the Amidah, we take three steps forward and three steps back.
As in, it’s never really the same. Melbourne won’t be the same. I won’t be the same. The sun won’t feel the same. My family won’t be the same. None of this will ever really be here again. But I’m tired of wishing for things that can’t possibly be, and feeling none the wiser at the end of the day when I’m lying in bed with none of them held in my grasp. The German writer Peter Weiss coined the term Wunschautobiographie – the story of a life he wished he had. But I don’t want to write a Wunschautobiographie. I want the real thing. Who ever knew how little that really is to ask.