A Short Trip Before A Long Voyage

This is a true story, basically.

I left Australia some 30 years ago. When I left it was for good. I was single and vaguely rebellious, with no clear game plan or ideology. But I believed that in moving to the land of the forefathers I could somehow hammer out a meaning to all the ethnic baggage I'd been with laden with.

In contrast when my daughter returned from Israel about three decades later it was for an extended holiday. Even for the blindsided a trip like this is bound to dig up all sorts of dormant emotions. But I have always shared the antipodean's down to earth aversion to sentimentality, so this is a story without an epiphany.  

My daughter is 21 and like most of her contemporaries in Israel she wants to make up for those lost years spent in khaki and national service. Ever since before her recruitment, she's been talking about going trekking and seeing the world. But for all her talk she's also a bit of a homebody. So she kind of had to be pushed to go. It was her mother not me. She's the one with open lines of communications with the kids. At best I'm the clumsy assistant. But in spite of all her talk and her mother's encouragement, months after her honourable discharge she was still kind of floundering, making some money waitressing. But how long could that go on? This isn't Europe. Waitressing's no long term occupation.

Eventually her mother persuaded her to go to Australia. I heard about it second hand and quietly approved. Still she needed some reminding in order to get her to move. As parents we'd like our kids to be proactive and to take the initiative. But she was still kind of stuck, dragging her feet. And can I really blame her? Am I that much better? In retrospect I guess she was intimidated by the tyranny of distance, the unknown, a sense of anonymity revisited. But a child's procrastination is frustrating to a parent. You think, "Do as I say, not as I do." I wasn't thinking about her apprehensions in separating from her circle of friends, their shared tastes and all that's familiar to them. I was only thinking how if only we could turn back the clock, but keep the so called wisdom of our gained experience, life could be so much more expedient; and that unfortunately we're not any better at transferring that bank of experience to the next generation than we were at accepting it. But as I said this is a story without an epiphany. 

All this foot dragging was really quite irritating. I even found it a bit offensive. It's not like she shut me out. There were requests for help but it was as if they were planned to disarray my equilibrium, pushing all the right buttons. It was as if she was doing me a favour. Like asking for help in getting her an application form from the Embassy. I even had to accompany her down to the embassy to renew her passport and help her fill out the forms." Get a life." I wanted to say. "If you're going on this big trip take some responsibility. Start somewhere. You learnt to deal with bureaucracy in the army and you did that better than I ever could have. So now you're too shy to call the Australian Embassy?" In the end the only thing I didn't do was have my photo taken instead of hers.

She also asked me for job connections in Australia. "No use asking me about work," I countered. "I don't have any useful connections in that department."

I may be as useful as a drover's pup when it comes to helping find work, but there were other issues I was ready, willing and able to discuss. Like how would she open a bank account and tax file? What about Medibank? (Tho' since I left it's called Medicare, and Medibank is now something else.) I didn't know the answers to these questions but I knew that these were the sort of questions that she ought to be asking. And I knew that this was the most useful sort of advice I could give her.  She might well have taken into consideration half a lifetime's experience in relocating between one country and another and dealing with the repercussions. If there's one thing I have learnt over the years it's how a few well-placed legitimate and unobtrusive enquiries about your rights can be a lot of help. But she was neglecting all this "sensible footwear" advice. Nada. "Yes, yes, yes," my daughter mumbled just within earshot. 

Beyond that I didn't dare raise the subject with her head on. Eventually a couple of weeks before her flight I took hold of the reins and made all sorts of phone calls myself. It's not as if discussing the outcome of those communications was any less volatile than reminding her to take care of it herself. "I'm 21. Not 50." That was her attitude. Déjà vu? No. Déjà entendu. I must have said it myself, only more pointedly and more bluntly to my own well-meaning, harassing parents.  

With all this hassle and passive aggression in the air it wasn't til about a weekend before she was off that any emotion got through to me. It happened walking down the street on a Friday morning, taking care of errands. In my head they started playing some old song, parallel to something out of the 60's. It got replayed a lot just after Rabin's murder. It seemed to reflect the paradox in his demise, how in some furtive way he'd opened up in the last few months before he was shot, started smiling for the cameras, in a bashfully charming way, and became a kind of a national grandfather figure, as if somehow he'd let go, sort of like On Golden Pond; and started soaring like a swift, and then got cut down. My daughter and I used to sing the song together. Bonding, you might call it. She was still in kindergarten then. As for the words of the song, I won't bother boring you. It's someone else's nostalgia, the sort of thing that gets lost in translation. But there I was walking alone in the street and out of the blue I start sobbing to myself. I knew it was because of her but I didn't really know why. It was something to do with pride and something to do with worrying. Here she was ready to make her maiden solo flight. And here she was not taking care of the queries I expected her to clear up. I thought to myself, it was damn lucky I had sunglasses on.

I knew that this little sob was a meaningful tap on the shoulder. It meant: breaching the cone of industrial quiet, breaking routine and running against the grain of standard survival drill mode. So I gave it some thought. What I realized was that my daughter's trip was discreetly stirring up my own fantasies about visiting Australia, touching on all sorts of things I'd love to do on a trip to Australia; like taking Bill Bryson's book Down Under as a blueprint, driving over the top, visiting farms and country towns; even my dad's wool buying region. Like visiting family, driving great distances, and laughing at the cricket commentaries on the radio, swimming at secluded beaches, listening to RN, bodysurfing at Scarborough, seeing bands at the Sunday session, visiting the Barossa, investigating rewritten history. In short, rediscovering something in my own identity.

But as for my kids, Australia's just a far off place, with big houses, open spaces, some rarely seen cousins, distant in a literal sense; overall not unlike home but on another scale of economy. There's no real issue for them about rediscovering their identity in Australia. That's their dad's problem. I had wanted them to grow up identifying with their immediate environment, and barring the mixed messages I sent them at a political level I guess I've achieved that. For me a journey like this would be a giant romantic back to roots trip, but not for my daughter. She's someone else, not me. Isn't that what I'd always wanted? As usual it's me that's all mixed up. She's like a fledgling being pushed from the nest, ready to take on life, but nervous. As for me mixing up our identities, that's just me getting lost in my own seminiferous tubercles.

So by the time we all got to the airport I had reconciled myself with things unresolvable at face value, somewhere between my confusion of identities and my daughter's apprehensions in facing the unknown. I'd even managed to share some of all this metrosexual stuff with my wife. In fact one of the turning points in this story had been when one of my wife's matriarchal cousins consecrated my daughter's departure saying, "It doesn't matter so much who you latch up with over there, just as long as you bring him back home". To which I blurted out, "No you don't have to. It's fine if you stay there."

Silence.

So there, a cat had popped out of the bag. I'd unconsciously expressed a preparedness to unravel three decades of trying to reinvent myself, and everything that goes along with that. A bit of a faux pas and none too patriotic, but I guess that after all these years here I'm integrated enough to be entitled to say something like that.

And in so far as this story's lacking an epiphany, as I had promised, she's over there having a great time and I'm ambivalently adhering to my multilayered identity with all its conflicts and confusion. I am nevertheless keeping the faith with something; something quintessentially Australian; and that is with Father McGuire's counsel to Cleaver Greene. Sage words of wisdom to the enlightened. "Be a little wary of epiphanies mate, they have a nasty habit of disappearing."