A lady emailed me a few weeks back to complain that the content of this column is, to her mind, overly critical of Ireland and extravagantly lacking in accounts of the beaches of Australia. “People want to read about the beaches,” she wrote to me. They want to fantasise about Christmas in the summertime.
The suggestion was that I should write less about the conflicted emigrant relationship to home and more about turquoise water and the traditional Australian Christmas dinner.
Having never enjoyed a traditional Australian Christmas dinner myself, I asked around. While answers vary, it seems that festive fare over here generally contains a lot of salad components. That may sound odd to us, but we do have experience of this particular hot weather impulse. Consider those sweltering (if rare) Irish summer days when your mammy would down tools and definitively declare that “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, it’s too hot for cooking”. Then everyone would have a wedge of iceberg lettuce, a slice of anaemic tomato, boiled egg and some cold ham for dinner.
This culinary solution predated Uber Eats, and was objectively terrible, but is nevertheless one of the fires in which Irish psychology was forged. When I recently asked the four-year-old daughter of a friend what her favourite food is, and the child looked contemplatively into the distance before answering “chorizo”, I was confirmed in my suspicion that the hot-weather-cold-ham dinner might now legally qualify as child abuse.
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According to my research on the ground (ie asking an accountant I met) pavlova is apparently the ideal Australian Christmas dessert, and I can understand that. Even the memory of British colonialism can’t eradicate the undeniable truth that a strawberry pavlova is, to use Hiberno-English-adjacent parlance, an absolutely unbelievable dessert. It has everything you could want. Tanginess, sweetness, four tonnes of sugar and a veritable riot of textures. Crisp, soft, light, creamy.
And yet. if I’m not drenching a dense, fatty pudding in brandy and setting it alight, it really doesn’t feel like Christmas at all. Even if it is more than 30 degrees out and the idea of roasting meat in the oven all day long sort of makes you want to die.
Thus far, I haven’t been able to oblige the woman who complained by writing of her voracious appetite for descriptions of beaches. Outside Australia, most people seem to think of this country in geographical terms as a large land mass with coastal cities and towns peppering its perimeter.
An Irish person recently messaged me on Instagram when I shared a post indicating the various times The Late Late Toy Show would be broadcast live in Australia, which has three primary time zones but six in all if you include regional variations and territories. Her message indicated some shock that Australia was big enough to have so many time zones. There was a hint of incredulity to it, as if Australia had lost the run of itself a bit, but if you airlifted this country and plonked it on top of Europe, it would apparently stretch from Iceland in the northwest to Turkey in the southeast, with some parts of Russia sticking out untidily, as they are wont to do regardless.
It is difficult for us as Europeans to grasp just how large Australia is. You feel it when you’re here – everything takes up more space, because space is something Australia is abundant in. The horizon is vaster. The sky feels bigger. The mountains are gargantuan. The birds are intimidatingly large and blowsy, and they have the personality of mean drunks. Anything not abutting the sea is considered outside Australia as a sort of molten hellscape, uninhabitable by any creature containing organs made of meat. Most Irish people don’t seem to realise that you can live in Australia and not be next to, or permanently overlooking, the ocean at all. Until I moved to Canberra, the country’s inland capital, I thought the same.
[ From an Irish workhouse to Australia – the story of the Famine orphan girlsOpens in new window ]
I understand the mentality of some Irish people, which suggests that only a total gom would move to Australia and not live near the ocean when so very much of the country is indeed adjacent to it. To those people I say this – yes, I live inland, about 3½ hours from the sea, but it is 27 degrees out as I write this and everything in my rented apartment is relatively new and in working order. These conditions are not attainable in Dublin, so ocean or no, I’m content.
The lady who emailed to complain won’t like me writing that, but there you have it.
But listen, I have a sense of my professional obligation. I’m not a wild animal. If the nation of Ireland has come to a standstill until some random woman in Australia writes about what a day at the beach is like – and my concerned emailer seemed to convey that this indeed is the case – then I clearly have to write about the beach. I can’t have my homeland tanking economically and then sinking into the Irish Sea on my conscience. I’m a patriot that way.
So I’ve arranged a beach trip. Everyone at home can forestall another snap election. Sydney’s famous Bondi Beach awaits. My husband loves the beach. Not being Irish, he is without any body shame whatever. The sun is not fatal to him and the God of his ancestors won’t smite him for lying about on white sand like a cat on a warm rock for an afternoon.
I, on the other hand, am Irish. I’ve had to buy a special medical grade sun hat and check with my GP whether SPF goes higher than 100. I already feel guilty about taking the time off, and I’m strongly considering just wearing jeans.
My emailer will get her beach column, even if it kills me (and it might).
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