The Restless Years
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday August 17, 2013

A homesick Irishman is the last person you expect to find on a storm-wrecked Swanbourne beach on a Sunday morning. It was not yet 8am and the wind was biting. As the kids and I climbed over the craggy rocks jutting out over the point, we spotted a middle-aged dad and his two small boys down in the cove. They were fossicking about in the great mounds of seaweed coughed up by the still surging ocean.

My three kids were keen to see what mysterious flotsam those boys were collecting in their buckets. So the dad and I got talking. His wife was sleeping off a nurse’s nightshift, he told me, and his boys needed to blow off steam. My own husband had just flown in from the Philippines, I told him, and we’d abandoned the house so he could enjoy his jetlag in peace.

“Ryan!” he introduced himself, and crushed my hand in his. We laughed at the lunacy of a trip to the beach on a day like this. He’d come prepared to be weather-beaten: his boys were in woolly turtle necks zipped inside windjackets. They were sloshing about in knee-high welly boots, beanies pulled down low to cover small ears.

My boys had refused to wear anything but board shorts. Three-year-old daughter had agreed to a tracksuit, but was saturated within a few minutes. She stripped down to her knickers and a singlet and began collecting shells, flashing her goosebumps at the weak-willed sun.  

I had to concentrate to decipher Ryan’s south Dublin brogue as the wind snatched his words and flung them past my ears: “Y’knaw, there was nothin’ doin’ at home” he said. “We’d been to Australia on holiday and I loved the place, milk n’ honey, like. We came out eighteen months ago. It was my idea to move – I landed a job in construction.”

“How have you found it here?” I asked.

“Ay, I like it, but not enough. I think we have to go home soon” he said, scuffing the sand with his left boot, “My wife is desperately homesick – she’s not managing well.”

 “What are you missing most?”

“Green fields, family, the neighbours.”

“In that order?” I laughed, and he nodded.

“My wife has 27 nieces and nephews all about, and the neighbours, we’re very close with the neighbours. The village comes alive after knock-off – we head in next door or up the lane for a couple of pints while the kids play. You don’t do that here – I miss it.”

That got me thinking. Is homesickness a weakness? I always thought homebodies who stay rooted to the same familiar place must lack ambition or curiosity. But then I experienced the wrench of dislocation for myself. 

At age 26, I was distraught with homesickness after moving to Sydney for a new job. It was meant to be summer, but the rain bucketed down. My excitement soon wore off and I slid into  despondency.

Home was a rented flat in an unfamiliar suburb. Work colleagues were indifferent to the new girl. On weekends, I became a lonely observer of other peoples’ happiness. I traipsed around my new city on foot. In sidewalk cafes, I was the solitary figure contemplating the  parade of couples and families. It seemed everyone but me took the comforts of belonging for granted. I never quite shook that feeling of restlessness. The dull ache of homesickness stayed with me even as I made a new life in a city I grew fond of. Four years later, I seized the opportunity to move back to Perth.

Now I question whether my homesickness was a deficiency: me, pining for home, because I couldn’t cope with the newness of being alone.

Fifteen years later, I fantasise about escaping the stranglehold of my domestic responsibilities and moving the five of us to some exotic locale. I fool myself into believing I could be at home anywhere in the world. After all, I could instantly re-connect with friends on Skype and Facebook, family would be just a text or a mouse-click away. Such are my daydreams. Technology may have created the global village but it cannot convince me migration is now painless.

I ask my perpetually jetlagged husband if he struggles with homesickness when he’s away. “Always” comes the reply.

“What does it feel like?”

“Melancholy” he says, “Waves of it. And talking on the phone just reminds me of what I’m missing.”

Homesickness must be a close relative of nostalgia. We are not easily separated from the people and places who shape our histories. The Irishman on the beach could not explain his wife’s deep longing for the green fields of Dún Laoghaire. But even I knew a balding Australian paddock was a poor substitute.

“My wife comes from a family of twelve” he tells me. “It’s not easy leaving that behind.”

“Twelve?” I gasp. “My husband’s one of seven and I thought that was a big family! He and his younger brother are born in the same year!”

“Aah” he replies, “back home we call them Irish twins.”