Wrecked

The Great Ocean Road, a single-lane ribbon at the top of sheer bluffs outside Melbourne in Australia, is called the Shipwreck Coast. It’s so named after the hundreds of boats that journeyed from Europe in the nineteenth century looking for safe harbor—and finding anything but.  

One hundred years later, my own family journeyed from America to Australia, looking for safe harbor. Though by the 1990s, Qantas and in-flight service had supplanted the clippers and barques that smashed into the cliffs so long ago.  

My Irish father, who had first left home for England, had met my American mother in Canada, moved with her to the States, then decided to move us all at the end of the 1980s. “Reagan America is a terrible place to live,” he declared as he leaned back in the chaise longue across the living room, facing my brother (8), my sister (6), and me (10) as we sat in a row on our seventies-style rust-colored couch in Michigan. “This is an ignorant country,” he intoned over folded fingers. “Ketchup has been declared a vegetable in school lunches, and my co-workers at General Motors congratulate me, my English is ‘so good.’” He paused, blazing eyes scanning the room for dissent. My mother hovered a few feet away in the kitchen, in silent agreement as she bustled a casserole out of the oven. “Eejits,” he sputtered under his breath in disgust.  

After dinner we huddled up on the carpet in front of the TV and watched a documentary about Australia. My parents gently goaded us to excitement about koalas and kangaroos, eucalyptus trees and a land where everything was backwards, from the seasons to the toilet flushes. My little sister became excited. She’d like to see these wonders. My father sprang to action, seizing the moment he’d carefully staged: “You can! We’re moving there!”

We moved from Michigan to Melbourne in early 1992. The following decade in Australia was ideal for most of us, especially me. The end of my childhood, my teenage years, university: school musicals, school captain, labour activism, friends, first jobs, first loves. Blue-blazered, white-knee-socked school years, broken by summers out on the back deck under the gum trees, reading in the cool shade. My brother’s rotating infatuations with different sports: footie, cricket, sailing, soccer, surrounded by a brotherly crowd of mates. My sister, quiet on the surface, seemed to enjoy youth the most, and was, we laugh with affection, caught repeatedly out for an underage drink. My mother recalls these as the most social and vibrant times of her life.  

Ideal for most of us. Just like most ships that sailed for Australia docked, and their passengers eventually conquered the land. But for others, shipwreck faced them as they reached the fatal shore—the name famously given to this land by historian Robert Hughes to describe the trials faced by Aboriginal peoples, convicts, and those who were shipwrecked.

Perhaps like my father. Alone among us, my father decided he disliked Australia as much as he’d hated the States—and Canada, and England, and Ireland before that. “It’s too much like Ireland, like England,” he grumbled; “everyone wants to know your business, to put you in your box.” His presence felt heavy, and his quiet anger—which I now know to be depression—weighted others down. “You go try to talk to him,” my mum would sometimes whisper to me. Me, the one who was supposedly closest to him, most like him—because I read the most, I did union organizing with him, because I too could be quiet and melancholy.

I resented her for putting me in this position. My resentment towards her: another tie to my dad. But I didn’t ask him. I loved him, I felt more like him than her, but I was afraid of him.

My parents worked hard in Oz, my dad driving a truck for a soft drink franchise he’d bought when he didn’t quickly find work, and my mum in a women’s clothing shop. Hard physical work and the heavy weight of mental anguish sometimes sank him. Like on Friday nights at the end of a long hot week out driving his truck, when he would settle into the armchair with bottle after bottle of VB beer and drift into a drunken slumber.  

Looking back, I’m grateful these were the majority of Fridays. The occasional alternate Fridays were much harder. The VB could unleash cruel tirades against whoever was in the room, usually me or my mum. Belittling criticism about how stupid or fat we were.  Then mocking us for being weak if we broke down into tears or left the room. This would usually be followed the next morning by his silent, shameful contrition. Then months of his pointed abstinence, theatrical pouring of glasses of milk at dinner. No one was allowed to speak of this after—certainly no one spoke to me, my mother to check in on me or to mediate, or my father to apologise.

A pattern: a looping cycle of relapse, of hope and despair. Going back to when we’d lived in Michigan, probably back to every country he’d emigrated to, then left. Back home to Ireland, to the warfare of the Troubles just miles away from his hometown. To his loneliness for home, when he was sent away at age seven to boarding school. To the ways he felt lost in a brood of fourteen children, and the unspoken grief for the five who died as babies.

Eventually, my father’s restlessness won over his remorse. He insisted on moving back to the States, “where no one gives a fuck about you, at least you have privacy.”  

Nobody else wanted to leave. The rest of us had become citizens; we had friends and lives and plans. I had just finished uni and was intent on moving to New York City for a period, but had not imagined that would mean leaving Australia, leaving home, forever. My siblings were both in the midst of university. I remember my mother weeping, doing an ironic dance around the kitchen to the Rolling Stones song “Mother’s Little Helper,” telling me “Mummy’s got pills!”, that our GP had prescribed something to help lower her anxiety. My parents spent long hours in their bathroom together, the ceiling fan on, the noise and suction supposedly hiding their chain smoking and hushed conversations. Eventually they emerged, sharing my father’s consensus.  

Before we left, we took a vacation. We spent a week out on the Great Ocean Road. Winter was a majestic time to visit, the cold winds and grey skies evoking the isolation settlers must have felt out on the Shipwreck Coast. The soaring cliffs on this part of the coast are a mix of limestone and deep red. When the light catches them, they gleam silver and gold, alluring against the deep turquoise of the beaches. 

Not every boat crashed here. Many made it: European settlers overpowered the First Nations peoples, and the sunburnt country took form. There were 638 known shipwrecks, though, only 250 of which were recovered. The rest disappeared forever.

I think my father was one of the ones who disappeared. At least from me. In Australia, he kept trying to resurface, resolutions made tall, like glasses of cold and fresh new milk. I felt some of it on that last family trip. The way he strode out to the shore, looked to the middle distance and smiled, the hope that this next move back to the States would at last provide a homecoming for heart and mind.  

You will not be surprised, reader, to learn that he did not find contentment back in America. The father I could sometimes trust remained mangled, twisted against the stormy rocks, slowly washing away. After he gave up on Australia—on its beauty, on his alienation with how content the rest of us were—I rarely encountered the parts of him that had most shaped my life: his hope, his willful independence, the determined work ethic that carried him around the globe and back.  

But those gifts I inherited guided me from there. I did not want to make the stormy passage back to America with my family of origin. Instead, I bought my own plane ticket. I flew separately back across the world to New York and began my adult life.

One of the few times I’ve seen my father animated since then was after the recent re-election of Donald Trump. Helpless in despair about the result, he unleashed his fury on us kids, urging us to renew our foreign passports, criticizing our negligence: his last desperate attempt to keep us safe. If real conversation were our currency, I would talk to him. I would ask if he regrets leaving the faraway place where he sought refuge. If he regrets returning to the land where, it is becoming frighteningly clear, many people indeed do not give a fuck about you.