I’d been enamoured with the idea of living way up in the lush greenery of a mountain range ever since I was tiny, and my dad’s parents lived at the top of Mount Tamborine in Queensland (which, history suggests, is the very house where I was conceived, and like most history I am disinclined to learn any more details). I adored the long, winding drive up the mountain to their house, on ten acres of Tamborine’s summit. As the world got greener, darker and mistier, I was lulled into a deep state of relaxation, decades before I consciously learnt what a deep state of relaxation was, or why I was so often experiencing the opposite.

Flash forward to the early 2010s, while still living in Melbourne. One of my dearest friends Sarah and her husband Justin moved up to “The Hills” outside Melbourne, formally known as the Dandenong Ranges. Overwhelmingly reminiscent of Mt Tamborine, their half-underground cottage in Belgrave was one of my favourite places to visit, and I made the 45-minute drive up there often. I fantasised about living up there, but it was a logistic impossibility for me: everything in my life was in the city, and what’s more, I was a City Boy.

My existence as a City Boy reached its apex from 20187-2019 when I lived in New York City. More pertinent to this story is the part after those three years, when I left New York City. I don’t want to be one of those absolute wankpots who leaves New York and then writes a thinkpiece about it, so I’m going to keep this paragraph as short as I can, but something about a City Boy leaving one of the world’s citiest cities sort of neutralises that “but I MUST live in the city!” mentality.

So when we moved back to Australia, and Will craved a bit of space to recover from two years living in a city he hated (Will is decidedly not a City Boy), and a once-in-a-lifetime (I HOPE) pandemic made private outdoor space a premium luxury (because going past your own property boundary was suddenly a life-threatening risk), the idea of living in the Dandenongs became not just viable, but ideal.

So we fucked off to The Hills.

The change in our lives when we moved to a large house on quarter of an acre up a mountainside was immediate. The change wasn’t better; we were in lockdown. It wasn’t peaceful; the pandemic raged and our jobs were uncertain and groceries were sometimes scarce. It wasn’t enriching; a big backyard stops being exciting when it’s the only fucking place you can go every single fucking day. But it was ornithological.

Allow me to explain.

On the day we moved in, there was a note left for us on the kitchen counter from the real estate agent, welcoming us to the home. This was a delightful new experience for me, as Australian real estate agents typically treat renters with a level of repulsed hostility somewhere between “a cockroach just ran over my foot” and “my dentist demanded a follow up appointment”. Even more surprising, the note was accompanied by two gifts: two movie tickets, and a giant bag of mixed seed. 

At first glance, both gifts seemed useless, as we were in the middle of what would become a six month lockdown and the cinema was closed, and while I have been known to nibble on the odd sunflower seed  or chuck a handful of pine nuts into a salad, I wasn’t really a “mixed seed” person.

And then I looked out the kitchen window.

As we learnt later from the real estate agent, the last people to live in the house were the owners themselves, and they loved their bird visitors, and hoped the new tenants would too. 

Now look, I feel like this should have been disclosed before we signed the lease. What if we had a bird phobia? I’ve seen how people afraid of birds react to the very THOUGHT of a bird near them, let alone having their actual home beset by a flock of king parrots, crimson rosellas, galahs and rainbow lorikeets. They would prefer to rent a house murders took place in than somewhere that would make them feel like a yassified Tippi Hedren every morning.

But this is a moot point, because I bloody love birds, and had absolutely no issue embracing my new role as The Bird Witch of Belgrave Heights.

The king parrots were the most fearless, and were the first to go from eating out of my hand to flying onto my hand, elbow or shoulder every time I stepped outside, whether I was ready for them or not. Being king parrots, I gave them names of people I knew with the surname King, and at one point we were visited daily by Stephen & Regina, Martin Luther & Billie-Jean, and Larry & Carole (unlikely human pairings, I realise, but king parrots are often coupled off and always arrived together).

In addition to the king parrots, we called the two bullying rainbow lorikeets David and Alexis, because they were beautiful but very annoying, and the cockatoos we called “NO, FUCK OFF” because once cockatoos get the idea that you’ll feed them, they’ll start gnawing at your house to get your attention. As we were still only renting and couldn’t afford the maintenance on having our dwelling EATEN, we were forced to be prejudiced against them. 

If I’m to be cancelled for my blatant birdism, so be it.

Not that the king parrots were much better. They became familiar with us during the cooler months, and buggered off to fend for themselves during the summer. When they returned the following autumn they were so familiar and emboldened, it would have been annoying if it weren’t so adorable.

Unfortunately, along with the beautiful, loveable and soul-nourishing bird friendships, living in The Hills brought about two other every-day occurrences: crushing loneliness and so. many. spiders. I guess if I considered spiders companions instead of pants-pissing nightmare fuel, the two could have cancelled each other out. But as the lockdowns became less frequent and our isolation became more acute, and I spent more than one evening watching TV on the middle of the kitchen bench, sitting perched and cross-legged because it was the only place in the house in view of the TV that wasn’t touching a surface a spider could be on, we realised it might be time to end our Mountain Men fantasy and rejoin the rest of our friends down in Melbourne proper.

Turns out being a City Boy is harder to shake than I realised.

The day we moved out of Colby Drive, we left behind a gift for the next residents: two movie tickets, and a giant bag of mixed seed.

The downside of moving to the United States of America on the day Donald Trump was inaugurated as President was…everything.

I’m not being dramatic. It’s mathematical: There is no upside, ergo it’s all a downside.

Everything.

By the time the election was called in his favour, I was already five months into the six-and-a-half month process to move my life to the U.S., so it was too late to turn back.

Nevertheless, it was a lifelong dream, and as I said approximately five thousand times (every time I was well-meaningly asked “I guess you don’t want to move there now?”): I wasn’t going to turn an existential defeat into a personal one. I wasn’t giving up my lifelong dream for anyone.

And besides: did I make it work or did I make it work? I had an incredible time in New York for three years: learning shit at the Upright Citizens Brigade, starting a podcast with my BFF, being a background actor on one of my favourite TV shows (and several I’ve never seen), learning the art of comedy writing at a one-of-a-kind comedy writer’s summer camp, being shortlisted for NBC’s Late Night Writer’s Workshop, GETTING MARRIED? I loved my apartment, I loved the winters, I loved the excitement, I loved the musical theatre, I loved the life.

But the weight of the world still gnawed at me. The cruelty being enacted by the government; inside the borders, outside the borders, and particularly on the borders, weighed us down. The spectacular joke that is the American healthcare system weighed us down. The “invisible” class system that infiltrates every level of American society, particularly in corporate workplaces in New York City, weighed Will down. The things that I had taken for granted in Australia: a standard four weeks annual leave, superannuation, bread that doesn’t have sugar in it, weighed me down. That last one isn’t even a metaphor. The sugary bread—which is cake. It’s JUST CAKE. You are making sandwiches with SLICES OF CAKE—started weighing me down. There’s nowhere better in the world to stress eat than the United States of America. I highly recommend it. But the root cause of the stress eating was no fucking fun.

But this is what I wanted.

Right?

In the weeks leading up to the U.S.’s midterm elections in 2018, Will and I had a heavy conversation that had a very simple premise: What if we just left? We very carefully handed the decision back and forth for weeks. Every time one of us did a heavy sigh, or had a bad night’s sleep, or started clawing at the cakebread, the other would bring up The Question: carefully, like a recently jostled champagne bottle, lest we make the decision too abruptly and lose an eye.

Every time one of us asked The Question, we got a tiny bit closer to an answer. And then, one day, the cork popped: it was decided if things didn’t swing back toward the left in the midterm elections, then it would be panic stations because they may never, so we should plan an escape now and deploy the plan in November if things went pear-shaped.

“Escape”. That was the specific word we used. In hindsight that seems very melodramatic, but at the time it was, at worst, only slightly melodramatic. I’ll be honest, the word felt right. So, we laid out the logistics, the requirements, the pros and the cons, and by the time the elections were upon us, we had our contingency plan.

As it turned out, the midterm elections went surprisingly well. “Escape” was not necessary.

Except.

The morning after the midterm elections, the thought remained in our minds. I can’t remember which of us started the conversation, but I know what was said:

“I…sort of…still want to enact the contingency plan.”
“Me too.”
“Fuck. Okay.”
“Fuck.”
“Let’s go.”
“Fuck.”

And we enacted the plan.

Now, to move a small dog to Australia (or any size dog, but we happen to have a small one) requires about six months of scheduled vet visits. A six month wait put us just about at the time of our lease ending, so we had our time frame built in.

In the middle of that six month wait, I had a potential writing career opportunity that threatened to derail the whole thing. It didn’t pan out obviously, I just want to point out that it wasn’t just a six month waiting stint. It was six months of managing somewhere between two and seven “what if?” scenarios. Nothing was settled, nothing was final, nothing was certain until we were sitting on the plane.

On August 15, 2019 we sat on the plane.

On August 17, 2019 we landed in Melbourne. 

I’m writing this over two and a half years after the fact, so I can say with the benefit of hindsight that we moved into a two bedroom house that was modest in size, bordering on “poky”. But having just come from a 1 bedroom apartment on Manhattan’s 148th St, it felt palatial. Will went almost two whole weeks without stubbing his toe on anything.

Ten days after we arrived back in Australia, we picked Mattie up from quarantine (a term that, back in 2019, only referred to something you did with dogs when you brought them to Australia), she let out a high-pitched keening noise for 25 straight minutes, we vowed to never put her on a plane ever again, and we started building a new life, again. I reconnected with my old friends, started going back into the office after three years of working remotely (a term that, back in 2019, only referred to something you did in extreme circumstances such as, for example, an employee with a particularly niche set of skills fucking off to America), and Will started adjusting to a new life of savoury bread and no ozone layer.

My chapter of living in another hemisphere ended, and his began.