Shortly into the first day of the last new year, I wrote on social media that “We’re twelve minutes into 2025 here in Canberra as I write this. Nothing major to report so far.”
Being eleven hours ahead of home here in the Australian capital, I was struck by the bizarreness of it all. The new year had begun for me while friends and family at home were readying themselves for lunch or the New Year’s Eve plans they’d made for the evening to come. I was in 2025, getting ‘Happy New Year!’ messages from my brother in Limerick, who was still somehow living in the year before, waiting on his own midnight.
Naturally, the internet being what it is, some guy waited the mere minutes it would inevitably take before something major did happen somewhere, and then drily replied to my post: “This didn’t age well.”
I had of course written the note in the firm belief nothing bad was ever going to happen again anywhere on earth. It was not merely a banal little joke about how living in Australia is not actually the same as living in the future, even though it can sometimes feel like it.
It would be fun if it were the future, though I think Australian people would make reluctant oracles. They’re a bit too focused on a healthy life outside work to spare time to report to the northern hemisphere on upcoming natural disasters, or the results of rugby matches.
One of the most confusing and interesting aspects of living in Australia is the time difference that separates you from home. It generates a distance far beyond the merely temporal. It’s a sort of border – every morning I wake up and my friends and family in the other hemisphere are experiencing a yesterday that is untouchable to me.
I listened to a voice note from a friend in San Francisco early this morning as I walked to the bus stop in the shadowy balminess of an early summer morning. He opened it with greetings “from yesterday afternoon. We’re nineteen hours behind you I think!”
Everything is out of sync. Because I spent most of my life in Ireland, this time of year brings expectations that seem to live unconsciously inside my body. Meanwhile, Australia is having none of it. Some clock in my guts is attuned to nature slowing down into the brumal pace of the colder months just as the Australian landscape splits into a white-eyed summer.
New Year’s Eve fireworks light up the sky over the Harbour Bridge during the fireworks display in Sydney on January 1st, 2023. Photograph: Muhammad Fardoq/AFP via Getty
Lush roadside shrubs shriek with the menacing music of unseen winged and leggy insects. The heat pushes you back like a resistant current as you take a walk. The power of the sun is unlike anything I’d experienced before I came here. To go outside unprotected would be insanity – you can feel it burning bare skin almost instantaneously.
You simply can’t see without sunglasses and all the while, your squinting, watery Irish eyes and your tender, burning Irish back belong to body that somehow still seeks the gloom of a recognisably Hibernian winter. The lurk of skeletal trees. A wet, icy silence you can think in.
The magic of nature wintering over and playing dead as you wait for its miraculous resurrection in the spring, pacified in the meantime by the bodily comforts and softly lit insularity of the festive season. Sitting warmly somewhere, indulging in nostalgia, and putting Baileys into everything.
And all of it as you consider, not for the first year, whether going no contact with your mother is a mental health necessity or whether you’re acting like an intolerant adolescent because you’re back in your old room, playing an old part. This is what time does. The reality and the illusion of it. It places us in conflict with other versions of ourselves.
When you are in Australia, everything in Ireland happens in another time. The seasons. The events that mark the year. No moment in the lives of those you care about at home occurs in real time for you. You’ve always missed it.
This week, I woke up to a message sharing the news that somebody near to me had died while I was sleeping. When I made the decision to move to Australia, I did so knowing this would inevitably happen eventually. I thought about what it would mean, and how it might feel.
The Irish day conducts itself while I sleep, and I inevitably awake to updates from home. Videos of my niece and nephews practising reading or doing something funny. Thoughts from friends on what they are currently watching, reading or engaged in.
News from people’s lives. And now, texts about who has died. Reading them is like watching the ripples of this news pass through every person it closely touches, and each message is a tiny window into an event that I feel very far away from here at the end of the year in a parallel universe
There is a lag to everything at this great distance, and it forces you to experience everything outside of time, or in retrospect. Emigration stretches you across geographies as well as time.
I have spent the last few days with a mind in Ireland and a body in Australia, considering the year just passed and the one to come. When the clock hits midnight on New Year’s Eve, I’ll once again be a year ahead for a few sparse hours, with a foot in two countries and two time zones. All the way over here, midnight comes twice.