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 cap