Chronicles of a Trailing Spouse...

Eldest son has been worrying me of late. His teacher has been on and off sick practically all year, necessitating his class being shared around the rest of the school - sometimes for days on end. Add in the fact that he changed schools in April, and it's fair to say he hasn't exactly thrived academically this year. This is a worry. The idea of homeschooling had come up already this year, when - in his budget - State Premier Colin Barnett decided to charge those on a 457 visa (us) a $4,000 school fee from 2015 (read my take on it here ), which would mean I'd have no choice but to home-school all of them (living nightmare). So, by way of preparation for such an eventuality, and to see if it might benefit the eldest boy, I decided to attempt a two day trial with him. “Oh please no,”  groaned DH, “next you’ll be breastfeeding him and knitting him cardigans out of hemp! ” This, I felt was a little unfair; it’s true that until that moment I had considered home-sc...

Look, I'm not saying I'm not happy to be up here in the outback, thousands of kilometres from civilisation; light-years away from bookshops, cafes, swanky bars, cinemas and the beach - and did I mention bookshops? No, I'm not saying that at all. However, I will admit that the first line in her memoir 'Diplomatic Baggage', by journalist and diplomat's wife, Brigid Keenan, does strike a proverbial chord with me when she writes: " Oh God, I don't know if I can bear it. This is my first morning in Kazakhstan and it is only 11 o'clock and I have already run out of things to do and I have another four years to go (that means one thousand four hundred and sixty days) until this posting comes to an end. How on earth am I going to get through it?" Hilarious read... A certain truth rings loudly from this paragraph for me. Yes it is a privilege to live somewhere as extraordinary as the Pilbara - how many people can claim that? But I sometime...

Last month marked the fifth anniversary of this family leaving Ireland. Five years - it sounds at once such a short period of time - a snippet, an ad break! - and yet the world we left behind us in Ireland seems like a murky dream, something from another lifetime. These past five years have been eventful - life changing even. When we left Galway for Abu Dhabi back in 2008 it was with the idea that we might stay away for a year, maybe two at the most - you know, have an experience, open our minds, and all that jazz , before returning to the comfort of our lives. However, the collapse of Lehman brothers shortly after we left - and the gory aftermath of that - combined with the realisation that this world was far bigger than our tiny part of south county Galway - meant that pretty quickly we knew we wouldn't be returning to Ireland any time soon. If ever. In the UAE I never really thought of myself as an expat, never sought out Irish people in particular, didn't give any ...

I found myself uttering a sentence yesterday which caused me stop in my tracks, and dwell on what I had just said. Sitting on the grass, watching the children's Twilight Faction Sports Carnival, I complained to a friend that life in Paraburdoo had "too many hours in the day" . Imagine saying that? But so many of the time consuming aspects of life - such as a school commute, work commute, two-hour round-trips to the supermarket - are non-existent here. It takes five minutes to walk to the local shop (I never drive), the kids skip off to school in the mornings three minutes before the bell, and DH's job is a five minute drive away. The hustle and bustle of life has fled, leaving behind a simple, uncluttered existence of chores, family, and internet shopping. Lots of internet shopping. I would be lying if I said I didn't miss the mindless shop-wandering I used to spend so much time doing, because I do - emphatically. I miss going into a newly discovered cafe...

One thing I've noticed about Paraburdoo is that it is very much a town on the make. Everyone here is working towards the day they leave, and making money is the name of the game. This sense of shared purpose is almost palpable here, there is no time for frills or fripperies, you get in, make your money, and get out. This ethos is so at odds with the way DH and I have operated up til now -- money is made and wasted; if it comes in nice packaging I will most certainly buy it -- that in many ways this is the best place we could have come to; a financial boot camp if you will. Chatting to just about anyone you meet goes something like this: Me: 'So, how long do you intend to stay here?' Person I've just met: (screws up face to mentally figure out how many years left on mortgage) 'Umm...I think about another two years at least.' Nobody I've met intends to stay long term, but they won't leave until it's paid dividends. This also me...

Oh dear, we really need to get used to the idea that this is not a country which can be easily traversed in three hours by road. And when people tell you something is 'just on your doorstep', what they actually mean is that you don't need to take a flight to get there. Yesterday we decided to visit the famous Karijini National Park, which had been described by several people as - yep -- 'on our doorstep'. It isn't. Setting off with a picnic, five bickering children and half a tank of petrol, we figured we'd be at the park in an hour. And yes, we did reach its outer edges in just over an hour, however we quickly discovered that the Visitor Centre was 55 kilometres away, and all the attractions were of similar distances and in various directions. And the road had given way to a red gravel track making for a bumpy and uncomfortable ride. I had imagined visiting the park would be a bit like visiting The World Showcase in Disney World , where you can ...

One thing I like about all the moving around we've been doing over the last few years, is how you can walk -- quite literally -- out of one world and into another ( and as if by magic, the shopkeeper appeared! ) One day you're living in a house on the west coast of Ireland, surrounded by green fields and grazing cows, the next day 'home' is a 16th floor hotel room in hot and dusty downtown Abu Dhabi. And where you once woke up to the sound of tractors chugging along the road and 'Morning Ireland' on the radio, you are now woken by beeping taxis and the international edition of CNN news on the TV. All that is required to implement this dramatic transformation is enough money to board a flight (or preferably an employer willing to relocate you) and the will to do it. Just over a week ago we did it again, we left the Perth hills and tumbled -- head first -- from one world right into another. The journey, which we planned to do in two days, ended up taking ...

I'm sitting on a mattress in the middle of my bedroom, surrounded by suitcases, boxes and deconstructed IKEA furniture, contemplating our next move. We're moving to the Bush and once more I am heading into a harsh, dusty and unyielding landscape, inhospitable to human life and far away from civilisation. I have a habit of doing this. Of course the difference is that -- unlike living in  RAK or Al Ain, which are not unlike the Pilbarra in terms of sand and rock -- in the bush I can't simply jump in the car, drive two hours down the road to buy some gold from a vending machine in a gilded palace, more's the pity. No, this will be like moving to a village in the Empty Quarter, a 16 hour drive from Perth, where my local shopping options are confined to an IGA supermarket. I'm really not sure how I'm going to cope with a life that doesn't involve hours spent mindlessly wandering around shopping centres, waiting to be seduced by things I don't need an...

A new problem has developed in our house; we can't stop the baby from swearing. It started innocently enough with him hissing  'I HATE you!' every time he was annoyed about something -- which was actually a little bit funny; there's something intrinsically hilarious about a three-foot-tall tot, with the face of an angel, spouting such venom -- but he's fast developing the vocabulary of a sharp-faced docker. What did I say? Strolling around Target with him the other day, he sat bolt upright in his buggy lisping ' You stupid bitch!' over and over again to anyone who so much as looked at him, much to the distress of an old woman smiling in at his pink, plump, ringletted-self. This has developed into him yelling ' Oh SHIT!' every time he throws something over the balcony outside (which is often, and in fact when we had our grass cut recently, a treasure trove was discovered down below -- kitchen implements, toys, electrical gadgets --  tos...

First off, I want to say that so far I'm very impressed with the Australian primary education system - honest I am. Classes are so well staffed that last year I gave up asking the names of all the different classroom assistants I encountered after a while, settling instead for a nod and smile. And the 11-year-old girl (AKA 'the tweenager') - following a series of interviews and auditions last year - has been offered a place in a high-school dedicated to the Arts for 2014. This is very good news considering the fact that many people send their children to private schools for their secondary education, and the school in question is not just of good repute, but also free. Winning! Teachers here are well-paid and well-accommodated as far as I can tell (many work part time, sharing classes with other teachers for one or two days a week), and mercifully - apart from a brief mention in the school creed - they generally keep God out of the classroom. Like anywhere, the stand...

'Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you got 'til it's gone ' So sang Joni Mitchel in ' Big yellow taxi'.  In a similar vein, the Greek philosopher of Stoicism, Epictitus said ,  'He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things he has not, but rejoices for those which he has'. I think it's safe to say that one of life's truisms is that we rarely appreciate what we have until we've been deprived of it. And I've been thinking about this quite a lot of late, now that I'm all husbanded up again. I feel like a latter day George Bailey or Ebenezer Scrooge, having had a mirror held up to my life to show me what is important; and like Dorothy too, everything I needed was in my own backyard all along (actually this metaphor doesn't hold up - after all, DH wasn't in the back yard, but up in the Pilbara, but bear with me dear reader). Of course the separation wasn't of my choosing -...