Life

As the author prepares for an extended stay on the other side of the world, the details of the life he leaves behind take on new significance. By Rick Morton.

Abroad-minded: the hope and heartache of moving overseas

Rick Morton’s cattle dog, Jack.

Credit: Supplied

I have been taking extra-large gulps from the industrial vat of mouthwash in the bathroom. The idea came to me in a moment of domestic clarity – it won’t be finished before I go.

Teeth brushed, I clocked the drum of Listerine and knew it couldn’t come with me. Too big. Better take bigger sips, I thought.

I am not dying – though my high-school friend’s mum, who retrained as a lawyer late in life, found me in the local supermarket and has now done my will.

I am moving to Paris. For a year, maybe longer. Or until my money runs out.

As far as I know, the French sell mouthwash and I can afford at least one bottle while I’m over there, but that’s not really the point. The point is that I really am leaving, swept from home and country in a spiritual death, and one must mourn the thoroughly ordinary.

The most mundane things have graduated to new meaning.

“I’m off to Paris for a year,” I tell the parking attendant at Brisbane Airport, with whom I have become friendly over the course of two-and-a-half years of relentless domestic travel. I cancel my local gym membership with solemnity. I am mostly certain France has no replica of the man who always accosts me on the treadmill to monologue about René Girard.

Each sip of coffee in one of my hometown haunts is a countdown to the final one. I ate a ritual last pumpkin scone at my sentimental favourite. And was that super-sized ute with double mudflaps and “Rum Pig” emblazoned across the back window the last I will see for the next year?

The moment the French authorities approved my long-stay visa, I decided I didn’t want to go anymore. A three-month extended break seemed long enough, and what business did I have living overseas anyway? That was for people with tax debts and complicated legacies.

But I am also the kind of person who has to win at “visa”, which I did, so off I go. As a “national talent”, no less. I still remember a time when my pronunciation of “grand prix” rhymed with the name of former United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix. Look at me now!

Oh, how avant-garde. Another Australian running off to Europe to write a novel. I know how it sounds, and I have little in the way of defence except to say I only became a journalist because I didn’t know how else to be paid to write. Of course, reporting isn’t really writing at all. It is distinct and useful but not what I imagined for myself all those years ago.

I have spent much of the past 20 years figuring out ways to get back on mission. Ideally, with some time off from my day job so I could haul the cortisol-stewed hunk of grey matter in my skull on to a different track and let it breathe a little.

There is a lot more to say by way of explanation but, to be honest, it all sounds like insufferable complaint. We’re all tired, and much is asked of the many.

Same as it ever was.

I decided to learn French slowly at first, so it didn’t feel like a big commitment. Every day I spent 10 or 15 minutes on an app and very slowly absorbed the basic grammar, a clutch of ordinary words. I can tell other people in France I have seen a horse, pig, dog or cat but not yet a mole, deer or stoat.

A not-insignificant part of me is enlivened by the idea that I will have nothing to offer in a language I can barely read and certainly cannot speak. On the few occasions when someone has tried to engage me in French, I have responded autonomically in German, which I learnt for 10 years through primary and secondary school, and which has long since remained dormant.

When I was studying German I refused to speak English at home, even though my family is decidedly monolingual. This time, I can afford to spare them this involuntary language immersion program but must give up a bit of my self-conception in the process.

In Paris, I will be precisely nobody, unable even to explain who I think I am in the native tongue.

What terror and bliss.

Before the blank invitation of an arrival is the complicated work of departure, however. Leaving a home is a thousand little ministries.

I started mourning the cattle dog early. I know this weekend will likely be the last I see him alive. He survived a paralysis tick last year, but now plain old age is creeping through him, as it must.

I want him to know how much he is loved, and I am terrified that when the moment comes he will not remember unless I am right there with him, in the room. What use all of Europe at that price? One of the defining memories I will leave with the poor old grump is my attempt to clip his toenails. If you believe him, no greater torment has been visited upon an animal.

Love occupies a lonely office.

The cat will be fine.

As for the chickens, I cannot say. They are inscrutable. The hawk that circles low every other week has no respect for occasion and has allowed no détente.

In our family, animals have always served as a conduit for the more-tricky cues of human emotion. Perhaps I focus on them now because I am unwilling to contemplate what else I leave behind: my mother, Deb, with whom I have lived for the past two-and-a-half years; my sister and her family, especially my nephew, Hugh, and the new bub due in a few months.

Growing up in outback Australia was a gift, in many ways. It has left me with worlds to conquer. First the town I would come to call home, all of 3000 people – that felt vibrant when we arrived. Then the Gold Coast. Imagine a city bigger than the Gold Coast, I double dare you. And then Brisbane and Sydney and, for fun, Melbourne, Canberra and Hobart.

Each move has had the effect of simultaneously making my world bigger and smaller. I brought an insatiable conqueror’s mindset to living in this way. A new place was exciting and very soon it was never enough.

Then I stopped. After all that, the longest I have lived anywhere for one stretch in my adult life – all 38 years of it – is in my home town.

Ain’t that something.

I could guess why. A pathological need for financial security (and then some) swept me here and made me too scared to leave. Burnout. The false comfort of the familiar, which, I might add, has infected politics throughout the world.

Fear, in other words.

The way I see it, living is a little bit like reading a good book that you do not wish to finish. It is possible to become so anxious about the end of this experience that you set the book aside and read no further, for a time.

I have done this by moving back to my home town in late 2022. I have stayed because I was bruised and, increasingly, grumpy and unbearable, like the dog having his toenails seen to.

Also because of the interest rates.

One should not abdicate existence entirely, however.

At some indeterminate point, having taken the time to grieve for whatever model of the world we have constructed, we must pick up the book again and read.

In Paris, I will read.

Rick Morton is taking extended leave.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 7, 2025 as "Tender little ministries".

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