To my siblings and friends in Ireland their house is their home, and they would never sell it and never move. But myself and my wife don’t have that affiliation. Home is wherever we are at the time.
We are what in Australia are called grey nomads, a growing group of retirees who spend their lives on the road. Right now home is Palm Cove, in Far North Queensland, but we have been to a lot of other places in this vast country.
In the 1970s and 1980s I worked at the Ordnance Survey. Twelve years of surveying around Ireland gave me a sense of rootlessness. I never felt attachment to a place except for my parents' house, in Drumcondra in Dublin.
I lived with my wife, Trish, in Kilkenny for nine years, but we couldn’t see our future there; we had wanderlust. In the 1980s you couldn’t travel, especially with children; the cost was prohibitive. We had been to France on the ferry a few times, and to England. But that was it. If we were to go far away we’d be going for a long time.
We talked about moving to Texas, where Trish had an uncle, but in the end we settled on Australia. There was no internet back then; the only information we had before we left came from the Australian embassy or from library books.
In February 1988 we got on the plane in Dublin in minus-two degrees and landed in Adelaide in 38-degree heat. With no one to greet us we beat our way through the airport with our two small kids, got a hire car, drove into a city we had never been in before, stayed at a hotel, and drove 400km the next day to the place where we were going to live: Mount Gambier, in South Australia. We chose it because it was a similar size to Kilkenny. Turns out that wasn't reason enough to live in a place, and we soon moved back to Adelaide.
I got work surveying up in Tennant Creek, in Northern Territory. It took two days to drive there, and it felt like the middle of nowhere. We took readings off the sun, and did some of the most amazing things I have done as a surveyor. But I hated the work once I got back to Adelaide. It was so boring in comparison.
My wife’s nursing colleague had a husband who worked for a liquor company, and he set me up with a job at a liquor store. I used to make my own wine in Ireland, out of sugar beet or nettles or whatever else I could find. So while I was working in the store I did a winemaking course, and eventually I set up a website with a friend, selling wine on the internet. It was the early 1990s, and we were the first in Australia to sell wine online. Australia had the fastest internet connection in the world at that time, and the business took off.
I continued working at the head office of the liquor company, selling wine abroad through agents. I used to sell a lot of wine to Ireland. In the early 2000s I went out on my own, and the business was really successful until the global financial crisis hit, and that was that.
We were in Adelaide for close to 20 years before we decided to go, but we did a lot of travelling, to visit friends all around Australia. In the 1980s we drove up to Brisbane, to see if we'd like it there. My dad couldn't believe we had driven the distance from Dublin to Moscow in a car. We stayed for a few weeks but didn't like it. We also tried Melbourne, but the weather was terrible.
The first time we went to Cairns we drove the long route, around Uluru, or Ayers Rock, which took six weeks. The next time we visited we stayed for four months, and the next for eight. It ended up that we were staying longer in caravan parks up around Cairns than we were in our house in Adelaide.
We had a little wind-up caravan, which my wife used to call a fruit box, because it was so small. We just wanted to travel and see places. We have now driven every road and dirt track you could find between Adelaide and Cairns – a 3,500km journey when you drive direct, which we rarely do.
In the past five years we have done about 140,000km. My mechanic says I’m the only person he knows with a four-wheel drive who spends more time off road than on. We go tenting now rather than caravanning. It means we can go even farther off road.
Usually we follow the sun. We head north for the Australian winter and back south for the summer. The wet season can be a bit sticky in Far North Queensland, but the dry heat of an Adelaide summer is sensational.
The scenery, depending on the route, can be desert, outback, mountains or coastal. It can be stinking hot, flooding rain or just perfect. The roads can be boring sometimes, straight for kilometre after kilometre, but that in itself is one of the joys of this vast country. We’ve lost spotlights on roads so rough you’re down to 25km/h, and we’ve had to be towed out of creeks after getting stuck.
A few years ago we gave away all the furniture we had in our four-bedroom house in Adelaide and drove all our remaining belongings in a little trailer to Cairns. We still brought about six boxes too much. It is only when you downsize that you realise how little you need. When the weather is so good you don’t need many clothes, either. I live in shorts and T-shirts.
We are renting an apartment in Palm Cove now, because it’s cheaper than staying in the caravan park. The rental income from our house in Adelaide finances most of what we want to do. We worked out how much extra money we needed to earn in order to live, and I don’t see much point in doing any more than that. My career is finished, but I still pick up a bit of work here and there. There is always work as long as you don’t mind what it is you do. No one cares what you do for a living or where you come from when you’re on the road.
We travel back to Ireland every two years, to catch up with family and friends. I do miss the Irish countryside, because I spent so much time surveying it, but we won’t move back. Wherever we are in Australia is home now, and we haven’t finished driving around this amazing country just yet.
In conversation with Ciara Kenny
