Going Home

Immigration, a trip to the museum, and my favourite hills

My first goal when I moved to Melbourne was to work in a bookshop. I submitted my application on my second day, securing an interview by the week’s end. As part of the interview, the manager handed me a stack of books and asked me to categorise them. I answered each one incorrectly, but she gave me the job anyway. I worked in a little store on Lonsdale Street and spent my afternoons talking about books and worrying about money. At the register, if a customer paid with a bank card I recognised, I would ask them where they were from.

A woman placed a book on the counter and opened her wallet, her KiwiBank card on display.

‘Where are you from in New Zealand?’ I asked

‘It’s a small town on the North Island, just below Auckland.’

‘It’s not Waiuku, is it?’

‘Yes!’ Excitement visible on her face. ‘What’s your name?’

I told her. I knew what was coming next.

‘Are you Robbie’s boy?’

The week before I left, I was waiting for a friend in a cafe. I got caught in a conversation with an American woman who pointed out that the first thing a Kiwi will ask you is where you are from. At first, she said, it could seem like an interrogation, but after becoming increasingly acquainted with Māoritanga, she realised we were asking about their whakapapa, the layers of their genealogy.

A pepeha is a way to introduce yourself. You introduce your river and mountains first. Then your community. Then your family. Then yourself. The least interesting thing about you is who you are. We want to know who made you and what makes us the same. This is where my dad shines. He knows most things about most people.

We met a hitchhiker with a flat tyre beside a lonely road. He got into the back of Dad’s yellow van with his bicycle that had blown a tyre, tired and cold. The first question Dad asked him was where he was from. A few towns over, he was passing through. Dad was quiet for a moment and then asked him if he liked racing cars. The man returned the serve by asking if Dad liked horses.

“The only horse I’m into, mate, is horsepower.”

Dad spent the next 15 minutes trying to find someone they both knew, listing anyone he knew with a horse. They finally found a common friend, relaxing moments before saying goodbye.

Waiuku isn’t famous for many things. There was a battle just outside of town during the land wars that no one talks about, and there is an All Black who was the son of our history teacher.

Four bodies of water straddle Waiuku: an estuary, an ocean, a harbour, and our river. The Waikato River is called the river of 1000 Chiefs, with my family perched on one of the bends. I grew up in a small hamlet that’s a seven-minute drive out of town, or five minutes if Mum’s in a hurry. There are no shops, a school, and a church; we only went to at Christmas. The tavern across the road was thriving until it wasn’t. The paddock next to the tavern was where we used to host our school bonfire nights, where we would throw childish effigies of Guy Fawkes into the flames and dance around like little pagans, powered by sugar and blood lust.

Behind my parents’ house is a set of meandering hills with manufactured lakes cupped in the valleys. When I was a teenager, the best part of my day was driving through the hills, swooping around the hairpin turns, and smoking as many cigarettes as I could before coming too close to home.

If the Waikato were my river, ko Waikato te awa – these unnamed hills are my mountain. In Te Reo, the name for the North Island is Te Ika-a-Māui. These were not just our hills, but the curved flesh of the fish that Maui dragged up from the ocean floor. The flesh that became the land; the remnant of what Maui’s brothers feasted on.

During the pandemic, the borders between Aotearoa and Australia were ever-changing. Every time the travel bubble opened, I would cry in my boss’s office, and she would approve my leave request.

The closest I got to a trip home was when my bags were already packed with presents. It was the first time my family was to meet my boyfriend, James. The night before our flight, I went to get pizza for dinner. When I walked back in the front door, James met me at the end of the hallway with an asymmetrical frown. I knew the borders had suddenly popped again. I called my parents. Mum didn’t believe me, and Dad yelled in the background. The call didn’t last long.

I had to call my sister to tell her that, for the fourth time, I would have to postpone the museum trip I promised my nephew. For the rest of the night, I lay in James’ lap, not watching the movie I had asked him to put on.

When I finally got home, a whole year after my last attempt, the customs officer told me to take a box of rapid antigen tests from the pile and to read the information inside. When I walked through the doors, I saw my nephew run towards the entrance before my sister noticed me and screamed.

The morning after, my nephew and his Velcro wallet were excited to finally have our day at the museum. Each generation of my mum’s family has one uncle who flew the nest. I remember what it felt like to spend time with them when my long-distance uncles returned, and I was determined that if Ben ever had to eulogise me, he would have plenty to reference. As I reversed out of my parents’ driveway, Ben announced that he was wearing his city shoes. He told me that all my music sounded the same and the names of each of his friends. Each sentence began with ‘Uncle Sammy…’

After several hours of questions and exhibits, we were sitting in the food court when Ben asked, ‘Are you gay?’

My sister has told him many times that I am in love with a man. After some follow-up questions, I realised that he was more confused about the dynamics of a share house than he was about my sexuality. He asked me about every person I had lived with and if I had been married. He put his knife and fork down and said earnestly,

‘It’s hard, because I feel like I don’t know many things about you.’

I quietly told him to ‘Ask me anything you like.’

Hoping that, while Ben had learnt to read a room well enough to have impeccable comedic timing for his age, he wasn’t astute enough to recognise the thin smile of a man trying to hide that he had been shattered unexpectedly.

In the museum gift shop, Ben pored over three trinkets. He had $35 in his wallet, and the treasures in his hands were double that. If I were going to leave him with something that day, it was going to be the memory of an experience devoid of compromise. Ben said it was the best part of his day. I repeatedly asked if he liked his gifts until he told me to stop.

It’s hard to distinguish between a change within yourself or a change in an environment you once called home. Standing outside the post office, I locked eyes with a woman sitting in a cafe. She was with a man her age, drinking a latte from a bowl. She didn’t look away when I acknowledged her, but rather raised her eyebrows and opened her eyes wide, as if her staring was justified. Before I’d moved to Melbourne, I had sat in the same spot, telling whoever I was with that it was the best coffee in town. I have lived in Melbourne long enough now to understand that no coffee served in a bowl is going to be good. She wasn’t the first person I had been stared at by that day. It wasn’t until I told people my name that they realised that I was from the hills and the river. They knew my Dad through racing, or they had eaten my mum’s finger food.

I took the long way back to my parents’ house, through the hills. I slowed down each time I passed a house, wondering if the person I had once known still lived there. If the friends I rode on the bus home with every day returned here frequently enough to take the view for granted.

When I came down the final hill, I was startled by the new edging on the road. The tavern, where I spent my childhood stacking glasses for free ginger beer, was gone and replaced by new sections that had yet to be defined by fences.

At the airport, I took Ben to the All Blacks store and bought him a scarf. He asked me what my favourite rugby team was and laughed when I said I didn’t have one. He wore the scarf while we sat eating McDonald’s for breakfast, even though he was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt.

When I returned to work in Melbourne, and my coworkers asked me how my trip was, I had to tell them that it was nice to see my family. I couldn’t say that I was upset when Ben didn’t cry at the airport, but I was relieved when my sister told me that he cried in the car later.

When I immigrated, I did so knowing that I would miss odd-numbered birthdays and engagement parties. I knew it would create distance between myself and the people who love me, because there is no way to share the minutiae of a life over a sea. The longer I spend away from home, the further I diverge from the person I could have become and the people who would have helped me become him. I am an uncle and a son and a nephew and a brother and a friend, gone but not forgotten; the phantom limb of a whanau that meanders on without me, just like the hills that roll on forever.