rachelhills.net

Published in Sunday Life, 27 March 2011. Copyright Rachel Hills 2011.

Once the domain of the rich and famous, more of us are living overseas as global citizens. But as Rachel Hills discovers, there is a price to be paid for all that jetsetting.

Trying to line up an interview with Jessica Hart is like trying to get a meeting with a world leader or track down an undercover CIA operative. In the four weeks we exchange emails, text messages and play phone tag, Hart – at 25, one of Australia’s most successful international models, having worked with Guess, Sports Illustrated and Victoria’s Secret – crosses through New York, Los Angeles, Sydney, Melbourne and London.

When we finally get hold of each other, Hart is in her sixth city for the month – Paris. I ask how she copes with all the travel. Does constantly being on the go ever get to her? “It sounds crazier than it feels,” she laughs. “It’s actually really normal for me. My friends think it’s strange, but I love being on a plane. It’s the only time I get to myself; it’s like forced relaxation.”

And fair enough – Hart’s lifestyle is “really normal” for a model of her stature. Fashion has long been characterised by late nights, early mornings, and a seemingly endless succession of photo shoots, castings and exotic locations. The opportunity to learn about the world first hand is one of the perks that attracts young models to the industry.

What’s more interesting is that Hart’s perpetual motion – or a toned down version of it, at any rate – is less unusual than it used to be, and not just for Victoria’s Secret models. “It used to be that only movie stars and certain types of people could live in this way,” explains Brigid Delaney, author of This Restless Life: Churning Through Love, Work and Travel. “But with work being less connected to your physical location, people aren’t tied down in the same way they used to be.”

For baby boomers, the opportunity to travel was a matter of class; something you did only if you were born wealthy, or were in middle age, after you’d made your fortune. For the generation currently aged in their 20s and 30s, it’s a given; an essential item on the bucket list of things to do before, to borrow from The Who, you die or get old. You might be able to do it earlier or more often if you grew up in Toorak than if you did in Tullamarine – but GFC aside, greater wealth and low airfares mean that Australians are more mobile than ever before. And even if you’re not participating in the exodus yourself, chances are at least one person you care about is.

But while this mobility is a great privilege, it comes at a price. Most obvious are the environmental impacts; the contradiction between our professed concern about our warming planet, and the more immediate, hedonistic urge to see the world before rising fuel prices and the weight of our collective guilt put an end to the party.

Mobility also has a price on a more personal level, says Delaney. “The costs are a lack of involvement in any one particular place,” she explains. “If you’re always moving, it’s very hard to be there for the nitty gritty, so people are likely to feel disconnected from you on a friendship level. You’re also likely to feel displaced from your community more generally.”

Lyrian, 30, remembers well the fallout from her first big trip overseas. She had just turned 21, was living with her parents and was in a steady relationship with her boyfriend of two years when she packed up and left for Saint Petersburg as part of a university exchange. Back in 2001, she recalls, “Skype didn’t exist and the internet was expensive. I had to pay to use email by the minute. I was a student, so I was broke. I don’t think I even talked to my family for the first two months.”

The lack of communication quickly took its toll. “I was having these life-changing experiences and the most important people in my life weren’t part of them,” says Lyrian. “By the time we could speak, so much had happened that you don’t even bother to get into the details.”

While Lyrian’s friends were missing out on “the utter bursting of [her] heart” when she walked across the cobble stones of Red Square, she was missing out on 21st birthday parties, first boyfriends, first break-ups and university graduations. When Lyrian returned to Sydney a year later, she found that she’d grown apart from a lot of people, some permanently. “It took a good six months to feel like I was a part of things again,” she recalls.

When you ask expats how they manage their relationships when they return home from overseas, they’ll often regale you with stories of frenzied nights out and enthusiastic reunions. “It was exactly the same,” they marvel. “That’s the mark of a good friendship.”

But the annual dinner out with old chums when you’re back for the Christmas break is the easy bit. The real reckoning comes when you return for something more permanent, and you have to slot your new self into an old life that no longer exists.

Amanda, 48, recently returned to her home town of Brisbane after 23 years living in Sydney, Hong Kong and finally London. At first, she says, there was “a bit of a honeymoon period. Everyone is so pleased to see you – and then it goes back to normal life.”

She remembers going to her 30-year school reunion. “I went thinking I’d be welcomed by everyone. But you realise that everyone’s lives have closed over without you. They’ve gone to each other’s weddings, anniversaries, births of children – there’s so much history they’ve shared that any hole that was there when you left has been completely filled, and they can’t even imagine where they could put you. It just brought home the fact that we could go back to Brisbane, but we couldn’t go back to our old lives.”

Part of the chasm, says Brigid Delaney, is the underlying message that expats send to the people around them when they choose to leave. “Intentionally or not, you’re telling the people you already know that you want more, or that you are changing. To many people that can be threatening. There is this weird underlying thing that life where you were was not enough,” she says.

Delaney left Melbourne in 1996 – first for Sydney and later for London – and didn’t return until 2009. “I had to do a lot of work when I got back,” she says. “People’s lives had radically changed. You couldn’t rock up and say, ‘I’m here, let’s go out to this place.’ You have to go to them, you have to fit in with their schedule.”

Delaney also warns against sounding too arrogant. “People know that life in London or New York or wherever has been exciting. I don’t think there’s a huge appetite for them to sit there and hear about how fabulous your life is. I think you owe it to your friends to hear their stories and to show an interest in their lives.”

The other common disconnect arises from the fact that the longer you spend away, the less you feel like you have a home. Even the strongest ties can begin to erode with enough time and distance, and former homebodies who swore they’d “only” be gone for a year or two can find that once they make the break from Australia, it’s hard to find a reason to come back.

At the same time, their new city doesn’t immediately feel like a “home” either.

“I never thought I’d leave Melbourne for so long,” says Jessica Hart, who still recalls crying herself to sleep when she first moved to London at the age of 17, “but now I’m not sure when I’ll come back for good. I will, but it won’t be until I feel like I’m ‘done’.”

In part, Hart manages to make it work because she’s on the road so much. “I do make an effort to come back to Australia quite often to catch up with clients and friends, because I want to have something to come back to,” she says. “My fear is coming back and having nothing to do.”

Such compromises are easier for the well paid and hyper mobile – Delaney says she envies people like Cate Blanchett, who are able to maintain international careers while still having an Australian base – but they’re also translatable to the rest of us.

Following her Russian experience, Lyrian spent a second year abroad in 2009, as an AusAID ambassador for development in Bangladesh. This time, she says, her experience was much more positive. “It was really, really important for me to keep involved in other people’s lives as much as possible. Within 24 hours of arriving, I was sending text messages to friends and family, even though it was expensive. I was Skyping my parents within three days. I set up a blog. I joined Facebook.”

Lyrian’s efforts made reintegrating into her old life in Australia much easier than it had been before. “Because I’d spoken to my family so much, I could tell stories straight away and they had a good handle on what I’d been doing,” she says.

Like Hart, Lyrian is conscious that maintaining that sense of connection will require effort on her part. Upon returning to Australia, she made a decision not to apply for roles overseas for two years, so she could strengthen her relationships and rebuild her ties with the country she grew up in. “Especially in development, you meet so many people who don’t feel at home at home,” she says. “Living in a developing country and then travelling through the developing world made me concerned about how comfortable I’d feel in Australia.“

Still, she admits, “Even living in a different state, there is a distance. When I go home [to Sydney, from Melbourne] there are priority people you see, and if you’re not on the list, it’s really difficult. And at this age, it’s big stuff you’re missing – marriages, babies.”

Amanda is less convinced of the need for a permanent base. “My husband and I have always said that home is exactly where we are living at the time. When we were overseas, I never let the kids yearn for somewhere else. We would never talk about Australia as if we were going to go back ‘home’. And we never had it in our head than we would – we were where we were.”

It’s not just your first home that you can’t go back to, either – the same goes for any place or experience. Says Amanda: “I can’t yearn for our Hong Kong experience because if we went back now it would be a different one. Same with going back to the UK. We worked hard to make a home exactly where we were. You just have to adapt and that makes for a happy posting.”

Amanda doesn’t think this will be her last “posting”, either. “When we came back [to Brisbane], people said, ‘That’s so great that you’re finally settling down.’ But we’re not settling down, we’re taking a moment to get organised, and then we’re going to go again. I don’t know where, how or why, but it’s always a possibility. If my husband came home and said we’re moving to Singapore tomorrow, my bag would be packed,” she says.

After six years living in New York, Jessica Hart feels like she has two homes; the one where her old friends and families are, and the one she calls her base – for now, at least. “No one could live in New York forever,” she says. “But for now it’s great. Every time I land I get a warm fuzzy feeling.”

She’s not adverse to packing her bags and making a new home, though. “Then again, as I look out this window I wish I lived in Paris,” Hart muses.

She pauses. “I think I will move here, actually.”