My Viennese Whirl

I never expected that I would live in Vienna. But here I am.

I live in Vienna because I like Vienna. And I feel lucky to live in a place I like. I feel lucky to live in a place that I could choose and which put up no barriers to me being there. But, the circumstances that brought me to Vienna were not as simple as a passport nor as romantic as being called back by my ancestral roots. Loss and trauma landed me in Vienna—the same forces that drove my grandparents out. On the 7th April 2022, I lost my home. And the prospect of rebuilding it in a country that I felt ambivalent affection for on the other side of the world, where my permission to reside was attached to a visa with a litany of requirements that could be terminated at any time, seemed at best unappealing at worst untenable. When your house burns down—perhaps especially when you watch your house burn down and comprehend that you had a home at lunchtime and by dinnertime you do not—the world becomes shaky. The impermanence of things derailed me; that things I counted on could evaporate so quickly was terrifying. To rebuild a home in a country where I had lived for just a few years, with no family, no blood ties, no tethers that cracked the surface of Australia’s parched vermillion earth, was impossible. I needed something firmer, a place with solid ground where roots could bind me. 

A few weeks after the fire, I returned to the UK. It was the first time I had been back since moving to Melbourne, having been barricaded in by the pandemic. Although I had no plans to return to Australia, I also had no plans to stay in the UK, a country which I had been escaping for over a decade. So, after my sister’s wedding in Sicily, my boyfriend and I travelled up the boot of Italy, and then some, until we arrived in Vienna. It’s a cliché, no? You go for a visit and never leave. But Vienna is more entrenched in me than that. And my boyfriend and I were tired and sad. Travelling is not so fun when circumstances have bent your arm in such a way that having no home address and only the belongings you can carry are forced upon you. The rootlessness of travelling is not so desirable when you feel blasted into a million pieces as it is. But in Vienna, there was not only the comfortable practicalities of an apartment where we could stay but something less tangible and more encompassing that made sense. I’m struck repeatedly by this feeling. Because although I have lived in seven different places across four different countries and three different continents, Vienna is the only one I have hit upon that feels like I belong. So the circumstances that brought me to Vienna are steeped in luck, bad and good; spurred by trauma, personal and intergenerational. I cannot ignore the siren song of my ancestors calling me back to a place they never stopped loving despite the lack of love it showed them.

In the months I have been here, I have been acutely aware of the history surrounding me; the gaps in my understanding of my origins are glaring. So, I have begun patching these up by collecting stories. Stories wrung from fuzzy minds, blanks filled in, inscribed meanings, fragmentary recollections, misremembered tales that are prone to mutation. But story is perhaps the very best we can hope for to understand where we have come from, where we are going, and who we are now.