I’m locked out of voting this election. I feel less Australian than ever

I haven’t lived in Australia for 12 years, but I keep finding myself here at election time. My last trip back was long awaited after enduring two years of solid border closures and happened to coincide with the 2022 federal election. This year, I’m here to launch a book while my fellow Australians decide whether to hand another term to Labor, return to the Coalition, or have another go at a minority government.

Sadly, Australian elections have become a spectator sport for me. I fell off the electoral roll some time during the long pandemic years, and the good folks at the electoral commission told me I couldn’t re-enrol from outside the country. No democracy sausage for me.

Author Megan Clement migrated to Australia from the UK as a teenager.Credit: Claire Jaillard

That’s not all I lost during Australia’s long period of sealing itself off from the rest of the world.

For many, the pandemic was an opportunity to reflect on where we truly wanted to live. For some, that meant returning to Australia as soon as possible. For me, it created an ambivalence towards a place I used to call home. Five years after the borders first closed, I somehow feel less Australian than ever.

I migrated to Australia from the UK as a teenager, becoming a citizen in 2004. I quickly and enthusiastically adopted the identity – footy, Cup Day, Tim Tams, the lot. Life in Melbourne was as liveable as everyone said it would be, and I grew to love its unparalleled live music scene, its bars, the roar of the ’G. Melbourne was the city where I found my profession as a journalist, where I fell in love and where I became a passionate supporter of the Melbourne Demons (OK, some bad choices were made).

I left to work in Europe in 2013 and somehow never made it back. I didn’t think that changed my Australianness – until COVID-19 hit.

My father was diagnosed with cancer soon after I left Australia, and I spent the following years ferrying back and forth between my new and old homes to be with him when I could, through surgeries and rounds of chemo. When I was back, we’d walk with the dog around our local oval, pop over to Cinema Nova for a film and then discuss it over ricotta panzerotti at Brunetti.

Then COVID-19 struck, the borders closed, and his condition took a turn for the worse. When it was clear the end was coming, I boarded a plane at an empty Charles de Gaulle Airport and went through 14 days of hotel quarantine, hoping he would last long enough for me to say goodbye in person.

He did. On July 7, 2020, the day after I got out of quarantine, my father died of cancer at home in East Brunswick. On July 8, Melbourne went into a lockdown that would become the world’s longest. We held no funeral (restrictions meant we couldn’t), and so I returned to Paris and tried to support my family remotely while they were confined to different neighbourhoods for months on end. It would be two years of waiting for Australia to reopen to the world before I saw them again.

In 2021, my nephew was born, but I didn’t meet him until he was a bouncing toddler. In September that year, my beloved Dees won their first premiership for 57 years in virus-free Perth. I watched at the Cafe Oz in Paris and wept with a mix of joy and sadness.

The hardest thing during those years was not that the borders were closed – before vaccines arrived I understood they had to be – but with how unconcerned those inside Australia seemed to be about shutting off from the rest of the world. Especially in a nation where 30 per cent of people were born in another country, and nearly half have a parent born elsewhere. After my own stint in quarantine, I watched in horror as the Australian government enacted a total travel ban on citizens returning from India during an apocalyptic outbreak of COVID-19 there, denying them the same chance I’d had to return. It seemed some of us were more Australian than others.

I could not vote in the Voice referendum, the devastating result of which I struggled to explain to friends in Europe. My only explanation was that Australia’s national sport is not cricket but forgetting: refusing to grapple with difficult questions about who we are and what has been done in our name.

These days, home is in the inner suburbs of Paris with my partner and our scruffy rescue dog. Last year, I applied for French citizenship. If I get it, I’ll be able to vote in French elections for the rest of my life, even if I leave. In that case, there would be an MP in parliament – one of 11 – to represent my interests and all those of French people who emigrate.

Becoming French shouldn’t make me less Australian than a pandemic did, but perhaps I didn’t understand the terms of the deal when I sang the national anthem at that citizenship ceremony two decades ago. Maybe the least Australian thing about me is my inability to forget.

Megan Clement is a journalist in Paris. Her memoir, Desire Paths, was published this week by Ultimo Press.

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