My tearful farewell to my son cast new light on the foreign student ‘industry’

I was 22, saying goodbye to my parents at the Sydney international terminal. Suddenly finding his last words, my dad rushed up, grabbed my shoulders, and yelped: “Don’t trust anybody!”

Characteristically, it didn’t come out as he wanted. In the long time I was away, I wondered what he actually meant. Something about his fears and anxieties, but really a chaotic, semi-coherent expression of love. It was left to me to build a bridge between what he said and what he meant. Dad’s no longer alive but I’m still working on the bridge. This week, my son – also 22 – said goodbye to us at the same airport. Compared with that long-ago day, there were a lot more tears; and as the dad, I kept the words to a minimum.

We speak about the international student “industry” as if families send their children to Australia in a ruthless act of plunder, not an agonising severance.Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto

The circumstances are different. My son is off to study and build a career, maybe forever. I was off with a backpack and no plan other than to place all my trust in complete strangers. What I had never fully appreciated until now was what the parent feels at the airport: the shearing physical pain of having your guts ripped out of your insides.

Children leaving their parents, parents losing their children, is of course a rite of passage and a pivot in our lives and all of the obvious things. My ache is the first-world kind. According to UNESCO, about 15,000 Australian tertiary students enrol overseas each year, a privileged minority, some of whom, like my son (a musician), can do so thanks to generous sponsors and supporters in their artistic community.

Some 94,000 Australian citizens leave the country each year, most in their 20s, with the outflow reaching its peak at 24 years old. I am making an assumption when I say that each of them tears out a piece of their parents’ hearts. Being proud of them and being broken are not incompatible.

Elsewhere, in another country split by migration anxiety, our son will become that maligned other: the temporary visa holder, the overseas student. Immigration is a topic cynically used to divide populations against each other. It might not be such a weapon if we considered how many immigrants are in pain and divided from someplace or somebody where their heart resides.

Of the 717,500 international students currently in Australia, much is said about the burden they place on housing and jobs, the warp factor they exercise on educational priorities, the commercialising impact they have on universities, and the opportunities they provide for exploiters. These negative observations produce a reaction, such as the federal government this week capping enrolments at 270,000 next year, 53,000 fewer than last year.

In the brutal air of such debates – the most positive spin Education Minister Jason Clare could put on it is that education is our “biggest export we don’t dig out of the ground” – the unspoken story is about the hole the foreign student leaves in their family. We speak about the international student “industry” as if families send their children to Australia in a ruthless act of plunder, not an agonising severance of hundreds of thousands of loving relationships.

Separation of parents from children in Australia cannot be mentioned without the subtext of coercion. This is not to place different kinds of family separation on a par; it is to connect us to our past, and we don’t need a history lesson to reaffirm how, since 1788, our houses are built on a bedrock of separated families. These all have their own singularities and if they can be mentioned in the same breath, it is because Australians all have some share in that primal heartbreak. In every community, whether separation is theft or resettlement or the search for opportunity, through every layer from dispossession to adventure, a parent’s tears are a parent’s tears.

The story would be incomplete if we did not mention how many families are experiencing the exact opposite of separation: enforced togetherness. The latest HILDA (Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia) survey tracks the “boomerang children” effect. Since 2000, the number of Australians aged 18 to 29 living in the parental home increased by around 10 per cent, a large quotient having left and moved back in. More than half of the respondents felt that anyone over the age of 26 should be living away from their parents. The increase was taken to be forced on twentysomethings by the housing market, increased participation in (expensive) graduate education programs, and the lingering results of the COVID pandemic. I’m not going to speculate on whether boomeranging children enhance or diminish family cohesion and happiness.

But our children have left and may not ever boomerang. If a child leaving their parents’ home is voluntary and propelled by high hopes, then everyone is meant to count their blessings. After they’ve finished crying.

As for last words, decades ago my dad’s had a chance to stay in my head without further elaboration. Phone calls were prohibitively expensive and unreliable mail took forever. Don’t trust anybody? You couldn’t trust 1980s communications. By the time I could ask him what he’d meant, he’d forgotten he’d said it.

Now, the technology we spend so much time distrusting – the social media platforms, the WhatsApp groups, the smartphone hegemony – is our salvation. Often, thanks to that same technology, separated families talk more than they do when they’re in the same home.

Our son might be gone forever. If his career plans go as he wishes, he won’t be back in Australia for a very long time. It hasn’t hit me yet. Humans have a great capacity to fend off realities and, when it comes to their complicated feelings, to mix pros into their cons. He might, like me when I was 22, come back earlier than expected, wrenched by the shocks of loneliness and homesickness. We can only hope.

Illustration: Simon LetchCredit:

I went for a last surf with him this week. It’s been our primary way of bonding since he was five. The waves didn’t look fabulous, and he said, “Hopefully I’ll have a bad session and I won’t get sad about how much I’ll miss it.” But he can make any waves good, and unfortunately, he had one last nice surf to regret.

I had to go away for another blubber before writing this next bit. My mother, his grandmother, went to pieces when she said goodbye because she’s not sure she’ll see him again. His sister, who’s spent years bickering with him, went to pieces because of how much she’s going to miss him. Family Jenga: pull one piece away, the rest crash down.

These experiences are meant to build our empathy for others who have suffered loss, and make us appreciate what we have. This weekend, while my son will be in the air on his way to becoming a foreign student – and trusting whoever he can trust himself to trust – we will be at a wedding. My mother’s eldest grandson, my son’s eldest cousin, starts a new stage of life.

I’m too gutted to say something convincingly philosophical about the turning of the wheel, but here it is, it’s upon us.

Malcolm Knox is an author and regular columnist.

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