ILLEGIBLE NEW ZEALAND CITIZEN

By Meg Mason

Should future generations be inclined to ask, ‘I was hold with the Department of Immigration and Home Affairs’ will be my answer to question, what were you doing when the pandemic broke out?

And, ‘On hold, still,’ my answer to the possible follow-up, how did you spend Australia’s first lockdown?

I suspect their interest wouldn’t sustain further enquiry, but if you might wonder what I learned from three months, progressing in a queue but never quite to the head of it by, either, close of business or before carrying out a day’s weft with the phone cradled between my head and neck caused a sudden, shooting pain down one side and I would be forced to hang up, and gird my loins to redial the next day –I would say two things. I learned, two things.

First, Pachelbel's Canon is the worst piece of music ever composed. And when a synthetic arrangement of just the first movement is alternated with a pre-recorded directive to visit the website instead, because there exists the answer to my every immigration-related query, even though it categorically does not and I know that because I am on the website right now, Pachelbel’s Canon becomes something closer to an aural hate crime. 

And second, although I moved to Australia when I was 16, and have – apart from a brief spell in London – resided here permanently since, I am not a permanent resident. 

Twenty-five years, it turns out, of living and working and tax-paying does not automatically confer that status in the Lucky Country, as I had sort of assumed. Neither does marrying an Australian citizen, or breeding them yourself. I have made two Australians in my body but, according to a customer service agent called Scott, I remain here on the visa that gave me first admittance as a minor,with my parents, who long ago lost all related paperwork: the Subclass 444 Special Category Visa, which is for New Zealanders only and which is temporary. For a quarter of a century, I have been here on a temporary visa.

Why the issue had even arisen: my novel was about to come out and the publisher intended to put it forward for Australia’s literary prizes, a condition of each, entrants must be citizens or permanent residents. If I hadn’t been moved, for whatever reason, to confirm that I definitely was a resident, we could have maintained plausible deniability and just entered, a thought that recurred whenever I found myself back at the opening strains of the Canon, which is, I learned, constituted of just eight bars that simply repeat themselves in different registers 28 times. Like a toddler who wants something. Or an immigration department that wants you to hang up.

I was indescribably excited when Scott, a human, interrupted it by coming on the line after six weeks of it. During that time, I had put together a picture of my status from the website, even though it is not so much a lineally-progressing experience, as a diabolically circular one – metaphorically speaking, eight bars of content that simply repeat themselves, returning you again and again to the first. 

I will not take you further into the particulars of visa classes and their different eligibility requirements because you haven’t done anything wrong. But for a sense of the challenge, I would just quote here, the summary description of the 444, which appears under the peculiarly injunctive heading, STAY.

‘From the time you are granted the visa, until you leave Australia unless it ceases because of other reasons. These may include if we grant you a permanent visa, you become an Australian citizen or we cancel the visa.’

Depending on your emphasis, and it is totally self-selecting based on the absence of meaningful commas, it is a description both menacing and confusing, a ransom note written by a kidnapper who has no truck demonstrative pronouns either.

Still, I had acquired from it, the understanding that New Zealanders can progress straight from a 444 to citizenship, bypassing the two-year process of becoming a resident first, as long as they were present here for a sum total of 365 of days out of the two years prior to February 21, 2001. Which I was. 

It was Scott who disabused me of that notion and told me that because of holiday I took in 1999, I was six days short. And therefore, he said, an illegible New Zealand citizen.

I cannot describe my confusion in the moment. First, because I hadn’t submitted anything written and, had I been after an Exceptional Talent visa, I would have got it on the grounds of my pristine handwriting. Then, when I realised the cream of the customer services crop meant I was an ineligible New Zealand citizen, I was disbelieving; that a trip I took at 21 could cost me now at 42.

And then I was furious, then rude, telling Scott before I hung up that I didn’t want to become a citizen anyway. Not adding, of your boiling hot snake-factory of a country with its brown rivers, and lakes that aren’t classified as the scientifically-clearest in the world. And, if you had been to New Zealand, Scott, you would agree, national parks that look, in comparison to ours, like expanses of protected dust. Not a single majestic mountain range soaring above a glacial fiord to bless itself with. And good luck hearing a tūī, while you’re walking to Briscoes, because neither of those things exist here.

Then I was devastated. Not because of the prizes. The chance of a comedy about chronic mental illness sweeping the field felt vanishingly small. I was devastated because New Zealand still feels like home but for two thirds of my life, Australia has been my actual home. And, lack of fiords to one side, I do like it. I love it. I have been lucky here. But I don’t belong here, I had just been told. I am a temporary. I could be made to leave, at any time, for any number of reasons.

The shock and emotional import of this new knowledge might have been less in ordinary times. But these were not ordinary times. While I was holding for Scott, New Zealand was closing its borders. If I were made to leave now, I would have nowhere to go. And, suddenly, we weren’t allowed to go anywhere, which produced in me the strangest sense of being simultaneously trapped and untethered, interned and exiled. The belief that I could always just go home has been a given throughout my adult life and sustained me in the kind of seasons that make us want to flee to the familiar and safe. The idea of home has been a chief concern all my writing life. 

Feeling as I did, the best thing would have been not to read Janet Frame, the author from whom that concern is borrowed. Feeling as I did, I went straight to Janet Frame, the author whose house in Levin I used to wander past on my way to the dairy, age five and six, when I was staying with my grandmother who lived two streets away. The author whose snowdrops and freesias and forget-me-nots I would have picked, as long as they were growing through the fence, which was the rule. The author who has, ever since I left, been my quickest route back between real returnings. Opportunities to, as I once described to my husband, ‘touch my earth.’ 

In the magical way of books, I picked up the one that would resonate with me the most just then. TOWARDS ANOTHER SUMMER, about a woman called Grace,who believes she is turning into a migratory bird. This passage: ‘I'm not there, she thought. I'm not there. I'm nowhere. She felt the world go dark with sudden exclusion and she was beating her wings against the door of the dark but no one opened the door; indeed, no one heard.’

There were tears. So many tears from the lingering shock, a new kind of homesickness, both acute and useless, from the diffused fear the pandemic put in all of us, not knowing what was going to happen, when we might get back to the normal business of doing and being and going. When doors would all open. 

If we are forced by circumstances to be static, we are agitated by the desire to move. Grounded, the only thing we want to do is fly. Movement is so much easier than stillness. But at a door, if no one comes, we just wait. Through uncertainty and discomfort, we stay, just standing there, hoping so waiting for the thing we want.

As readers and writers, we are the lucky ones because, in the wait, we can go anywhere we want. Like Grace, we have ‘a passion for the sunlight of memory’ which gives us, in mind, permanent and unlimited powers of transport. In body, if we are even holding a book, we are likely to be still. And rarely, doing one thing at a time.

Grace says, ‘I – a migratory bird – am suffering from the need to return to the place I have come from before the season and sun are right for my return.’

Presently, so am I. I know what another writer described as the most paradoxical of human emotions which imbues that novel; an emigre’s longing for home. I have been allowed to experience Frame’s sense of being constantly drawn back to a place we chose to leave, sometimes longing for it, sometimes resenting the fact we’ll never get free of the where-ever was first. And I can do it. This is what I have learned. I can be still in it. I can survive not being able to fly. I can live for however long I have to on hold. Another way. If Pachelbel did not kill me, neither will this.