Moving to Melbourne: from bedbugs and tears to building a career

My move to Australia had an inauspicious beginning. My parents would be selling my childhood home and moving to another country a few months after I left the northern hemisphere for the south, so my possessions faced an ultimatum. Everything must go – to Australia, or into the bin. There was no third option.

Determined to outfox the 23-kilogram limit imposed by the airline, I figured out what I thought was the perfect way to game the system: Just wear everything onto the plane. Then I’d have the weight allowance to bring my collection of original Broadway cast CDs and an ugly bathrobe to which I had an unreasonable attachment. I was clad in tights, leggings, track pants and loose jeans, and several singlets, long-sleeved T-shirts, a few jackets and a winter coat.

We went to St Kilda, because it was the only suburb anyone in Ireland had heard of.

Sadly, this was seven years before the all-female Ghostbusters movie, because I would have made an absolutely perfect Stay Puft Marshmallow. If you think a 26-hour journey is uncomfortable, well, you probably haven’t done it wearing everything you own. It levels up a miserable experience to one that is truly hellish. Going through security in Dublin and Dubai were their own particular tortures.

It was February, which meant I was a little too warmly dressed for the 6 degrees it was when I boarded the plane in Dublin. If anyone else had forced me to wear that many clothes in the 40-degree Melbourne heat on the other end, they probably would have gone to prison.

As I’d done it to myself, I had to go to an un-airconditioned youth hostel in St Kilda, the accommodation my partner and I had booked because it was very cheap and in the only suburb anyone in Ireland had ever heard of.

Were we slightly leery when we read online reviews that the place was infested with bedbugs? “That was several months ago,” we said with the callous disregard for personal comfort common in 23-year-olds. “Surely they will have dealt with them by now.”

Cassidy Knowlton after moving to Melbourne.

If you are wiser than I was (which is almost certain), you know that they absolutely had not. The overnight 35-degree increase in temperature was not kind to a body that, although raised in New York, had become used to Irish winters. Hydration was not the absolute cultural obsession it is now, and I was ill-prepared for the heatwave.

I spent a lot of those first few days throwing up into the hostel toilet while bedbugs and fleas raised lines of welts on my bare legs. I could actually see them jumping on my skin as I lay in a bed that hundreds or thousands of backpackers had slept in before me.

We had no jobs and little money, but we found another un-airconditioned apartment in St Kilda, near enough to our hostel that the bedbugs were able to make the journey with us. My partner was studying during the day while I tried to find a job.

With no Australian experience and several degrees from foreign universities, this was not an easy prospect. I had done internships, but none in the correct hemisphere that would give me the connections I’d need to get my foot in the door of the world of Australian journalism.

“I didn’t know a soul in the country except my partner.”

I sent out CV after CV in between rounds of boiling or freezing all the clothing and linens to try to drive out our uninvited hostel hangers-on. I remember vividly sitting on the floor of my unfurnished apartment, knowing not a soul in the country except my partner, crying hot tears of loneliness and frustration as I scratched at the maddening, perennial bites.

They were very different tears eight years later, when I proudly took my oath of citizenship. To this day I still well up at Qantas ads, remembering how my heart felt full enough to burst as we new Australians sang I Still Call Australia Home in Glen Eira Town Hall. I now have a wonderful career I love and a community of friends who make me joyful every day.

I will always be grateful to my first Australian boss, who took a chance on me and let me prove I was willing to make the four-hour round trip commute to Fairfax Community Network’s Dandenong office via pushbike and train.

My home is blessedly bedbug free, though I have learned constant vigilance when travelling. In the intervening 16 years, I’ve thrown away or donated every one of those hateful items of clothing I wore on that plane.

Though I no longer own a CD player, I still have my Broadway cast recordings of Rent, Les Miserables and most of the oeuvre of Andrew Lloyd Webber. And you know what? I was right to bring it. I still wear that bathrobe.

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