“Sure…. come stay with me” says Billy Zeik Kelleher on Facebook. Excellent, I thought. A night or two at his parent’s place in Melbourne would be great before I go off exploring and find a hostel. I’ve been to Melbourne before to stay with my friend Mel and it was much more my sort of place than Sydney. It’s very arty, a bit more edgy and the people are more normal-looking. I also had the best ever meal of my life in Melbourne last time at a restaurant called LongGrain. So, yeah, I was excited. A cheap flight down from Sydney arrived late at night and Billy kindly agreed to tear himself away from the hectic summer social life of a 19yr old and stay sober enough to pick me up from where Tiger airlines spat me out. It’s such a budget airline, you get off the plane, walk across the tarmac to a metal shed, root about for your bag and then go through a metal turn style into the carpark. No frills. It’s also in a different continent to the actual airport.
I cannot tell you how great it was to see Billy. although we had only spent a few weeks together in northern Laos, they had been very memorable and it was great hang out with him on his home turf.
Billy lives with his Mum; Christy (I call her Cathy), Dad; Trev, sister; Skye and 2 dogs in a place called Altona in a house in a quiet street that fronts on to a golf course. It’s surrounded by marshland and some wicked industrial plantations. The bluest sky I have ever seen was the back drop for these fantastic factories and warehouses. I loved it and was always hanging out the car window flapping my lens.


I stayed in Billy’s ‘Shed’ in the garden and was given my first introduction to a proper Aussie family and their home. Billy had often talked about his front yard while we were away and not I got to see why he missed it so much. He didn’t mention the volume of mosquitos though or, to honest, I’d have never have gone. The tennis-racket shaped electric bug bat was too addictive.

So, rather than make me feel like this old English bird was cramping his style, Billy was the perfect host and tour guide. He took me all over the place- beaches, towns, jetties, cafes, pointing at things out the window and for a brilliant breakfast where he discovered olive tapenade and I discovered the best Bloody Mary of my trip. He took me to places he thought I’d like to take pictures and to an art exhibition of work from a local college in a cool old pump house. It was shut but we went in anyway.

He bravely introduced me to all his lovely friends, most of which are very talented, wise and clever and the opposite of what I was like at the beginning of my 20’s. They also could have been my kids if I had been sexually active at 13. (I wasn’t, Mum) My favourites were: Kiah- a brilliant photographer and like a pretty little sprite, Ash- very clever and will one day build a Lego city and Tom Canny- a bit of a lose cannon who will probably go off the rails at some point in his life.
Did you know that the Australians say that someone playing in ‘goal’ for a team, is ‘Playing in goals’ HA!!! can you believe it? goalS!? they put an S on the end! HHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. I found this funnier than they did. Whatever.

When I got too embarrassing, Billy and I went on a road trip. We packed up his blue car and went down the Great Ocean Road to the 12 Apostles (6.5 now though due to fallage into the sea)
I am sat here trying to write about this and I genuinely am a bit stumped about how to write how great it was. I really think it was one of the best things I have ever done. We shared driving, shared fags, drank coffee, got cold, made fires, over-wined, checked the surf, played guitar, bbq’d meat-socks, musically educated each other, talked shit, talked sense, talked life/love/longitude and bonded for 3 days.

I wanted to go into the city and have a wander so billy and Tom Canny went for a skate and I pottered about, went to an exhibition and pretended that I didn’t still have toothache.

I wanted to bring something to the family that would be traditionally British. Looking a bit like Lily Allen seemed to be enough for Trev, but the only thing to do that seemed sensible was to insist that we have a family drinking game of ‘Centurion’. This is when you do a shot of beer, every minute, for a hundred minutes. I learned this many Christmases ago with the Obbard family and, to be honest, it just ain’t Jesus’ birthday without it. The Kelleher family collective were not too keen on this so I compromised with a half-centurion. We drove to the drive-thru bottle shop to collect the beer. On the way back, and probably fed up with me harping on about the landscape and photos, Christy/Cathy suddenly turned down a gravel path next to the railway and we bumped along the side of the track, Skye and I bobbing about in the back, snapping away out the window and clinging to boxes of clinking beer bottles. I’m sure it was illegal.

So, Centurion went like this:
Skye: 11
Trev: 32
Christy/Cathy 49, tactical chunder, 50
Billy 50
Jules 50 but obviously could have done 100

Well played team.

As if to punish me for having a lovely time, and trying to ignore it for a while, my tooth decided to grow an abscess. During a party that Billy was having. I felt it growing and growing. I bailed and tried to sleep and hide my face from the lumpy horror.
At 6.45 the next morning, with a face an inch short of being the Elephant Man’s female doppleganger, I shuffled into the Kitchen to show Christy/Cathy. In turn her face, bearing in mind she has been through childbirth twice, was quite a shocked picture and she cancelled all her plans and drove me to the hospital to get drugs. Thank you Christy/Cathy. Thank you.

I lay on the sofa all day watching movies with Skye and eating lovely scrambled egg that my surrogate mum made me.

One thing I had to do before I left Melbourne was go and see Alex, that i had met at the Elephant Nature park. I’d been out with Mel, his better half the week before in the city but he’d been working so Billy and I went to St.Kilda on the other side of the bay to surprise him. We took the ferry from Williamstown into the centre of the city ducking under all the low bridges. Alex worked at the cafe at the end of the St. Kilda Pier. I fell over twice on the way down the Pier like a 5 year old and had a blooded knee and ripped my leggings. We caught up and ate delicious food. (Ooh Billy- remember you were going to go and play squash…)

My time in Melbourne was over. With more of a heavy heart and a slightly more emptying feeling than I can explain as I got on the plane, I flew back to Sydney to see lovely Hayley. I wasn’t sad to be going back to Sydney, I was just sad that this special time was over. Billy’s family were so lovely to me and I will never forget the dog walk on the marsh, the barefoot bowling, the lemon stealing mission that we got so wrong, all the anti-inflamatories, the banana writing, the massive heart-to-hearts and the feeling of family that is so strong in the Kelleher household. And in Billy, as unlikely as it looks on paper, I found my soulmate. Melbourne, I will be back.

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