Love is love
Kiwi expat Hannah Spyksma arrived in Brisbane as the debate on Australia’s same-sex marriage referendum was heating up. She was delighted by the result, but it came at a cost.
Iwas home alone the December evening that Malcolm Turnbull announced marriage equality was “a win for Australian values”.
It was such an exciting moment that I took a photo of the TV news for posterity, then ran out to the balcony to see if the rest of the world on the street below was also cheering for the bill passing. They weren’t.
Well, it’s not that nobody was celebrating – there were huge parties around the country, and had been earlier when the postal vote was announced too. But it’s just that where I was, in inner-city Brisbane, the leaves were still blowing in the wind and that roaming cat was still wandering the street with her bell tinkling.
Life seemed to be continuing pretty much as it had a few moments earlier. It was, in all, a bit of an anti-climax. Which was, an absolute contrast to the intensity of the past several months since I moved to Australia.
My partner, Chloe Fill, and I moved from Auckland to Brisbane in February 2017 – in love and gleeful at having made our first big move as a couple. Our arrival was almost in unison with the debate in Australia’s Parliament heating up about whether people like us should be able to legally marry here.
We were still in the honeymoon phase of our relationship, having met mid-2015. I hadn’t given the topic of marriage, or even my sexuality, for that matter, much thought in a while.