Love conquers almost all

While True Blue Aussies understand perfectly when Nicole Kidman says she wants to come home, they are not kind to anyone who complains. A trapped parent is seen a just another whingeing boomerang Pom (or other nationality).

And so the conversation goes:

“If you don’t like it here, why don’t you go home!”
“… I would, but the children.”
“Then take them with you.”
“Their mother/father might have something to say about that!”
“Oh.”

It’s not easy to fly solo in this country and it is not a particularly welcoming or easy culture to survive in. Perhaps no culture is.

Different personalities respond differently: often in silence and with great courage. Some fight in the courts. A few years ago a case in the High Court concerned a mother who, the court ruled, had to choose between home and child. Choosing the child, (as the vast majority of mothers do) she told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2002 that she was trapped in “a living death” of poverty and alienation, in sharp contrast from her life in her homeland.

Feeling trapped, sometimes a mother or father will take the child and run. Or perhaps they refuse to return after a holiday home.

The stark legal term is “parent abduction” and since 1980 the Hague Convention has been the international legal standard for dealing with parent abductions. According to this international treaty, children must be sent back to the country of their “habitual residence’ for custody to be decided.

Twenty-five years ago the Hague Convention was seen as a legal weapon against non-custodial fathers who spirited their children away from their mothers. Since then 65 countries have agreed to the convention and now it deals mostly with custodial mothers who want to leave failed or violent marriages.

The Hague Convention goes against the grain for courts inclined to favour their own country’s citizens, or courts that normally make the best interests of the child their priority. Children abducted to Denmark, France or Germany are unlikely to ever return. But the courts of the countries where most Australian children are taken - New Zealand and the UK - are likely to order a return.

Inter-country abduction by a parent is a classic no-win situation. Everyone loses: mother, father and child.

There’s no cure for terminal homesickness, so prevention is the only approach.

Advocacy group, Fathers for Life, takes a radical preventive approach: “Advice to Young Men - Tip #372: Don't marry someone with family overseas!”