How a Tassie minibreak reminded a family of what they meant to each other.

There’s always something. A deadline. A sick child. That friend you haven’t seen for ages. Point in any direction and you’ll find abundant reason to push aside that ‘we should go’ idea. And while intentions of a trip with the family are honestly meant in the moment, they tend to dissipate in the fog of daily endeavour.

Greetings from the middle of the sandwich! Where life is sticky and spread thin between parenting, work commitments and showing up for your own aging parents. With family members geographically adrift or occupationally encumbered, coordinating travel around schedules is tricky. For most of us, it’s regrettably low on the list of must-dos.

So here’s a melancholic fact to move that multi-gen trip to the top of your list. By the time you are 20, you have spent 90 per cent of the time you ever will with your parents. Yep, that sure does hit you in the heart centre. And perhaps doubly so for parents of younger children, who white-knuckle that all-consuming Gravitron of love as it spins turbulently in a parade of sleepless nights, lunchbox dramas and Pokemon obsessions – while trying desperately to appreciate every moment.

In the last five years, I’ve returned to my hometown with my young family to be closer to my OG one. But even without the impediments of distance, connecting is confoundingly hit and miss. I drop my children off at my parents with a quick kiss and a thanks, but always have to rush to meet a deadline, make a meeting or catch a plane. There’s no time for a coffee, let alone an extra-curricular trip away.

But here’s the thing, if you’re like me, unless a wealthy benefactor appears from obscurity and bestows upon you millions of dollars, work is not stopping. Life is, hopefully, not stopping. So it’s up to us to pause and make time for each other. After all, what on earth could possibly be more important than those we treasure most?

My mum, an artist, has always wanted to go to MONA. She hadn’t been to Tasmania for about 50 years. So my sisters and I cleared the calendar and made the commitment to take her to Hobart for a few days. We should have done it so much sooner. But it’s been a busy 20 years with businesses run and sold, careers pursued, knots tied (and untied), six children ranging from 19 to four years old between us, and decades lived elsewhere. Still, here we are. It’s never too late, until it is. So, hesitate not.

In case you’re still on the fence about it, here are some things I discovered on our multi-gen trip to Hobart.

Being away from everyday life helps you connect.

Remove the tedium of daily life and dynamics certainly do shift. There are, undoubtedly, times for some families when mutli-gen trips are ill-advised. When the dislocation from our normal lives can fuel a crucible of pent-up grievances that boils over in sensational The White Lotus-style drama. Happily, we had much more of a Sense and Sensibility-toned trip, especially given our stunning lodgings at West Hobart’s Lumiere Lodge.

As we entered the historic cottage on a sharply crisp Tasmanian evening, the exquisitely restored home was warmly lit and soothing with a 1920s-era playlist crooning away in the background. In the beautiful French provincial kitchen of everyone’s dreams, a platter of briny oysters begged pairing with the chilled Champagne and cheeses that oozed forth as we spread them on crunchy baguettes.

As a mother and three daughters who share a similar sense of style and appreciation for beautifully made things and moments, Lumiere was singular. The ooh-ing and ahh-ing over each considered detail did not cease for three days. We delighted in everything from a crowned taxidermy duck keeping a beady eye on proceedings to delicate light fittings and oil paintings of bygone matriarchs.

We were giddy in our novel surroundings, not just because they were so consciously curated, but because we were sharing a house again – something we hadn’t done for at least 25 years. Our nightly fireside gatherings here, far removed from things that needed to be done and pressures that weighed heavily, massaged taut bonds and allowed us to relax into each other’s company once more.

How long had it been since the four of us had been away together? I don’t think we had ever done this for more than a day without the rest of the branches in the family tree. It seems astonishing that so much time had passed and not even three days had been allocated for something so important.

Exposure to new things is important as we grow older.

The next day, we set out for what was ostensibly the reason for the trip, MONA. But really, I think we all understood MONA was the excuse for the trip.

We opted for the Posh Pit on the MONA ferry. Because, well, who doesn’t need a little sparkling wine and a canapé at 10am to kickstart some familial bonding? As we skipped up the Derwent River to the sandstone bunker that houses the Museum of Old and New Art, we chatted excitedly in a way that we never would in our usual lives.

The novelty of togetherness away from our normal surroundings fuelled us from disembarkation through the day as we absorbed the absurd and the astonishing at this veritable theme park of art. I noticed my sisters and I intermittently checking in with mum, reading her face, studying her energy levels as we made our way through the ethereally and enigmatic Divine Comedy artwork and through plenty of sexually subversive works, even a computer that digested and excreted, well, excrement. ‘Is she OK with this?’ we queried with glances.

My mother is not unworldly. She spent the first half of her life meandering around the globe. She’s lived in South Africa, was kidnapped in Afghanistan, was propositioned by a Swede in the Alps, roamed India, and (allegedly) didn’t take acid on a beach in Barcelona. Her advice was always to marry an older man and travel before I got hitched. Both of which I have dutifully obeyed. But in the second half of her life, her world has largely shrunk to the acreage of the family farm. Circumstance means she can’t, or won’t, roam too far and I worry how much of life has dissolved into obligation.

But she was here and open to (most) of it. And although she looked genuinely alarmed when a performance artist repurposed her handbag for a skit, she really tried not to panic. When she read the menu at Faro Bar + Restaurant and found a dish titled ‘Fuck art let’s eat’, she stifled her inner prude and ordered it.

Given how much research credits keeping our minds stimulated and active as key factors to aging well, travelling together like this is incredible not just for shared experiences and memory formation, but also to help older generations stay engaged with life. At any age this is good for us, but for our parents and grandparents, it’s imperative to maintain a feeling of connection to a world that increasingly may not feel like theirs.

This is why going away with our parents or grandparents is so rewarding. They’ve guided us through the world when we fully didn’t understand it, and now it’s our turn to push them out of their comfort zones to experience new things.

Time to talk (or not) fills cups.

The next day, we took the ferry to Bruny Island. And here’s a lesson unrelated to family travel – don’t leave the coffee thermos on the kitchen counter. Bruny Island is a gourmand’s must-do, but coffee is woefully absent here.

Although our coffee cups remained unfilled, what Bruny did runneth our cups over with was a stunning, water-hemmed road trip. And that means plenty of time to relax, chat and listen to each other muse on everything from wishful alternate realities to the merits of Phil Collins. Even silence is restorative, because proximity to each other is just… nice. I remembered things about my sisters I’d forgotten, and learned things about Mum I never knew, simply because I’d never made time to ask.

In normal life, there are rarely moments to let conversations dwindle without interruption or to be around each other without logistics to plan. But when all you have to do is get yourself from a cheese tasting at Bruny Island Cheese Company to a whisky flight at Bruny Island House of Whisky, you can enjoy the verbal lulls.

It doesn’t have to be a long trip and it doesn’t have to be all of you.

We’ve done the big multi-gen trips before. We’ve travelled as a three-generational conglomerate back to the homeland in Italy and we’ve done short jaunts closer to home, but what was nice about this trip was that it was just a mother and her children. We didn’t have to assume our roles of parents and grandparents; instead, we could revert back to our original dynamic.

And three days were enough to find that rhythm. Sure, more time would always be nice, but with so many demands on us all these days, it becomes difficult to wrangle. Rather than waiting until everyone can clear a week of annual leave, just take the weekend and do it. Small trips, more often, are just as good.

It’s easy to forget how instrumental family ties are in our lives; sometimes we just need a moment to be together to remember. Remove the stress of cooking the turkey on Christmas Day, potential partners being road-tested at family lunches, and the shuffling of schedules, and you may find there’s still plenty of golden moments to make together.