Why Malta

People keep asking why we're doing all this for Malta. Not Paris, not Rome, not somewhere with a queue outside it. A small island most Australians couldn't place on a map.

The answer is that I'm from there. But the longer answer is more tangled than that, and I think it's the reason this whole trip matters to me more than the points ever will.

The back and forth

My grandparents were Maltese. They left the island for Sydney, the way a lot of Maltese families did, and they raised my mum and my aunty here. So my mum is Australian — Australian-Maltese, technically, but she grew up in Sydney like any other kid.

Then my dad came to Sydney on a working holiday. He met my mum. They got married. And when they started thinking about having children, they decided they wanted to raise them in Malta.

So back they went. To the island my grandparents had left.

Which is how I came to be born and raised in a small village called Mġarr, on the outskirts, on the road that runs down to Golden Bay.

And then at seventeen I came to Australia. Officially it was a holiday — a look around, see whether I liked living here. I never went back.

My grandparents left Malta for Sydney. My parents left Sydney for Malta. I left Malta for Sydney. And now I'm taking my son the other way again.

Four generations of the same short journey, made in alternating directions, each time for reasons that felt entirely sensible to the person making it.

What I actually miss

I'm not going to romanticise this, because I don't miss it the way people expect.

I miss the food. Constantly, and specifically. There's nothing here that's quite it.

I miss the beaches — not beaches in general, which Sydney has in abundance, but those beaches.

I miss being able to walk places. Actually walk, to actual things, without it being a project. That's the bit of European life that never quite leaves you once you've had it: the shop, the bar, the water, your cousin's house, all within reach of your own feet.

And I miss the shape of the days there. The lifestyle, for want of a less brochure-sounding word.

The part I don't often say out loud

Here's the honest bit, and I've hesitated over whether to include it.

I love Malta. I'm genuinely glad I grew up there. And I don't want to live there again.

It's a rocky, dry island. Beautiful in a stark, sun-bleached, limestone kind of way — but dry. And somewhere along the way I worked out that greenery does something to my happiness that I can't really explain and can't do without. Sydney has it. Malta doesn't, not in the way I seem to need.

I don't want to work there. I don't want to build a life there. That decision was made at seventeen and every year since has confirmed it.

Both things are true, and I've stopped feeling like I need to resolve them.

So why go for months?

Because of a small boy who's currently two and a half, and who has no idea any of this exists.

I want him to have a slice of what my childhood looked and felt like. Not a summary of it, not photos of it — a stretch of actual time in it. Long enough that it stops being a holiday and starts being ordinary. Long enough that the village becomes somewhere he's been rather than somewhere his mum is from.

And I want him to spend real time with my parents. Not a fortnight of best behaviour and airport goodbyes. Weeks. Enough that they get to be regular grandparents rather than people on a screen.

That's the whole reason for the months. You can see Malta in a week. You cannot become part of a household in a week.

Why now, and why so long

I last went in 2023, with my then-boyfriend — now my husband — who'd never been. We did Rome, Naples, Sorrento, Lake Como and Pisa first, then a couple of weeks in Malta.

Before that, the gaps have been longer than I intended. I always tell myself every two to four years. Then life happens, and it doesn't.

The plan is to go while I'm on maternity leave, which is the one window where an extended stay is actually possible rather than theoretical. It's the difference between two weeks and a proper stretch of time — and it's why the whole points project exists. Flights for a family of four, on points, is what makes the length of the trip affordable at all.

What I'm hoping for

Realistically he'll be four, going on five. He probably won't remember most of it.

I've made my peace with that. Because I don't think it's really about what he'll remember — it's about what will feel familiar later. The particular light. The smell of my mum's kitchen. The sound of a language he doesn't speak but has heard before.

My grandparents left. My parents went back. I left again. Somewhere in all that, a place stopped being where anyone lives and started being where we're from.

I'd like him to have a version of it that's his own.

That's why Malta. All of this, for that.