I'm definitely being unreasonable! Comparing lives with Australians!

[teulie]

Watched a lot of Love Island Australia and MAFS Australia this year and follow a lot of the people from it now. Seeing all their stories all year and today for NYE, the sunshine, the beaches, the groups of girls all just having the best time being young in such a beautiful country with the best sort of lifestyle and it makes me feel sad!

I'm in my late twenties married with two kids, boring job, normal family life style but I look and think god could I of done that? Could life of been like that?

One of my old friends is currently in Australia so I'm seeing their insta stories all day everyday and it's made the pining worse than ever, I've never even been there and I find myself just wishing I could do life again and be born there

I have family in Australia and you couldn’t pay me to live there 🙈
I do get what you mean though, I’ve spent my life looking after others and I’m jealous of the lives I never got to live. Have you read the midnight library by Matt haig? It’s really good and might help with the what ifs

Why though?

The office in Australia is much friendlier than London in my and friends experience. We had someone come back from London and they came in here and someone met them and said hello and they were like oh I’m back! Friendly welcomes would never happen in the London office! Then I moved to London and it’s so true. You go hi I’m new in x team, would you be around for a coffee and chat next week? And you literally get no sorry I’m busy. Same team, same company, I loved living in London but London doesn’t welcome newbies.

I've got family and friends living in various places around Australia. Some born there, some immigrated. One who loves the sun, but came home because it was too hot to function in everyday life.
None of them have particularly glamorous lives. They are all working, paying bills and living like we do over here. The only difference being they get more sunshine, but even that can be too hot to enjoy at times. We take shelter from the rain, they take it from the heat. I wouldn't want to live there and the Aussie born relatives say the same about here.

@IamMini nothing dramatic, just not my cup of tea really! Too hot, too many spiders and snakes, everything is really far apart, expensive. My cousin is married and raising his son in the outback and it looks incredible but in reality I’d hate it, my other cousin is in Perth and it just doesn’t appeal to me.

It is a filter of reality. The other day I passed a minor celeb who lives near me. In reality she looked just like any other careworn human with a small child and partner. On her insta she looks like she is living a dream life.

Stop watching social media and count your blessings. As the saying goes, comparison is the thief of joy.

I find this idea utterly bizarre - in my primary school class in the 1970s, of about 25 students, about 20 were born in Australia, but only 4 had parents born in Australia (including me), all of the rest were immigrant families. Lots would travel back to home countries in Europe or Asia, some regularly, others just occasionally. Saturday morning language classes were very common for children of migrant communities to keep their "home" language going.

More recently Australia has provided a home for many more refugees from war torn areas, and a lot of economic migrants from very diverse backgrounds have also made their home here.

I feel far more comfortable using my "foreign" birth surname in Australia than I ever did in the UK. Apart from checking how to spell it, and very occasionally asking what background it came from, that is as far as any questioning goes. In the UK it would generate a storm of questions which only served to make me feel "other".

Australian wildlife is bizarre, some of it wants to kill you, the rest is fuzzy and friendly, koalas, quokkas, kangaroos, I once met a bandicoot in a restaurant.

Yes I have come across casual racism but that would be 30 years ago so I can't say it is still the same.

My relatives are in Perth and there were loads of arts places, galleries and workshops, but again many years ago, I assume there still are.

And even then you could buy aborigine art.

As for not having buildings, why would you need buildings when you have Ularu as part of your culture?

OP

IN the 1970s my mum's sister was living in a house with a pool, we thought that was posh, but she thought we were because we had colour TV.

You seem nice.

Yoo hoo @teulie - are you coming back to your thread….??

Well, I'm a damn site nicer than the posters who pop up on all the Australia/US/anywhere but England bashing threads with their stererotypical nonsense and stupid comments, mostly based in blatant ignorance.

As for not having buildings, why would you need buildings when you have Ularu as part of your culture?

This is the one that always gets me. For the most part the buildings you see in Australia are of much the same vintage as in the USA, smaller numbers of 18thC, more 19thC and lots of 20thC, though fewer in total as it is not so evenly populated. I've yet to see complaints about the lack of old buildings in the USA, yet it is constantly levelled against Australia. Funny that.

The old buildings thing….

’I don’t like this country because it doesn’t have exactly the same things as my country’….

Well, the Black & White Minstrel Show did tour Australia and NZ during its tenure so it found an audience there too...

2021

"Australians are familiar with racism. Three in four Australians say there is "a lot" of it here.

In fact, the prevalence of racism is one of the more widely agreed-upon propositions bowled up to the 60,000 Australia Talks respondents.

Even "I pay too much tax" mustered only 31 per cent support, but most Australians were pretty sure about the racism.

This response was fairly uniform across all Australian electorates and states."

Australia Talks shows we agree there's a lot of racism here, but less than half say white supremacy is ingrained in our society - ABC News

I’m an Australian. Sitting here right now in a massively overpriced house, where I can’t access medical care because successive governments have reduced health care and all I think about is how much I miss the Oxford i grew up in. Social media is an ad for yourself - you’re not going to put the truth on there. Embrace the boring, one day you’ll realise how precious it is.

For goodness' sake, OP, you need to stop using tacky TV and influencers as your source of knowledge about the world.

I have a fair bit of family divided between Oz and the UK. Both are just countries, with good and bad points. The people I know who have spent time in both countries have positive and negative comments to make about both of them. Nobody in Oz that I know lives like an influencer. Australia is a wealthy, mostly well governed country with a lot of space and a more outdoorsy lifestyle than the UK--people call it the "lucky country" for a reason. But the heat/sun can be extreme (and is really bad for your skin long-term), the cities are sprawling and people tend to drive everywhere, there is a housing crisis every bit as bad as that in the UK, you don't get the depth of historical architecture and close links with European countries and culture that you get in the UK.

"Bloom where you are planted." And stop looking at InstaCrap!

Australian morning show host makes offensive comment while introducing biracial twins (youtube.com)

Let's all be glad programmes like the Black and White Minstrel show are off the air, never to be repeated.

Meanwhile, this kind of reporting is still happening in 2015.

Australian news reporting on the Alma twins from the UK - non-identical twins.

"Maria has taken after her half-Jamaican mum with dark skin and brown eyes and curly dark hair, but Lucy got her dad's fair skin GOOD ON HER with straight red hair..."

OP insta and MAFS is so far from reality it’s not a useful information point. But - if Australia is a place you’d like to live why not look into it? Why not have the conversation with your spouse and start to see whether you are in a desired profession for sponsored or highly skilled visas? If you happen to be a nurse/cop/teacher it’s far more a realistic prospect than some other careers. Of you are both excited by the chance, and professionally there’sa pathway - start exploring and slowly talk to your kids about it.

Australia is incredibly isolated - from England. If your enjoyment in life is English-, or Europe-centric then moving to Australia is a bad idea. No matter how great the weather, culture, people, etc if your heart is in things being English/European and being able to physically be in England/Europe then moving such a long way away is not sensible. Australia isn’t English despite having English heritage. It’s its own massively diverse and huge country with subcultures and difference even in small geographic areas - like anywhere really. If your idea of a holiday is being in England/Europe the distance will exhaust you - but Europe isn’t the world, and you could spend a lifetime exploring this part of the world and not see all of it

Moving to a new country requires an openness to living and breathing a culture (or cultures) that aren’t what you grew up with. Some people can embrace the differences and learn to love them - others are constantly bothered by things not being the same. If you see difference as less - you will struggle. But you might also struggle just because difference bothers you without looking down on others. Not everyone is comfortable with the changes.

I previously lived short term in Europe as a student. I loved it. Some of my fellow students (mostly European) really struggled with how different to home it was - the different food, language, city size whatever. Some people have a narrower variety they can enjoy in life. It’s more about them than the country!

Is Australia perfect? Definitely not. I can happily talk in detail about areas where social progress is definitely needed. I had typed out a long rant about things I think need to be improved but it wasn’t actually helpful so I’ve deleted that.

Australia is incredibly diverse as a nation in every respect. It is pointless saying this is the life you’ll have in Australia. The richer you are the more choices you have. The wealthy-poor gap is obscene (is that really not the case in England?). There’s a class system that is quite rigid in many respects (but we don’t have actual Lords … and the fair go culture helps to fight back from that horrid legacy somewhat ). Whether you’ll be surrounded by European food choices, or whether they’ll be Asian, African or whatever depends on where you live. Australia is an immigrant nation - there’s very few who cannot trace at least some recent ancestors to other nations.

If you settle in Melbourne your life will be incredibly different than if you head out to a remote station. If you are serious about moving to Australia look at what sort of lifestyle appeals to you and the family and choose where you live. You balance your resources (income) with desires. I lived in Melbourne for a while and my ideal weekend was getting out to nature! I was surrounded by “culture” with shows and galleries and food options from around the world instead preferred to camp under the stars. Other friends were always at some show or another. If you want it to be like Paris or Berlin you should look there instead!

I love living in Australia. I’ve lived in other countries - and loved it - my life kept me here and while I occasionally think of the fun of living somewhere else they just haven’t yet ordered enough for me to give up what I have.

Oh - and all the people saying there’s huge distances between places - it’s true, there is a long way between points on the map. You learn to travel further. But you also learn that maps were created by people - the land is there in between the markers with a thousand adventures for those who want to find them. You don’t have to travel across the country for a holiday - you could have one nearby and still explore amazing things, meet different people and have a great time. How often do you honestly holiday in Paris or Berlin anyway?

Oh here we go again.

Never once, on any Australia bashing pile-on thread, have I ever read an explanation of what a ‘cultural wasteland’ actually is.

As for not having buildings, why would you need buildings when you have Ularu as part of your culture?

It's kind of hard to visit the original culture of Australia when they seem determined to destroy it.

More than 100 Aboriginal sacred sites – some dating before the ice age – could be destroyed by mining companies | Western Australia | The Guardian

"Mining companies have been granted permission to damage 463 sites in the past 10 years. They include the cave that was used to prove the theory that the iron ore-rich Hamersley range was used as a climate refuge at the end of the last Ice Age between 18,000 and 12,000 years ago – around the same time the clay bison were sculpted in the Tuc d’Audoubert in France.

Traditional owners reveal their fears for ancient sites, including rock shelters with painted walls and scar trees

Now one of the foremost Indigenous academics in Australia, Prof Marcia Langton, says public attention is all that is keeping some companies from destroying many more sites."

No one has said on this thread that Australia has no racism.

What people are objecting to is the idea that Australia is uniquely more racist than any other country in the world, especially Britain, because that's what is continuously stated in threads like these, usually while also complaining that Australia is boring because it doesn't have enough white European culture. If you're going to Google, at least be relevant.

I don't think a total of 10 years of war (WW1 and WW2) can account for the fact it took until 1973 for the White Australia policy to end, nearly 30 years after WW2 ended!

Having small children is hard work and that's bound to affect how you feel. But you are lucky - you have a family and a home and as your children grow, things will be easier.

All countries have their good and bad points, nowhere is perfect. Social Media is designed for people to present their best experiences or artificially create a perfect picture - it isn't real. Or at least it isn't a totally honest representation of their whole lives.

As lovely as beaches are, when anything becomes a norm? It gets boring after a while. Your British friends, posting pics from the beach, are enjoying a novel experience. People who live there full time, won't be in constant holiday mode, they'll be going to work too, wrangling their kids into car seats to go to school etc, like you are!

Do you even read the links you post?

The wikipedia article you linked said that the White Australia policy was dismantled by successive governments - Holt and Menzies - after World War II and that in the late 1800s the British government refused to disallow the laws. The British Colonial Secretary said "We quite sympathise with the determination... of these colonies... that there should not be an influx of people alien in civilisation, aliens in religion, alien in customs." Meanwhile NSW, South Australia and Queensland did not ratify the 1895 laws because they already had a treaty with Japan.

Again, no one has argued that Australia has no racism. What they have argued is that Australia is not uniquely more racist than other countries and that anyone who wants to pretend that Britain has no racist past or present is making themselves look ridiculous. Fortunately, most people in Britain are more sensible than that.