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

Has it escaped your notice that parts of the UK have also recently had major storm activity, with people losing power?

Honestly, I swear some people live in their own little bubble, with no idea what is happening outside of it.

It’s definitely a grass is greener situation, I live in Australia in QLD, somewhat close to a beach and tbh we rarely go. I find the people here to be gross 😂 there is a lot of racism here, our First Nations people are treated so poorly and unfairly discriminated against. Plus it’s expensive to travel within Australia and the cost of living is pretty ridiculous (although I’m sure it’s like that in a lot of other countries atm) and as an Australian I would love to live in the UK or somewhere in Europe, experience snow and white Christmas’, having the option to travel to any country in Europe with ease to name a few.

I am not dissing Australia OP, its a beautiful country, but did you know that 40% of people who emigrate there, come back because they prefer the UK?

I'm saying that purely to emphasise that often what we think is going to be a paradise, often doesnt live up to our high expectations. This isnt about which country is better, its about the "grass is greener" feeling and that when you move, you still have the same issues and problems as you did before only just in a different geographical location.

I also wouldn't compare your life to that of influencers- their world on instagram is carefully curated to look amazing and filtered to heck. You are comparing your unedited life to the edited "best bits" of someone else's.

I have a lot of family there, in Sydney mainly.

They seem to have "bigger" weather than us. For example, when it hails, the hail can be as big as golf balls and crack your car windscreen and dent it.

Climate of Australia - Wikipedia

Australia holds many heat-related records: the continent has the hottest extended region year-round, the areas with the hottest summer climate, and the highest sunshine duration.

The El Niño–Southern Oscillation is associated with seasonal abnormality in many areas in the world. Australia is one of the continents most affected and experiences extensive droughts alongside considerable wet periods. Occasionally a dust storm will blanket a region and there are reports of the occasional tornado. Tropical cyclones, heat waves, bushfires and frosts in the country are also associated with the Southern Oscillation. Rising levels of salinity and desertification in some areas is ravaging the landscape.

I'm just doing my "Mumsnetters Talk About Australia Bingo Card". So far I've got:

Australians are all racist and don't have proper culture, the European kind
Australia sometimes has bad weather, unlike the rest of the world.
The wildlife murders everyone, they're all dead now

Kicking myself I didn't think to put "they have ugly furniture, all 26 million of them" but still holding out hope for my old favourites "they're just not very sophisticated, are they?" and "there is literally nothing else to do in Sydney but go to the beach. Nothing at all" to pop up.

Just a reminder that before the British left, they created a constitution that didn't recognise the indigenous as actual people let alone with any rights, they'd attempted to exterminate them, and they'd given away the good, productive land that they stole to their mates. Vast swathes of it.

That last part is important. Land is the heart of the problem. That land has either been passed down through generations of people who are incredibly wealthy and well connected, or sold to multinationals. Both will fight their corner with the kind of money and influence it's very hard for ordinary people to rally against.

@GlorianaCervixia you forgot that we don't have insulation or heating!

The White Australia Policy was only dismantled in 1973!

White Australia policy - Wikipedia

2 days ago...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/tennis/67847517

Neck chains were not phased out until the 1940s and continued to be used informally until the 1960s. Policemen were paid per aboriginal they brought back in chains.

Haunting pics showing Australian aboriginals shackled and chained around the neck expose the brutal treatment of indigenous people | The Sun

Don’t forget we still have the British monarch as our king which does make us pretty backward and racist doesn’t it? A little bit like those British I guess. Colonialism ey.

Lived there for 18m in my twenties. Miss is every day my dream /goal / hope is that we will emigrate back in a few years when my DH sells his business . Would love to let my children grow up there

The UK weather is not comparable to Australian weather and if you even think it might be, well I would say it is you in a bubble. The severe weather incidents in Australia are far more frequent and severe than anything I have come across in the UK. We lived there for five years, I worked in insurance, as I did in the UK, and the losses due to weather were incredible and as I say nothing like I have ever seen during my much longer time working in the UK.

Anyway OP, you are not comparing to a reality. I loved my time in Australia, but it still involves going to work everyday and doing chores. Pros and cons as with most things.

Brit living in Australia 👋
I could never return to the uk. We spend our weekends in the creeks, climbing mountains and swimming in lakes.

don’t swim at the beach because of crocodiles in this region, but I never swam at the beach in the uk either because pneumonia is not a good luck.

I don’t think the racism or sexism is any worse than the uk, it’s just more overt, people tend to say what they think out loud, rather than hiding it in plain sights as it’s done in the uk.

yep theres a cost of living crisis as there seems to be everywhere, however we’re a mid income family and have enough space to grow our own vegetables and our holidays entail camping and weekends spent in nature.

i live rurally but absolutely do not miss the commercialism and rat race mentality that I experienced in the uk. It felt like everything there was about how you look and what you buy.

maybe that’s age changing me, or maybe that’s just big city living in general….

everywhere has its flaws but I look at my kid running around barefoot and riding her bike to school everyday and think I did the right thing emigrating. I miss uk christmases and wearing knee high boots but whenever I tak to friends and family in the uk, year on year they seem increasingly miserable….

if you get the chance to emigrate, I would encourage you to take the chance !

Australia could get rid of the monarchy if they wanted. I wonder why they don't?

They could also have voted YES on the Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing a body called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice.

My family who live there are very unhappy, but I suspect that would be the case anywhere they lived.

We're currently in massive storms & floods so be careful what you wish for. Haha

For the same reason england doesn't = the governemnt would claim full control/ownership of every legal/ceromonial/cultural aspect

Flies, snakes and spiders but I like Melbourne.

John Patterson on X: "To celebrate Daryl Somers’ hot take on cancel culture yesterday here’s all the edits I’ve done from the Hey Hey archives. Here’s the legend Kamahl being bullied by the Hey Hey gang t.co/Aa3WMeRw54" / X (twitter.com)

Australian TV in the 1980s.

One skit shows him being introduced to the sounds of African drumming and voiceover artist John Blackman, pretending to be from the show’s lighting department, suggesting Kamahl should smile so that the audience could “see him”. He was also hit in the face with white powder while trying to perform, and then told he was now a white man.

A montage of segments, recently circulated on Twitter, showed a joke that Kamahl’s album would “go black” instead of gold or platinum, the singer getting hit in the face with white powder and told “You’re a real white man now”, and a caricature of him sitting in a stew pot with a bone through his nose.

The answer is the same for both: they both require constitutional amendment, referenda are notoriously difficult to pass in Australia and voters didn't like the models put forward (or lack of, in the case of the voice).

I visited Australia 30 years ago as a teenager. There was some sort of referendum ongoing at the time to vote whether to become independent of the commonwealth/monarchy.

15 year old me was constantly asked by every adult why I thought our queen should be their head of state or whatever. I had no clue, and didn’t really care.

so the opportunity to ditch the queen/king has been presented on at least one occasion. If Australians want to keep it as is that’s their choice.

I'm really enjoying posters firing up Google to find articles about Australians being racist, as if Britain doesn't have its own history of racism including the violent colonisation of countries around the world and grotesque abuse of indigenous peoples.

Sounds like a great idea for a thread. I'd be up for that.

This was about Australia though so it didn't occur to me Google articles on the UK...