• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

This guidebook, wrapped in the story of two Americans who flew away to Queensland in 2005, moves from the price of bananas and housing to the costs of being far from family. It celebrates Australia's civility and natural beauty. MOVING TO AUSTRALIA: Two Texans Down Under Buy The Complete Version of This Book at Booklocker.com: http://www.booklocker.com/p/books/3244.html?s=pdf Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ MOVING TO AUSTRALIA: Two Texans Down Under Copyright © 2007 Robert L. Hill ISBN 978-1-60145-393-8 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author. Printed in the United States of America. This book is for informational and entertainment purposes only and offers the beliefs of the author, nothing more. No professional, medical, legal, or financial advice is offered here. You should seek independent professional help from a person who is knowledgeable and fully qualified in applicable areas before acting upon any opinion, suggestion, or information contained in this book. Websites we’ve found interesting or helpful are listed and/or linked, but we make no representations regarding their content, which, in any case, may have changed since we last consulted them. If you enjoy reading more about our adventures down under, though, we’d be please to hear from you. Booklocker.com, Inc. 2007 Cover photo: Wintertime stroller on a Queensland beach near Point Danger. MOVING TO AUSTRALIA: Two Texans Down Under Robert L. Hill ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would not be in Australia and I would not have begun this book except for my partner (here, that term includes the person to whom one is legally married) Kristiann C. Heesch and her determination to email to family and friends everything she deemed worth writing home about. While the opinions expressed here, when not directly quoted from her “Brisbane Chronicles,” are my responsibility alone, she has helped immensely by encouraging me, challenging me, and editing various drafts of what I wanted to say. Others who have been generous with their time and insights include several Aussie-born advisers, one of whom is Yvette Miller, who read and edited several chapters for me. John Kelly reviewed the final chapter and taught me about the peculiarities of Aussie sport. His American-born partner, Lynn Kelly, read every word, caught many mistakes, and made invaluable suggestions. James and Renee Hills helped with me the cover design. Jai Streeter kept me well supplied with books about Australia. My thanks to all of them. I am also grateful for the encouragement I’ve had from my Texas family, including my daughter, my brothers, and Kristi’s “mum.” TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: Why this book? ...................................................... 1 Chapter 1: WE’RE OFF......................................................................... 5 Chapter 2: A FORTNIGHT IN QUEENSLAND ................................ 13 Chapter 3: COUNTING THE COINS ................................................. 27 Chapter 4: SETTLING IN.................................................................... 35 Chapter 5: SIGHTSEEING WITHOUT LEAVING THE AREA....... 45 Chapter 6: PRICEY PROPERTIES ..................................................... 57 Chapter 7: VISITING MELBOURNE WHILE BUYING A HOUSE............................................................................................ 67 Chapter 8: SYDNEY AND THE BLUE MOUNTAINS..................... 79 Chapter 9: HOME AGAIN .................................................................. 97 Chapter 10: HUGE BEACHES NEARBY ........................................ 109 Chapter 11: GREEN BRIDGE, BEER BREAD, JACKFRUIT, AND CIVILITY............................................................................ 115 Chapter 12: MOVING TOWARD DUAL CITIZENSHIP?.............. 131 Chapter 13: PUMPKIN PIE, CRICKET FLINGS, AND CRITTERS .................................................................................... 145 Chapter 14: SOUTH OF SUMMER IN AND AROUND HOBART ...................................................................................... 155 Chapter 15: TO THE EDGE OF THE INDIAN OCEAN ................. 167 Chapter 16: TWO YEARS AND COUNTING ................................. 175 REFERENCES, LINKS, NOTES, FURTHER READING............... 193 vii INTRODUCTION: Why this book? n July 10, 2005, we had been in Australia exactly two weeks, a fortnight. O Kristi, despite some misgivings on my part, wrote and sent out the first of what would turn out to be quite a few email newsletters to family and friends. Here’s how she began: Greetings! Several of our friends and family members have asked us to email them our adventures in Australia. Therefore, we will be sending out a report about our new home regularly (well, more likely, irregularly). If you would prefer to NOT receive our regular reports, please let us know and we will take you off our list. If you are interested in hearing about our adventures, the best thing to do is to stay on the list. Two years and a few months have passed since then and we have been amazed at how many people stayed on the list, at how many people have read and, they say, enjoyed our periodic reports. We think that is related to something we noticed when we told people in the United States that we were moving to Australia. They all smiled. Some looked for a moment like small children thinking of Santa Claus. They often said, “I’ve always wanted to visit there.” And they seemed genuinely pleased at our good fortune, although, at the time we were not sure whether we were doing something we’d always be glad of or if we were beginning a risky venture that we’d look back on as foolish. What we knew then was that we were stepping off the edge of the world as we knew it. I was leaving a responsible position with no prospect of a new one. Kristi was leaving a tenure-track university post to become a researcher working with people she knew only by reputation. Neither of us had ever been to Australia. We’d never seen a kangaroo and we didn’t know a “billabong” from a “bluey.” But we were going, and not just for a vacation, but to live down under. We had sold the house we’d just spent months remodeling (new kitchen, new wood flooring, and more). We had held two huge garage sales. We had given or sold loads of leftover possessions to friends, family, and worthy causes and stored in a rental unit what we couldn’t part with. We sold our nearly new Prius and Kristi’s much beloved 1990 BMW. We said our 1 Robert L. Hill goodbyes to family members and friends. Our emotions were close to the surface. It wasn’t easy for us to leave our home hemisphere. Nevertheless, on a Friday night, my daughter Lyn drove us to the Dallas- Fort Worth airport and we flew to Los Angeles International and boarded a Qantas flight that took us in a southwesterly direction up over the Pacific for a 14-hour flight. To our surprise, we gave up a whole calendar day, Saturday, because of crossing the International Date Line. When we landed in Brisbane, an Australian Sunday morning was just getting started. Since then we’ve been on a learning curve, one that seemed steep, even a little scary, at first. Much that was strange to us then is familiar now, and we know a lot that we wish we’d known when we got here. Or before. • If you’re about to move to Australia, this book may show you ways to make your move go more smoothly than ours did. • If you’re contemplating such a move, learning about what we experienced may give you a better feel for what could be ahead in your life. • If you’re in the pre-contemplation stage, wondering if you want to seriously consider thinking about such a move, this book is for you. It may give you some ideas of what is possible for someone in your situation. • If you're an Australian curious about how your country and your fellow Australians appear to people moving here with few preconceptions, this book is for you, too, mate. • And if you like true-life reports of modern-day adventurers of the relatively timid sort who are willing to swap countries but will never plunge into jungles, explore under-sea canyons, skydive, or trek across sun-scorched deserts -- reports that detail the daily-life struggles of a couple of ordinary people in a new culture -- we think you’ll enjoy our story. Memory plays tricks and we adjust quickly to new environments. Remember how the place where you live now looked to you the first time you saw it? You see a different place now, don’t you? The new becomes the norm. To keep us in touch with our first days here when everything was far from ordinary to our eyes, we’ll use portions of our “Brisbane Chronicles” newsletter to remind us of the wild freshness of this place. Sometimes the words will be mine, sometimes they’ll be Kristi’s, and sometimes they’ll belong to both of us. We’ll emphasize facts, feelings, and insights from our experience. Wanting to tell a good yarn, we’ll write about things in 2 Moving to Australia chronological order as much as we can, but sometimes we’ll pull together our comments from various times in order to make logical connections. We hope this book based on our experiences can fill in some of what Bill Bryson omitted from In a Sunburned Country. Bryson’s wonderful book is about traveling while ours is about moving, and he reports that he ran short of time on a trip to Brisbane, getting only as far into Queensland as the Gold Coast, a resort area that disappointed him. Soon he was back in his car headed south toward Sydney, where some people, he’d been told, think folks who live up here are “madder than cut snakes.” Not so.

Load more

  153

Copy Link