walaj

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...967265,00.html

Link is for article by Germaine Greer on why Oz is not for her. It actually makes a change of most of the british media picture that everything about Oz is paradise.

Still, even with her coments, which I was mostly aware of beforehand, I still want and give it a try

Megalania

Poor dear wouldn't shave armpits.

Simone

It says I have to register
Could you copy it into here?
Thanks

walaj

ok - just this once. I don't want to get a name for C&P

Exodus from Oz — it's grim down under
Germaine Greer loves her Australian homeland but, she says, like many of her compatriots she can't bear to live there

English people think of Australia as a land of beaches and winter sunshine where in a cold and stormy month like this it must be heaven to live. Yet every month brings news of another Australian celebrity who has decamped (Nicole Kidman, Kylie Minogue, Baz Luhrmann to name but a few). The international movie industry is illuminated by Australian stars, none of whom lives in Australia — unless you count the New Zealander Russell Crowe, who pretends to live in Australia.
Australian professionals of all kinds are popping up at the top of their trees in other countries; they are vice-chancellors of British universities, media executives, account managers, scientists, surgeons, lawyers, dons, willingly enduring the manifold discomforts of life in Britain when they could enjoy the lifestyle on which Australia prides itself.

This year 1m Australians out of a population of 20m are living outside Australia. Many Europeans who have given the best years of their lives to Australia have decided to cut their losses and return to the other side of the world. Go to Greece and you’ll be astonished at how many Greeks speak fluent idiomatic Australian. So why do so many abandon the “you beaut� country? What can be the problem?

I can best explain from my own point of view, as someone who left Australia in 1964, never to return. (Here goes my chance of an Order of Australia.) In fact I do return. I probably spend more time in Australia than Crowe does, but I always come back to Blighty.

Make no mistake. I love Australia with a fierce passion that churns my guts and makes my eyes burn with tears of rage and frustration. But I would rather not be there.

For the vast majority, life in Australia is neither urban nor rural but suburban. The reality is not Uluru or the Sydney Opera House but endless, ever-expanding replications of Ramsay Street that spread out as rapidly as oilstains on water, further and further from the tiny central business districts of the state capitals.

Each street has a “nature strip�; each bungalow faces the same way, has a backyard and a front garden, all fenced, low at the front, high at the back. Somewhere nearby there’ll be a shopping centre with fast-food outlets and a supermarket.

If your ambition is to live on Ramsay Street, where nobody has ever been heard to discuss a book or a movie let alone an international event, then Australia may be the place for you. But you need to remember that Australians don’t live in each other’s pockets; Neighbours is a fiction. Most Australians don’t know their next-door neighbours or care what becomes of them. Australians are kind but in a thoroughly British, non-committal kind of way.

It’s different in the countryside — but nobody lives there except a few squatters and graziers, flitting hordes of British backpackers and some remnant populations of Aborigines. Aborigines could teach other Australians how to make living in Oz emotionally and intellectually satisfying, but nobody is going to give them the chance.

Marooned in oceanic tracts of suburban doldrums, the downtown central business districts don’t expand at all. They still occupy the same tiny nucleus of streets that they did 100 years ago; indeed the Sydney commercial district has actually shrunk in the past 40 years. Australians might refer to rush hour, but there is never any rush. Even at 11am on a weekday you’ll feel no bustle. In what should be the swankiest streets you will find shops with designer names and nothing in them alongside pawnshops and outlets for cheap imports, T-shirts, jeans and plastic homewares.

In the big emporiums the floors are jammed with overloaded clothes racks as if they were discount stores, but the prices in Australian dollars are huge. Australian wages, on the other hand, are surprisingly low. Many Australian expatriates (and I would include myself) live in Britain partly because they couldn’t earn a decent living in Australia. A British salary will buy a ticket to Australia sooner than an Australian salary for the same job will finance travel to Europe. Australian food prices are low, but just about everything else is, for many, unaffordable.

The Australian economy is growing, we are told, faster than almost any other. Growth understood as a percentage is related to the initial size of the economy and Australia’s remains tiny, even though it is the world’s largest exporter of coal, iron ore, beef and wool. Coal and iron ore are both obtained by massively mechanised open-cut mining with devastating environmental consequences. The Australian rush to self-destruction is a bewildering phenomenon.

Why does Australia destroy a greater percentage of its forest each year than all but two other countries on earth? In a mere 200 years one of the most biodiverse systems in the world has been utterly compromised, and for what? Nobody is costing the degradation of fragile ecosystems by grazing or by irrigation for rice and cotton, crops that could never earn their keep unless the Australian dollar remained artificially low.

As a primary producer, Australia, with high labour costs, is in competition with the poorest nations in the world but we look in vain for any expansion in the manufacturing sector. Most of the manufactured goods on sale anywhere in Australia were made somewhere in Asia, including “Australia’s own car�, the Holden. The one and only Australian software millionaire has gone on record saying that if Australians take a lead in the IT revolution the myth of Australian prosperity will explode, while the very people who could do it are walking away.

I was 12 years old when I decided that I had to get out of Australia if my life was to begin. I had been bored ever since I could remember. I was ungainly and I was bored by sport, which in Australia is a sure sign that you’re a bad person. In the 13 years that followed before I could actually get away, I managed to get mildly interested in long-distance skiing, mainly as a way to see the alpine country.

The other great Australian passion is relaxation, and I was even less interested in that. For me to be as good as I could be I needed the pressure of competition, the intellectual cut and thrust, so I came to Cambridge (where, needless to say, I didn’t find it, but that’s another story).

The real reason I won’t live in Australia, even when Britain has no further use for my services, is that I love the country too much. The pain of watching its relentless dilapidation by people too relaxed to give a damn is more than I can bear. I don’t know how many of my fellow expatriates feel this way, but I’ll bet some do.

Simone

Well, you already C&P the link
But I don't care anyway! If it's relevant, post it!

Anyway, I can't be bothered reacting to the article, there's so many points that could be responded to!!
Just confirms what I already knew, Oz isn't perfect, no country is!

Oh, but I found the food prices comment wierd!? I thought food was usually more expensive, or am I confused?

Thanks for the article anyway!

mozzie

A few points about Ms Greer's article:

(1) She seems to be living in a 1964 time warp, the year she left the country. Those were the days of the White Australia Policy, and from all accounts it was a country of endless suburbia at that time. But things have changed a lot since then.

(2) Her quote that "the downtown central business districts don’t expand at all" is crap. The Melbourne CBD has more than doubled in size over the past ten years with the development of South Bank and now Docklands.

(3) The reason some Greeks go back home when they retire in Oz is that they get their pensions/superannuation paid at Aussie rates. Which makes them relatively wealthy in Greece.

(4) The reason celebrities have to leave the country is that to be internationally successful they need to be in the large population centres of Europe or the USA.

And BTW, her comment about spending more time in Oz than Russell Crowe is also complete bollocks. When not making or promoting a movie Crowe spends virtually all his time in Oz. Greer on the other hand returns for about two weeks every five years or so.

Timber Floor Au

who is germaine greer ?????

Keelie

Germaine Greer expressed my sentiments exactly.
Not being an Aussie I wouldn't have the gaul to say what she said so eloquently...don't want to be accused of being just another Brit. whiner.

My time in Oz. this past summer was a huge eye-opener, quickly disolving all thought of buying a retirement home in Queensland.

I'll repeat what I've said before..before making such a momentous life-changing decison... go and see for yourself what you're getting into.

For the singles with no kids, no bridges to burn, go for the adventure, you've got nothing to lose.
It's true about Australians leaving for opportunity in other countries. I know of four Ozzie couples in our city here in Canada who have started businesses..everything from Ski shops to Landscape gardening. We also know a schoolteacher, T.V. reporter, hotel receptionist. Not one of them intends to return..except for family visits.

Would Germaine Greer lie to you ?

PaulDClark

I've worked with many Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans in the computer consultancy business. Most of them are here for the money. I would say that on average 60% are purely here to make wads of cash and then go home, rates are massively higher in Europe than in Australia or even the US.

Expats in either direction will always be biased in their opinion, its the nature of the beast that you will critisise the place you came from, to justify why you have chosen to live. I just want to try it out and see how it goes, nothing more.

Lets face it, we are going the same way here, its grimy, crowded, no-one gives a damn about anything, and our suburbs now consist of tiny houses crammed together on flood plains. We do have 'Next' and 'Marks and Spencers' though.

Go Banana's !!

I'm keeping the 'rosies' firmly planted on my face. I could write something far more depressing about the UK.

Jill

shedu

Much like many of you I think that we could all write similar stuff about the UK. Certainly the day I have had at work gave me a whole heap of reasons not to stay.

I am pretty sure that there will be things I don't like about Oz but there are lots of things I hate about London/England. I think there will be some things that really are not so different and lots that are. My mind set is that unless I get out there and see for myself then I will never know.

Its an adventure - we have been given the opportunity to give it a go and we will throw ourselves into it with everything we've got. I have no doubt there will be highs as well as lows but then that is life.

I can remember many years ago having a discussion about emigrating and saying "nah its not for me, I am too English to live abroad, London is my home and no-where is as good as London". (Mind you at that point in my life I had never travelled out of England and did not have a passport) Now I have done some travelling and grown up a bit more I think about that statement and find it quite comical - now I think London is the pits, I don't think about it as 'my city, my home' as I once used to and I'm not sure I know what being English is supposed to be anymore but still consider myself patriotic.

Of course these are just my personal thoughts but I thought I would throw them into the mix.

Regards to you all.

jeannie

Never heard of her either thought it might be a 1940's Movie Star.........

Amazulu

It doesn't matter what Greer thinks. She's got her own opinions (or axe to grind, whichever you want) & she is entitled to them. Go for your own reasons.

maxpaxx

Famous feminist - burn your bra and all that malarky - writes books!

dotty

And the reaction if it had been written by Kylie Minogue??

MS G is some hairy armpitted feminist which detracts from the article, however it has a lot of home truths in it. One big glitch tho, food is no longer a cheap item at all.