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.

Excerpt

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

INTRODUCTION: Why this book?

O

n July 10, 2005, we had been in Australia exactly two weeks, a fortnight. 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 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 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. And, despite what local folk like to say, Brisbane is no longer “just a big country town.” It’s a city and Australia is – from the perspective of two Texans who have lived in New England, Oklahoma, and other places but never, until now, down under – a whole new country, a new continent, a new culture where people are at once just like us and significantly different.

Getting to move here was good fortune. We know that now. We love this place and we want to tell you why.

Chapter 1: WE’RE OFF

The 8,333-mile leap

L

os Angeles airport was a madhouse. From a carousel in the domestic terminal, we retrieved our four brand-new, fully stuffed bags and began looking for signs to the international terminal. We thought we should have enough time to find and get on board our Qantas flight, but we were not sure, and we were hoping to find, somewhere in that Friday night LAX mob scene, Kristi’s best friend, Scottie. She was living in Los Angeles and she’d driven to the airport to see us off. Normally, finding each other would not have been much of a problem since she always carried a cell phone and we did, too. Told ours wouldn’t work in Australia, though, we’d left it behind.

With one very large and one medium-sized suitcase rolling along behind each of us and with our carry-on bags strapped to our backs, Kristi and I walked to the international terminal. The taxis and buses in the streets were just creeping along anyway and we were in a hurry.

Packing: how big? how heavy?

Kristi: Maybe this is a good time to tell you about bag size and weight limits. Qantas allows (as we write this, anyway) two checked bags per passenger with a maximum weight per bag of 70 pounds. Flying in economy class, we were allowed one checked bag with total dimensions (height plus width plus thickness) of up to 62 inches (158cm) but the two together could not have dimensions adding up to more than 106 inches (270cm).

If you begin your flight with a US airline, though, the rules of that company will determine the size and weight of your checked luggage. American Airlines passengers, for example, can have two checked bags with total dimensions of 62 inches each, but each one can weigh only 50 pounds, 20 less than the Qantas limit.

Before you start packing, though, check with the first airline you’ll be boarding. The carry-on and checked-baggage regulations change from time to time and vary depending on what country you’re flying to. If you show up with one over-weight bag and one under-weight bag, and if the desk clerk isn’t too busy, you can transfer your carefully packed stuff from one to the other.

Returning to the US from Australia, if you check your bags with Qantas all the way through to your destination, we found, the heavier weight is accepted by connecting flights on American or Delta or Continental, even though you’ll have to retrieve your bags at your first US stop, take them through customs, and re-check them. Again, the rules of the country of origin or the original airline seem to rule.

We’d packed to the limit in weight, but we were pretty sure we were not over because I’d weighed each bag on the bathroom scale. I did that by weighing myself and then weighing myself holding each bag. Kristi had to read the scale. We did the math and shifted items until we were about a pound under limit in the heaviest bags. At the DFW ticket counter, we crossed our fingers and then breathed a sigh of relief when our suitcases passed their weight test. There was nothing in any one of the four bags that we wanted to be without.

Kristi: We were also afraid that our largest bags might be rejected because, if you put a tape measure on them, they are a fraction of an inch wider than regulation limits. That made me nervous, but the check-in counter folk we have encountered so far seem happy with eyeball measurements and the little bit of extra width didn’t hang us up. May that always be the case.

We used every square inch and nearly every ounce of what the airline allowed us, knowing that we’d be living out of those suitcases for a little while or a long time. The things we had movers transfer for us could take months to reach us, we were told. (They did: two and a half months.) So, we had struggled with two hard questions.

1. What goods should we spend lots of money having shipped? We got rid of our television and other electronic entertainment gear, but I wanted to bring about 50 music CDs and to store a couple of hundred more. A few special cooking tools, including our bread machine, went into our “ship this” collection. We also decided to ship our nice, firm mattress, which we’d just bought although a Qantas employee I talked to on the phone while we were making these decisions told me with frost in her tone, “We have bedding in Australia.” Since we’d be arriving in winter, we shipped out lightweight summer clothes. But since we’d learned that Brisbane winters are mild we took the chance of shipping, not packing, a couple of heavy coats we thought we might need sometime. (We did, but not until our second full winter.) Into our bags, we put only a couple of light jackets.

2. What should we be sure to fit into our luggage? For an undetermined number of months we’d have to live with what we’d packed or we’d have to buy replacements in Australia at prices about which we had no clue. Would our favorite products be available down under? (Answer: Some, yes; some, no. More on this later.) We played a guessing game with less than complete information and I’m not sure we made the best decisions in all cases.

If we had these decisions to make again, we would ship less and buy more replacement goods here. Strangely enough, I’m still happy that I brought an eight-pound lump of metal in my suitcase, a transformer I’d bought on eBay so I could use our US-built

appliances with Australian electrical current. A smaller one would have worked, but this was what I had, and it let me use my electric toothbrush right off, and, as soon as they arrived, our bread machine, espresso coffee maker, and scanner, too. I haven’t seen these transformers for sale in Australian stores.

I’d still want our music CDs with us here and we needed most all of the clothes we packed or shipped. Clothing, by the way, seems awfully expensive here. Still, I now think that traveling light is generally a good policy even when you’re moving. Ship some things that’ll help you feel more at home, yes, but don’t be too generous with your choices. Australians do make good bedding.

By the way, please note that the name of Australia’s main airline contains no “u.” It’s an acronym for “Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services,” and it drives some Aussies nuts to see it written as “Quantas,” as I invariably spelled it at first.

Meanwhile, back at LAX…

Kristi: When we finally got to the international terminal, we kept our eyes out for Scottie, but the crowds were so large we had little hope of spotting her and we needed to be in line at the Qantas check-in as soon as possible. It was a good thing we went straight there because we hit a snag with Bob’s visa.

Since my passport was due to expire in a few months, I had acquired a new one while we were still in Oklahoma. Although I didn’t notice the difference at the time, my new passport arrived with my middle initial omitted, listing me just as Robert Hill. The paperwork Australia had sent us listed me the way my old passport had, as Robert L. Hill.

That, the Qantas worker at the ticket counter said, would not do. As she frowned at the passport and the visa, my mind raced ahead to visions of saying goodbye to Kristi at the gate, finding a hotel room, waiting until the appropriate offices opened on Monday, and then catching a later flight across the ocean. Before I could get to even worse fantasies about being barred from Australia forever because of one missing initial, the woman behind the counter smiled ever so slightly and said there might be a solution. After conferring with someone by phone, she produced a form for us to fill out and, with that and an extra $50 payment, we were able to check in. We were free to go. To the next long line.

By the time we’d made our way through the security checkpoint and found the gate for our Qantas flight, we were approaching boarding time. All Kristi could do was find a pay phone and call Scottie’s cell phone. They talked for a while and I’m sure they shed a few tears of disappointment. We’d been looking forward to seeing Scottie and it would have been cool to have her send us on our way. As it was, she had a nighttime trip to LAX for nothing.

On board

But we made it, and at 11:20 p.m., Friday, June 24, I wrote in my notebook, “We’re on our Qantas flight and our mood is improving. We just had a conversation with a stewardess who was standing behind our seat and I agree with Kristi that it is fun to hear her talk. We think we’re going to like Australian accents.”

We lucked out with seating on this flight. Since we were in the back row of a section, there were no knees pressing into the back of our seats, and because we had a three-seat section to ourselves, Kristi could sleep with her head in my lap for much of the long night’s flight. It’s easy for me to sleep sitting up, so I did some of that, but I also read, watched television, and enjoyed knowing that our long-anticipated move was actually happening.

So much uncertainty and preparation had gone into the months, week, and days before this flight that it was a relief to know that, important or not, anything we’d omitted from our lists couldn’t be attended to now. Here is just one such list, which we’d put together three months earlier:

· Finish negotiating possible house sale.

· Weigh merits of renting our house instead. Furnished, unfurnished?

· Arrange for movers.

· Choose and contract for a storage unit.

· Clean out garage and office.

· Mow the lawn.

· Plan garage sales.

· Advertise garage sales in paper.

· Sort things to sell, give away, discard.

· Follow up on visas.

· Get appointments with authorized doctors.

· Bob: get new passport.

· Sell both cars.

· Check on reserving a Prius in Australia.

· Get motel reservation for first week in Brisbane.

· Announce our decision to move to those who don’t know.

· Find out about airline luggage limits, size, weight.

· Buy luggage.

Both Kristi and I had even longer to-do lists related to our jobs, but now, as we sat in the plane on the LAX runway, every item was either checked off or abandoned forever.

And we had said our goodbyes during the previous weeks to families, friends, and colleagues. While Kristi had spent a couple of days in Houston with her parents, two of my brothers, Mike and Ronald, had visited me in Oklahoma. We’d sat on the back porch of our house in Norman, drinking beer and talking, looking out over the lawn and trees that Kristi and I had spent way too many hours tending. My other brother, Gary, came to Fort Worth to hang out with me as I finished up my work for the Unitarian Universalist Association, the day before our departure. And I’d spent extra time with my daughter, Lyn, her husband, Scott, and my grandsons, Cooper and Casey.

In several situations, I’d found myself to be unexpectedly tearful. My emotions were much closer to the surface than normal in the blur of busy-ness just before we left. And then, almost before I knew it, Kristi and I were in the midst of (according to a web site’s estimate of the distance from Dallas to Brisbane) an 8,333-mile leap from the country we’d always called home.

Kristi: It certainly was a long flight from LAX. My advice about long flights is: sleep as much as you can. The Qantas plane we were on had TV screens in the seat backs in front of us that gave us access to several channels of programming. Sleeping as much as we could, though, was the best help.

Our direct flight to Brisbane took a bit more than 14 hours, a long time to be sitting in a metal tube with a few hundred other people. If you get a flight that requires a stop in Melbourne or Sydney, the trip can be much longer, of course. Fortunately for us, Qantas offers this late-night direct flight from LAX to Brisbane, currently, six times a week.

Arrival

We landed in Brisbane just after sunrise on Sunday, June 26. Back in Dallas, in the time zone to which our bodies were attuned, people were enjoying the Saturday afternoon we’d skipped. Not one of our bags had been lost by Qantas, though, and getting through customs was simple, uncomplicated, and fairly quick.

Kristi’s new boss, Wendy, graciously picked us up, drove us through Brisbane, and dropped us off at our motel in St. Lucia, leaving us to sleep or recuperate in whatever way we preferred. Our second floor unit had a bedroom, small kitchen, and living/dining room, but when we opened up our bags so we could get to our clothes and other things, there wasn’t much space left for moving around our rooms. We didn’t care. We were safely housed and full of energy. It was time to go out and begin exploring.

CityCat tour

Who told us to take the CityCat, the river ferry with catamaran boats? Perhaps it was Wendy. Whoever made the suggestion did us a great favor because this was the best imaginable way for us to spend our first hours in Brisbane. We got directions to the nearest CityCat stops, bought all-day tickets for a little over $5 each, and rode up the Brisbane River to the University of Queensland campus. We found Kristi’s building easily and I took pictures of her standing by its sign: Human Movement Studies. I figured her family would like to see where she’d be working in five days. The building was all locked up for the weekend, so we caught another CityCat and headed back in the other direction on the beautiful river.

You can sit well sheltered inside the CityCat’s cabin, but we managed to work our way to the front railing so we could face into the wind and have a good view of everything on this cool and partly cloudy day. From the UQ stop we went to the West End stop, then darted across the river to Guyatt Park. A longer ride took us back to the Regatta stop in Toowong, which is where we had got on. From here the ferry speeds along what is called “the long reach” to North Quay (pronounced “key”) in the Central Business District (CBD). Then we went over to South Bank Parklands, on to the Queensland University of Technology stop, then to Riverside, Sydney Street, Mowbray Park, New Farm Park, Hawthorne, Bulimba, and, finally, Brett’s Wharf. Then we rode back to the Regatta stop.

By the time we got off, we’d had a conversation with some tourists, including a farmer’s wife who told us not to look for mangos until December because the season starts around Christmas most years. We had also gazed at the tall buildings of the CBD and at the bridges, parks, warehouses, businesses, apartment complexes and homes that line the river as it twists and turns like the huge snake that, according to Aboriginal legend, lives on its bottom. It was a little more than two hours well spent, and after two years we still delight in riding the CityCat whenever it is convenient to do so. For most trips, Brisbane’s excellent train and bus system makes more sense, and a ticket on one – CityCat, train, or bus – entitles you to ride the others without extra charge.

For pure enjoyment, though, nothing beats the CityCat as a means of getting around. If everything in our new life could be counted on to proceed as easily as our first day, we decided, then we could begin to use, with great sincerity, a phrase we kept hearing from Australians: “No worries.”

Chapter 2: A FORTNIGHT IN QUEENSLAND

A car and a “unit”

L

ife isn’t always a sunny-day ferry ride anywhere, of course, not even in Brisbane. We were surrounded by strangeness. We knew one other person on the entire continent. We were in two expensive motel rooms that we’d reserved for a week. We had no car and no phone number of our own. We had some cash, but no bank account. Where were we going to live? Where should we go to buy food? Where should I go for the haircut that I’d been too busy to get before we left home?

Not even trivial things seemed mundane. This was all both exciting and stressful. It might have been overwhelming except that Kristi had a job that would begin in a few days. Also, we did have a car reserved for us, a hybrid Prius we’d ordered in advance. It was being made ready for us at a Toyota dealership in Kedron, wherever that was, but, having seen the scary streets full of traffic racing along on the left side, we were in no hurry to pick it up.

Walking on the sidewalks was challenging enough. As we made our way to and from the nearest mall in those first few days, we developed a mantra which we depended on to keep us safe: “Walk left, look right, walk left, look right.”

People we met on sidewalks tended to stay to the left, so we did, too. And looking right when crossing a street is necessary here because that’s where any near-side traffic will most likely be coming from. Even after we’d been here a few months, I came close to death or serious injury one day by not looking to my right enough times. Standing between two parked cars on an inclined street, I looked right toward the top of a little hill close by. No car was coming. I looked left to see that a vehicle in need of a muffler was roaring up the hill slowly, but it began signaling and turning left onto a side street well short of where I wanted to cross. I had already begun to move forward and I was leaning into the traffic lane when a car that had topped the hill to my right whizzed by me, inches away. Walk left, look right and don’t count on your ears in noisy situations.

Changes big and small

The mall to which we could walk from our motel was a large one, Toowong Village. It was about half a mile away. We went there often at first and I practically lived there for several days because it became my source of food, telephones, and Internet service. My notebook from our first Monday here lists shops I could see from where I was sitting with a cup of coffee. Those included:

· Fruit Capers, a stand with bins of fruits and vegetables and a sign saying it was “2003 Retailer of the Year,”

· Donut King,

· Le Scoops, an ice cream shop,

· Kmart, just like at home,

· Coles, a grocery store,

· a Vodafone cell phone kiosk,

· Roast and Toast, a lunch place,

· Baker’s Delight, a bakery,

· BB’s Espresso, offering to sell “1 tea + 1 coffee, $4.90,”

· and Toowong Village Meats where “all chicken sold here is guaranteed growth hormone and steroid free!”

Our grocery list for that day included peanut butter, shampoo, yoghurt, and “tonight’s dinner.” I don’t recall what that last item turned out to be. We shopped for food first in Coles, which is one of two national grocery chains here, and then went across to a nearby Woolworth’s, which is the other grocery chain, not a five-and-dime store. In both stores, we noted that many people carried their own canvass bags, a practice we soon adopted to cut down on plastic and paper-bag use.

My notebook for this first Monday also includes the notation: 1 kilogram = about 2.2 pounds, 1 meter = about 3.3 feet. I needed those reminders to help with my transition to the metric system, which is the norm here. The temperature was predicted to reach 18 degrees as a “top” for that day which, we had figured out, meant a cool but pleasant 64 degrees Fahrenheit. (The formula “Centigrade times two plus 30 equals Fahrenheit” gets close enough to tell you how to dress for the day.) We didn’t realize, then, that Australia went metric only in the 1970s. An Ask.com writer identifying himself as “flabdablet” said he was an Aussie teenager when the change came and that he still catches himself “thinking in inches occasionally.” Pints, pounds and Fahrenheit have been replaced in his mind, he said, but he still thinks of tire pressures “in pounds per square inch, not kilopascals.” Kilopascals? Even my favorite dictionary ignores that word. Flabdablet also advised, “Don’t bother with centimetres; nobody in the civilized world does.”

Back to our first Monday: From Toowong’s station, we took the train to Central Station in the CBD, which is what everyone here calls the downtown area or Central Business District, and found our way to the Immigration Department to get our passports amended. We’d been promised work visas, but we’d have no ready proof of that until the immigration people printed little labels and pasted them into our passports.

Hassles and details

Except for the experience of walking around downtown before and during the noontime rush of harried workers, it was a wasted trip. The office’s printer was broken. We were promised that I would be able to acquire the necessary labels another day if I brought in both passports and I made myself a note to do that. We had a lunch-counter meal that was expensive and not great. Afterward, according to my journal, I was “feeling surly” and finding that it was good to get back to Toowong Village, which was busy but calmer. Sometimes, the tiniest bit of familiarity is soothing.

My not having a regular job (I did a bit of freelance work for the Unitarian Universalist Association back in the United States soon after our arrival) was fortunate for us in our early weeks here. While Kristi was getting immersed in her new work situation, I was free to attend to the thousand and one tasks that stood between us and a settled life as Brisbane residents. Tending to details is not my greatest talent, but even a go-with-the-flow, big-picture guy can buckle down to the mundane when wife depends on it. Oops, I mean when life depends on it.

On Tuesday, after checking out some other banks (including ANZ, which is pronounced “Ann-zed” in Queensland, but not in all parts of Australia), we opened an account at the Bank of Queensland’s branch office in Toowong Center. The bank officer who helped us, Charyl Rollinson, was gracious and friendly. Realizing, perhaps, that we had no friends in Brisbane, she even invited us to her house for “tea and biscuits.” We appreciated the offer, but, imagining the difficulty that would be involved in finding our way to her suburb, we didn’t take her up on her gracious invitation. Maybe if we’d known then that “biscuits” means cookies…

For our bank account to become usable, we learned as we were filling out the forms, we had to get a copy of Kristi’s contract from the university. I promised to show up with that in a day or two. The forms required each of us to say how we were employed and offered a list of professions with boxes to check. There was no listing for “professor,” Kristi noticed, but there was one for “prostitute or escort.” Maybe I should have checked that. I wasn’t happy with “retired,” and “between professions” was not a choice either.

We initiated the electronic transfer of our house sale money and some savings from our US bank to the Bank of Queensland. With the exchange rate as it was then, each US dollar became $1.30 in our Australian account, so when the transfer came through we suddenly felt almost rich. Later, when we got our first full-month bank statement, we were elated to see that the quite-high interest rates here, even on checking accounts, had added more than $1,000. By then, though, we’d begun the rapid draw down of our momentarily cheery account totals.

The fluctuating exchange rates for Australian dollars could tempt one into efforts to do what stock traders call “timing the market.” It’s not a recommended practice unless you have an unusually accurate crystal ball, but the statistics do lend themselves to if-only thinking. If only we had moved here in 1998, shortly after severe economic problems hit Japan and other Asian countries, each of our American dollars would have bought us two Australian dollars and we’d still feel rich. If we were wiring our money here today, two years later, we’d have a somewhat smaller account total, since the Australian dollar is at an all-time high compared to the US dollar. On the other hand, Kristi’s salary from UQ is worth a little bit more now when measured in the currency that carries pictures of Washington and Lincoln.

No squirrels, no pennies

Other first-week observations included in my journal were:

· The little bananas that fruit stands sell here are not tasty. They cost about one US dollar per pound, at least twice as much as we’ve been used to paying.

· The oranges are good, though not as sweet as Texas oranges.

· Electric pots here have thick coils and heat water quickly.

· There are no squirrels. Not even ground squirrels.

· Banks sell insurance and investments.

· There are no pennies, so clerks round things up, but there are $1 and $2 “gold” coins.

I wrote: “Australian bills seem odd to us. They are made of plastic and each one contains an oval that is totally transparent. Not one of them has a picture of an American President. Who the heck is John Flynn? Or Edith D. Cowen? Oh, well. You can buy things with them.”

Vodafone seemed to have the best offer on pre-paid mobile phones. We call them “cell phones,” but Australians have “mobile phones” and the first word rhymes with “file.” By forgoing text messaging and all the available bells and whistles, I got voice-only service for $50 spread over two months, and I haven’t neared my minutes limit yet. If I renew before the last day of the 60-day period, I get to carry over unused minutes. I paid $199 for a good Samsung phone in part because I was told it would accept the cards of other countries, making it usable back in the US and elsewhere. One positive difference: here mobile or cell phone owners do not pay for incoming calls. The callers do.

Lookin’ for a home

With Kristi heading off to work each morning, I began seeking another place for us to live. I read ads in papers and on bulletin boards, but mainly I called or visited real estate offices, almost all of which have plate-glass windows full of for-rent and for-sale listings available through their particular agencies. Here, agents don’t work from a shared Multiple Listing Service (MLS) book. Each office has its own inventory of properties, so you have to go from agent to agent to learn about what’s available. That made my job harder.

Also, in Australia, agents may or may not offer to drive you to places you want to look at. Often you’re just informed of times when an agent will be on hand to show a unit to all comers. You have to be present at the address between, say, 2 o’clock and 2:30 p.m. on a Saturday. The agent arrives, opens up, invites everyone through, asks them to sign a guest book, shows them around, closes up, and leaves for the next showing somewhere else.

My already high appreciation for the work of real estate agents increased during this process, however. These workers will never be replaced by machines or computers because their jobs are labor-intensive, personal, and just about necessary for people in situations such as ours was.

There were real estate web sites, of course, but I was using an Internet café in Toowong Village for emails, limiting myself mostly to “we’ve arrived safely” messages to family and friends. We’d checked real estate listings in Brisbane before we left Norman, Oklahoma, but we gave that up as a waste of time since, even when we found one that sounded interesting, we had no notion of its surroundings.

We were difficult clients for two reasons. One was that we wanted something within walking distance of (as we’d already learned to call it) “the uni,” the University of Queensland, which meant looking in or very near to St. Lucia, one of the most expensive areas of Brisbane. In addition, although we assumed we’d have to rent for a while first, we wanted to look at houses for sale also. We didn’t want to miss out on any suitable bargain that might be out there for purchase. Fat chance in St. Lucia.

Among the possibilities Kristi and I saw were these:

· A second-floor apartment… excuse me, a second-floor unit, overlooking a nice backyard, with a large and open park across the road and, downstairs, a neighbor practicing scales on a tuba.

· Another second-floor place with small rooms that managed to look dingy even though it was almost new.

· A couple of units on the far side of Toowong Village which we viewed hurriedly with several other individuals or couples during a half-hour showing.

· A brand-new condo with neighbors behind adjoining walls on two sides, lots of carpet, one bath, two small bedrooms, and a garage, oops, “car park.” Price: on the far edge of our range. Location: on the far edge of walking distance to the university.

· A recently elevated “Queenslander” (more on these houses later), with new appliances, one bath, and no built-in closet space. Zero closets and even farther from the uni? We said no.

· A wonderful, spacious, fairly new condo with many closets on a top floor of a high-rise building located on Coronation Drive. It had a large balcony that provided a great view of the swimming pool below and, across the Brisbane River, the St. Lucia area in which we really needed to locate. We felt a little guilty about asking the agent to show us this one since, lacking connections in the drug trades, we couldn’t think of affording such a place, but he seemed to enjoy the view, too.

· A similarly elevated unit, in St. Lucia, with a smaller balcony providing treetop views available at $550 per week. The agent was a young woman honest enough to say she thought this place was over-priced (most of the places I saw were renting for between $300 and $500 per week) and that the building contained several units occupied by three, four, or perhaps more rent-sharing uni students given to loud parties. Grateful for her openness, I asked if she had anything else to show me and she did: the place we rented.

Success

In an email for the folks back home, I was soon writing, “We have an address: 5/66 Sisley Street, St. Lucia, QLD 4067. Here, addresses are written with the apartment number first, then a slash, then the street number. It’s a small, two-bedroom, two-bath, second-floor ‘unit,’ unfurnished, and it’s a 17-minute walk from Kristi’s office in a reasonably quiet area.” So I thought. More later on how quiet it was, but it was well located, clean, and available for (take deep breaths and be brave, we said to ourselves) $375 per week on a six-month lease. We were able to leave our motel quarters two days early, for which the owner didn’t charge us since he had someone wanting to move in right away.

The real estate woman met me and Kristi on Friday night, July 1, at the Sisley Street apartment house. Kristi concurred that this was as good a place as we’d been shown, so we agreed to meet at the agent’s real estate office the next day to finalize the deal. That set in motion what we now think of as Mad Saturday, the day in which we had to:

· acquire keys to our new home by signing a contract and putting up a $1,500 property deposit,

· settle our bill with the motel owner,

· move all our stuff from the motel to our unit,

· buy a bed to sleep on,

· buy everything else we needed for ordinary living, including sheets and pillow covers, forks and knives, glasses, plates, towels, a can opener, and 30 or 40 other things.

We had to acquire all that before all the stores closed their doors at four or five o’clock. Yes, 4 p.m. or 5 p.m. on a Saturday. In the final minutes before closing, we were rushing from department to department with a bulging “trolley” at a Target store. Fortunately, some of what we needed was on sale.

On the road again

But wait, I forgot to tell you. By this Saturday morning, we had a car. It was a loaner car, a white Prius that had been brought to us by Neil Wojic of Kedron Toyota for our use until the car we’d ordered was ready. Since its delivery, it had been sitting safely in the car park underneath our motel. Our luggage filled it completely, leaving just enough room for one driver and one passenger saying, “Stay left!” Our first trip was a nerve-wracking six or eight blocks to Sisley Street.

We unpacked and moved in, grateful our new place had an elevator from the underneath car park to the second floor. We had a cheese-and-cracker lunch. Then, well into the afternoon, we set off on an even more perilous journey to find a futon store we’d been told about in the heart of the downtown section. With Kristi reading maps and directing me, I drove, staying left! until we spied the store we needed up a street we couldn’t turn onto because it was one way the wrong way. I pulled over out of traffic, Kristi studied the map, and we found our way around to a place where we could turn onto the street we needed. Lucky break: we found a parking place near the store.

Second lucky break: the store was still open. We hadn’t known for sure that it would be on Saturday afternoon downtown. Hurriedly looking over the selections, we found a futon mattress and frame we wanted and asked the price. The salesman said, “$1,000.” My reply probably surprised him. I said, “Okay.” I felt proud that, before paying, I managed to get two pillows thrown in. A few days later, I learned that Australians never expect to pay the stated price in such situations. They almost always get a lower price as they’re about to leave the store in mock disgust.

But then we had lucky break three, something about which I had my doubts although I hadn’t said so to Kristi: we managed to get the frame and the double-bed mattress into the Prius, a hatchback that thinks it’s a truck. It fit, but just barely. The salesman, who had helped us squeeze it all in, was smiling broadly. I thought he was proud of our achievement.

We rushed cautiously home, manhandled the floppy futon into the elevator, and dumped it and the wood pieces of its frame onto the bare floor of our unit. Then we immediately set out for a shopping center in Indooroopilly, again with Kristi reading maps and calling out directions. That’s where we found the Target and started throwing things from Kristi’s list into our trolley. By the time we got home, exhausted and hungry, we’d managed our first left-side nighttime driving.

Lots and lots of screws

While Kristi pulled together dinner, I began reading instructions for assembling the various wooden parts of our futon’s frame. “Tools,” I thought, feeling like a cartoon character with a light bulb shining above his head. “It would have been smart to have bought tools.”

A $2 screwdriver, for example. All the pieces that needed to go together so that the futon could function as either a bed or a couch were to be held together by screws or fasteners with screw heads. I could have put the whole thing together in 20 minutes if I’d had my old screwgun, a favorite gadget of mine that was now more than 8,000 miles away. And no longer mine. After two hours and one blister in my right palm, we had a functional bed, thanks to my Swiss Army knife.

We both slept soundly that night. Our $1,000 bed turned out to be sturdy and comfortable and it is now, two years later, serving as an acceptable couch that’s always ready to be folded out for guests. I’ve tightened its fasteners a bit more with my new screwgun.

Bright and early Sunday, I walked to a nearby “everything” store that we came to think of as “Ling’s store” because of the friendly young Malaysian woman who worked there. John, the Chinese owner who was to become a sort of friend of mine because I saw him so often, was busy putting together the Sunday “Brisbane Courier” newspaper, inserting sections printed earlier in the week into just-printed new sections, a weekly task that caused him to describe himself as “a cheap machine.” I bought one of the fat Saturday/Sunday papers and took it home so we could scan the classified ads for garage sales. We found a couple that we thought we could locate with the help of our map book, and set out.

Sunday morning early is a great time to drive in Brisbane, regardless of which side of the street you’re on. (I know, I know, stay left!) Traffic was light and we found a sale being given by two young couples wanting to shed a number of items that we needed. Then we found another sale in progress at a nearby house with a tree full of the most wonderful, brightly colored parrots.

Lorikeet magic

“Lorikeets. I feed ‘em,” the owner of the house said. He had a flock of 20 or more that flew away like a magic cloud when we got too close. People who grew up here give lorikeets no more attention than robins get in the States, but they thrilled us that day with their beauty and their loud chattering. We came home with a load of stuff, including a bicycle that turned out to be not worth repairing and a couple of plastic chairs that served us well so long as we were, as someone put it later, “camped out” in our St. Lucia unit.

While we’re talking about garage sales and their importance to our move here, I want Kristi to tell you about our next bit of luck. This is from something she wrote for a subsequent issue of our “Brisbane Chronicles.”

Busy and stressed though we’ve been, we’ve been having a great time. People have gone way out of their way to be friendly and helpful to us. Brisbane, they say, is “just a big country town” and it seems so. For example, Saturday morning before last, we showed up early at a “news agency” (we’d call it a news stand) and asked about which papers might have ads for garage sales. The proprietors, Paul and Marilyn, volunteered the fact that a friend of theirs, Anna, was planning a garage sale. They said they’d ask her if we could come early. We checked back in a few days and they’d done that. Anna welcomed us the following Friday and was gracious and accommodating. Getting “first-pick” on Friday and then returning for the official garage sale on Saturday, we bought so much nice furniture and other necessary household things that it took several trips to haul it all back, and in the process we learned just how much our hatchback Prius can carry, even a five-drawer chest if you let part of it hang out the back and tie it down with rope.

Finally, everything was in place. Everything, that is, except a refrigerator, telephone, microwave, washing machine, dryer, dining table, computer connection, computer printer, all the things we’d put into a container and arranged to be shipped to us here, and a few other odds and ends. And we needed to swap our borrowed car for our own.

Gold Coast fridge

The absence of a refrigerator in rental units in Australia surprised us. Apartments we’d rented in the US always came with refrigerators, but that is not the practice here. You have to supply your own. We found and bought a used one. The story of how we did that involved our first trip out of the city limits and Kristi told it in her email newsletter:

A newspaper ad for an American-size (that is to say, big) refrigerator got us to venture down to the Gold Coast yesterday, to the home of a married couple who live in a fancy house with a boat dock on a canal. The fridge is not particularly interesting, but the Gold Coast was worth the trip. After we bought and paid for it, we drove along the coast, and got out at one point to walk on the beach next to the ocean. The white sand squeaks like snow underfoot and reminded Bob of the beaches between Fort Walton Beach and Pensacola in Florida, the best he has ever seen. The water felt a little chilly on our fingertips, but it was a gorgeous blue and a few people were swimming. There were even a few surfers out catching real waves.

We particularly appreciated the way the beach has been made available to all, not just to folks staying in hotels and condos. The beach extends for miles and miles, but even in the most developed parts, walkways and green spaces run alongside the beaches. In some areas, there are even park areas and playgrounds. These green areas are between the street and the beach and the big hotels are all on the other side of the street, so we could walk along the beach without worrying about “private” areas.

The various towns run together, but they seem nice and clean. There are lots of stores, but we saw no junky beach shops selling shell lamps and T-shirts.

Best of all, we made the trip without incident and arrived home safely. Now all we had to do was find a trucker willing to haul the thing to our unit, squeeze it in through our door with only a centimeter or two to spare, and install it in a space with a centimeter or two to spare. My fingers almost cramped from being crossed for more than a week, but, finally, the installation was completed successfully.

With the refrigerator in place, our diets improved. Until then we’d been living mostly on peanut butter, crackers, and other things that did not require refrigeration, plus small quantities of foods transportable enough so Kristi could keep them in a refrigerator at her office until we needed them. Fortunately, Ling’s Chinese Everything Store had fruits and vegetables we could buy daily, as we needed them. I even found a tray or two of soft, perfectly over-ripe persimmons there and they cost only about 25 cents each. Heavenly!

Soon, we had reached a significant milestone and we wrote a “Brisbane Chronicles” email to commemorate it:

July 10 – Not so long ago we were not absolutely sure that “fortnight” meant “two weeks” and now we’ve been here that long, in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, Southern Hemisphere. Two weeks, as of today. We have a unit (Aussie for apartment) that we’re pleased to be living in and a car that we’re scared to drive.

Today even WE thought it was chilly. It was windy all day and the temperature never got above 60 degrees Fahrenheit or 15 degrees Celsius. June, July, and August are the wintertime months in Brisbane, so we should expect some cool weather. Still, up to now our standing joke has been Kristi’s remark one morning soon after we got here: “Oh, what wonderful weather! Or, as the Australians would say, ‘Brrrrrrr!’”

We were feeling pretty proud of ourselves for having accomplished so much in two weeks and for knowing it was a fortnight. Kristi wrote:

Obviously, practical considerations have occupied much of our time so far as we set ourselves up here after selling everything we had in Oklahoma. Cars, real estate, rent and a lot of other things are more expensive here than in the US, but up until now our set-up costs (except for our car) have been almost covered by what we took in from our garage sales back in Oklahoma. Soon, we’ll be able to get on with living here.

The Prius salesman, Neil, was so genuine and nice that when he delivered our car, Bob took him to lunch and learned a lot about two kinds of rugby in time for us to watch the “match of the year” on TV with some awareness of what was going on. The local team was trounced by New South Wales. I didn’t think it was much more interesting than football in the US. Bob thought it was faster and a little more fun to watch, but he turned it off at halftime.

We felt ready to draw some conclusions about Australia as compared to the States, and we alternated comments in an issue of Kristi’s “Chronicles.”

Bob: People here are doing what people everywhere do: they try to make a living, get to work on time, be with each other, have fun, and enjoy life. Things really do seem a little more laid-back, though. In fact, on Kristi’s first day of work, she rushed past an Australian woman in the office and the woman was totally startled. Thinking there must be an emergency, she asked, “What’s wrong?!” So, we’re trying to slow down a bit. We don’t want to startle anyone, and the change could be good for us, too.

Kristi: Even if they move more slowly, Australians talk faster than anyone else, we’ve been told, and we believe it. That, plus the accents, can make it difficult to understand their English. We’re learning the lingo, though. Bob’s working on saying “How ya going?” instead of “How’re ya doing?” Since that greeting implies a concern about being rather than accomplishing, we think it’s a language upgrade.

Bob: Kristi is beginning to sound more Australian by unconsciously adopting the tendency to end sentences with an upward inflection. For some reason, this practice doesn’t strike me as being obnoxious or “Valley-girl.”

Bill Bryson, while visiting the Gold Coast, noted that a young female clerk in a tourist shop spoke “with the rising intonation common to young people in Australia,” a tendency that “drives older Australians crazy.” In his down under travel book, he reports that he found it “endearing and sometimes, as here, charmingly sexy.” He’s right. It can be over-done, but now and again it’s nice.

Read more about Moving to Australia HERE.

Copyright © 2007 Robert L. Hill. 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.

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