The Good Oil: Living in Australia as an Expat

It’s Cat’s first Mother’s Day as a Mum today.

It seems that the traditional Aussie thing to do on Mother’s Day is to head off down the beach for a family picnic, or maybe book a table at a posh restaurant. However, Cat has been working really hard looking after Isaac these past three months, so we decided the best Mother’s Day treat for her would be to have the whole day off! That’s right – a whole day of baby-free (not to mention hubby-free) time.

So I’ve packed her off on a bus to the city, armed with mobile phone and breast pump, so that she can relax and enjoy herself – do some clothes shopping, hang out in the botanic gardens, maybe catch a movie. Meanwhile I’m experiencing my first whole day alone with Isaac. We have plenty of breast milk in the fridge to keep him going. Right now he’s sleeping like an angel, everything’s going swimmingly, and I’m even finding time to blog!

Right – better go and hang his nappies out to dry, then get him up for a feed…

For some reason, when I lived in the UK I was always under the mistaken impression that Australia is a cheap place to live. I suppose it is cheaper living in Sydney than, say, London, but it’s by no means “cheap”. In fact, in some areas, Australia seems more expensive than the UK.

For one thing, electronics goods tend to be pricier here – presumably because of the cost of shipping stuff to this remote island. (I’m really hoping an amazon.com.au will open here soon, and create some decent competition on pricing.)

Even foodstuffs are often more expensive than in the UK. For example, Tesco in the UK sells pretty decent own-brand wholemeal sliced bread for around 55p, or AUD $1.35. That’s for an 800g loaf. Try finding an 800g wholemeal loaf in an Australian supermarket for under $3. Other basics such as potatoes and tomatoes are pricey here, though they fluctuate wildly according to season. (Not much chance of Tesco influencing prices here now, either.)

Then again, it’s not surprising food is expensive, seeing as the supermarkets import half their goods from the other side of the world. You’d have thought with Australia’s climate that the shelves would be packed with Australian olives, but 90% of them are from Greece or Spain. I have a Woolworths own-brand jar of strawberry jam in the fridge that was made in Poland.

I suspect a lot of this is down to the supermarkets; there’s not really much competition amongst supermarkets here, with Woolworths and Coles pretty much sewing up the “supermarket market”. If you shop in small local shops, such as bakers and greengrocers, you often get better quality food – I guess that’s a given – but they’re often cheaper than the supermarkets, and you get a bigger range too. The opposite of the UK, basically.

It also doesn’t help that the government happily slaps 10% GST – the equivalent of VAT – on anything considered a “luxury item” in a supermarket – and this includes things like coffee, biscuits, and toilet rolls.

To be fair, some things, such as milk and tins of beans, seem to be roughly the same price in both Australian and UK supermarkets, and of course the exchange rate has a big effect on these comparisons too. So maybe there’s not a lot in it overall.

However, books are ridiculously expensive – often up to double the price of books in the UK – and to add insult to injury that 10% GST applies to books too. Doesn’t the government want its citizens to read?! On the plus side, this makes second-hand bookstores very popular here.

Electricity has traditionally been relatively inexpensive – compared to the UK – but thanks to the major drought going on here at the moment, that looks set to change.

It must be said, though – compared to the UK, Australian public transport is a bargain. And the beer’s cheap too! 🙂

Culturally speaking, Australia is pretty similar to the UK, so if you’re a Brit moving over here then things will mostly be plain sailing. However there are a few oddities that’ll catch you out when you first arrive:

• Saying “Alright” to someone doesn’t mean “hello”, it means “are you OK?”. So you’ll get some strange looks if you go up to someone and say “Alright mate!”
• A “hotel” is sometimes an actual hotel, but more often than not, it’s a pub. (Aussies also use the word “pub” for the same thing, just to add to the confusion.)
• Manchester isn’t a city over here – it means bedding and linen. So don’t be surprised when you see shops selling Manchester.
• Woolworths isn’t a cut-price department store flogging music and pick & mix – it’s a supermarket like Tesco.
• Speaking of supermarkets, you can’t buy alcohol in supermarkets here. You have to go into the bottle shop, or “bottle-o” – otherwise known as an off-licence – next door and make a separate purchase. (Crazy, but them’s the rules.)
• Most banks charge you for the privilege of banking your money with them. The concept of “free banking” is relatively novel here, despite existing in the UK for over 20 years now. HSBC‘s online accounts were some of the first to abolish charges, and other Aussie banks are slowly starting to follow suit.
• And speaking of banks, Aussies call a current account a “savings” account, just to confuse the foreigners. Sometimes they call them “check” accounts too, just for fun. When you pay via a bank card in a shop, you have to press either the “cheque” or the “savings” button, depending on your account type.
• 9/532 Sydney Street is the Aussie way of writing “Flat 9, 532 Sydney Street”. Except they don’t call them flats either – they call them units. (Not quite so romantic sounding, is it?)
• Contrary to appearances, “Sydney” isn’t, strictly speaking, the whole city, but just a small suburb in the middle. (Much like Kensington isn’t London.) So if you’re addressing a letter to someone in the central-ish Sydney suburb of Newtown, you must write “Newtown, NSW” on the envelope, not “Sydney, NSW”. Assuming you want your letter to get delivered of course.
• You’ll find that locals will call you a Pom quite a lot. This is quite normal and they’re not trying to be offensive.
• Automatic transmissions are much more common here. In fact, most cars are automatics. If you hire a car, you’ll probably be given an automatic by default. (Suits me – one less pedal to worry about.)
• In the UK, a B&B (bed & breakfast) is often cheaper than a hotel, and often consists of a mouldy old room in a ramshackle terrace house with a deaf host. In Australia, a B&B tends to be more of a luxury option when compared to a standard hotel or motel. (Although we have stayed in a couple of fairly grotty B&Bs here too.)

These are just off the top of my head. If you’re British then no doubt you will encounter (or have encountered) many more!

Finally, the Australian government has launched the national Do Not Call register. This might just save my sanity; we currently get plagued by telemarketers at least once every other day. It’s reached the point where we often don’t even bother answering the phone.

Signing up is, thankfully, fairly straightforward. I’ve added both my home and mobile numbers to the register today, so in 30 days’ time that should mean the end of all these nuisance calls. In theory.

Apparently so many people tried to sign up when it was launched that the system crashed. Gives you some idea of how annoying telemarketers are!

I admit that I’m a bit of a spelling and grammar nazi (and that my own standard of English is far from perfect). I just like to see decent English, that’s all; blatant spelling and grammar errors make me cringe. It’s bad enough when you see the odd greengrocer writing “apples” as “apple’s”, but really, there’s no excuse for this:

This is taken from a large (half-page) advert on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald, a large, national Australian newspaper. You would have thought that a company that has created, and spends large sums of money marketing, an anti-allergy treatment would at least make sure they were spelling “allergies” correctly. Particularly when the word in question stands two inches high on the page. Failing that, you’d think that someone in the newspaper’s advertising department would pick up on such a blatant cock-up. It’s not as though Photoshop, InDesign et al don’t have built-in spell checkers.

This is only one of countless blatant errors that I frequently see here. There’s even an apartment block nearby whose name – lovingly created in wrought iron on the side of the building, so it’s not like they haven’t had time to think about it – is spelled “The Oak’s”. (Maybe the building belongs to a person called “The Oak”, I dunno.)

Is the standard of spelling and grammar worse here than in the UK? It seems so, to me. But then it’s been five years since I’ve lived in the UK; maybe standards have dropped there too. Or maybe I’m just becoming more sensitive to these things over time. Or maybe I’m just a whinging Pom. 😉

One of the things I love about Australia is that you can have a really good meal out without breaking the bank, even in big cities such as Sydney. You can easily get a decent meal for AUD $30 (£12) a head, including wine, and superb meals are available for AUD $100 a head should you feel like splashing out.

This is in marked contrast to the UK, where eating out can set you back a week’s wages. Well OK, I exaggerate, although there is a place in Reading, my old hometown in the UK, that costs over £100 (AUD $250) a head. Fantastic food, mind. And there was the time I spent 20 quid (AUD $50) for the worst meal of my life in the Beefeater outside Paddington Station in London. (The best bit was the waiter cleaning the table next to mine, flicking bits of cabbage off the table onto my plate as he went. I guess that’ll teach me to eat in a restaurant next to Paddington Station. But I digress.)

I’m not sure why eating out in Australia is relatively cheap, but I guess it’s a combination of lower rents and cheaper sales tax than the UK – 10% GST vs. 17.5% VAT. Actually it’s more expensive now than it was when I first visited Australia in 1999, as Australia had no GST back then. Those were the days.

Maybe raw ingredients are cheaper here. Maybe business taxes are lower. Or maybe Australians simply demand affordable eating out as their birthright. (If so, good for them I say.)

BYO (bring your own) alcohol licences probably help a lot. They’re a great idea. Basically, a BYO restaurant carries a BYO licence instead of a full licence to serve alcohol, and you just bring along your own wine or beer. The licence is cheaper for them – which translates to cheaper food for you – and also means you can choose from the much wider (and often cheaper) range of booze from your local bottle shop (off-licence if you’re a Pom), rather than relying on the range that the restaurant has to offer.

Whatever the reasons are, such affordable dining out makes me glad – and proud – to live in Australia. We definitely eat out more than we did in the UK, although less so these days thanks to little Isaac! Having said that, we had a fantastic meal at Emilia’s, our local veggie restaurant, last Thursday; one of Cat’s mates generously offered to babysit the little’un. If you’re ever looking for somewhere to eat out on the Northern Beaches, I can heartily recommend them. (Cheap, too!)

Finally…

(Found somewhere on the Innerweb)

It’s May in Sydney right now, so not even winter yet, but already we have the heaters going full blast in our apartment. It feels like it’s getting colder each year, but in reality I know that it’s just us getting wussier. To paraphrase the late, great Bill Hicks, I’m turning into a lizard.

Sometimes I give myself a reality check and compare Sydney winter temperatures with UK summer temperatures. There’s not a lot in it. Houses are more geared up for winter in the UK, of course, with thick brick walls, double-glazed windows, roof insulation and central heating. A bit of a contrast to your average wooden Sydney home with a fan heater in the corner of the bedroom.

Random facts about Sydney weather:

• The sun burns you even in the middle of winter, and even when it’s cloudy. I have the panda-faced photos to prove it. You can actually feel the sun prickling your skin as you start roasting.
• It sometimes hails – great big bloody marble-sized hailstones – even in the middle of summer.
• Sydney actually gets more annual rainfall than London (hard to believe, but true).
• The wettest period tends to be January to July. There’s usually a couple of times a year when it rains for 2 weeks solid, which is pretty miserable. And when it rains, it really rains. Then, suddenly, the rain goes, and you have 3 weeks of lovely sunshine.
• Most days there’s a breeze – sometimes a gale – that kicks in during mid-afternoon. This is great in the middle of summer; not so nice in winter, or when you’re trying to light the BBQ.
• Air conditioning certainly makes life more pleasant in the summer months, but it’s not essential (in my opinion). Evaporative (“swamp”) coolers are next-to-useless in the Sydney humidity, especially near the coast where we are.