Adell Rees, a 39-year-old PA from Durham, recently became an Australian
citizen and vowed never to return to Britain, except on holiday. The thing
Adell loves most about her adopted country is its “tolerance”: “I can even
wear flip-flops to work,” she says. The local attitude that lets her wear
them in the office appeals: so laid-back, free, uniquely Australian, she
believes.
Adell is a PA at Naked Communications, an advertising firm whose parent
company is British and whose dress standards are tolerant even by Aussie
standards. She has joined tens of thousands of poms who have become
Australian citizens in record numbers in recent years. And thongs (Aussie
for flip-flops) join the list of other Aussie icons Adell loves: the sun and
sand, the perfect blue skies, the BBQ, the lack of “class” – “In England
everyone’s always in their box,” she says – and the bronzed male torsos.
“What else do you need in a man?” she laughs, as we down schooners in a pub
in Sydney.
Adell, who answers the phone, “Naked, Adell speaking,” has gone native. She
has a mane of sun-bleached hair, her skin is nut-brown, she loves the beach
and, but for traces of a northern accent, she seems a true-blue Aussie
“sheila” (not that the term is used any more; younger Australian women tend
to be referred to as babes or chicks). The only thing missing is her bloke
(or “bruce”, as Aussie men used to be called). Adell is single. One reason
is her chronic restlessness: until recently, she was a “boomerang pom”,
having gone home and returned to Australia many times in the past 20 years.
Yet last month, after a seven-month recce in England to see if the old
country held any vestigial allure, Adell declared Australia “home”.
“This time, when I got back to Sydney, I felt I was at home at last. I love
Australia! I love Sydney. I’m so happy to be here. I walk down the street
and say to myself, ‘How lucky am I!’ This time I feel more settled than
ever. I’m home.”
Indeed, if it came to a choice, Adell says she would happily discard her
British passport in favour of an Australian one (she retains dual
citizenship). So would Penny Hillier, an Essex-born nurse who is about to
apply for Australian citizenship. She and her husband arrived in 1978, but
only just applied for an Australian passport: “We love it here. When my mum
dies, I won’t be going back to the UK,” Penny says.
Similarly, Birmingham-born Ian “Dicko” Dickson (a household name in Australia
as a judge of Australian Idol), who swoons about being an Aussie. “The
second we moved here, I knew this was the place I wanted to watch my family
chase their dreams.”
His family – wife and two daughters – became Australian citizens on Australia
Day, January 26, 2007. Known for his abrasive Brummie wit and savage
dispatch of aspiring local stars, Dicko got the Australian Idol job because
the producers needed “a venomous British man” on the judging panel. The
celebrity aimed his most controversial remark at a scantily clad contestant
of voluptuous proportions: “Choose more appropriate clothes or shed some
pounds!” Dicko told her with bruising honesty – to the horror of the local
press and that rather surly new breed of politically correct Australians.
Yet Dicko has been well received Down Under, which has fulfilled “the
passionate love affair I’ve had with this country”, he says. “It feels like
my wife and I are committing marriage-style to the nation. We’re making an
honest woman of Australia. We’re doing the decent thing.”
) ) ) ) )
Adell and Dicko are in good company. More British people are moving to
Australia than ever. For the first time, Australia is the preferred
destination for British emigrants, more popular than America and the Med. In
2006-7, 23,223 British people emigrated to Australia, according to the
Department of Immigration and Citizenship; of the total, 3,837 were members
of families who had uprooted, and 18,115 were “skilled migrants” granted
resident visas under the more relaxed residential points system. The figure
is double that of a decade ago, and compares with 18,000 in 2004.
British people make up almost a quarter of foreigners applying for Australian
citizenship: in 2005-6, Australian citizenship was conferred on 103,350
people from over 175 different countries. Of those, people of British origin
numbered 22,143, or 21.4% of the total.
Hundreds of thousands of British people go to Australia every year – for a
holiday, a long-term stay, or to test the waters prior to emigrating. In the
12 months to July 2007, nearly 200,000 native British citizens packed their
bags for Australia, the highest number to leave since the heavily subsidised
mass emigration Down Under in the 1960s (1 in 12 Britons now lives abroad, a
total of about 5.5m, according to a study by the Institute for Public Policy
Research).
And the British easily top the census lists of foreigners resident in
Australia and eligible to apply for citizenship. In 2001 they numbered
346,000, or 36.9% of the total ahead of the New Zealanders with 204,900 and
Italians with 44,200. In fact, a quarter of a million British people
(245,311) living in Australia claimed a British pension in 2006.
Many young arrivals have made a great success of Australia. Emma-Jane
Granleese, 35, of Kew, London, came here almost a decade ago as a traveller
and has recently obtained citizenship. She is now the managing director of
the PR firm Weber Shandwick Australia. This year she plans to marry an
Australian, Matthew Griffin, who runs a web-design firm, and with whom she
lives in Bondi Beach. Her future husband is adamant that Emma-Jane fits in.
Believing the new immigration test too lenient, he grills her on Aussie
culture: “Matt asks me about cricket, history and books. I even had to know
the author of something called Snugglepot and Cuddlepie” – a well-known
Australian children’s book about two “gum-nut babies” who live in a
eucalyptus tree. Oddly, he didn’t ask her whether she’d heard of Patrick
White, Australia’s only Nobel laureate for literature, Robert Hughes, the
acclaimed art critic, Germaine Greer or Clive James.
British public servants, too, have come Down Under in their tens of thousands,
drawn by better relative salaries and living conditions (see panel, left).
The state of South Australia has appealed in particular for British bobbies;
and all states need British nurses and health workers.
Of the 8,000 nurses and midwives who left Britain in 2006, 3,000 opted for
Australia, double the number that moved here a decade ago.
Constable Ian Crossland, 42, from South Yorkshire, arrived in South Australia
as part of the first intake of UK police officers in March 2005. He left the
joint Crime and Disorder Reduction Team in Westminster Council, where he was
detective sergeant in charge of intelligence, to be an Australian policeman,
starting again as a probationary officer. In August, his wife, Joanne, and
their sons, Samuel, 12, and James, 9, became Australian citizens.
Other citizens landed in Australia by accident. Ruth Weeks, 40, from London,
and her husband, Josef Dabbs, 42, from Lincolnshire, decided to settle in
Australia in the late 1990s. “We decided we’d travel till we found somewhere
we wanted to live,” said Ruth. The couple have two children, Maya, 6, and
Dominic, 2, and live in the inner Sydney suburb of Newtown (a little like
Islington). They love it here, but their chief complaint is the cost of
childcare: “It’s hideously expensive,” Ruth said. Their daughter already
corrects Ruth’s English pronunciation.
Local trades, too, such as plumbing, electrical services, building and
bricklaying, are in need of skilled labour, and often advertise in Britain.
While the salaries are about the same as in the UK, their purchasing power
is greater because the cost of living in Australia is lower. Others go in
search of love, or the promise of it. Australia’s outback regions are
severely short of women, especially “young wife fodder”, said one farmer.
Many recent newcomers are middle-class professionals with young families,
drawn by an immigration policy that appeals to the highly skilled.
Australian cities fiercely compete for the most talented. Among last year’s
British émigrés were a Sikh family – the father an investment banker, the
mother a dentist – who settled here, their third country of residence, to
enjoy better prospects and a more child-friendly environment.
And consider Andrew Woodmansey of Portsmouth, a former investment banker who
met his wife, Christine, at Cambridge, where they studied languages. They
moved to Australia in 2000 and have recently obtained citizenship. Andrew,
49, is now the business development director at Sydney’s Harbour Trust, a
federal government agency responsible for developing the harbour for public
use. The couple have a teenage son who attends Sydney grammar school, one of
eight “great public schools”, as some of the city’s elite private schools
are called, and which cost about $21,000 (£8,000) a year.
Andrew worked at several international banks before settling down in
Australia. “Each time we went back to the UK, we felt we were becoming less
and less English,” he said. “One of the great things is, you’re taken at
face value. You’re treated the same as everyone else – whether you’ve been
here for a few weeks or for 30 years. You’re not judged by your background
or your accent. You’re judged by what you can do for Australia.”
They advise others to enjoy the unique attributes of their new home, and not
to compare Australia with Britain: “If you’re just running away from
something – costs, crowds, traffic – you’ll be disappointed. There’ll always
be something to whinge about.”
But not all emigrants are happy; even some long-standing ones have not adapted
to Australia’s coarseness, freewheeling society and the dislocating lack of
a recognisable class system.
Take Maisie McDonald, from Bristol, who went there as a child, aged nine, in
the 1960s, with her parents and two sisters. They were 10-pound poms (Brits
who migrated to Australia under an assisted-passage scheme) and she loathed
her new home – as she told the recent Australian-made documentary Ten Pound
Poms, shown on BBC2. Her father lacked the money to return to Britain, so
Maisie grew up in her new home and married an Australian. Yet she seems to
hate her “home” more intensely with every passing year: “When people say,
‘How do you like Australia?’ you don’t say, ‘I can’t stand the place, it’s
horrible.’ You just learn to live a big lie: ‘Oh, yeah, it’s great, you
know. I love living in Australia’… I always learnt to bite my tongue.
“In England, I’m allowed to complain and run it down, but if you run down
Australia, Australians get nasty because they think their country is the
best place in the world… but not everything about Australia is perfect. But
they won’t always admit to that…
“The thing I love about England is the country, the greenery, the soft rolling
hills… When I compare it with Australia, Australia is so stark, it’s barren,
it’s harsh. There is nothing soft and gentle or even genteel about
Australia. In England birds twitter; in Australia they squawk.”
) ) ) ) )
There are many factors driving people out of Britain, despite Maisie’s
twittering birds. Emigrants cite obvious factors such as the weather,
hospital queues, crime rate and cost of living – variations of which exist
in Australian cities, of course. And many émigrés seem shocked by what they
find when they go “home” to Britain: a brutally self-confident chav culture,
where good education and quality medical care are unavailable or
unaffordable. The words “heartless” and “selfish” leap to mind, they say:
“Everyone was looking after No 1,” Adell Rees said of her most recent trip
to Britain.
Why Australia, though? Why not America? One obvious reason is the lighter
residency conditions introduced last year. Britain’s love affair with
Australia is, after all, a very recent phenomenon. But there are deep
historical links. Not so long ago the British and Irish were forced or
bribed to go there. From the day the first white settlers landed in what
became Sydney in 1788, through to the early 19th century, Australia was a
huge prison, the bloody and terrible terminus for thousands of British and
Irish convicts, most transported for petty crimes, such as theft and
prostitution.
News of Australia’s rare riches – vast fertile lands and enormous mineral
wealth – spread to parts of Europe and Asia in the 19th century, culminating
in the gold rush of the 1850s, which drew tens of thousands of Irish,
British, Chinese and American settlers. Yet the distance and rapid
exhaustion of the superficial gold fields soon pushed Australia well down
the priority list for European emigrants. In fact, 100 years later,
Australia was so desperate for
labour it had to pay workers to come. The nation must “populate or perish”,
insisted the prime minister Robert Menzies’s Liberal government in the
1950s, after two world wars in which Australia lost more young men per
capita than any other nation fighting for the mother country. But populate
with whom? Asians? Definitely not. The White Australia Policy, the first law
enacted after federation in 1901, and in force until 1973, determined that
all new arrivals be white, and preferably British.
In the 1950s, over 90% of Australians saw themselves as proudly British or
Irish, regardless of whether they traced their lineage to a Georgian
pickpocket, an East End prostitute, a déclassé aristocrat, a potato-famine
refugee or a family of graziers (cattle herders) and squatters.
Today’s influx has subtly different motives for emigrating: they tend to be
pursuing a realisable dream, rather than escaping a nightmare. Asked why
they emigrated, most cite: sun and coastal living, lots of space, affordable
housing (outside city centres), a generally reliable public health system,
good, cheap schools, many jobs and relative security. They are also drawn by
some of the world’s last unspoilt natural wildernesses, ie, Uluru (Ayers
Rock), Tasmania, Kakadu and the Great Barrier Reef. Holidays to exotic South
Pacific islands – Vanuatu, Fiji, New Caledonia – are relatively cheap and a
few hours away.
But the latest wave of emigrants are motivated by deeper social and economic
impulses. Christopher Wade, the director of British Council Australia, said:
“Australia has a great work ethic, but a very good after-work ethic too.” He
especially admires the “fair go” and egalitarian spirit. This is best
expressed, he said, in the culture of “volunteerism”: for example, many
parents commonly coach their children’s sports teams. There is such a thing
as a community here, Wade insists.
Of course, it is Wade’s job to talk up the Australian-British relationship.
But the nation’s rude economic success and political stability are strong
magnets. During the past 15 years, Australia’s standard of living has risen
constantly and in 2006 it surpassed that of all Group of Eight countries
except the US, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD). Since 1990, Australia’s real economy grew by an average
of around 3.3% a year, coupled with low inflation averaging around 2.5%
(however, it recently exceeded the Reserve Bank’s threshold, driving up
variable interest rates to a mortgage-busting 8.97%, and rendering the cost
of inner-city homes, as a multiple of income, less affordable than that of
any other developed nation). There are jobs aplenty, however: the rate of
unemployment fell from a peak of nearly 11% in 1992 to below 5% last year –
its lowest level since the early 1970s.
The unprecedented Asian, chiefly Chinese, demand for Australia’s mineral
resources is behind this boom. Australia has some of the world’s largest
coal, iron ore and uranium reserves, and is one of the biggest gold and
diamond producers. Western Australia, lavishly endowed with natural gas and
minerals, is enjoying the biggest mining-led surge in its history, and Perth
is one of the most expensive cities.
Buttressing that success is the world’s oldest continuous democracy. At first
glance, Australian standards of public debate suggest an Anglo-Celtic
version of Italy’s saloon-bar atmosphere. Yet the nation’s raucous
politicians – witness the Welsh-born deputy prime minister, Julia Gillard,
herself the daughter of 10-pound poms, who last year called an opponent “a
snivelling little grub”, and the former prime minister Paul Keating, who
regularly emerges from retirement to toss in a little more rebarbative
Aussie wit (the former treasurer Paul Costello, he said last year, was “all
tip and no iceberg”) – are constrained by a parliamentary system that draws
on the best of the Westminster tradition and the English and Scots
enlightenment. The November 2007 general election was a sublime example of
Australian democracy. When the incumbent prime minister, John Howard, lost
the election – and his seat – after 11 years in power, the leadership
shifted seamlessly to Labor’s Kevin Rudd. Thanks to the compulsory system of
preferential voting, the transition was gracious, popular, representative
and bloodless.
) ) ) ) )
Australians may dislike outside criticism but they’re practised at
self-criticism. Many older, better-educated Aussies are quietly appalled at
the new breed of thuggish Australian chauvinists, who appear
unsportsmanlike, sneering and
ugly. The boorish chant of “Aussie Aussie Aussie, oi oi oi” at sporting events
suggests a lack of imagination, wit or self-confidence.
New Australia seems to have sidelined the supposedly traditional Aussie values
of mateship, the fair go and self-sacrifice. Asked to nominate “true
Australian values”, almost 40% cited “mateship” or “loyalty” in a survey
last month in The Bulletin (itself snuffed out last month by private-equity
investors who showed no loyalty to the magazine’s 128-year tradition). Yet
the same proportion said Australia was no longer the land of the fair go;
more than 80% said the gap between Australia’s rich and poor is increasing,
and 70% said Australia was too close to America.
Asked to state what appealed to them most about their country, they replied,
in no apparent order: “The Australian Rules football grand final.
Mateship. The beach. Multiculturalism. The fair go. The Great Barrier Reef.
The Boxing Day cricket test match. The spirit of adventure. Surfing. The
Opera House. Indigenous heritage.” Not a single scientist, artist or
national leader; not a single charity or cause, invention, social reform or
business success.
Yet despite this vacuous ideal, a “cultural strut” seems to have replaced the
old Australian “cultural cringe”, as the art critic Robert Hughes has
observed. The cringe at least suggested modesty and self-effacement.
Humour is perhaps the best mirror of a nation’s psyche, and by this measure,
New Australia is unrecognisable from the nation that gave us Barry Humphries
and Paul Hogan. Today’s Australians are tickled pink by the silliest home
videos, The Chaser (young men pulling stunts at other people’s expense),
Summer Heights High (a clever mockumentary about a suburban state school)
and, of course, Kath & Kim (a mother-and-daughter sitcom set in suburbia).
With the exception of the silliest home videos, the new comedies tend to
push a shared political view of Australia as coarse and class-ridden (along
brutish materialistic lines). One Australian expatriate remarked on a
website recently: “We laugh at Kath & Kim, but don’t really realise that we
are Kath & Kim.”
One doesn’t have to look far to find them.
The bacchic orgy that is the Melbourne Cup – the nation’s premier horse race –
fetches up images that routinely fail to edify the human race. The crowning
image of last November’s event was a drunken, thickset blonde who appeared
on the front pages pouring champagne from a great height into the mouth of
an alcohol-engorged man lying dishevelled on the grass. And that was before
the race began.
Christopher Wade saw a positive side to this behaviour: “One of the challenges
for Australia in the 21st century is to adopt a more confident sense of
itself, and not be so hidebound about its origins. That may play itself out
in terms of boorish behaviour. But yobs are everywhere.”
By this argument, New Australia’s boorishness, beach-side ostentation, loud
new money, aggressive republicanism, impatient energy and killer instincts
are healthy expressions of youthful self-confidence embodied by the first
lines of the national anthem: “Australians all let us rejoice/For we are
young and free…”
It also signals the end of Old Australia, a land of irreverence and
iconoclasm, charm and humility, dung heaps and dead ground, booze and boobs
and hard, leathery men and women who survived the Depression and two world
wars to build in their own good time the most durable of democracies.
The country is lavish in contradictions, of course: a monarchist nation that
must slowly yield to a republic, yet with large numbers still clinging to
the coat-tails of the Queen of Australia; a nation of young people who,
unlike their parents, worship the Anzac tradition; and a “classless”
Australia seeded with expensive private schools and controlled by powerful
business and political elites. The racism – always denied – of white
Australia seems most troubling for many new emigrants. It has had many
disquieting manifestations. During the cold war, politicians stoked the
hysterical fear of China – the “red-yellow peril” – in justifying the
nation’s involvement in the Vietnam war.
In recent years the Muslim community has felt the sharp end of white
Australian hostility. Consider the leafy commuter town of Camden, near
Sydney, one of Australia’s oldest pastoral communities. In December, locals
impaled bleeding pigs’ heads on stakes, draped them in the Australian flag
and rammed them into the site of a proposed Islamic school.
The most damaging expression of racism is to be found in the whites’ treatment
of the Aboriginals. An unofficial apartheid has always divided whites and
blacks, as the former conservative politician Mal Brough observed last year
when justifying his draconian intervention in Aboriginal communities of the
Northern Territory, whose members were accused of rampant child sexual
abuse. While some blacks, chiefly mothers living with alcoholic husbands,
applauded the measures, others saw the intervention as another doomed
attempt to legislate away social problems whose roots lie much deeper.
Blacks were not even recognised as citizens until 1967, when they were
granted the right to vote. Until then they were treated as a dying race,
abused and forgotten. Unlike heads of cattle, they were not even counted on
the census forms. Many blacks refer to Australia Day, which commemorates the
arrival of the first white settlers, as “Invasion Day”.
The dismal history of white-black relations is alive in the minds of
indigenous leaders. They relate many accounts of white drovers passing
through their communities and raping their women; of the missionaries and
government officials who took children, many of them mixed-race, from black
families. The whites who ran the foster homes and mission schools that
housed this “stolen generation” allegedly sexually abused 1 in 10 Aboriginal
boys and up to 3 in 10 Aboriginal girls, according to testimonies given to
the 1997 Bringing Them Home report on the stolen generation.
Can white Australia redeem the past? A starting point was perhaps Paul
Keating’s famous speech in Redfern Park on December 10, 1992, when he said:
“We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We
practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our
prejudice… We failed to ask, ‘How would I feel if this were done to me?’”
Hope rests with the will of the people to acknowledge rather than deny their
past. White Australians tried to do this on February 13, when the government
apologised for the first time to the black people for past injustices. It
will also depend on the young and newcomers to forge a constructive future
with the original inhabitants. Gratitude is never far away, either. More
Australians seem to realise how good they’ve got it, and how hard won. Every
year more than 10,000 young Australians gather on the shores of Gallipoli on
Anzac Day to commemorate the fallen Australian troops. The Kokoda Track and
Milne Bay in Papua – the battleground on which Australian forces, many of
them untrained militia, first defeated the imperial Japanese army on land –
is now considered to be hallowed turf.
And as I watched younger Australians and British backpackers dance in the New
Year and partying on the beaches of Sydney, it occurred to me that perhaps
Britain had made a terrible mistake – surely they should have left the
convicts at home and emigrated?
PERMANENT RESIDENCY
•British people wishing to emigrate Down Under as permanent residents must
have medical checks and be of “good character”.
• As part of the General Skilled Migration (GSM) programme, they must acquire
120 points according to a checklist based on skills and experience. This is
one of the most common ways of entering Australia as a skilled permanent
migrant. The programme awards points not only according to skills, but also
according to the demand for them.
CITIZENSHIP
•Most Britons who wish to become Australian citizens need to satisfy general
eligibility requirements. These include being an Australian permanent
resident, meeting the residence requirements and being of good character.
Most will also have to pass a new citizenship test prior to applying.
•To meet the residence requirement, those who became permanent residents on or
after July 1, 2007, must have been resident in Australia for four years,
including 12 months as a permanent resident immediately before applying.
They must not have been absent from Australia for longer than 12 months
during the four years.
