On the anniversary of our big move, I am reflecting on the past year – the ups, downs, in between and, the big question, would I do it all again, or would we have been better off staying put?!

So, in true “Wanted Down Under” style, I’m rating certain aspects of our new life compared to our old one and giving a verdict on which one would win each category. This is purely based on my personal opinion of the last twelve months and is not meant to offend anyone! :p

Cost of living:

It’s not as cheap as I remember when backpacking ten years ago, but it was pretty stupid to think it would be! However, this did not deter me (or my husband) from exclaiming “Wow! That’s gone up!” every time we purchased anything for the first month or so.  I’ll give you an example: my trusty can of Diet Coke, although now banished from my life, was obviously one of the first items I purchased.  When I was backpacking, it was $1.20, now they’re $2.50! “More than double the price!” as I shrieked in disgust at the discovery! I slowly realised that I was sounding like a pensioner still talking about things in “bob”, as my Dad still has a tendency to do, so stopped. And I suppose the novelty of the new prices wore off too.

I still can’t stop the habit of converting everything to pounds before I buy it, but I must stop this dangerous game! You see, when I convert it to pounds, I have the tendency to think “Oh, that’s not too bad!” even when I know that in dollars it seems quite pricey. The moral of the tale is: everything is relative to what you have in the bank and what the going rate is, so if I saw the same prices in England, I would jump at them, but here I need to think twice.  I could do with more pounds to convert to feel like I’m getting a great deal!

Rental prices and house prices seem to be higher here, but that’s coming from central England and would probably be a different story if I was Southern.  On the whole: clothes, groceries and household items are cheaper here and petrol is about half the price. It really shows you how much we get ripped off on petrol prices in the UK! The sales here are amazing too, so it’s definitely worth waiting for what you want.

Winner: Australia

Lifestyle:

So, we’re living in a city inland and not on the coast as we envisaged, but it’s still definitely a more pleasant outdoor lifestyle than I had in the UK.  Lack of money has hit us hard, but thank goodness, the parks are free! Toowoomba has 157 parks, according to Wikipedia, and we’re doing our best to get round them all, as friends can tell from my Facebook pics! One friend commented: “You’re always at the park!” and I said “Yes! At the very least twice a week! It’s free and it’s fun.  The dog can get walked, the munchkin can get rid of some energy and everyone can get some fresh air!”

Don’t get me wrong, the UK has some beautiful scenic spots, but you just can’t trust the weather!

Winner: Australia

Weather:

This is not as clear-cut as you may think.  We decided on Queensland over the other states for a few reasons, one being that it is warm all year round…and then we moved to Toowoomba! Toowoomba is high up on the crest of the Great Dividing range, so it can get very chilly and very windy.  I must hear “You’ll be used to this!” “Does it feel like home?” or “I bet you like this weather, don’t you?!” every time we get a bout of bad weather here and the answer is “No!!!! I hate the cold! I hate rain! I hate wind! And I moved the other side of the world to try to get away from it, not to think “Ooh, this drizzle is really making me homesick!””  Friends back home don’t seem to believe me when I say it gets cold and think it’s because I’ve acclimatised already! Sadly untrue.

I wouldn’t be British if I didn’t moan about the weather though and having said all that, nine months of mostly decent weather is a far cry from what I could expect in Blighty.  I was a little bit jealous at everyone’s snow pictures for a few seconds, but then I remembered that I don’t actually like the cold, at all! A pretty easy decision.

Winner: Australia

House:

I love the space you get in Australian houses.  I like the open plan layout and I like being all on one level, especially with a small child. The houses are cool (in the cold sense), the tiles feel amazing on your feet when you’re coming in from the heat and the air con is amazing in the sweltering Summer.  However, they are not built for a cold winter at all! The walls are too thin, there is no insulation, we have no fireplace.  I never thought I would miss our wood-burner, but I do!  I have never been colder at night than I have here! When I was having a good old whinge about it, I was asked how I coped in England?!  Well, we certainly know how to do cosy in the UK! Some may see our houses as poky, but they help keep us warm! I miss our double glazing, loft insulation, insulated walls and definitely miss our fire! No, for nine months of the year it isn’t needed here, but as I type this in bed wearing my fleecy “Christmas” pyjamas I would love a bit of central heating!

Winner: Summer – Australia  Winter – UK

Friends:

I am starting to make some really good friends here.  It took a while, but I suppose that was to be expected too.  You can’t just descend on a new place, shout “I’m here!” and expect to have a new circle of friends straight away! My partner in crime on my friend-finding missions has been Mia.  Practically all of the friends I have made are Mums I have met at playgroup, dancing or sports club, so she has been very handy in improving my social life! She can also destroy it if she has a tantrum in the middle of something and I have to leave, but I figure I wouldn’t have been there in the first place if it wasn’t for her.  My embarrassment at her behaviour is sometimes a great icebreaker as well, as all the Mums tend to know who I am after Mia has done something “hilarious”!

Obviously I continue to miss my friends in the UK.  A year is a long time to not see them.  Skype is excellent but obviously not the same as a good catch-up in person and is fairly hard to timetable with everyone’s busy lives and the time difference.  I don’t think I’ll be flying home until we’ve got some decent savings in the bank, which means they’re going to have to come to me, which is a bit hard to do with families in tow and the price of airfares.  I’ll keep buying the scratch-cards!

Winner: UK

Language:

It’s too late in life for me to be trying to change my accent and I wouldn’t want to – it’s a part of who I am! When I first arrived, people in shops would smirk when I started talking, or make a comment, which made me a bit self-conscious about sounding different, but Ian reckons it was the same for him the other way round in the UK.  I’ve been used to listening to Ian’s Aussie accent for over a decade, so I forget that I sound different, until the smirk happens or “one of those words” come up.  For instance, ordering a “cob” in a sandwich shop and getting a bewildered look (although that could happen in different parts of the UK); talking about Mia’s “nursery” when here they would say “daycare”; “flip-flops” and “thongs” (snigger!); “football” and “rugby”; “plasters” and “band aids”, “lorries” and “trucks”, “vans” and “Utes”, “wellies” and “gumboots”, the list could go on and on!

But the main difference is pronunciation and it’s mainly the vowels.  If I was from the South of England, the difference probably wouldn’t be as great, but I find Aussies tend to drag out vowels way more, whereas in the Midlands, vowels are short.  Poor little Mia is trying to overcompensate with her accent and has ended up sounding a bit South African at times, which has caused us much amusement at home! Who knew that South Africa was the missing link between English and Australian accents?! In all seriousness though, the more she hangs around with other kids, the more she is going to adopt their accents – she even corrected my pronunciation when we were practising her letters the other day, so I know my time of her sounding like a mini me is running out!

Winner: UK

Sport:

England loves to see Australia lose at sport and Australia loves to see England lose, it’s a love/hate relationship! Ian has taken years of verbal battering about it and I suppose now it’s my turn!  It might be the people we hang around with, or where we’re living, but Australia isn’t as sport-orientated as you might think.  The outdoor lifestyle is certainly conducive to playing sport, but obesity is a massive problem here (pun intended!)  I have certainly seen more overweight people here than in the UK (although we certainly have more than our fair share of overweight people too (pun intended again!)) and I think it’s down to the vast array of American style fast food outlets and the fact that everyone seems to drive everywhere!  Ian even commented on it and for him to say anything remotely negative about his home country is unheard of! I know that, thanks to America, we have all this in the UK too, but, the other night we were ordering from a pizza place and the guy on the phone kept telling Ian that if he ordered more of certain things then it would work out cheaper, so we ended up with twice as much food for half the price! How does that make sense?!

Having said that, there is a massive turnout for Parkrun every week, there are loads of gyms around, so people must be using them and I do see people out jogging and walking their dogs etc.  Perhaps there is just a bigger divide between fit and fat here!

Football (read soccer for the Aussies) isn’t as big here, though it’s starting to grow in popularity and I do miss my Saturday afternoon results coming up on the vidiprinter and actually knowing who any of the sports personalities are.  I’m not really into rugby or cricket and AFL still baffles me, so I do feel a round shaped ball hole as far as that’s concerned.

Winner: UK

Healthcare:

It’s not free to go to the doctor – no likey.  I wasn’t aware of this the first time I went and just strolled out, only to get a bill in the post! Whoops! However, you do get about two-thirds of your bill back through Medicare, which I suppose is sort of like two-thirds of an NHS then!  It doesn’t cover private facilities either (like the NHS).  The good bit though is the waiting time.  I can call up and get an appointment that day, or, at the very worst, the next day, whereas at my doctors in the UK, you’d be lucky to get one the next week!  Everything seems very fast and efficient, but there does seem to be a big difference between public and private.  In public hospitals, you can just turn up with your Medicare card, whereas you must have a private healthcare plan to use a private one.  Again, I know we have private hospitals in the UK, but Toowoomba has one public hospital and three private ones, so I don’t think that adds up and the facilities are vastly different.  Ian was jammy enough to get into a private hospital for his hernia operation and it was more like a hotel than a hospital!  We have also been to the public hospital and it felt like a hospital in the UK with a similar waiting experience.  It seems like it’s halfway towards being the American system here and I don’t think privatisation is a good thing for any country – watch out UK!  But, on the other hand, I’ve certainly felt the benefit of being able to see a doctor when I want to, so…

Winner: Undecided

Education:

I still don’t know enough about the system here to fully make a decision, the extra term here and differing dates and holidays have already mangled my mind, but my observations so far are that, like the health system, there are so many more private schools here than in the UK and in general, the state schools aren’t very well regarded.  That puts me in a personal and professional dilemma, as I don’t believe you should have to pay for your education.  I feel that it should be a right, no matter how much money you have.  It’s divisive based on parental income, not the child’s intelligence.  I don’t really want Mia to go to a private school, nor do I really want to teach in one further down the track, but I do want her to go to a good school, so I’m going to have to do a lot of research!

Winner: Undecided

TV:

The amount of ad breaks here drive me mad!  As do the infomercials on daytime TV. I will never moan about daytime TV in the UK ever again!  Plus I can’t watch the “football”. Yes, I mean football! I miss some of our soaps too, but YouTube is my friend!;)  I have adopted some new shows here too though, but for now…

Winner: UK

Flora and fauna

Yes, there are more things that can kill me here than anywhere else in the world, but the likelihood of seeing snakes, spiders, sharks and crocodiles in everyday life is pretty slim, unless you’re working in a zoo or living in the bush (childish snigger – another English language joke!). I actually think I saw more house spiders in England, which is fine by me!

However, the cute and cuddly looking koalas, kangaroos, wallabies, wombats, and possums have got to win hands down, even if I am partial to a squirrel, there really is no contest there.  And the lorikeets, galahs and kookaburras are just that bit more appealing than the one-legged pigeons you get hobbling around the market square at home.

Winner: Australia

So, there you have it! On total categories…it’s a draw! If I had written this possibly even as little as three months ago, the verdict may have been completely different. But I am starting to feel more settled now and working towards calling here “home”.

So, overall I choose…Australia! Bloody good job really, as I can’t afford the plane ticket out of here!