Life In Australia

As 2005 draws to a close, I was thinking about the future - not just mine but my children’s.

Since we arrived in Brisbane, we’ve added to our family and our son is a little Aussie. We wondered though if, legally, he was also British. It turns out that he’s not completely British - he is British by descent. This means he has the right to live and work in Britain as a citizen. If, however, he does not live in Britain for at least three years, his children will have no right to be British or to live in Britain.

We prefer living in Australia but it seems strange to think of our “mother country” disowning people whose family’s association with the British Isles goes back thousands of years simply because their grandparents decided they would prefer to live in Australia.

I suppose that’s the situation many young Australians find themselves in today when they’re looking to work abroad for a few years. Their ancestry is entirely British but they are not British and, unless they follow the same immigration procedures as people whose anscestors have never had any association with Britain, they can never be British.

Everyone hates cane toads. They were brought from South America to control another pest and have become worse pests themselves. Brisbane is the only big Australian city they live in.

The toads are pests because they eat Australia’s native wildlife and, since they are poisonous, they kill dogs, cats, dingos and anything else that tries to eat them.

The Aussies are happy to kill any cane toads they come across, splatting them with golf clubs, cricket bats and any other implement to hand. As more sensitive Poms, we use the recommended humane approach, catching them in plastic bags and freezing them to death in the freezer. This supposedly causes no pain.

According to today’s Courier Mail, fines for using a sprinkler on your garden have doubled from $75 to $150. If you’re caught using a sprinkler a second time the fine increases to $225. Third time you’re hit with a $300 fine.

Apparently 6 people in Brisbane have been fined in the last 10 days or so.

It’s not going to affect me. I’ve always used a hand-held hose.

Hand-held hoses are going to be banned in a month’s time if we don’t get more rain. Getting rain in summer shouldn’t be a problem in Brisbane - it’s our wet season, but in these days of global warming …..?

We came to Australia the official way - playing it totally by the book. Not everyone does though. Funnily enough, the biggest single nationality of illegal workers in Australia is British. Most of them come here on holiday and find the thought of returning to the grey skies of Britain makes them miserable.

So they stay in Australia.

Often they do casual work. There’s a shortage of casual workers and fruit pickers etc here so it’s fair to say that many people turn a blind eye. Not the authorities though. If you’re found out, you are deported and most likely banned from coming back to Australia for a few years.

The typical overstayer is a man aged 31 to 50 or a woman over 60.

According to the Dept. of Immigration, more than 40,000 overstayers came to Australia on visitor visas and most had stayed up to a year longer than they should have. In the last 12 months more than 18,000 overstayers and illegal workers have been deported.

A few weeks back, my wife was taking some cuttings to propagate some of her plants. As a once avid watcher of the late and much missed Geoff Hamilton on Gardener’s World, she knew her chances of success would be better if she added a touch of rooting hormone to each cutting. So that’s what she did. I’m pleased to report that her cuttings rooted very well.

Anyone with a passing acquantance with Australian English will know that “rooting” means more than something botanical - there’s a very much biological meaning too. Still, the Aussies don’t bat an eyelid. They still call it rooting hormone just the same.

If you still don’t know what “rooting” means, then trying thinking of rooting hormone as some sort of aphrodisiac.

And now you’ll have to excuse me, just off to get a tub of yoghurt. (Pronounced Aussie style so the “yo” rhymes with “go” rather than “law”.)

I thought I’d write about the weather in my first ever blog entry, after all it seems to be one of the main reasons most of us Poms up anchor and move here. Today in Brisbane, it’s hot. Yesterday in Brisbane it was hot. Tomorrow in Brisbane it will be hot. I need to add humid to each of these descriptions too.

For anyone who has lived in Britain all their lives with the odd trip to the Costa Del Sol thrown in, you’ll find summertime in Brisbane a new experience. When my parents arrived to visit us and they got off the flight in the early morning, one of their first questions was “when does the day start to cool off”. They were a bit disorientated about the time - poor things. They thought it was early evening. I felt almost cruel telling them that the sun had just risen and it was only going to get hotter…… and hotter…… and stickier as the day went on. So if you’re a pom thinking about joining the stampede to the subtropics, the first thing you need to think about is that old saying - “if you can’t stand the heat……” Because for three or four months every year here, the heat and humidity feels like it will melt you.

Blimey, I’m beginning to sound like the proverbial whinging pom. Quickly cuts to a fresh train of thought. The good news is that the heat can’t be that bad - we’re still here after a couple of years - and loving it.