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 …..?