Life In Australia

It’s important for everyone with fair skin (and not so fair skin too) to take on board a simple fact. The UV from the sunshine in Australia will take the skin off you – literally.

People get sunburnt here much, much faster than in the Mediterranean. I’d say the sunshine in Australia is stronger than in the Greek Islands by the same amount as the Greek Islands are stronger than the south of England.

If you expose unprotected skin to the sun for half an hour here at midday here you could be burnt badly.

I’d never been a regular hat wearer until I came here. The first few days here – and ears and nose burnt so badly that the pain was excruciating – changed all that. At this time of year, I’ve learnt not to go outside for more than a few minutes between 9am and 3pm. If I really have to, I wear sunblock, hat and sunglasses and move quickly from one clump of shade to the next.

Fortunately the sun rises at around 5am in summer in Brisbane so you can get in plenty of outdoor activity before it gets really strong.

If you’re coming here in summer for the first time, please be safe rather than sorry. Cover up until you can judge safely for yourself the extreme effects of the Australian sun.

Very sad reading about the young lady killed by sharks just off the coast near Brisbane. I’ve been myself to the island (Amity Point – a weird coincidence with Jaws being set on Amity Island.). Amity is a beautiful place with clean, white sand and calm shallow water. Apparently the water was muddier than usual when the attack happened.

According to the newspaper,

“Another island visitor, who wanted to be identified only as Jess, 18, said she had been about 20m from the shore when she heard a woman screaming from the beach for her to get out.

“I saw dolphins and thought she might have been talking about them,” she said.
Amity Point fisherman Miles Scott, owner of Fresh Local Seafood at Amity Point, said locals had long been concerned about sharks.

“We’ve been waiting for this for a long time. We’ve always thought someone was going to be taken here.
“I’m a crabber and at this time of the year massive bull sharks come over the bar.

“It’s nothing to see 10 or a dozen bull sharks under our boat when we are crabbing and they are really aggressive – they are not like normal sharks.”

Rod Farrell, who owns Amity Point Waterfront Cabins, said the woman had been swimming in a channel that locals avoided.

“We’re forever telling little ones and tourists not to swim late in the afternoon or at night, especially in the summer,” he said.

Water police and parks and wildlife staff plan to search for the shark this morning, with a 2km stretch of beach to be closed during the hunt.

Will it put me off swimming? Putting it in perspective, more people in Australia are killed by bee stings than sharks. I think I’ll stick to beaches with shark nets for a while though.

Australia works hard at attracting British people to move here. There is sometimes an element of over-projecting an image of Australia as the land of milk and honey but most Poms who move here don’t regret it. The quality of life is better here for most of us.

If there’s one thing the Aussies love to crow about, it’s their sporting success. Beating the Poms is their greatest ambition. Reading a press release from the Minister of Immigration (Senator Amanda Vanstone) a few days ago made me smile. She said:

“People arrived from more than 200 countries, with the largest influx coming from the United Kingdom. A total of 18 220 now call Australia home – maybe keen to be part of a successful sporting nation!”

http://www.minister.immi.gov.au/media_releases/media05/v05164.htm

I hope the minister and her advisors are more on the ball with immigration matters than they are with sport because – whisper it- The Poms beat Australia in Sydney to take the Rugby World Cup in 2003 and we’ve just won back the Ashes.