Life In Australia

In the worst drought in Brisbane’s history, it looks like my fellow citizens have been saving enough water to delay the start of level 3 water restrictions. We’ve now been spared until mid-March at the earliest.

Normally we get rain on summer afternoons – often dramatic lightning storms – but we’re not getting them this year. The water levels in the dams that feed Brisbane are falling.

Brisbane City Council had told us the city needed to cut water consumption to 920 megalitres a day. We’ve done better than that, cutting to 860 megalitres a day. We’ve been rewarded by the delay of increasingly severe water restrictions. I just hope we get a bit of decent rain between now and March.

Other Poms sometimes ask me if it’s safe to drink the water here. Well, of course it is. Not that it tastes very nice. A lot of people buy filters – not to make the water safe for drinking – but just to make it nice for drinking. Or they buy bottled water in the supermarkets.

A tip for the frugally minded is to do what I do – boil up tap-water for five or ten minutes, leave it to cool to room temperature, then put it in the fridge to make it nice and cool for drinking. It should taste pretty good.

At this time of year I drink as much water in a day as I did in a week before we emigrated.

Unlike most of the UK, the water here isn’t fluoridated so it’s important to make sure your kids brush their teeth if you want to prevent tooth-decay.

Immigration stats released in the last week show that Western Australia (Perth) is the most popular state for British immigration to Australia, followed by our very own Queensland. The numbers for 12 months were,

My take on the numbers is that a lot of Poms are choosing smaller cities for quality of life reasons while less than you might expect are heading for Australia’s big two – Sydney (New South Wales) and Melbourne (Victoria).