2 Texans Down Under

Nearly all our friends smiled, two and a half years ago in the United States, when we told them that we were planning to move to Australia. Many looked wistful. Some pulled out an Aussie phrase or two that they seemed proud to know. Others began talking about, maybe, visiting us down under.

Our announcement was treated as good news by nearly all our friends and acquaintances.

We did get more ambivalence from some of our family members. “Australia!” one said, as if I’d just told him we were moving to Mars. Another took me aside and proposed an outside limit for our being so far away: “You know, Bob, three years would be just about enough.”

And, for us, two Texans who’d never spent more than a few months abroad, the idea of leaving secure work situations, selling most of our possessions, and then packing up and moving to a new hemisphere and a continent we’d never even visited… well, it was a scary and an exciting time.

We had a thousand questions and there were a thousand more we would have asked if we had known enough ask them.

We prepared as best we could. We read some books and did web searches and called or emailed some people who’d been in one or another part of Australia, but we boarded the plane that brought us here with much less knowledge than we wanted.

The only person on this continent that we knew picked us up at the airport in Brisbane, dropped us off at a motel, and graciously left us alone to begin finding our way in a place where people drive on the wrong side of the road and speak their own sort of English.

Now, many months and some hard-knock lessons later, we know a few of the questions we should have asked but didn’t and we even know an answer or two. We have some experienced-based opinions about what it’s like to live and work in this country we have come to love.

This blog will be about what we’ve learned, about Australia as it is seen by two Americans far from what we’ve always known as home, and about what we hear from other immigrants and visitors.

If thinking of Australia as a place to visit or to live gives your spirits a lift, then please join us by returning here regularly. We like company. We like responses. We want to hear your questions.

Australia has surprised us, tested us, and pleased us. We’d like to tell you about why all those smiles on the faces of our friends were, in fact, justified. — Bob