2 Texans Down Under

I got a bird’s eye view of about a thousand miles of Australian desert, mountains, sandy rivers, and “gibber plains” this week and it was about as much fun as a person can have in a commercial airliner seat.

A courteous Qantas check-in agent at the Alice Springs Airport assigned me and Kristi to window and aisle seats toward the front of the plane to Brisbane when I told him I wanted to see the countryside.  I’m grateful that he did.

The sky was clear and for an hour and a half I sat transfixed by the scenery passing below at, I suppose, 600 miles an hour or more.  My camera has an “aerial photo” setting and a zoom lens with an anti-shake mechanism, so I shot picture after picture of territory I’d never seen before and may never fly over again.

We’d just spent a week hiking around in “the red center” of Australia, starting in Uluru (also known as Ayers Rock), driving to King’s Canyon, and then using Alice Springs as a base for tours to its west and east.

From our home-bound plane on Wednesday afternoon, I got to see country similar to and different from what we’d hiked and I was made sharply aware of the luxuries of modern-day life by Alice on the Line, a book about one family’s experience of travel to, and life in, Alice Springs a century ago.

With the help of a professional writer, Douglas Lockwood, Doris Bradshaw Blackwell told of traveling in 1899 from Adelaide with her mother and siblings to join her father, the newly appointed manager of the telegraph station in Alice Springs.  She was eight years old and 300 miles of the trip involved riding for 14 days in either a buggy or a wagon, neither of which offered any protection from sun or storms.  It’s quite a story.

We got to visit Telegraph Station Museum, including the house the Bradshaws lived in until Doris was 16.  Built of stone and located two miles from what was then a tiny village known as “the Alice,” it is today much as it appears in black-and-white photos from the early 1900s.

As the landscape slipped past, below my comfortable airline seat, I noticed long red streaks that puzzled me at first.  They were part of the scenery for about an hour.

I realized what I was seeing when I recalled Doris Blackwell’s tale of Read the rest of this entry »

Where’s the best place to live? The answers vary, but every year Australian news sources pay attention to survey results and generally report that Sydney and Melbourne get high ratings among the world’s cities.

This year, Sydney was named “world’s best city” by a group called Anhold City Brands Index, just topping London, Paris, Rome, New York, and, in sixth place, Melbourne.

While researching my book on Australia last year, I found a report from a British firm called the Economic Intelligence Unit that put Melbourne at the top of its list of “most livable cities,” behind only Vancouver and Vienna.

That group put Perth, Adelaide, and Sydney in the top 10 and Brisbane at 11th.

This year’s report from a company that advises on pay levels for expatriates puts Australian cities high in its list of 215 cities, but not at the top.

Mercer’s Worldwide Quality of Living Survey for 2008 has Sydney at 9th, Melbourne Read the rest of this entry »

Finally, we have a clear notion of “the Darling downs.”

Most Brisbane folk watch the ABC television weather news on weekday evening, I expect, for hints on how to dress the next day, but for me it’s a geography lesson as much as anything else.

On an outline of Queensland, town and city names are posted with their high and low temperatures for the day, and I think, “Oh, that’s where that is” or, more rarely, “We’ve been there.”

But the names of various regions such as “the Darling downs” never get put on the screen because, obviously, everybody knows where they are. Unless, of course, you’re newcomers, as we are even after nearly three years.

Until Easter weekend this year, we didn’t know where Australia’s “New England” was. Then we drove through there and expanded our knowledge even further by visiting Texas, QLD, which is, appropriately enough, in the southwestern part of the state. Well, south, anyway, and as far west as we’d been.

On that trip, we also learned, while hiking over large chunks of it, where “the granite belt” is and we got to know a bit about Stanthorpe, where our farmers’ market apples come from, near the New South Wales border.

But “the Darling downs” was an entirely mythical place as far as I was concerned. I assumed it must have something to do with the Darling River, which is dying a slow death from drought, up-stream irrigation, and city-water demands.

Our printed maps don’t use the term as a label and my trusty Australian dictionary carries no definition of it despite listing “Darling shower.” That’s a dust storm.

As I said, though, we are finally in the know. This past weekend, Kristi and I traveled west and then north, passing near Ipswich, driving over the Wivenhoe Dam’s dam, and going through Esk, Toogoolawah, Blackbutt (named after the tree of the same name, I assume), Read the rest of this entry »

Two liquids, water and gasoline or petrol, are big news here this week, as is the case in many parts of the world.

The good news is that we’ve had rain, glorious alternating bands of light to heavy rain for more than a day, ending this morning, about three inches of unexpected wet stuff here in Brisbane. That’s about twice the normal June total.

News reports say farmers south and west of here, who’ve missed out on earlier rains this year, also got welcome totals.

The three lakes (called “dams” here) that are Brisbane’s main water source — Wivenhoe, Somerset, and North Pine — have all caught some runoff and their total content is approaching 40 per cent, the point at which water-use restrictions here would be eased back a notch.

The largest, with about two-thirds of the storage capacity of the three, is Wivenhoe and it is often shorted by weather systems that soak Brisbane. Located well inland from the coastline, where rain is almost always heaviest here in Australia, it’s increase yesterday was less than two-tenths of one per cent of capacity.

Worse, government bar graphs show a decline from nearly 30,000 megalitres of stored water in the three dams in April, 2005, to just over 10,000 in April, 2008, roughly the time we’ve been living here. (Honest, though, we’re not at fault; the two of us use just a bit more water daily than Brisbane’s Council has set as a usage goal for one person.)

Petrol is another matter, of course. While the gasoline pumps seem to be delivering ample supplies, the cost has soared here as it has in the United States and elsewhere. Unleaded regular was selling this morning at our local 7/11 for about $1.43/litre or roughly 5.15 US dollars per gallon.

I put in premium on the recommendation of a Prius mechanic and paid Read the rest of this entry »

Thinking of taking a big leap? Thinking of starting a new chapter in your life and considering Australia as its setting? Then you may be in luck.

The new Rudd Government has announced for the coming fiscal year the biggest annual increase in permanent and temporary migration into Australia since the 1940s, and there doesn’t seem to be much backlash. Some worries, but no real opposition.

The plan is to open the door to nearly 300,000 workers from overseas between July 1 this year and the end of June, 2009, and the work visas will be not only for high-demand jobs, but various kinds of work, skilled and unskilled.

As I noted in my last blog, Treasurer Wayne Swan, speaking for the Labor Government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, announced this widening of the immigration door in his budget presentation last week and it could be good news for anyone considering moving to the Land of Oz.

(Note: My spell checker IS working. Aussies put a “u” in “labor,” writing it “labour,” but not in the name of the party now in power, Labor.)

Inflation is a hot topic here and business leaders hope opening the door to more migrants will help dampen wage demands. Labour union leaders fear that it might, but they don’t seem to be too worried, only protesting that they need a place at the immigration decision-making table.

The reasons behind this substantial change and the absence of acrimony about it, so far, were expressed in a column May 17 in The Australian by the newspaper’s primary political-affairs editor, Paul Kelly.

Kelly wrote: “Australian labour shortages are here to stay. They are Read the rest of this entry »

“Less tar, more taste,” proclaimed a United States cigarette company
ad a few years ago. Today, the US and Australia could claim this:
“Less smoking, more pollution.”

Americans send huge amounts of toxic stuff into the air and water and
Australians pollute more per person than any other nation, but while
we foul the atmosphere, we are breathing easier at ground level than
we otherwise would because of steady declines in tobacco smoking.

Phillip Adams, a prominent print and radio commentator here, recently
wrote about parallels between the indefensible tactics of tobacco
companies peddling their products over the decades and the way our
political leaders in both countries avoid taking effective action to
stop “giving the planet lung cancer.”

Propaganda and profit, he argues, are keeping us from cleaning up our
environmental act in the same way lies and deceptions allowed
companies to manufacture and sell billions of highly addictive
products that maim and kill.

These little white sticks that Adams labels weapons of mass
destruction (March 22-23, 2008, The Weekend Australian) are still
being manufactured and sold, of course, often addicting the poorest
and most vulnerable before they reach the legal age of consent. Adams
could have written about corporate child abuse, too.

Tobacco use is still the leading cause of preventable death in the US,
according to the Center for Disease Control, but the proportion of
adults smoking there is as low as it’s been since the 1930s. About
21% of adult Americans smoke.

A government report says 70% of Aussie men and 30% of Aussie women
smoked in the 1950s. About 17% of adult Australians smoke now.

In both countries, prohibitions against smoking in enclosed public
places Read the rest of this entry »

Moving to Australia gave us a new perspective on our home country, the United States. Now Kristi and I are traveling for a bit in the Netherlands and Belgium following a work conference she had in Amsterdam and we’re getting a new perspective on Australia.

 * Most noticeable of all is the fact that Australia is, relatively speaking, less pricey than we thought. We asked our friend from Amsterdam if anything is cheaper there than in Australia, where she now lives, and here answer was unequivocal: no.

 Our experience verifies that with one exception: beer, very good beer of many varieties, costs less than a euro per bottle in stores and you surely can’t beat that in Brisbane.

 * One cannot live on beer alone.  But you can come pretty close if you add in cheese.  The Netherlands has incredible cheeses.

 * The Internet speeds I experience with my ADSL connection at home are put to shame by all the connections speeds we’ve experienced here. Gmail comes up fast! I watched a brief movie sent to me via email and there were no interruptions for more downloading. None. Amazing.

 * Really old things in Australia tend to be trees, like Read the rest of this entry »

People everywhere, even those of us who enjoy travel and find ourselves able to adjust well to living in countries other than the one in which we were born, long for “the comforts of home.”

Being near family and friends is at the top of the list of what we miss.  Knowing one’s way around and speaking the most-common language, is up there, too.

But sometimes what we expatriates miss is  “comfort food” or, at least, food we’re accustomed to buying and eating.

Friends of ours from Amsterdam were missing “pindakaas” until they found a Dutch food store not far from where they live now in Brisbane.  That Dutch word means “peanut cheese,” which is Read the rest of this entry »

This was supposed to be yesterday’s blog, but something more pressing came up. It would have been perfect for April Fool’s Day, a Y2K sort of story in 2008 … except that it’s all true.

Here is a paragraph from a report by Ryan Emery in “The Australian” for March 31: “Yesterday Western Australia returned to standard time, leaving NSW, the ACT, Victoria and South Australia keeping track with Tasmania … and Queensland and Northern Territory somewhere in the middle.”

That was, more or less, the good news. Before I get to the bad news, I need to offer my US readers a few translations and bits of fact. NSW means New South Wales and it is a state, as are Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania, and Western Australia. “The ACT” is the Australian Capitol Territory, where Canberra is located. “Northern Territory” is a federal territory that occupies most of the north end of Australia.

Now, with the geography lesson done (don’t feel bad, I needed it, too), let’s turn to time. Time in Australia.

Australia has Western, Central, and Eastern time zones. Parts of the Northern Territory are in each of the three.

In Tasmania, until this year, daylight savings time ended on the last Sunday in March, which put that island state south of Victoria out of sync with its neighbors.

So, this year, officials in New South Wales, the ACT, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania agreed to a new plan — they’d all turn their clocks back one hour at 2 a.m. on Sunday, April 6. The only problem was that a lot of people and a lot of computer programs didn’t get the message about delaying the shift for one week.

They result was, in some parts of this country, a mini-Y2K.

Personal computers, some hand-held Blackberries, many cell phones, and even some automated telephone company correct-time services gave people Read the rest of this entry »

Money. Since beginning consideration of your compatibility with Australia, I’ve discussed two of the three traditional areas of concern: degree of neatness and sex. I took the easy one’s first.

Money is the tough one. First, flying to an Aussie destination from the US will cost you couple of thousand at least, maybe much more, for a round-trip ticket, and then you’ll need food (expensive) and lodging (very expensive).

It helps a little, of course, that your US dollar will still get you an Australian dollar and nine cents more, and maybe you are one of the fortunate few who don’t have to worry about such things. A “New York Times” story this past week said there are in the world today 2,000 superyachts (120 to more than 500 feet long, valued in millions) and about 200,000 people could afford to buy one of them.

Are you more interested in the minimum wage than the price of yachts? You could be in luck here. Is the minimum wage still about $5.50 per hour in Texas and up to around $10 in one or more states of the US? I know middle- and low-income earners in the US have been losing ground.

It doesn’t seem so here. Aussies prefer to speak in terms of minimum wage per week and a week is counted as 38 hours of work. The current, Australia-wide minimum wage is $522.12 or $13.74/hour (US$12.60).

The Australian Fair Pay Commission (AFPC) wants to give the lowest-paid workers here a $26/week raise to $548.12/week or $14.42/hour (US$13.23). Unions want more. The Rudd government is expected to decide soon.

No worries, though, if you’re between 18 and 45 years of age, and your training or experience qualifies you for a 457, skilled migrant worker, visa. That lets you stay four years, at least, and according to this morning’s newspapers, you won’t be worrying about the minimum wage.

“The Australian” has a front-page story today by Paul Maley and Matthew Franklin saying Australia’s full-employment economy is currently paying skilled migrants $15,000 more per year than the average Australian earns.

Here are a few facts from that story:

1. In 2006-07, the average skilled migrant’s salary was $71,600 (US$65,682) while the average salary Read the rest of this entry »