2 Texans Down Under

Following up on my reading and my last blog, I have a useful link now for anyone considering a move to Australia.

An Ozzie in America named Wolf just posted — on the Yahoo group site that I read often to see what Australians in my home country are thinking and writing about — this extremely useful link:
http://www.homepriceguide.com.au/snapshot/index.cfm

Here you’ll be able to type in the name of a suburb and, if the information is available, you’ll be given the median price of a home there as it was six months ago and as it is now.

I did that and found that the Brisbane suburb in which we already own a small house is “hot” and that the median price is continuing to rise.  If I were looking to buy here, that news would not have pleased me, of course.

So, have a look.  Type in the name or postal code of any Aussie suburb that interest you.

Thanks, Wolf.  — Bob

Even Ozzies can be startled by Australian prices.

One named Neal wrote in an ozinamerica post this week that — when he returned for a visit recently after living in the United States — he was shocked by the costs of basics like food and housing.

“Yeah, right, dad,” had been his mental response to what he’d heard as whinging from his father, but then he returned home to a Sydney suburb and had a look for himself. “One thing I didn’t prepare myself for,” he wrote, “was the price of groceries. OMG!!”

Wondering about the possibility of price fixing between the two main grocery chains here, Coles and Woolworths, Neal concluded, “As much as I hate to say it (people in Australia) probably do need Wal Mart to keep healthy competition and inflation down.”

He was puzzled by signs in Woolworths stores proclaiming a “rollback” in prices, just as I was puzzled recently by a sign in a chain-store pharmacy labelling – proudly, it appeared – a shelf of razor blades as “budget busters.” (And they were surely expensive enough to bust my budget, well over $2 each.)

Although most of the Ozzies who replied agreed with Neal about prices, especially house prices, one named Katrina added, “As for the need for Wal Mart - NEVER!” Then she added 13 more exclamation points.

Neil commented on how much Brisbane and the Gold Coast have changed since he’d seen them last, noted that “Sydney hasn’t changed much, everyone is still wearing black,” and concluded with this comment about three-hundred-thousand dollar price tags for average homes: “Yikes, wish I had bought real estate instead of partying back in the 90’s.”

Wait, it gets worse, according to a writer called Rama: “I am from Canberra. In Canberra, the average price of a three-bedroom home in an average suburb, away from the city, is 500 K. Houses closer to the city go for 630 K.” A friend of his recently paid $740 thousand for a three-bedroom, one-bath house in posh suburb.

One bath!  We are often amazed at how often expensive homes here have only one bath.

Not even Tasmania is immune to the cost run-ups, “truebluetas” wrote: “Tassie housing is insane also. In Hobart the most simple 3 bedrooms are in the high 300s.” His home in North Carolina is valued at half that, so he also wishes he’d invested here in the 90s.

Who doesn’t? Other than those who did, of course. We’re just glad we bought our small house in a Brisbane inner suburb in 2006, several years “too late.”

On the positive side, though, my wife and I spent some time this past week driving to various Brisbane suburbs to interview people for a study she’s doing and everywhere we went we found wonderful parks with great playground equipment and picnic areas (not to mention clean, well-maintained public toilets), the health care system covers everyone, and most working people have salary/benefits packages superior to those of folks doing similar jobs in the United States.

Thanks in part to the lingering effects of a declining union movement, pay increases for people in academic positions are more frequent and more generous here than what we experienced in the United States. And the Australia-wide minimum wage is much higher that of any state back home.

Those facts, alone, I suspect, are enough to keep Wal Mart, Inc., from being interested in trying to set up shot down under.

English grammar, I’m discovering decades after studying it half-heartedly because I had to in secondary school, is remarkably interesting. So, too, are my native tongue’s conventions of punctuation, spelling, and capitalization.

I know, I know, that sounds crazy, doesn’t it?

If you’re like me, someone born into an English-speaking culture, you probably didn’t really appreciate studying arcane rules guiding the use of the language you were already using intuitively at an acceptable level. In talking and writing, I could “play it by ear” and get things right most of the time.

It was only when I began to study Spanish that I realized the importance of knowing the rules governing a language’s usages and patterns.

Now, I’m studying yet another language, Australian English, Read the rest of this entry »

A picture is worth…what is it?…oh, yes, a whole bunch of words.

So I’m trying an experiment and I hope you’ll like it.

If you click here, you’ll be taken to a public Picasa site where you’ll be able to see six photos of the area I wrote about in my last blog.  No sign-up, no password.  Just a chance to have a look at some places we enjoyed visiting.  And Picasa now works for Macs as well as PCs.

Let me know what you think.  — Bob

Pardon me if I keep bragging about Brisbane as if we invented it or something, but it is a special place.

Beyond picking up litter now and again to keep it out of the Brisbane River, we haven’t improved Brissie in any discernible way. So I guess what I’m bragging about is our luck in landing here in 2005 when we took the big leap to this continent we’d seen only on maps and in an occasional movie.

The job Kristi took could have been in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, or Hobart, but it wasn’t.  It was here in Brisbane, which we now consider to have been fortunate indeed.  Let me tell you about our Saturday and you’ll see why.

I should say up front that we’re suffering through the coldest winter of our three years here.  But it’s my kind of “suffering:” Fahrenheit readings in the 40s when we get up each morning and in the 70s by the afternoon (or “by the arvo,” as the Aussies say).

It’s the sort of winter weather that makes you want to be out and about, which is not how we feel here, admittedly, on summer days around Christmas and after.

This past Saturday, though, in the depths of Brisbane winter, we took a six-hour, 111.1 kilometre (69 mile) tour of the coast to our east and thoroughly enjoyed seeing ocean, beaches, islands, swamp, marsh, forest, lots of birds, and even a chattering crowd of the big bats that are called flying foxes.

If we’d gone west for a drive of similar door-to-door distance, we’d have seen Read the rest of this entry »

Being 8,000 miles of so from family is one of the very few aspects of being in Australia that Kristi and I experience as a drawback.  This week, I was reminded of the fact that we are far, far away from many people with whom we are emotionally close.

My youngest brother, who had a heart attack a few months ago, was helicoptered to a hospital in Texas one morning this week after he woke up and found himself virtually unable to breathe.

I got the news of his being in an Intensive Care Unit by email from another brother, but I’d shut down my computer and gone to bed about the time he sent the message, so 10 hours had passed before I learned that I had cause to worry.

Then I began using the phone.  Many calls later, I know now that Mike is feeling fine and going home tomorrow, although nobody seems to know why he suddenly had the problem.

My relief is palpable.  And my appreciation of satellite technology and cheap long distance calling is real.

I pre-pay for calls I make on my gotalk “ezichat” phone.  An automated female voice always tells me how much money and time I have left, before connecting to the number I’ve dialled in the United States, and I’m currently down to less than $10 in my account, but that’s nearly 900 minutes of talking.

So I just had a leisurely chat with Mike in his hospital room.  The connection was perfect and he sounded good.  Now I’m feeling fine, too.

Technology brings with it problems, but cheap and excellent calling from one hemisphere to another?  That is something for which I am deeply grateful.

“Politicians are incentivised to … ”

A man being interviewed on ABC AM radio this morning spoke a sentence that began with those words.  I didn’t hear the rest of what he said because I was distracted by the sound of the new crack forming in the façade of civilization.

I don’t even know how to spell that word, with an “s” or a “z,” and I hope to never see it in print.  (Okay, after this.)  “Politicians have incentives to…” is a readily-available phrase and it’s shorter.  Why use such an awkward construction, putting a noun to work as an adverb?

To obsfuscate.  I think that’s the only logical explanation and I use that fancy word in both it’s primary dictionary meanings, “to obscure or confuse” and “to stupefy, bewilder.”

When you have a weak argument, use words people are not used to hearing, words people may not know but suspect they should.  And don’t define them.  Some of us will be stupefied and offended, but perhaps others will think, “Wow, this guy must be really smart.”

Maybe “obfuscate” should become more common in the vocabularies of us all.  Maybe it could remind us to be more alert to attempts to deliberately obscure and confuse.  Maybe we all need to become obfuscation detectors.

Of course, obfuscation doesn’t always require concocted terms or big words.

Soon after we arrived here in Australia in 2005, I began to notice public persuaders using, over and over, “at the end of the day.” I thought it was an Aussie usage, but I’ve since learned that the term is rampant in the United States, too, and that at least one poll shows it to be most people’s least favorite cliché.

It’s hard to imagine, but now it seems to me that a new phrase is being used even more often, here and probably back home, too.  It’s “get this right.”  Every public figure interviewed by the media is now devoted wholeheartedly to Read the rest of this entry »

Maybe “Sicko” is not a great name for an important and serious movie that all Americans should watch.  If I’d been judging by the name alone, I wouldn’t have given it a second glance.

Lots of people, of course, will know that it was made by Michael Moore and that it’s an expose of the medical care system in the United States, so by the time they’re in a video rental place, they’ll have decided, on grounds other than name appeal, whether they want to see it.

I wish everyone in America would watch it between now and the next time they get a chance to cast an election ballot.  Perhaps you should know that this wish comes from a person who, as a senior in high school, wrote a prize-winning essay opposing “socialized medicine.”  The statewide contest that gave me a cash award for second place was sponsored by the American Medical Association.  (Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned …)

Having now experienced health systems here in Australia and in the US, I have been positively impressed with the care I’ve received in both places.  I am alive and healthy today because of excellent doctors, technicians, and equipment provided to me a few years ago in Oklahoma and Texas.

I was, fortunately, well insured. Having insurance makes all the difference in the US.  A brother of mine had a heart attack a couple of months ago and had a pacemaker installed.  He’s fine, now.  If he had not been insured, he told me, “We simply couldn’t have afforded a pacemaker.”

As Moore’s movie points out, America is alone among developed countries in letting insurance issues and companies determine life and death health decisions for its citizens. I thought I already knew how dire the medical situation in my home country is (50 million without coverage, etc.), but “Sicko” showed me that things are even worse than I thought.

A few days after my partner and I watched Moore’s documentary, I stumbled onto an intense discussion between Australians about the American health care system and I found it fascinating to read the views of people who grew up with universal health care but, as expatriates, don’t have it now.

Their sometimes-heated discussion took place in a Yahoo group called Ozinamerica.  Over a period of days and after several thousand words, these articulate Aussies produced general agreement on at least a couple of points.

GENERAL AGREEMENT 1 – Insurance in the United States is expensive, but Read the rest of this entry »

A step-down transformer. That’s what I should have called the metal box I had in my carry-on luggage when we flew from DFW to Los Angeles and then to Brisbane three years ago.  Not knowing the term “step-down,” when I wrote about it, however, just plain “transformer” is what I called that 16-pound pain in the bag.

You need one of those (maybe a modern one that weighs only a pound or two) if you want to run most US appliances from Australian electrical current, I said in an issue of my email newsletter, OzAnswers.

Boy, I thought I was smart.  I’d bought my bargain transformer on eBay, lugged it here, and used it for my electric toothbrush and our bread-making machine.  Now I had heaps of useful, experience based information to share with folks thinking of moving down under.

And then I got an email from a reader named Nicky (not her real name; she has given me permission to quote what she wrote me but she prefers to be anonymous).

Nicky, with typical Aussie tact, began with praise for my newsletter and my take on Australian life, and then she gently suggested that my “instalment on electrical appliances lacked an important angle to the question of bringing equipment from one country to use in another.”

That angle, as some others of you probably knew but I didn’t until Nicky told me, has to do with “line frequency (aka Hertz) differences.”  Then she wrote five highly informative paragraphs that should be read with care by anyone moving from the US to Australia, or, I suppose, the other way.  Here they are, with numbers to remind you that these are Nicky’s five well-informed paragraphs, not mine:

1. Step-down transformers only convert voltage.  However, you still have to worry about the hertz differences.  US a/c power runs on 60hz and Australian power runs on 50hz.  This means that some appliances will not work correctly even with a step-down transformer.  For example, many clock radios use line frequency as calibration.  Running them on a different line frequency than they’re made for Read the rest of this entry »

Canada or Australia? If you were going to immigrate to one, which would be the best choice?

A blogger friend of mine recently decided to ask the universe for advice on this question. She did so by posting a long list of the pros and cons of both countries as she perceives them to be from her vantage point, a small English village.

At this time a little over three years ago, my partner and I were living in the United States and we had our own long list of questions about Australia. We’d traveled in Canada, but like Cath Lawson (http://cathlawson.com), neither of us had been down under. The few notions we had of what it would be like to live here were vague and not always accurate.

Now – after three years and lots of experiences on this island continent that looks so small on maps but is roughly the size of the continental United States — I found Cath’s Aussie pro-and-con list intriguing.

Some of the responses to Cath’s blog on this topic were insightful, I thought, and experienced based, especially those from a guy named Nick who has evidently lived in England and now lives where we do, in Brisbane.

Cath began her “pros” list with geography, noting Australia’s abundance of open spaces but said Read the rest of this entry »