Life in Australia for Two New Citizens
(Last updated Sept. 3, 2010)
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A small country that covers a very big continent-island, Australia is “girt by sea,” as the national anthem says. Its 20 million people (about the population of greater Los Angeles ) live mostly in six cities dotted along the 30,000-km (18.600-mile) coastline. Basically, it takes a while to get from here to there, as we’ve learned. For example, whenever we fly to Bali (one of the islands above Broome in the map) the flight time is about seven hours, but for about six hours we’re still flying over Australia. |
Our first nine years of living in Australia have flown by quickly, and since we became naturalized Australian citizens six years ago we especially feel right at home. (See the Citizenship web page).
After enjoying life in our house on a very pleasant, quiet and leafy street in the Studley Park neighborhood of Kew, a close-in Melbourne suburb only about 3 km from the city center, we grew a bit bored with suburban life and moved in November, 2005, to an old period house that we bought closer to downtown Melbourne (and closer to Lisa, Jacob and the grandchildren).
The house is a brick Federation-style
double-fronted three-bedroom house built at the turn of the century. It has
12-foot-high ceilings, fireplaces in every room and was definitely built to
last, as we discovered when we had a contractor knock down a wall between the living
room (lounge) and the kitchen/dining area, thereby creating the kind of
spacious “open plan” that we like. The interior walls are brick, the exterior
walls double brick and the foundations and some walls are bluestone. The
electricians and cable TV workmen had fits drilling through the walls. We
recently had the 
kitchen and bathroom remodeled, which signaled the end
to renovations for the time being (I hope).
The house’s greatest feature is its location right in the heart of a restaurant district that also has within a short walk almost every kind of shop that we could we could want. The result is we walk more than we ever have, and if we don’t walk we take one of two tram lines within 3 blocks of our house. The result is that we’re less car-dependent than since we lived in the center of downtown Chicago years ago.
We both remain very busy. Alma is active in a book group and is attending art classes. Her drawings and water colors are starting to look very professional, and recently her art group’s paintings were exhibited in a show and favorably commented upon. Alma works out regularly at our local gym, as I also do (a bit less regularly), and we both are still keen on bicycling and in good weather we enjoy the excellent bike paths that abound in Melbourne, a very bicycle-friendly city. Our favored route is along the foreshore of Port Phillip Bay from Melbourne Port to the historic St. Kilda pier, where we lunch before making the return ride.
I’ve been doing some writing, on the basis of as much or as little as I feel like, for Harvard University’s Nieman Watchdog, a policy watchdog group that seeks to provide journalists with questions they should ask when they look for information that the public should have. Quite a few of my old colleagues at The Washington Post write for the Neiman Watchdog website, as well as policy wonks from many other fields. In addition to the “Ask This” feature, I also enjoy throwing off the constraints of traditional objective journalism and writing opinion pieces in the Commentary section. Check out http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/ . My initial two essays are on health care and how the dysfunctional U.S. Senate could learn something from Australia’s Parliament.
I have also been doing, on an on-and-off basis, volunteer teaching at the University of the Third Age (U3A), a continuing education program for Over 55s that is affiliated with the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (See the U3A Page ). Mature-age education flourishes in Australia, and I think it’s a great way to keep the mind stimulated. Also, I believe in volunteerism, and there is something very satisfying about challenging my fellow citizens intellectually and seeing to it that neither they nor I lose our marbles through disuse as we grow older.
At the urging of many people since I retired from the news game nine years ago, I wrote a book-length memoir, mostly about my 42 years in journalism. (I was enjoying writing it so much I couldn’t stop). For now, I plan to just leave it for Lisa, the grandchildren and others in the family and also friends who might want to read it. While writing it I rummaged through hundreds of old photos of those years and put together an album I call “Hacks at Work and Play.” The Hacks at Work and Play album on this website and on my Facebook profile page contains about 80 photographs of myself and newspaper colleagues taken while I was covering stories in the Middle East, India and the rest of the South Asian subcontinent, South Africa and elsewhere in southern Africa, and the Canadian Arctic, among other places. Check it out.
I’m
also enjoying my m
embership in the Melbourne Savage Club, a
somewhat eccentric downtown men’s club whose roots are in 19th
Century England and which also has a long tradition here of providing merriment
to some very irreverent and fun-loving writers, artists, musicians and sundry
bohemians, as well as lawyers, businessmen etc. In addition to the regular
lunches I attend at the club with fellow Savages, there are frequent black-tie
events in the evening, including operatic and jazz concerts, cabarets, satiric
revues and special club dinners featuring major Australian public figures as guest
speakers. It’s all good fun because Savages are known for not taking themselves
too seriously. A number of former Aussie foreign correspondents whom I knew
during my various overseas postings are also members of the Savage Club.
I’m also a member (season ticket holder) of the Carlton Blues Australian Rules football team, and most Sundays during the footy season you can find me at the Telstra Dome or Melbourne Cricket Ground with friend and longtime Blues supporter Dennis Floyd. See my Footy page. I also have become a keen cricket fan, but I also remain addicted to baseball and watch games on ESPN and Fox Sports here, as well as NFL football games.
The
thing about retirement is that you can be as busy as you want to be, and you
are completely in control of how you spend your time. You can go flat out if
you want, but if you ever feel like sitting and staring into space, you can do
that, too. Retirement is also a great time to read all of those books you
never had time for when your nose was to the grindstone. Thankfully, Melbourne is the kind of cultural city where there are lots of ways to stay busy with
interesting things to do.
Alma and I
subscribe to and regularly attend performances of the Melbourne Theater Company
at the Melbourne Arts Centre, and we occasionally go to the Australia Opera Company performances as well. And we travel whenever the mood strikes: New 
Zealand’s
beautiful South Island, the glorious tropical island of Bali three times,
Western Australia via a trans-continental train, Tasmania, Queensland and the
Great Barrier Reef, an upcoming trip to Vietnam and Cambodia…the list go on.
(There are links to pages about most of those trips on the Home Page). In
June-July of 2004 we made an exciting train journey on the Trans-Siberian line
from St. Petersburg and Moscow across Russia and down to Mongolia, and then on
to Beijing. (See the “Train”
web page). In April, 2007, we flew to Japan for 16 days, and visited about 10
cities, including Tokyo, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Atacama, Kanazawa, Nara, Kumamoto and Kagoshima, mostly traveling by bullet train. See the Japan web page). In
May-June 2008 we toured the ruggedly-beautiful Kimberley coast of northwestern Australia, traveling from Darwin to Broome in a very large and luxurious yacht and exploring many
rivers and tributaries along the way. See the Kimberley
web page. In September-October of this year we traveled along Croatia’s Dalmatian coast and to Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Hungary, Austria and up the Danube River by boat to Nuremberg, Germany (See my Europe web page). Other
likely destinations: some more of the Pacific islands, the Amazon River and Andes and Vietnam-Cambodia 
. The frequent flyer miles are mounting up.
We belong to the Camberwell Pétanque Club (I’m past-president of the club and currently a board member) We both enjoy Pétanque, a French game vaguely similar to the Italian game of bocce except that instead of rolling the ball you lob it high in the air as in slow-pitch softball and try to get it to stop next to the cochenette (jack) 6-10 meters away. It’s a very social game and is typically played while sipping a glass of good wine. (See the “Pétanque” webpage for details).
In addition to this website, I created and continue to edit and write for Pisteup.com, a Pétanque club website, and I’m a board member of the Washington Post Alumni Group, which runs a website (http://twp-alumninews.org/ ), as well as a Facebook page for former Washington Post employees. Yes, once a Luddite, I’m now quite immersed in the cyberworld.
We also spend time with our beautiful granddaughters, Tilly, 8; Eleanor,5, and baby Edith, 1. Having grandchildren is great. It’s like having small children all over again, except that when they start to lose the plot you can just hand them back to Mum and let her deal with it.
Lisa and Jacob live in roomy, 4-bedroom double-fronted Victorian house in Brunswick that they bought shortly before Matilda was born on Jan. 6, 2002. It’s not even a 5-minute drive from our house, which means that visits both ways are hardly a big hassle. Sometimes we even walk or ride our bikes between the two houses. Being closer to Lisa, Jacob and the grandchildren, of course, was a large part of our 2001 decision to move to Australia.
HERE ARE A FEW SCENES OF OUR LIFE IN AUSTRALIA:
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A pregnant Lisa, Alma and Bill celebrate Alma’s 65th birthday with Jacob at the Circa Restaurant |
Alma and Lisa enjoy a coffee in Lygon Street, not far from our Carlton North house |
Alma and Bill ready themselves for a black-tie dinner at the Melbourne Savage Club, Bill’s haunt |
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Beautiful Tilly and No. 1 Teddy Bear, Dudley |
Eleanor at the park near our house. As sometimes happens with grandparents, Alma and I are completely besotted over Tilly and Eleanor. As a result, we have them visit us frequently and of course we spoil them with lots of “lollies,” visits to the ice cream shop down the street and visits to the swimming pool a block from our house. This, of course, was one of the great motivators in our decision to move to Australia, and we have never regretted the move. |
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Eleanor, Alma and Tilly in our patio at home |
Tilly and little sister Eleanor help Lisa with the cooking |
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Eleanor and her Daddy, Jacob, at Kindergarten |
Tilly and her granddad ( “Papa”) at an art show where Grandma exhibited a collage of teapots, which is behind us in the photo above |
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Tilly and little sister Edith, at 4 months |
Tilly and Eleanor cuddle with baby sister Edith |
A REFLECTION IN TIME
We’ve been living in Melbourne for nine years now and I have almost forgotten how exhausted we looked after our 14-hour flight from Los Angeles a little more than a week after I retired from The Washington Post on Sept. 6, 2001. So, the photo on the left below shows the scene in front of Melbourne’s Tullamarine Airport at 8 a.m. on Sept. 17, 2001 as Lisa and Jacob greeted us in our adopted country. And the photo on the right is of Bill, Alma, Lisa and Tilly at Melbourne’s All Nations pub celebrating our new Australian citizenship with Jacob and granddad Wally an hour after being sworn in on Jan. 26, 2004 (which happened to be Australia Day). Recently Tilly and Eleanor, who of course were born as Australians, also gained American citizenship (and passports) and are dual nationals like the rest of us. Yes, that’s a toy Koala Alma is holding in the photo on the left. Lisa is hiding her pregnant condition behind a pile of suitcases, and Jacob is taking the picture, while trying not to laugh.
It’s amazing how quickly we both started feeling completely at home here. That’s the way Australia is. But I think our somewhat nomadic life and our 15 years of living abroad while I was a foreign correspondent made the transition somewhat easier. We took Australian citizenship for several reasons: because we wanted to more a part of our new home country than we were as unnaturalized permanent residents, because we felt Australian, and because we wanted the right to vote here (as well as casting absentee votes in U.S. elections as dual nationals). I may have been the only Australian to vote against both George Bush and his neo-conservative admirer, Prime Minister John Howard, within one month in 2004!
For more about our naturalization, go to the CITIZENSHIP page, which has photos of us being sworn in.
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The road to Australian citizenship: From Tullamarine Airport on Sept. 17, 2001 (left), when we landed as immigrants, to the All Nations Pub, in Melbourne, on Jan. 26, 2004 (right), where we celebrated after our naturalization ceremony with Lisa, Tilly, Jacob and Jacob’s granddad Wally, who immigrated from England in the 1960s and became an Australian citizen. |
Some random scenes from our life Down Under:
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Alma waits for a tram on line near our house |
Alma riding one of Melbourne’s famous old W-Class trams |
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Another attraction is the 125-year-old old Victoria Market…… |
…And its colorful vegetable stalls |
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The Yarra River runs through heart of the city |
They don’t call this region Oceania for nothing |
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Australia, which is about the same size as the mainland U.S., has beaches like this one all the way around its 22,814-mile (36,738 km) coastline. You can’t find many Aussies who don’t swim |
Lisa snapped this at Ocean Grove, on the Pacific coast south of Melbourne, but the city also has wonderful beaches on Port Phillip Bay. Throughout Australia, the rugged shoreline of tea tree heath and sand dunes is largely free of development |
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Eleanor and Tilly after carving up a Halloween pumpkin |
Eleanor made up to look like a cat |
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Grandma reads bedtime stories to the girls during a sleepover |
Eleanor and Tilly ready for bed at sleepover at Papa and Grandma’s house, where they get away with everything |
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Edie showing very early signs of becoming a wino (Photo by Jacob) |
Little Edith, at about six months, and her mum, Lisa (Photo by Jacob) |
