Life in Australia for Two New Citizens
(Last updated Sept. 13, 2011)
|
A small country that covers a very big continent-island, Australia is “girt by sea,” as its national anthem says. Australia’s 22 million people (only a couple million more than the population of metropolitan New York) live mostly in six major cities dotted along the 30,000-km-long (18,600-mile) coastline. We’re about the same geographical size as the 48 contiguous states of the United States combined. Basically, it takes a while to get from here to there, as we’ve learned on our travels. For example, whenever we fly to Bali (one of the Indonesian islands above Broome in the map above) the flight time is about seven hours, but for six hours we’re still flying over Australia. Melbourne to New York is 21 hours, a trip which sometimes feels interminable. |
Our first 10 years of living in Australia have flown by quickly, and since we became naturalized Australian citizens seven years ago we especially feel right at home Down Under. (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 in November, 2005, we bought an old turn-of-the-century house much closer to downtown Melbourne (and closer to Lisa, Jacob and the grandchildren).
The house is a brick Federation-style
double-fronted three-bedroom house which 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 old 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/cafe district that also has, within short walking distance, 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 to the city center. The result is that we’re less car-dependent, just as we were when we lived in the center of downtown Chicago years ago. It’s a very liberating feeling to become less car-dependant.
We both remain very busy. Alma is active in an art group, and her drawings and paintings are starting to look very professional. She rarely misses new exhibits at Melbourne’s excellent National Gallery of Victoria and other art galleries. 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. Some of my former colleagues at The Washington Post write for the Neiman website, as well as policy wonks from many other fields. In addition to Watchdog’s “Ask This” feature, I also enjoy throwing off the constraints of traditional reportage and writing opinion pieces in the Commentary section. Check out http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/ and go to “Contributors.” My essay topics include: a comparison of U.S. policy on Cuba and Vietnam; Australia’s very good health care system; how the dysfunctional U.S. Senate could learn something from Australia’s Parliament; the correlation between rising combat death tolls of small countries in the coalition forces in Afghanistan and the withdrawal rate of donor nations, and a piece reflecting on the unintended consequences of the U.S. covert military aid to the Afghan mujhaheddin in the early 1980s when I was based in the South Asia subcontinent.
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. Currently I am blogging about political issues on a U3A online policy forum.
On Sept. 9, 2011, Alma and I observed our 50th wedding anniversary. I say “observed” because we didn’t celebrate it in the usual gala fashion.
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 the Melbourne Theater Company and attend performances monthly at the Melbourne Arts Centre and the nearby Sumner Theater. Also, we travel whenever the mood
strikes: New 
Zealand’s beautiful South Island; the glorious tropical
island of Bali four times; Western Australia via a trans-continental train;
Australia’s quaint island of Tasmania; Queensland and the Great Barrier
Reef…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 2009 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). In
October-November he had a glorious trip to Indochina, traveling through Vietnam and Cambodia by plane, car, train, a junk on Halong Bay and motorized sampan up the Mekong River. See my Indochina
web page.
We belong to the Camberwell Pétanque Club (I’m president of the club and also president of the state of Victoria’s Pétanque league, which has more than 600 players). We both enjoy Pétanque, a French game vaguely similar to the Italian game of bocce except that instead of rolling the “boule” 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 (or, alternatively, knock away your opponent’s boule . 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, our Pétanque club’s 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 cyber world. Among other things it enables me to introduce beautiful Australia to many people who have never been here.
Alma and I also spend “quality time” with our beautiful granddaughters, Tilly, 9; Eleanor, 6, and Edith, 2. Having grandchildren is wonderful. 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 a 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 the raison d’etre in our 2001 decision to move to Australia.
HERE ARE A FEW SCENES OF OUR LIFE IN AUSTRALIA:
|
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 |
|
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. |
|
Eleanor, Alma and Tilly in our patio at home |
Tilly and little sister Eleanor help Lisa with the cooking |
|
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 |
|
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 nearly 10 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.
|
|
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:
|
Alma waits for a tram on line near our house |
Alma riding one of Melbourne’s famous old W-Class trams |
|
Another attraction is the 125-year-old old Victoria Market…… |
…And its colorful vegetable stalls |
|
The Yarra River runs through heart of the city |
They don’t call this region Oceania for nothing |
|
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 |
|
Eleanor and Tilly after carving up a Halloween pumpkin |
Eleanor made up to look like a cat |
|
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 |
|
Edie discovers her sisters’ dress-up hamper (Photo by Lisa) |
Little Edith, at almost 2 years, plays dress-up with a wig and says “Ta-da!” (Photo by Lisa |
