Australia. Not that it was wholly terrible. It just wasn’t what I expected and I overcooked it by staying for 2 years.
To be fair, it could never have lived up to the super-positive stereotype it has here in the UK.
We think of Aussies as fun-living, friendly, witty, laid-back beautiful people who are down to earth yet somehow savvy and open-minded. They love a drink and a BBQ and have a ‘live and let live’, inclusive attitude. Basically everything we Brits would love to be if we weren’t so repressed.
I think this cliche comes from a cross between Crocodile Dundee and through meeting the thousands of charming Aussies who end up working behind bars when they visit the UK in their youth.
Also, with the British weather being what it is, we imagine anywhere with a sunny climate would encourage people with a similarly sunny disposition.
Anyway, I’ll spare you the details, but having travelled extensively throughout Australia - well beyond Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane - I found little of the stereotype I’d expected and quite a lot of the opposite.
I did meet some great people, but they were mainly Irish 🤣
Yeah the cut the tall poppy syndrome is rampant there.
They celebrate alcoholism.
It’s still legal to hit children in certain states
In fact domestic violence was pretty normalized and women in droves die per year to it.
And they think the rest of the world is going soft by trying to be more inclusive in minority rights. Women in particular.
I mean it has some appeal with the beaches but yea, the people are still 1970s -1980s chauvinistic crowd.
I will give them this though: they do look after people with disabilities a heck of a lot better than another countries I’ve seen. Never mind ‘the elevator broke.’. That shit doesnt fly there not even for a second. And they did stomp down the classism way more than UK attempted to.
Yeah I mean, we’ve been heavily influenced by the US and UK historically, so we have a deeply racist disposition. Our treatment of Indigenous Australians is as much of a blight on our history as it is for other English-speaking nations like the US, Canada and South Africa. I do still strongly believe we’re doing better in a lot of ways, for example we’ve started using indigenous place names, acknowledging traditional land ownership and other steps. But we’re far from perfect, and if you come here with that conceptualisation then you’ll definitely be disappointed.
Australia. Not that it was wholly terrible. It just wasn’t what I expected and I overcooked it by staying for 2 years.
To be fair, it could never have lived up to the super-positive stereotype it has here in the UK.
We think of Aussies as fun-living, friendly, witty, laid-back beautiful people who are down to earth yet somehow savvy and open-minded. They love a drink and a BBQ and have a ‘live and let live’, inclusive attitude. Basically everything we Brits would love to be if we weren’t so repressed.
I think this cliche comes from a cross between Crocodile Dundee and through meeting the thousands of charming Aussies who end up working behind bars when they visit the UK in their youth.
Also, with the British weather being what it is, we imagine anywhere with a sunny climate would encourage people with a similarly sunny disposition.
Anyway, I’ll spare you the details, but having travelled extensively throughout Australia - well beyond Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane - I found little of the stereotype I’d expected and quite a lot of the opposite.
I did meet some great people, but they were mainly Irish 🤣
Yeah the cut the tall poppy syndrome is rampant there.
They celebrate alcoholism.
It’s still legal to hit children in certain states
In fact domestic violence was pretty normalized and women in droves die per year to it.
And they think the rest of the world is going soft by trying to be more inclusive in minority rights. Women in particular.
I mean it has some appeal with the beaches but yea, the people are still 1970s -1980s chauvinistic crowd.
I will give them this though: they do look after people with disabilities a heck of a lot better than another countries I’ve seen. Never mind ‘the elevator broke.’. That shit doesnt fly there not even for a second. And they did stomp down the classism way more than UK attempted to.
Yeah I mean, we’ve been heavily influenced by the US and UK historically, so we have a deeply racist disposition. Our treatment of Indigenous Australians is as much of a blight on our history as it is for other English-speaking nations like the US, Canada and South Africa. I do still strongly believe we’re doing better in a lot of ways, for example we’ve started using indigenous place names, acknowledging traditional land ownership and other steps. But we’re far from perfect, and if you come here with that conceptualisation then you’ll definitely be disappointed.
Understandable.
I know a few Australians and they are racist and nasty.
I know one who is kind, though.