Old Blighty

My mother is off to the UK this afternoon - Easter struck again and her favourite cousin dropped dead in his garden. She's going to do the funeral, estate sorting thing. Poor Mum - her Dad died at Easter (when she was 16); my Dad had a near-fatal car-repairing accident (a MkII Cortina fell on him) at Easter; her favourite aunt died at Easter...

I was born in the UK, in Cheshire. We moved to Australia in 1982 - I was 8 and remember being horrified - I understood just how far away it was. My brother and sister thought we were going to Austria... I was not a happy little chicken for ages - I was old enough to have identified myself as English. The Falklands War probably helped with that now I think about it. An easy lesson in nationalism - start a conflict and get all the school children to pray at school assemblies. And I wonder why I'm still uncertain around Argentineans... So, I started a new school, didn't deal well with the heat, didn't deal well with being called a pommy bastard (this was the Shire after all), didn't realise that people couldn't understand my interesting Warrington accent (cross between Liverpudlian and Mancunian). My identity as 'English', as different, was thoroughly entrenched. My parents became citizens, my siblings became citizens... I only got naturalised when I got a job with the Federal public service, and that was only because I had to.

1998 - happily married, one baby and another on the way... MrB gets a job in Eastbourne, East Sussex. We'd always wanted to go overseas, have an adventure, and we didn't let having kids stop us. It took a whole 3 weeks before I realised that I REALLY wasn't English after all. I was aussie through and through...

The English are... odd. And the Southern English are just a bunch of stereotypes! I spent 4 years living in Eastbourne and found it highly amusing that I offended people with my 'blunt aussie humour' Little old 'wouldn't say boo to a goose' me! They really are uptight, they really are unspontaneous, they really do talk about the weather. Constantly. There were things we loved about being in the UK, proximity to Europe not necessarily the most important, but I yearned to come home. We became increasingly frustrated with the fact that, especially in the organisations we were involved with, change and innovation was frowned upon. The "this is how we do things, we don't need to change" attitude ruled everything. Of course there are always exceptions, and we met some amazing people, made lifelong friends, but overall we missed Australians. We missed the way life is meant to be lived: the 'work to live, not live to work' mentality.

And I now feel so proud to identify myself as Australian. In a non-nationalistic way. To me it means: openess; friendliness; spontaneity; joyousness!