When my daughters were aged six and three we made the long 10,000-mile trip from our home in Australia to visit their grandmother in Weston-super-Mare.
They’d been promised donkey rides on the beach, a pier teeming with exciting attractions and fish and chips at Papas, an institution their English dad assured them would be a highlight of our visit.
It was 2007, right in the middle of summer, but it rained for a week without pause. The donkeys never showed, the pier was charmless and the fish and chips proved as soggy as the sand. But that didn’t bother them.
Rather, what left them terrorised and desperate to leave was the preponderance of mobility scooters. Propelled by the overweight and irascible, they were both menace and emblem of a town that had clearly become God’s waiting room.
Angela Mollard says moving to Australia with her daughters 24 years ago was the best decision she ever made
After a decade in Britain characterised by grey days and long commutes, Amanda and her family headed Down Under to a life of sunshine, mangoes and year-round salads
Their grandmother, my ex mother-in-law, has long since died but occasionally, and largely for my own amusement, I still consult the weather app on my phone to compare the forecast in Weston-super-Mare with that for Manly in Sydney, where we live.
Next Wednesday WSM is showing a cloudy day with a high of 18C degrees. Manly looks set to enjoy hours of uninterrupted sunshine with a high of 22C. The difference? You lot are in peak summer while we’re in the depths of winter.
Moving to Australia 24 years ago, pregnant with my eldest Eliza, now 23, is the best life decision I’ve ever made.
My ex-husband and I moved in 2000 because of better quality of life for kids.
While pregnant in London I visited a friend with young children and the whole time we were there they watched DVDs. I’d grown up with bare feet and beaches in New Zealand; I wanted that for my own children.
I rise at 6am to do Sunrise HIIT or a Pilates class on the beach
As research this week shows, I’m not just enjoying a healthier life but it’s likely to be a longer one. Australians outlive their peers in the UK by two years, and those in America by nearly five, according to a study published by the journal BMJ Open – which showed we also beat Canada, Ireland and my birthplace of New Zealand for life expectancy.
It’s not hard to see why.
I first moved to the UK in 1992 like so many young New Zealanders looking to go overseas for a working adventure.
But my decade living there was characterised by grey days, long commutes, constant coat management and a diet of insufficiently chilled wine, crisps and ready meals. In contrast, life here is sunshine, mangoes, year-round salads and the scent of frangipani.
I rise at 6am to do Sunrise HIIT or a Pilates class on the beach, followed by a quick dip and a AU$4.85 coffee – just £2.50 – which I order via an app on my phone. If I need to go to the city for work, it’s via ferry. Dolphins are our regular travelling companions.
If I’m honest, it was British men who once seduced me to your country. They made me laugh. But as you age and health becomes your new metric, you don’t want a bloke who looks like he’s hewn from pork pie and salad cream.
Incidentally, you’d be hard-pressed to find those foodstuffs here. Rather, you need steak, lentils, vegetables and kombucha if you want a body like Aussie stars Chris Hemsworth, Hugh Jackman or Margot Robbie. And a lot of us do, because public health campaigns, which begin at school, have laid out the benefits.
In my Saturday morning swim squad where half the members are exuberant expat Brits delighted to race each other outdoors in mid-winter, the talk is not of hangovers but glucose monitors, intermittent fasting and the route for the next day’s three-hour cycle.
Even our politicians model good health. Former Prime Minister John Howard famously walked around the parliamentary triangle each morning (clocking up more than 20,000km during his 11 years in power), our current PM Anthony Albanese lost 15kg by cutting out alcohol and installing a treadmill at his Canberra office, while Treasurer Jim Chalmers was out running at 4am ahead of delivering the national budget in May.
Mobility scooters in Weston-super-Mare were both menace and emblem of a town that had clearly become God’s waiting room
Mamils, aka ‘Middle-Aged Men In Lycra’, are our fastest-growing species. Tradesmen, who knock off work at 3pm to go surfing, are our heroes. Frankly, you can keep your puny and pale Joe Alwyns and Tom Hiddlestons.
The recent longevity research found that most of the gains in life expectancy in Australia accrue after the age of 45, largely because of better diagnosis and treatment of disease. Here, scientists and medics are revered. Currently we are transfixed by the health journey of Professor Richard Scolyer, who remains cancer-free after using experimental therapy based on his own pioneering research on melanoma.
Compared to the UK where it’s almost impossible to get a same-day GP appointment and one friend had to wait more than a fortnight to learn the results of a worrying breast cancer screening call-back, our health system is easily accessible and efficient.
Skin cancer doctors – Australians are at the highest risk in the world – are heavily booked, but if I spot something worrying, mine will squeeze me in the following day. Here the expertise and communication are excellent, unlike in the UK where I was always fearful after being mistakenly prescribed menopause medication rather than the contraceptive pill in my 20s. (I took it for a week without realising, before finally reading the instructions.)
Tax incentives also mean more than half Australians have private health care, significantly more than the ten per cent in the UK. My family pays AU$291 (£150) a month, which may seem steep, but it ensures I can see a specialist of my choosing, have non-urgent surgery straight away and be hospitalised in a private room. Optical, physiotherapy and gym memberships are subsidised extras.
In Australia, tradesmen, who knock off work at 3pm to go surfing, are the local heroes
Ultimately, I suspect it’s the compelling combination of sunshine, ease, lack of crowding and hope that are the real gamechangers for Aussie longevity. Last year while visiting the UK, I was horrified by the long commutes and sedentary lifestyles of former colleagues.
Hanging out for a fortnight in the Mediterranean once a year to escape the misery of Blighty is hardly a joyful existence and while I’ll forever maintain that few characteristics can beat the British wit, it seems increasingly soured by cynicism.
As everyone tells me, Britain is broken. It took just two days to recognise this on a visit last year. Driving on the A12 from London to Colchester we were held up for more than two hours by a breakdown. The road was too narrow for a recovery vehicle to get through and, as I remarked, ‘it’s a country lane masquerading as an arterial road’.
Elsewhere friends complained of crime, grime, lacklustre care of the aged, questionable practices when buying a home, expensive trains and the relentless, soul-depleting certainty of rubbish weather. Explaining the current British temperament to a friend here, I found myself using the same descriptors you’d use for mushy peas: soggy, pallid, tasteless and underwhelmed.
A mate here says he’d never live in the UK again because of the fishing. ‘You sit in a deckchair in the drizzle using maggots to catch carp which no one can eat, or pay a fortune to fish for salmon in some fancy river. Here you can throw in a line and feed yourself on free gourmet fish for a week.’
A girlfriend, recently returned to the UK, had forgotten the parlous state of the plumbing. ‘You’d think a nation which invented the flushing toilet might, four centuries later, have created an adequate shower.’
A stylish woman, she was also incensed by the overuse of Farrow & Ball’s muted rose-pink paint. Sulking Room Pink No.295 gave her a sense of being trapped in the birth canal. ‘Thank God our light is too bright for it here,’ she remarked.
Generally, Australians stress less. Stretched out under wide blue skies and raised on an ethos of ‘no worries’, we may fret about the cost of living but a bush walk or a dunk in the ocean will typically restore our optimism. We work to live, not live to work, starting and finishing early with 6pm the most popular time for restaurant bookings.
I do still come back to the UK regularly to see family and friends – every two to three years – and my daughters love it (although complain it’s always raining and Marks & Spencer’s prawn sandwich is not as good as we remember now we have huge, sweet, local prawns on tap).
Honestly, the only problem with living in Australia is that we take it for granted. We forget how lucky we are – but a trip back to Blighty is a guaranteed reminder of why we left your dreary shores behind.