When my daughters were six and three, we made the long 10,000 mile journey from our home in Australia to visit their grandmother in Weston-super-Mare.
They had been promised donkey rides on the beach, a pier packed with thrill rides and fish and chips at Papas, an institution their English father assured them would be the highlight of our visit.
It was 2007, the height of summer, but it rained for a week without stopping. The donkeys didn’t appear, the pier had no charm and the fish and chips were as soaked as the sand. But that didn’t bother them.
Rather, what left them terrified and desperate to leave was the preponderance of mobility scooters. Driven by overweight and irascible people, they were both a menace and an emblem of a city 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 for a life of sunshine, mangoes and salads all year round.
Her grandmother, my former mother-in-law, died a long time ago, but from time to time, and largely for my own amusement, I still check the weather app on my phone to compare the forecast in Weston-super-Mare with that in Manly in Sydney, where we live.
Next Wednesday, the WSM shows a cloudy day with a high of 18°C. Manly looks set to enjoy hours of uninterrupted sunshine with a high of 22°C. The difference? You are in the middle of summer while we are in the middle of winter.
Moving to Australia 24 years ago, pregnant with my eldest daughter, Eliza, now 23, is the best life decision I have ever made.
My ex-husband and I moved in 2000 to have a better quality of life for the children.
While I was pregnant in London, I visited a friend who had young children and the whole time we were there, they watched DVDs. I had grown up barefoot and on the beaches of New Zealand; I wanted that for my own children.
I wake up 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, I’m likely to live longer. Australians live two years longer than their UK counterparts and almost five years longer than Americans, according to a study published by the journal BMJ Open, which also showed we outperform Canada, Ireland and my birthplace, New Zealand, in terms of 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 work adventure.
But the decade I lived there was characterised by grey days, long commutes, constant coat checks and a diet of wine, chips and ready meals that weren’t cold enough. Instead, life here is sunshine, mangoes, salads all year round and the scent of frangipani.
I wake up at 6am to do a sunrise HIIT class or Pilates on the beach, followed by a quick swim and a $4.85 AUD coffee (just £2.50) ordered via an app on my phone. If I need to get into the city for work, I take the ferry. Dolphins are our regular travel companions.
If I’m honest, it was British men who seduced me into coming to their country. They made me laugh. But as we get older and health becomes our new parameter, we don’t want a guy who looks like he’s straight out of a pork pie and salad cream.
By the way, you’ll be hard pressed to find those foods here. If you want to have a body like that of Australian stars Chris Hemsworth, Hugh Jackman or Margot Robbie, you’ll need steaks, lentils, vegetables and kombucha. And many of us want it, because public health campaigns, starting in school, have exposed its benefits.
On my Saturday morning swim team, half of whom are exuberant British expats thrilled to be competing against each other outdoors in the dead of winter, the talk is not of hangovers but of glucose monitors, intermittent fasting and the route for the next day’s three-hour cycle.
Even our politicians are models of good health. Former Prime Minister John Howard walked the length of the parliamentary triangle every morning (he covered more than 20,000 kilometres during his 11 years in power), our current Prime Minister Anthony Albanese lost 15kg by giving up alcohol and installing a treadmill in his Canberra office, while Treasurer Jim Chalmers went for a 4am run before presenting the national budget in May.
The mobility scooters in Weston-super-Mare were both a menace and an emblem of a town that had clearly become God’s waiting room.
The Mamils, otherwise known as “Middle-Aged Men in Lycra,” are our fastest-growing species. Blue-collar workers, who finish work at 3pm to go surfing, are our heroes. Frankly, you can keep your puny, pale Joe Alwyns and Tom Hiddlestons.
According to recent longevity research, most of the gains in life expectancy in Australia are occurring after the age of 45, largely due to better diagnosis and treatment of disease. Here, scientists and doctors are revered. We are currently fascinated by the health journey of Professor Richard Scolyer, who remains cancer-free after using an experimental therapy based on his own pioneering research into melanoma.
Compared to the UK, where it is almost impossible to get a same-day GP appointment and a friend had to wait over a fortnight for the results of a worrying breast cancer screening call, our healthcare system is easily accessible and efficient.
Doctors who treat skin cancer (Australians are at the highest risk in the world) have a full schedule of appointments, but if I see something worrying, mine will give me an appointment the next day. Here the experience and communication is excellent, unlike in the UK, where I was always scared after being mistakenly prescribed menopausal drugs instead of the contraceptive pill when I was 20 (I took it for a week without realising, before finally reading the instructions).
Tax incentives also mean that more than half of Australians have private healthcare, significantly more than ten per cent in the UK. My family pays AU$291 (£150) a month, which may seem like a lot, but it ensures I can see a specialist of my choice, have non-urgent surgery promptly and be hospitalised in a private room. Opticians, physiotherapy and gym memberships are subsidised extras.
In Australia, the shopkeepers who finish work at 3pm to go surfing are local heroes.
Ultimately, I suspect that the combination of sunshine, tranquillity, lack of crowds and hope is what is the real game-changer for Australian longevity. Last year, when I visited the UK, I was horrified by the long commutes and sedentary lifestyles of my former colleagues.
Spending a fortnight in the Mediterranean once a year to escape the misery of Britain is not a cheerful existence, and while I will always maintain that few traits can surpass British ingenuity, it seems increasingly marred by cynicism.
As everyone tells me, Britain is in ruins. It took me just two days to realise this during a visit last year. Driving along the A12 from London to Colchester, we were stopped for over two hours due to a breakdown. The road was too narrow for a rescue vehicle to pass and, as I commented, “it’s a minor road camouflaged as a main road.”
Elsewhere, my friends complained about crime, dirt, lack of care for the elderly, questionable house-buying practices, expensive trains and the relentless, stifling certainty of terrible weather. Explaining the current British temperament to a friend here, I found myself using the same adjectives one would use for mushy peas: soggy, pale, tasteless and disappointing.
A friend here says he would never go back to the UK because of the fishing. “You sit on a deckchair in the drizzle and use maggots to catch carp that no one can eat, or pay a fortune to fish for salmon on some fancy river. Here you can cast your line and eat gourmet fish for free for a week.”
A friend, who had recently returned to the UK, had forgotten the sorry state of the plumbing. “You’d think that a nation that invented the flushing toilet could, four centuries later, have created a proper shower.”
An elegant woman, she was also outraged by Farrow & Ball’s overuse of muted pink paint. Sulking Room Pink No.295 gave her the feeling of being trapped in the birth canal. “Thank goodness our light is too bright in here,” she commented.
In general, we Australians are less stressed. We relax under blue skies and are raised with the motto of “no worries” so we worry about the cost of living, but a walk in the woods or a dip in the ocean usually restores our optimism. We work to live, not live to work, and we start and finish early, with 6pm being the most popular time for restaurant reservations.
I still go back to the UK periodically to see family and friends (every two or three years) and my daughters love it (although they do complain that it always rains and that the Marks & Spencer prawn sandwich isn’t as good as we remember, now that we have huge local prawns and sweets 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 Britain is a guaranteed reminder of why we left its dreary shores behind.
