Pace Brings Peace : Expatriates Revel in Australia

Ask Susan Young what first struck her about life in Australia, and she’ll tell you about the tea ladies at work.

An investment banker who was transferred here 6 years ago from California, Young found these genteel beings, who wheeled in refreshments each morning and afternoon for bank employees, symbolic of a relaxed approach to business that was “a shock to my system.”

“I was used to getting things done in 2 days,” she says, and in Australia, “it would take 2 weeks. People would say to me, ‘Slow down!’ It’s not a manana approach, but it’s not the same ruthless pace.

“It took a while,” she says, “but I got used to it.”

Young and her husband, Jeff, not only got used to it, but came to prefer the life here so much that when Young’s bank wanted to bring her back to the United States 2 years later, she balked.

She took a job in another bank (with no tea ladies); Jeff Young founded his own graphics design firm, and they now live on permanent-resident visas in the green hills of this sprawling coastal city, home to a growing number of Americans in recent years.

The Youngs are among about 80,000 Americans who, according to Australian government figures, have moved to this country since 1945. Unlike the country’s first immigrants, the convicts carried from England 200 years ago by the infamous First Fleet, these voyagers arrived willingly. Some came for poetic reasons: to marry an Australian, to seek adventure, to find themselves. Others had more prosaic motives such as to improve economic prospects or to escape urban ills.

Bernard Finifter, a sociologist at Michigan State University who is writing a book on Americans in Australia, divides them into three main types: future-oriented people seeking career prospects that they could not find back home; “yesteryear nostalgia-seekers” searching for a country like the one they think the United States used to be, and those “who want to try their wings in another society” and for whom Australia represents “safe adventure.”

A small percentage fled the United States for political reasons, Finifter said, some during the social ferment of the 1960s. An even smaller group saw in Australia a haven for whites dating from the days when the country discouraged non-white immigration, a policy officially abandoned in 1973.

Like an Engagement

Whatever the reason for their moves, the relationship of many American settlers to the country affectionately known as Oz is more like a long engagement than a marriage. Even some who have lived here for more than 40 years continue to think of themselves as Americans; only an estimated 10% become Australian citizens. Most remain on permanent-resident visas that allow them all the privileges of Australians except the right to vote.

These settlers say Australia caught their imaginations even before its international profile was raised by the celebration of its First Fleet bicentennial, the capture of the America’s Cup and the success of Australian films such as “Crocodile Dundee.” What holds them, they agree, is the country’s relaxed life style, its physical beauty, its relative lack of urban ills, its sense of possibility not unlike that of the American frontier.

But unlike so many immigrants to the United States, most of the new American settlers here already have a leg up economically. Australia is choosy about whom it admits and grades would-be immigrants on a point scale that considers job training and age. Most settlers are young and relatively well-off.

Still, like Susan Young, many discover that their enthusiasm and skills did not always prepare them for what they found.

The Youngs were leading “comfortable but rather nowhere lives” in San Francisco, Jeff Young recalls, when his wife came home one night and announced that her bank wanted to transfer her Down Under.

The idea clicked. “It was a big adventure,” he says now, “and it was company-sponsored.”

Although his image of Australia had been “the old cliche of kangaroos and red desert,” the couple ended up here in the nation’s largest city, an urban cluster as large as Los Angeles arrayed along a strikingly crenelated coastline. In this, they are like most Australians: The nation is the size of the continental United States, but three-quarters of its 16 million people live in the oceanside arc of cities stretching from Brisbane on the east-central coast to Melbourne in the southeast.

The couple--she is 38, he is 41--live with their two young daughters in a white-walled contemporary house furnished with white leather sofas and boldly patterned aboriginal art. It was business that brought them here, they say, but it is the relaxed life that holds them. Sydney alone offers 30 beaches.

“Maybe because we’re both Midwesterners, the water access here is so appealing,” says Susan Young. “We do diving, sailing, crew, swimming and sailboarding with friends.”

An Imperfect World

Still, they have found flaws in their adopted land. Susan is enthusiastic about the Australian fondness for children--they “are encouraged here. It’s really a youth-oriented society,” she says. But she discovered that as a working mother, she was considered unusual enough to be the subject of a magazine profile whose author clearly thought she should stay at home. Some of her male colleagues have told her that they would never let their wives hold paying jobs.

The pair wish they weren’t so far away from family, would like more racial diversity in this overwhelmingly white nation and, on a less cosmic note, miss college football and round-the-clock shopping. Compensations include fresh mangoes and native fish with names like barramundi and John Dory.

The one issue that could drive them back to the United States, they say, is their children’s education. The relaxed life style they enjoy so much has its downside: Educational attainment is not highly prized. Many students quit school at the end of the 10th grade, and few go on to one of the 13 commonwealth universities.

The Youngs are graduates of public schools in the United States, and Susan Young was upset that “people were telling me before the children were born to get them on the waiting list” for private school.

Two hours south of Melbourne, Jeanette Rowe Cadwallender, 31, also lives a more laid-back life than the one she knew growing up in Fredericksburg, Va., where her father and uncle run the Fredericksburg Freelance Star. Cadwallender, her schoolteacher husband, Nick, and their three children live on a 5-acre farm where the weather is mild enough for a year-round vegetable garden. They also have a small flock of sheep.

Cadwallender came here to marry her Australian husband, but says she was also ready for a change. Weary of teaching Latin in a Charlottesville high school, she was traveling the world 6 years ago when she met Nick in Nepal.

Now, she relishes the rural life, its slower pace and lack of social climbing. “It’s a quiet sort of healthy existence,” she says. “I’m glad to be away from a lot of America.”

She still stays in touch through American news programs: The U.S. “Today” show comes on at midnight, and Cable News Network broadcasts in the wee hours. Her third baby was born this summer, and “I don’t mind getting up for the 2 a.m. feeding,” she says.

But on her last trip to Fredericksburg a few months ago, “I couldn’t believe how crowded things were. People spend an hour in a traffic jam on the way to work.”

Far From Texas

Pamela Lyons, 35, came to this country 4 years ago because “it was as far away from Dallas as you could get without falling off the globe.” In the harsh red desert in the empty heart of Australia, she found what she was looking for.

Lyons had just quit her job as a newspaper reporter in Dallas and wanted to think about her life. She made her way to Alice Springs, a town of 25,000 about 800 miles from the next city. Known as “The Alice” or simply “Alice,” it has a decided frontier flavor that, despite the presence of two air-conditioned shopping malls and a tourist-oriented casino, draws an international mix of people seeking to shed their former lives.

Fascinated by aboriginal culture, Lyons became involved with a local advocacy group, the Pitjantjatjara Council, which was in the forefront of the growing native land-rights movement. “I had the feeling of being on the cutting edge of something socially important, like the civil-rights movement of the 1960s in the United States,” she says. “You felt privileged to be there.”

Intending to stay 4 weeks, she remained for 3 months, partly because she fell in love with the council’s senior legal adviser, a British-born Australian citizen.

Returning briefly to the United States, Lyons discovered that “I really didn’t enjoy living in America anymore. . . . I was absolutely overwhelmed by the amount of choice, and by the pace of everything--how fast people talked, and how fast they moved. You see this constant jockeying for position. Your essential identity is identified by the degree of your material comfort.”

After months of vacillation, she decided to get married and return. Now writing a novel, she says she has “a much richer life here than I ever had in Dallas.” Most of her friends work for the aboriginal council; she stays away from Americans who work at nearby Pine Gap, a U.S. military communications base that, among other things, tracks satellites to help detect Soviet missile launchings, because it makes her nervous. “I could be blown up because it’s there,” she says.

For Lyons, going “out bush,” as the Australians say, “makes it all worthwhile.” She loves to camp under stars that cannot be seen in the Northern Hemisphere, hours from indoor plumbing and electric lights, as wild dingoes howl in the distance.

Australia’s isolation also appeals to Robert Marino, 64. A Queens, N.Y., native who was stationed in Brisbane during World War II, he loved the city’s tropical lushness, met his wife there and decided to stay. Marino, who retired 3 years ago after 23 years of collecting water samples for the city, has returned to the United States only once, 10 years ago.

He was disgusted by what he saw when he brought his wife to Grand Central Station, a place he remembered fondly because he had worked near there after his 1942 high school graduation. “People living indoors. . . . Half the people there were sitting around in the station talking to themselves.”

Judy Wye-Dvorak, 38, and her husband, David Dvorak, 40, were robbed several times when they lived in Los Angeles, and she once was accosted on the beach at knifepoint. Now, they and their 2-year-old son live just outside Perth on Australia’s pristine west coast, where she studies the eyes of wallabies for clues to the development of human sight, and he sells chemicals for medical researchers.

“Perth is Utopia,” she says. “The environment is clean; the pressures of living in a country where there are so few people just aren’t as great; there isn’t as much crime; there isn’t the same kind of racial tension. . . .

“It’s Southern California without the people.”

On the other hand, Kim Hoggard, for one, misses the kick of being in a world capital, even though her Washington friends keep her up on the gossip. Two years ago, Hoggard left her job as deputy assistant secretary for public affairs in the Treasury Department because, after 3 years of a commuting marriage she wanted to live with her husband, a reporter for Australia’s “Sixty Minutes.”

The soft-spoken Hoggard, 31, says she has “had to tone down some of my strident opinions” because of the pressure here to conform. She has not quite adjusted to shark alarms at the beach, to being expected to defend the United States at every cocktail party or to being quizzed by strangers about the cost of her house overlooking the beach and the size of her famous husband’s salary.

“It’s this egalitarian thing--’I want to make sure this guy does not make more money than I do, and if he does I want to know how he does it,’ ” she says, referring to the Australian passion for treating the high and the mighty like everyone else. “Cutting down the tall poppies,” it’s called.

Pleasures Abound

Yet for Hoggard, the discomforts are minor compared with the pleasures. She spends her days reading Australian history, playing competition tennis and training the family German shepherd, Ned Kelly, named for the continent’s best-known bush outlaw. She suns in a garden where bright orange birds of paradise--a costly rarity in Washington--grow like wild flowers.

She still marvels when she looks out a window and sees leaping dolphins, and she treasures the times she has visited the Outback with her husband on his assignments. “Most of Australia is so unspoiled,” she says. “Not too many feet have trod over it. That’s an amazing thought.”

Another who shares Hoggard’s view on the Australian passion for equality is Stephen Cohen, 40, a professor of philosophy at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. “Australia is the great equalizer--we push for mediocrity in everything,” he jokes.

Cohen, who came here in 1976, remembers feeling as if he had arrived at the end of the earth; he had been advised to bring his refrigerator and car, and he also shipped a stereo and typewriter “at horrible expense.” He still feels a sense of isolation that he deals with by returning to the United States on vacations and sabbaticals and by subscribing to American publications.

He also says he would never give up his U.S. citizenship and thinks that he eventually will return to the United States. “I don’t feel like an Australian; I feel very much an American,” he says. Married to a university professor, Cohen is the father of three, and he was jarred when his 8-year-old son came home from school one day to report that he could not answer a question: Who is president of the United States?

Still, Cohen, who planned at the outset to stay only 3 years, appreciates the quintessentially Australian sense of potential. “You have the feeling here that the millionaires are standing right next to you,” he says. “They are folks just like everyone else.”

Robert Reed fits in Finifter’s first category: immigrants drawn to Australia by its economic possibilities. Seven years ago, when “the bottom dropped out” of the mining industry in the United States, he moved here after working in lead-, zinc- and copper-mining operations in Nebraska, Colorado and New Mexico. He had three suitcases, mostly containing books, and no job.

The Wisconsin native had been to Australia once before, as a lieutenant in the Vietnam War on leave in Sydney. Now he lives in the country’s vast northern outback, known as the Top End.

“I don’t think I would go back to the United States,” said Reed, 43, now senior mining engineer for Ranger Uranium Mines in Jabiru.

His marriage to an Australian helped seal his decision to stay. Dulcie Reed, who is part aboriginal, works with the Northern Land Council, an advocacy organization pressing for the return of aboriginal lands. The Reeds have a houseboat that he built on a hull bought from a barramundi fisherman and have acquired land in a tiny settlement named Humpty Doo, where they hope to retire.

Natural Beauty

Reed remains captivated by the beauty of the country, particularly the Kakadu National Park and the Arnhem Land Aboriginal Reservation, an area of thousands of square miles to which access by non-aborigines is restricted and where portions of “Crocodile Dundee” were filmed. “It has everything from rain forest to flood plain,” he says. “I can go to places that tourists would pay $10,000 to see.”

He appreciates Australia’s relatively high standard of living and the variety of “real characters” with whom he comes in contact. Still, he plans to retain his U.S. citizenship: “I would not part with that,” he says.

War first brought Reed to Australia, and a desire to stay out of war brought Bob Richman here from Cleveland in 1970. But as with Reed, economic opportunity is a big reason he’s still here.

Richman, 38, first arrived as a 19-year-old student in 1970, enrolling at Melbourne University because he wanted to go overseas but had to maintain his student deferment to stay out of the military during the Vietnam War.

He fancied the nation so much that after a brief return home, he has lived here since mid-1971. Richman characterizes himself as a “practitioner of applied mathematics” who makes his living by playing the horses, the stock market and, primarily, championship bridge. He travels the world to play in tournaments, and his trips allow him to return to the United States frequently; as a result, he does not share the sense of isolation from family that other immigrants mention.

Also unlike most other Americans, Richman cares little for the outdoor life. Many of his friends are central European Jewish exiles who prefer talking to athletics. He describes Sydney not in terms of its natural beauty but as a city that has the feel of a “place that whatever has to get done, gets done.”

Like himself, he says, many of the other top bridge players in Australia are from somewhere else. “There are good bridge players here, but not many,” he explains. “We try to find one token Australian to play on the Australian bridge team.” Which is fine with Richman, who enjoys “being a big fish in a smaller pond.”

Then, summing up Australia’s low-pressure appeal in his own particular terms, he says: “I don’t have to be a bridge player here to the exclusion of everything else.”