The Lucky Country

In March 2005 I left Australia with my family after 15 life changing months. After escaping Hong Kong we decided to visit my cousin and intended to stay there for a couple of months to see in Christmas and the New year of 2004. Things started to snowball when Janet decided that she wanted to see her cousin in New Zealand. We went over there for a couple of weeks and travelled around the country, visiting Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. When we got back I decided to look for a job, because I had seen that English was a shortage subject and one that attracted the easiest route into permanent residence. I was shortlisted, interviewed and offered an EAP job in a school in the Sydney area. I went excitedly to the Immigration Department and showed them the job offer and inquired as to the next step. An extremely officious and rude woman behind the counter looked at my job offer and said that teaching English to foreigners didn’t count! It was a very interesting insight into the incredibly narrow view of what was acceptable to them and what wasn’t. Mind you, I have dealt with immigration all over the world and pretty much the only personal quality needed is to hate anyone trying to enter the country! After making sure that she didn’t have it wrong I had to ring up the school to turn down the job. That wasn’t the end of it though. I found out that the University of Wollongong had an MEd TESOL course starting in March, which I knew would secure my long term future in the sector, because I still had nothing other than experience. Even that was tricky because I had a family. We had to get our three school age children admitted to the local school and we had to follow strict rules on working hours. Then I had to go over to New Zealand again to get our tourist visa changed to a student visa. I won’t recount the story this time but suffice to say that it was stressful and very poorly organised from a Department of Immigration standpoint.

Once that was done I settled down to getting my Masters which I did with an overall distinction. Once that had finished the university sent the Department of Immigration a notification that I was no longer a student and the countdown to leaving began. When the day finally arrived I knew that I was saying goodbye to my dreams of settling down in Australia as a family. It was one of the worst experiences I have had outside of the obvious stress points of loss because I knew we could have made an amazing life there. We came back to the UK and two weeks later I turned 40. There was no celebration that year. Janet intended to mark it with a trip on the London Eye but it was foggy that day and it was a non starter, so I sat in St James’s Park freezing cold and feeling like things wouldn’t get better! Obviously they did, but the knowledge that a multiverse version of myself was allowed to stay in Australia made me very unhappy for a long time!