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Saludos:
Esto lo consegui el foro de los britanicos. La verdad no veo la diferencia entre Oz y USA segun lo expresado por el autor. La verdad habria que experimentarlo en carne propia, sin embargo algo si es cierto mejor que Venezuela un rato largo.
que lo disfruten.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-967265,00.html
—————————————————————————————-The Sunday Times – Review
January 18, 2004
Exodus from Oz — it’s grim down under
Germaine Greer loves her Australian homeland but, she says, like many of her compatriots she can’t bear to live thereEnglish people think of Australia as a land of beaches and winter sunshine where in a cold and stormy month like this it must be heaven to live. Yet every month brings news of another Australian celebrity who has decamped (Nicole Kidman, Kylie Minogue, Baz Luhrmann to name but a few). The international movie industry is illuminated by Australian stars, none of whom lives in Australia — unless you count the New Zealander Russell Crowe, who pretends to live in Australia.
Australian professionals of all kinds are popping up at the top of their trees in other countries; they are vice-chancellors of British universities, media executives, account managers, scientists, surgeons, lawyers, dons, willingly enduring the manifold discomforts of life in Britain when they could enjoy the lifestyle on which Australia prides itself.This year 1m Australians out of a population of 20m are living outside Australia. Many Europeans who have given the best years of their lives to Australia have decided to cut their losses and return to the other side of the world. Go to Greece and you’ll be astonished at how many Greeks speak fluent idiomatic Australian. So why do so many abandon the “you beaut” country? What can be the problem?
I can best explain from my own point of view, as someone who left Australia in 1964, never to return. (Here goes my chance of an Order of Australia.) In fact I do return. I probably spend more time in Australia than Crowe does, but I always come back to Blighty.
Make no mistake. I love Australia with a fierce passion that churns my guts and makes my eyes burn with tears of rage and frustration. But I would rather not be there.
For the vast majority, life in Australia is neither urban nor rural but suburban. The reality is not Uluru or the Sydney Opera House but endless, ever-expanding replications of Ramsay Street that spread out as rapidly as oilstains on water, further and further from the tiny central business districts of the state capitals.
Each street has a “nature strip”; each bungalow faces the same way, has a backyard and a front garden, all fenced, low at the front, high at the back. Somewhere nearby there’ll be a shopping centre with fast-food outlets and a supermarket.
If your ambition is to live on Ramsay Street, where nobody has ever been heard to discuss a book or a movie let alone an international event, then Australia may be the place for you. But you need to remember that Australians don’t live in each other’s pockets; Neighbours is a fiction. Most Australians don’t know their next-door neighbours or care what becomes of them. Australians are kind but in a thoroughly British, non-committal kind of way.
It’s different in the countryside — but nobody lives there except a few squatters and graziers, flitting hordes of British backpackers and some remnant populations of Aborigines. Aborigines could teach other Australians how to make living in Oz emotionally and intellectually satisfying, but nobody is going to give them the chance.
Marooned in oceanic tracts of suburban doldrums, the downtown central business districts don’t expand at all. They still occupy the same tiny nucleus of streets that they did 100 years ago; indeed the Sydney commercial district has actually shrunk in the past 40 years. Australians might refer to rush hour, but there is never any rush. Even at 11am on a weekday you’ll feel no bustle. In what should be the swankiest streets you will find shops with designer names and nothing in them alongside pawnshops and outlets for cheap imports, T-shirts, jeans and plastic homewares.
In the big emporiums the floors are jammed with overloaded clothes racks as if they were discount stores, but the prices in Australian dollars are huge. Australian wages, on the other hand, are surprisingly low. Many Australian expatriates (and I would include myself) live in Britain partly because they couldn’t earn a decent living in Australia. A British salary will buy a ticket to Australia sooner than an Australian salary for the same job will finance travel to Europe. Australian food prices are low, but just about everything else is, for many, unaffordable.
The Australian economy is growing, we are told, faster than almost any other. Growth understood as a percentage is related to the initial size of the economy and Australia’s remains tiny, even though it is the world’s largest exporter of coal, iron ore, beef and wool. Coal and iron ore are both obtained by massively mechanised open-cut mining with devastating environmental consequences. The Australian rush to self-destruction is a bewildering phenomenon.
Why does Australia destroy a greater percentage of its forest each year than all but two other countries on earth? In a mere 200 years one of the most biodiverse systems in the world has been utterly compromised, and for what? Nobody is costing the degradation of fragile ecosystems by grazing or by irrigation for rice and cotton, crops that could never earn their keep unless the Australian dollar remained artificially low.
As a primary producer, Australia, with high labour costs, is in competition with the poorest nations in the world but we look in vain for any expansion in the manufacturing sector. Most of the manufactured goods on sale anywhere in Australia were made somewhere in Asia, including “Australia’s own car”, the Holden. The one and only Australian software millionaire has gone on record saying that if Australians take a lead in the IT revolution the myth of Australian prosperity will explode, while the very people who could do it are walking away.
I was 12 years old when I decided that I had to get out of Australia if my life was to begin. I had been bored ever since I could remember. I was ungainly and I was bored by sport, which in Australia is a sure sign that you’re a bad person. In the 13 years that followed before I could actually get away, I managed to get mildly interested in long-distance skiing, mainly as a way to see the alpine country.
The other great Australian passion is relaxation, and I was even less interested in that. For me to be as good as I could be I needed the pressure of competition, the intellectual cut and thrust, so I came to Cambridge (where, needless to say, I didn’t find it, but that’s another story).
The real reason I won’t live in Australia, even when Britain has no further use for my services, is that I love the country too much. The pain of watching its relentless dilapidation by people too relaxed to give a damn is more than I can bear. I don’t know how many of my fellow expatriates feel this way, but I’ll bet some do.
———————————————————————————————esta gente no tiene idea de lo que es vivir en un tercer mundo. Son como niños consentidos que siempre ambicionan más (materialmente, sobre todo, aunque esta mujer enfatice también el aspecto cultural).
Mi mayor aventura, la de la migración, empieza en un mes, pero creo que luego de año y medio de haber estudiado en Sydney, mi opinión es válida y conozco lo suficiente como para descalificar la mayor parte de lo que aquí se dice.
Cierto, no es un país altamente industrial y el aspecto ecológico está comprometido por malas decisiones de décadas de descuido, y los salarios no son compables con las libras esterlinas… no entiendo por qué las constantes referencias a Neighbours y el desprecio a la vida suburbana que es igual en casi todo el primer mundo.
en fin, the grass is always greener on the other side, y cada quien tiene derecho a su opinión, pero a mí me molesta cada vez que oigo habla mal de Australia, mi obsesión y objetivo de vida desde hace casi 4 años.extranjera, sé perfectamente qué es Neighbours y lo popular que es (y fue) en UK. incluso hay tours para los backpackers británicos en Melbourne, para ver Ramsay Street.
Mi comentario es respecto a la creación de estereotipos utilizando un programa de TV. O acaso diremos que México es como sus telenovelas, o EU es como The OC?ah, y Dannii Minogue nunca estuvo en Neighbours. Ahí actuaron Kylie MInogue, Jason Donovan, Natalie Imbruglia y Delta Goodrem.
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