It’s Australia Day. As an Aussie in Qatar this means that we have all gone about our business in the usual manner – it’s a work day, a school day, an everyday. Tonight G and I will have drinks with some fellow Aussies at a hotel in town – there will not be one Holden Ute in the carpark, just a plethora of dressed up bogans looking for an opportunity to eat a lamb chop with a lamington chaser.
It seems apt that I turned the final page (or swiped in our Kindle era) of Annabel Crabb’s latest piece of brilliance “The Wife Drought” on this day. My favourite Australian political commentator, and one of a group of Australian women I adore. I implore you to read it. I have quoted, discussed and rudely changed the conversation to Annabel’s words often this week.
Thanks to The Wife Drought I’ve been provided with an answer to a question – an example of the Average Australian. In our travels I have been asked of the average Australian often. For those who have never been to Australia the questions are as genuine as they are peculiar. What do we look like? Where are we from? Where does the Average Australian live in Australia? What do we eat?
I answer appropriately. We all look like Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman, we were all convicts or more to the point people who hated the weather in Britain so much we did anything to get out. We all live in the outback, which is where most of the filming for Masterchef is done, and naturally we feast mostly on Kangaroo, Emu and pavlova.
With no mention of indigenous Australians my answers are irresponsible and fickle, they come with an equal measure of frustration and humour. Obviously we’re not all white and freckled. The Average though? What does the average Australian look like?
This portrait was issued by the Australian Bureau of Statistics after Census 2011.
The average Australian is a 37 year old woman. She was born in Australia, of Australian parents, and has Anglo Celtic ancestry. When at home with her husband and her two children – a boy and a girl aged nine and six – the Average Australian speaks only English. The house she lives in is located in a suburb of a capital city; it has three bedrooms, and a mortgage on which the Average Australian and her husband pay $1800 a month. They have lived in that house for more than five years, and every day the Average Australian drives in one of the family’s two cars to her job as a sales assistant, a job in which she works 32 hours a week. She has a certificate in Business and Management, but the Average Australian finds the flexible hours in retail suit her perfectly well, because she needs to juggle things with the kids.
Being a women who is currently sitting in front of her laptop, slurping her cauliflower soup at her dining room table before she heads to a meeting I can somewhat identify. I may not live in the Australian burbs but it is I who will be picking up three children at one school gate at 3 o’clock and another at a different school gate at 4 o’clock. It’s a choice I/we have made for a myriad of reasons – many of which I have given far more thought to while I’ve taken Annabel Crabb and her statistics on the treadmill with me this week.
For the average expat woman child minding and job flexibility is a completely different can of worms. Who has the work permit or visa? Are you eligible to work? Is there child care available and how do you feel about leaving your child with someone who you’re struggling to read a basic shopping list with? And how is it that this journey that you began with just one child on one year’s maternity leave has now turned into three kids, and four countries, five years ago – “so what did you do pre kids?”.
This average Australian women (who really needs to close her laptop and run to her meeting) has an observation for her average female colleagues and friends about average expat men. The Average Expat man is missing out on flexibility, he’s been sent somewhere to do a job, he’s a worker bee, that’s what they pay him for. And while he’s missing flexibility, you’re perhaps stuck being a statistic. This is not all bad, maybe for the first time in your life you’ve been given a chance to think about what it is that you really want to do: study, create, read, consider and think about how you want the rest of your career to pan out.
Be the person you’d like to meet, the friend you’d like to make – because none of us are average.
I can’t help but LOVE every single one of your posts… From an average Australian living in Fiji !! Thanks for brightening my day always x
well…that’s my opportunity right now, to take the chance to try what I really want to do..I dont fit the 37yr old average, but I do have an average expat man. (kind of) with an inflxible job, so I’ll be taking my opportunity to paint thankyou very much.
Your commentary on expat life is poignant and perceptive. I have been an expat (and wife) for almost 15 years and except for two brief maternity leaves I have worked every single day over that time. My point is that there is no average expat wife or woman in the same way as there is no average Australian. There are those of us who even as expats simply couldn’t survive without two incomes, let alone afford to keep an empty house in Australia to go to for the entire school holidays. We are what you would call your middle-class expat: no packages, no allowances for rent or school fees, limited holidays, no flexibility.
As for the expat husbands who have no flexibility, forgive me if my heart doesn’t bleed for them or their wives. It is them who after all keep those wives in the lifestyle they have become accustomed to, allow their spouses to navel gaze and think. You really can’t have it all.
I would poke out my eyes to have the luxury to sit at home and ponder what I really want to do, to soul search. I would think I hit the jackpot if my only worry would be picking up the kids from school and cooking dinner, not navigating nasty office politics while answering irate messages from 11 year olds.
So this is for an oft forgotten and perhaps never even thought of group of expats. Maybe we are truly the average ones.
Snap! We’ve just about been expats (and wives) for the same amount of time. G and I been on the road for 16 years now. Statistics provide an average everything – it doesn’t mean it’s everyone’s story, it’s the most average. I don’t know the statistics on expats, and if there were statistics we would first have to agree on what makes an expat? Is it an immigrant? Or is it someone who has a work permit for a certain period of time who will then return to their home country?
Expat life has certainly not made G and I wealthy in the terms of money (definitely in terms of travel) – but yes we have a mortgage on a house in Australia, as do most, no, make that all, of our Australian friends. Our house in Oz is not an extra house, it’s our one and only house, we keep it empty so that we can live in it when we are home rather than in my mother’s spare room which is what we did for the first 10 years we were travelling. You’re right, we have help with trips home, a travel allowance – and we would have been bloody nuts not to have negotiated that into our contract. I want to get home at least once a year to be with my family and I want my children to understand Australian life – they are not Qatari, can never be Qatari, and will not graduate in Qatar. I do not see their trips home as a luxury, more a necessity.
My heart also does not bleed for expat men – and I did say MEN, not husbands, who have no flexibility, I was making a point from the book (which I highly recommend you read) – which is to say that I feel for true equality we need men and women to both have more flexibility at work. Men need to be able to ask for time off so child care can by shared by men and women. I feel that women are still expected to be responsible for child care and are still being asked “who’s looking after the children and where are the children” far more often than working men.
Now, your comment about navel gazing? I’m not sure I even want to waste the key strokes – 7 countries, 4 kids, 10 houses. I’ve worked full time, part-time and not at all. There hasn’t been a lot of time for navel gazing but please, go ahead and make your own assumptions. I can promise you though, there is no-one on this planet who only has to worry about picking up kids from school and cooking dinner. While the grass may look greener it rarely is.
As for the oft forgotten, please know you are not forgotten, you have suddenly become very special in my mind. I have a large number of expat full time working women friends (my work hours are pretty much full time now), none of them average, all of them unique, and thankfully supportive towards the other women around them – we’re all just trying to do our best.