Nine years in Australia

Jethro's take on his mummy: he took this 28th October 2013

Nine years ago, to the day, I arrived in Australia. It was a profound feeling. I was 41, and my life was starting over.

I remember Francis meeting me at the airport and feeling particularly awkward. I remember thinking that nothing could make him understand what was going on inside me, and that I wasn't going to try to explain. I was just going to get on with it.

I noticed that so many people leaving South Africa were running from something, and I wasn't. I was going TO something. I was going to a new life with a man I had met in Spain, learning Spanish. I was seriously starting again. Life was changing:
- from being single to being part of a couple
- from being well known to completely unknown.
 - from a life of dance and consulting to a life of little dance and no permission to work.
 - from years of experience to not being recognised for any experience.

I had left my home with four bedrooms plus a flat for a shared room in a shared unit. I had left being a landlady for being a partner of a renter. I had left a huge circle of family and friends and colleagues for a country where I knew one person well, two more people quite well, and about ten people vaguely. I had left the mountain and sea for the suburbs.
Instead of a house filled with belongings I had just one suitcase with my clothes and my cutlery (!). Instead of a car I was on foot.

Yes this was still 34 degrees South. Just not Cape Town. It was Sydney.

Some of this was apparent on the first day, and some only became apparent over time. Slowly but surely it sank in that I'd really taken this enormous step at 41. It was my sister-in-law's birthday and I wasn't there to celebrate it. Today, nine years later, it's her birthday again and I'm not there to celebrate it. But I am celebrating, instead, a nine-year journey to date.

I woke this morning thinking about the highlight of each year:
2004: Discovering the tango, flamenco, latino dance and music scene in Sydney and my first New Year's Eve fireworks over the Bridge and Opera House
2005:  A five day trip, alone and camping, to the heart-stopping beauty of New Zealand's South Island; buying our home in Heighway Avenue in Ashfield and joining Sing Australia
2006: Our wedding; visitors throughout that year from South Africa
2007: Being allowed to work. Restarting Making Things Work. Dancing Tango at Darling Harbour. 
2008: Magical trip to Europe with Francis
2009: Jethro was born. Becoming a mum at 46. Starting to work with social enterprises in earnest.
2010: Jethro's baby naming ceremony. Becoming an Ausralian Citizen. Taking Jethro to South Africa to meet the family.
2011: Marjorie's visit to Sydney; An African drumming course
2012: Moving to Oatley to the green and the blue of nature once again
2013: Marjorie in Sydney again. Embarking on the Key Person of Influence course and restarting my work as Beyond Win-Win.

And then, of course, there have been the annual highlights - Jewish high festivals on the North Short and the Eastern Suburbs, re-acquainting with cousins I knew as a child in South Africa, annual Christmas celebrations (the street party in Heighway Avenue, the Mother's Group party and the Chilean-Iranian-South African-Australian party each year), Chinese New Year and all the diversity type celebrations in Sydney. And lots, lots more.

Today I am celebrating a long journey that, in the scheme of things, is only just starting. It's amazing, though, that I've lived in Australian almost one fifth of my life. Just one more year and it will be a decade. Hah.

 

 

 

 

10 things you need to know if you move from Cape Town to Sydney

 Sydney is a pretty city, with the best food in the world from many nationalities. People live at peace with one another, even though they often stick to those they know and are not that welcoming of outsiders. You'll be safe here, but you have to work hard to fit in. Even though both cities are 34 degrees south, they are quite different. A bit of local knowledge might help. 

1. There is no mountain
And with that, no way of knowing which way you are facing. Amazing what you can discern from shadows if you work hard at it. You need to work out what season you are in, take into account the time of day, and then vaguely work out if the sun is north east or north west. It's not Table Mountain, but it works.

2. Flies like the inside of your mouth
Not only does Cape Town have very few flies, when they do appear, they like food. Not Sydney flies. They like the inside of your mouth. I know because I have eaten a fair few. Not on purpose, of course. What's good to know is that the Sydney flies are sluggish. My brother (yes, the famous Zapiro), used to pride himself in being the only person who could catch a fly on our kitchen table by grabbing it from behind. I kid you not. Sydney flies - hey - they move so slowly you hardly have to work to squash them. Go right ahead, I say.

3. Don't say "it was a thumbsuck"
In Cape Town if you are estimating something, it's a thumbsuck. You put your thumb in your mouth, pull it out quickly, make a popping noise and everyone knows you just guestimated the answer. Here, there's a strange look of disgust that crosses people's faces when you do that. I won't go into it. Just don't do it.

4. Don't say "holding thumbs"
Refer to number 3 above. I don't have to go into detail, but the same look crosses Sydneysiders' faces when you say "hold thumbs for me". In Cape Town, it means the same as "cross fingers" for me. Believe me - just ask people to cross fingers. You'll have a far better response!

5. Save hard to use public transport
Because the Rand is so abysmal next to the Aussie Dollar, there have to be some money tips in a blogpost like this. There's nothing more demoralising realising that your whole week's budget has been used on public transport. It's expensive in Sydney. I mean really expensive. In 2013 it costs $10 (or R100) to get a return to the city at peak times. Travel after 9am. Buy travel tens when you can (busses, ferries). And get an Opal Card as soon as you can. They are being phased in - but where you have occasion to be somewhere for less than an hour you are charged only one leg of a return journey. You can, for instance, travel to Town Hall, have a 50 minute meeting, and get back on the return train and you'll only be charged one way. In some cities there are free busses. Use them. Better still, walk.

6. Most great performers at festivals also have a free performances
Check it out. It's worthwhile. People pay $100's of dollars to see great performers (that's 1000's of Rands) when you can often catch them in free venues. Do your research

7. Check out and compare mobile plans
Talk about doing your research - work hard at finding a mobile plan that offers unlimited text and voice calls and a lot of data. It's the best investment you'll make. You can find all the cheap deals - and there are cheap deals for everything (almost).

8. Use 131500
This is a great get-everywhere-planner. You can dial it and speak to a real person or you can go to www.131500.com.au and feel completely cool about finding your way to anywhere. Times, modes of transport - it's all there.

9. Don't be demanding
South African have a reputation in Sydney for being incredibly pushy, entitled and just plain rude. There's a reason for this. We are. As a rule. We are too direct for most people living in Sydney. We are spoilt either because we were privileged in South Africa and have learnt to expect people to be there for our every whim, or we are demanding because we weren't privileged but we know what it is to have to ask for things to happen. By all means stick to your guns when expecting good service (not a high point in Sydney) or expecting people to be welcoming or whatever other reasonable expectation you have. But watch your body language and your way of speaking to people - there is a very strong "entitled-South-African-detector" in many Sydneysiders. The most frequent back-handed compliment I have received in Australia is "You're South African - and you're nice? How come?"

10. Hang out at the Opera House and surrounds
Sydney is known as being "up itself" - that's Australian for being too big for it's boots - in many ways. But the Opera House, and the harbour - they are just magic. Hang around at dawn, hang around in the middle of the day, hang around at night. Enjoy the Botanic Gardens and the fruit bats. Enjoy the fantastic walls that are shaped as benches. They're made to enjoy so enjoy them.  Specially at the Opera Bar. Yes, a drink could cost the same as a day's earnings - but hey - you only live once. And you can always consider how crazy some people are that they are paying $1000 for a bottle of bubbly - yep, that's R10,000 and enough to feed a village in Africa for a very, very long time. Yes, the contrast is crazy. It's First World, Third World stuff. And it never goes away (why do you think I work with social enterprise and creating beyond win-win solutions... that's another story).

Oh, and one more thing. People who live in Sydney are called Sydneysiders. Just good to know.

We wish you a Multi-Cultural Christmas

There's a whole lot to be said about living in the inner-west in Sydney. It's an incredible melting pot of cultures, and with that, opportunities. Every cuisine imaginable, every kind of music, clubs and social groups of many nationalities and neighbourhoods offering the opportunity to meet people from every corner of the globe.

Francis and I have made it our business to immerse ourselves in as many different kinds of opportunity as we can absorb into the time available. We love the Addison St market in Marrickville with it's Casa Latina where the latin american community meet and dance and play and sing on a Sunday. We enjoy the Gladstone Pub, also in Marrickville, where our friend Mary-Jane Field has introduced us to the Bolivian community who spontaneously celebrate their music by jamming together on some Saturday nights. We follow our friends Marlene and Faramarz around, watching their festival productions of the Chilean national dance, the Cueca, and have even learnt it (at a time when I was about five months pregnant!). We frequent the  Camelot Lounge, a club run by a chap called Yarron from Port Elizabeth who is known for his amazing band, Monsieur Camembert. I don't think there are many places in the world with more camels under one roof - big ones, small ones, pictures of camels, even flying camels - or more stairs to reach a club! One of my best evenings there was a Yiddish night which I attended with Marjorie, the woman who was my nanny when I was a child in South Africa. I think she knew more of the culture than some of the Jewish people there.

This Christmas has been, as usual, a multi-cultural one. The annual Heighway Avenue Street party was, as usual, filled with foods from many nations, games for the children, and great music and even some dance in the middle of the closed street. As anyone who has visited us at our home knows, within ten doors of where we live are representatives of New Zealand, China, Australia, Pakistan, India, South Africa (Durban), the Phillipines, Mauritius, Ireland, Lebanon, Poland... the list goes on. The kids are like a troop this time of year - dashing through the street on bicycles, jumping on one another's trampolines, dropping off hand-me-down clothes.

Christmas Eve was our annual meeting-of-cultures in Baulkham Hills - yes, out of the inner-west - with our Chilean, Iranian, Chinese and Australian friends. It's always an outrageous evening of foods from our various cultures and a wild game of giving and stealing Christmas presents. And over the last two years the addition of the new generation, Jethro at 2 and Kian at 6 months, has added new flavour.

To top it, yesterday was Christmas in Ashfield with Francis' parents - something we often do at Christmas. 

While almost everything is closed, the Ashfield shops remain open with up to 20 Asian Eateries doing business as usual. This year we took a friend of mine's niece, Kristin from Germany. She has been backpacking and had been staying with us earlier in the year with her friend, Judy. They house-sat our home while we were traveling. After a fruit-picking stint up north, she and Judy moved in with Nikki-next-door to couch-surf. Over the season two more friends have joined them - one from Germany and one from Sweden. So we invited them to share Christmas. Another adventure in sharing stories of different cultures, and what we all usually do at Christmas. They turned up, all clean and shiny in their party frocks and joined us for dumplings, and later for fruit and other delicacies at home.

It's been another year of enjoying all that Sydney has to offer. A highlight was West African drumming with Saul of Soul Drumming. Brooke dragged me along, and I've taken to it like a duck to water. There's discipline and fun, and the body percussion (see picture) works well when your hands need a break from beating those drums. The pictures are of the performance on our last night, in Newtown. Four of Saul's groups came together to drum - about 50 of us in all - and Jethro was pretty taken with it all. At two, he is now "drumming like mummy" at every opportunity. Long may he have the opportunity to glean from Sydney all that Francis and I have been lucky to have in the inner-west in our seven years here.

Aussie Women continue to earn less than men

Last year in October I wrote about women earning less than men in Australia. I just came across an update at Women's Forum where Robert Tanton of the University of Canberra writes that women are catching up but the progress is slow.

I am amazed by the anecdotal evidence I see around me every day. Of all the women I know, almost none earn more than their men. That's a simple fact, and one that needs stating. There are plenty of reasons for this, and Robert Tanton touches on a number of these, but even not taking into account the times that women don't work full time (babies and the like), women's salaries start to lag behind men's in their early years, and generally lag far behind men's salaries in their later years.

I work with social entrepreneurs and small business people, and a great deal with people in the non-profit sector. And here the trend is emphasised. While some social entrepreneurs who are men tend to take on the social justice ethos, which in this country seems to involve not earning much, it is women that I see earning erratically and only for particular hours that they count as "really working". Robert Stanton makes the point that in salaried positions, and he is not distinguishing in which kinds of salaried positions, women tend to take unpaid hours to do child and family care and men mostly slot in those times to flexible paid hours. This is a difference in perception between the way men and women see their roles, in my opinion.

But back to those working in the social justice arena - I have heard, again and again in Australia, that people "should either work for love OR money". I don't get it. Why can't people work for love AND money? It makes sense to me. Love what you do, and earn while you do it. Why not?

One interviewee in a piece of social research I have just finished said: "you can just TELL who is doing it for love and who is doing it for money". For her, there was no way the two go together.

This is my challenge. Do your work for love AND money. Do what you love doing, and get paid for it. As I encourage my coaching clients to do, check how much of your time goes into each paid hour. And if you are anything like the people I coach, teach and facilitate, you will find that between two and four hours go into every hour that is an earning hour. So account for it. And if you are a woman, check if you are telling yourself that some hours are not worth being paid for (and some men need this check too).

Closing the gap between men and women's earnings is a lot to do with closing the gap between men and women's worth. And I include myself in the audience to this advice - since coming to Australia I have had to take my own advice and really put a stop to people wanting to use my ideas, my skills and my time free because I am doing "good work", and since putting a stop to that my work has grown and developed. However, it remains in that category that needs constant maintenance and a constant check that I am not putting in hours and hours before the first dollar comes back to me.

In my holistic coaching course I work with the participants to motivate their people and to free them to be the best they can be. For that they need to earn well. And to remove the word "just" as one of the participants reminds us as in "I am just a coach", "I am just a mother", "I was just thinking that it might be a good idea"....

It might just be a good idea to rethink the earning gap and be a bit more proactive in closing it.

Citizenship - ten facts for the Citizenship test

I took this photo at the Blacktown Festival. Love the Australian Flag turban!

I just discovered I am free to apply for Australian Citizenship. I thought that was still a few months off, but in fact it is now. There was even an appointment available this Saturday to sit my Australian Citizenship test. So I took it.

I have been pretty anti the Citizenship test. I have had dire doubts as to whether it's a good idea. However, having just booked my test, I started reading the preparation booklet for Citizenship, Becoming a Citizen. It provides some useful information and hey, it's not that bad. In fact I think I could've done well to read it the week I arrived. It would have saved me some wonderful dinner table boo-boos over time! I have yet to get all the way through the 46 pages, but I am now sure, if I wasn't before, that:

1. The national flower is the Golden Wattle
2. Humans have inhabited Australia for 40,000 to 60,000 years and Australia's Indigenous Culture is the oldest surviving culture in the world
3. More than 700 languages were spoken by Aboriginal people pre-settlement and 250 remain today
4. Voting is compulsory in Australia
5. There are three levels of government: Federal (national), State and Territory, and Local (councils).
6. There are 21 million people in Australia (a similar population, by the way, as Shanghai)
7. 22% of Australians were born overseas (where I live the figure is way past 50%)
8. The country is predominately Christian (64%), with the other all having less than 2.2% each (Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism). The Jewish people, which is where I identity, make up just 0,4% of the population. Interestingly, Aboriginal people make up just 2,3% of the population, just 0.1% more than any of the minority religions.
9. The median age is 37 years
10. There are eight states and territories: Western Australia, Northern Territory, Queensland (that's where you find the Barrier Reef), New South Wales (where I live), ACT (where Canberra is), Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania (I have to admit I thought Tasmania was a country when I got to Australia, but then many people here don't know South Africa is a country, they think it's a region).

So Citizenship can't be that far away. Once I pass the test and lodge my application, it's about three months til it gets approved. I think it might be just a bit too short a time to manage before the Spud is born, but I will try. After all, I can't officialy change my name to Shapiro-Liu until I am a citizen, and it would just be so much more convenient to have this sorted before Spud Shapiro-Liu arrives.

I hope that I get to attend a Citizenship Ceremony where my own choir sings. I don't know if I can arrange to attend Canterbury (where 120 nations are represented, sometimes 60 at a time) or whether I will be in Ashfield. I'll wait and see.

My greatest excitement about being an Australian citizen is being part of an incredible multi-cultural nation, expressed so wonderful in the song We Are Australian by Judith Durham:
We are one
But we are many
And from all the lands on earth we come
We share a dream
And sing with one voice
I am
You are
We are Australian.