This is Australia

Oh but sleeping on a train! ? I’m sure if Michael Portillo turns up, it won’t be boring.

That would be a bonus!

Hello, Platypus, this thread is a good idea, thank you.
I have DS2 and family living in Sydney and have visited twice. Unfortunately , last November/December's trip to there and New Zealand got postponed due to Covid, and now that postponed trip has been cancelled by me for the indefinite future.
My late DH and I were great travellers but never went to Australia because we imagined it would be full of boring white people like us! So it was South America, China etc etc. When he died, I went out there and loved it. I've always preferred the big open spaces to rather confined little England but even more than the country, I found Australians themselves greatly to my liking,
Trains having been mentioned, I will add that the last time I visited, I flew into Perth and travelled across to Sydney on the Indian Pacific. It was 3 whole days to cross a country! When a child, I loved studying the atlas and the name Nullarbor Plain fascinated me so I had a long held ambition to see it. It did not disappoint. It's huge and seemingly endless and beautiful in its way. I was definitely not bored! The food was great and we stopped for various outings, one to the Kalgoorlie gold mine at night...an absolutely vast hole in the ground. Just one of the great trips I've had out in Australia. I'd be very happy to live there permanently but for various reasons, it's not on now.
I'm going to be very interested in hearing news from the country.

Anyone here from Mildura?

EkwaNimitee awww bless - I’m just not sure what news everyone wants - what are people interested in about over here? General news? Covid? Politics? Places? People?

Hello Platypus this is a lovely thread. I for one would like to hear local to you news, about local places and local weather. I have a nephew and his family in Melbourne and a friend in New Zealand. Not being able to travel,due to the pandemic, I crave knowledge of different places.

Hello Platypus I've been thinking of some famous Aussies (past and present) who are favourites ... Dame Joan Sutherland (I heard her give a recital in London. The power of that phenomenal voice had a visceral effect. I felt I was being pinned back in my seat!), Cate Blanchett (a terrific actress with such a beautiful face) ... and, of course, the stars of Neighbours, which I watched avidly with my children.
I'm curious to know which Brits are household names /icons for you. David Attenborough? William and Kate? ... and which UK-made programmes (if any) do you love to follow.
On reflection, maybe this needs a separate thread?

Hi Platypus, nanna8 and all other marsupial types
I tell you what I’d like to know please!
It’s a bit nosy really, but what are your houses like?
I’m sure that I’m not the only Brit who is fascinated by how large even ‘normal’ people’s houses are in Aus and also in the US (my main reference points are ‘Kath & Kim’ and ‘The Simpson’s’!)
Also, there seem to be a lot of houses that are one level only, or have I imagined that?
So, yes, I’d love to know what your homes and gardens are like please!

Also, there seem to be a lot of houses that are one level only, or have I imagined that?
But don't call them bungalows! Nor in New Zealand. I made that mistake.

I like Queenslanders

So, yes, I’d love to know what your homes and gardens are like please!

Why, with all that space, do so many new houses on estates have such small gardens?

Oh thanks ladies for the ideas - perfect - I’ll get to all of them so I’ll start from the first poster - local to you news, about local places and local weather
I live about 100km south from the city of Sydney - here - on the left.
I’m obviously surrounded by the beach on one side and a lake on the other so I get a lovely cooling breeze off the ocean in summer - sometimes. Otherwise it can be stifling hot and humid. Thank goodness I have an air conditioner on some days and nights.
Currently it’s the last month of winter - it’s gets down to around 12 degrees at night at the moment and the days are averaging 18 to 21 mainly sunny with a few grey ones.
My bit of Australia is a long strip of beach side suburbs with a strip of mountains, which we call an escapement, running parallel about 20km inland but sometimes closer and to the south they fall away to plains which is mainly farming land away from the coast. If you go up the escarpment, you arrive at the highlands which is mainly farms as well.
The farming areas are being sold up though with new housing estates popping up here and there. I grew up here until I was 17, moved away for many years and came back to have children and what was rolling hills is now covered by houses.

It’s a very beach and water dominated lifestyle around me, I have a large shopping centre/mall about 10kms inland from me that has all the big fashion shops and department stores.
About 2km from me I have a sort of mini shopping centre that houses a Woolworths and an Aldi, fruit shop, bakery, post office and a few specialty shops and cafes. 2km beyond that is our old high street - there’s not much there anymore a bank, a real estate, a solicitor, a mini supermarket, a few different nationality takeaway, that sort of thing and some shuttered.
Lots of suburbs have the British old high street style streets and then interspersed with the American style malls - I think we’ve been influenced by both countries and by all the different cultures that live here. It’s a very eclectic mix.
Can’t say I’ve got a lot of local news - we’re in lockdown - so not a lot happening. We’re supposed to have had council elections in September that have been postponed but the local councillors are still grandstanding about any useless issue they can.
Australia stretches from say Ireland to Turkey down to Libya up to Finland so where I live is obviously very different to where others Australian gransnetters live. But hopefully I gave you a bit of an idea of my part of the world.

FannyCornforth

Hi Platypus, nanna8 and all other marsupial types
I tell you what I’d like to know please!
It’s a bit nosy really, but what are your houses like?
I’m sure that I’m not the only Brit who is fascinated by how large even ‘normal’ people’s houses are in Aus and also in the US (my main reference points are ‘Kath & Kim’ and ‘The Simpson’s’!)
Also, there seem to be a lot of houses that are one level only, or have I imagined that?
So, yes, I’d love to know what your homes and gardens are like please!

FannyCornforth until fairly recently I would say that most of our homes were single story. An exception would be inner city living where homes were mostly older terrace (attached) style. To have a double story home was pretty much to mean you were really wealthy. Of course the standard house block of land was a quarter acre so there was plenty of room to build a single story. In the last probably 20-25 years land sizes have become smaller for various reasons. Many people wanting to live closer to the central business district drove a rush to build apartments in the city (Melbourne) and close by suburbs. People, usually younger ones, wanted to spend less time in the garden, and working hours changed. We no longer had a week of 5 days work 2 weekend. Parents were more involved in carting children around to activities and they also in many cases wanted their holidays overseas. Also and probably the biggest reason for smaller blocks was the almighty $ that could be achieved by making blocks smaller - developers and local councils both benefiting form this. So we saw the rise of the McMansion (a big home on a small block of land) and as mortgage rates were low - and are still about <2% everyone wanted one.

Having lived much of my childhood in rural areas space is one thing I crave. We bought a house on 2 acres (7500 sq mtr) and lived there for 40 years. This was in an area that was at the edge of suburbia. When it came time to downsize we sold our property and it was cut up to build 16 homes a mix of single and double story. These are not particularly small homes but the average land size for them is 444 square metres. The demand for these homes is massive particularly among the older people wanting to downsize.

Our new home is waaaaay bigger than we need, but to buy something with a reasonable size block that was single story (I don't do stairs and steps) and room for DH's man cave it is what we had to settle for.

I could go on for ages but will stop here for now.

Callestimon
Why, with all that space, do so many new houses on estates have such small gardens?

Being cynical $'ssss

The trend for small gardens is probably because both people have to work these days (with couples)to pay off the stonking great mortgages - so not a ,out of time for gardening. Also the developers are greedy so they cram as many houses onto a block as possible.
Our house is 3 storeys, bedrooms upstairs, study in the middle and living areas downstairs. It is a fairly big house but not huge by today’s standards,on the traditional quarter acre block. We have lived here since 1992 and before that we lived in a 2 storey weatherboard in a neighbouring suburb for 17 years so we don’t move that much. Briefly we lived in Tasmania whilst my husband was on secondment to Savage River mines. We live near the Yarra Valley wine areas, 20 minutes or so drive. Several friends live up in the Dandenongs,Olinda and Ferny Creek. Melbourne covers a huge area, would take most of a day to travel from one end to the other and my English cousin was amazed at how big it is. Think London or Manchester areas and it was expanding every single day until lockdown. One good thing about it because with hundreds moving in every week and lack of infrastructure things were becoming annoying and congested.

OOpps! Callistemon not Callestimon -fingers working faster than the brain!

One other thing people need to realise is that the vast majority of settlement in Australia is within 100 kilometers of the East Coast. There is a huge amount of land that is basically uninhabitable. Infrastructure is expensive and so settlement is dictated to a degree around that.

Yes and we never did work out how to irrigate the red centre. Not like the Saudi countries. Vast tracts of emptiness .Lovely to visit but not to live in. It is the driest continent on earth.

Vast tracts of emptiness, nanna8 and also endless sun, so surely scope for generating lots of solar power? Better than digging up that coal which Australia regularly gets criticised for internationally. I thought there was a lot of entrepreneurial spirit in Australia, my son blames the government, of whatever stripe, though. Just wondering. I can drive across Spain with similarly useless land for agriculture and there are thousands of acres of solar panels. But I suppose that's EU money.

I love ( envy) that your weather in winter is the same as our summer.
I live in what is supposed to be the warmer part of the uk but I am indoors with trousers and a woolly jumper on. It’s August!
Maybe we should have gone ahead after all with out £10 tickets back in the 70 s.

That was replying to Platypus.

Thank you Platypus for this thread. My aunt and uncle were one of the last of the ten pound poms and took two of my cousins with them. They should have got off the ship in Perth but were enjoying their trip so much they stayed on to Sydney. My cousins still live in Penrith, and I suppose there's a good chance I'll not see them again although I live in hope. We can't face the flight again even if we could go.

We have been twice though and it was wonderful. The first time was on a Round the World ticket. Landed in Adelaide, with it's very British weather, leisurely drove the Ocean Road round to Melbourne (there were more Apostles when we saw them) and then up to Sydney by train to stay with the rellies. The second time we landed in Sydney and continued our way up the coast, flying to Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef and then on to Darwin. Darwin is something else! Loved the whole country and if we didn't have all our family here I would happily have stayed.

Spice101

OOpps! Callistemon not Callestimon -fingers working faster than the brain!

That's ok - I'm named after your bottle brushes!

Yes and we never did work out how to irrigate the red centre

nanna8 but we can send men to the moon, probes to Jupiter and Voyager 1 is now in interstellar space!

Landed in Adelaide, with it's very British weather,

I lived in Adelaide for a while. At Christmas it was 44 deg C and you could only go out after dark because it was so hot. You must have got it on an off day!

I can drive across Spain with similarly useless land for agriculture and there are thousands of acres of solar panels. But I suppose that's EU money.
Spain is tiny in comparison and not so arid.

Well, think how much more solar power Australians could generate than the Spanish then

We spent a week in a campervan between Melbourne & Adelaide two years ago when the night time temps were 2degC! A friend warned me to bring thermals as we were visiting in September and boy, did we need them!