Neighbours - A Documentary of Life Down Under ?

By P.Garcia

Anyone who has ever watched the Australian television soap opera Neighbours has had a glimpse into everyday Australian suburban life, albeit with a bit of extra drama thrown in.

But is life on the show’s fictional Ramsay Street (even though it is a real cul-de-sac in Melbourne that you can drive on) a realistic glimpse of Australian life in the suburbs or a throwback to a more cliched view of what life should be like?

Well the answer is that it does. Kind of. I mean, throw in the more mundane parts of everyday life like constant trips to the nearby shopping mall, grocery store or Saturday morning kids sports events and it is still pretty close.

In fact, the main reason the show is even still being produced after so many years is that it continues to get lapped up by British and overseas audiences dreaming of an idyllic life Down Under.

The numbers don’t lie - since World War II more than 7.5 million people have immigrated to Australia and that number is actually quite low because immigration into Australia has been strictly capped for many years and currently stands at 190,000 per year.

Australia still remains the most popular country for British people to immigrate to according to The Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford.

On the flipside, official Australian Government figures show British people traditionally were the highest source of Australian permanent migrants until 2010-11, when China and India took over the mantle.

It can be argued that most of the western world is morphing into this suburban, shopping mall-centred utopia,so why would Australia be any different and why would it be worth uprooting everything and moving there?

There are plenty of reasons - the opportunities, the weather, the accepting, multi-cultural melting pot, the natural landscape, low crime levels and the top-shelf educational and sporting facilities that are available to all and not just the well-off.

But the number one reason is the people themselves - or more clearly the Australian cultural ethos of “a Fair Go”.

Ever since the first European settlement in 1788, Australia has become home to people of all kinds of backgrounds from the convicts of yesteryear to the highly-trained professionals migrating to Australia today.

But from the outset, there has been the constant common denominator of A Fair Go.

While it would be a stretch to argue that it is a classless society, it is certainly much closer to it than most other countries around the world.

While the laid-back, laconic bushman of days gone by has gone, they have been replaced by suburbanites with a great sense of humour, a playful disdain of authorities and snobbishness and the idea that Australians are all in it together for the greater good.

It’s not uncommon for even the more economically disadvantaged people in cities like Sydney or Melbourne to have good friendships with those better off and experience some of their lifestyle. Go on a party yacht cruise around Sydney Harbour and you will often bump into someone who runs the local convenience store who met the host purely because they liked the same football team.

In fact, the way that the property market has gone in places like Sydney, it’s not uncommon for even people on an average wage in the outer suburbs to be sitting in a house valued at more than a million Australian dollars.

It all comes back to the culture of inclusiveness that has become ingrained in Australians and is expected to be followed by new migrants.

In fact, it is the personification of the Neighbours theme song words of “that’s when good neighbours become good friends”.

It’s why you see hordes of Australian people helping rather than looting during natural disasters - the total opposite of countries like the US where disasters are seen by the poor as an opportunity to even the scales of injustice with the rich by looting their possessions.

This concept of fairness is ingrained in a fairer average wage system, universal health care, education and better working conditions. While it probably doesn’t go as far as the devout socialism of Scandinavian countries, it is much better than the American system of “every man for himself”.

In short, it’s the best of both worlds.

Without necessarily meaning to, that’s another thing that Australians have done well - taking the best parts of other countries and blending them into its ever evolving culture that wasn’t set in stone hundreds or thousands of years ago.

While watching Neighbours might lead viewers to the impression that Australia is a very Caucasian country, it is actually not the case. Sure, go out to the rural and semi-rural areas and it is still full of white people, but in the cities where the majority of Australians live, it is a multi-cultural mixing pot.

Recent Australian government figures show about 28.2 per cent of the population was born overseas, the numbers from cities such as Sydney show that up to 51-55% of people have recent overseas cultural backgrounds.

Many of these people are drawn to Australia by its good weather by international standards.

Sydney is “cold” (which Australians define as non-shorts weather)  for only six weeks of the year and the sub-tropical parts of Northern Australia are never cold. Even places that Australians consider cold in the winter, such as Melbourne or Tasmania are quite mild by overseas standards.

Other factors that make Australia worth emigrating to is the great educational and sporting opportunities for its young people that don’t have the high cost- and social-barrier entry problems as similar facilities overseas. If little Johnny or Sun-Li want to become good golfers they can just wander down to their local course and get better at it without having to come from wealthy families to be able to afford to do so.

Domestic travel is also a plus - many people born in Australia never or rarely travel overseas because there is so much natural diversity in their own continent and if they do, there is plenty of variety in nearby New Zealand, the Pacific Islands or Southeast Asia.

And here’s a secret Australians try to keep under wraps - while they have a lot of wildlife that could probably kill you - it is unlikely that you will ever see it! This is best summed up by the Dropbear, a mythical killer koala that only exists in folklore so locals have an in-joke to playfully scare tourists.

So all in all, Australia isn’t a bad place to move to. It’s not exactly Ramsay Street, but you definitely won’t have to worry about the Dropbears!