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Mark Moxon's Travel Writing

Australia: An English View of Australia

A bean growing anti-clockwise round a pole
A runner bean growing anti-clockwise round a pole, a different direction to beans in the northern hemisphere

When talking to people in Australia – people who actually live here, rather than tourists – you notice how different things are between Australia and England, even though, on the surface, they can seem almost anticlimactically similar.

Houses and Cities

Another big difference that is really obvious to a Pom is that in Australia all the houses are flat. There's so much space, there's no need to build multi-storey buildings, so ninety-nine per cent of the houses are bungalows; in fact, nobody uses the word 'bungalow', they're all just 'houses'. Sure, some areas have houses with stairs, and there are skyscrapers in the city centres, but the suburbs are just full of flat houses with red roofs. It also means you can see all the trees between the houses, so although the amount of greenery in suburbia isn't hugely different to that in the UK, you can actually see it when you look over the city.


Television is a different world, too. There are plenty of English programmes on the Australian networks – one night we had To the Manor Born followed by The Good Life, with Heartbeat on the other side – but there are loads more advert breaks than at home, and they repeat the same adverts all the time. What happens is that you get companies sponsoring certain programmes, and part of the deal is that the company gets its adverts in the break; this means you see the same advert maybe four or five times an hour, which is pretty tiring. Another annoying habit is the advert break two minutes before the programme finishes, so if you want to watch the end of anything, you have to sit through those bloody adverts again. It really makes you appreciate the BBC.