Five Years

Now look, I don't want you getting the impression that I'm preoccupied with Australian insects, though yes, I never put on my Ugg boots without shaking them first and yes, I scan the kitchen floor for cockroaches first thing every morning but today I had the playgroup make some creepy-crawlies out of egg boxes and pipe cleaners and afterwards I closed the door in the staff room and noticed this poster on the back.

Take note of spider number six - that's the mouse spider. Either it's the size of a mouse or it actually eats mice, I don't know which, but there's one thing I won't be trying to suck up the hoover anytime soon.

Another perfect blue sky today, though Jackie beat me to the office again and switched on the heating, which meant I had to wait until her first patient was in the room before I could go and turn it off. Then Emily came into my office to get a video tape and before I knew it she'd closed the door behind her and we were deep in conversation about life in Sydney, washing powder and where to buy the best coffee in the inner western suburbs, an all-important topic for any serious Sydneysider.

Emily is British, a graduate of Oxford University. She now works at the University here in Sydney conducting research into autism and language and working part-time as a family counsellor. The first thing you notice about Emily is her very upper class British accent and the way it's been coloured by rising inflections after six years down under. Her mother was a teacher and her father was an old Etonian and editor of a daily newspaper in London. We have very different backgrounds but we're united in a longing for Marks and Spencers knickers and a quick scoot around John Lewis every now and then. She's an unlikely expat really, so firmly British. I wonder how she fits in.

"Are you applying for citizenship?" I asked her

"Oh god no. I'd never renounce my naionality. I'm British"

"And what about your kids?"

"Yes well, they're Australian but they know where they come from, where I come from"

"So you'll never go back now, not now you've got kids"

She sighed and sat back in the chair.

"Sometimes I think there's nothing I want more than a cottage in rural Bedfordshire but my husband is Australian and it's not that he wouldn't consider the move, it's just I don't think it would be terribly fair on any of them"

"So you're stateless then"

"That's exactly it. That's exactly how I feel. I'll never be Australian, if you saw my house you'd laugh because I've got all this Spode china and these English bedspreads and I give the children Marmite instead of Vegemite, just to make the point. They taste as bad as one another but it's about bringing some of my childhood into my children's lives. It's important to do that otherwise they feel disconnected with the place you're from"

"Do you fit in when you go home?"

"Not really. The friends I grew up with have made wealth upon wealth. They started with pretty healthy trust funds anyway and that sort of wealth just multiplies. My husband and I, we're academics, we don't earn that sort of money and we'd always be the poor relations, we just can't afford the skiing holidays and all the gear and the second home in Stow-on-the-whatever. That sort of thing matters less in Sydney and we've made different sorts of friends through having the children. I miss the history with the old lot though. Sad really"

Emily reminds me of so many British women I've met. The men are more resolved to stay but the women often live in five-year blocks, re-assessing the situation every few years and never ruling out a return to the mother country. I know how they feel, five years would be my limit as well, cockatoos or no cockatoos, there's only so long you can expect one pair of M&S knickers to last.