In this post I share why I’m moving back to Australia after only 6 months in England. It’s a very honest post and I felt it was right to share with you why I decided to make this decision.
I can’t believe we’ve been back in England for six months. Sometimes I think it’s flown by, but most of the time I think it’s been a long and incredibly hard journey.
To give you some context if you’re new to my blog, I lived in Australia for seven years with my Australian fiancee Steve, left in January 2018 to travel the world and moved back to UK in June 2018.
We’ve now decided to jack it all in and move back to Australia.
Here’s what’s been going on over these last six months.
Be warned, this is probably one of my most personal blog posts I’ve ever written. Please think before you judge on this one as I’m purely writing this to show what my experience has been like for those also thinking about moving back.
Ultimately everyone’s experience will be completely different, but here’s mine for anyone wondering what someone else’s was like.
Did we ever want to live in Australia?
Firstly, living in Australia was never actually a plan, although I did have a feeling I’d end up settling down with an Australian. I left UK in 2011 to travel for six months and randomly met Steve, my Aussie, when I was least expecting it at a meditation retreat in the foothills of the Himalayas in India.
We ended up moving to Sydney and after seven years of living there and doing a few around-the-world trips, we decided to leave in January 2018 to embark on one last world trip before settling down.
Although I appreciated every single day living in Sydney, I always felt like I couldn’t really connect with many people there as my heart was always in England. I missed my friends and my brother and I missed the charm of the people in general. So coming back to live in England for me was an absolute dream and when Steve mentioned we should do it two weeks before we actually made the move, I was incredibly excited.
It’s funny when I look back on some of my other posts about our thoughts on moving back to England, my first being optimistic and my second maybe not so much. Now it’s my third and I can say there’s a few things I’ve not mentioned before.
The first few months back in England
Since we arrived back in England we’ve been struggling with the idea about whether it was the right thing to do. Ultimately a lot of things are much different to how I remembered, who I am now, and what living in England has made me become as a person.
Things were brilliant the first two months, it was the best summer England had ever seen, people were friendly and we were still in the travelling mode. After the first month, money was running out fast and I had to get a job because Steve was on a six month tourist visa and couldn’t work, so the pressure was on.
Why my job in London broke me
So I landed a fantastic role at a big radio company right in the middle of London which made me feel like I’d hit the jackpot. I couldn’t wait to get back into London life and work right in the middle of it all and to be around fun and creative people again.
Although to be honest, within the first few weeks of starting that role, things rapidly started to change. I had a massive shock when I started to be treated so badly by other colleagues, that I was actually going home with tears rolling down my face.
As a woman in her 30s, I was wondering what on earth was going on and why a company could let people treat each other in a way that I can’t explain it as anything else other than bullying. I quickly realised this wasn’t a job for me
The awful 2-3 hour train commute to work and the same back home each day wasn’t helping that I started to burn out fast. But I had decided to live in Brighton which I knew had one of the worst commutes to London, something I thought I could stick out.
Within three weeks of starting that job I didn’t only become one of those miserable people I used to see on the tube (which is one of the reasons I left London in the first place), I was now getting sympathetic looks off other miserable people which made me wonder how miserable I had really become too.
We saw England to be a different country than we remembered
Not only was the job bad but both of us were seeing England in a totally different way than we had seen it before. Everything seemed so expensive compared to an average person’s salary, that we both wondered how people manage to live in this country. I even wrote a blog about the price comparison which made me realise that maybe we were better off in Australia.
We also had moved to England thinking we would be able to have some great weekend getaways in Europe but the reality was very different. It would take me most of the weekend to get over the week’s worth of commuting and stress of the job so we didn’t actually do very much at all during the six months.
Although flights are cheap to European destinations, we were so shocked to see how expensive these places actually are to visit, that a weekend a few times a month to a different country seemed less feasible than we originally thought, especially after the shock we had on our trip to Croatia during the Summer.
I also became really claustrophobic and felt like I didn’t have any space to myself at all because not only were we living with our airbnb host but there are so many people in the country, it’s hard to get away from it all at times.
Australia made me fall in love with nature, with the hikes and beaches and I really felt like I needed a life that involved the two. Living in England without a car definitely made it hard to do anything and to feel like I had any space.
Maybe it was because we were living in a crowded part of England but I definitely felt like there was tension in the air all the time and people seemed to be pretty aggressive. They were unpredictable and I often saw fights or people shouting at each other most days. I never really felt that safe living in Brighton.
I can understand now why some English people last only six months
I heard about my friend’s friend who came back to London and lasted six months because she not only hated the commute to work but also experienced a bullying work environment that she got back on that plane to Sydney.
From what others have told me, it seems that my job wasn’t a one off toxic environment in England. But, I can admit I had some pretty awful jobs in Australia too, just not on a level to what I’ve experienced in England with people being that cut throat.
Another friend has returned back to London from Sydney to be confronted with his extreme fatigue he had before he moved to Australia. His doctor thinks it could all be because of the lack of sunshine for months on end here.
I had another reader contact me who lived in Sydney for five years before returning to England because her family and friends kept telling them how much they missed them. Since they’ve returned, they’ve not seen them as much as they thought they would because ultimately people are getting on with their own lives. They now 100% regret not getting their PR in Australia.
Ultimately… visa issues
Overall, because I have a PR in Australia, we knew we could only spend a few years in England as we’d have to get back before the visa was cancelled (you get 5 years from when it’s granted to be back living in Australia permanently, otherwise the visa gets voided). We also started to think more long term and in reality, given the chance we were lucky to choose between the two countries, ultimately we’d want to bring up a family in Australia.
If I had an amazing job, lived in a part of England I truly loved and saw my friends more than twice in the last six months, then we’d 100% want to give it a go. I know six months isn’t long enough to settle at all and that I could have changed my situation in a few months time with a new job and I could have cut out that commute, but unfortunately this time it didn’t work out for us.
We felt it all wasn’t worth us being apart for at least 4 months whilst Steve went back to Aus in the new year and waited for his spouse visa to come through.
When we decided to move back, we were in Cuba at the time and didn’t have a lot of access to the internet. We thought the visa process might be similar to the defacto visa I applied for in Australia where I could go in on a tourist visa and then apply. In England it doesn’t work like this.
We actually found it almost impossible to speak with anyone from immigration in England because the information they gave us differed every single time we spoke to them, (and you have to pay like £1.50 a minute to call them) so we found a migration agent who told us what we’d actually have to do.
Just to be clear, the situation we were faced with was; Steve had six months on a tourist visa with no permission to work. We decided I would try to get a job to help support us both whilst we figured out if we wanted to go ahead and stay.
After six months, Steve would then have to return to Australia to apply for the spouse visa (you can only apply in your home country). We would also need six months of work payslips from me for the application, and seeing as I got a job two months into us moving back, Steve would have to wait an extra two months in Australia for the final payslips to come through before he could send off the application.
It would then take at least another two months for the application to be approved. This means he would have left England on Boxing Day and wouldn’t be returning until at least April, maybe May time. With my awful work situation, we didn’t know if it was really worth going through all of this, knowing that we would be returning to Australia in a couple of years time.
If you’re in a Aussie / English relationship and thinking of moving over, I’m going to write about the visa process on this blog very soon.
I’m glad I moved back to England
I was devastated it didn’t work out for us in England this time, but I’m not surprised really when I look at the factors I was faced with. I think if you’re moving back to England, make sure you pick the city wisely that’s close to friends or family and a city that you’ll like. I’ve read on similar related Facebook groups that a lot of people recommend moving to somewhere new when coming back because these places change but more importantly so do you.
I will miss a lot of things about England but I hope I can move back to Australia and actually settle there now rather than wonder what life would be like back home. We’ve definitely learnt a lot with this experience about what we want and don’t want and I think if we were to make the move again, we won’t be doing it on a whim next time and will plan everything much better.
I’ll be making sure I visit England much more rather than once every few years, but given the opportunity, I feel Australia has much more to offer for our future. I will definitely miss the buzz of London, the countryside and of course a good Sunday roast and a cream tea!
For now, we’re off to travel a bit more on our way back to Australia. Here comes Georgia, Spain and Mexico as we spend some time planning out our future. As a generally positive person, I can’t wait to get back to living life to the full again.
In the meantime, you’ll see loads more blogs coming your way about living in England, more things to do in Australia and more about our trip around the world this year!
Moving Back To Australia From England
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