How To Be Australian by Ashley Kalagian Blunt
“This is what I realised, lying awake night after night, my heart racing: I knew how to move. I didn’t know how to stay.”
After spending her twenties working abroad and traveling solo across the globe, Canadian Ashley convinces her career-oriented, new-husband Steve to relocate to sunny Sydney for at least a year. Ashley’s vision for their new Australian life together is filled with carefree frolics along Bondi Beach, limitless sunshine, and welcoming Aussie hospitality.
She is left perplexed when her vision is met with the reality that life “down under” may not be as breezy as she hoped. When Steve struggles to find work and Ashley realises there is more to ingratiating herself with the locals than she anticipated, she begins to question whether her Australian dream is what she wants after all. Tension mounts, and losing her one-of-a-kind wedding ring on the beach doesn’t reassure her that their marriage will survive the move.
Fast-forward to the end of their first year and Ashley is ready to return to Canada. Then Steve drops a bombshell: he wants to stay.
This book could easily have been nothing more than a humblebrag about escaping the frigid winters of Winnipeg and living it up in one of the world’s most sought-after cities but Ashley provides a far more nuanced account of what it really takes to upend your life and build a foundation somewhere new. I went through a similar process myself four years ago, leaving London after a year of long-distance love to build a new life with my partner in Perth, WA. I found myself nodding along empathetically with the uniquely Australian challenges Ashley and Steve faced (I’d never heard of tall poppy syndrome before moving here either)! It’s easy to assume there are similarities between one Western city and another, and while there is an ease to the transition, we often dismiss how much we give up and don’t anticipate when making these big moves.
Ashley embraces her naivety and sets out to uncover what it truly means to be Australian. She doesn’t neatly side-step what she learns about the history of Aboriginal rights, the covert racism that still exists across Australian society, and the broken policies for handling asylum seekers and refugees. Placing these lessons into a broader scheme of cultural identity as she explores her own Armenian heritage, Ashley leaves us with the important message that where we choose to lay our roots is more political than we may think.
What I admired most about Ashley’s journey was her refreshing and deeply honest reflection on the pressure some of these growing points placed on her mental health and her relationship with her husband. She doesn’t shy away from sharing her anxieties and she left me feeling seen with how she subtly details the loneliness, sadness, and dismay that comes with questioning the path you’ve put yourself on in life.
With a wonderfully witty and dry sense of humour, Ashley offers her insights on how to be Australian, yes, but also how to be human. How to take the pinch-points of the choices we make in life and embrace them for further growth. How to find your feet and, most of all, how to find yourself.
Elaine Mead is a freelance writer and book reviewer, currently residing in Hobart, Tasmania. She is passionate about the ways we can use literature to learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves and obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her online under @wordswithelaine.
