How is it going?

Not too shabby was my answer for the last three months to this question that is everywhere in Australia.

How is it going?

Every conversation, every coffee order, every encounter began with it. A not really serious, superficial question about how you are doing. Friendly, sure. Polite, maybe. But after a while also exhausting.

Today my answer would be different.

Excellent.

Really. I am in the best mood. I am returning. I am going home. And I like that. Finally Germany again. The Länd. Finally good food again. Finally real people again. Finally emotions again. Finally seasons again. Finally bad weather again. Finally privacy again. Finally civil rights again. Finally evenings where it stays light until 10 pm.

How I feel today is completely different from how I felt a year and a half ago, when I emigrated.

Did I fail?

Maybe that is the question you have to ask yourself when you go back. But I never really wanted to emigrate. So probably not. I am experimental. Australia was an experiment. Now the experiment is over, and I am going home. Home to the Swabian province, to a beautiful old farmhouse at D & T.

Finally no longer an alien.

So what do I take with me?

I have already mentioned quite a few things in the last posts. You inevitably compare. You compare places, people, systems, language, food, weather, manners, freedoms, prohibitions, routines. And at some point you realize that maybe you never really integrated at all. I always remained myself. That is good. That is bad. It is probably both.

One question kept bothering me throughout this year: Is racism more widespread in Australian society than it appears from the outside?

Several times I found myself in situations where I had to swallow hard. Situations that seriously challenged my value system, especially as a German. Fairly early on, someone sent me a video. He was not Australian, I have to say that, but also an immigrant from South East Asia who had lived in Australia for almost 25 years. The video was animated and portrayed the Second World War, especially the Blitzkrieg, as a great achievement. Along with the question of whether I was not proud to be part of such a nation, one that had been so efficient.

I felt sick.

How can anyone find anything positive in mass murder on a scale of millions? How do you even arrive at such a thought? For me, that was extremely hard. And it was not the only borderline remark about the Second World War and the Holocaust.

On another occasion, at a Christmas party, jokes about gas chambers were made in front of others. Only one person reacted. The person who told the joke later even stood in front of a group and let himself be celebrated for having told me such a joke. He had Jewish colleagues.

I stood there and wondered what kind of film I had ended up in.

In Germany, something like that would not simply have been a bad joke. In Germany, the room would have frozen. Someone would have objected. Immediately. Hard. Rightly so. Here? Well. You are not supposed to take your conflicts abroad with you. And since I had already been internally programmed for departure anyway, at some point I just walked away shaking my head. In Germany, a judge would have given you a medal if you had punched that guy’s teeth in.

A few days later, the Bondi Beach massacre happened. Just to give the whole thing some context.

Again, one of those situations. One of the attackers was stopped by a passerby, and in the media, on Twitter, everywhere, this was celebrated. The context was clear: We Aussies, we are strong and ready to defend ourselves. Oi, oi, oi. When it became known that the passerby was also an immigrant, things became noticeably quieter.

Maybe I only heard selectively.

But that is exactly the point. After a while you start asking yourself whether you are hearing selectively or whether you are finally listening more closely.

By the way, this was not a phenomenon that only came from white people. Insults, different treatment, defamation and discrimination also came from other, non white people. Also based on origin.

Sometimes, as an immigrant from Europe, you felt as if you belonged nowhere. To some, you were a foreigner. To others, you were white. And as the same South East Asian man who had sent me the videos so beautifully explained to me, as a white man I was not allowed to call this racism.

Huh?

What?

Where did I take the wrong turn?

Is my moral compass wrong?

That question came to me more than once. But to keep it short: the wa&%er was simply an ar&#<ole. Character study completed.

Then came my second chance.

I travelled through the country once again as a tourist, especially through North Queensland, and wanted to see whether I had perhaps read Australia wrongly. Whether what I perceived as racism was perhaps more of an intercultural misunderstanding. A cultural norm violation. People come from outside into an existing system, do not know the visible and invisible rules, break them unconsciously and are then treated differently because of it.

Yes, certainly. That exists too.

But there were also clearly derogatory, racist remarks about almost every other ethnicity. That exists in Germany too, of course. But there, people are very quick and very firm in contradicting it, and that is a good thing.

In this respect, Australia did not always match my value system.

Maybe it is culturally different. Maybe more things here are disguised as jokes. Anyone who wants to get an impression of how Australian humour can work should simply search for YeahMad on YouTube. Very popular here. And very revealing.

Why is this tolerated here? Why are racist statements, disguised as jokes, so often simply laughed away?

One possible explanation is education. It is almost hard to imagine, but according to estimates, around 40 percent of Australians never leave their country. Not even once in their lives. Some people here throw falsehoods at you with unbelievable self confidence.

Dunning Kruger at its finest.

Another question for me was: Is there structural racism?

As an alien, as a person not born in Australia, I failed once at identity verification. A lot of things here are digital. If you want something, you have to verify your identity online with two documents. If you were not born in Australia and do not have an Australian driver licence, you have a problem.

My passport was perfectly valid. But I did not have a second document that was accepted. No Medicare card. I will only get that once I do my tax return for this year. I never had an ImmiCard. The driver licence is used everywhere here as an identity card. Bad luck if you do not have one.

Is that structural racism?

I do not think so. It was more bad luck. It is a disadvantage for people without a driver licence, for immigrants, for people who do not fit neatly into the digital boxes. I still got my rental bond back, even if it took a few detours. But the whole thing showed me again how systems can exclude people without anyone actively being evil.

The rental market is a topic of its own anyway. There you are treated badly no matter where you come from. Unless you are the landlord.

I am curious how the identification process will work when my tax return is due. Last year it was uncomplicated. Maybe this year I will fail at doing my tax return because I do not have an Australian driver licence. Who knows.

Enough on that topic. In all its detail.

What is also important, of course, is that Australia is still considered by many to be a country people like to emigrate to. Sun. Beach. No worries. Ease. Lifestyle. The narrative is strong. Australia as a counter model to Europe. Less heavy, less conflict loaded, less historical, less dramatic.

Let us look at the hard facts: suicide rates, alcohol abuse, general drug use. And there it is: Australia is not better. It sits roughly in the Western middle range. Cairns and Townsville are even extreme outliers with very high suicide rates among men. But in general, life here does not seem one bit better.

It is just different.

What we in Europe express, fight out, discuss, talk to death and sometimes problematize to the point of exhaustion is often kept silent here or pushed away. That seems just as unhealthy as our method.

Europe argues loudly. Australia suffers quietly and sometimes calls it relaxation.

There is one difference, though: life expectancy. It is very high in Australia, even comparable with Italy and Spain, and clearly above Germany. This is probably due to several factors: climate, wealth, the health care system, a very strict anti smoking policy and the Healthy Migrant Effect in a high wage country. Of course, there are also massive regional and ethnic differences here that are statistically relevant.

But living long is not automatically living well.

What bothered me most in Australia was this surface.

This How is it going?

This phrase that does not really want to know how you are doing.

Australians are often incredibly friendly. They smile at you, they talk to you, they seem open. But in my experience, they often do not mean it deeply. It is surface. Friendly surface, yes. But surface. Never truly meant friendliness. New Zealanders were different. That was one of the most surprising things about this journey for me.

When I do not feel like smiling, I do not smile. Quite normal. When something annoys me, I say it. Quite normal.

Not here.

No confrontation. Do not address anything openly. Do not become unpleasant. Better behind the scenes. Friendly, nice, indirect, but never really open. Exhausting. Complicated. And in the long run, hard for me to endure.

If you want to know what people are really like, walk through their streets as a pedestrian. Cross roads. Get on a bicycle. You will learn more about a society that way than from any image film.

Rarely have I experienced so much ruthlessness and such a display of power as in Australian traffic. You will be driven at mercilessly if you are not careful. No worries. Same thing on a bicycle. In traffic, Australians can be observed in their natural habitat. That is where they show what they are really like. There they feel strong and superior, surrounded by a ton of material.

And to add one more thing: many of them cannot really drive.

Yes, they drive on the wrong side of the road. No, that is not what I mean.

I mean accelerating, shifting, braking, rhythm, a feeling for movement. Sometimes I sat in a car and internally lost it because of this jerky incompetence.

Are there also things I will look back on and say: yes, that was good?

Certainly.

There will be. It will just take some time before they rise back to the surface. At the moment, disappointment dominates. Disappointment in people, in behaviour, in the surface, in this country that promised something and in the end never became home. I do not think it ever would have.

In terms of landscape, Australia has magnificent places. No question. An impressive animal world. Even though I still have not seen a koala. There are beautiful coasts, rainforests, vastness, light, sea, birds, colours. There is relatively advanced digitalisation, with all its pitfalls. There are cafés, routines, places that became familiar to me. There were people who were friendly. There are moments that will remain.

And I will certainly come back again. In six years, for the Olympic Games in Brisbane.

I could keep writing forever, but my flight is about to leave.

In that spirit.