I made a sea change during the pandemic, but I miss the diversity of the city
Over the past year, many of us reflected on our lifestyles and budgets and came to the conclusion that life in a capital city just isn’t all that tenable or attractive. News reports dubbed this the pandemic “exodus”, as people fled cities around the world.
It accelerated a trend that was already occurring in Australia, particularly among young people. One report published last year found that between 2011 and 2016, young people were tending to either staying in regional towns or bailing out of capital cities – Sydney lost more millennials than it gained during that period. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australia’s capital cities lost well over 10,000 people to internal migration in the first half of last year.
I made the move out of the city in May last year and I was even interviewed in one of the many, many news stories about it when I spoke (heavily bragged) to Guardian Australia’s Brigid Delaney about the home my partner and I had found in an idyllic town on the south coast of New South Wales.
We’ve both been incredibly lucky to be afforded the luxury of working remotely and our new flat is pretty outrageous; a modern two-bedroom apartment wedged between the verdant escarpment and the water’s edge.
It’s also about $250 a week cheaper than any equivalent property we could hope to find at Bondi Beach (unsurprisingly, the painfully high prices of a rental property in Sydney are consistently cited as the foremost reason that millennials have been moving out of its bounds).
And yet, despite those benefits, attempting to settle into regional life has been an uncomfortable experience for me and, tricky as it may be to talk about, it’s because I’m a brown woman.
It’s a problem that I honestly didn’t anticipate and, had I been forced to reconcile with it earlier, I may well have thought twice about leaving Sydney behind.
The place that I live in and its surrounding towns are – and there’s no delicate way to put this – extremely white.
Living in a majority-white regional community, or even just passing through, can feel like a fairly sketchy prospect as a person with darker skin or ethnic features.
Often all eyes on the street will be on you and, while I’m not necessarily attributing that to any sort of abject racism, it can be incredibly discomforting. At the least, it can feel a little humiliating, and at most, genuinely intimidating and unsafe.
When we were based in Sydney’s inner west, I was never really made to feel aware of the colour of my skin in my day-to-day. The only times I felt vulnerable were for the normal, women reasons, like being out by yourself past 10pm. Suddenly I felt a real longing to be settled back in a multicultural neighbourhood where I didn’t particularly stand out or feel othered every time I went to the supermarket.
In the earliest weeks after our move I spoke to another brown female friend about it over a dinner table and she asked me if I felt pressure to apologise for my skin colour by acting with inordinate politeness within that community – I did, I’d become socially exhausted by it.
I was curious to see if this was a common experience, so I made a callout on social media asking if other people of colour felt the same sense of discomfort in some regional areas.
My inbox was overwhelmed by res
ponses: people who avoided regional travel because they resented being stared at so much; people treated with suspicion by locals in country towns; and even people who declined to take jobs that involved travelling through regional areas.
For regional coastal communities, the broad “locals only” attitude on the beaches can easily feel like “white people only”.
In the reasonably socioeconomically privileged area that I live in, that intolerance invariably intersects with classist attitudes as the surrounding beaches are one of the closest options for people from Sydney’s south-western suburbs.
On hot weekends, large families from western Sydney will come down and set up cabanas on the beachfronts, often hauling an enviable setup of grills and camping stoves, filling the air with some absurdly delicious scents. It’s a great break from the cultural homogeneity of the town.
But there’s some strong resentment for those visitors. I once overheard two young local men, I would assume purposefully, loudly exclaiming on a searing Sunday that they “don’t go to swamp Campbelltown, so why are all of these people coming here?”
At this point, it almost goes without saying, I miss living in Sydney remarkably and plan on moving back as soon as the lease is up.
I’ve been to some incredibly diverse and open-minded regional towns, and maybe with the increased migration out of cities, we could expect demographics in these areas to shift.
Altering the cultural and ethnic diversity in the country and the coast is a pretty thrilling idea. But at the moment, I don’t blame any POC for not wanting to be among the first to move.
Elfy Scott is a journalist and presenter. She currently hosts and produces the daily news show, The Junkee Takeaway and has written for BuzzFeed News, The Saturday Paper, and 10 Daily.