2001: American odyssey
Leaving Australia, and missing out on a fortune.
Maybe 2001 began in June.
From that point on, I can tell you exactly what I was doing. Staying for six weeks at the YMCA on West 63rd Street, because I foolishly thought foreign correspondents should play by expense limit rules. Moving into a place a dozen blocks north, because the only people I knew in New York had families and convinced me the Upper West Side was the place to be. Trying in vain to find decent coffee. Grabbing the IKEA shuttle bus to New Jersey, because older New York apartments never have overhead lighting. Witnessing a city, country, and world shift on its axis on September 11.
Here’s what I can’t remember: anything happening in Australia. I don’t remember the six months before I left Sydney for New York City, and I certainly don’t remember anything afterward. Not even the weekly delivery of newspapers from home—air-freighted at sphincter-puckering expense to the Australian Financial Review’s office in SoHo—kept me up to speed. I looked for my own articles, read the Good Weekend magazine from the Herald, and called it a day. That I was now at the center of the universe was obvious. Sydney? Melbourne? Brisbane? Ha! The only thing that mattered was the teeming metropolis outside my front door and the fact Seinfeld episodes were even more hilarious, brought to life by what I was seeing and experiencing.
Yet none of that was real at the start of the year. I’d accepted the New York Correspondent role a couple of months earlier and figured I was well ahead of the career curve. Two weeks in the pre-Christmas rush as a salesperson in the toy department at David Jones’ Queen Street Mall store in Brisbane was the sum total of my work experience before joining the Courier-Mail as a copyboy in December 1989 because, in the words of then-editor Greg Chamberlin, I was “too young to be a journalist.”
What that meant was I was 16 and looked it, so I spent a year cooling my heels and possibly losing my hearing before beginning my cadetship; doing a bit of everything; backpacking for a spell in 1994; returning to the newspaper and falling into business journalism; alternating between Brisbane, Sydney, and Canberra; and seeing in the first new year since the Millennium Bug freakout in a two-bedroom flat on a hill in Bondi Beach where the windows, naturally, faced the wrong way.
I was paying what seemed the insane amount of $A290 a week, or something like 20% of my salary. But it was Bondi Beach! I could surf before work (which I never did)! Take the Bondi to Bronte walk daily (ditto)! Meet a cute surfer girl (ditto)! Here’s what I actually did: worked all week, recuperated over the weekend, and repeated. I did love early morning strolls to Gusto on Hall Street, though, sipping a flat white while perched on an upturned milk crate to watch the walk of shame parade.
That summer, India took on the Aussies in Test cricket, which resulted in “a historic victory for the Indian team on Australian soil.” That draws a blank. Andre Agassi allegedly won the Australian Open—I don’t even remember Pat Rafter holding a two sets to one lead against him in the semis (sorry, mate). Just to underscore that I’m now geriatric, Michael Schumacher won the Formula One grand prix. From January 1, digital television arrived—freeing the ABC and SBS to offer multi-channel services—and I don’t remember a thing about it. Apparently by this point I was the media writer for the country’s most prestigious business newspaper in name only. Oops.
Much as I’ve tried to suppress the memory, I do recall the daily embarrassment of John Howard being prime minister (that will always be the political equivalent of giving a kid a participation trophy) and the ongoing shame of the Queen being Australia’s head of state. Howard’s conservative government was also salting the battlefield for its “illegals are overrunning the country and we risk becoming a crime-infested hell!” platform in the federal election later in the year. Sound familiar?
I never watched Neighbours, but Holly Valance was still on Ramsay Street—her marriage to British luxury property developer Nick Candy and her metamorphosis into a hard-core Trumper would have to wait for another decade. And the country waited until I was gone to “rest” Sale of the Century, leaving me with only memories of Tony Barber and Delvene Delaney, since I never really accepted Glenn Ridge as host. I mean, he was just a poor man’s Tony.1
A couple of years after I landed in the US, I heard about The Secret Life of Us, which debuted just six weeks after I left, in July 2001, and was yet another TV show where I just missed being the target audience. Beverly Hills 90210 and its aspirational (sort of) depiction of high school kids debuted in 1990, the year after I finished high school. Its spin-off, Melrose Place, appeared in 1992, but its take on young adults making their way in the world didn’t resonate with this 19 year old.
By the time The Secret Life of Us lobbed, I wasn’t exactly relating to twenty-somethings in St. Kilda but I found myself hooked on the DVDs anyway. A few years later at my favorite New York coffee shop, some acquaintances introduced me to a visiting Australian friend because Americans think we all know each other.2 I didn’t know her but I felt like I did: it was actress Sibylla Budd, and the circle of The Secret Life of Us was complete.
Two other things happened back home in 2001 that seem significant. The first I was aware of: Howard was in the US when September 11 happened, and immediately and reflexively committed the country to providing troops and whatnot to Dubya’s military misadventures. I guess “oops” would be appropriate, but that would suggest Howard has a sense of shame. Second, Ansett went under. Until that point in my life, flying domestically was a binary choice: Qantas or Ansett. Today, I go back home and there’s all sorts of weird and wacky options, to the point where I just default to Qantas because at least it’s the devil I know.
There was one other data point to note, although it didn’t seem that significant at the time. Eighteen months after I moved out of my apartment in Bondi Beach, it rented for $A380 per week—31% more than I was paying. It was a small but telling canary in the coal mine of Australian real estate, and a hint to the crazy boom it’s still riding.
When I first landed in Sydney full-time in 1999, the dream was to stop renting by, in my dream world, buying a terrace house in Paddington. I mean, naturally. Here’s an example: this property sold in March 1999 for $A680,000, a sum that only confirms my ambition has always outstripped my resources. Had I been able to stump up the funds? The property almost tripled in value during the next 14 years to sell for $A1.95 million in 2013 and tripled again to sell this month for $A6 million—a gain of almost 800% over 25 years. My rented place in Bondi? It sold in 2013 for $A675,000, and hasn’t moved since. But other apartments in its modest building have. An equivalent unit below it sold in 2021 for $A1.725 million, and apartments in the complex are now renting for upwards of $A700 a week. It all made my rent in Sydney in 2001 a bargain—especially compared with the $4,500 a month Fairfax stumped up for my place on West 76th Street, half a block from Central Park.
As I look back on that year, it was pretty damn good. My parents were healthy and able to travel. Movers took care of getting me to a new country where my employer paid for everything. I got to live in one of the world’s great cities with the prospect of returning to the world’s greatest country. I covered some of the biggest news stories of the past century for a newspaper that valued my work and colleagues I not only learned from, but really liked to be around. Magazines were abundant and gorgeous; social media didn’t exist; and coming home bearing hard-to-get US goods was a thrill.
At the time, I remember being energized and inspired but never hesitant to moan and complain. Of course, people not recognizing what they’ve got until it’s gone is a cliche for a reason. For me, it’s slightly different: I simply didn’t realize I was already living in what I’d look back on as the good old days.
About this series: Australian almanac
This is part of a series of articles examining what the heck has happened in Australia in the 23-odd years I’ve been living in the United States. The introduction to this series is here.
I also remember mornings with Steve Liebmann on Nine’s Today show—he reminded me of my dad, and I loved his combination with both Liz Hayes and Tracy Grimshaw. If I ever want to recall Liebmann’s utter disdain for the populist pap that are staples of morning shows, I look to George Stephanopoulos here in the US, who grudgingly tolerates celebrity news and similar segments while looking like he’d prefer a root canal.
For what it’s worth, at least half the time some American lights up with “I know another Australian!” and runs the name past me, I embarrassingly … actually know them.