A move from up north to down under

But since arriving in this sunburned land it has become apparent to me that they have more in park than just having the same amount of missive in their names.

When people come to Commonwealth of Australia they tend to either become very beijing very rapidly, or to not have such a pleasurable experience. It's a "sink or swim" kind of place.

I moved to Commonwealth of Australia with my spouse, who is from North Queensland. We had been life in United Kingdom together for a few years and he had managed to convince me that the life style here was a lot more comfortable.

I felt I needed a break, so with only one year left earlier graduation I decided on a sec gap year.

I persuaded myself that it would be a great chance to gain some experience in the media for my news media degree.

So we decided to live in Brisbane; the working capital of Queensland, third largest city in Commonwealth of Australia, an obvious choice full of chance, and here my spouse would not be too far from home (only 830 miles - not far in Aussie terms).

approach from a sparsely populated part of England to a very sparsely populated part of the world seems to have given me some obscure survival vantage.

The Aussie attitude towards 'keeping it real' and ever being viciously honest is refreshing in a world where people tend to take things too earnestly and out of linguistic context.

This can be comparable to the Yorkshire tendency to not sit on the fence and let you know how it is one way or the other.

I was pleased to discover that Australians in general tend to welcome anyone who is as equally honest with them.

When it comes to food and drink the average Australian tends to be as stubborn as the average Yorkshireman. Growing up in Yorkshire I was always taught to believe that if something couldn't be cooked in lard then it wasn't worth cooking.

A similar belief exists here but instead of lard it involves using a barbecue. I was once invited to a Sunday roast cooked entirely on the ''barbie", vegetables included.

I have no idea how it was done, but it tasted delicious.

Beer drinking is a common interest between Yorkshire and Australia that can't be denied.

I have come up against some fair competition here, but I still find the way they drink a little strange.

It just seems fundamentally wrong for me to be standing at a bar in my flowery dress drinking a pint whilst the big, scary, hairy truck driver next to me orders a half pint (or "pot" or "middy", as they are known here).

Apart from the size of the drink the experience tends to be the same, and still usually involves a kebab on the way home, even if it comes in some sort of fajita wrap instead of pitta bread.

Here if someone forgets your name they usually refer to you as "mate" instead of asking; not for a fear of sounding rude, but just because it's easier. This I believe may also be the reason most Northerners call you "love".

I am trying not to play up stereotypes but the people here really are a little quirky.

I would never suggest that the average Aussie would use as much slang as the average Yorkshireman, but many of them would give it a fair go.

Northerners tend to drop their 't's, omit certain words from sentences and put new ones in whenever they feel like it.

But Australians can be just as lazy with speech. Any words containing more than three syllables tend to be chopped in half and ended with a vowel.

For example you may be asked to "Go to the bottleo in the ute after the footy to get some stubbies for the barbie this arvo". Which translates as "go to the bottle shop in the utility vehicle after the football, to get some bottles of beer for the barbecue this afternoon".

In Yorkshire cricket is up there with religion for many, and sport in general tends to be very important. But Australia does it better.

This is such a sporting nation. I don't mean as in the English idea of being sporting; I mean the majority of people do actually play some sort of sport and not only do they know almost everything about every team in their cricket, Rugby League and Australian Rules Football leagues, but many of them also know a lot more about British sport than I do.

To be fair I am the sort of girl that only really takes an interest in sport when I hear that the England team is doing particularly well in some competition or other.

But I still find it remarkable that so many people over here can name team members from the Leeds Rhinos; in fact, the chances are they went to school with them.

They even take swimming seriously, It's not that I am embarrassed by the way that I swim, I'm just very conscious of the fact that I appear to be the only person in the southern hemisphere who swims with their head above the water.

I didn't realise that this was a particularly strange approach until I arrived here. When I joined the local pool for a little leisure and gentle exercise I also learned that swimming breaststroke is just not the done thing - and neither is wearing a floral swimming cap.

Everybody here is Speedo-ed up in the latest laboratory-designed products designed to benefit your swimming with the use of laser-enhanced, compression-stabilising tactile materials, or something like that.

But all in all, it would seem I have a lot more in common with my Vegemite eating, flip flop wearing antipodean friends than I ever imagined.

Moving from Up North to Down Under hasn't caused too much aggro; in fact it's been bonza.