As a little white girl, naively comforted by the romances of Madame Butterfly and Disney’s Mulan, I had developed a pretty enduring schema by which to evaluate Asian women: they must either be supplicants donning opulently embellished kimonos, or they must be men. By the time that movies like Godzilla and Aloha came around,…
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This is the final instalment of Really Honest Postcards from Lyon, April Smallwood’s six part series on life as a young Australian expatriate in France. You can look back over the series here. Dear Ike, I love that the French expression for placing an object down so as to not surprise you is, ‘Op!’, and…
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Be sure to check Lip in two weeks for the final instalment of Really Honest Postcards from Lyon, April Smallwood’s six part series on life as a young Australian expatriate in France. Dear JM, What is the latest and how is your heart? I was watching a talk by author and social researcher Hugh Mackay…
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Be sure to check Lip weekly for new instalments of Really Honest Postcards from Lyon, April Smallwood’s six part series on life as a young Australian expatriate in France. Dear Michelle, I’ve been cooking a lot of Filipino dishes lately – adobo and sinegang mostly; kare-kare oxtail stew is next, because it calls for peanut butter. Like a…
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Be sure to check Lip weekly for new instalments of Really Honest Postcards from Lyon, April Smallwood’s new six part series on life as a young Australian expatriate in France. Dear Shelley, Lyon is a pretty lady. She’s got two great big rivers, the Rhône and Saône, which rhyme, and an old city boasting that classic cobblestone…
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Be sure to check Lip weekly for new instalments of Really Honest Postcards from Lyon, April Smallwood’s new six part series on life as a young Australian expatriate in France. Dear Laura, So moving overseas with the one you love is chancy. It’s kind of like having your first baby in that you need to…
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I have just had the privilege of spending three days at a game reserve in South Africa. Each day I would rise at 6am, climb into an open-top range rover with a ranger and tracker and drive out to spot creatures of legendary strength and prowess. On our first morning we rounded a…
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Fifteen year old Sok collects facts in the back of her notebook. At the end of school she approaches the teacher’s desk to tell me that television was invented in 1922. Sok’s English is better than most other students, and she quickly realises my skepticism. She grabs her book and points to a scrawling script…
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Be sure to check Lip weekly for new instalments of Really Honest Postcards from Lyon – April Smallwood’s new six part series on life as a young Australian expatriate in France. Dear Siobhan, No-one will hire me on this visa. I’m absolutely entitled to work but the French aren’t interested in an Australian…
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It doesn’t feel like all too long ago that I was sitting drafting the first of my Lip articles about travelling Australia on my own. When my travels were stretched out in front of me, it felt like forever, but now that it’s almost over it seems my endless days are numbered. I can now…
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When I think of backpacking, I think of dragging a battered backpack along the road and changing from buses to trains to coaches to trains to buses. I’m not sure if this next admission will make me lose my Backpacker Cool Points (Ha… like I had any of them) but in the whole time I’ve…
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Since September, I’ve felt like I’ve been constantly moving. Whether it was driving down the west coast, or across the Nullarbor or the Great Ocean Road, or flying to Sydney and then flying to Hobart and roadtripping around Tassie. I have just over two months left on my visa and I’m staying in Victoria. I…
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When I last wrote, I was about to embark across the Nullarbor, the iconic journey spanning the lower part of Australia. I’d been warned that the Nullarbor was, well, a bit tedious after you get over the fact that there is nothing above knee height in view for possibly three days. The novelty wears thin….
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I’m writing this while sitting in a soggy Kombi watching out the window as the predicted thunderstorm rolls in. When I first arrived in Sydney all those months ago, I was talking with a woman in a hostel who said that the south-west was her favourite place in Australia. She described the white beaches, the…
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