A reality check on Australian wages
is a €10 Aperol Spritz unfair? And other parting Greece thoughts.
I find ferries emotional. The loud rumbling and the unsophisticated grunty machinery brings passengers in closer to the experience of leaving and arriving. Also, inherent in the experience is watching where you were now disappearing behind you. Leaving and arriving from an airport, by contrast, is such a clinical, round-edged affair that you don’t quite access the same rip-chord melancholia.
I just noticed I wrote about this same feeling a year ago. I was stranded in Milan, on my long way home back to Australia, not sure what I was going back to. And described the eerie sadness of being in this liminal time and space, leaving and yet to arrive:
Liminality describes the psychological process of transitioning across boundaries and borders. The term “limen” comes from the Latin for threshold separating one space from another.
Yeah, I’m at that threshold. We all are. We are between worlds. What do we do there? How do we be in the suspended space?
We stumble, we feel tired and sad, as I am in this video. We find it special and big. We watch it all and then uncomfortable things bubble up and happen. And in the grappling with these very uncomfortable things we find ourselves moving toward the next place. The grappling readies us.
But I have digressed with my atmospherics.
To my observation.
Last night I encountered a young (late 20s/early30s?) Australian couple on the island. Australians don’t really come to Sifnos. Same with Brits and Americans. The holiday-makers here are mostly Greeks (from Athens) and French, and they are a little older (40s-plus). Which makes for a more gentle experience TBH.
I can generally spot young Australians in Europe. Leaving aside that we all tend to talk a lot louder than most Europeans (Italians aside), young Australian travellers today look “expensive”, a lot more expensive than other Europeans the same age. The guy might mostly will have an ironic mullet and mo’ (this phenomenon is the talking point of the summer here in Europe!), but his kit will be unblemished, branded and of the moment. The women are equally crisp and “resort ready”. I am entirely out of fashion loops, so can’t spot the brands, but I recognise the whole look (and quite a bit of Lucy Folk) from Instagram shots taken at bars and on yachts across Sydney and Melbourne, with Aperol Spritzes in hand.
Not so long ago young Australians on the other side of the world stood out for being scruffy. Our hair was beach-bleached and scrappy, we wore faded shorts and tees and carried backpacks. Today this same demographic have shell suitcases and stay in hotels.
OK, I’m still pre-ambling…
To the millennial Australian couple last night. They were from Melbourne and were very sweet. And crisp. They were sitting in a small wine bar in Kastro and they told me they loved Greece, but that it was “super hard because things are expensive for Australians… you know, with the exchange rate”. They pointed out that 60 Euros was $AU100 and then detailed how they calculate things when they’re shopping about the place. For example, with their Aperol Spritz they were just now consuming they….
I interrupted.
I’ve had this conversation many many times over the years so I was equipped with a perspective they might like to consider. The exchange rate is (mostly) neither here nor there. You have to look at average earnings to get a real indication of whether the situation is “super hard”.
So, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics1, the average adult Australian monthly wage is $7632, which equates to roughly €4500 (gross).
And the average wages for Greeks? That would be €1131 (also gross).
For the French it’s €3530, for the Italians it’s €2479 and if you’re from Turkey it’s €553.
We also have to bear in mind Australia has incredibly high minimum and entry level wages while a lot of young people in Greece are out of work - they have a 23 per cent unemployment rate. Also, millennials have just taken over the boomers as the second highest earning demographic (after Generation X).
Further, last year Swiss investment bank Credit Suisse calculated the world's wealthiest countries, based on both median and mean wealth (not income). Australia came in at #1 and #4 respectively.
I’m not an economist and I’m not about to discount the growing wage disparity and “cost of living” crisis going on back in Australia (a backdrop against which some might deem this post obnoxious). Nor am I discounting the situation millennials face buying a home, nor the fact wages have not kept up with inflation. But amid all this, it is worth keeping in mind realistically just how “hard” it is to buy an Aperol Spritz around the world and just how expensive the Australian aesthetic and expectation has become.
Here in Greece, young locals go out to a club and order a Nescafe frappe and sit on it for four hours. I remember visiting during the austerity crisis and the Greeks told me, “Bah, we’ll be fine. It doesn’t really affect what matters to us - food and family. We just go back to the islands for a bit'“. I should probably resist adding this (but won’t): When I was in my late 20s, I also sat on a frappe for hours. And worked to the Euro budget diet - bread and dairy (both of which are subsidised in France, for instance), cucumbers and tomatoes. Actually, I still do work to this diet.
(PS While fact-checking this post I learned there are 2.2 million millionaires in Australia, about 11 per cent of the population.)
OK, the ferry is arriving into port. TBH this issue is not the gnawing one for me here. Or, rather, it reflects a broader one, about the way we’re all going to be interacting with each other going forward. I don’t think it’s going to hold. Much MTK on this.
I had to pass through Santorini on the way here. I wandered for a few hours and saw an Australian couple on honeymoon doing selfies with the four cruise ships down below as the backdrop. The cruise ships, which spew 11,500 tourists onto the island each day, were a motif for lushness in their straight-to-the-socials capture. I think “lushness” is the word…perhaps you have a better one.
But about two metres in front of them was a man begging with his two sons. It reminded me of those images from years ago with Syrian kids washing up on the shores of some Greek island (I think it was Kos) where the sunbathers didn’t even look up. Later, I listened as Santorini locals explained that the cruise ship tourists don’t shop or buy food (they have everything they need on the ships); they just “trash the place”.
As I’m researching this next book and just following what’s happening in the world, this kind of crass contrast speaks to a very large conversation that we are going to have to have. Actually, I don’t think we will get the opportunity for a languid conversation. We are going to be hit with it all very, very soon. On the way to the port this morning, Daphne (the lovely woman who rented me my little room on the side of the hill), looked up at a construction site for some new villas and said, “This won’t last”. I get the sense she wasn’t lamenting the end of Greece’s simple ways, but rather that the gentrification won’t hold.
I apologise for the judgy tone here today. I’m in the weeds.
Sarah x
https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/labour/earnings-and-working-conditions/average-weekly-earnings-australia/may-2023#methodology
Can we put this prayer on a t-shirt, ‘the gentrification will not hold”?
I honestly don’t reckon people even realise how ridiculous some of their words (e.g. “the conversion rate is hard” stuff) sound to others. And I don’t think they mean to look like totally insensitive jerks when they take their selfie pics in front of revolting cruise ships while people beg in front of them. It’s more that everyone seems to be so preoccupied with their own little bubble (of privilege or pain or entitlement or insecurity or ego etc etc) of experience that they don’t even stop to question (or notice) how insane us humans are. I mean, we are literally shitting where we sleep and unwittingly betraying our primal survival instincts because we cannot see beyond our needs (and/or those of our close loved ones) in whatever moment we find ourselves in.
Our imminent demise seems to be the sum total of a whole mass of individual people who are trying to survive and/or thrive and/or “succeed” and/or prevail and/or ‘get by’ etc etc.
I feel we are likely doomed as a species. Not because we are essentially ‘bad’ or even ‘selfish’ people necessarily. Most of us have done the best we can with what we’ve got. We all have our belief systems, conscious and unconscious biases etc. Many of us feel (rightly or wrongly) justified to live the lives we lead and make the choices we do. Or yeah - are just too busy on the treadmill to even notice that things really aren’t okay.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the notion of “truth” lately....and if people want to hear it or not etc etc. But I’m not sure this is even the right question as truth is so subjective in so many contexts? Surely our individual filters/lenses etc will continue to distort any ‘objective’ truth? (if this even exists?).
Anyway. I could go on but it’s late here in Australia. And besides - I really have nothing original to say! So, I will keep turning over every stone as I wander and wonder through this life...but have resigned myself to a kind of knowing that what I can individually do/contribute to help our collective plight, actually involves doing a whole lot less. Talking less. Consuming less. Travelling less. “Working” less. I have more than enough. I already am enough. And well, that’s probably enough from me for now ;).
Thank you as always Sarah. I feel heartened knowing that you are continually trying to “shake up the snow globe” to help better our world...may the fragile flakes land in a more beautiful configuration xx