Humans of USyd: growing up in the country

Emily Graetz speaks with 3 USyd students who grew up in rural and regional Australia. 

Annabelle Shannon 

Annabelle is in her first year of a Bachelor of Arts (English and History). She hails from a cattle and crop farm about 50kms out of Coonabarabran. She is currently living back home with her family for the duration of the Sydney lockdown. 

I grew up in a really really beautiful part of Australia. To get to town I have to drive about 40 minutes and you know, it is a little bit isolating but it's also really nice to have a place where you can kind of go away from people and society.

We didn’t have a lot of same-age kids as me and my siblings growing up so we played around a lot with family, helped out on the farm, read a lot of books, helped Mum in the kitchen, just hanging about the farm and went for walks.

I always knew I wanted to move to the city. Even though I am quite isolated - I'm six hours North-West of Sydney - Mum and Dad still wanted us kids to be able to be aware of the world and not sheltered and naive. They were able to take us places and we'd go to Sydney at least once a year and build up our street smarts. I've always really liked Sydney and it's always been a place that I knew I'd go to university for. Where I live, you can't go to uni. The closest unis are usually about 4 hours away anyway. 

Living in the city, it's different, it's very different. In the city, of course, it's louder. One thing the city doesn't have is stars. Where I live is actually the capital of astronomy for Australia and so in my backyard at home I could just go out and look up at the sky and see the Milky Way for what it is. And then you go to the city and there's only four stars! I also miss not being able to walk somewhere and have my music blasting and just be alone. It is a little bit hard to get alone time in the city. Right now I'm looking out to a paddock of Canola - it’s just yellow for a very, very large expanse of land and I missed that beauty as well. 

When I’m in Sydney, I love being able to walk 10 minutes and see things or experience things! What I love is being able to go to new food places and just being able to have so many activities and resources at your fingertips by just walking! Growing up in the country, everything that you have to do, you have to plan in advance for a week or so so you can make sure things correlate. Everyday I had to travel an hour and half to high school so now I love just being able to go somewhere when I want to or being able to be like 'oh you know what it's a Sunday, I'm a bit bored, I'm gonna go for a walk somewhere!' 

I will happily say I'm a very flexible person, I can live anywhere. But moving to the city and getting grounded and making sure that you have people around you that make life fun and enjoyable and just making sure to get out of your comfort zone is difficult. One problem that I do have is sometimes finding people that understand what it's like growing up in the country, in isolation and in a part of Australia where you may not get as many opportunities. Sydney University is a fantastic university but I haven't come across many rural students and so it's a little bit hard to find people that you can talk with about moving to the city. 

I think one thing about living in the country and regional and rural areas, is that you know a lot of people and you grow up around a lot of people and you can walk down the street and just say hello to everyone. I think one particular thing that's been taught to me well, growing up rurally, is being able to speak to people, being able to go up to someone and just start talking to them. It’s taught me people skills and about having an open-mind. Every person you pass has their own story and life and I’ve learnt to keep that in mind when talking to people. 

Philipp Eversheim - Doctor in Dental Medicine

Philipp is in his first year studying a Doctor in Dental Medicine. He spent most of his childhood in Wodonga. 

I was born in Germany in a town south of Cologne called Bonn. My parents and my siblings, I've got a brother and a sister, we migrated to Australia in 2006 when I was 7 and a half. They found work in Wodonga, which is North-East Victoria. I lived there until the end of 2015 and then I moved to Melbourne for Boarding school and my undergrad degree. And now I'm a first year dental student at USyd. 

Wodonga is a small town. I really enjoyed the freedom and the serenity and the clear air especially. You notice the difference between the city and the country life especially when you go back. I really miss the small surrounding towns like Beechworth and Yackandandah and their famous attractions like Beechworth Honey. I think all of those little towns have their own unique character which I think is very special. I kind of miss that.

Given that I went to boarding school in Melbourne and finished my high school there, I think I did want to go to university in the city, especially as I wanted to go into the health area. I don't think there are that many health opportunities in the country so I didn't have much choice. 

Moving to the city has been a big change for me, leaving everything I knew in the country behind. At first it was quite overwhelming for me but there were so many opportunities which challenged me to become who I am today. Moving from Melbourne to Sydney meant leaving a lot of what I knew behind. I found that particularly hard, starting a new life in a new city without much family, unfamiliar streets and moving alone because of the December lockdown. Some of my undergraduate friends moved with me to Sydney. But my current housemate is studying dentistry with me and we went to the same residential college together in Melbourne so at least I wasn't completely alone. Now that I'm in Sydney, I love it. I think that it's refreshing to be able to start somewhere new and I also believe that this adversity will help me become more independent and mature into my profession - hopefully!

I love Sydney's nature and the weather. I love the beaches, they're stunning, and the sunny days and the long summers really make the city unique and stand out over Melbourne. I think Melbourne's got a very rich culture but sometimes it can be quite depressing when there's always a cloud cover when you wake up in the morning, especially in Winter. I think that this makes living in Sydney quite special and I can't wait to explore more of the walks and strips of nature that are integrated into the city grid in the upcoming Summer, hopefully when Covid is over. 

I think Covid has affected these areas a lot because there's not a lot of tourism and I think the politicians nowadays always just look to the cities and kind of ignore what happens in the country. My dad, for example, works in Albury and lives in Wodonga, and in the first lockdown the border was closed and it meant a 10 minute drive turned into a 1 and a half hour drive. 

I guess growing up in the country has made me realise that Australia's nature is very unique and I think it's important to protect these communities as they are quite fragile. Now that global warming is such a big theme in the world, we need to take care of these unique treasures.

Lucy Cantrill

Growing up on a family property in Duri, about 20kms outside of Tamworth, Lucy is now in her final year of a Bachelor of Music (Education). 

I grew up with my parents who are part-time farmers and my younger sister. We went to school at Duri Public School, there were only 30 people in the whole school and then we moved to high school in Tamworth which was more of a town than a village! 

Growing up in the area was really peaceful and isolated and I suppose we had to dive into all of these different friendships even though we probably weren't that similar to each other. I had so many different friends who were interested in so many different things. I'm a musician so a lot of my music came from the music community in Tamworth and that was quite a small and tight-knit community because Tamworth in general is quite small. It was pretty isolated and I had this little circle of people that I had grown up with through my music. 

You would always run into someone who you knew and it was just a hands down thing! That was really nice when I grew up there. Since I've moved away I have felt quite anonymous and private in Sydney. When I go back to Tamworth and run into people I know, it's such an unnerving, weird, exciting experience because I'm not used to running into people at the grocery store anymore! So yeah, very tight knit and close to everybody in the whole town.

I always knew that I would move somewhere with more music. I had done the most I possibly could in Tamworth, I took leadership positions at school, so I always knew that I wanted somewhere bigger and with a more diverse range of musicians and a more experienced musician base that I could learn from. Sydney was just a very natural choice for me because I was semi familiar with it, I'd done gigs in Sydney before and I'd travelled for concerts that I had tickets to. Then I discovered I kind of wanted to go to the Sydney Con and then when the music education degree popped up it just suited me so well and it led from there. I just really wanted to meet more musicians and expand my musical horizons and Sydney was the best fit. I'm just really grateful to have the opportunity to move. A lot of people in Tamworth don't have the financial support and stability to move.

I love the accessibility of Sydney, I love that you can walk down the street and there's kind of everything you need right there. But also the diversity of people. I really didn't realise how shallow my people base was in Tamworth. I really appreciated learning about people who were just so different from me. In a country town it's easy to get bogged down in the people who you're used to and then being quite static in your growth because everybody's just like you and it's comfortable and you feel like you belong. But then when you throw a whole mix of diversity and you meet people who are so different from you, it forces you to grow and it makes you appreciate that there's not one right or wrong way to do things in life.

There’s things I miss about Tamworth though. I miss the light traffic! I miss the space, the breathability. It seems very cramped in Sydney especially when you're used to living in quite a big house with a big property. So to have everything within this tiny little radius and it's quite concentrated and compact, you just don't feel like you have space to let go and breathe. To come here and move it was a big culture shock, especially with the amount of people I was seeing everyday. I've been living here for almost 4 years now and it's taken so much effort and energy to relearn everything, relearn how to live in such a densely populated place. It's only been about this year, or last year where I finally found my feet and went 'ok, I can live here'. 

Growing up in the country taught me that I was really passionate about music and being in a country town didn't disadvantage me. I had the drive and I had the passion to do really well at music in school and nobody else was going to get the results I wanted except me. That's something you really need to learn when working or living or going to school in a country town: you're the person who is responsible for your opportunities and you need to go chase those opportunities otherwise no one's going to do that for you. It just taught me this real drive to advocate for myself and to really promote myself as a musician and know my worth.