YAN Fu Ho, Dick

Student of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong
Exchange to The University of Western Australia, Australia

Everything started from a simple mouse click.

“Thinking to live in a foreign country yourself for half a year?” said the email. You’re kidding, aren’t you? Frankly, I had never thought of going on exchange, but “Hey,” I thought, “why not give it a try?”

After completing the application, I started searching online to see what Australia is all about. Oh my… tons of results came up: the nice beaches, the hot summer, the long coastal lines, the attractive outback, the Aussie gentlemen, the aboriginals, and surely the kangaroos. I imagined in my mind: OK, Australia is a country as large as China, while having just 15% of China’s population, with a large desert in the middle, so people are living along the coast and the density must be quite low that the quality of life would be nice.

I thought that I had prepared enough already, but as soon as the plane landed on the red soil, I found that everything was so different.

My first impression of Perth was that people walked so slowly and smiled to you while passing by. Well, I felt quite strange at the beginning. As you may know, in Hong Kong, people are rushing everywhere, to study, to work, to play, to get on the trains (though trains arrive every 45 seconds in peak hour). It seems like life is too short to waste even a second. So efficiency is what the city is always proud of. “Life could be like that?” I adjusted myself to the Aussie lifestyle - walking slowly, observing things around me, saying “G’Day” to people, and going to beaches (and shopping, cooking and cleaning for sure). It refreshed my whole body, letting me re-discover every detail of my daily life in Hong Kong.

The best thing to do in Perth is to go wild. Rottnest Island was my dream place to go in Perth (I heard about it from my backpacker friends). I took a ferry at the famous port city Fremantle, rented a bike and enjoyed a day with the Quokka (luckily I brought a pair of sunglasses and sunscreen with me). I also tried walking in water to Penguin Island, an outlying island near Perth. While walking on the sandbar, the water level gradually rose from your knees to your neck, “Follow me mate, or get bitten by sharks or dive into the Indian Ocean”, this was the most useful advice I’d ever heard. Tired of water and islands? Let’s drive along the coast! (Hey Eric, thanks for the drive).

The West coast is a lot quieter and more relaxing than the East, so indeed a good place for one to get to know himself. After the semester ended, I decided to have a trip to the East coast.

One thing in Melbourne that inspired me the most was the Puffing Billy (a heritage railway opened in 1900). It was used to help develop rural areas near Melbourne decades before, and would probably be dumped elsewhere, while in Melbourne I saw a group of volunteers dedicated their private time to keeping the rail in operation. Their reason is simple, just to retain something they think is good for the next generation, such that children will be able to take a ride and enjoy the breeze and smell of burnt coals, not only “learning history” in books.

In my home city, people don’t quite care about how our society changes, they’d rather remove old invaluable constructions, leaving only a small piece out of the whole set (like the Clock Tower in Tsim Sha Tsui, formerly part of the Kowloon-Canton Railway station). I think what’s important is to keep the whole set of constructions in order to make the conservation meaningful. Between development and conservation, we need to strike a balance, but at this moment, we’ve got to raise people’s awareness. I hope that I can share with more people the Australians’ respect to their history and their conservation works.

Since I returned to Hong Kong, it’s already been 9 months, and the times in Australia are just like yesterday. I’ve still got much to say, but now, I’d like to express my special thanks to the Endeavour Australia Cheung Kong Awards. Without it, I have no doubt that my life would just be comparing prices of groceries in supermarkets!

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