Angela Osborn - Life in Adelaide, SA

I’m excited to share another instalment of the Life In series today. I met up with the lovely Angela Osborn when I was in South Australia recently. Angela grew up on a farm and moved to Adelaide after she finished school to study fashion design. Now 30, the full-time psychology student gives us a glimpse into her everyday life in the city of churches. 

I moved to Adelaide after I finished Year 12 and I've been here ever since.

I grew up in Naracoorte, which is about three-and-a-half to four hours away in the south east. Naracoorte is a really lovely little town but it's a small town. We've always had family in Adelaide and it was a big exciting thing to visit for a holiday. 

Often people from cities like Sydney or Melbourne think Adelaide is just a big country town and not a real city. It doesn’t bother me because it's all relative. Growing up on a farm I was like - Adelaide is so big, there's public transport!

I'd always planned to move to Adelaide when I finished high school, it’s just the thing you do. Initially I hadn't decided if I wanted to do psychology or fashion design and I ended up going with fashion design. I moved around a lot through different share houses. I probably lived in half a dozen suburbs, which was stressful but in one sense moving to a new city and moving to all of these different areas did give me a better understanding of the layout of the city. 

I've certainly considered moving to Sydney or Melbourne.

When I was considering moving to Sydney I was just feeling a bit lost and wanted to move away, and then I met Matt. I might have put aside that plan to move because I thought this guy's really cute and nice. We've been married for six years now and we really love where we live. 

We live in Oakden, which is a little suburb about 15 minutes out of the city.

Matt's parents and a lot of our friends are on the north east side, a bit further out of the city. We didn't want to be too far away from our sense of community there but we wanted to be a bit closer to the city. We wanted to be smart and buy into an area that might increase in value and that's one of the things about Adelaide - a young couple can afford a mortgage for a three bedroom house. If we were in Sydney that would not be happening.

When we were looking around at different houses we'd never heard of the suburb Oakden. It's quite small and it was actually only built in the '90s. Prior to that it was agricultural land or CSIRO land and then it was developed into housing. The houses are mostly quite small and because of that there are a lot of parks and outdoor communal spaces.

On a typical day I study at Uni SA. 

Two years ago I decided I really wanted to study psychology. I thought, it's 10 years later and I’m still interested it, maybe I should just bite the bullet and go to uni, and that's what I've done. 

Most of my subjects are at the Magill campus, which I love because it's green and there's a little creek that runs through it, it's really beautiful. But this last semester, I've had two subjects at Magilll and two subjects at City East. So I might go to a lecture at City East at 8am - 8am lectures that's cruel - and then have another class, and then I'd go to Magill for another class, then home to listen to a lecture online.

I don't drive because it scares the shit out of me, I'm working on that. I usually rely on public transport.  If you were driving it would probably take 15 minutes tops to travel between campuses but buses always take a little bit longer. But it's not too bad, for people from other cities getting somewhere in 20 minutes is amazing.

We absolutely love the beach so we'll often drive to Semaphore.

There's a really cute little cafe there called Whipped, we'll often go for brunch and for a walk along the beach. That's one of the things I love about Adelaide, you can drive for 30 minutes and you're at the beach and 30 minutes in the opposite direction and you're in the Adelaide Hills at a winery. 

Another one of our favourite cafes is in Stirling, again it's not that far away but you feel like you're far from the city. It's a cafe that's attached to an organic market, so we'll often go there for brunch and then wander around the market. There are two bookshops in the street, we are obsessed with books so always look, Matilda's bookshop is new books and the other one is secondhand books. There's also Topiary cafe, which is part of Newmann's Nursery. The food is incredible.

We went to a new microbrewery on Saturday night, I think it’s Adelaide’s first but generally speaking, we more often hang out at a friend's place. 

It's easier, you don’t have to worry about parking and a lot of our friends have kids now, so we're more likely to go for dinner or grab a pizza and watch the football, just something relaxed. Because there are a lot of kids there will be barbecues and lunches, which I like. It's interesting seeing that shift from going out to a pub to being at someone's house and now daytime activities with all these little kids running around. 

With visitors we’d want to take them to a coastal location like Glenelg or Henley beach and there will have to be a winery, there are so many nice wineries.

Maggie Beer's Farm Shop in the Barossa is a great place to take visitors. The shop overlooks a lake and once we saw little turtles swimming in it! They have yummy picnic baskets on offer and we're actually planning a trip there with Matt's parents as a really late Mother’s Day present. 

I was at the Two Hands cellar door in the Barossa recently and they have two gorgeous young Rhodesian Ridgebacks - Saffy and Daisy. I'd never been to this winery before but I'd highly recommend them to anyone visiting the region. Their wines are delicious, the atmosphere of the cellar door was lovely and I appreciate their philosophy - they charge a small fee for wine tasting, which is entirely donated to the Uganda Project. Rockford cellar door have beautiful old buildings and their wines are amazing. 

Hahndorf is really beautiful and as well as the pubs and eateries, there's some lovely wineries as well. Hahndorf Hill winery do this thing that's chocolate and wine tasting, it's called ChocoVino and they might have single origin chocolates or a mix of chocolates from different places. It's amazing, they'll pair each of these chocolates with a wine and they even had a little bit of a raw cacao bean, so you can see what it tastes like raw. It’s really fun. 

I like being part of a city that’s really diverse.

I just like wandering around the city, I like seeing the buskers and seeing all of these different cultures coming together. In Naracoorte, it's a lot more diverse now than it used to be but what I love about Adelaide is that you see people from so many different subcultures and that's just embraced, it's just normal. 

Thank you Angela! She's on Instagram if you'd like to see more snippets of her life in Adelaide, including a few more photos of her super cute cat. Thanks too to Tim and Sophie for the introduction :) You can find more Life in interviews here.

Photos by Angela Osborn.

Lucy Parakhina - Life in Hobart, TAS

While Lucy Parakhina has only just moved to Hobart, Tasmania, the landscape and the lifestyle of the island city is already making an impression on her life and photographic practice. Today, in the second installment of the Life In series, the 27-year-old photographer and Honours student takes us on a tour of her new hometown and reflects on how it compares to the 18 years she spent living in Sydney. 

I’ve only been in Hobart for three months. 

I was born in Tomsk, in central Siberia, Russia and lived there until I migrated to Sydney with my family in 1997, when I was 10. I lived in Sydney until this February.

I am doing an Honours in Fine Arts at University of Tasmania (UTAS) in Hobart, in the Photomedia studio.

For the previous five or so years I was mostly working as a freelance photographer/videographer in Sydney, documenting art exhibitions, performance and theatre for a range of largely arts organisations. While I’m here in Hobart, I’m also working as online producer for RealTime magazine and occasionally go back to Sydney for photo/video work.

Moving to Hobart has changed the nature of my photography a lot, which is what I was looking for.

In Sydney, I was shooting a lot for work and didn’t really feel the urge to take photos in my free time. Here, with wanting to focus on my Honours, I haven’t sought out any freelance work, so I’m shooting for my project or just documenting daily life. 

With smartphone cameras as good as they are, it’s really easy to take photos quickly and discreetly. I love Instagram because I am often out exploring somewhere on my own and it allows me to share things I think are interesting or beautiful with people.

With Honours, I’ve thought more deeply about how and why I take photos in three months than I ever did in all my years of taking photos. It’s been great. I’m working on a project that involves me moving away from the purely representational photography I’ve been doing and thinking about how images are constructed and what it means to do that.

From my impressions so far, Hobart feels like a really big country town. 

Country town in that everything shuts early, there’s pretty much no traffic, rent is cheap - coming from Sydney - and everything is pretty close together. Yet it’s also big enough to have some great cafes and restaurants, all the shops you might want or need, a really nice indie cinema, a few galleries, and of course, MONA and all its associated festivals and events.

The population seems more diverse than I would expect in other towns of Hobart’s size, there are a lot of international students that come to UTAS and that adds to the cultural mix. I’ve met locals but also a lot of people who moved here from the mainland at some point.

I've also noticed how amazing all the food is - you can go into the most standard looking pub, and there will be an incredible menu consisting of fresh, local ingredients and the service will be great. 

When I first came to Tasmania, I found the whole idea of the rest of Australia being known as 'the mainland’ strange. 

The psychological experience of being physically separated from the mainland is primarily that of thinking about yourself in relation to somewhere else. That was a new sensation for me because on the mainland, you never think of yourself in relation to the island of Tasmania. It’s more about Australia being separated from the rest of the world.

On a really practical level, I’ve found that the separation means that internet is slow and there is a limited choice of internet providers (unless you’re in an area that is part of the NBN, which I am not) and that things that have to be shipped here, like petrol, are more expensive.

The landscape is one of the most remarkable things about Hobart and part of the reason I moved here. 

The city is dominated by the presence of the mountain, Kunanyi/Mount Wellington, which is really breathtaking. This probably passes with time but I still pause every time I glimpse it between buildings, around a corner or out of my kitchen window!

I live in the suburb of New Town, which is just past North Hobart. 

I visited Hobart several times over the last few years and the North Hobart area seemed like the place most similar to the area of Sydney I lived in. New Town is close enough to the centre of town to still be really convenient but far enough out to have lots of space, wide streets and cheap rent. There is a strip of a shops, good restaurants, galleries, bookshops and a cinema. 

I also just fell in love with the flat that I live in when I went to inspect it on my second day in Hobart. 

I live in a one bedroom flat on a nice, quiet street not too far from the main strip in North Hobart. It’s in an older building with a bit of character and it has massive windows, including a bay window in the bedroom. The building is on a bit of a hill and I’m on the first floor so I have really lovely views.

 I live by myself and that was another reason I decided to move to Hobart. 

I’ve lived in lots of different share houses in Sydney over the last 10 years and just wanted to have my own space but in Sydney I couldn’t even afford a studio, much less a one bedroom flat. I don’t have a pet but there’s a weird cat that comes and says hi every time I hang out the washing.

Nearby, there is a great supermarket called Hill St Grocer, which stocks lots of local produce, there is also Jackman & McRoss, an amazing café and bakery and Jean Pascal Patisserie, run by a fifth-generation French national pastry chef.

One of my first experiences in Hobart was buying some bookshelves on Gumtree and realising that the person I bought them from lived in the flat on the other side of the wall. 

This turned out pretty well, as she was moving to Melbourne and getting rid of everything so we just moved all her furniture and plants across the hall from one flat into the other. This experience gave me a taste of how small Hobart can sometimes feel. 

I mostly drive because it's so easy and quick, I am mostly running late and because it’s just so damn cold. 

It takes me five minutes to drive to uni, which is on the waterfront, where I can then park right outside the doors for the whole day for five dollars. There are buses in Hobart but they’re pretty irregular unless you’re on a main route, and even those stop running quite early. 

Monday to Friday I generally go to uni, as there are seminars, supervisor meetings and public lectures by visiting artists. I’ve got a studio/office on campus so I work there but I also do work on the weekends, or go away on a weekday.

These are kind of boring details but the contrast to Sydney blows my mind. As a freelance photographer, I would often spend hours stuck in traffic, trying to get out to some part of Sydney.

For the last few weeks, there’s been a great weekly community dinner at an artist-run space called The Arts Factory. 

Every Wednesday, a different group of artists cook a huge delicious meal, which you get for a gold coin donation, there’s usually some live music, cheap drinks and most people from the art school head there.

When I first got here, I started following most of the arts organisations and galleries on social media to keep up to date with what was going on. But most of the things I’ve gone to have been recommended by someone, or I’ve stumbled upon like walking past a pub and seeing that Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks were playing there in a week or coming across an Italian street fair with a spaghetti-eating competition.

Driving out of town in Tasmania is different to what I’m used to. 

I’ve driven a lot around New South Wales and Victoria and as far west as Bourke and Broken Hill. I’m used to driving for 10 hours through an environment that doesn’t change much. 

Tasmania is a lot smaller geographically but extremely diverse. So a couple of hours from Hobart in one direction you can be up on a pre-historic alpine plateau, near Cradle Mountain and a couple of hours in a different direction you’re in lush forest, surrounded by picturesque cliffs in the Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers National Park. 

One of my other favourite places to drive to is Queenstown, on the west coast, which is a former mining town surrounded by cliffs that have been completely stripped of vegetation. It’s not everyone’s idea of beauty, but just an incredibly striking landscape.

I haven’t had many visitors yet but I would take anyone to MONA, followed by fish and chips on the waterfront, then to the Lark Distillery to buy a small bottle of whiskey to take up to the top of Mount Wellington to sip from while watching the sunset.

I’ve found the people in Hobart to be really friendly and helpful. It’s also REALLY COLD here. 

I’m adjusting to that and actually don’t mind the cold and seeing snow on the mountain is pretty great. Plus, every time I boil water to cook pasta, I get an actual cloud forming in my kitchen.

When I first got here, I was filming a piece on the Electrona festival for the arts magazine that I work for, so I immediately met some people. I also started uni a week after moving and met people through the course, including a woman who has just moved from Melbourne. We bonded over our attempts to get our bearings and she generously let me stay with her for a few days after one conversation, when an Airbnb place I was staying in had a break-in. Having the structure and immediate community of the course has definitely helped me feel not isolated, and I feel like I’ve settled in pretty quickly.

Thank you Lucy! You can see more of her photos online, follow her on Instagram to see her everyday phone snaps, you'll find her personal portfolio here and the images she's shot for clients on her website.

All photos by Lucy Parakhina.

Sonya - Life in Wagga Wagga, NSW

This week I’m excited to launch a new series, Life In that will give you a glimpse into what it’s like to live in different parts of Australia. Soon, you’ll be hearing about life in Hobart, Perth and Sydney but first I wanted to show you around my adopted hometown of Wagga Wagga. Moving to regional New South Wales has definitely opened my eyes to life outside a city. Here are a few observations about the place I now call home:

I've lived in Wagga Wagga for just over four years.

I moved here at the end of 2010 for work and lucky for me Tony decided to come too and could study at the university. He's since finished his Honours and PhD in Fine Art. When I lived in Sydney, I worked at a television station and while it was an eye-opening first job, I spent a lot of time on the computer and on the phone. I was desperate to record stories face-to-face, which I knew I’d be able to do here. 

In my job interview I had to talk a little about the town and not having time to visit, I did some research online. I was telling Tony that it was known as the ‘land of many cows’ and he laughed and corrected me, apparently it was the land of many crows.  It didn’t come up in the interview, so I still got the job. 

It was our first experience of living outside a city.

Tony and I both grew up in Sydney and while my family had moved to Melbourne and Adelaide when I was a toddler, Sydney was my home. I still remember driving down the main street of Wagga Wagga when we first arrived to look for a place to rent. For some reason I thought it would be much smaller than it is and I’m embarrassed to say that I was reassured when I spotted a Sportsgirl and then Myer.

Settling in, there were a few things that surprised me.

At first they were superficial things, like the shops closing early on a weekend but the most confronting thing for me was arriving home five minutes after I left work. In the first few weeks of my new job that was 5.05pm. It used to take me an hour to an hour and a half to commute to work each day, and that was just one way, so I was used to getting home at around 7 or 8pm. Suddenly I had to work out what I liked doing at night, and for awhile I couldn’t think of anything!

Living here has made me a much better cook.

I liked cooking when we lived in Sydney but had only recently moved out of home and was still getting used to preparing my own dinner of a night (!). We also didn’t have a car, so I used to do my grocery shopping at the train station on the way home. In Wagga Wagga I felt like I had hours to make my dinner and so I started making some really elaborate things. My cookbook collection is now four or five times the size it was when we left Sydney, possibly more. We've made so many things  from scratch while we've lived here, from bread, mayonnaise and custard to our own hot chips, tortillas, waffles and hot cross buns.

It took a little while to make friends.

In our first year here we went back to Sydney a lot - for birthdays, Easter, Christmas, long weekends - whereas now, we tend to travel for specific events and special occasions only. We both made friends through work but it took time to find people we really clicked with and get to know them. Early on I found myself looking wistfully at groups of girlfriends catching up for coffee. Facebook started to bug me too because I kept seeing what my friends were up to and wanted to join them.

We've since made really great friends and I don't think I've received so many home delivered gifts in my life, from cookbook loans to freshly picked flowers, eggs and homemade bread and cheese. I remember meeting Sophie and being really excited because she'd also recently moved from Sydney and had a blog too. I think I read the entire archive in a few days.

The seasons here are really distinct.

In summer, there are times when it's over 40 degrees celsius for days on end. One year I ended up getting a heatwave haircut out of desperation. But the heat is different here, it's dry rather than humid so in a way it's a bit more bearable. Also, we end up driving most places so you're not outdoors or battling the trains in that heat. I love the dramatic fog in winter and have finally invested in a goosedown jacket, because some mornings it's hard to leave the house.

I spend a lot of time on the road and working in different country towns.

On our first trip to Wagga Wagga, I was still on my green P-plates and Tony had to teach me about driving on the highway. I had to build up my confidence quickly because while I work in Wagga Wagga, I have to travel right around the region for work. I’ve learnt how to approach cows in a car (you have to keep moving really slowly because their peripheral vision isn’t great) and found freckles on my face for the first time and now wear a lot of sunscreen.

Driving around the region is so different to driving in the city, it’s quite meditative, and I’ve become a big podcast listener. Directions are pretty funny too, often I drive to one town and turn left and drive for another 45 minutes, reach the next town and turn right and that’s it. I’ve also found cute cafes in different towns, I love Nest in Tumbarumba, The Red Door in Narrandera, Ajanta in Coolamon and The Ginger Baker in Bright.

Visiting friends often ask where everyone is at night.

Most people drive or ride a bike around town, so there are times where the streets seem really empty. I used to get really annoyed when people asked me where everyone was but now I can see that the lifestyle here is different. You tend to go to people’s houses more for dinner rather than going out, maybe because there are fewer places to go out, it's not that cheap and everyone has a bit more space at home.

Our house is huge in comparison to our Sydney apartment, we even have a guest room :)

I dreamt of living in a cottage but given the two days we had to find a house, we ended up renting a really functional two bedroom townhouse in a central part of town. While it makes me sound old, I love all the storage we have here. We rented a one bedroom apartment in Sydney and had so much stuff and nowhere to put it so we just lived amongst it. I joke that you could probably do a cartwheel in our current bathroom only because our last bathroom was so small that it didn’t even have a proper door, it had these two mini doors, like the kind of you’d find on a wardrobe. 

One of my favourite things to do is go for a bike ride on a Sunday afternoon.

I bought a fixie shortly after we moved because it’s quite flat here and the roads are very wide. This year I invested in a cute pink helmet and an extra basket for groceries. On a Sunday I like to ride around the streets when they’re quiet, especially in the late afternoon when you can start to smell what people are cooking for dinner. Lately, you can smell the smoke from fireplaces too, which I love. It’s super relaxing and I love discovering unusual houses on new streets and riding along the river. 

My friend Mayan taught me a trick for entertaining guests.

Mayan moved from Sydney to Canberra right about the time we moved here and found that her city friends constantly wanted to know what they were doing next when they visited her. She plans one thing for each day and then lets her friends decide what they’ll do around that, whether it’s hanging around the house, going out for a drink or a bushwalk. It takes the pressure off trying to show people everything the town has to offer or worrying if there isn't much on that weekend.

I like taking people for a walk along the Murrumbidgee river or for a picnic in my favourite park with some pastries from our nice patisserie. Food is a big thing and we almost always take visitors to Mates Gully, Trail St and Tony loves showing friends the local brewery too.

Sometimes I get restless but that happened in the city too.

If we have time and funds, we’ll take a trip to Sydney, Canberra or Melbourne to get our gallery, movie and food fix. Often we'll go because there's a particular exhibition we want to see and each year there's always one doco that I'm busting to see at the movies. 

Embarrassingly, at the end of our first year here we drove to Melbourne for a holiday and I managed to put on 3 kilos in a week because I went nuts eating at all of the cool cafes and restaurants. Since we’ve been here the food scene has changed a fair bit, with new places opening up and now an amazing chef has moved to town, so crazy city eating trips might be a thing of the past.

Thanks for reading! This weekend we have a lot of visitors coming from Sydney to celebrate the end of Tony’s exhibition. My parents will be here, and I’m looking forward to showing them all of the new things I’ve discovered since they last visited in 2011. We’ll be having a fancy dinner, checking out the farmer’s market and going for walks.

P.S You might also like two earlier and ongoing series - Real Girl Wardrobes and Sentimental Cakes.