It took moving overseas to find the world news.

Back in Australia I was introduced to ABC Newsradio by a friend, and enjoyed the ‘world perspective’ that was often sorely lacking–but that was because at night it cut to BBC World Service, Deutsche Welle, Radio Netherlands. As the daughter of migrants from a country that wasn’t economically or politically important to Australia, it meant that the piecemeal bits of news that we could get from ‘home’ either came in the form of major disasters or ‘amusing’ trivia. There is an economy of information in the local and national press, a demand and supply curve that can only fit in so many pages of doom and gloom before they have to call out for more advertisers, most whom probably don’t want to share page space with doom and gloom in the first.

So the internet was a boon for myself as an information seeker, particularly when I started to listen to the foreign radio–Radio France Internationale for a broad world coverage that included Africa and the Middle East (that was not just about the war of the time), Radio Nacional de Espana for Spain and Latin America. And with the study of new languages came a new appreciation of the intricacies of how culture shapes perceptions. And, dare I say it–how perceptions, in a way, shape culture.

My Australian upbringing, in comparison, feels very sunny, isolated–not so much naive, but that separation by kilometres and oceans and history probably has a real bearing on its laidback culture. I miss it–on the other hand I just feel lucky to have been raised in such a place, and the day to day realities I face now remind me not to take these things for granted.