Factual Storytelling

Down From the Cold and into the Warmth

The Thomas Family In Australia 2011

Making the move from Scotland to Australia may seem a terrifying transition, but for the Thomas family, fitting in is just another part of life. Having lived in Scotland for 17 years, Sophie Thomas found settling into the Australian lifestyle easier than anticipated. Sophie, her mother Nicki, father David, and sister Hannah moved to Australia in August 2010 and settled in to the coastal city of Cairns. Their move, prompted by a change in David’s career which found him working on the Great Barrier Reef, brought the family new opportunities, and a life very different to that offered back home.

Apart from being over 14,000km from Scotland, the family found moving to Australia a smooth transition. Upon arriving in Australia, Sophie and her family were met by family friends, who were kind enough to drop everything and help them settle in. The owners of their new apartment were welcoming; everyone wanted to know where they came from and why they had moved; and their friends would invite them over for social barbeques to meet new people. The Cairns community seemed very warm, welcoming, and helpful, a far cry from the cold atmosphere back in Scotland.  

In 1993, David and Nicki Thomas made the decision that their house in John O’Groats, in the North of Scotland, was not a suitable place to bring up children. As a result, in 1994, they left the decrepit old country house, and moved to the sheltered climate of Dunnet, 30 minutes west. For five years the family lived a quiet life in Dunnet, while David skippered the John O’Groats ferry, and Nicki juggled working at the hospital and looking after Sophie and her younger sister Hannah.

Although the Thomas family were born and bred Scotsmen, moving to a new village in Scotland was always a challenge. The villagers in Scotland were generally weary of strangers, and therefore the family seemed to encounter hostility from the Dunnet locals, which made relocating difficult. This was clearly not just a small issue, as the Thomas family were set to encounter further hostility from the villagers of John O’Groats when they moved back in 1998.

As a child, Sophie understood little concerning her family’s initial exclusion from the community, however, even at the age of five, she knew something was wrong. The John O’Groats locals were clearly wary of strangers and upon starting school, the divide between the locals and Sophie’s family was obvious. She recalls standing with her sister and mother as well as her cousins at the school bus stop, and witnessing a clear physical divide between them and the local families. Although Sophie’s father David had a distinct family connection to the village of John O’Groats, for at least 10 years after their arrival, the family were never really treated as locals. Without this connection however, it was plain they wouldn’t have been treated as locals at all.

John O’Groats was unmistakably a proud community, and the locals were not willing to let strangers take their life and work away from them. The other ‘new’ families to the village, who (unlike Sophie’s family) had no ties to the community, were excluded by the locals and left to make a living on their own. Life in John O’Groats was steady and continuous. No one left, and hardly anyone moved in. On the odd occasion that a family did move in, there were no smiling faces to help them settle in and no barbeques to welcome the new neighbours. The villagers were stubborn; their roots too deep to be budged by foreigners, and therefore they made no attempt to make anyone new feel at home.  

The steady environment of John O’Groats, and Wick (where Sophie attended high school), gave life a certain routine which residents found comforting. However, this consistency became frustrating at times for Sophie and her family. For this reason, it was unsurprising that as one of the ‘new families’, the Thomas’s broke with tradition and decided to leave Scotland. In 2009, after waiting five years for VISA’s, the Thomas family were finally able to leave the monotonies of Scotland, and to the surprise of friends, they departed in 2010.

It came as a shock to Sophie, just how easy it was to settle into the relaxed environment of Australia, compared to the unfriendly atmosphere back home. As foreigners in a new country, Sophie and her family were never excluded or treated differently. The transient community of Cairns was accepting of new residents, and the locals worked hard to help these people feel at home. When starting school in Australia, the Principal went to great efforts to ensure that Sophie was fitting in fine, as well as the other foreign students starting out.

The unwillingness of the John O’Groats people to accept unfamiliar families frustrated Sophie. It seemed ridiculous that her family found it so easy to fit into Australia as foreigners, while it was so difficult to fit into a community back in Scotland, as Scotsmen. Those family’s which displayed the most hostility happened to be those who had worked their land through generations, and were too stubborn to accept that anyone new could be of any benefit to the community. This unfriendliness is still a problem in the small villages in Scotland, but little is being done to help integrate families into the communities such as John O’Groats and Dunnet.

As a permanent resident, Sophie’s life in Australia has opened her eyes to different ways of life, and opportunities in education and sport that weren’t available back in Scotland. Although her heart will always remain in Scotland, she has never regretted her family’s decision to move to Australia, and has greatly appreciated the warmth shown to her by the community of Cairns, and the people of Australia.  

Photo courtesy of Sophie Thomas