The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australian agency. To register to receive it by email. This week’s issue was written by Melbourne reporter Natasha Frost.
The Australia Letter recently celebrated its sixth anniversary. In more than 300 issues, we’ve shared the backstories of our reporting journeys, made local recommendations and served up bits of life down under.
Perhaps one of the best things about writing this newsletter is hearing from you — Australians in Australia; Australians no longer in Australia; New Zealanders at home or on the road; and the many Times readers curious about a different way of life, or who may have had the pleasure of spending time in Australia or New Zealand.
We try to write for all of you. (We use American English. Sorry about that.) And you usually let us know what you think we did right or disagree with, often with typical antipodean candor. We read all those emails.
Today we turn our gaze inwards and appeal to you – all of you! — again, to tell us: What would you like to see more of in this newsletter? Are there any stories from Australia and New Zealand that you think the world should know?
For relative newcomers to the Australia Letter, or those wanting a refresher course, some introductions.
Damien Cave, our bureau chief since 2017, is based in Sydney. This newsletter is now mainly written by me – Natasha Frost, in Melbourne – and Yan Zhuang, a reporter in Sydney. Together we form the agency. Occasionally you can expect guest spots from other Times contributors from around the region.
Damien has been in Sydney so long that his children now teach him cricket and sound Australian. Yan is an old Sydneysider who has recently returned from Melbourne. And I grew up in New Zealand and have been living in Melbourne since 2021.
Since Australia and New Zealand are home to us, it can be nice to be reminded of the things about the region that surprise newcomers.
Earlier this year I met Matthew Futterman, a sports reporter for The Times, while covering the Australian Open. He was struck, he told me, by two things: that no one seems to pay for the tram, and that the locals seem to take the wealth of clean, beautiful and cheap public swimming pools for granted.
My brother-in-law, who has been visiting from Britain for the past month, had another comment: the people of Australia just seem happier than his friends back home. (For what it’s worth, Australia ranks 12th in the world’s most satisfied countries, while Britain is 19th.)
These reflections stopped me in my tracks. We hope the newsletter can do something similar for Australians and New Zealanders, serving as a window into how the world sees you and where you live. We want to do what many readers have been asking of us since we opened the agency: add perspective.
Australia and New Zealand are relatively peaceful, stable and prosperous countries. That doesn’t mean they’re straightforward or unimportant, or that they don’t have their own problems. But it does mean that sometimes we get more room for good news — stories about the peculiarities of Australian English; custom showers for Melbourne’s bats; or a quest to save a rare turtleto cite three recent examples.
You can expect more from this newsletter. But what else would you like to see? And what did you like so far?
For example, we know that you would like to read more stories from outside of Melbourne and Sydney. We are working on it and welcome specific suggestions. But would you like to hear about local books, television, movies or other content? Explanation of how we report on the stories we do? Q&A with great Australian thinkers? Or something completely different?
Ideally, we’d like the Australia Letter to be something you look forward to: the Friday dessert at the end of the workweek meal. For that reason, we try to keep it short and sweet, saving our in-depth analysis or more rigorous investigations for the stories that eventually make it to the papers. (You can subscribe hereif you don’t already.)
Let us know what we’re missing and send your thoughts to NYTAustralia@nytimes.com. And thank you to those who have been reading this newsletter for a long time, and to those who recently signed up. It’s great to have you with us.
Now for the stories of the week.
Do you like this email?
Forward it to your friends and let them know to sign up here.