Advance, Australians

THE dream of glorious otherness. It's what inspires so many Aussie expats to stride hungrily into the world.

THE dream of glorious otherness.

It's what inspires so many Aussie expats to stride hungrily into the world. They yearn for something else; a release, a remaking, an escape; there's a great dynamism to that yearning that propels them forward voraciously - and extremely successfully. They're not going to atrophy with that visceral, urgent potency within them. And coupled with the Aussie's can-do mentality, well, what a potency it can be in foreign markets.

I saw it all around me in the exile years:

Aussies in love with the great zoom of life, elsewhere, and wanting to seize it while they can. It was often, intriguingly, born of small places - outback towns, suburbia's quietness - as if the very narrowness of those judgmental little worlds was the flint to fly.

Never underestimate the kick in the youthful compulsion to create a different self beyond what family/locality/life has moulded for you. Couple it with that bolshy Aussie attitude of "why shouldn't I do this, no one says I can't" and the results can be spectacular.

"What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?

It's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies," Jack Kerouac wrote in On The Road.

They were of a type, those kids leaning forward all around me in exile. Once I gave a speech as a novelist to young Aussies at Cambridge; some of us went for a drink afterwards and I marvelled at these bright young things, many not from flash schools in the Big Smoke but places like Broken Hill or a Tassie hamlet. It made me so proud of Australia; they got to this hallowed institution through sheer grit and brilliance, seemed so shiny and questing, so poised for the future.

And I could discern the ingrained bluntness and practicality of the Antipodean childhood; the mums all those years ago telling them to just pick themselves up and get on with it, don't muck about, just do it; the dads telling them to get out there and make something of themselves with hard yakka and a smile on their faces - and always look out for your mates.

They're valued, highly, these Aussies overseas. It's our greatest natural resource, our shiniest export to the world. That smile, that enthusiasm, that breezy, can-do grit; that ease in stepping into something beyond the comfort zone. They do vaultingly ambitious things because no one's told them they can't;

They were of a type, those kids leaning forward all around me in exile. Once I gave a speech as a novelist to young Aussies at Cambridge; some of us went for a drink afterwards and I marvelled at these bright young things, many not from flash schools in the Big Smoke but places like Broken Hill or a Tassie hamlet. It made me so proud of Australia; they got to this hallowed institution through sheer grit and brilliance, seemed so shiny and questing, so poised for the future.

And I could discern the ingrained bluntness and practicality of the Antipodean childhood; the mums all those years ago telling them to just pick themselves up and get on with it, don't muck about, just do it; the dads telling them to get out there and make something of themselves with hard yakka and a smile on their faces - and always look out for your mates.

They're valued, highly, these Aussies overseas. It's our greatest natural resource, our shiniest export to the world. That smile, that enthusiasm, that breezy, can-do grit; that ease in stepping into something beyond the comfort zone. They do vaultingly ambitious things because no one's told them they can't; they've not been clamped down by a suffocating sense of class, of hierarchical place determined by birth. It's a refreshing fearlessness. Who says we can't do it? If it doesn't work out we can always go home, or try something else. But it just might ...

Take my mate, Kylie Morris, the Maitland chick who told her BBC bosses they needed a bureau in Gaza and set one up - they then sent her on to Iraq and Afghanistan. Overseas we all felt bolder and braver than we'd ever been back home; all the Aussies around us were do-ers and it was infectious. We brought to our new lands a restless, cheeky, larrikin energy, a feeling we could be anything here.

Serafina Maiorano is the CEO of Advance, an international networking organisation for Aussie expats. Our nation's USP in the global expat market? "We're known as go-getters," she says, "adaptable, energetic, positive, innovative, hard-working yet easy-going, highly educated."

I'm excited to be raising my kids as Aussies because of where it may lead them as adults.

And I'll never stifle the sense of yearning that may bloom in them - to be someone else, somewhere else - agonising as that is for a mum to acknowledge. But necessary. As Ben Okri wrote in To An English Friend in Africa, "Learn to free yourself from all things/That have moulded you/And which limit your secret and undiscovered road."