Kailani Marlow
PhD Candidate at Queensland University of Technology
Brisbane, Australia

All of my life I have been exposed to people from diverse cultural backgrounds. Those ongoing experiences fueled my desire to live in different places and led me to cultivate an interest in living overseas. I dreamed of being an international person living abroad and immersing myself in a new language and culture that was far away and foreign to everything I had ever known. I moved from Oahu, Hawaii to Sunshine Coast, Australia almost 4.5 years ago. The weather is similar enough as is the language, for the most part. Although living in Australia is comfortably similar to the United States, my lifestyle now includes more frequent international travel. Like many Aussies, extended surf trips allow me to experience immersion in other cultures where I enjoy practicing conversational Bahasa or exploring untamed Fijian landscapes alongside a briskly walking guide old enough to be my grandfather.

Living in Australia has been a life changing experience, however less foreign than I had anticipated. In the coastal suburb where I live beaches are easily accessible, the population is small but growing, people earn a reasonable wage for a high standard of living, accrue a descent amount of vacation time and generally enjoy a good quality of life. It truly is a great place to live and a seemingly safe place to raise children. I live in a regional area that easily affords local residents a lifestyle that is conducive to wellness. Our quaint beach pocket community is situated between a river mouth that fills into a small lake with the changing tides, a small creek, a coastline with a variety of surf – able beach breaks and a well maintained pathway that winds through protected national park bushland along the coast.

Nature based-physical activity is a major component of my life in Australia. There are only a few major cities and even those areas of dense urban development often feature natural landscapes, botanical gardens, harbor views and river footpaths that help to break up the intensity of city life. It appears that activity in nature is a central component of daily life that helps Aussies on the Sunshine Coast enhance their longevity and remain active as they transition across their lifespan. When I have the time, I particularly enjoy surfing with a group of mostly retiree’s who meet every morning at the beach access on my street. This group of people is representative of the active aging population that is encouraged and supported in Australia. People in these regional areas seem to remain more active because city councils maintain infrastructure for accessing beaches and national parks, participating in active recreation, and provide daily upkeep of outdoor entertainment and rest area amenities that permit people of all ages to enjoy the health enhancing features of restorative coastal landscapes.

Being a resident in Australia has helped me to live a wellness induced lifestyle. Although a train route has yet to be built connecting the Sunshine Coast to Brisbane where I attend University, my full or partial commute to the city is predominantly a tree lined highway that makes the drive much more relaxing. Oddly enough the thing that has most benefited my wellness journey is probably not what you would expect. Within the context of innumerable positive lifestyle components the thing that I feel has contributed most to improving my wellness has by far been the social impact. I am a woman of color. And whatever color my skin actually happens to be, in Australia, friends and strangers alike bring up my color as an issue or unsolicited topic of conversation. People here are probably not any different from people in the United States or any other westernized country but prior to moving here I personally had little to no experience with people who did not communicate in a reasonably politically correct manner.

In Australia, for some in all levels of society and for many in some levels, there is no such thing as political correctness; some might even say that the idea of being politically correct is laughable. For example pumpkin, cookies and cheese are openly advertised using terms that would in no way be considered politically correct in the USA. Similarly, roads and places still carry the names of historical laws and events that can be a reminder of past tragedy. While I am not suggesting support for these things, I must admit that my personal wellness has profoundly improved as a result of the Aussie way of “taking the p..s” and generally making light of, well of everything.

Initially these aspects of life in Australia were probably detrimental to my health and wellness. In recounting my experiences there are still things I have heard and experienced that I would be reluctant to repeat, but through these experiences I have connected with others and acquired more self responsibility in my wellness journey.

Admittedly I grew up a bit sheltered in a multi-ethnic family which allowed me to believe that Western societies had left certain beliefs and ideas in the past. For anyone who might have thought that was our history, I’m sure media and elections in the past decade have brought to light some surprising realities. However, I cannot speak for Australia’s Indigenous people, immigrants, refugees or various populations in Australia who might also be considered “other” like myself. Though fundamentally this speaks to an important yet neglected aspect of wellness, in western societies such as Australia or the United States the law provides a reasonable amount of protection within which individuals can explore ways to develop more wellness and specifically to break free of potentially limiting generational cultural and/or socioeconomic patterns.

Being born as a woman of color I will sometimes, maybe always, be placed in a certain social context. Beyond my lived experience there might always be a larger context that in some way pervades all aspect of my life. In recent decades such impacts have been enhanced as technology increasingly innervates life and continues to shrink our world as we establish global connectivity. As a result, our social and emotional experiences can be affected by those of others and not necessarily our own. By living in Australia where little is off limits I have gone beyond what had mostly been internalizing negative experiences of others. Aussie culture has created opportunities for me to experience what some people think and feel. Without rules about what is politically acceptable I sometimes find myself in conversations that reveal what might otherwise be obscured and provides an opportunity for me to better understand how people define and experience individuals or cultures they find different. 

This has been the most health enhancing aspect of my experience in Australia because I have been presented with beliefs and ideas that I sometimes cannot comprehend yet they exist alongside my life and in my relationships with the people who hold these beliefs. My ability to live in a place where there is little to no ethnic diversity is evidence of the luxury of exploring self-identity and self-responsibility from within a somewhat protected space and this process demonstrates how dynamic adaptation can enhance our wellness journey. For example, someone who I have developed a friendship with recently said in matter of fact way that I was of an inferior race. He then revealed that it was said as a joke, and though believed by some, not actually true. This might sound horrendous, and it is actually the second time someone in Australia has said this to me though the other person was not making a joke. In no way do I intend to offend anyone in sharing this nor am I condoning such words. In sharing this I would like to express the transformation I have been through while living in Australia. I have heard enough to understand how some people have come to hold or even just consider such ideas.

As he said those words I had the most interesting experience. I felt this energy move through my body. It was some combination of appall and other unpleasant feelings. This was not a one on one experience either; he said it in a room full of people with whom I had no emotional connection. With pause he defined me as the only person in the room who was not part of the ethnic/racial mainstream as they saw it.

As he spoke my emotions were raised, and because I have heard such things so many times, I immediately processed his comment. I had actually previously heard enough of his ideas and words that I recognized those are his ideas and might even be a consensus in the room. Though I have never had any extreme obstacles due to being a woman of color, I grew up inspired by change makers and have been affected by the inspirational words of people like Viktor E. Frankl and Nelson Mandela. Inspired by others I’ve strengthened my self-identity and I have cultivated more self-responsibility as a direct result of experiences like this that are an example of the Aussie way of “taking the p..s” or giving people a hard time.

One of the many proposed models explains wellness as the functional or dysfunctional transformation of incoming and outgoing energy. I believe that my wellness has improved because I have nature all around me and submerge myself in it regularly. Being a resident in Australia has shown me that unrestricted communication in combination with the ongoing exposure to psychologically restorative landscapes that I experience when surfing helps me to process and transform energy in ways that continually improve my overall wellness and helps me to enhance my life in each composite domain.

I hope that sharing my personal wellness journey can help others explore unconventional opportunities to cultivate a more wellness enhancing lifestyle.

Kailani Marlow is a PhD candidate at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. Her thesis is an examination of the health effects of natural and built environments. She is passionate about helping people discover ways to have more vitality inducing experiences in their daily lives. In pursuit of this goal she has worked in various capacities with adults and children of all ages including infants, seniors, at risk youth, and children diagnosed with autism. Kailani is currently serving as student liaison officer for the NWI Australia. Kailani is currently a member of the National Wellness Institute of Australia Management Committee in the role of Student Liaison Officer.