Bonjour Australia (and about bloody time!)

After ten years of living in France, my French husband agreed to move to Australia (to Melbourne, my home town). For years he'd been making excuses not to move ('we won't find jobs', 'the kids will turn into pumpkins' (well, something like that)). At times I gave up hope of ever shifting him. So what was it that convinced Maxime in the end?

CHEESE.

In was mid 2012, at the end of a four month sabbatical, a trial of living in Australia, when Maxime announced to the cheering masses (well, to me and Mum anyway), that he'd be happy to move here permanently.

'It's thanks to this cheese that I've decided,' said Maxime, waving a chunk of Bruny Island hard cheese.

'What?' I said, and Mum looked skeptical.

'I know if I can have a source of good cheese, it will be possible to survive,' he explained.

He made a move to Melbourne sound as dangerous and difficult as settling in the middle of the Amazon. But I shouldn't really have been surprised - Maxime once told me he lived to eat. And meant it. Other Aussie cheeses Maxime had sampled thus far had been adjudged 'nice', but 'not real cheese' and 'more like cream'. But now, Eureka! He'd found the cheesy grail.

'It's because of the schools out here too,' I added to Mum, to prevent her from thinking Maxime bases all his life decisions solely on dairy products.

Our two eldest kids had been attending the local state primary school and the contrast with their school in France could not have been starker. I thought back to snowy evenings in France, when I would pick up our six year old after a long day (8.15 to 4.15), asking about her day, what she'd played at lunchtime.

'We don't play, Maman,' Chloé'd said once. 'There isn't play equipment. And we're not allowed to get our clothes dirty.'

I was astonished.

'Well, what do you do then?'

'We sit and talk.'

I pictured all these children sitting about at playtime, discussing like mini Jean-Paul Sartres at a Left Bank café.

And then there was the evening Chloé was in floods of tears because she had red crosses in her book because she had lost her pen.

'Your pen?!' I'd said. 'That's no big deal. Here, have one of mine,' and I gave her a biro.

'No no!' she'd wailed. 'Un stylo à encre.'

'A fountain pen! You've got to be kidding me! They went out with Dickens, for Christ's sake!' I turned on Maxime accusingly, 'Did you use a fountain pen at school?'

'Yes,' he said mildly.

So it was I'd discovered the French school system had not evolved since Napoleon. And I saw my first fountain pen (eventually). Forget pen licences, five and six year old froglets were were writing in flowery cursive script in ink.

During the Australian sabbatical, Chloé and Elise had been having to learn to print their letters separately with a pencil while they made amusing spelling mistakes, like spelling 'sheep' as 'chip'. But they'd also been saying a lot of things like, 'Mummy, I love school here.'

'Yes,'  Maxime now concurred to Mum, 'there are lots of things specially adapted for children here. The lifestyle suits them well.'

But just quietly, I think the main reason he agreed to move was the cheese.

And so we relocated to Melbourne in 2013. The kids can now spell 'sheep' with reasonable reliability and every month or so a little refrigerated parcel arrives at our door from a small Island off Tasmania.

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P.S., here's the link to the cheese website, for cheese lovers.

http://www.brunyislandcheese.com.au/