Avocados cost only about €1 in Australia and yet young people here cannot afford to buy houses either

Avocados cost the equivalent of about €1 at my local supermarket in Canberra. Each time you slice into one (provided you’ve allowed the appropriate “just enough but not too much, this is it, you’re in the ripe 30 minutes between creamy and rotten, now now now!” time), it is the best avocado you’ve ever had. For an Irish person at least, accustomed as we are to slightly less exotic home-grown fruits and vegetables.

Hence our love of subterranean fare. Turnips, spuds and carrots are hard to beat. Robust foods full of complex sugars to catapult us reluctantly through a drab winter. The sort of foods you could knock a burglar out with if you got the torque on your throw right. A ripe avocado? It would only make a mess, spattering about four quid’s worth of wintering well across the back of the intruder’s skull.

Wasn’t it baby boomers (mostly British – let’s lay the blame where it rightfully belongs) who popularised the avocado over here anyway, like Francis Drake rocking up to Queen Elizabeth I with the very first potato? The noble avocado festooned all those 1970s dinner parties: people eating them plain like a shower of hungry armadillos, who apparently like plain avocados too. These are festivities unlike any my health-conscious generation indulges in. Halved avocados eaten with teaspoons, pale cheddar fondu everything and clouds of cigarette smoke creeping upstairs and into the lungs of sleeping children. Crack a window, sure – be grand.

Having rented for years in the housing wastelands of Dublin and London, I had largely settled in my belief that renting inherently carries an understanding that you just have to live with less dignity than homeowners do

Did dinner parties exist outside certain suburbs of Dublin in the Ireland of the 1970s? I’ve heard that it was just dinner time and if you were there, they fed you whether it was your own house or someone else’s. It would have been highly indecorous, then or now, to describe that as a party.

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Avocados remain a somewhat contested fruit in Ireland given that, for a while there between 2016 and the pandemic, the housing crisis was frequently blamed on a millennial fondness for avocado toast. “A €4 fruit? Mashed up on American bread?” our parents exclaimed. This was apparently a reference to sourdough. “And a ‘turmeric latte’ is it? More fool you, anyway. Sure it’s no wonder you’re all riddled with anxiety and you can’t afford to buy a house.”

Our parents and grandparents were, of course, quite right. It was imported fruit and our tendency toward Marie Antoinette-style antics rather than the global financial collapse presided over by their generation that has left Irish “young people” (a term now encompassing anyone under 40 for some reason) living in flat shares of six people but fussy as monarchs about bread. As though it was not wider economic conditions but merely mustering the backbone to look people in the eye and give them a firm handshake that resulted in affordable homes for prior generations and Ireland’s significant disparity in home ownership rates between the under- and over-40s.

One of the reassuring elements of emigrating very far from home is, unsurprisingly, exposure to the possibility that things can be different as well as the reassurance that things are the same everywhere. Avocados cost about €1 here in Canberra and yet “young” people here cannot afford to buy houses either. Home ownership numbers for Australians of my generation are significantly lower than those of their parents’ generation at the same age. So it might be a bigger issue than what we’re mashing on to our toast. However, the rental market works differently and I find that fascinating.

Australia is different in countless ways, of course, but it does show that renting doesn’t have to be queuing in a freezing street or living at home until you’re 35

Having rented for years in the housing wastelands of Dublin and London, I had largely settled in my belief that renting inherently carries an understanding that you just have to live with less dignity than homeowners do. Being a renter, I thought, necessitates handing over 60-plus per cent of your take-home pay to live in a grimy, cheaply fitted-out property for about double the cost of the average monthly mortgage payment a bank assesses you don’t make sufficient money to afford. The Dublin landlord horror stories abound. On very cold days, I still think fondly of that one landlord we had (a senior Irish legal figure) who repeatedly encouraged leaving windows open during the 2017 ‘big snow’ to keep a badly ventilated property free of mould.

When we arrived in Canberra, the warnings came hard and fast from everyone we met. “There’s a rental crisis here,” they declared. “Rents are the highest in Australia here in the capital!” they told us (they’ve recently dropped behind Sydney). We worried that it would be as it had been at home and prepared for gazzumping, queues of wan 30-somethings in office attire, lack of supply and the disproportionately inflated prices that result from it.

We discovered that the average monthly rent for a home in Canberra – rent is paid weekly here – amounts to $2,620. That’s about €1,560. For that, you can get a very central location with a couple of bedrooms, two bathrooms and high-end appliances (so no tilted oven that only cooks one side of your dinner). Pets are an entitlement in rental accommodation here. This is excellent news for my cat, Mabel, who moved with us from London.

That average rent is far from cheap, but I looked online to find what was available in Dublin for that money. The first search result was a portacabin next to the M50. The second was a granny flat behind the advertising landlord’s house in Raheny.

When you live in Ireland, it’s easy to conflate “renting in Ireland” with “renting full stop”. Australia is different in countless ways, of course, but it does show that renting doesn’t have to be queuing in a freezing street or living at home until you’re 35.

It could be different. At home, it just isn’t.

Why?

Well … avocado toast. Obviously.