Brand Tas

When she was growing up, everyone around Emma Nugent expected her to stay in her little village in the middle of England.

Her mum ran the post office and Emma did deliveries. She worked in the pub. Everyone knew Emma and she knew everyone.

For family holidays, they stayed in the UK. “Maybe once we went to France. But we never went to far-flung, exotic places.”

Even when she decided to pursue nursing as a career, Emma’s family and friends expected her to commute to university from home. She didn’t, but her uni residence in Liverpool was like another version of the little village. When she met her future husband, Darren, they found another small, market town between Liverpool and Manchester so they could both commute.

So how did this self-described “home bird” end up moving as far away from home as possible, to the other side of the world?

Maybe it was the year and a half, round-the-world tickets Emma and Darren bought shortly after getting married. Maybe it was the trip to Cuba.

Or maybe the rupture was, like for so many other people, the pandemic.

Darren had followed his dream to open a brewery and distillery in his Irish hometown. COVID was devastating for a business that relied on bringing people together to have fun. Emma’s nursing salary was low, by global standards, yet homes in the UK were enormously expensive and only becoming more so. The reality of Brexit was starting to sink in as well, and it was bringing uncertainty and potential tension back to Ireland and Northern Ireland.

“We didn’t want that for the children,” says Emma.

What did they want for their children, and for themselves?

Emma and Darren began to look around. Their trip around the world had been educational, so they knew they liked Malta and Scandinavia. Emma’s brother lives in New Zealand and they had liked it there. They had liked Australia too, though they worried about the heat in some of the cities.

“Then we thought of Tasmania,” she says. “We hadn’t been here. It was a gamble. But everything online that we had read and all the forums that we had been involved in, and all the people that we'd been chatting to, it just felt more right than anywhere else that we'd considered. The salary, the nurses' salary was much better than the UK, and when we were comparing it to New Zealand the cost of houses and living expenses seemed to be quite reasonable as well. And obviously this little island has got everything — from beautiful beaches to snowy mountains, little cities and big towns. It just seemed to tick most of the boxes, aside from it being so far away from the UK and all our family and friends. We didn't know anybody here.”

It wasn’t easy: the work visas, moving across the world, pulling their children from schools they liked. But overcoming the difficulties added to the excitement.

“It was new, a completely different way of life. When we first got here, our first little house was right on the beach, literally a two-minute walk. And neither of us had ever grown up with anything like that. The beach would have been an hour and a half drive from where we had been living in Northern Ireland. And weather-wise, you would only have a day or two a year. But yes, really daunting: the paperwork, visas, getting all my nursing transcripts all together. But we got there in the end, and felt supported all the way.”

Emma and Darren were worried about their children, moving so far away from friends and family. Both of them spoke Irish at school. But today, both children are happy in school – fully integrated little Tasmanians.

“The lifestyle we have now, we could never have had in the UK. There's so much on our doorstep. The children have something on nearly every night of the week: netball, AFL, swimming, karate, tennis, basketball. Surf lessons. And our weekends are full of sport, or just going out for hikes, or going down to the beach or meeting up with friends – there's always something on. We're getting our own little groups of friends together now, which is nice.”

The family camps. Emma swims in the ocean twice a week. Emma and Darren go to trivia nights with friends and visit wineries and distilleries on the weekend.

The Royal Hobart Hospital has been both challenging and rewarding. Emma’s role in the cardiology outpatient clinics means every day is different. “It’s challenging, and there has been a steep learning curve, but it’s so much easier when you’ve got a really supportive team of people that you work with. Management have been fabulous.”

As the family becomes more and more Tasmanian, they hold on to some traditions — Yorkshire puddings, watching Wimbledon, getting the hurling stick out and having a hit-about in the back garden. But they have decided to allow a few things to remain in the UK.

“There is a working brewery in Kingston and we went the other day,” says Emma. “We went up to the bar, we had pizza. We could see what might have been, if only things had worked out with the distillery. Darren was like, ‘Maybe I could bring over some of the tanks.’ And I was like, ‘Don’t even. They stay in Ireland.”

Emma is featured in partnership with our friends at Department of Health Tasmania.

We worked with southern Tasmanian videographer Bree Sanders and north west Tasmanian photographers Moon Cheese Studio for this Tasmanian story.