Australian winters shouldn't feel this unbelievably cold
The coldest I've ever been are the four winters I lived in Sydney. And I come from Melbourne.
We were renting a 1960s apartment that came with aircon but no heating. That's okay, we thought: we're now in Sydney! Who needs heating in the most temperate climate in the most beautiful city on earth?
That first morning in June, when I woke to see my shocked shout of cold hanging in the air as a little ball of mist, I thought I was hallucinating that I was back in Melbourne. I went to turn on the… heater? Nothing there. Just a row of windows looking onto a lovely view which was seeping into our home in the form of an 11 degree overnight low.
That weekend we took the car to a famous discount electronics shop and piled the boot with plug-in, thermostat-controlled oil heaters. As winter gradually set in, increasingly resembling something like the ones we left behind, we gradually accumulated oil heaters until there was one in every room. The electricity bill that first year really was something.
But everyone around us seemed to be in denial. Maybe a really great summer makes you inured to the cold? We spent that first winter at friend's homes trying not to steal looks at the sole, milk-crate sized gas heater they all seemed to have in their living rooms, with nothing else. Going to the bathroom was a shock, as you walked into a wall of freezing air whenever you left that one heated room. It was like the worst Melbourne winter: cold out, cold in.
I don't know why, but this is finally the winter that social media, dominated by young world travellers, has discovered that most of Australia is absolute rubbish at keeping our houses warm.
The posts of young Europeans warming themselves by an open gas oven, or Americans cocooned in polar fleece onesies inside their Aussie homes have been both amusing and prolific. They wonder when we are going to discover proper insulation. One, based in Brisbane, wanted to know why she was colder inside than outside.
They are stunned to discover they were warmer back in a country that's blanketed by snow for four months of the year.
It's a very Australian thing: denial at the reality that yes, all Australian coastal towns do actually have winters. Our other proud tradition is a long and only recently reversed one: really slack building standards when it comes to home insulation.
Many homes in Australia were built before insulation was required by law, and even after regulations were introduced, the minimum standards here are lower than in Europe or North America. In Victoria, mandatory insulation only started in 1991, and national minimum energy standards were not set until 2003.
Poor airtightness and a lack of focus on thermal efficiency make our houses colder. We build timber-framed suburban homes, like the US, but unlike them most our homes have poorer insulation and single-pane windows. US homes are generally more airtight and energy efficient. UK homes are usually brick or masonry, making it easier to retain internal heat.
Australian homes are also some of the largest in the world, making them harder and more expensive to heat. We like our floor-to-ceiling windows and big sliding glass doors. I remember visiting relatives in Canada and wondering at how few and how small their windows were compared to ours. But you don't need a snowy winter like theirs to realise that any temperature below 15 degrees will seep into a house made from a lot of glass, and that will make sitting inside it unpleasant. And a badly insulated house will be hard, expensive and energy-inefficient to heat.
We are not bad at keeping our houses cool, although no longer in the passive way of the wonderful verandahs we used to build, or even the suburban tradition of eves that keep the sun off the glass. Now, we just lean on air conditioning, and you won't find even a student studio apartment that doesn't have (energy inefficient) air conditioning.
But heating? Well, most of those aircon units will be reverse-cycle but, as any traveller from the northern hemisphere will tell you, heat rises, so those high-set aircon units are keeping the ceiling beautifully warm while you reach for that puffer jacket just to sit on couch and watch TV.
I'm sure the Australian followers of these shivering expat accounts are enjoying a kind of Antipodean schadenfreude: cold enough for ya?
But there's not a lot to enjoy here and, perhaps unwittingly, our freezing friends are pointing out the consequences of the extravagant way of living and building that you can indulge in when you are sitting on pools and piles of fossil fuels that you once believed would never run out.
The warmest place I ever spent a winter was my tiny Greenwich Village studio in New York, where an oil radiator the size of a fold-out couch came hissing to life in September and was turned off by the building supervisor in May. No matter the weather inside or out, that blistering, nuggety thing pumped out heat that had me in a t-shirt even while the 17th major snowstorm of the winter of 1994 roared outside.
That now seems to me as much overkill as our as badly-insulated, all-glass houses. The climate emergency makes it crucial to fix our energy-inefficient homes and to find passive ways of building and heating that use the least amount of energy to keep us warm in a climate where freezing conditions are few, but the experience of cold is too common. Even if it's just to keep the visiting Scandi kids on their gap-year from freezing their clogs off.
This weekend my editors have thoughtfully provided you with an essay on whether something with the utterly ghastly-sounding name of "perpetual stew" is actually safe to eat. I have refused to open the link and read it. I am appalled on your behalf.
Have a safe and happy weekend and as the Triple J family celebrates 50 years by kicking off the Hottest 100 of Australian songs — which I could easily fill myself with my own list of 100 — let's get you thinking. Undisputed classics? Or neglected masterpieces? Your call. Get voting. Kick off with this. Go well.
Virginia Trioli is presenter of Creative Types and a former co-host of ABC News Breakfast and Mornings on ABC Radio Melbourne.
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