G’BYE CALIFORNIA, G’DAY AUSTRALIA

On a clear, blue, ocean-scented morning in Sydney, a day like so many others when the sidewalk cafes in Kings Cross have their awnings out for breakfast, the joggers are loose in the Royal Botanical Gardens and no one is sleeping nearby in a cardboard box, it’s possible to see that California is no longer the end of the line. The search for the good life and the new life that for 150 years carried millions of restless Americans across the continent to the West Coast has in recent years carried some of them farther, 7,500 miles and 15 hours by air farther, into the southern hemisphere, to Australia.

Settled 200 years ago by the same stock of Anglo-Irish criminals and political dissidents King George III had been shipping off in servitude to the American colonies, Australia has always been a distant cousin, both strange and familiar. Maligned in the past as a rude wilderness of kangaroos and ale-slobbering rugby players, the country has become increasingly attractive to Americans as more of them turn their gaze backward in pursuit of happiness. To Californians, Australia can look like only yesterday, a thinly populated, eucalyptus-lined frontier of manageable cities, unspoiled hills andbeaches far from the smog, mini-malls, freeway shoot-outs and desperation of their own lost paradise.

A U.S. Consulate official in Sydney estimates that there are 80,000 to 90,000 Americans living in Australia. Although the consulate doesn’t compile such statistics, a good percentage of them are known to be Californians, drawn by the same visions of adventure, economic opportunity, peace of mind and wide-open space that once lured their parents or grandparents to Los Angeles and San Francisco. Australia is a country the size of the United States with the population (16.5 million) of Southern California.

As recently as 10 years ago, the Australian government was offering to help finance passage to its remote island continent for immigrants with proven skills--teachers, doctors and businessmen. Those days are over. Such inducements are no longer necessary given the country’s rising profile, boosted lately by the America’s Cup races, the romantic hokum of “Crocodile Dundee” and the 1988 Australian Bicentennial celebration. The Australian Consulate in Los Angeles receives about 5,000 travel and emigration inquiries a month from residents in Arizona, New Mexico and Southern California, the last of which accounts for a majority of the 670 immigrant visas it grants each year. Although the government still holds seminars in America for wealthy businessmen considering migration, for the average person it’s not a simple matter to gain residency.

Nevertheless, a lot are trying.

Last year, more than 1 million people worldwide applied to immigrate to Australia, and the government accepted 140,000, making it just about as easy as getting into Harvard.

“It’s a comfortable place to get very far away,” said Becky Robertson, who moved to Sydney this year from San Gabriel with her two young daughters, Sarah and Carly, and her husband, John, formerly a software engineer with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. His technical skills landed him a job with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, a government agency, although the application process took a year and a half.

The Robertsons, both in their 30s, went to Australia partly to escape the incidents of daily violence in Los Angeles that they felt were hitting closer and closer to home. “I feel so much safer here,” Becky Robertson said.

“Family issues were one of the main reasons we left,” said John Robertson, sipping a can of Foster’s Lager in their still-undecorated living room. “Australia is very family-oriented. I had a negative image of what’s going to go on in the U.S. in the next five years, and I wanted to protect my family from that.”

They feel safe enough in their rented $1,200-a-month (in Australian dollars, $900 in U.S. dollars), three-bedroom house in the northern suburb of Lane Cove not to lock their doors at night.

“It appealed to us,” Becky Robertson said, “that everyone said it was 30 years behind the times. I was reassured that it wouldn’t be considered outmoded to stay home with the kids.”

She hasn’t been disappointed. “You don’t get the impression that every kid is being shipped off to day care. Here, a woman isn’t proving anything to anyone by having a career.”

Greatly impressed by the friendliness and informality of the people, she mentioned that as she was walking to the local shopping center, a motorist stopped and offered her a ride.

“God, it’s so innocent!”

MORE THAN a few Californians who’ve taken up residence in Australia make comparisons between their adopted land and the California they remember before the Watts riots, the influx of millions of political refugees from Latin America and Asia, the clogging of the freeways, the pollution of coastal waters and the emergence of gangs. So, in spite of Australia’s declining standard of living--the result of an ailing economy and an imbalance of trade--and its unfolding pollution and crime problems, expatriates feel as if they’ve turned back the clock.

Standing at the edge of a national park in Noosa Heads, in Queensland, 600 miles up the coast from Sydney, Los Angeles-born Gordon Clements, stared out over the burgeoning town and said, “My parents bought a house in Manhattan Beach in 1952 for $9,000. I thought, ‘When am I going to be able to afford this?’ I wanted to live on the beach.”

Clements, 36, who looks like the archetypal tanned and blue-eyed California surfer, was once co-owner of a delicatessen in Manhattan Beach. He sold out to his partner and moved to Australia “on a lark” in 1978. “I remember that first day in August I arrived in Noosa. It looked like paradise. The surfing was good, the sky was blue, the beer was cold and there were all these naked girls on the beach. I thought, ‘Why should I leave here?’ ”

He arranged to return the following year, under a temporary work visa, to coach a water polo team at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. Eventually, he went to work as a carpenter, at one point hiring out to a construction crew in the remote Outback where he ate the famous red dust of the bush and lived in military-style barracks.

Today, he supervises a crew of 40 carpenters building hotels and petrol stations in Noosa Heads, a developing tropical resort where the ocean temperature in the winter is the same as it is in Los Angeles in the summer. He has built himself a 2,800-square-foot house near a golf course, where it’s not uncommon to see kangaroos on the greens. He tells his Australian wife, Joanna, “This is what Manhattan Beach was 30 years ago. It’s going to grow up around us.”

A thousand miles across the country in Adelaide, a serene city of Victorian parks, cathedral spires and 1 million people that faces the Southern Ocean, Ron Somers led the way into his back yard to show off George and Martha, the pet wallabies he and his wife bought since resettling six years ago. “We feel like we’re in a bit of a time warp. It’s like California in the ‘50s,” said Somers, 41, a public-health official who grew up in the Fairfax district and went to UCLA. “Kids wear school uniforms. You’re not afraid to go out at night. You go to a national park here and have the place to yourselves.”

Ten years ago, he and his 35-year-old wife, Pam Rachootin, were employees of Kaiser-Permanente in Los Angeles, “making good incomes, and we still couldn’t touch housing.”

They left Los Angeles first for Denmark, where both of them worked on a three-year grant; then Somers heard about a university research job in Adelaide. Neither of them had been to Australia before, but he took the job, and Rachootin enrolled in medical school for free (nearly all education in Australia is free) and became a physician. Soon after they arrived, the couple bought a four-bedroom house with a red-tile roof, half a mile from the beach, for $80,000 Australian.

“We’re living in a more manageable environment here,” said Somers, who’s since moved on to a position with the state of South Australia as a specialist in accident prevention. “We’ve been out of the country for 10 years now, and in that time we’ve seen such changes in Los Angeles that it’s become less and less of a magnet to draw us back.”

“The last time we were back,” Rachootin said of their visit to West Los Angeles, “we were shocked to see armed guards at our old supermarket.”

Although Adelaide is a quiet city of vestigial English character, its physical layout, between the ocean and a ridge of golden brown hills, and its mild climate are reminiscent of Los Angeles. “After Denmark,” Rachootin said, “we almost felt like we were going back home when we came here.” But emigres from the West Coast are surprised when they learn how different the culture really is.

“It’s a first-world Mexico,” said Phil Tripp, a former tour manager for rock bands in the United States who now lives in Sydney, a metropolis of 3 million spread out on an 18th-Century grid across low hills surrounding one of the world’s great natural harbors. “It’s manana -land. People here don’t live to work; they work to live.”

WALK INTO A clothing store on Oxford Street in Sydney’s fashionable Paddington district and chances are that no clerk will pounce on you with a phony smile. On the other hand, neither is anyone likely to offer much assistance if you want to buy something. Order an omelet of green peppers and mushrooms at one of those sidewalk cafes in Kings Cross and you might get, without apologies, cheese and ham (or was it Spam?).

American tourists can be disconcerted by the Australians’ lackadaisical attitude toward service, and American businessmen can be dismayed to learn that financial success in Australia is still viewed with a touch of disdain. The latter is traceable to the country’s founders--downtrodden working-class settlers who, in the words of Sydney’s best-known playwright and screenwriter, David Williamson, “despised success because it could be achieved only by ingratiation and betraying your mates.”

Costa Mesa restaurateur Dennis Bramnick, 38, and his wife, Cathy, traveled to Sydney last year with $1.4 million to open the first of a proposed chain of “California Southwest” cuisine restaurants, and found that doing business in Australia has required adjusting to its powerful unions, heavy taxes (a rate of 46% for incomes of $35,000, for instance), inflexible state bureaucracy and different work ethic.

“It’s a country of Victorian attitudes and archaic laws,” Bramnick said over lunch at a sunny brasserie on Bayswater Road. He admitted good-naturedly that he has done his share of “whingeing,” an Aussie term for complaining.

A self-described “loner and adventurer open to new situations,” Bramnick had hoped to have his first Red Onion restaurant operating by now but was slowed by tedious lease negotiations, training a staff and winning reluctant government approval to add another American to his payroll. Just as Gordon Clements discovered that, with holidays and vacation time, his Australian carpenters actually work 43 weeks out of the 52 they are paid for, Bramnick learned that Australian waiters don’t work for tips (the whole concept is slightly foreign) and are paid time and a half on weekends. All Australians, including dishwashers, are guaranteed by law a minimum of four weeks’ annual paid vacation, even in the first year of a job.

Bramnick also has done battle with his Australian chef over how the food is going to be prepared. “His attitude is that he knows what Australians want,” Bramnick said about his chef, whom he sent back to California for additional training. “My point is, how can they know what Mexican food is here when they’ve never really had good Mexican food?”

Australians traditionally have been as eager to accept new ideas as they have been to cultivate good service.

“You want to say, ‘Get your act together. This place could be paradise.’ But you can’t do that. You can’t act American and get aggressive.”

This is a country, after all, where many people still celebrate Queen Elizabeth’s birthday. There may be no more glaring example of Australia’s collective lack of initiative than its continuing failure to declare independence from Great Britain, despite widespread uneasiness over its Commonwealth status and lingering resentment against the “Pommies,” or resident English.

But traditions aside, Bramnick remains optimistic that he and other Californians can find success. “If you go down to the Circular Quay,” he said, referring to a section of the waterfront, “and you look at cars and the houses, you know people are making a lot of money despite the taxes.”

MANUEL NILA, the “Tortilla King” of Sydney, hasn’t done too badly for himself. Born and reared in East L.A. and a former hairdresser, Nila quit the real estate business in Los Angeles 16 years ago and moved to Australia in search of something better. “I was bored. I felt I had gone as far as I could go there,” said the 58-year-old expatriate, who first became aware of Australia while working as an Air Force control-tower operator in the South Pacific after World War II.

The government helped pay the passage for him, his wife and three children in 1973. Beginning with one tortilla machine, he launched Senor Nila Mexican Food Products, catering primarily to Sydney’s handful of Mexican restaurants. Now divorced and married to an Australian and living in a hillside home with a pool in the northern suburbs, he grosses more than $1 million a year and supervises a staff of eight. Senor Nila’s logo is a koala squatting on a sombrero.

If Nila wanted to resettle in Australia today, he would have to apply for residency status, as Bramnick did, under Australia’s business migration program. The program requires that an entrepreneur bring at least $500,000 Australian (and presumably new jobs) into the country. It’s one of the four main routes to residency still open to foreigners. The others are to marry an Australian, possess professional skills deemed desirable by the government (such as pastry chef, speech pathologist, cabinetmaker, furniture polisher, accountant, plumber) or be recognized as a political refugee.

Joe Wissert got in because of who he is: a well-known record producer who spent 20 years in Los Angeles working with The Lovin’ Spoonful, Boz Scaggs, Earth, Wind & Fire and other major artists. Three years ago, he bought a townhouse in Sydney’s quaint, leafy Woollahra district and began recording Australian performers such as Ganggajang, Cal and Raging Waters.

“I felt things were becoming kind of staid for me. I felt I needed a change,” Wissert said one morning in Sydney, surrounded by his collection of big, bright contemporary oil paintings. “I’ve always been looking for new ideas, new places to be. I had an interest in the country on a lot of different levels and got excited when I found out there’s a lot going on in music here that’s not really getting out.

“There was certainly the ecological aspect of things--the life style. I didn’t want my children to wake up in the middle of the night with nightmares. And I certainly didn’t want to go to New York. I almost went to Nashville.”

Wissert, 42, said he has gained a new perspective on the world and his own business by relocating.

“Going into the clubs, there isn’t so much of a scene as in L.A., where, if you go to see a band, there are 100 attorneys and 100 publicists. We live on a smaller scale. Not that it isn’t as competitive in a certain way, but there isn’t all that hype. I think when they opened up the Hard Rock Cafe here, they tried to present a bit of that (status-mongering), and it didn’t really work. Here, even if you have a Top 10 record, you have to wait in line like anybody else.”

In Wissert’s profession, the migration traditionally has been in the opposite direction. But he said, “People don’t realize they have such a great country here. They tend to ask me, ‘Why did you come here from the States?’ And I say, well, ‘If you were born in America, then you’d look at it differently.’ ”

Phil Tripp, another refugee from American rock ‘n’ roll, liked the country so much after sailing into Sydney Harbor on an ocean liner in 1980 that he has become an Australian citizen and a defender of its “no worries, mate” level of ambition.

“I love the people in Australia,” he said, leaning back in a desk chair at his home/office in Sydney’s scruffy Chippendale district. “They’re not pretentious. They’re honest and they’re lazy.”

An Army brat from the South who moved to Malibu after he entered the music business, Tripp spent eight years as a production assistant and tour manager with rock performers such as Stevie Wonder and Rick James and helped produce campaign concerts for Jimmy Carter the year he lost the presidency to Ronald Reagan. That same year, Tripp decided that he no longer wanted to live in the United States.

“The last straw was the Rick James tour in 1980, when we had a shooting in the audience,” said Tripp, a beefy, rhapsodic man of 38 who now promotes and manages bands in Sydney. “The cocaine, the guns, the whole racial thing--it all just jelled at that one concert. I began making a study of all the countries in the world I could move to. I wanted a country that had no nuclear anything.”

His research led him to Australia, an English-speaking democracy at a safer distance from the United States (and warmer) than Canada and with a similarly insignificant military establishment and strict gun laws.

The murder rate in Australia is 1.77 per 100,000, or about 283 homicides nationwide in one year, contrasted with the 832 murders recorded last year in the city of Los Angeles alone.

“There’s tremendous personal freedom here,” Tripp said, reaching for his wallet. He pulled out his driver’s license and displayed it. It was a plain piece of paper with a few numbers on it but with no picture or other personal data. “The government is big, but it’s unobtrusive.

“The thing about America is to be bigger and better. Here, it’s laid-back and classless. Being here made me realize how performance had always dictated my sense of who I was. In Australia, I found my spirituality. In America, I never had time to.”

Of the many virtues Tripp has found in Australia’s welfare state, he ranks none higher than the national health insurance, which costs its citizens a little more than 1% of their gross income. “I had a heart attack two years ago. I was in the hospital for 10 days, and it cost me $180.”

TO THE NEW arrival from California, Australia offers its own array of head-scratching contradictions, beginning with a political terminology that defines its Liberal Party as the equivalent of the United States’ Republicans. But perhaps none of the contradictions is as striking as its street-level commitment to egalitarianism and “fairness” combined with its history of racism and sexism. Until the early 1970s, immigration was largely restricted to white Anglo-Saxons, and the country’s treatment of its dark-skinned aborigines was an unseemly facsimile of the American neglect of Indians and blacks.

A series of reforms erased the notorious “white Australia” policy and restored land rights to the aborigines, improving if not ending their longstanding impoverishment. Less progress has been made in repairing the nation’s lingering reputation as an island of old-fashioned male privilege. Women, both natives and new arrivals, still complain about the men.

Nancy Falcone, who grew up in Long Beach as the daughter of Mexican and Italian parents, moved to Australia in 1971 after meeting an Australian woman who told her “there were five men for every woman.” “Little did I know what Australian men were like,” she said with a pinched smile during a conversation outside a nightclub in Byron Bay, a surfing town of 18,000 people south of Brisbane on the central coast.

Falcone, 43, a waitress and cashier, has found much to admire about the country (“It’s still acceptable to roam around here; you don’t have to do the same thing for 20 years”) but does not count the men among its assets.

Asked what she missed about California, she answered, “I miss how well-mannered the men are and all the grade-A junk food--Mexican food that tastes good and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. It’s too ‘WASPy’ here.”

Pat Woolley, also 43 and single, a Sydney book publisher and a graduate of Hollywood High, offered a different account of the storied male chauvinism. “The men are friendlier, less restrained from saying what they really think,” she said. “They’re less polite. There’s terrible sexism, but there is in America, too. It’s not that different.”

Woolley, who moved to Australia from Los Angeles in 1970 partly in reaction to the Manson murders, preferred to talk about the political education she has received and the global perspective she has gained while living in Sydney.

“My parents were Republicans. I never thought about socialism or communism. It just wasn’t talked about. Here, I found that people talked about what these things mean. I’m ‘left’ now. I’d vote for the Labor Party if I could vote.”

Her company, Wild and Woolley, begun in 1974 in partnership with Australian novelist Michael Wilding, publishes new Australian fiction and serious nonfiction.

“Americans in the book trade don’t look beyond America,” Woolley said. “They don’t see themselves as part of the world.”

THE HARDEST thing for Americans to get used to here is the Australian political system,” said Ric Zuckerman, an associate professor of Russian history at the University of Adelaide. “The politicians here are people. The premier of South Australia (who is like a state governor) lives in an ordinary neighborhood and drives an ordinary car, and you bump into him in the market.”

Zuckerman, 44, taught for three years at San Jose State during the mid-’70s but lost his job to budget cuts. He was thinking about becoming a librarian when he heard about the Adelaide position at a party in Berkeley. “I applied on a whim,” he said. “I didn’t even know where Adelaide was.”

Looking up from a desk covered with exam papers he was grading in his fourth-floor campus office, the professor recalled: “There was no one in Australia at the time who could do this job, but I had a hell of a time getting in, so it wasn’t easy even then. I underwent a grilling--there’s no other word for it--at the consulate in San Francisco.”

Finally awarded his working visa, Zuckerman and his Los Angeles-born wife, Lorre, 43, headed for the unknown. “The first year was terrible,” he said. “We got very homesick.”

But after the first year, things began to look up. He found the university, which has 8,000 students, to be “as good as most good state universities in the States, and we don’t have the bottom 20%. We don’t have the dregs.”

“Our personal lives have been outstanding. We actually have leisure time together. We live 15 minutes from the water, and I have a 20-foot boat. If I was an academic in California, I’d be lucky to own a rowboat.”

His 10-year-old son, Michael, has become a cricket player, “a left-handed spin bowler, and he’s very good,” said his father, an umpire in the same league.

“Australians recognize that the joy of doing something is more important than the talent to do it. The concept of amateurism is much greater here than in the U.S. There are no athletic scholarships to college, and pro athletes make nothing by comparison,” Zuckerman said.

The Zuckermans, who also have a 7-year-old daughter, Nicola, are happy in Australia but have not given up their American citizenship. Like many expatriates, they visit their families every few years and haven’t ruled out the possibility that they might one day return to the United States.

Others, like Colin Heaney, have already discovered that they can’t go home again. Heaney, a glass blower of custom vases and tableware, traveled to Australia in search of adventure and good surfing after graduating from Pomona High School in 1967. He surfed Sydney’s beaches, “lived in sheds for years” and survived on part-time jobs.

He returned to California in 1972, to Santa Cruz, and began making good money selling candles and furniture. But, he said, “as soon as I arrived back in the States, I knew I couldn’t live there anymore. There were too many people mainly. It was just a matter of time until I could get the money together to get back.”

As he spoke, he was standing barefoot, dressed for work in shorts and a tank top. He had just returned from an afternoon surfing break to his cinder-block studio on the outskirts of Byron Bay, a former whaling village with inhabitants that include retired California surfing heroes Rusty Miller and George Greenough.

“I think that happens heaps,” Heaney said. “People live here awhile and they try to go back, and then they end up back here again.”

What he missed when he returned to the United States, he said, was “the slower pace of life” he had grown accustomed to in Australia, and the lack of emphasis on materialism.

“The money here is never what I could make in California. In California, I found that it was easy to impress women with money, but it doesn’t impress people the same way here.”

Now 41, Heaney is married to an Australian he met on a dance floor in Byron Bay. They have a daughter, and he’s building a house on a piece of beachfront property he bought several years ago for $37,000.

“I’m not a patriotic person,” he said when asked if he still had any emotional attachment to the United States. “I’m not comfortable with the emotions associated with patriotism.”

Ron Somers, the public-health specialist in Adelaide, had explained the giddiness many expatriates experience just after they’ve made the move: “The first few months here, you’re on a mental holiday anyway. But eventually, the euphoria wears off, and after a few years you can bounce into a depression, coming to grips with the reality that there is no place like home and that you will never be a native. Weighing the advantages and the disadvantages, I’m personally convinced of the advantages. But people go back at all stages.”

On one of those clear, blue mornings in Sydney, a visitor from Los Angeles fixed on one of the hypnotic harbor views is reminded of what Somers said and is tempted to see how long the euphoria might last. Maybe Australia is what California used to be, but with kangaroos and socialized medicine instead of coyotes and movie moguls. For the Southern Californian who’s seen one limo too many, Australia can indeed be a comfortable place to get very far away. Here, people ride in the front seats of cabs next to the driver. And they call him “mate.”

But the visitor realizes, too, that moving here would require a bigger adjustment than remembering the Liberals are the party on the right and that Christmas comes in mid-summer. There is the realization that the flip side of Aussie egalitarianism is a leveling suspicion aimed at all who seek to rise above the average. The honesty that often sounds so refreshing in conversation and political discourse can also bring to mind the many uses of tact. The “slower pace of life” is a wonderful idea until you need to get something done.

“I must admit,” Heaney said, “I wouldn’t mind better service.”

Then, too, there is the question being asked by a lot of Australians themselves: How long can Australia keep out the rest of the world and its problems? The welfare state under Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke is showing signs of strain--declining benefits and increased “privitization” of the public sector. Hawke’s treasurer, Paul Keating, has warned that the trade deficit will turn the country into “a banana republic” unless its citizens can compete more vigorously in the world marketplace. In a reflection of what has happened in the United States, the cost of living is shooting up, driving housing prices in Sydney out of reach of the younger middle class for the first time since World War II. Vandalism, however modest compared with the mean streets of Los Angeles, is on the rise. Pollution has turned up on some of Sydney’s beaches. And the non-discriminatory immigration policy has brought in substantial numbers of Asians in recent years, reawakening racist fears.

Perhaps the Californians who have gone to Australia and stayed can be expected to accentuate the positive. For one reason or another, they’re still there. They have found something in themselves or in the country that they didn’t have before, something more important than bad service.

Pat Woolley, the publisher, sat with a cup of tea one afternoon at her office near the University of Sydney and reflected on her decision 19 years ago to head west to make a new start.

“I think my life has been better here,” she said. “I remember when I went back for the first time after about three years, and all my friends in Hollywood were still waiting by the phone, waiting for something to happen. It made me see the difference, and the difference is that I looked beyond America.”

She said she realizes that after all these years she has undergone a fundamental change.

“There was a time when I’d say, ‘That’s not the way we’d do it in America.’ Now I go to America and think, ‘That’s not the way we’d do it in Australia.’ ”