My Australian boyfriend and I moved to Montreal to escape culture and practices common to Australia and the US, practices that in the early naughts made each of us feel like a Stranger in a Strange Land in our own countries.

I’ll never forget the night of the shouted phone conversation across the Pacific when his mother threatened to give the remainder of his education trust to a “non-Asian, non-aboriginal Australian" if he didn’t come home and forget about this whole gay business.

Obviously, her homophobia and racism are not majority Australian traits, but heavy regional accent aside, her words might as well have come from a member of my own family. We both felt more comfortable among francophone Canadians than in our birth states, Ohio and NSW, respectively.

We often joked about how similar Australia and the United States are.

Not that either of us has ever come to actively dislike Australia or Australians, quite the opposite. It’s just that the similarities, positive and negative both, are striking.