Scottish family moves to Whangarei

Moving from central Scotland to a seaside community near Whangarei gave Graham Stewart and his family the chance to “build our life around what we wanted to achieve as a family”. They also ended up, unlike many migrants, building a new home. 

Graham uses the phrase “blank canvas” – referring to a painter’s canvas before any paint is applied to it – to describe the freedom of creating a new home in a new country. 

“You can make it what you want to make it, rather than having historical problems to deal with in a house,” he says. He and wife Louise looked at existing houses at first, but quickly realised they would still want to make major changes to any house they bought.

Graham, Louise and daughter Addison ended up living in a house built in One Tree Point, a beach community approximately 30 minutes south of Whangarei. Five-year-old Addison adores being at the beach and Graham works only 10 minutes away at Refining NZ’s Marsden Point oil refinery.

He had no trouble getting used to being further away from a city, but Louise says it took time for her to adjust to how quiet the neighbourhood was. 

“It’s a bit more isolated in terms of public transport; in Scotland, I had Glasgow and Edinburgh on my doorstep, a 20-minute train journey away. It was a big change to come somewhere that isolated,” she says. That changed when she began to make friends in the community.

“The people were welcoming. My little girl made friends, then you meet a lot of mums and go round to people’s houses. Instead of jumping in the car or going to the shops, you’d take a walk to the beach or to someone’s house.” 

So what did they want to achieve as a family when they moved here? Something very simple: more time together. Louise had gone back to her work in interior design and web design when Addison was one year old, and Graham did shift work – a type of work schedule where people take turns working at any time of day or night.

“We hardly ever got any time as a family,” says Graham. “We came here for a change in pace, and to redress the work/family balance because we felt it had got out of balance.”

With a qualification in chemical engineering, Graham had worked as an oil-refinery shift leader back in Scotland. Battles between the company owner and unions about retirement payments also prompted him to begin looking for work overseas. He heard about a job with Refining NZ through a former workmate, sent off his CV, and waited.

The Skype interview went well, and suddenly Graham and Louise found themselves on a whirlwind, four-day trip to check out Whangarei and the refinery. “The whole time we were here, it poured with rain, and I said, ‘It isn’t meant to be like this. This place is meant to be subtropical!’” laughs Graham.

While he spent time at Marsden Point refinery, Louise visited local shops to research the cost of living. Converting the cost of groceries and petrol into British pounds was not accurate, she found, as the exchange rate goes up and down – so they compared those prices as a percentage of Graham’s salary, to find out how expensive living in New Zealand would be.

They arrived in January 2015, just before Addison turned three. Many people move to New Zealand to create a better life for their kids, but in doing so they separate children from their beloved grandparents. Graham says if he and Louise did not have a child, it would have been easier to make the move.

“We would have missed people, obviously, but you wouldn’t have felt guilty – but taking Addison away from her grandparents, who she is incredibly close with, was massive,” he says. At first, they were too busy to miss loved ones back home. There was a car to buy, a house to rent, routines to establish. The reality sank in after a few weeks, but family members were already making plans to come and visit.

Louise works from home and only has a few clients, so the family has a lot more time to spend together. They have an active, outdoors lifestyle: Addison has her own kayak, Graham and Louise both run, and they sometimes go camping at the freshwater lakes near Dargaville.

The more migrants make the effort to settle in, the easier it will be, says Louise. “When you get invited to something, always go. A lot of the times when you are in a new environment, you have to take yourself outside of your comfort zone,” she says.

“If you don’t, there’s no way you’ll meet people. You have to be open and always willing to have time for people. Everyone has quite a lot of time for each other out here.”