Helen and Phil Lisle didn’t want to be the kind of people who missed their chance at a new life, so they moved to Singapore, before discovering that Sydney suited them perfectly. Words Jane Riley

First Singapore, now Sydney, Australia. It’s all a far cry from Cramlington, near Newcastle, where Helen and Phil Lisle started their journey around the world nine years ago.

“We got the travel bug,” says Helen, “and it wouldn’t go away and we knew we didn’t want to be the sort of people who kept talking about doing something but never acted on their impulses.”

The couple were each born, went to the same school and lived with their families just around the corner from one another. While they’d been on European holidays before they weren’t, by their own admission, “worldly”.

Inspired by a banking friend of Phil’s, who got a job in the Cayman Islands and then relocated to Miami, they realised they could do it too and started looking at what would work for them as a couple with two young children. Assessing Phil’s work in project management and consulting, and Helen’s background as a secondary school science teacher, they decided her teaching experience would be the easier profession in which to find work.

“We didn’t know where we wanted to go, and decided to look at what international teaching posts were available. But a lot of them were in places like Kenya or countries that we felt weren’t safe for kids,” says Helen. “So when a job came up in Singapore, we thought we would give it a go and see whether living and working somewhere else was going to be for us.” Six months after applying for the post, in December 2002, they moved to Singapore and began their overseas adventure.
While they found moving away from their families and living in a new culture a bit of a shock, they didn’t realise that changing their roles within the family would be even more of an adjustment.

“I went from being a full-time mum to the main breadwinner, and Phil became a househusband,” says Helen. “Plus the teaching job didn’t end up being what I thought it would be – it also included working Saturday mornings and I was seeing very little of the kids because I was leaving the house at 7 am every morning.”
While they found the first six months hard, they were determined to make it work and not return to the UK, which they admit they could easily have done.

“But it was important for us to realise you shouldn’t have a knee-jerk reaction to anything – especially if you’ve made such a big decision in the first place. I don’t think for the first six months you feel any normalcy – you still feel homesick and are experiencing culture shock. If you’re at all sensitive or sentimental it’s too easy to pack it in.”

They decided that Phil should find work – which he did, landing a job as project manager for a company called PIPC Consulting. But their adventure was not over yet. “We’d always wanted to have a holiday in Australia and had started a ‘Sydney fund’ in the UK,” says Helen. “After being in Singapore for two years we decided to make a visit from there.”

It was to be the turning point in their lives, because, after only a couple of days in Sydney, they knew they had found the place they wanted to be. “I said to Phil, are you thinking what I’m thinking? When he said yes, we decided then and there to find a way of going to live in Sydney.

Read more in the March issue of Living Abroad magazine