Sweet As Tees › Blog › What It's Really Like Being a Kiwi Expat — Life Away From Home
By The Sweet As Crew · · Updated — Sweet As Tees Blog
There are about 900,000 New Zealanders living overseas. That's a lot of people eating Whittaker's chocolate from care packages and talking about the weather back home. Here's the honest story.
Around 900,000 New Zealanders live overseas. That's roughly 18% of the entire New Zealand population dispersed across Australia, the UK, the US, Canada, Europe, and beyond. The Kiwi diaspora is one of the largest per capita in the world.
And if you're part of it — or you know someone who is — you'll know that being a Kiwi expat is a very specific kind of experience. Here's the honest version of what it's like.
Every Kiwi expat knows the cycle. You leave because you want to see the world, earn more money, have new experiences, escape the small-town feeling, do your OE (Overseas Experience — the Kiwi rite of passage). And all of those are valid.
Then you have a summer in New Zealand after two years away. The bush, the beaches, the food, the friends, the quality of light in the afternoon. And you have a moment — possibly at a barbecue, possibly looking at the Remarkables, possibly just walking barefoot on the grass — where you think: why did I leave this?
The cycle then involves going back overseas and pretending you're not thinking about it constantly. You're not quite. But it comes back.
Ask any Kiwi expat what they miss and the list is always a mix of the profound and the very specific. The profound: the landscape, the space, the openness of people, the pace of life, being near family. The specific:
The specificity of the homesickness is part of what makes it Kiwi. It's not vague longing. It's precise, sensory, exact.
About 600,000 New Zealanders live in Australia — by far the biggest expat community. The proximity makes it easier: same timezone roughly, cheap flights, easy to visit. But it also creates its own particular dynamic. Australia and New Zealand have a deeply affectionate rivalry. Kiwis in Australia are constantly defining themselves against Australians and occasionally having to explain the difference between their accents.
The ANZAC connection runs deep and genuinely. But so does the quiet insistence that we're not the same thing. We are not Australians who haven't crossed the Tasman. We're something different.
The UK — particularly London — has been absorbing waves of young Kiwis on their OE for generations. The Kiwi pub culture in London is well-established; there are bars, communities, flat-white shops run by New Zealanders, whole suburbs where you'll hear the accent on every corner.
It's brilliant at 25. By 30, something shifts. The seasons feel heavy. The distance feels real. The cost of living is insane. And home starts pulling harder.
If you're planning the move or you've just landed, the crew at Kiwis in London have put together a cracking FAQ — everything you wanted to know to plan and survive London but were afraid to ask, from visas and flats to banking and finding a decent flat white.
For many Kiwi expats, staying connected to home happens in small ways. Following NZ rugby. Watching the New Zealand news. Sending and receiving care packages. Having friends and family visit. Coming home when you can.
And wearing the culture. A Sweet As Tees t-shirt worn in London or Melbourne or New York is a signal — to other Kiwis who pass you on the street, and to yourself. This is where I'm from. This is part of who I am. Even when I'm far from it.
Most Kiwi expats eventually come home. Some come back at 30, some at 40, some at 60. Some don't make it back until retirement. A small number stay away forever. But the gravitational pull of Aotearoa doesn't fully go away, and for most people, at some point, it wins.
When it does: the smell of the bush, the quality of the air, the familiar slang, the people who just get it without explanation — there's nothing like it.
🥝 Wear It Wherever You Are
Our Sweet As New Zealand tee and Aotearoa Down Under tee were made for Kiwis living their best life overseas. Browse the full range →
Tags: NZ expat, Kiwi abroad, New Zealand expats, homesick Kiwi