Written by Louise Miolin, one of our amazing C2C bloggers.
I grew up 
on a few acres in the cross section of pine and karri forests, ten minutes from what I had always considered a vastly unremarkable WA town. I was by no means a farm kid – my mother is a medical scientist and my father a schoolteacher, and both grew up in Perth. As such, I never really considered my country upbringing an integral part of my identity.
In fact, it wasn’t until I moved to the city to start university that I realised how pivotal growing up rurally has been for me.
The summer before I moved to Perth I worked in an apple orchard, as I had done for many of my teenage years. It’s sweaty, boring, repetitive work, and had it not been for the fact that it was funding my move, I’d probably have been far less motivated to get up at 5am every day. Unbeknownst to me, this kind of work, which I’m sure many fellow C2C women are familiar with, was strange, interesting and even exotic to many people I met in Perth (I could never imagine thinking thinning apples is interesting!)
After that summer I spent the first year and a half of my uni life at a residential college living with 300 other students. Half of them were from overseas or interstate, and the other half grew up in a plethora of country towns scattered across WA. Quite quickly, “Where are you from?” became the first thing we asked our new neighbours as we got to know one another (and bonded over our mutual lack of understanding of the public transport system…)
As such, I began to attribute my small town to my identity a lot more than I ever had, and when I started to make friends in university classes I would of course ask where they were from. I was baffled by the number of times this question – which at college heralded such a wide variety of answers – was met with “What do you mean?” in a moment of intrigue as people discovered that I was not from Perth.
It blew my mind that for many of my peers, university was not a huge lifestyle change. For them it did not bring with it a change of location, finances and friends; it was not the embodiment of newfound freedom and adventure. Instead, so many of the people I met in my classes hung out with their high school friends on the weekend, lived with their parents and had no idea about the triumph and tribulation that comes with moving away from home to study.
There are a thousand tired stereotypes about country people: that we receive subpar education, that we are ignorant and small minded, and that we live uncomplicated and easy lives. I of course never considered these things to be true and hated the idea of judging someone based on where they grew up. However, I did discover when I moved to Perth that it is sometimes easy to tell the difference between a country kid and a city kid. It is difficult to articulate this difference – I’m not trying to say that one is better than the other – but in a city university setting, I have found that all the people I’ve become closest to were raised in the country, and it’s evident in their character. They work hard, play hard, and appreciate the novelties and the hardships of both country and city life, because they have experienced both.
Last summer I took my British, city-raised boyfriend to my childhood home, and we worked at the orchards for a few weeks. It was still sweaty, boring and repetitive, and I was still motivated entirely by the fact that I was funding a move (this time to Leeds!). This time, however, I was far more appreciative of the sunrise at 5am, and of long, lazy afternoons beneath the karri trees. My boyfriend said he’d never experienced anything like that, and it reminded me how lucky I am to carry a little bit of my rural life with me wherever I go.