When You Miss Home in Australia: The Honest Guide to Getting Through It

Nobody talks about the homesickness part honestly. The working holiday visa brochure version is beaches, adventures, and lifelong friendships. The real version also includes the specific, physical ache of wanting a bowl of doenjang jjigae at 9pm in a town where the closest Korean restaurant is eight hours away by bus — and realising, for the first time in your life, that you genuinely cannot have it. This is about that experience, and what I learned from it.

I spent four months in Ravensthorpe, Western Australia — a small mining town in the state's south with a population of about 3,000 people, one pub, one small supermarket, and zero Korean restaurants. Perth is five and a half hours away by car. The nearest large supermarket — the kind that might carry kimchi or Shin Ramyeon — was a two-hour drive. I didn't have a car. I had a bike, a phone, and a work roster that left me with enough energy in the evenings to cook and not much more.

For four months, I did not eat Korean food. Not once.

I want to be precise about what that means, because it sounds like a minor inconvenience until you've experienced it. Food is not just fuel. It is memory, comfort, identity, and the most reliable shortcut back to a feeling of home that exists. When it's gone — not as a choice but as a geographical fact — the absence of it sits in a part of you that isn't rational and doesn't respond to reasoning.

What Homesickness in Regional Australia Actually Feels Like

The homesickness that people experience in Sydney or Melbourne is manageable — the city has Korean food, Korean people, Korean supermarkets. You can fix the specific craving within an hour. The homesickness that hits in regional Australia is different because the fix is genuinely unavailable. You can't just go and get it. You have to sit with it.

And sitting with it has phases. The first phase is fine — novelty carries you. Everything is new, the work is engaging, the people are interesting, and you're too busy adjusting to the environment to notice what's missing. This phase lasts, in my experience, about three to four weeks.

The second phase is when the novelty wears off and the absence starts to register. You notice that the supermarket has the same twelve products it had last week and the week before. You start doing mental calculations: if I saved enough, if I found a ride, if I booked a weekend off — could I get to a city? Could I get to Perth? You spend more time than you'd admit browsing Korean restaurant menus in Perth on your phone, not because you're going, but because looking at the pictures scratches something.

The third phase — if you stay long enough — is a kind of dull resignation that eventually becomes adaptation. You stop wanting the thing quite so acutely because wanting it has no outlet and the brain eventually conserves energy. But the adaptation is not the same as being fine. It's more like a low-grade background noise that you've learned to live with.

After four months of this, I booked a flight home to Korea.

The Geography of Korean Homesickness in Australia — and Why Koreans Quit Earlier Than Europeans

There's something specific about being Korean in Australia that makes the homesickness calculation different from being British or French in the same situation — and it's the geography.

Korea to Australia is approximately 8–10 hours direct, or 10–13 hours with one stopover. It is one of the most accessible long-haul flights from Australia — direct services to Seoul on Korean Air and Asiana run from Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane, with ticket prices that, while not cheap, are not the $3,000 commitment that returning to Europe requires.

The accessibility of Korea from Australia is genuinely a double-edged thing. It means you can go home when you genuinely need to — which is valuable. It also means the option of going home is always concretely available, in a way that it isn't for someone who would need to spend $3,500 and 24 hours travelling to do the same thing. The lower barrier to going home means the lower barrier to giving up when things get hard.

I'm not saying this to judge anyone who went home — I went home. I'm saying it because understanding the psychology of the decision helps you make it more consciously. When you're sitting in Ravensthorpe at 8pm on a Wednesday having not eaten Korean food in three months, the thought of booking a flight to Seoul feels urgent and necessary. It helps to know, before you're in that moment, that the urgency is real and manageable — and that there's a middle option between white-knuckling it indefinitely and buying the ticket that night.

The Middle Option: Don't Suppress the Craving — Go and Address It

The advice I wish someone had given me before I went to Ravensthorpe is this: don't treat the craving as something to be endured. Treat it as information, and give it a scheduled outlet.

The mistake I made was framing the want as weakness — something to be overcome through willpower. I told myself I didn't need Korean food, that I was adapting, that this was part of the experience. What I was actually doing was pressure-building. Four months of suppression followed by a plane ticket.

The better approach — which I know now because I've watched other people do it more intelligently — is to plan for the need in advance and treat feeding it as maintenance, not failure.

The same principle applies to video calls home, to Korean dramas on your phone, to buying the one Korean ingredient that your local small supermarket might carry if you ask. You are not failing at Australia by maintaining a connection to Korea. You are doing the maintenance that makes staying in Australia sustainable.

The Logistics: Getting Out of a Regional Town Without a Car

One of the most isolating aspects of regional work for working holiday makers without a car is that the transport infrastructure simply doesn't exist in the way it does in cities. Ravensthorpe has no train station. The bus service to Perth runs infrequently and takes over eight hours. Without a car, the world shrinks to what you can reach on foot or bike.

These are the options that exist and are worth knowing before you go:

• 1

  Ridesharing with coworkers — the most underused option Most regional workplaces have Australian or international workers who make regular trips to the nearest large town for shopping. Asking to join these trips — and contributing to petrol costs — is the single most practical transport option available without a car. Most people say yes if you ask directly. Most people who could have asked never do, because asking feels like an imposition. It isn't. Regional workers understand the isolation and help each other navigate it.

• 2

  Buy a cheap car — seriously, do the maths A reliable second-hand car in regional Western Australia costs $3,000–$6,000. Registration and third-party insurance add $400–$800 per year. This sounds like a lot until you calculate what four months of isolation costs in terms of mental health, food quality, and the likelihood of quitting early. Many regional workers who buy a car specifically for their 88 days describe it as the best financial decision of their working holiday. You can sell it when you leave, often for close to what you paid.

• 3

  Online grocery delivery — more available in regional areas than people realise Woolworths and Coles deliver to many regional postcodes in Australia, with delivery times of 2–5 days. The range is limited compared to a city store and delivery fees apply, but for Korean pantry staples that keep — gochujang, doenjang, sesame oil, ramyeon, rice — ordering online every 4–6 weeks is a genuine option. Check delivery availability for your specific postcode before you go. Several Korean online grocery stores (Kmall09, KT Mart Mall) also deliver nationally.

• 4

  Pack before you leave the city — bulk Korean provisions Before leaving Sydney, Melbourne, or Perth for regional work, go to a Korean supermarket and buy 6–8 weeks of non-perishable Korean food. Ramyeon in bulk. Gochujang. Doenjang. Sesame oil. Dried seaweed. Instant rice. The weight is inconvenient to transport once; the alternative is four months of none of it. This is the advice I didn't have and wish I had.

What I Did Wrong — and What I'd Do Differently

Looking back at my four months in Ravensthorpe, the thing I got wrong was not the decision to go — it was the decision to treat the experience as something to be endured rather than managed. I framed the absence of Korean food as character-building. I told myself wanting it was weakness. I didn't plan for the months ahead; I just went and waited to see how it felt.

What I would do differently: pack a box of Korean provisions before leaving Perth. Arrange a rideshare to Albany (two hours away) for a grocery run once a month. Schedule a long weekend in Perth at the eight-week mark — book it before I left. Give myself permission, in advance, to acknowledge that missing home is normal and that addressing the need directly is smarter than suppressing it until the pressure becomes a plane ticket.

I don't regret going to Korea when I did. The trip reminded me of why I'd left, reset something that needed resetting, and I came back to Australia with a clarity I didn't have before. But I could have arrived at the same place without the four months of unnecessary suppression if I'd understood earlier that taking care of yourself is not the opposite of having a genuine experience — it's what makes the genuine experience sustainable.

The Bigger Picture: What the Hard Part of Australia Gives You

I want to end this with something that is true and that I didn't fully understand until I was back in Sydney after Ravensthorpe: the difficult months made the rest of Australia make more sense.

The friendships I formed in that small town — built entirely without the easy social scaffolding of shared language or shared culture — were some of the most honest I've made anywhere. The capacity I built for sitting with discomfort, for finding connection across genuine difference, for valuing the small things (a familiar taste, a voice from home, a clear night sky over a town that no one has heard of) — these are things I carried back to Sydney and then home to Korea, and I still have them.

The homesickness was real. The isolation was real. The flight home after four months was a genuine response to a genuine need. And all of it — including the part where I sat in a small supermarket in a town at the edge of the world and stood in the aisle holding a packet of pasta, understanding for the first time in my life what it means to be a long way from home — was worth it.

Go to the regional placement. Take the Korean food with you. Schedule the trip to the city. Call home more than you think you need to. And if after all of that you still need to book the flight — book the flight. It isn't failure. It's being human, at a specific latitude, far from where you started.