Making Friends in Australia: Why I Stopped Hanging Out With Koreans — and What Happened Next

When you first arrive in Australia, meeting someone who speaks your language feels like finding dry land. In Sydney, there are enough Koreans that you could, if you chose to, spend your entire working holiday speaking Korean, eating Korean food, and essentially living a Korean life in a warmer city. I almost did that. Then I made a deliberate choice not to — and it changed what Australia gave me.

This is not a guide that tells you to avoid your own community. That's not what I'm saying and it's not what I believe. Korean friends in Australia gave me real warmth, real help, and connections I still have. But there was a specific moment — sitting in a room full of Koreans in Sydney, laughing at a Korean joke, eating Korean food we'd bought from Eastwood — where I had a quiet, uncomfortable thought: I could go home and nothing about me would have changed.

That thought was the beginning of a different kind of year.

Sydney: The Korean Bubble Is Real and It's Comfortable

Sydney has one of the largest Korean communities outside of Korea — Eastwood, Strathfield, Lidcombe, Kogarah. There are Korean restaurants, Korean supermarkets, Korean karaoke bars, Korean churches, and Korean Facebook groups where people post about jobs, rooms, and second-hand items in Korean. The infrastructure for living a Korean life in Sydney is genuinely comprehensive.

And the social gravity is strong. When you're tired, when your English isn't flowing well that day, when you've had a frustrating interaction with an Australian bureaucracy that doesn't quite work the way you expected — the relief of finding a Korean to talk to is real and completely understandable. Nobody should feel guilty for seeking comfort in their community.

But I noticed something in my first few months. My English wasn't improving. Not because I wasn't capable — because I wasn't practicing. In the hostel, I gravitated toward Koreans at dinner. On my days off, I ended up in Eastwood. At work, I paired up with the Korean colleagues because it was easier. The language around me was mostly Korean and the effort required to push past that was something I kept deferring.

The decision I made was small and practical: I would find a place to live with a non-Korean housemate. Through a rental listing, I found a room in a house owned by an 80-year-old Australian man — a retired teacher who had lived in the same house for forty years, who had strong opinions about cricket, weak opinions about technology, and an inexhaustible supply of stories about Sydney in the 1970s.

Living with him was the single most effective English immersion experience of my time in Australia. Not because of anything dramatic — just the daily texture of conversation over breakfast, the need to explain where I was going and why, the gentle corrections he'd offer when I used a phrase that didn't quite land. He was not trying to teach me English. He was just living his life and including me in it. That turned out to be worth more than any language class.

Ravensthorpe: A Town With No Koreans

To get a second working holiday visa in Australia, you need to complete 88 days of specified regional work — farming, mining, construction, or a few other categories in a designated regional area. For me, that meant leaving Sydney and heading to a place I'd never heard of: Ravensthorpe, in the south of Western Australia.

Ravensthorpe has a population of approximately 3,000 people. It has a pub, a small supermarket, a hardware store, and a mine. It does not have a Korean restaurant, a Korean supermarket, or, as far as I could tell during the months I spent there, a single Korean person. The nearest city — Albany — is two hours away. Perth is five and a half hours.

The first week was the hardest. Not physically — the work was demanding but manageable. Socially. The easy social moves I'd learned in Sydney — find the Koreans, drift toward the familiar — simply weren't available. Everyone I worked with was Australian, British, French, German, Taiwanese, Brazilian. The only option was to figure out how to connect with people whose frame of reference was entirely different from mine.

What I found, over the weeks that followed, was that the absence of an easy option forced the growth of a harder one. When you can't default to your own language and culture, you start paying closer attention to the person in front of you. You ask more questions. You listen harder. You discover that a 28-year-old from a small town in Germany and a 26-year-old from Seoul have more in common than either of them expected — because the experience of being far from home, building something in an unfamiliar place, is one that creates its own common language.

What Actually Happened When I Stopped Looking for Koreans

The friendships I made in Ravensthorpe and after were qualitatively different from the friendships I'd made in Sydney's Korean community — not better in every way, but different in a way that mattered. They required more effort to build and offered more in return. An Australian friend who explains an idiom you've been misusing for six months. A French traveller who gives you a completely different frame for understanding something about Korea you'd never questioned. A British colleague who argues with you about something you thought everyone agreed on.

These conversations happen when you're outside the bubble. They don't happen when the path of least resistance is always available.

I also noticed something about English. By the time I left Ravensthorpe, I was thinking in English in a way I hadn't been in Sydney. Not because my vocabulary had dramatically expanded — because my relationship with the language had changed. It was no longer a translation task. It was just how I communicated. That shift happened because I had months of sustained practice with no Korean safety net.

Practical Ways to Meet Non-Korean People in Australia

This section is for people who want to make the same choice but aren't sure how to start. The social infrastructure for meeting Koreans in Australia is well established and obvious — the Facebook groups, the community churches, the Korean neighbourhoods. The infrastructure for meeting people from everywhere else requires a bit more intentionality.

• 1

  Choose accommodation that mixes nationalities Hostels that attract a genuinely international crowd — not specifically Korean-popular hostels — are the fastest way to meet people from everywhere at once. When booking, look at recent Google reviews for comments on the social atmosphere. Some hostels have a strong community; others are quiet. The social ones are worth paying a little more for if meeting people is a priority.

• 2

  Find a room with an Australian or non-Korean housemate via Flatmates.com.au This is the single most effective sustained immersion option. Filter for listings where the existing housemates are Australian. The daily low-level conversation — about nothing important — builds language and cultural fluency faster than anything deliberate.

• 3

  Join a sport, activity, or club that Australians actually attend Park runs (free 5km runs held every Saturday morning at hundreds of locations across Australia), local football teams, surfing lessons, rock climbing gyms — any recurring activity where you see the same people week after week builds the repeated contact that friendships are made from. Meetup.com has groups in every major city for almost every interest.

• 4

  Say yes to invitations that feel slightly uncomfortable The Australian pub after work. The backyard barbecue with people you barely know. The beach trip organised by someone from work. These invitations require more social energy than spending an evening with Koreans. They also produce friendships that wouldn't form any other way. The discomfort is usually over within twenty minutes. What follows it is often genuinely good.

• 5

  Regional work — seriously consider it for more than just the visa The second visa requirement forces many working holiday makers into regional areas where their own community simply doesn't exist. This is uncomfortable and ultimately one of the most valuable experiences available in Australia. You meet people you would never meet in a capital city and build the kind of cross-cultural friendships that don't happen when easier options are always available.

The Balance — What I'm Actually Suggesting

I want to be careful here, because this is not an argument that Korean friends are bad or that you should isolate yourself from your own community. Korean friends in Australia gave me practical help when I needed it — tips on jobs, warnings about dodgy landlords, company on difficult days. That community exists for good reasons and it's genuinely valuable.

What I'm suggesting — gently, and from personal experience — is a kind of intentional balance. If every social choice you make defaults to the Korean option when it's available, you will leave Australia with your Korean friendships intact and your English and your understanding of the rest of the world roughly where they were when you arrived.

If you occasionally choose the harder option — the Australian housemate, the international hostel, the regional town with no Korean community — you might return home with something less comfortable and more valuable: a genuinely different perspective on the world, built from sustained contact with people whose frame of reference is completely different from yours.

Australia is one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse countries in the world. The Korean community there is wonderful and worth knowing. But it's one thread in a much larger fabric — and the fabric is worth exploring.

The Bottom Line

I arrived in Sydney as a Korean in Australia. I left Australia as someone who had lived there — which is a different thing entirely. The difference wasn't made by the Korean friendships, which were warm and real. It was made by an 80-year-old Australian landlord who talked about cricket at breakfast, a small town in Western Australia called Ravensthorpe that had never heard of me, and the months of sustained discomfort and connection that followed.

If you're arriving in Australia soon: find your community when you need it. But leave room — deliberate, uncomfortable room — for the people you wouldn't have met if you'd always taken the easy option.