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Young New Zealanders are venturing out into the world again.

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australian office. Subscribe to receive it by email. This week's issue is written by Pete McKenzie, a New Zealander based in New York.

When Tyla Stevenson, a 23-year-old New Zealand campaigner South Island, applied for a job at an Australian cafe in New York, the first thing his manager said was, "Oh, it's great to hear your accent! It's been so long."

For years, a steady stream of young New Zealanders have traveled to cities like New York and London to experience culture shock , homesickness and a very foreign world. Border closures during the pandemic have hampered this flow. At the same time, many members of the New Zealand diaspora have rushed home, where, with the quarantine and lockdowns, people could live without Covid-19.

But after infectious variants and restive populations forced the country to lift its latest restrictions, young neo- New Zealanders are venturing out into the world again.

Stevenson is one of those young New Zealanders, I'm another. I moved to New York at the end of July to do a master's degree, and I find more and more New Zealanders everywhere: in a bar serving half-litre margaritas in Spanish Harlem, in a Blue Bottle in Morningside Heights, on a rooftop in Brooklyn.

It's a return to normal for New Zealand, which has the third largest diaspora per capita in the developed world. Hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders live abroad for higher education or work. And before the pandemic, tens of thousands more traveled on working holidays every year, which usually involved whipping up flat whites – the perfect latte – in cafes or pulling pints in pubs. p>

These "O.E. - experiences abroad - have become a rite of passage for the middle class. The pandemic has dealt a blow to the practice, but government data shows an apparent comeback: the number of New Zealand citizens leaving in 2022 through June was 11% higher than the previous year, with departures concentrated among people aged 20-29.

Many New Zealanders praise O.E.s as an informal professional development program for the country, providing experience and prospects abroad in an otherwise isolated archipelago. More fundamentally, however, traveling to bigger countries and more frenetic lifestyles is an exercise in deliberate culture shock.

Despite studying alongside people around the world, other students find my half-mumble accent the hardest to understand. I miss the native New Zealand bush. I am incapable of the American assurance that New Zealanders regard as buffoonery. I almost became a stereotypical New Yorker walking down 32nd Street the other week: my parents called and I started choking on the sound of their voices.

These struggles are the point. New Zealanders abroad revel in this homesickness. It's a reminder of the allure of home, which was easy to forget when I was there.

It's a strange privilege: we choose to experience something that, until recently, other New Zealanders have grudgingly endured. From October 2020, places in New Zealand's limited quarantine facilities were only available by lottery. Citizens who wanted to return home found that they could not. The result was anger and protracted legal battles, as New Zealanders who were homesick abroad fought their way back.

Now , however, New Zealand is no longer a pandemic oasis. There is less urgency to return. And there is reason to wonder if, for young New Zealanders discovering the rest of the world, the attractions of the house and its calm and peaceful community will not be enough to bring them back.

Luke White, a New Zealander intern at the United Nations, is a good example. "Whenever I start to get homesick," he said, "I always call a friend and ask, 'What's going on at home?