Let’s pretend for a minute that you moved to Williamsburg about twenty years ago. Brooklyn’s gentrification was in full swing, but it wasn’t yet happening at warp speed. At the time, you played in a noise band that once opened for an Animal Collective side project. Then you moved to Vermont, where you now make equitable cheddar cheese, or maybe the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where you run an inn informed by the concept of radical hospitality. In any case, you haven’t been back to the neighborhood since, say, June 2009. But for whatever reason, you’re in town today, so why not check it out?
The changes are overwhelming. There’s the transformation of Kent Avenue into a glass canyon, vaguely Miami-ish and boring. (Didn’t you once see TV on the Radio over there, by the river?) The swarms of Murray Hill types in puffer vests and quarter-zips. The glut of hotels. The disappearance of that Puerto Rican place you went to, like, three times but told everyone was your absolute favorite. And then: What’s with all these Australian restaurants and cafés, offering “coffee, brekkie & vibes,” sausage rolls and pavlova, and, at that one “Australian coastal” place, “kangaroo tucker” and “early birdies cockys”?
Like so many stories do, this one starts with a war. Before the twenty-first century, there were not a lot of Australians in New York. Most came over to work for international companies, like financial institutions. Some met American girls and brought them back home to Melbourne or Brisbane, blessing their kids with American passports. A few put down roots, though, and started pushing the Australian Agenda, plying unsuspecting Americans with bottles of Victoria Bitter and meat pies, like Frank Ford, who, alongside his brother Will, opened the restaurant Eight Mile Creek on Mulberry Street in 1998. Five years later, Nick Mathers and Lincoln Pilcher opened Ruby’s, a hot spot on Mulberry that made one Australian journalist feel, as she later wrote in The New Yorker, as if she’d “been transported back home to Sydney.” That was because, as another Australian told me, everyone from back home was working there. A lot of Aussies, including Heath Ledger, were also hanging out at Café Gitane in the aughts. The French Moroccan restaurant—sometimes credited with popularizing aesthetically pleasing avocado toast in the United States—became a major Australian point of reference. “There was a little bit of a pilgrimage vibe,” says Brooklyn-raised Ken Addington, who was the executive chef at Eight Mile Creek. One person I interviewed even remembered the restaurant being featured in the in-flight magazine of Qantas Airways, Australia’s flag carrier.
The year 2003 wasn’t just when an Australian beachhead was established in downtown Manhattan, though. It was also when the United States invaded Iraq. The war was not popular with many of our allies, like the French, who had their heads screwed on right for once and told President George W. Bush to get lost. Not Australian Prime Minister John Howard, though. He was playing the long game. He knew he could take over Madison Avenue and get Americans hooked on flat whites, so he agreed to join the U.S.-led coalition, sending around two thousand troops to Iraq. This partnership, along with the United States-Australia Free Trade Agreement, is widely believed to have led to the creation of the E-3 visa. It was signed into law in 2005 as part of an appropriations bill for the Global War on Terror and offered Australians an easier path to working in the United States. “The blood visa,” as one Australian in New York put it to me, “was our little treat.” Other members of the coalition—Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Tonga, and so on—were left out.
Every year, 10,500 of these visas are made available exclusively to Australians, so long as they have a job offer and a specialized skill they claim they’re using here. “It’s a gift,” Alfred Bridi, an immigration attorney, tells me. “A lot of immigration attorneys and advocates are trying to add another nationality to the list, so as not to waste the unused visas.” While the E-3 is a non-immigrant visa that doesn’t provide a path to citizenship, it lasts for two years and can theoretically be renewed indefinitely. To give you a sense of the program’s perks, the similar H-1 B visa has a cap of 85,000 for applicants from all foreign countries—nearly 800,000 people applied for it in fiscal year 2024—and a maximum stay of six years. The lottery opens just once a year. That visa does have its advantages: unlike the E-3, there’s a path to a green card. “Once you’re in, it’s great,” Bridi says, but “the demand far outweighs the supply.” By contrast, the E-3 visa quota is rarely, if ever, met (hence the repeated efforts to make them available to the Irish as well), and Australians can apply any time of the year. The E-3 is like a kind of cheat code.
It took a while for the effects of the E-3 visa to really be noticed by New Yorkers. Australian media, though, was on top of it. The influx was perhaps first documented in a 2007 article in the Melbourne newspaper The Age, which noted the meat pies for sale at the East Village’s Tuck Shop and described Park Slope as “a gentrifying suburb newly discovered by professionals and young families.” In 2012, the Sydney Morning Herald declared one made-up neighborhood, Nolita, to be a different made-up neighborhood, Little Australia, because there were ten Australian-owned art galleries, clothing stores, cafés, and nightclubs there. It wasn’t until a couple years later that local outlet Gothamist finally asked the question now on every New Yorker’s mind: Where were all these blokes coming from? The city’s Australian diaspora had ballooned, Gothamist noted, from an estimated 5,537 in 2005 to 20,000 by 2011. They were stealing all of our creative director jobs while denigrating the city’s coffee scene. They had no respect for the Latin lunch counter.
For a while, as the Herald report suggested, Nolita had a legitimate claim to being the Australian neighborhood of choice. Speaking to the paper in 2012, the model Jess Hart said, “It feels like a community, and that’s hard to find in a big, concrete city like New York.” As Australians will tell you, there aren’t a lot of people in Australia, and there’s no place quite as crazy and dense as Manhattan. In many ways, then, Brooklyn was more familiar-feeling. So off they went.
Whites Flat and Powdered
As it turns out, the E-3 visa was not the only consequential, city-transforming piece of legislation that was passed in 2005. That year, the New York City Council approved the rezoning of the Williamsburg waterfront, changes which were blasted at the time for bearing “little resemblance to the community plans” previously put forward. Instead of new low- and mid-rise housing that would be affordable for Williamsburg’s existing tenants, the rezoning allowed for the construction of twenty-story luxury towers, leading to the accelerated transformation of the neighborhood, particularly on its northside.
“Every time I’m in that area, I genuinely don’t feel like I’m in New York.”
Coincidence? There are no coincidences. As the story of Williamsburg’s gentrification goes, the artists who had been displacing the neighborhood’s longtime residents, many Latino, were themselves soon displaced by more well-heeled newcomers. (The Latino population declined from 34.1 percent in 2000 to 24.8 percent in 2022, while the percentage of residents making more than $250,000 annually increased from 1.6 percent to 16.5 percent over a similar period.) Those newcomers included Australians, who were generally better-off, if not all wealthy. They weren’t fleeing war, or an economic implosion, or a dictatorship. They were less burdened by college debt than their American peers, and the exchange rate was good. Some came for career opportunities; others just because they wanted to be in the center of the world. As the aughts turned into the 2010s, Brooklyn was cemented as a global signifier of culture and taste, the destination for small-batch everything.
By this time, Williamsburg in particular was already over for the starving artists, having evolved from a place you moved seeking cheap rent into the place you moved if you wanted to be cool. As early as 2003, hipsters were lamenting to the Times that the neighborhood’s end was imminent. They complained about yuppies, small dogs, trust-fund layabouts, and everyone dressing exactly the same. Some even reported moving back to Manhattan because the rent was becoming comparable. Nonetheless, Williamsburg was home to a lot of young, ambitious people, and it was widely perceived as a place where things were happening, especially by those living outside of New York. Vice was at the peak of its relevance and would soon cannibalize what remained of the neighborhood’s DIY institutions, kicking the latest cycle of counterculture’s commodification into high gear. These were the days of the French allegedly saying “très Brooklyn” to mean something was cool, when trendy neighborhoods in other cities were designated “the Williamsburg of . . .” As in, Miller Beach is the Williamsburg of Gary, Indiana.
The neighborhood’s rise as an object of public fascination dovetailed with the advent of social media, which Samantha Herron, a restaurant manager and jewelry designer, believes played a role in ushering in Williamsburg’s Australian Moment. Instagram was purchased by Facebook in 2012, the year before Herron moved over. Her friends back home were able to see her day-to-day in Brooklyn online, and they wanted in. Though still in its infancy, the platform provided us then-young members of New York’s creative class with a new outlet for our primary interest: telling other people we were having a better time than them. “It was a word-of-mouth thing. Like my friend Jeremy, who moved over the year after me, he was like, ‘Damn, it looks like so much fun,’” Herron recalls. “People were seeing a bunch of people over here on Instagram, and it wasn’t difficult to come as an Australian, so they were like, ‘Fuck it.’”
As with Café Gitane, the influence of Heath Ledger also played a role. Many may have first heard about Williamsburg through Five Leaves, where Ledger was going to be a partner before he died in 2008, with former Eight Mile Creek chef Ken Addington in the kitchen. The one Australian everyone outside of Australia knew, Ledger had moved to Brooklyn in 2005, becoming, per his friend and local tattoo artist Scott Campbell, “the Williamsburg dude”—such a neighborhood fixture that people stopped caring. Ledger’s life was a picture of Brooklyn bohemia and aspirational for many who moved to the neighborhood to be around artists. “Five Leaves is different now, but it influenced a lot of Australians to check out Williamsburg,” says Andrew Cenita, who was until recently the general manager of the café and bar Bright Side. “When I came to NYC for my twenty-first birthday, I was like, ‘Oh, I gotta check that place out because of Heath Ledger.’” Sam Hillman, a photographer and writer who has lived in Brooklyn since 2014, agrees. “I remember coming here in 2011 with my mom, and it was, like, incredibly different then, but we all knew to go there because of Heath Ledger,” she says.
Five Leaves’ owners included an Aussie, but no one was calling it a “Noosa Heads-style bistro.” Truthfully, there was a market opportunity for all of the neighborhood’s new antipodean arrivals.
Australians like to go outside; they wake up early; they enjoy fresh breakfasts. New York has some great, famous breakfast standards—bagels and lox; rice roll carts; bodega bacon, egg, and cheeses—but the city is oriented toward the night, and freshness is not a word associated with our first foods. So in the early 2010s, enterprising Australians began opening up more recognizably Australian places, a barrage of sunny, mostly Melbourne-inspired cafés serving flat whites and avo toast. It seemed that many were convinced they had invented the concept of eating food with coffee, as well as the idea that coffee should be good, and they wanted to evangelize us. These were dark years, when New York’s indigenous styles of caffeination—the burnt Italian American espresso and the diner drip—were under attack by coffee nerds: Nordic cafés with roasts as light as lemonade, and, yes, Australians. (If they were bummed about the quality of coffee in the city, many were excited by the price and relative quality of another stimulant, cocaine being notoriously expensive down under due to Australia’s distance from important production centers.)
In 2012, the Australian coffee brand Toby’s Estate opened a big, franchised café on Williamsburg’s North 6th Street (it was later rebranded as Partners). Two years later, Luke Woodard and Ryan De Remer opened the café Sweatshop (now just Shop) on Metropolitan Avenue. Two college friends from Melbourne, they served “brekkie” and jaffles—a type of toasted sandwich—prepared by an almost entirely Australian staff. “Yes, there’s a Little Collins, AND a Flinders Lane. At Sweatshop you can even order a ‘Toorak’ or a ‘Templestowe’ jaffle. Seriously,” one Aussie journalist later wrote of the café, allegedly in English. Woodard would advertise barista positions on a Facebook group called Australians in New York, which remains an active source of information for recent and aspiring arrivals, and he made a point of hiring people from back home. “Someone coming to an Aussie café and getting served by someone who is not Aussie—it’s like going to a French restaurant, and there aren’t any French people working,” he says.
The first proper Melbourne-style café in the neighborhood, Sweatshop was a networking space for members of the Australian diaspora. As Cenita, who worked as a barista there, sees it, Aussies gravitated to the café because of its familiarity and abundance of compatriots. “We started getting a lot of other Australians coming through, because it was exactly what they wanted,” Woodard says, and several of the café’s employees confirm that was the case. “I think the way a lot of Australians know each other is through Sweatshop, when it was called that,” Hillman says, who got connected to other emigres from Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth via the café.
Was everyone moving to the neighborhood at the time Australian? Possibly. In 2010, the Australian jewelry designer Scosha Woolridge opened a studio and store on Grand Street. Two years later, Awoke Vintage relocated to the neighborhood from Perth, redefining “bicoastal,” while the Greenpoint rooftop bar Northern Territory was started by Australian bartender Jamie Toll. “At that specific time in Williamsburg, the scale of Australians felt really high. There were Australians on every single block,” Hillman says. Woodard agrees: “It was definitely lush.” A friend of mine who worked at the bar The Woods between 2015 and 2016 described the crowd as “dominated by Australians,” as well as “people from Vice, bridge and tunnels, lesbians on Wednesdays, and biracial couples.” The editor of this very story told me she discovered Williamsburg’s Australian underbelly through her cousin, who lived off of Bedford Avenue in these years and was plugged in with a local crew.
In some cases, it seemed like whole social circles had been ported over. But even when they don’t share this kind of personal history, Australians move in packs and often stick to their own. (It should be noted that these Australians do, in fact, speak the same language as us, despite their pronunciation of filet, and, usually being white, experience relatively little friction integrating into American culture.) “They’re like teenagers. They’re super excited about themselves,” Addington says. “We have Australian friends who don’t really have non-Australian friends.” Even Aussies tend to agree. “I guess it’s because you meet one, and literally in their cupboard, there’s another eleven,” Hillman says. “People always ask me, ‘Why do all Australians know each other?’ And I’ve said, ‘If you saw another astronaut on the moon, you would probably wave.’”
Downfall Down Under
When I asked some of my sources whether Australians think about how their presence in New York is intrinsically tied to the Iraq War, I got versions of “not so much” in reply. One Aussie said that people turn a blind eye—they know, but they don’t think too hard about it. A non-Australian observer of the scene told me he believes the visa is seen positively as “part of their closeness with America.”
But not everyone who came over to Brooklyn—or even most—intended to become “Australian American.” Living in the States can be a bit of an extended vacation for many Australians. Few are necessarily committed to staying long-term, even if they want to stay medium-term. By the end of the 2010s, some of the Australians from the cohort of earlier arrivals had already said goodbye to New York, even as their numbers overall swelled to thirty thousand around the city.
The pandemic pushed many more to leave, especially those employed in the service industry, who suddenly found themselves out of work, with nothing to do and rents they couldn’t afford. According to the Aussies I interviewed, most of the expats they knew left. “A fuck-ton of people moved back in 2020,” says Cenita. “It was like a full reset.” Have the Australians moved on from Williamsburg? My friend Johnny, who has hung on unlike most of his friends from back home, believes it was a moment in time that has since passed. He doesn’t see a new wave of Aussies moving into this part of Brooklyn.
Twenty years on from the creation of the E-3 visa, approvals are up again after dropping significantly in 2020 and 2021. Some things seem to have hardly changed in that time: with its unconditional support for Israel’s assault on Gaza, the United States is wrapped up in yet another disastrous conflict in the Middle East. But it’s unlikely we’re on the cusp of creating any new pathways to immigration. While there’s uncertainty around what Donald Trump’s immigration policy will look like this time around, his campaign promise of mass deportations suggests a major crackdown is coming, even if he has reportedly expressed his desire for more immigrants from countries like Denmark, Norway, and Switzerland.
The Aussies washing up on the shores of New York now arrive to a different city than the one that greeted their predecessors. Over the last decade, Williamsburg has become unrecognizable to the people who moved there when it was becoming unrecognizable to the people who grew up there. Grand Street’s Toñita’s advertises itself as the neighborhood’s “longest and last Latino social club remaining,” while the blocks around it resemble nothing so much as an outdoor mall. A new, two-story Hermès flagship store is going up on North 6th. “I never really cared about shit in Williamsburg,” a friend from neighboring Bushwick told me. Still, he continued, “every time I’m in that area, I genuinely don’t feel like I’m in New York.”
The other week, I made the trek over to Williamsburg, where I shared a few rounds with some Australian holdouts at the Grand Street bar Iona. (This being a Scottish-slash-Irish establishment, my companions were supporting, in a sense, the very people trying to move in on their precious E-3s.) While my friend Johnny has admitted that the neighborhood is basically a glorified campus village for overpaid software engineers and rich entitled kids with fluffy white dogs, at the bar, he made his position clear: “You cannot attribute the downfall of Williamsburg to Australians.”