The group is called “Antipodean Nurses London” and it currently has forty-three members, a pinned message about a pub quiz in Clapham that happened seven months ago, and a running argument about whether pavlova is Australian or New Zealand that will never, under any circumstances, be resolved. It is the most important community I have found since moving to London, and I did not even go looking for it. It found me.
I was three weeks into my life in Greenwich, still waiting for my NMC PIN, filling my empty days with long walks and spiralling anxiety, when another Australian nurse at my OSCE preparation course handed me her phone and said, “Here, join this. You will need it.” I typed in my number, got added that evening, and within an hour had received a restaurant recommendation, a warning about a dodgy letting agent in Lewisham, and a voice note from a Kiwi nurse called Meg who simply said, “Welcome to the chaos, mate.” That chaotic little WhatsApp group was about to become the closest thing I had to family on this side of the world.
The First Weeks: When Everything Feels Temporary
There is a loneliness specific to the early weeks of an international move that is difficult to explain to anyone who has not lived it. You are surrounded by millions of people and you know none of them. Your friends back home are asleep when you are awake. Your family is a video call away but the time difference turns every conversation into a logistical negotiation. You are technically fine – housed, fed, safe – but you feel untethered in a way that catches you off guard.
The WhatsApp group cut through that isolation faster than anything else could have. Within my first week as a member, I had been invited to a Sunday roast at someone’s flat in Balham, given a detailed breakdown of which banks were easiest for Australian expats, and talked through a minor panic about whether my qualifications had been received by the NMC. None of these interactions were profound on their own. But together, they formed a net – a sense that there were people nearby who understood exactly where I was emotionally because they had been there themselves, sometimes only weeks before.
That is the thing about a community of overseas nurses. Nobody needs the adjustment explained to them. They are living it.
What the Group Actually Does
On any given day, the WhatsApp chat might contain a question about NHS payslips that nobody understands, a photo of someone’s first snow, a request for a shift swap at a hospital across London, or a genuinely heartfelt message from a nurse who has had a terrible day and just needs to be heard. The range is enormous, and that is what makes it work. It is not a professional network. It is not a social club. It is both and neither. It is just life, shared in real time with people who happen to be going through the same strange experience you are.
There are practical threads that have saved me hours of stress. Someone will post a step-by-step guide to registering with a GP, or a comparison of nurse agency rates, or a heads-up about a train strike affecting the morning commute. There are social threads – pub nights, park picnics in summer, a disastrous but memorable attempt at a group hike along the South Downs that ended in a pub after four kilometres because it started raining sideways. And then there are the quieter threads, the ones that matter most. A nurse asking if it is normal to cry after her first week on a ward. Another sharing that she passed her OSCE on the second attempt. Someone posting at two in the morning because they cannot sleep and they miss home and they just need someone to tell them it gets easier.
It always gets easier. And someone always replies.
The Aussie-Kiwi Dynamic
I need to address the elephant in the room, or rather the sheep in the room, because any group that combines Australians and New Zealanders is going to involve a certain amount of friendly antagonism. The pavlova argument is just the tip of the iceberg. There are ongoing disputes about rugby, about accents, about who makes better coffee, and about whether Russell Crowe belongs to Australia or New Zealand, a question that apparently depends on whether he has done something impressive or embarrassing that week.
But beneath the ribbing is something genuinely lovely. Australians and New Zealanders share enough cultural DNA that communication is effortless – the humour, the directness, the refusal to take ourselves too seriously – but we are different enough that there is always something new to learn about each other. Several of my closest friendships in London are with Kiwi nurses I would never have met if not for this group. We bonded over shared bewilderment at British customs, mutual homesickness for the southern hemisphere, and the unspoken understanding that when someone says they are fine, you check anyway.
There is also a professional dimension to the Aussie-Kiwi bond that I had not anticipated. The nursing registration pathways from Australia and New Zealand to the UK are similar enough that we face many of the same bureaucratic hurdles, which means advice flows freely and nobody has to start from scratch. When a new member joins and asks about the OSCE or the CBT, chances are at least five people have a recent, relevant answer ready to go. That collective knowledge is genuinely powerful, and it is offered without hesitation every single time.
The Moments That Made Us a Family
Communities are not built by group chats. They are built by moments, and some of ours have been extraordinary.
There was the evening six of us crammed into a tiny flat in Peckham to watch the All Blacks play at an hour that would have been unreasonable anywhere except in a room full of homesick nurses. There was the afternoon we threw a surprise birthday picnic in Greenwich Park for a nurse from Perth who had mentioned, just once, that she was dreading her first birthday away from home. There was the night shift debrief that turned into a three-hour dinner because one of us had received difficult news from back home and nobody wanted to leave her sitting alone.
And then there are the smaller moments – the ones without a story arc but with all the warmth. A jar of Vegemite left on someone’s doorstep during a rough week. A lift to the airport at four in the morning when someone was flying home for a family emergency. A voice note that just says, “Thinking of you, hope the shift was not too awful.” These are not grand gestures. They are the textures of genuine care between people who chose each other in a city that did not come with a built-in support system.
When the Group Shows Up in Real Life
The most striking thing about this community is how willing people are to move from the digital to the physical without hesitation. Someone posts that they are moving flats and need help, and four people show up with a borrowed van. Someone mentions they have a free Saturday, and by lunchtime there is a plan. The barrier between online and offline is almost nonexistent, and I think that is because the stakes are real. We are not networking. We are not performing friendship for an audience. We are a group of people far from home who decided, collectively and without ever formally agreeing to it, that we would look after each other.
What I Would Tell a Nurse Who Has Just Arrived
If you have just landed in London with your nursing qualifications and a suitcase and you do not yet have a community, please hear me when I say: find one. It does not have to be this specific WhatsApp group, though you are welcome to reach out and I will happily add you. It can be a group of Filipino nurses, or South African nurses, or a mixed cohort from your OSCE prep course, or the colleagues on your first ward. The nationality matters less than the shared understanding.
But do not try to do this alone. London is too big and too indifferent for that, and nursing is too emotionally demanding to process without people who get it. The strongest, most capable nurses I know here are not the ones who toughed it out solo. They are the ones who found their people early and leaned on them without shame.
Why I Am Writing This
I am writing this because nobody told me, before I moved, that the friendships would be the best part. Every blog I read before leaving Sydney was about NMC registration timelines, cost-of-living breakdowns, and which London boroughs to live in. All useful, and I have written some of those articles myself. But nobody mentioned that at some point you would be sitting in a park in Greenwich on a Tuesday evening with a group of Australians and New Zealanders you met four months ago, laughing so hard your ribs ache, and you would think: these people are my family now.
That is what happened to me. And if you let it, it will happen to you too. The group chat is always open.