Nobody tells you how heavy it gets, carrying a country on your back in a place where nobody knows your name.

You get used to it. You go to class, you go to work, you come home, you microwave something, you text your mother a version of your week that leaves out the hard parts. You tell yourself this is just what studying abroad is.

And it is. But it’s also the thing that quietly wears people down, and almost nobody says it out loud.

So let me say it out loud — and then let me tell you what 270 of us did about it.

The part we don’t talk about, in numbers

I want to put some evidence next to the feeling, because when you’re in it, isolation convinces you that you’re the only one.

You’re not. The research on this is not subtle.

  • Loneliness is the norm, not the exception. Allianz Partners surveyed nearly 800 international students in Australia for its State of Student Healthcare Report and found that 77% had experienced loneliness in the previous twelve months. 55% were classified as vulnerable, and two-thirds had found it challenging to find somewhere to live.
  • It shows up in our mental health. A systematic review in the Journal of Mental Health, pulling together nineteen separate studies of international students in Australia, found loneliness and isolation affecting 60–65% of students, and psychological distress running between 31.6% and 54% depending on the study. Anxiety and depression appear throughout.
  • We are measurably less well than the people around us. A study published in BMC Public Health measured 375 international students in Melbourne on the Personal Wellbeing Index — a standard tool — and got an average of 60.7. The Australian population average is 77.5. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a different quality of life, being lived on the same streets.
  • And we don’t ask for help. In a study of nearly 1,400 students at an Australian university, 17.1% of international students had ever sought help for a mental health problem, compared with 51.4% of domestic students. Allianz found the same gap from the other direction: 41% of students reported a mental health condition, and only one in five had sought treatment. The barriers named were cost, language and culture, stigma, and simply not knowing where to look.

Read those numbers again and notice what they add up to. A large group of people, mostly lonely, often distressed, mostly not reaching out — and mostly assuming they’re the only ones.

That last part is the cruellest bit. The condition is shared. The experience of it is completely private.

If you want the long version of why we stay quiet, I’ve written about why male international students don’t ask for help — the fear, the family story, and the free services almost none of us know exist.

Why a walkathon

You can respond to all of that with a report. Australia has plenty of reports about us.

We get talked about constantly in this country. We’re a number in a policy announcement, a line in a housing debate, a figure in a visa cap. We’re discussed on the news by people who have never sat in a share house at 2am doing the arithmetic of whether to send money home or fix the car.

We get talked about. We rarely get talked to.

So AusWISE didn’t write another report. On Sunday the 2nd of August, at nine in the morning, we put a walk in Princes Park and asked people to show up.

The logic was simple, and it’s the same logic the research keeps landing on: if loneliness is the problem, the answer is not information. It’s other people, in a physical place, at a set time.

You cannot read your way out of isolation. You have to stand in it with someone.

What actually happened

More than 270 participants came onto one ground.

More than 19 industry mentors came, and stayed — walked the whole thing, talked to students for hours. More than 10 VIPs showed up, people whose Sunday mornings are worth something, who chose to spend one walking beside international students instead of talking about us from a stage somewhere else.

And I need to be honest about the money, because people assume events like this come out of a grant or a corporate sponsorship.

This one didn’t. It ran on close to nothing.

Every permit, every compliance form, every risk assessment, every first aid arrangement, every roster and water station was handled by AusWISE volunteers. One hundred per cent volunteer-led and volunteer-managed. Most of them international students and immigrants themselves — people already juggling study, jobs, visa deadlines and families overseas.

They did it in the gaps between all of that. That’s where this event was built. In the gaps.

I mention it not to be humble about it, but because it matters to anyone reading this who’s waiting for funding before they start something. Two hundred and seventy people stood in a park because a group of volunteers decided it should happen, and then did the unglamorous work.

What it was like to be there

I spent most of that morning walking with Samantha Ratnam.

I was her buddy for the day — my job was to host her, introduce her around, keep her company. A social worker of fifteen years. The former leader of the Victorian Greens, who sat in the Legislative Council. And she spent her Sunday morning walking beside international students, asking questions and then actually waiting for the answers.

We swapped stories. We laughed more than I expected to. Not once did it feel like being managed by someone important.

That’s the part I keep coming back to. The people who genuinely want to help are usually the easiest ones to talk to. We just don’t get near enough of them to find out.

There’s one moment I keep going back to. I’d been at the park since early, doing the small unglamorous jobs — signage, rosters, checking people knew where to stand. Somewhere around the start of the walk I stopped and turned around, and the field was just full. Not a polite handful. Full. It was a glorious Sunday morning — blue sky, winter sun, the kind of morning Melbourne gives you about six times a year — and every one of those people had decided this was where they wanted to spend it.

What 270 of us walked away with

I’ve had a week to think about what actually changed, and it comes down to three things.

We know where we stand. Isolation lies to you. It tells you everyone else is coping, that your struggle is a personal failure rather than a shared condition. Then you stand in a park with 270 people living the same week you’re living, and the lie falls apart. Not in a competitive way — in a locating way. Like finding yourself on a map. The weight you’ve been carrying isn’t a defect in you. It’s the actual weight of the thing you’re doing. Other people are carrying it too, and they’re still standing.

We know there is support, and we’ve seen its face. That 17% help-seeking figure isn’t about laziness. It’s about not knowing what’s real. A service on a website is theoretical. A mentor on a walking track who asks what you’re studying and then gives you their number is not. Nineteen-plus mentors were reachable that morning in a way they are simply not reachable in my normal week. Some students found a mentor. Some found out about a service they didn’t know existed. Some found out that professionals in this city want them to do well — which sounds small until you’ve spent two years assuming nobody does.

We belonged somewhere, out loud. Not privately, not in a group chat. On grass, in public, 270 strong, in a city that mostly encounters us as a statistic. Belonging isn’t a feeling you generate on your own in a rented room. It’s something a place gives you, and it needs a place to happen in.

And then Monday came

I want to end this honestly, because this blog is not a place for tidy endings.

The Walkathon did not cure anyone’s loneliness. On Monday morning I went back to my normal week, and so did everyone else. The feeling of standing in that field faded, the way feelings do. The 77% is still 77%.

But something stayed. I know now that those 270 people exist. I know some of their faces. I know where to find them next time. And when the isolation starts telling me its usual lies, I have evidence against it.

That’s not nothing. When you’re far from home, that’s actually quite a lot.

If you’re an international student reading this and the last few months have been heavier than you’ve admitted to anyone — please don’t wait for the next event. Come to it, yes. But also talk to someone this week. The research says you probably won’t. I’m asking you to be the exception.

There is more support in this country than most of us realise, and none of it works until you use it. I’ve put the ones I trust in the support list every international student in Australia should save — crisis lines, free counselling, money and legal help, all in one place.

You’re not doing this alone, even when it feels exactly like that.

Sources

— Asanka Tharindu