For almost 30 years, Australia's best young financial brains have beaten a path to Wall Street to do battle in the world's toughest business environment.
Some have gone for the adrenalin rush from working on the biggest and most complex deals on the planet, others to test themselves against the smartest guys in the room, or to be at the cutting edge of finance.
All were motivated, at least to some extent, by the huge pay in what has been a gilded age in US banking and finance. But now the lucrative tide, which began with the aggressive mergers and acquisitions advisory practices of the investment banks in the 1980s and continued to rise with the growth of hedge funds, loan securitisation and the derivatives market, has turned.
Jobs in Wall Street's financial services sector are drying up faster than the Murray River, forcing many Australian expats to pack up and return home.
Others are wondering if it's worth staying on, given the demonising of the huge bonuses that made working on Wall Street so worthwhile for so long.
In 2007, the average bonus at Goldman Sachs was more than $US650,000 a year, a figure based on the bank's whole staff. This meant even mid-range bankers were taking home millions. But the global financial crisis has changed everything by exposing the fool's gold nature of much Wall Street wealth.
For expat Australian investment banker John Stewart, the prospect of a shrinking bonus was part of his decision to quit JPMorgan Chase, where he had worked as a senior executive in the technology M&A practice, and opt for a job in Sydney with investment bank Lazard.
"In terms of working on Wall Street, I couldn't have had it better," Mr Stewart, 38, said yesterday from his "for sale" home in San Francisco.
"I was working with a great firm with the smartest people and on some of the best deals in the world. And I had all of that with the luxury of living in San Francisco rather than New York.
"In a normal market, I might have stayed another three to five years, but in the current climate it's definitely not monetarily compelling to stay. We have two kids and have always known we would return to Australia eventually, so now seems like the right opportunity.
"If I'd waited another two years, I might not have had an opportunity as good as this to re-establish in Australia."
For those unlucky Australians sacked in the big wave of US retrenchments, returning to Australia is one thing, but finding work is another matter.
Brent Quinn of inwardXpat, a firm that helps returning Australians find employment, says even with international experience, financial jobs are hard to find.
"In the banking and finance hubs of Sydney and Melbourne, the situation is much the same as in the US - there are not a lot of jobs out there," Mr Quinn said. "That may change, but right now we're putting a lot of effort into getting people to think about redeploying their skills outside of banking and finance."
In New York, the rise in the number of out-of-work Australians has seen more job inquiries at Advance and the American Australian Association, agencies that represent Australian professionals in the US.
Advance's Diana Pizzari said on the weekend: "They don't want to go home but they don't have many choices."
However, Camille Cassel at AAA said many of the Australians leaving New York were heading to Asia - to Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai - rather than going home.
"They see the US as a sinking ship, whereas Asia is the up-and-coming entity."
