Icelanders work hard and play hard. 

Which is hardly surprising when you think the founding fathers of the country were Scandinavian vikings, shipwrecked on the coast of the island nation. 

Icelanders are proud of their heritage, that they built up from “outlaws” of the ancient world to the fourth most wealthy nation in the world prior to the global financial crisis. 

All the same, Icelander Aegir Kristinsson fell in love with Tasmania, and has barely left since arriving 35 years ago. 

“All these little [Icelandic] settlements were settled, or most of them, by Scandinavian Vkings; half of them didn't land there by choice,” Aegir said.

“With a lot of the early settlers [would] set out from Scandinavia in their Viking ships and they'd go out into the North Sea, which is notorious for rough conditions, and by the time they touched land in a lot of cases their vessels were barely sea worthy. 

“Unless they mended them and did some serious repairs they weren’t going to sail any further, so they didn't exactly crash … [but were] forced to make the most of it and try to survive where they landed.”

Life wasn’t easy to establish in Iceland, a country that averages 15 degrees below Tasmanian temperatures and where six months of the year is dark and the other six light except for a dusk in the depth of night. 

Despite the advances the centuries have brought since then the conditions are as harsh as ever, but the Icelanders have learnt to have fun despite this. 

“Yes it was a hard life, but very rewarding,” Aegir said. 

“In the village I came from for example we had about one kilometre to go from home to school regardless of weather conditions, it was your problem to get there whether you have to strap on a pair of skis or whatever.”

Temperatures that cold need planning, Aegir would leave a tap running overnight to stop the water freezing – something unthinkable here, but perfectly normal in Iceland where water is plentiful. 

“[You had to] dig your way out in the morning and only then to fight the elements on foot because even if you owned a car you couldn’t find it, completely buried and you weren't going to go anywhere with it even if you could find it,” he said. 

“I suppose in that sense it was probably fairly tough but we never used to think so, we didn’t know any different.”

Aegir describes Iceland as a beautiful place, where inky fiords lie beneath rugged mountains, stars and the dancing northern lights overhead. 

Come summer and the long sun stretching into night, and it was a time for celebration. 

“You celebrated this because you knew you were going to hibernate and hide away in the winter,” Aegir said. 

“[The] suicide rate in Iceland is very high because people get very depressed in the winter.”

Aejir is from Tálknafjördur, a small village in the North West of Iceland. 

“When you look at a map of Iceland you've got the main body of the country with a ragged peninsula that almost looks like a spread out hand up North West,” he said. 

“I come from one of these fjords known as the Western Fjords that face into the Greenland Sea, I came from a little arctic village that’s probably about 100, 150 kilometres south of the Arctic Circle.”

It was here Aegir met his wife Karen in 1981 when she arrived to work in the fish factories after running out of money travelling in England. 

Fishing has been a key industry for Iceland, although Aegir said it is waning as the seas around the country have almost been fished out. 

But as a child, fishing was a way of life for Icelanders. 

“You dreamt about becoming a captain on a boat, you were trying to catch a fish whenever you could,” he said.

“I was fairly young when I started to go out to the North Sea as a boathand, I was actually baiting a long line and that is an extremely tough job to do in the winter.”

Growing up in Iceland unemployment was not an option.

Aegir said Icelanders had a strong work ethic and it was socially unacceptable not to work. 

“The government that was in charge when I was being brought up had a very strict rule with one thing: while there is a single foreigner employed in the country they would not pay an unemployment benefit to an Icelander, no arguments about it,” he said. 

The country could boast a zero unemployment rate, Aegir said.

“Back then their work ethic was that strong that unemployment wasn't really a problem.”

After meeting Karen in 1981, the couple came to Australia to avoid rocketing inflation rates. 

“I was trying to buy the place I was born and raised in off my mother, that was in 1982 and the inflation rate was 82 per cent,” Aegir said.

“I had a first home owners loan, which was the best available loan in the country at the time, and I was paying 45 per cent interest ... this is why we decided to sell up, get out and try something different and we came here.”

Relocating to the other side of the world did bring its challenges, “[It was] a huge adjustment, in so many ways, anything and everything was alien to me when I came here, everything turned around in your head.

“I was used to if the wind blew from the south it was a warm wind back in Iceland, if it blew from the south here it’s the opposite.”

But it was the heat that really hit Aegir, coming from autumn into the beginning of summer. 

“I landed a job as a furnaceman in Comalco within 10 days, well I thought it was going to kill me, I thought I was going to melt,” he said. 

But he wouldn’t have it any other way now. 

“​I just fell in love with Tassie, I haven’t wanted to leave since.”