41 posts tagged “australia”
Right!
Considering that the Original Purpose of this blog was documenting my educational rampages across the disapproving wastes of Ye Olde Lions-And-Unicorns Mother Country, perhaps the fact that I am now attempting to batter my way back in to said Mother Country for another postgraduate round indicates that I should start writing the damn thing again.
(It also indicates that I am a complete glutton for punishment and have little to no respect for the demands of my accent, which was damaged so severely by the last English jaunt that I may never be viewed as properly Strayan even again. The masochistic strain is enhanced by the fact that I will once again be exposed to people trying to make me take tea seriously. I may not cope.)
However: after essentially falling out of my university feet-first, my next move is to try and present myself as a Charming Convict Lass oozing with talent/brains/legs/je ne sais quoi to a bunch of universities offering that much-mocked degree on the post-graduate platter, the Creative Writing Masters Degree. One imagines it, runty, snuffling and slightly diabetic, stabled with all the various Economics MAs and the M.Phils in Fine Arts, trying to hide itself in a corner lest a lot of MBAs unintentionally stampede it.
The amount of flak the Creative Writing Degree gets is nicely summarised, I think, by the amount of conversations I've had where well-meaning friends, on the mere mention of the concept, go on a long rant about how 'writing can't be taught except by experience' and their belief that these MAs are a blatantly vampiric measure by those university systems trying to latch on to gullible, Zadie-Smith-reading necks. However, though there are many reasons, suffice to say that my creative approach is so in need of an environment of discipline and guidance that were a twelve-week course in a dungeon with a Literary Dominatrix offered somewhere, I would be on the application list so fast I'd break the land-speed record. (If one more person says 'Yes, but...' to me following this explanation, I shall begin sharpening my stainless steel knitting needles.)
Thus, I am currently in the process of applying to, or waiting for a response from, several UK/US universities. It's a charming process, involving a delicate mixture of failed organisation, shuffling envelopes, forgetting forms, discovering the printer is only using green ink for a week in a presumed belated celebration of St Patrick's Day, managing forgetful referees, abject panic, the attempted sorting of 14 deranged short pieces (40,000 words) spread out on a double bed into something mildly resembling a sane portfolio of 5,000, the Ancestral Visa Tango, looking at finances, covering eyes and looking at finances again in the hopes of change, waiting by telephones, more panic, more deranged short pieces, horribly lying Personal Statements about how excellent I am, Rebekah Del Rio's version of Llorando, improperly applied stamps, incompetent post offices, fits of depression in New York hotel rooms and more, calmly comforting panic.
The fruit of one of these applications- an imminent telephone interview with a UK university so scarily prestigious it probably once used Australians as basement slaves who never saw sunlight and had to donate their bodily hair for ink-blotters- has increased the panic to a nice, shrill fear.
I may soon give up, apply for an English Lit PhD on stoats in medieval literature, and huddle inside a university with very thick walls for the next four years. (The fact that I have also, for reasons I can honestly only attribute to reading too much of The Economist and Amaryta Sen, applied for a Global Politics degree at the London School Of Economics indicates that the next little while is going to be very, very odd.)
Over ten months in Europe, I experienced exactly one thunderstorm. When it hit, there was a mad rush to go outside and watch it. Herein lies the difference: the British treated it as an extremely exciting rarity, like Christmas, or nuclear warfare. I, however, regarded being threatened with death by lightning, drenching and hailstones as a very comforting reminder of home. The thunderstorm which has just passed over Sydney was a case in point.
On the left, boys and girls, we have its encroaching cloud over the course of five minutes. (The official weather reporter on the radio was squawking 'Anybody who is outside, GET INSIDE, RIGHT NOW.' There were helicopters warning yachts to get out of the harbour. And I was standing on my balcony, taking photographs. Truly I am either brave or very stupid.)
It gets better. On the right, we have my view of the city. It disappeared in twenty seconds, which is about as long as the average person takes to sprint 100m at top speed. Which is utterly ridiculous.
Australia knows how to do many things: win the cricket, ignore warnings about skin cancer, flatten vowels, populate unimportant rural towns with huge plaster sculptures of fruit, produce thoroughly repellent and thus fairly typical politicians, dominate the world market in crops such as wheat and apathy, be part of the Commonwealth purely for the joys of beating the English silly at the Commonwealth Games, kill unprepared nineteenth-century explorers, and confuse tourists with tales of closing the Harbour Bridge at 3am to let the kangaroos across. When it comes to weather, though, it's at its belligerent best.
As a nation, we are collective experts on drought, heatwave, flood, empty dams, water shortages, wind storms, hurricanes, hail, raising salinity and virtually every natural disaster with the possible exception of earthquakes. This is because, one, we're all know-it-alls, and two, Australia doesn't so much have a weather system as a perpetual act of God.
Resemblances to the Apocalpyse and Independence Day are not coincidental. With global warming, of course, the storms will only get worse. Australians, though, will probably just shrug, turn up the cricket and keep telling Americans that Australia Post uses wallabies for out-of-state deliveries.
On the list of Things You Really Shouldn't Do To Me, above 'pulling my streaks to see if they're real' and 'asking me if I'm ever going to finish my book', is 'be condescending', particularly about the whole being female issue. Luckily, the few people who've ever tried that have generally been such poor specimens of humanity that they've deserved my pity rather than my incendiary wrath. (Hence why they all remain alive and retain their limbs.)
Today, however, I got a letter.
More specifically, my mother and myself both received letters, from the wife of the politician seeking re-election in our constituency. (Draw me not upon the inanities of Australian elections. Politics here is 99% blather and 1% small children asking about cactuses.) My brother and father, also sometime residents of this address, were left wholly unmolested by said wife, whose letterhead includes a photograph of herself looking Glamorous But Relatable. If you're noting a gender pattern here, congratulations, five points to you; but it gets better.
Said letter runs to two pages, and contains absolutely no reference to her husband's politics AT ALL. (I scoured it.) What it does contain is a thorough, wifely, hearts-and-flowers account of her husband's character: his father's death, his unprivileged upbringing, his 'commitment to family life' through their 25 years of marriage. 'I thought it was important', says Wife, 'for you to have the opportunity to hear about the Malcolm I know and love.'
I, being approximately as sentimental as a particularly craggy boulder (I found My Girl mawkish and am often found being sarcastic to small children), find this disgusting. I also, however, find it insulting, and this is why:
One, obviously women are complete political ignoramuses, and need to be provided with special letters all of their very own (oh! how charming! a note from the Mayoress!) outside the normal political commentary of newspapers, television and the general media to make them participate in a big ol' election. No, it takes a woman-to-woman talk to get us interested in that boring rubbish.
Two, because I am a woman voter, defined by my soft heart and good feelings towards my fellow members of breast-kind, I will of course respond with avid sisterhood to a woman's touch in any political material, rather than that scary rough-ridin' tobacco-chewin' yippie-ki-yay masculine discourse they have in them scary newspapers. I mean, EVIDENTLY. I need something I can read whilst fanning myself gently upon the verandah, which won't stain my petticoats.
Three, the central thing to think about when going after my vote is that I am a WOMAN, a woman whose chief concerns are making babies, beds and buns. The letter contains the assurance that 'Malcolm understands that it is vital for women to have a good work-life balance', because it is of course completely self-evident that for a woman, 'life' and 'work' are two diametrically opposed things which require balancing. (Probably many career women without children would find it slightly surprising that they don't actually have a life; we should be glad of the Mayoress's touching generosity in letting them know. Unless, of course, they are lesbians, which in Australia apparently equates to 'single woman with minimalist taste in interior design'.)
Of course, being as I'm a tender-hearted woman and all, it seems obvious that my sympathies with regard to voting are located in my personal feelings about the politician's life (oh, he has children, that's nice, oh, his father died, how tragic) rather than in my opinions about, you know, ACTUAL POLITICAL STUFF. Women? Opinions? What a farcical idea; the stress of it makes me swoon! My stars, where are the smelling salts, Ellie-May?
The Wife may be slightly shocked to know that I find her husband's stance on the Kyoto protocol intriguing, and wonder how he reconciles his Catholic beliefs with his stance on abortion. She would probably be surprised by the fact that I read the Economist rather than knitting booties for my future children. What may startle her the most, though, is the idea that being treated like a woman is pretty much the opposite of what I want from my electorate.
Edit: This silly woman's emotivoting plea made the front page of the city's biggest newspaper, so uproarious was the response. No mention, though, of how it was only sent to women, which makes me hope desperately, for the fate of my electorate, that said gender discrimination was a mistake. Unfortunately, I still have my doubts.
At around 8am this morning, I was alerted by British friends to the existence of a very large elephant in my room.
Said elephant was large and rugby-coloured (I don't necessarily know how something can be rugby-coloured, but this elephant was), and I had successfully managed to be completely unaware of its existence until said British friends very kindly pelted me with various happy epistles about the elephant's progress- including a limerick ending in 'We beat you in the rugby'. No, it isn't true to the limerick form, but we can grant them their little foibles in their joy; it's so rare that they win anything, after all.
How did I come to be completely oblivious of the fact that the Rugby World Cup was going on? Possibly the whole week-underground-producing-a-newspaper lark contributed a bit, as did the avoiding-reading-Australian-papers-because-I-can't-stand-to-roll-my-eyes-four-times-before-breakfast. (A week ago, the headline: 'People on Australian Workplace Agreements earn less, research shows.' Presumably it was written by Bleeding McObvious, professional purveyor of the blindingly apparent.) My mother was near-concussed a week ago when a door fell on her head; possibly the concussion was contagious.
Clearly, however, I am not acknowledging the true problem: that exposure to those moss-bound Dickens-spouting tea-sodden Englishers has corroded my Australian mentality, and thus my innate knowledge of all sporting events ever. All Australians are obviously implanted at birth with a psychic sense of sportive movement involving their fellow antipodeans across the globe. Presumably, in order to reverse this un-Australian development, I will be required to take the new Citizenship Test for immigrants, to prove my loyalty remains untarnished. I'll demonstrate my nearness and dearness to the true-blue values of Australia by answering questions about the 'correct colloquial term for a swimming costume' (budgie smugglers, tozi smugglers and muggly buggers are amongst the options) and whether Rod Laver was famous for playing cricket.
[Note: I'm actually not making those questions up. They're part of the new requirements for attaining citizenship in Australia. There is something gloriously addled in the assumption that a Chinese immigrant would be sufficiently interested in the slang term for coverings of Australian beach nakedness to actually know the phrase before they got here. Personally I think the whole Test should be scrapped in favour of a simple game of rugby; then at least we might have somebody in this country who could win a World Cup.]
Against these slings and arrows of outrageous Johnny Wilkinson, I can at the very least defend myself through the retort, 'Oh yeah? Well, at least we get a proper summer', and flaunt my new summer dresses (above) to prove it.
+ Lecturers. This is, oddly, one of the funniest semesters I've ever had. Perhaps the onslaught of awesome in England taught me to recognise lecturer humour; perhaps the University of Sydney reserves their best and most brilliantly hilarious educators for those rare third-year Arts students who have avoided dropping out or transferring to more profitable degrees. (The coterie, compared to first year's hordes, is now mightily small, friends.)
Either way, I defy you not to envy me my academic situation, in light of what I've overheard this past week alone:
"I'm unable to call his theory what I truly think of it, given that this is a university, but let's just say it is utter something-bulls-do."
"You shouldn't think you have to understand my lectures! That isn't the point at all!"
"Armchair anthropologists never left their offices... well, I suppose they did on occasion to go to the toilet, and to see their offspring, and various other technicalities."
[On an argument between theorists at a recent literary conference] "There were a lot of words you, ahem, wouldn't expect to be spoken at an academic conference. People accusing others of being the death of poetry was the very least of it."
"Wordsworth was a big coward!"
"He has a very exaggerated French style, which my colleague will shortly bemoan."
"And they will not [sudden sotto voce] unless they are John Howard [resume normal tone] aim to be hypocrites!"
"The two anthropologists were rumoured to be lovers. Then they were to a garden party together in Toowoomba, had a massive fight, and one went back to Poland to fight for the White Russians."
"Taking the piss IS a valid academic stance!"
"It's not really a disagreement. I think his argument is sturdy. I'm just being lazy."
"He has a zany character which I find frankly irritating, but don't put that in your essays."
"What is a hole? A hole is for sitting in!"
+ Australian sunshine. It gets down to your very marrow and bones if you stand in its full glare; you can feel it pressing upon your skin. A better method of warmth- or, more darkly, of getting sunburnt after standing in a garden for five minutes in a backless dress- has not yet been invented.
+ Rooms you don't so much 'redecorate' as 'continually add to.' The room at left is my study, and since I've returned from England the small patches of white still left (and they are very small) have been plastered over with memorabilia from the United Kingdom. I am everything all at once: I am what I am and have been and perhaps will be.
+ Graffiti on a campus in the middle of the night. I shouldn't have to explain this. Or why it was hilarious to be unable to get the paint off for a day afterwards.
+ Three-day weekends, every week.
+ Being a Grand Pooh-Bah third-year. Yes, I have more work, but it is better work, and more interesting, and I Know Things Which Are Relevant To It now. More than this, though, being a third-year means knowing all the shortcuts across campus, and a rather high proportion of the people on it. I now get approximately half my exercise from nodding and waving in a friendly manner at passing people who once had a tutorial with me. One of them salutes me every time we run into one another. (Presumably the third-year status also affords me the ability to boss around inferior beings, as I'll investigate when I help helm the student publication later in the semester. Abuse of power? Definitely a plus.)
+ Driving with the window down, barefoot, because it's too hot for shoes. Australian winters/springs are clean, filled with incredible smells, and just warm enough to make you anticipate the days when the outdoor tiles will be warm under your feet long after the sun sets.
+ Antipodean fast food. It is one of the beauties of my country that if you want a 'quick bite', you are as easily able to get grilled chicken, sushi, some opulently nutritious smoothie or a 'design-your-own-salad' as you are meat of indeterminate origin n' chips. I think we're all obese because the food is too damn good.
+ The use of the word 'oxymoron'. Like, say, in describing the phrase 'Australian literature.'
+ King Street, and Newtown generally. It's dirty and grotty and filled with questionable-looking people and stupidly-named Thai restaurants, but for character (and a beautiful cemetery next door) it's beauty itself.
+ Taking my inexplicable good mood out on Vox, because it's too good a day to be sarcastic.
All the following are genuine witnessed quotations from (generally straight-faced) lecturers at the University of Sydney. I feel the need to reassure people of this to stall accusations of an over-active imagination, despite the fact that I couldn't have made any of it up even with the aid of half a barrel of sherry and a concussion. There is reality, there is imagination, and then there is my university's Arts department.
I can't say I haven't been thoroughly educated, anyway- though in exactly what remains to be decided.
"It's not really a very good essay. I'd recommend you glance at it, though. Have a terrible grumpy look on your face if you'd like."
"I do a lot of gourmet cooking while listening to minimalist modern classical music, hence why I wear a lot of black and work in a design department. It's all embarassingly predictable, really."
"Now, in the nineteenth century, women of status had tortoise-shell... oh... what are they called? Um. Um. Hair-forks? No..." *makes frantic brushing motions* "COMBS! That's it." (This from the holder of a PhD and head of a department. I won't say which one, because knowing that the person in charge actually used the phrase 'hair-forks' might undermine peoples' confidence in its competence. Although it's USYD, so nobody really should have any confidence in competence anyway.)
"I am in a showy way... not showy."
Student: "But doesn't the article make people think of things differently?"
Tutor: "It makes them think of things bloody WRONGLY, is what it does."
"I don't see what metaphysical meaning I could attach to a bottle of toiler cleaner."
"Yes, [a certain thinker] would have had a very good academic career had he not turned out to be a bit of an awful fascist."
"The LG Internet Fridge is completely and utterly useless. It only exists to make us all feel sensible and sane while we're buying less hideous-overpriced fridges which don't actually break into a tapdance every time you reach for the crisper."
"Suddenly in this poem's geography there is a hill where there wasn't a hill. It's like he suddenly realised he needs a hill. Which if you're looking for consistency is a bit of a problem."
[On attempting to find an economic definition of 'consumption']
Student: 'But consumption doesn't have to be just purchasing products. You could, like, eat a tree.'
Tutor: '... I'm sorry, how is that consumption?'
Student, confidently: 'Coz I'm eating it!'
"Listen, people shower less in the UK because it's a less enjoyable experience. Most showers in London feel as if you're being spat on repeatedly by a large man behind the shower head."
"Anybody who's familiar with drugs will connect to the metaphor of addiction he uses here..." Cue an intensely detailed explanation of the depleting impact of drugs over time, followed by five seconds' silence. "Er. Not that I am."
"I don't want to look like I'm being entirely negative about his theory... oh, wait. Yes I do."
"Lesbian is a bit of an odd word. We should find another one... like... lesbotany? No, that sounds like the cultivation of Sapphic plants."
"You know, I'd really rather not be covered in excrement, and I'm sure you all share my feelings."
The winner, however, comes from a student, who in a discussion about the relativism of cleanliness came out with this, and offered no further explanation or elucidation of the point:
"I think the idea of 'stink' came from people throwing dead cows off the walls of fortresses."
I am beginning to think that calling my Virgil course in England an anomaly was a bit premature. True, calling ancient characters 'wangs' is undeniably special; but evidence is mounting that, regardless of geography, any course I attend is going to possess a very high level of abject silliness. Perhaps it's me. I should hire myself out to the Engineering faculty to enliven lectures by proxy.
A more likely candidate is the timing. Second semester of third year is the end of the line for all the Arts undergraduates who have, intelligently, recognised that a Bachelor of Arts with Honours is actually an oxymoron, and have therefore decided not to waste another year on getting any. Most of my fellow students, by consequence, are beyond the point of caring, following protocol, or focussing on the material. Most staff members, who have had to be patient and nurturing (or at least resisted their urge to break out the machine gun) for the past two and a half years, have apparently taken the opportunity to go entirely barking mad.
You doubt me?
++ In first year, speaking overtime in a tutorial presentation was a sin of such magnitude that offenders half-expected to be taken out back and given some 'constructive criticism' in the form of limb removal. In third year, however, with class sizes down from thirty to, oh, six, things are a bit more relaxed.
Student: "I spoke for 25 minutes? My presentation was only supposed to be ten! Why didn't you stop me?!"
Tutor, shrugging: "Well, you looked like you were having fun, so we just let you roll?"
++ "A pelican is not a compromise between a seagull and a cow! It is the best possible pelican!" (Admittedly, when questioned, the lecturer admitted it was meant to be 'crow'- but insisted that the point held regardless. Don't ask me what the point was. I was too busy imagining Darwin's hysterics in the afterlife.)
++ "Marcus, are you calling for a revolution? Could it possibly be left uncalled until after the lecture?"
++ "The peacock's tail is the mark of the metrosexual in the wild, and like the metrosexual it is grossly inefficient and should be phased out by evolution immediately."
++ A powerful lecture on consumerist society was undermined somewhat by the fact that, to denote an appliance breaking down as a result of deliberate obsolescence or poor design, the lecturer used the memorable phrase 'going BUNG!' Repeatedly. Loudly. With hand movements to denote explosions.
++ "The only reason that an elephant has ears is because it bloody well does!"
++ "One way to understand Derrida is to take a lot of hallucinogenic drugs."
++ "Why is the book not in the library? Well, I suppose that it's got fairly low standards of academic rigour, not enough footnotes, that sort of thing. It could, of course, also be that Sydney Uni is a bit up itself."
++ An English tutor- it's always them, isn't it- in a Very Serious Class somehow distracted himself from taking about dissonance and Matthew Arnold into talking about the best method of seduction in modern society. Bewilderingly enough, it seemed to make at least partial sense at the time; but a time lapse of several days allows you to contemplate the fact that you listened to an academic dissect 'sexiness' (finger quotes) for ten minutes for no reason at all. Something tells me that it's only a few subtle steps before we get to calling Levi-Strauss a wang.
++ "I really do think that the best way to be remembered in an obituary would be 'She Was Vanquished By A Muffin'. I mean, it has a ring to it."
++ This, at least, was a student: "Look, I just don't understand why she and the Empress weren't depicted as having a sexual relationship. So she was a disembodied soul! Who cares? What, is she wearing a chastity belt of immateriality?" Despite valiant efforts, the class was unable to recover from the phrase 'chastity belt of immateriality', and what ensued is what is commonly known as 'shambles'.
++ One of my classes involves ringing Tibetan prayer bells at 20-minute intervals. No, really. It ostensibly has something to do with focus, though I suspect it's largely to do with waking us all up- but the best offshoot is that it fulfills PRECISELY what other faculties think Arts courses are like. We could only cleave to the stereotype more if we started sitting cross-legged in circles on the front lawns, burning incense and writing Petrarchan love sonnets about Marx.
An additional note: when people you've never set eyes on in your life hear your name and go 'Oh! Yeah! I read your blog!', you can either have a minor panic attack or fall over laughing. I chose falling over, which I think is indicative of how I approach things generally.
My fellow Australians are wonderful, but on occasion they really can be spectacularly stupid.
To put this explosion into context: I live near The Gap, a famed set of 200-ft cliffs on Sydney's eastern-most peninsula. Dive off the edge of these and swim straight, and you'll eventually hit Brazil (or New Zealand, though whether this is preferable is a matter of opinion). The Gap is notable for its spectacular views of the ocean, its natural beauty, and the fact that it is Australia's most popular suicide spot, with two or three a week choosing to end their lot with a triple-pike off a peak.
(Apologies for being blase, but nearly two decades of seeing police cars and rescue workers running around does make one slightly desensitised.)
I walk along the clifftops pretty frequently; it's a gorgeous spot with an incredible view of the whole of central Sydney on the one side and the ocean on the other. Yesterday, for the first time since returning from England, I went walking at sunset, because I'm all romantic like that. What do I see on my return, when dark has fallen and the clifftops are utterly deserted, but a small light down the bottom of a cliff, flashing around in apparent distress?
Let's take a moment to consider the situation. Australia tends to be a bit less laissez-faire about clifftop safety than Ireland (which, you remember, operates on a principle of apparent Darwinism); the Gap cliffs have five-foot-high wire fencing around their tops, sending what one assumes is a fairly definitive Do Not Pass This Point, Do Not Collect $200 message. Basically, the bottom of the cliffs is not part of the tour, unless you are shuffling yourself off this mortal coil, in which case you don't get much of a chance to sight-see.
So Jenny sees a flashing light, perhaps a torch or a phone, flashing around the rocks at the base of a 200-ft notorious suicide spot at night in a haphazard way, as if looking for handholds to climb the cliff. Can she be blamed for being quite unnerved, particularly when she calls out and gets no answer? WARNING WARNING PERSON IN TROUBLE WARNING WARNING.
The solution, after I pulled a panicked Good Samaritan and returned to the cliff with my father and a powerful torch, was a simple one which hadn't occurred to me because it was such a mind-bogglingly stupid idea: night fishermen. At the base of a dangerous cliff. At high tide. On jagged rocks. In pure darkness, without any light save a small torch, which it seemed was being used to find a lost bait-bucket.
On reflection, I should have just assumed that the light was a symptom of my country's ability to completely disregard our own safety. Australians all know people who've surfed above shallow coral reefs which could mangle skin, who've driven at 200km down a lonely country road while drunk, who've eaten something with a use-by date from the previous millenium. My brother and myself employed a "f*** it" approach to crossing roads in busy Irish cities, which only nearly got us killed, oh, 3 or 4 times.
What, I wonder, is the British equivalent to this thrill-seeking: eating cucumber sandwiches without the crusts cut off? Getting to an appointment on time rather than five minutes early? Showing brazen disregard for their cholesterol levels while scoffing black pudding breakfasts? Frankly, after this latest escapade on the part of my countrymen, I'm Unimpressed.
Then again, now that I've said this I'll probably get arrested for doing something phenomenally risky within the next week or so. At least I can blame it on a national stupidity problem.
I am beginning to believe that England has made me, if not soft, then a little more (dare I say it) aware of Australian cultural foibles. I am prepared to blame it for this, and to demand suitable compensation in the form of an indeterminate amount of double-decker buses and red phone boxes.
Australia has, at least in the public space, a healthy respect for plain speaking. Look in any self-respecting politician's autobiography, or indeed on the nightly news, and you'll encounter an incredibly colourful series of insults which could only be produced by a culture unafraid to get to the point and call a dole bludger a dole bludger. We are, in general, quite liable to tell you that your emperor has no clothes whatsoever, a point which got me into, ahem, a bit of trouble in some delicate British situations.
(You can tell this is the case because Australian universities, which try so hard to escape embarrassing antipodean ways and climb towards the dangling fruit of Europeanism, deliberately attempt to stamp it out. Remember, if you will, the trouble I had with my runaway metaphors in British-European academia. Also note, if you will, the irony of that. Presumably Australian universities operate on the theory that one must progress from barbarous directness through overelaborate pomposity before one gets to civilised directness.)
Before I left Australia I quite liked this aspect of Australian society; talk radio was occasionally cringe-worthy, but then again it generally is unless you are a redneck named Bud with a large ute called, affectionately, Sheila. On my return, though, I've found myself in several unprecedented situations where I desperately wanted all parties to sit down, shut up and ask each other about the weather over tea.
Granted, the situations themselves- both academic ones, one a case of a loudmouth insisting to myself, eight women and a female philosophy tutor that feminism was against nature, the other an incredibly unpleasant and vitriolic argument between a student and a tutor about Derrida which became personal and upset the entire tutorial- were rare ones. It's quite hard to joke about the latter, actually, so very disturbing was the experience. This, however, is not the forum in which to assert my right to a safe and unthreatening academic space.
I simply wish to note that, while I was never the type to come out swinging a large cudgel and roaring blue murder, there is perhaps more of a need for a thick skin (or, like a frill-necked lizard, scales) in Australian environments than in puff-pale English ones. This is about as surprising an allegation as suggesting that perhaps England receives on average a bit more rain than the Australian continent. All I need to do is start growing mine up again, like some kind of linguistic Driza-Bone. Damn the British for being so
utterly polite about everything; they've weakened my natural-bred resistance to the slings and arrows of outrageous Australians!
The idea of myself as any kind of shrinking, easily shocked violet is an unsettling one- but considering that I spent last night moshing for three straight hours at the Cure concert, I doubt anybody will be calling me a delicate little specimen and spreading cloaks across puddles for me any time soon.
I can say, without any (noticeable) coercion, that England is a country which deserves positive adjectives: charming, interesting, full of character. It welcomed me to its well-padded ex-imperial bosom with only a minimum of bureaucratic aneurysms, spectacular misunderstandings and syntactic clashes, and gave me a thorough mothering, as Mother Countries will tend to do.
Despite this, I'm perfectly contented to change my status back from ex-pat to, erm, pat (what does that even mean?) Australia, in the lived sense, is my aunt coming to visit in her ute from the bush, bringing a sheep skull as a gift, admittedly to minor hysteria from my mother. Australia is a citywide public transport network which is less system of commute than national amusement. Australia is the mullet showing its shameful face once you're a barely acceptable distance out of the CBD, generally on blokes (and I do mean that word in its fullest sense) wearing old AC/DC T-shirts with no sleeves, or singlets, or nothing on top at all except a beer can in the relevant hand.
Lexicon-wise, Australia means swapping phrases like 'bugger that for a game of soldiers', 'faffing about' and 'old chaps' for 'walkabout', 'she'll be right' and 'onya, mate'. It means not being called 'sweetheart' or 'darlin' by anybody selling anything of any sort, because said anybody should know the likelihood that an Australian girl will reward the epiphet with a punch in the gob. It means remembering that 'me' and 'my' are perfectly interchangeable, that any public figure of any position is liable to be called a wanker by the press if they do something 'un-Australian' (still the worst insult around), that a spade is generally a fucken spade, and that vowel sounds should be so broad and flat they are the linguistic equivalent of the Great Sandy Desert. Yes, that is its real name. Yes, Australians are that imaginative all the time; my road, which happens to be half houses and half a bloody great cliff, is called, with similar flair, 'Cliff Street'. Great minds, my lot.
Australia also, in one of its most blissful advantages, means no longer being faced with accusations of perversions against humanity and the spirit of imbibement when I make the confession that I DO NOT LIKE TEA. In England, this sort of truth would have gotten me ostracised, had anybody believed me. The scenario, which occured perhaps fifty times, would be a friendly offer of tea, followed by my refusal, followed by a blank look and a repeated offer of tea, followed by my more insistent refusal, followed by a blanker look tinged with panic about how this anomaly in the universe could possibly be tolerated by natural laws.
Generally the interplay would conclude with the English person laughing, saying the equivalent of 'Of COURSE you don't like tea, you charming Australian person- what a joke! What a lovely antipodean sense of humour!', and thus reassuring themselves that my heretical rejection of the National Lifeblood was a hilarious jape and that their belief in its universal properties of Good and Wholesomeness could remain unmolested. They would then, five minutes later, proceed to offer me tea again. This situation was repeated so often that it's a miracle I didn't go on a murdering spree armed with broken pieces of china teapots and garrotting-strings off teabags.
Probably the worst purveyors were the waitresses, who slipped tea into the end of their order in the manner of politicians paper-clipping bills about sound pollution in their constituency to the back of huge boring bills about tax brackets. "A salad for you and the special for your friend? Right. And you'll be wanting tea," they add, as they move away from the table, nodding. "No," I am forced to call, halfway across the restaurant to their backs as they retreat rapidly back into the kitchen like crabs returning to their burrows. "Beg pardon, love?" they yell back. "No tea," I bellow, usually several times, to shock them out of the familiar blank-panic expression which crosses their faces.
More often than not they'd bring tea anyway. And then proceed to charge me for it.
My theories as to English tea-usage, from an outsider's perspective, all strive to explain its status as a panacea for all emotional and physical ills, and all fail. A replacement for the messier and generally more expensive process of emotions and their requisite therapy? A shot in the national imperial arm, as a reminder that once the women striving to pick the tealeaves in the fields of Ceylon had British overseers? A mass hypnotic device designed to keep the masses in line and properly raising their pinkies? Unsatisfactory explanations, I know- but the dogmatic insistence upon it, the fact that if you gave an Englishman an autopsy you'd probably discover that their blood had long away been replaced by weak brown fluid, begs for a theory of some kind. Suggestions?
At least Sydney and Melbourne are so thoroughly preoccupied with pretending to be Italian coffee-makers (I swear there are more people who think Starbucks is the world's greatest plague in my country than there are people who vote) that I won't be dealing with the substance involuntarily from now on.
