Lots of little things catch your attention when you’re new to a culture. Sometimes they make perfect sense, sometimes they don’t, and sometimes they just add a bit of spice to one’s day.
Here in Australia, for example, the last letter of the alphabet is not pronounced “zee.” It’s “zed.” So one of the major banks, ANZ, is not described as “A-N-Zee” or “Ann-Zee,” but “Ann-zed.”
Sports scores are not “six to nothing” but “six to nil.” Games or “matches” are called “tests” here.
And then there’s cricket, which can have wildly lopsided scores and gets reported in language I don’t understand. I saw this in a local paper recently: “Hayden lasted five deliveries as Valley reached 6-191 at stumps. Marriott took a career-best 6-27 to rout Wests for 97 in friendly bowling conditions.” Marriott, the story goes on, “bowled 13 overs.”
Ooookaaay. If you say so.
Of course, I’m just showing how little I know about cricket. All I know for sure is that much of the world loves the sport almost as much as soccer (which is called “foosball” in Mexico) and “footie,” the term here for rugby, which is a kind of fast-paced football without pads or huddles.
Of course, I could puzzle most Australians by talking about the infield fly rule, but if I bring up baseball, I lay myself open to the question: “Why do you Americans call it ‘the World Series’ when it involves only United States teams?”
Stumps me. Because we tend to think we ARE the world?
Still, I’m delighted the Astros have made the playoffs and since I get to read the Houston Chronicle on line each day, I’m cheering them on, hoping they make it to the Part-of-North-America Series and bowl over the Yankees four tests to nil.
I suppose scores like 191-6 would be too much to hope for, but they would be nice.
-- Bob
Friday, October 07, 2005
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
Two Floods: Brisbane and New Orleans
I thought so, and now I’ve confirmed it: the Liberals here are conservatives. What would you expect from a country where everybody drives on the wrong side of the road and it’s getting warm outside when garden thermometers reach 32 degrees?
Prime Minister John Howard, a conservative who is not a Liberal, seeks to align this country with the George Bush vision of how things ought to be, in world affairs, at least, and -- Liberal, liberal, or conservative -- the Australians we’ve met have been much too polite to say anything negative to us about our home country or its current leadership.
On Saturday, though, I overheard an elderly Brisbane man expressing a harsh viewpoint to a friend about Hurricane Rita’s threat to the Gulf Coast. “As individuals, some Americans are great people,” he said, “but as a country? Who could deserve a storm like that more!?”
Some of my friends back home who are politically to my left would understand immediately, as I did, why he might say such a thing. At the top of a long list would be Iraq and global warming. Other friends politically to my right, including some I respect, admire, and even love, would dismiss the old guy’s rant with the wave of a hand. They would have no inkling of a justification for such a harsh view of America in the second term of Bush and Chaney and their neo-con friends.
THE CONSERVATIVE/LIBERAL DIVIDE
Conservatives. Liberals. Where I come from, those of us who identify with one side or the other have difficulty imagining how any decent, intelligent person who pays attention could have voted for (or against) George Bush. Because of the huge divide I see even in my own family, I am fascinated by various reactions to the horrors of post-hurricane New Orleans. Some of those reactions seem to me to be profoundly colored by biases indicative of extremes in political outlooks.
Last week I received by email one assessment of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath, written by a not-identified person (a man, I’m guessing) who recalls being in a cyclone-triggered flood here in Brisbane, in 1974. After the storm passed, the relatively high ground of his neighbourhood was an island surrounded by a large lake of floodwater. Marooned and isolated from the rest of the city for days, he and his neighbours, the writer recalls, organized themselves, shared what they had, and made it through quite well.
People here still talk about that terrible flood frequently. It’s a living part of the psyche of Brisbane residents to this day, but the email writer says there was virtually no looting or other bad behaviour and he wants to know why, in New Orleans, people behaved differently? “Why didn't the people in the Superdome make any effort to organize themselves? Why didn't groups of men patrol the restrooms to prevent rapes?”
He has answers to his own questions: “We have gone a long way in the past 40 years to creating a dysfunctional society where self reliance, pride in one's self and a sense of right and wrong are no longer esteemed or even valued.”
At fault, he says, are “our government and media” who have (a) told minorities that whatever happens to them is a result of racism and that they cannot succeed in our societies; (b) allowed crime to be excused because it results from poverty which is not the criminal’s fault; (c) shown adolescent girls that it’s okay, even lucrative, to have babies with little hope that their boyfriends will become true fathers; and (d) promoted the notion that society has no right to impose on people morals and old-fashioned judgments of right and wrong. He concludes, “God help us. We're reaping what we sowed.”
While there are grains of uncomfortable truth here, the implication that the people waiting for rescue at the Superdome last month were inferior to the writer and his neighbours in Brisbane in 1974 is answerable in several ways.
He and his neighbours, for one thing, were high-ground dwellers. I expect that what is true in Brisbane today was true in 1974: the elevation of the land on which one’s residence sits correlates with its value, and, therefore, with one’s own financial resources. My wife and I learned quickly that we probably couldn’t afford a Brisbane-area house advertised as having a view of any sort, and we’re not poor. Those marooned above the 1974 flood line were, I expect, people with resources not so common in the swampier neighbourhoods here at that time and not so common in the poorer parts of New Orleans when their flood came.
ON-SITE REPORTING
Further, there is already one report, from two emergency technicians (EMTs) who were in New Orleans when Katrina hit, which indicates that citizens there did organize and did do a lot for each other. Larry Bradshaw and Lorie Beth Slonsky wrote, in a piece that has been widely circulated on the web, that they were barred by National Guardsmen from both the Superdome and the Convention Center after they were turned out of their hotel on the fourth day after the storm hit.
Their experience from then on, they said, was one of self-help and organization being met with official hostility and deception. After being prevented by an adjacent suburb’s police from simply walking out of New Orleans under their own power, Bradshaw and Slonsky and others set up an encampment which some of us may have seen on TV because they built it where it would be noticed, “in the middle of the Ponchartrain Expressway on the center divide, between the O'Keefe and Tchoupitoulas exits.”
Supplied with found and/or stolen C-rations and water, they made a community that flourished for a while. Bradshaw and Slonsky wrote: “We organized a clean up and hung garbage bags from the rebar poles. We made beds from wood pallets and cardboard. We designated a storm drain as the bathroom and the kids built an elaborate enclosure for privacy out of plastic, broken umbrellas, and other scraps. We even organized a food recycling system where individuals could swap out parts of C-rations (applesauce for babies and candies for kids!).”
They offered food and water to people passing by and their numbers grew to 80 or 90. A woman with a battery-powered radio learned that their high-ground encampment was being noticed by relief and news organizations and that those organizations were asking officials what was being done for these families.
The result? Bradshaw and Slonsky report: “Just as dusk set in, a Gretna Sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces, screaming, ‘Get off the f---ing freeway.’ A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up … our food and water.”
Law enforcement agencies during this crisis, Bradshaw and Slonsky concluded, were threatened by congregations of people of 20 or more, fearing gangs or riots. Their group sought to stay together to have safety in numbers, but that was impossible because “the agencies would force us into small, atomized groups.” These two EMTs and about a half dozen others took refuge together in an abandoned bus, seeking to be safe from both from criminals and from the police. The next day they walked for hours in their small group until they found some New Orleans firemen who arranged to airlift them out of the city.
COMMUNITY, HEROES
So maybe immoral, dependent childishness was not the main story in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina. It was, in fact, a brutal place when people were fighting for food and water for themselves and their families, Bradshaw and Slonsky observed, but, when these most basic needs were met (as, indeed, they were in the situation of the Brisbane folks reported upon earlier), “People began to look out for each other, working together and constructing a community.”
This testimony from two who lived through the situation and reported from their own experience concluded: “If the relief organizations had saturated the City with food and water in the first 2 or 3 days, the desperation, the frustration and the ugliness would not have set in.”
Help was promised but did not come, and so ordinary people stepped up, according to Bradshaw and Slonsky, and it was the common folk who were the real heroes of the situation. Among those they single out for praise are these:
• “The maintenance workers who used a fork lift to carry the sick and disabled.
• “The engineers, who rigged, nurtured and kept the generators running.
• “The electricians who improvised thick extension cords stretching over blocks to share the little electricity we had in order to free cars stuck on rooftop parking lots.
• “Nurses who took over for mechanical ventilators and spent many hours on end manually forcing air into the lungs of unconscious patients to keep them alive.
• “Doormen who rescued folks stuck in elevators.
• “Refinery workers who broke into boat yards, ‘stealing’ boats to rescue their neighbors clinging to their roofs in flood waters.
• “Mechanics who helped hot-wire any car that could be found to ferry people out of the City.
• “And the food service workers who scoured the commercial kitchens improvising communal meals for hundreds of those stranded.”
From a distance mediated by TV images, those of us who were not there may project upon stranded New Orleans flood victims our liberal or conservative biases, but at least these two who can speak from experience tell us that a lot of people acted with skill, organization, and pragmatism on behalf of each other even when the appointed guardians of our society failed, for so many days and nights, to do so.
Sounds like good old American (or Australian) initiative to me. – Bob
P.S. As I eat lunch most weekdays, I watch delayed telecasts of the U.S. evening news from ABC and CBS. Today I learned something shocking, and the CBS anchor prefaced this item by saying “you may not believe this:”
Former FEMA director Michael Brown is continuing to work at FEMA for two more weeks (with full pay according to another source) as a “contractor.” A spokesman for the Homeland Security Department said he’ll advise on "some of his views on his experience with Katrina.''
Prime Minister John Howard, a conservative who is not a Liberal, seeks to align this country with the George Bush vision of how things ought to be, in world affairs, at least, and -- Liberal, liberal, or conservative -- the Australians we’ve met have been much too polite to say anything negative to us about our home country or its current leadership.
On Saturday, though, I overheard an elderly Brisbane man expressing a harsh viewpoint to a friend about Hurricane Rita’s threat to the Gulf Coast. “As individuals, some Americans are great people,” he said, “but as a country? Who could deserve a storm like that more!?”
Some of my friends back home who are politically to my left would understand immediately, as I did, why he might say such a thing. At the top of a long list would be Iraq and global warming. Other friends politically to my right, including some I respect, admire, and even love, would dismiss the old guy’s rant with the wave of a hand. They would have no inkling of a justification for such a harsh view of America in the second term of Bush and Chaney and their neo-con friends.
THE CONSERVATIVE/LIBERAL DIVIDE
Conservatives. Liberals. Where I come from, those of us who identify with one side or the other have difficulty imagining how any decent, intelligent person who pays attention could have voted for (or against) George Bush. Because of the huge divide I see even in my own family, I am fascinated by various reactions to the horrors of post-hurricane New Orleans. Some of those reactions seem to me to be profoundly colored by biases indicative of extremes in political outlooks.
Last week I received by email one assessment of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath, written by a not-identified person (a man, I’m guessing) who recalls being in a cyclone-triggered flood here in Brisbane, in 1974. After the storm passed, the relatively high ground of his neighbourhood was an island surrounded by a large lake of floodwater. Marooned and isolated from the rest of the city for days, he and his neighbours, the writer recalls, organized themselves, shared what they had, and made it through quite well.
People here still talk about that terrible flood frequently. It’s a living part of the psyche of Brisbane residents to this day, but the email writer says there was virtually no looting or other bad behaviour and he wants to know why, in New Orleans, people behaved differently? “Why didn't the people in the Superdome make any effort to organize themselves? Why didn't groups of men patrol the restrooms to prevent rapes?”
He has answers to his own questions: “We have gone a long way in the past 40 years to creating a dysfunctional society where self reliance, pride in one's self and a sense of right and wrong are no longer esteemed or even valued.”
At fault, he says, are “our government and media” who have (a) told minorities that whatever happens to them is a result of racism and that they cannot succeed in our societies; (b) allowed crime to be excused because it results from poverty which is not the criminal’s fault; (c) shown adolescent girls that it’s okay, even lucrative, to have babies with little hope that their boyfriends will become true fathers; and (d) promoted the notion that society has no right to impose on people morals and old-fashioned judgments of right and wrong. He concludes, “God help us. We're reaping what we sowed.”
While there are grains of uncomfortable truth here, the implication that the people waiting for rescue at the Superdome last month were inferior to the writer and his neighbours in Brisbane in 1974 is answerable in several ways.
He and his neighbours, for one thing, were high-ground dwellers. I expect that what is true in Brisbane today was true in 1974: the elevation of the land on which one’s residence sits correlates with its value, and, therefore, with one’s own financial resources. My wife and I learned quickly that we probably couldn’t afford a Brisbane-area house advertised as having a view of any sort, and we’re not poor. Those marooned above the 1974 flood line were, I expect, people with resources not so common in the swampier neighbourhoods here at that time and not so common in the poorer parts of New Orleans when their flood came.
ON-SITE REPORTING
Further, there is already one report, from two emergency technicians (EMTs) who were in New Orleans when Katrina hit, which indicates that citizens there did organize and did do a lot for each other. Larry Bradshaw and Lorie Beth Slonsky wrote, in a piece that has been widely circulated on the web, that they were barred by National Guardsmen from both the Superdome and the Convention Center after they were turned out of their hotel on the fourth day after the storm hit.
Their experience from then on, they said, was one of self-help and organization being met with official hostility and deception. After being prevented by an adjacent suburb’s police from simply walking out of New Orleans under their own power, Bradshaw and Slonsky and others set up an encampment which some of us may have seen on TV because they built it where it would be noticed, “in the middle of the Ponchartrain Expressway on the center divide, between the O'Keefe and Tchoupitoulas exits.”
Supplied with found and/or stolen C-rations and water, they made a community that flourished for a while. Bradshaw and Slonsky wrote: “We organized a clean up and hung garbage bags from the rebar poles. We made beds from wood pallets and cardboard. We designated a storm drain as the bathroom and the kids built an elaborate enclosure for privacy out of plastic, broken umbrellas, and other scraps. We even organized a food recycling system where individuals could swap out parts of C-rations (applesauce for babies and candies for kids!).”
They offered food and water to people passing by and their numbers grew to 80 or 90. A woman with a battery-powered radio learned that their high-ground encampment was being noticed by relief and news organizations and that those organizations were asking officials what was being done for these families.
The result? Bradshaw and Slonsky report: “Just as dusk set in, a Gretna Sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces, screaming, ‘Get off the f---ing freeway.’ A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up … our food and water.”
Law enforcement agencies during this crisis, Bradshaw and Slonsky concluded, were threatened by congregations of people of 20 or more, fearing gangs or riots. Their group sought to stay together to have safety in numbers, but that was impossible because “the agencies would force us into small, atomized groups.” These two EMTs and about a half dozen others took refuge together in an abandoned bus, seeking to be safe from both from criminals and from the police. The next day they walked for hours in their small group until they found some New Orleans firemen who arranged to airlift them out of the city.
COMMUNITY, HEROES
So maybe immoral, dependent childishness was not the main story in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina. It was, in fact, a brutal place when people were fighting for food and water for themselves and their families, Bradshaw and Slonsky observed, but, when these most basic needs were met (as, indeed, they were in the situation of the Brisbane folks reported upon earlier), “People began to look out for each other, working together and constructing a community.”
This testimony from two who lived through the situation and reported from their own experience concluded: “If the relief organizations had saturated the City with food and water in the first 2 or 3 days, the desperation, the frustration and the ugliness would not have set in.”
Help was promised but did not come, and so ordinary people stepped up, according to Bradshaw and Slonsky, and it was the common folk who were the real heroes of the situation. Among those they single out for praise are these:
• “The maintenance workers who used a fork lift to carry the sick and disabled.
• “The engineers, who rigged, nurtured and kept the generators running.
• “The electricians who improvised thick extension cords stretching over blocks to share the little electricity we had in order to free cars stuck on rooftop parking lots.
• “Nurses who took over for mechanical ventilators and spent many hours on end manually forcing air into the lungs of unconscious patients to keep them alive.
• “Doormen who rescued folks stuck in elevators.
• “Refinery workers who broke into boat yards, ‘stealing’ boats to rescue their neighbors clinging to their roofs in flood waters.
• “Mechanics who helped hot-wire any car that could be found to ferry people out of the City.
• “And the food service workers who scoured the commercial kitchens improvising communal meals for hundreds of those stranded.”
From a distance mediated by TV images, those of us who were not there may project upon stranded New Orleans flood victims our liberal or conservative biases, but at least these two who can speak from experience tell us that a lot of people acted with skill, organization, and pragmatism on behalf of each other even when the appointed guardians of our society failed, for so many days and nights, to do so.
Sounds like good old American (or Australian) initiative to me. – Bob
P.S. As I eat lunch most weekdays, I watch delayed telecasts of the U.S. evening news from ABC and CBS. Today I learned something shocking, and the CBS anchor prefaced this item by saying “you may not believe this:”
Former FEMA director Michael Brown is continuing to work at FEMA for two more weeks (with full pay according to another source) as a “contractor.” A spokesman for the Homeland Security Department said he’ll advise on "some of his views on his experience with Katrina.''
Thursday, September 15, 2005
Jaded in Brisbane?
After just ten weeks in Australia, I’m noticing a diminishment of “newness.” Granted, there is much for us to puzzle over and there are frequent surprises, but what was noticeably odd to our eyes and ears in July is already beginning to seem almost ordinary.
Getting comfortable is good, but I worry about becoming prematurely jaded.
Surely Anthony Trollope, the writer who focused on the British upper class, was jaded when he travelled in Australia in 1871. Once he got past affirming his not-great expectations of society in this colony, Trollope did some insightful reporting, but he was often less than impressed with what he saw.
About a trip to Perth, he wrote: “No man perhaps ever travelled two hundred and sixty miles with less to see… The bush in these parts never develops itself into scenery, never for a moment becomes interesting.”
And, after taking a horseback ride alone through the bush, he said: “It was all wood. There arose at last a feeling that, go where one might through the forest, one was never going anywhere…. One might ride on, to the right or to the left, or might turn back, and there was ever the same view.”
My partner and I recently had similar feelings about the scenery in a eucalypt forest in southwest Brisbane. During two earlier weekend trips, we’d wandered through forests similarly made up for the most part of one variety or another of the gum or eucalypt tree, of which Australia has about 700 native varieties. We had loved the first two hikes, but three weekends among eucalypts seemed to us to be one too many, right then. (Last weekend’s bushwalk lived up to the name of its locale, Mt. Glorious.)
Perhaps a less jaded viewer or a more knowledgeable one might have noted interesting differences missed by us and missed earlier by Trollope. An Aborigine, for example, might have seen, in the same forest through which the English visitor rode, plants with edible roots or indications of recent animal activity. Even Trollope noted that an “astonishing phenomena of these runs is the apparent paucity of sheep,” even when there might be, grazing in the area, as many as 18 woollies per square mile. Even a trained eye could miss them, he said.
Discernment depends on knowledge and those with trained eyes can often find what is different, varied or new where others see only boring sameness. One wants, normally, some of each, sameness and novelty.
SAME AND DIFFERENT
Noting that a lot of life here is much the same as what we knew in the United States (people eat, sleep, work, play, and most speak English as their first language), my partner and I wrote some friends about some of what seemed different to us in our first days in Brisbane when our sensitivities, only weeks ago, were fresher than they are now.
We said:
• Australians are generally friendly and forward-looking, like many ordinary Texans and Oklahomans, but even more so. The most commonly used phrase seems to reflect real attitudes: “No worries!”
• We have to remember, when stepping off curbs (actually, “kerbs” here), that there are worries, life-threatening ones in the form of cars coming rapidly from our right.
• Pedestrians on sidewalks, like drivers in the streets, keep to the left when meeting others. “Walk left, look right” was our mantra.
• The wonderful, raucous, crazy-laugh sounds we kept hearing came from Kookaburras, we learned, and the melancholy, downward-trending “aaawwhhh” sounds came from crows. (Trollope thought this distinctively mournful birdcall was from magpies.)
• There are no squirrels here. At least, we’ve seen none. There are, however, possums and “bush turkeys,” smallish wild turkeys that roam all over residential areas and the bush.
• Lots of things are smaller here, including cars, refrigerators, washing machines, some soft drink bottles, rolls of paper towels, and toilets. The latter often have something all toilets should have: two buttons to push for flushing, one for urine and one, as a plumber who adjusted one of ours delicately put it, “for solids.”
• The 230-240V current here powers large heating elements in tea kettles, bringing water to a boil quickly, and the wall sockets each have on-off switches that save current by reducing the number of appliances on standby.
• People pass right by pennies on sidewalks at home, but dropped coins are retrieved quickly here because they include $1 and $2 pieces. There are no $1 bills and no pennies, although there are prices like $1.97. Clerks round up (or down?) at cash registers. The various denominations of bills are multi-colored and of slightly different in size, and they feel more like plastic than paper.
• With an exchange rate fluctuating at about 1.30 Australian dollars for every U.S. dollar, one can feel suddenly richer after transferring funds electronically from home, until one does the math. And compares prices.
• Banks here sell car and house insurance (for other companies; they don’t issue the policies themselves) and offer investment advice. Interest on readily accessible savings accounts is well over 5% without term limitations.
• Phone calls almost always cost money. There are some “free call” numbers, but a call from one’s own home phone costs 20 cents most of the time, and from pay phones, 40 cents (more if you’re calling the number of a cell phone). There is a positive side, though. So far we’ve had only one wrong number call and no calls from telemarketers.
• And they’re not “cell phones” here, they’re “mobiles.” That’s pronounced with a long “i” and with emphasis on the second syllable. It rhymes with “aisles.”
• Australian television is digital and based on a standard developed in Europe, DVB, and it provides high quality pictures on inexpensive TVs. Some programming is Australian and some British, but much of what’s on cable channels consists of U.S. re-runs all the way back to “The Brady Bunch” and “Hogan’s Heroes.”
• British influence is stronger than U.S. influence here and the recent London bombing was heavily covered by local news media, but then, so were the horrors in and around New Orleans after Katrina. United States politics does get a good bit of coverage here, also, although China is a more important trading partner than our country.
A hot national issue at the moment in Australia has been the in-power party’s attempt to sell the government’s 51% share of Telstra, the major telephone company, to make it entirely privatised. Legislators passed that proposal last night amid predictions from proponents of telecommunications heaven just ahead and, from opponents, the immanent arrival of hell for the less profitable service areas in the bush.
I haven’t figured out yet the political landscape in Australia. Two Queensland parties, the Nationals and the Liberals, were identified by a Courier-Mail writer last weekend as “the two conservative parties.” There’s also a Labour party and who knows what else, given that some conservatives here are aligned under the Liberal label.
My listening to some of the Telstra debate on radio makes me think that politicians of all types here are quite out-spoken when challenging each other’s views and that strikes me, thus far at least, as refreshing. Maybe that’s a sign I’m not well informed or maybe it means that I’m not yet jaded. Regardless, it gives me something to share with Anthony Trollope. I, too, perceive an apparent paucity of sheep.
***
ABOUT NEW ORLEANS
For a balanced, well-reasoned, angry, and heart-felt “Pastoral Letter” concerning New Orleans please read what the Rev. Bill Sinkford has posted at www.uua.org.
And for a disturbing, first-person account of what it was like to try to leave New Orleans in the days after Katrina hit, written by two emergency medical technicians who were at a convention there, go to any number of web sites carrying a report usually entitled “Hurricane Katrina-Our Experiences.” It’s by Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky. Type her name into a Google search box and you’ll find it.
If you are bothered by the fact that Bradshaw and Slonsky’s piece is featured on a socialist web site, as I am somewhat, please look past that to the article itself. I understand it was first published by a web site for professional EMTs. Regardless, its authenticity seems to be supported by (a) its specificity and detail and (b) the authors’ willingness to admit that they were among the tourists who tried to use their relative wealth and standing to hire busses and flee the flooded city, knowing others would be left behind with no similar opportunity to leave. Propagandists usually avoid admissions that put them in questionable light.
The busses they hired never arrived, though, and they report experiences of thug-like behavior on the part of people who should have been helping them. This is information that, if accurate, should be a part of our national understanding of this event, and it is information that may not be made available by mainstream publications.
And, if it is true that three college students in a two-wheel-drive car were able to get into New Orleans when FEMA was saying there was no way to get in to help the stranded, and if it is true that police would not let survivors walk out of the city, we all need to know that and I, like Bill Sinkford, am angry.
For quotations from the Bradshaw and Slonsky article, for commentary, and for other corroborating reports please go to
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006754.html.
***
FOOTNOTE: My information about Anthony Trollope’s visit to Australia comes from a fine book entitled “The Australians: From 1788 to Modern Times” by John Fisher (Rigby Limited, copyright 1968).
Getting comfortable is good, but I worry about becoming prematurely jaded.
Surely Anthony Trollope, the writer who focused on the British upper class, was jaded when he travelled in Australia in 1871. Once he got past affirming his not-great expectations of society in this colony, Trollope did some insightful reporting, but he was often less than impressed with what he saw.
About a trip to Perth, he wrote: “No man perhaps ever travelled two hundred and sixty miles with less to see… The bush in these parts never develops itself into scenery, never for a moment becomes interesting.”
And, after taking a horseback ride alone through the bush, he said: “It was all wood. There arose at last a feeling that, go where one might through the forest, one was never going anywhere…. One might ride on, to the right or to the left, or might turn back, and there was ever the same view.”
My partner and I recently had similar feelings about the scenery in a eucalypt forest in southwest Brisbane. During two earlier weekend trips, we’d wandered through forests similarly made up for the most part of one variety or another of the gum or eucalypt tree, of which Australia has about 700 native varieties. We had loved the first two hikes, but three weekends among eucalypts seemed to us to be one too many, right then. (Last weekend’s bushwalk lived up to the name of its locale, Mt. Glorious.)
Perhaps a less jaded viewer or a more knowledgeable one might have noted interesting differences missed by us and missed earlier by Trollope. An Aborigine, for example, might have seen, in the same forest through which the English visitor rode, plants with edible roots or indications of recent animal activity. Even Trollope noted that an “astonishing phenomena of these runs is the apparent paucity of sheep,” even when there might be, grazing in the area, as many as 18 woollies per square mile. Even a trained eye could miss them, he said.
Discernment depends on knowledge and those with trained eyes can often find what is different, varied or new where others see only boring sameness. One wants, normally, some of each, sameness and novelty.
SAME AND DIFFERENT
Noting that a lot of life here is much the same as what we knew in the United States (people eat, sleep, work, play, and most speak English as their first language), my partner and I wrote some friends about some of what seemed different to us in our first days in Brisbane when our sensitivities, only weeks ago, were fresher than they are now.
We said:
• Australians are generally friendly and forward-looking, like many ordinary Texans and Oklahomans, but even more so. The most commonly used phrase seems to reflect real attitudes: “No worries!”
• We have to remember, when stepping off curbs (actually, “kerbs” here), that there are worries, life-threatening ones in the form of cars coming rapidly from our right.
• Pedestrians on sidewalks, like drivers in the streets, keep to the left when meeting others. “Walk left, look right” was our mantra.
• The wonderful, raucous, crazy-laugh sounds we kept hearing came from Kookaburras, we learned, and the melancholy, downward-trending “aaawwhhh” sounds came from crows. (Trollope thought this distinctively mournful birdcall was from magpies.)
• There are no squirrels here. At least, we’ve seen none. There are, however, possums and “bush turkeys,” smallish wild turkeys that roam all over residential areas and the bush.• Lots of things are smaller here, including cars, refrigerators, washing machines, some soft drink bottles, rolls of paper towels, and toilets. The latter often have something all toilets should have: two buttons to push for flushing, one for urine and one, as a plumber who adjusted one of ours delicately put it, “for solids.”
• The 230-240V current here powers large heating elements in tea kettles, bringing water to a boil quickly, and the wall sockets each have on-off switches that save current by reducing the number of appliances on standby.
• People pass right by pennies on sidewalks at home, but dropped coins are retrieved quickly here because they include $1 and $2 pieces. There are no $1 bills and no pennies, although there are prices like $1.97. Clerks round up (or down?) at cash registers. The various denominations of bills are multi-colored and of slightly different in size, and they feel more like plastic than paper.
• With an exchange rate fluctuating at about 1.30 Australian dollars for every U.S. dollar, one can feel suddenly richer after transferring funds electronically from home, until one does the math. And compares prices.
• Banks here sell car and house insurance (for other companies; they don’t issue the policies themselves) and offer investment advice. Interest on readily accessible savings accounts is well over 5% without term limitations.
• Phone calls almost always cost money. There are some “free call” numbers, but a call from one’s own home phone costs 20 cents most of the time, and from pay phones, 40 cents (more if you’re calling the number of a cell phone). There is a positive side, though. So far we’ve had only one wrong number call and no calls from telemarketers.
• And they’re not “cell phones” here, they’re “mobiles.” That’s pronounced with a long “i” and with emphasis on the second syllable. It rhymes with “aisles.”
• Australian television is digital and based on a standard developed in Europe, DVB, and it provides high quality pictures on inexpensive TVs. Some programming is Australian and some British, but much of what’s on cable channels consists of U.S. re-runs all the way back to “The Brady Bunch” and “Hogan’s Heroes.”
• British influence is stronger than U.S. influence here and the recent London bombing was heavily covered by local news media, but then, so were the horrors in and around New Orleans after Katrina. United States politics does get a good bit of coverage here, also, although China is a more important trading partner than our country.
A hot national issue at the moment in Australia has been the in-power party’s attempt to sell the government’s 51% share of Telstra, the major telephone company, to make it entirely privatised. Legislators passed that proposal last night amid predictions from proponents of telecommunications heaven just ahead and, from opponents, the immanent arrival of hell for the less profitable service areas in the bush.
I haven’t figured out yet the political landscape in Australia. Two Queensland parties, the Nationals and the Liberals, were identified by a Courier-Mail writer last weekend as “the two conservative parties.” There’s also a Labour party and who knows what else, given that some conservatives here are aligned under the Liberal label.
My listening to some of the Telstra debate on radio makes me think that politicians of all types here are quite out-spoken when challenging each other’s views and that strikes me, thus far at least, as refreshing. Maybe that’s a sign I’m not well informed or maybe it means that I’m not yet jaded. Regardless, it gives me something to share with Anthony Trollope. I, too, perceive an apparent paucity of sheep.
***
ABOUT NEW ORLEANS
For a balanced, well-reasoned, angry, and heart-felt “Pastoral Letter” concerning New Orleans please read what the Rev. Bill Sinkford has posted at www.uua.org.
And for a disturbing, first-person account of what it was like to try to leave New Orleans in the days after Katrina hit, written by two emergency medical technicians who were at a convention there, go to any number of web sites carrying a report usually entitled “Hurricane Katrina-Our Experiences.” It’s by Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky. Type her name into a Google search box and you’ll find it.
If you are bothered by the fact that Bradshaw and Slonsky’s piece is featured on a socialist web site, as I am somewhat, please look past that to the article itself. I understand it was first published by a web site for professional EMTs. Regardless, its authenticity seems to be supported by (a) its specificity and detail and (b) the authors’ willingness to admit that they were among the tourists who tried to use their relative wealth and standing to hire busses and flee the flooded city, knowing others would be left behind with no similar opportunity to leave. Propagandists usually avoid admissions that put them in questionable light.
The busses they hired never arrived, though, and they report experiences of thug-like behavior on the part of people who should have been helping them. This is information that, if accurate, should be a part of our national understanding of this event, and it is information that may not be made available by mainstream publications.
And, if it is true that three college students in a two-wheel-drive car were able to get into New Orleans when FEMA was saying there was no way to get in to help the stranded, and if it is true that police would not let survivors walk out of the city, we all need to know that and I, like Bill Sinkford, am angry.
For quotations from the Bradshaw and Slonsky article, for commentary, and for other corroborating reports please go to
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006754.html.
***
FOOTNOTE: My information about Anthony Trollope’s visit to Australia comes from a fine book entitled “The Australians: From 1788 to Modern Times” by John Fisher (Rigby Limited, copyright 1968).
Monday, September 12, 2005
Not cutting edge, but a start
To Family and Friends –
Thanks for checking in on this blog. I’m a novice and I sense that I’m getting into blogging late, so late that Doonesbury is already making fun of bloggers, portraying them as reporters of trivial news (two characters were recently racing to be the first to review a new type of Krispi Kreme donut).
Nevertheless, for good or ill, as purveyors of truth and not-truth, bloggers have become a part of the world of many who are seeking to stay in touch, particularly those who believe that our media is too centralized and too much in the control of major corporations more interested in stock price than in digging for and reporting facts, pleasant or otherwise. Lately, I’ve been reading blogs more than ever before, finding inside reports and insightful coverage of the terrible events in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina hit and caused damage that had been much predicted, with ghastly results that had been fully anticipated in official reports. (Remarkably, even some television reporters became uncharacteristically blunt with officials attempting to spin attention away from failures toward rosy projections of help to come.)
So, on the one hand, I begin writing this blog with a sense that blogging has social usefulness and, on the other, a touch of worry that I may be deserving of Doonesbury disdain. I have no special angle on events and I hope to never be a lone reporter trying to use my laptop to get a message out to the world as disaster closes in around me and others.
My idea has been and is more mundane, to post some personal observations about cultural differences. As a not-so-innocent abroad, a Texan who has also lived in Massachusetts, Alabama, Florida, and Oklahoma, I’d been planning for months to begin this blog about the new home my partner and I are claiming as our own for the next few years. Ah, ha, there’s Observation 1, an example of the sort of thing I’ve wanted to call to your attention as a cultural difference between the US and Australia. Here, it seems, everyone says “partner,” not wife or husband or spouse. My “partner,” is Kristi, the love of my life, my wife, and, in fact, my partner as well.
VERY WEST, VERY SOUTH
I told some of my Unitarian Universalist friends as I was leaving the Southwest District, that Kristi and I were moving to the “far, far, Southwest,” and, depending on one’s perspective, one could say Australia is that. It is way more Southwest than El Paso or Phoenix, from, say, Dallas or Norman or Boston.
And this place seems to be, in some ways, more Southwestern than many parts of Texas these days, if by “Southwestern” one means to call up images of helpful neighbourliness, a desire to avoid pretension, and an easy-going spirit of optimism. We feel very much at home here. We feel welcomed.
We also feel the newness of it all. Have you tried driving on the left? While sitting behind a steering wheel on your car’s “passenger side?” That’s newness and then some. And did you note the spelling, above, of “neighborliness”? Spell Checker here keeps wanting me to put in the letter “u” in the strangest places. Sometimes I will, sometimes I won’t. No worries. It is about such things that I expect to report here. Mostly, anyway. We’ll see. And I welcome your responses.
NEWS
Wait, though. I do have a sort of a news flash having to do with food, and it’s only a couple of hundreds of years old.
The background: I’ve never tasted a Krispi Kreme, but I adore mangos. They grow here and they’re about to come into season.
The news: I’ve just learned from a Brisbane TV program that the man who imported the first mango plants to Australia, the horticulturalist who brought them here as a cash crop, had the same last name I do: Hill. (First name: Walter.)
So, there. A fact and a boast in my very first post. I’d better clear a space on our bookshelf for the Pulitzer, don’t you think? Or maybe not? Either way, without ignoring the profound events that are a part of all our lives, I hope to amuse and inform those who visit here about what, in this Southwest Down Under, seems interesting to two pairs of eyes and ears with born-Texan filters.
-- Bob
Thanks for checking in on this blog. I’m a novice and I sense that I’m getting into blogging late, so late that Doonesbury is already making fun of bloggers, portraying them as reporters of trivial news (two characters were recently racing to be the first to review a new type of Krispi Kreme donut).
Nevertheless, for good or ill, as purveyors of truth and not-truth, bloggers have become a part of the world of many who are seeking to stay in touch, particularly those who believe that our media is too centralized and too much in the control of major corporations more interested in stock price than in digging for and reporting facts, pleasant or otherwise. Lately, I’ve been reading blogs more than ever before, finding inside reports and insightful coverage of the terrible events in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina hit and caused damage that had been much predicted, with ghastly results that had been fully anticipated in official reports. (Remarkably, even some television reporters became uncharacteristically blunt with officials attempting to spin attention away from failures toward rosy projections of help to come.)
So, on the one hand, I begin writing this blog with a sense that blogging has social usefulness and, on the other, a touch of worry that I may be deserving of Doonesbury disdain. I have no special angle on events and I hope to never be a lone reporter trying to use my laptop to get a message out to the world as disaster closes in around me and others.
My idea has been and is more mundane, to post some personal observations about cultural differences. As a not-so-innocent abroad, a Texan who has also lived in Massachusetts, Alabama, Florida, and Oklahoma, I’d been planning for months to begin this blog about the new home my partner and I are claiming as our own for the next few years. Ah, ha, there’s Observation 1, an example of the sort of thing I’ve wanted to call to your attention as a cultural difference between the US and Australia. Here, it seems, everyone says “partner,” not wife or husband or spouse. My “partner,” is Kristi, the love of my life, my wife, and, in fact, my partner as well.
VERY WEST, VERY SOUTH
I told some of my Unitarian Universalist friends as I was leaving the Southwest District, that Kristi and I were moving to the “far, far, Southwest,” and, depending on one’s perspective, one could say Australia is that. It is way more Southwest than El Paso or Phoenix, from, say, Dallas or Norman or Boston.
And this place seems to be, in some ways, more Southwestern than many parts of Texas these days, if by “Southwestern” one means to call up images of helpful neighbourliness, a desire to avoid pretension, and an easy-going spirit of optimism. We feel very much at home here. We feel welcomed.
We also feel the newness of it all. Have you tried driving on the left? While sitting behind a steering wheel on your car’s “passenger side?” That’s newness and then some. And did you note the spelling, above, of “neighborliness”? Spell Checker here keeps wanting me to put in the letter “u” in the strangest places. Sometimes I will, sometimes I won’t. No worries. It is about such things that I expect to report here. Mostly, anyway. We’ll see. And I welcome your responses.
NEWS
Wait, though. I do have a sort of a news flash having to do with food, and it’s only a couple of hundreds of years old.
The background: I’ve never tasted a Krispi Kreme, but I adore mangos. They grow here and they’re about to come into season.
The news: I’ve just learned from a Brisbane TV program that the man who imported the first mango plants to Australia, the horticulturalist who brought them here as a cash crop, had the same last name I do: Hill. (First name: Walter.)
So, there. A fact and a boast in my very first post. I’d better clear a space on our bookshelf for the Pulitzer, don’t you think? Or maybe not? Either way, without ignoring the profound events that are a part of all our lives, I hope to amuse and inform those who visit here about what, in this Southwest Down Under, seems interesting to two pairs of eyes and ears with born-Texan filters.
-- Bob
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)