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).
No comments:
Post a Comment