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