Damned if I know…

A Canadian friend of mine wrote me recently that he’s pleased that I’ve settled into the part of “Her Majesty’s dominion” that is, with the possible exception of Alberta, most like Texas.

Both Queensland and Alberta do remind me of Texas in some ways. I was in Calgary during their annual Stampede week once, a rodeo-centered celebration much like the Texas State Fair, though smaller, of course. (We Texans still think size matters, except in regard to Alaska.)

Surrounded by plains as flat as the Texas Panhandle, many Calgarians, by their own choice or feeling pressured to do so by their civic-minded employers, spent the week dressed in cowboy hats, jeans, and sometimes even pointy-toed boots with high tops and big heels. Unfortunately, I didn’t own any cowboy boots, but I had jeans and I borrowed a hat with a wide brim to wear to the Stampede grounds.

I don’t see many cowboy hats here, but, as in Calgary, it is easy to imagine oneself to be within the bounds of her Majesty’s dominion. Bill Bryson, in his fine book about this continent called “In a Sunburned Country,” reminds us that Australian citizenship became possible only in 1949. Until then, Australians were British. To this day, Lions Clubs here open their meetings with a toast to the queen and no one has ask, “Which queen?”

So we’ve had to learn how to drive on the wrong side of the road while steering from the passenger seat. Canada somehow managed to escape that oddity, at least.

Australians also show their British heritage when they speak. Subways are “trams,” for example, baby carriages are “prams,” grocery carts are “trolleys,” and candies are “lollies.” The term “bloody” gets used a bit.

-- Our dams are low

Some of the terms and usages that strike our American ears as unusual seem to be logical variations of phrases we use, improvements, even. People here don’t “take a look,” they “have a look.”

Others make no sense to me at all. Clerks in stores use “thank you” where I’m accustomed to hearing “please,” as in, “That will be $12.98, thank you.” I’ve never heard “please” here at the end of these requests.

Chickens are “chooks.”

“Mob” often gets used a lot affectionately to refer to family, as in “our mob,” although it also means Mafia.

You may not need to raise your voice to “shout a beer” for someone. You just buy the next round.

But shouting is involved in “barracking.” My Aussie Pocket Oxford Dictionary says barracking can be either jeering at someone or cheering them on, as in “We’re going to barrack for the Lions.”

And then their’s the word “dam.”

For months there’s been too little rain both here and in the parts of Texas where my brothers live, and Brisbane’s water restrictions are about to become a notch more severe.

Why? Because, the local papers and newscasters say, the dams are low.

Then we should build those dams up, shouldn’t we, raise them higher so they can back up larger lakes of water when rains finally come? Wrong. Here, in Australia, “dams” are what I believe the rest of the world refers to as lakes.

There’s a beautiful color picture in a book I’m reading now, a naturalist’s report of a year spent in a rural area close to Melbourne, and the caption says, “Sunset reflected in a dam below Cochran’s Gap.” It’s a photo of water. The “dam” is the water itself, collected behind a …

Until this week when I asked the guy who drives the ferry we ride across the Brisbane River from Dutton Park to the University of Queensland, I didn’t know what Aussies call that damn thing that holds the water back. It is, he said, “the dam wall.”

Perhaps I should have guessed. The lake… I mean, the dam, is held back by the dam wall.

In the name of politeness, I am censoring all remarks beginning with “Up against the dam wall, you….” Politeness, I’m glad to report, does matter here a great deal.

-- Polite as Texans and then some

We Texans pride ourselves on being polite and friendly, but residents of Brizzy (as our city is called by people caught up in the national drive to save letters and breath whenever possible) are friendlier than most Texans in towns or cities of similar size.

You cannot stand still on a Brisbane street with a map in your hand without someone immediately asking if you need help. Even in the middle of Ekka, the Brizzy equivalent of the Texas State Fair, our brief pause to figure things out not only got us verbal directions to a display we wanted to visit, but a helpful critique of what parts of it were worth visiting and which were not, plus a tip about where to find free samples of wine, snacks, and honey. All this from a woman pushing a pram and holding the hand of a fidgety four-year-old.

And, bless them, our friends here make frequent use of a word I thought was a Texas colloquialism, "reckon," as in “I reckon so.” Makes me feel as at home as fried okra, but the politeness of these folks warms my heart.

Both Australians and the Texans I grew up with are careful to avoid giving offence. There’s a delightful civility about the Canadians I’ve met also (granted, I’ve never been to Montreal), but the politeness of Aussies is both noticeable and pleasant.

Sometimes, it can be tactical, too. I’d wondered about the frequency with which I was getting asked, “Are you from Canada?” Or, “Are you from Canada or the US?” Never having pronounced “about” so that it rhymed with “boot,” I began to suspect that politeness was involved in these questions.

A neighbor has now confirmed for me that suspicion. Because US folks are never offended by being thought of as Canadian but Canadians can get huffy if they're "accused" of being from the US, polite Aussies take no chances.

Being still in touch with what's going on with the US government and foreign policy via several US newspapers on-line and, on cable TV, delayed broadcasts of the CBS Evening News, I've been working on my Canadian accent. Maybe I can learn to “pass,” eh?

Oh, well, according to someone Bill Bryson interviewed for his travel book, Queenslanders are all “as crazy as a barrel of cut snakes,” anyway. What a put-down! Not at all polite.

That colourful falsehood makes me think of New Englanders describing a person of suspect abilities as being “one brick shy of a load” or, worse yet, “soft as a grape.”

My favorite put-down phrase, though, sounds Texan to my ears. About me and about most of the others attending Calgary’s Stampede the year I was there, you could have truly said, preferably with a bit of a drawl, “He’s all hat and no cattle.”

Now, that is a put-down!

Thanks for reading this. I reckon I’ll blog again one day soon, the lord willin’ and the dams don’t rise. -- Bob