“OMG!! U didn’t warn me about the non-censorship of radio stations here. I was like did they just say fuck n pussy on the radio?!”
The Australian propensity for vulgarity is well-known, but the first day Down Under is always still a culture shock.
8pm in Bermuda, 11am in Cairns. My friend is texting me from the Hertz counter at Cairns International Airport, day four of her two-week grand tour of Australia. I’m in bed, with this Moleskine and a liberal pour of shiraz. Barossa Shiraz, in fact. Having spent my pre-teen years Down Under, I never had the chance to appreciate the alcoholic bounty my country offered. There’s a lot of catching up to do.
There is something shiny and elusive about Australia. Every year, I have at least one friend from the opposite end of the world making the pilgrimage to the Antipodeans. It’s the crowning jewel of long-haul travel, a prerequisite to any self-respecting backpacker’s bucket list. It takes less time to fly from London to Moscow than it takes to fly from Perth to Sydney, two ends of what is technically an island nation. Nine in ten of its 25 million inhabitants live along the coast. Venture more than fifty kilometres inland, and civilisation slowly peters out and gives way to bushland. Continue for a few more hours, and brush dies out into the vast, arid Outback. In Western Australia, mining towns are the last outpost of civilisation – with a population of twenty and a single pub holding steadfast as a literal watering hole in the middle of the desert. In the Northern Territory, Australia’s most remote region, doctors make their house calls on Beechcraft planes. There is a very good reason why cross-country road trips aren’t too common; in a list of “Tips to Drive Safely in Australia’s Remote Outback”, a travel insurance website advises the reader to “use your rear vision mirror to signal passing planes by flashing it into the sun.”
Australia has the terrain of Texas – cattle stations, stockmen, and a quite literal manifestation of the state slogan “Go Big Or Go Home”. A bewildering collection of towering sculptures dots the country’s landscape: a giant lobster in Kingston, the Big Banana of Coffs Harbour, Rambo the super-sized Merino ram of Goulburn, and a dozen other “Big Things” which have found its way onto the alternative tourist itinerary. But Australia, in its nonchalant disregard (or ignorance?) of convention, often seems a sister state of Florida. Huffington Post has an entire section dedicated to “Weird Australia” – just last week, a male member of the Australian parliament vehemently declared himself female to ward off critics of his anti-abortion stance. In 1967 a retired prime minister went for a swim off the coast of Melbourne, and simply disappeared forever. In 2016 the opposition Labor Party launched a “Waste-pedia” booklet accusing the incumbent government of over-lavish spending, and allocated $400,000 on “koala and other marsupial-related events”.
“This government is obsessed with hugging koalas. We’ve had (foreign minister) Julie Bishop paying $133,000 to fly four koalas to Singapore Zoo,” opposition minister Pat Conroy declared. “She spent I think it was $130,000 taking diplomats to Western Australia where they hugged wombats for a change – so at least they changed up the marsupial.”
Then, of course, we have the dangerous animals – regular features in Buzzfeed’s listicles. Box jellyfish, bull sharks, great whites, spiders, crocodiles, and over a hundred species of venomous snakes. In the nurse’s office at school, we had a chart showing all the spiders found in the area – funnel-webs, redbacks, trapdoors – in case any of the kids had the misfortune of getting bitten by one. Having never experienced it myself, I imagine visual identification wouldn’t be too difficult – the Sydney funnel-web has fangs larger than a brown snake’s, and apparently so powerful they can even pierce through nails and toenails. (According to the Australian Geographic, however, only one out of six funnelback bites cause a severe reaction. That means you have over 80% chance of surviving one without an antivenom. For Australia, those are really good odds to roll with.)
The first white men to settle in the country were criminals shipped over from Great Britain in the early 1800s – convicts relegated to the far end of the earth for everything from highway robbery to petty theft. When they got here, everything was strange and incomprehensible. In early European paintings the Australian bush resembled a transplanted Antipodean Cotswolds – eucalyptus was painted as oak; slender leaves and peeling silver bark were replaced by the gnarly thick branches of the Quercus robur. Nostalgic and frustrated, British immigrants formed “acclimatisation societies” to bring in house sparrows, English starlings and mynas. Australian birdsong wasn’t birdsong (“songless bright birds”, sniffed one colonial poet) – it was tuneless cacophony. There is nothing more primal than the crepuscular sounds of the Australian bush: the chortle of wattlebirds, the low-pitched hoots of noctural frogmouths just stirring into life, the staccato bass line of pobblebonks like the plodding plucks of a banjo string.
Even the weight of light is different here. At dawn or dusk, it seeps into your clothes, settling on open wounds like a cold, wet towel. The laugh of the kookaburra reverberates into the vermillion light; the air is still and the sunstruck gums stretch their limbs into a sky on fire. For the early colonisers, most whom arrived in Australia against their own volition, this was not a brave new world – this was a prison of memory, an exacting, unforgiving prism through which the future tense blurs into the past, leaving little breathing room for the present. The enormity of the land – the knowledge that beyond the tree line awaits brooding, unrelenting emptiness – touches a raw nerve. Confronted with infinity, very few things truly matter.
The history of Australia is, however, significantly older than the history of Columbus. Aborigines have been here for at least 65,000 years – probably longer – when humans first populated the continent. There have been at least 500 different clans, and each has its own language, belief system, and songlines – paths traced out by spirit beings during Dreamtime, the ancient time of creation. Their cross-continental travels carved out waterholes, landmarks, and sacred sites across an originally formless land.
In wild country, songlines are a blueprint of the living landscape. They are recorded in stories and songs, dances and paintings – an ode to the sanctity of the land. This is nature that awes you into silence – the changing colours of Uluru at sunset, the floodplains and escarpments of Kakadu, the filigree beauty of the Great Barrier Reef at low tide on a calm day.
Australia has its own chequered history of immigration and racial conflict – one that merits its own discussion – but the new millennium Down Under is a heady blend of tongues and dreams from across the globe. More than a quarter of Australians were born overseas (the same figure for the U.S. stands at around 14%), with two-thirds of this number – led by India and China – being skilled migrants brought in for the burgeoning Australian workforce. (Sydney’s consistently top-ranked high school is an all-Asian affair – out of a class of about 150 in a friend’s graduating class, there were two white kids. “Five if you count half-Asians,” ruminated my friend.)
I spent a total of five years in Australia, from middle school through high school, which also represents the longest stretch of time (to date) I have spent in any one place. The accent stuck, and I happily use it as a hall pass. “I swear a lot – I’m Australian”; “I drink a lot – I’m Australian.” When the compliance department at my investment banking job called about my choice of words on the office messenger, I sulkily retorted that it was part of my cultural heritage (and secretly wished I was working at Macquarie). I had a flask of rum stashed away in my cubicle drawer, and reveled in the street cred of being fired from my first job ever (a tour guide of my college campus – I was drinking wine out of my Nalgene bottle while on tour). Now, ever since moving to Bermuda, I’ve lost count of the number of Tinder guys who’ve unmatched me after hearing that I “launder money” for a living.
It’s been almost four years since I’ve been home. Maybe it’s another Aussie thing – with three or four weeks off a year, I find myself itching to travel instead to places I’ve never been before. The people of Australia, after all, have been children of the land from its very beginning. Nomads and migrants, wayfarers and dreamers – whether sleeping under the open sky in the middle of the Australian bush, or in the bunk bed of a Trans-Siberian carriage. Our most famous export isn’t the koala or the free-range beef, but the (drunk) party-hostel Aussie backpacker. It seems that every Australian you meet is blissfully in between jobs (or taking consecutive gap years) – when your home country is tucked into the most remote corner of the world, you make a point of squeezing out every last drop of your time on earth.
Living in a beach shack halfway around the world now, I am probably fulfilling a destiny more Australian than I imagined. Sausage rolls pop out of the oven every Anzac Day, I have little filter when I speak, and I still struggle with reporting to authority. A large map hangs in the living room pinned with the all the places I’ve lived in, visited, and plan to visit in 2019 (although I typically pick hotel suites over party hostels). And through all this travelling, Sydney will always be home. One of several, but no less important.
Sundays in Surry Hills, hopping from café to café with a laptop and Moleskine journal; summers in a double-decker Sydney train, slowly nodding off in the incapacitating heat. The raucous rainbow lorikeets that flock to our fifteenth floor balcony, and dad – shirtless and sweating in our un-airconditioned penthouse (frugality was next to godliness) – shooting at them with a gardening spray can when the incessant chattering built up to an unbearable din. The arches and stained glass of the Queen Victoria Building in grey rain; the breakers off Bondi on a winter’s day. The plaintive call of the currawong, echoing into the golden hour, that to this day still haunt my pastiche dreamscapes of Australia.
