Going Down…Under…For The First Time
Mutterings And Murmurs . Social Studies
Any trip of 28,000 kilometers or more (or less) begins with the first step, the first mile or kilometer, or in my case, and in spite of years of miles and kilometers travelled, a few missteps or turns. All of this distance is founded on several missteps and genuine accidents that ultimately allowed me to learn and unlearn good and bad habits and behaviors. I still have a long way to go. Stay in the right lane. Or the left.
Vroom vroom.
What a great place!
Let’s go.
Just stay left and you’ll be right.
But not too left or you’ll be riding the shoulder.
Those little rumble strips are alarming.
Drive your rental like you stole it.
But not too fast or too erratically, there are cameras and sensors and detectors everywhere…for everything.
For your collective safety of course.
But first, I will admit, I questioned the reality of what I was doing. Was it really happening as it was happening? Was it the right thing? What part of me was hurting most? I had to accept reality…I guess. It happened. I saw it. Smelled it. Heard it. Felt it.
Yes, it did happen.
All of it.
I confess.
Proceed.
I will avoid the clichés, tropes, colloquialisms and memes of everything I have ever learned and think I know about Australia. I saw so little of it. It’s a very big and diverse place of only 26,000,000 people of which only 813,000 are identified as aboriginal. I don’t know what to make of it but I only had contact with two people that I could identify as aboriginal. I didn’t ask. They must not be indigenous to the densely populated and prosperous New South Wales.
What do I know?
I know more now.
So.
Good day friend. How are things going for you?
Kookaburra
Kookaburra sits on the old gum tree
Merry merry king of the bush is he
Laugh Kookaburra, laugh Kookaburra
Gay your life must be
Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree
Eating all the gumdrops he can see
Stop Kookaburra, stop Kookaburra
Leave some there for me
Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree
Counting all the monkeys he can see
Stop Kookaburra, stop Kookaburra
Thats no monkey, thats me
I saw my first live Kookaburras, big ones and small. They made that laughing sound. You know, that classic sound of the jungle from any Tarzan or jungle explorer type movie you ever saw. They were laughing at me. I know it. I’m sure of it. They were laughing at the big old entitled white ape colonialist monkey, the one with the big purpose and the odd manner, the one that didn’t read the fine print on his plane ticket, travel insurance or visa application. The one with a long ago criminal history that nearly barred him from entering a former and modern day prison colony. The one with illegal contraband beef jerky and trail mix in his luggage – the armed customs agents cameth. I confessed. I surrendered. I dumped my dangerous and offending trail mix and water. They confiscated two of the three bags of excellent beef jerky I brought along for the trip. I am still a fugitive.
Bloody hell!
To be sure, Australia is a big place, an eerily familiar and strange place. Yes, there are similarities between this big island and other members of the dying Commonwealth of white colonialists but they drive on the wrong side of the road for goodness sake. They have fires and floods like everyone else…you know, the ones blamed on ‘C word’ Change instead of the plausible or likely. The good people there still honor their war dead and veterans on Nov.11. Canada, another Commonwealth Allied nation, has tried to ban prayer from Remembrance Day. The unCanadian C word government has a special arrangement with China for the procurement of insincere plastic poppies.
Um.
Well nobody’s paying attention or watching…are they? So many good people are handicapped and addicted to the head down use of one mobile clutching hand. They are war amputees. Will there be a day of rememberance for them? For all of us?
Australia seems to have a rapidly developing surveillance network, especially in Sydney, to control and penalize movement but they also have a much touted declining crime rate. Speed and cell phone use detection services are at your service and for your safety and protection 24/7. Chinese style track and trace monitoring is seemingly well accepted. Weeks later, I’m still getting charged for toll road use – the ‘No Go Zone’ penalties. They have unmolested pro HAMAS and anti Israel protests like everywhere else, especially in the diaspora of Macquarie Park. Were they mostly peaceful? Do the local constabulary, military and government agents wade in to brutalize the mostly peaceful activists and protesters like they did with those horrible granny killing anti authoritarian vaccine lockdown COVID terrorist protesters?
Not bloody likely mate!
Ahem.
Australia has enjoyed enough of a splendid isolation to produce alien flora and fauna species not seen anywhere else in the world and have, perhaps for the same reasons, produced some of the best music and musicians seen or heard anywhere…ever. The Birthday Party, Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds, The Chats, Hunters and Collectors, Mental As Anything, Split Enz, Tame Impala, Australian Crawl, Crowded House, Hoodoo Gurus, Amyl And The Sniffers, The Church, Powderfinger, The Angels, The Living End, Jet, The Go-Betweens, The Triffids, Lime Spiders, The Scientists, The Clouds, Beasts Of Bourbon, The Hitmen, Rolling Blackouts, Coastal Fever – to name too few. Max Igan is a brilliant guitarist…and exiled expat brilliant and bitter minded crotchety Australian. Honorable mention to The Bats, The Swingers and Hobnail Boots from New Zealand ( another authoritarian police state nation ) , the one with the horse faced psychopathic bitch for an ex prime minister…and one of Schwab’s Bitches to boot. Okay okay. Shout out to those big name bands that made it big everywhere. Okay, okay, AC/DC, Midnight Oil, INXS, Men At Work and um….Keith Urban.
Great film and literature came up and out from down there. I’ll leave a list later.
Continue.
Rent a car and drive.
Past and under fragrant Jaccaranda Trees, Gum Trees tangled and shedding and bare, Blackboy Bushes and Banksias with their prickly pods, catching sight of Swamp Wallabies, Bush Kangaroos, Eastern Greys Wombats, Echidnas, all while becoming enured to luxurious bird sounds.
And the birds?
Oh the birds.
Corellas, Lorikeets, Galahs, Red Capped Robins, Sulpher Crested cockatoos, Red rumped Parrots. The White Ibis, and the Carrawong Crow (also known as bin chickens). The Straw Necked Ibis and the Australian Pelicans, as big and clumsy as those Chinese AG600 amphibious aircraft or the Howard Hughes’ Spruce Goose. And the Whipping Bird. Toowoot!
From Sydney to Bondi Beach and exploitive parking rates and around and around and around the endless roundabouts and the Metro to Sydney Harbor, the bridge, the Grand Ole Opry House to Shellharbor to Kangaroo Valley to Fitzroy Falls to Bundanoon and Bundanoon Gorge Lookout. To Grand Canyon Lookout and Echo Point. To Wollongong, Gerroa, Kembla Heights, Port Kembla, Berry, Jaspers Brush, Bomaderry, Cambewarra, Barrangarry, Fitzroy Falls, Mossvale, Werai,and Exeter and numerous other townships named after stolen land language.
Austalian beaches and parks and campgrounds are primitive and clean. Australians are great campers. I admire them.
Yes, yes. I tried Vegemite. You know, the stuff made famous in that Men At Work song. It’s different to be sure. I brought some home…for a treat. The food was good. Their bacon is different. I mostly ate out of grocery stores that carried mostly domestically made, grown and protected goods. Food pricing and inflation bordered on the profiteering model…just like home. The coffee was better than at home. Drip coffee is against the law there…or at the very least…a venal sin. Even the sports pub hotel room instant coffee was good. I was introduced to the SMEG Lavazza pod coffee machine. Good coffee but…not very green that.
This first and probably last trip downunder began with a sense of forboding borne of the attrocities committed there during their very authoritarian pandemic response. I feared for my daughter that lives down there with really good people in a region removed from the worst of the pandemic response tragedies. Canada was no better but the video and images that came through from down there were truly horrific and I wondered and marveled at how normal things seemed down there. Have they all forgotten this recent history like so many of us up here? The camps. The arrests. The gassing and beatings. The energy weapons used in Canberra. The Dan Andrews. Did they or were they allowed to see what we saw from up here? Did they see what we were subjected to up here? Did their splendid isolation allow more and greater mass formation? Were these good people just relieved to be able to get on with things? To drive. To go to the beach. To party and be brilliant sociable humans. Are they naturally helpful and cheerful as Canadians are known to be polite, obedient and rule conscious?
Like us. Up here.
Perhaps.
For now.
Was I there?
For how long?
Am I back?
From down there?
From The Never Never?
Jet lag is overrated.
The Go Betweens – From LAST.FM Biography
The Go-Betweens were one of the most internationally influential indie rock bands from Australia, formed by guitarists Robert Forster (b. 1957) and Grant McLennan (1958-2006) in Brisbane in 1977. After disbanding in 1989, Forster and McLennan reformed the band in 2000 with a new line-up, however, they disbanded for good after McLennan died on May 6, 2006.
The Go-Betweens were a critically-acclaimed cult act famously summarised by Village Voice critic Robert Christgau thus: “Robert Forster and Grant McLennan are the greatest songwriting partnership working today.”