2 Texans Down Under

Rain! Again!

Steady flashes of lightening and crashing thunder kept me awake until well after midnight last night and I didn’t mind because it all came with buckets of rain, another couple of inches, perhaps.

Southwest of Brisbane, a place called Yarrahappini got nearly four inches (101mm) Sunday, yesterday, and set a 38-year record for rainfall in October.

Reports say our reservoirs, while not filling up, are maintaining at 20-21 percent capacity, an encouraging change from the downward slide we’ve been experiencing for months on end.

And predictions are for more thunderstorms, tonight and later this week. Could our luck be changing? Meteorologist Matt Pearce predicts the spread of rain across the interior of Australia through the rest of this week and offers this hopeful observation, “With a La Nina now in place, these systems are likely to become more frequent in coming months.”

Viva la La Nina! — Bob

It rained here last week. Gloriously. Most of a night. Maybe two inches in all, here in Brisbane.

Since there were no banner headlines in the papers the next day, I presume it didn’t rain much in central or western Queensland where the catchment areas for our dangerously low reservoirs are located, but at least it rained here, near the coast, proving that it is still possible for moisture to fall from the sky.

There was lightening and thunder, too, lots of it. I got up out of bed, poured myself a small brandy, and watched and listened for half an hour. Without turning on any lights, I opened the front door and breathed in the smell of newly wet dirt.

A recent magazine article by Graeme Blundell, about television travel shows, praised Michael Palin’s 1989 film “Around the World in 80 Days” and recalled a story Palin told after returning to London at the end of the filming.

“I’ve just been around the world,” he said to a man who was giving him a ride home. “Oh, yeah?” the man replied. Then he said, “It looks like rain.”

I think Palin read this response as an indication of how little fellow Londoners cared about travel and/or the rest of the world, but it seems to me there’s another possibility. Maybe there was a drought in progress, such as there still is here.

When reservoirs get below 20 percent people begin to focus on things that matter most and – at least in this part of Australia these days – the possibility of rain trumps nearly everything else. — Bob

Who pulled the plug on the worm?

It’s on page five in “The Australian” today but it continues to be one of the more interesting stories coming out of Sunday night’s John Howard, Kevin Rudd debate.

As I said in yesterday’s blog, Nine Network’s feed of the 90-minute debate was interrupted twice and Nine had to take its signal from another channel. Nine’s Ray Martin blamed Howard’s Liberal Party.

Today, the chief executive of the National Press Club, which ran the debate, took the blame and he wasn’t apologizing for it. Nine, he said, had been disobeying the rules so they were no longer entitled to the feed. However, news reports say he told colleagues that the Liberal Party had been “putting the weights on him” over Nine’s “worm,” an on-screen image showing how 70 undecided voters were scoring the two debaters as the event progressed.

Channel Nine and its worm, it turns out, drew more viewers than any of the other channels carrying the debate. The 1.4 million viewers watching Nine saw the 70 undecided voters with dials connected to the worm score a solid win for Rudd.

“The Australian,” which seems to me to be blatantly pro-Liberal Party, reported today that a poll it commissioned found that Rudd won the debate convincingly (70 percent) or marginally (eight percent) while only 18 percent of those polled thought Howard won either convincingly or marginally.

The worm gave Rudd the win by over 65 percent to less than 30 percent for Howard. The pollsters said 78 to 18.

In a column on the same page that gave the poll results today, Matthew Franklin, the chief political correspondent of “The Australian” says, “The Labor leader was widely seen to have scored a narrow victory in the nationally televised debate.”

They banned the worm. The worm showed up anyway. The worm says Rudd beat Howard in last night’s televised debate from the Great Hall of Parliament.

Watching Australian politics is a trip.

Here are the facts: John Howard has been Prime Minister for 11 years. Kevin Rudd is seeking to replace him in an election November 24, but nobody gets to vote for either one as Prime Minister.

Voters will cast ballots all over Australia for Senators and Representatives and when all the counting is done either the conservative Liberal Party will have won enough seats in Parliament to keep Howard in office or the less conservative Labor Party will have won enough to elevate Rudd to the top spot.

The incumbent got to set most of the rules for the Sunday night debate Read the rest of this entry »

A challenge for you, if you’re accustomed to American English. Translate this paragraph, please:

“Well what a week this has been. We finally packed the house and got away in nice time. We made it uneventfully that arvo to Glen Inness and again towards Newcastle when all of a sudden the car goes POP and we were looking at a blown turbo…”

Anyone given to shortening words, as Australians tend to be, might write “turbo” for “turbocharger,” defined in my “Australian Pocket Oxford Dictionary” as “a supercharger driven by a turbine powered by the engine’s exhaust gases.”

But “arvo?” It took us a while to figure out, once we’d moved to Brisbane, that arvo is Australian for “afternoon.” Just like “avos” is short for avacados, “Salvos” is the local term for Salvation Army, and “prezzies” (also “pressies”) means gifts.

See how migrating to the Land of Oz keeps a person on his toes?

Anyway, the blown turbo turned out to be something less serious and the story of one family’s year-long car trip around Australia got off to a good start. You can read all about it at a blog posted by Annett Kruse: http://duffkruse.blogspot.com . The sentence Read the rest of this entry »

Information and communications technology - especially Australia’s need for a new broadband network - is getting more attention lately in the run-up to the federal election which will be held in November.

Too bad kids can’t vote. Slow though Internet service is here compared to the speeds customers enjoy in many other countries, 92 percent of Aussie kids between the ages of six and 17 have logged onto the web and most of them logged on for the first time before they were 10. Forty-three percent log on daily.

These eye-opening statistics come from an article in “The Australian” newspaper by Ben Woodhead who is quoting, he says, from “Nielsen/NetRatings’ 2007 Australia eGeneration Report.” I was unable to find that report on line, but then, I didn’t have a child to help me.

Adjacent to Woodhead’s report is a story by Fran Foo detailing a Microsoft video aimed at educating parents about the use of pornography filters. Microsoft says that when the filters are ineffective it’s usually not a software problem.

The problem seems to be that kids know more about computers than their parents think they do. They’re getting administrator rights without their parents’ knowledge. If you want to know what that means or how it’s done, ask someone between six and 17.

We’ve found it helpful, as US transplants to Australia, to read about the struggles and successes of Aussies in America. Our two cultures have much in common, but the differences are powerfully real, too.

Dealing with “the new” can be tough when “home” is half way around the globe regardless of which direction you’ve traveled to get to a new place. That newness is also, of course, a big part of the excitement of being an immigrant or a visitor.

Seeing how Aussies cope in the US is not like looking in the mirror, exactly, but it does add a useful perspective.

Two web sites I’ve found helpful and entertaining are www.matesupover.com and a Yahoo Group site, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ozinamerica/.

In upcoming blogs, I’ll be reflecting on how the experiences of some Aussie expats compare with our own ups and downs down under. — Bob

Nearly all our friends smiled, two and a half years ago in the United States, when we told them that we were planning to move to Australia. Many looked wistful. Some pulled out an Aussie phrase or two that they seemed proud to know. Others began talking about, maybe, visiting us down under.

Our announcement was treated as good news by nearly all our friends and acquaintances.

We did get more ambivalence from some of our family members. “Australia!” one said, as if I’d just told him we were moving to Mars. Another took me aside and proposed an outside limit for our being so far away: “You know, Bob, three years would be just about enough.”

And, for us, two Texans who’d never spent more than a few months abroad, the idea of leaving secure work situations, selling most of our possessions, and then packing up and moving to a new hemisphere and a continent we’d never even visited… well, it was a scary and an exciting time.

We had a thousand questions and there were a thousand more we would have asked if we had known enough ask them.

We prepared as best we could. We read some books and did web searches and called or emailed some people who’d been in one or another part of Australia, but we boarded the plane that brought us here with much less knowledge than we wanted.

The only person on this continent that we knew picked us up at the airport in Brisbane, dropped us off at a motel, and graciously left us alone to begin finding our way in a place where people drive on the wrong side of the road and speak their own sort of English.

Now, many months and some hard-knock lessons later, we know a few of the questions we should have asked but didn’t and we even know an answer or two. We have some experienced-based opinions about what it’s like to live and work in this country we have come to love.

This blog will be about what we’ve learned, about Australia as it is seen by two Americans far from what we’ve always known as home, and about what we hear from other immigrants and visitors.

If thinking of Australia as a place to visit or to live gives your spirits a lift, then please join us by returning here regularly. We like company. We like responses. We want to hear your questions.

Australia has surprised us, tested us, and pleased us. We’d like to tell you about why all those smiles on the faces of our friends were, in fact, justified. — Bob