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A family, a caravan, and a year
October 19, 2007A 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 quoted above comes from a report compiled from this blog and published in a recent “The Age” newspaper.
It’s quite a story – headlined “Into the wild blue yonder” — and it shows that discovering this continent’s variety and charm can be thrilling for Aussies as well as immigrants like us. More than eight out of 10 Australians live in the southeast quadrant, after all, and few have left the environs of major cities like Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide to experience their much-celebrated outback.
The Kraus family of four sold their business, bought a vehicle and a caravan (mobile home), and drove 27,402 miles, blowing nine “tyres” on 84 million road corrugations and potholes (their estimate).
A whole year was too long, Annett says, and the family had to take vacations from their vacation to spend periods of time doing “normal everyday things, so as not to have to see, hear or be exposed to any more new experiences. You can really only have so much input before your brain stops comprehending.”
An issue for all of us who travel these days is the burning of fossil fuels and this trip used 6,500 litres of petrol (1,717 gallons of fuel), a $9,500 expense.
Was it worth it? Yes, Annett says. The family’s son and daughter learned a lot and matured in positive ways, the work-oriented father got re-integrated into the family, and they returned home with a year’s worth of memories and 16,000 photos.
Digital, surely, and backed up, I hope.
read comments (1)
October 22nd, 2007 at 6:13 am
Funny. I’m always amused by how people don’t get “arvo”. “Sunnies” (Sunglasses) also gets people, as does “Presso” (to give a presentation). I never know why; they’re obvious, aren’t they?
Once when living in Europe I said “Arvo” to a group of English, Irish, Scottish, American and Germans, in a professional office context, and they all looked at me blankly.
“Arvo”, y’know, “afternoon”. Its obvious, I thought to myself.
The reply astounded me. I expected them to go “oh, afternoon, of course.” Instead, one said “Um, Andrew, *I* have been to Australia and *I* never heard that term. It must be from YOUR part of Australia, and no-where else. Like your accent. YOU don’t really sound Australian.”
In a fit of paranoia that I’ve been away from the homeland for too long I canvassed all the other overseas Aussies with “is it me or is ‘Arvo’ a normal term?”. Thankfully, “eh? whaddya talkin about mate. Arvo is afternoon. Everyone knows that.”
And my accent? “Bloody hell you just have a normal city accent. So you don’t sound like the Croc hunter. Whaddya care about that mate?”
Thank God for Aussie bluntness, especially at times of need when an Irishman who has been to Alice Springs on a tour with a bus-load of Europeans think they know more about your country (and your accent) than you do.