2 Texans Down Under

I think I’ve just been saved from a life of crime.

Maybe I would have or maybe I wouldn’t have, but I was considering smuggling Vegemite into the United States when my wife and I fly there next month. I was already dreading going through Customs in San Francisco.

The need for authentic Aussie Christmas gifts was behind my wild and reckless plans. The last time we went home, we took small samples of Tim Tams, an iconic Australian cookie … woops, I mean biscuit. I didn’t want to Tim Tam twice, so I eyed the Vegemite display in our local Coles supermarket.

I’ve discovered a real taste for the brown, salty, yeast-based spread that so many down under folks view as a brekkie (breakfast) staple and snack food. It took me two years to give it a fair go, but now I agree that, on buttered toast, it’s really good.

About a year ago, we read lots of stories about a ban on Vegemite in the US because of its foliate content. Aussies and New Zealanders (Kiwis) were having their life-supporting jars taken away by Customs agents, we read, and there was a lot of gnashing of teeth among expatriates living in America.

Fearing condiment confiscation or worse if I proceeded with my scheme, I sent a message to a Yahoo Group for expats, ozinamerica, to inquire about Read the rest of this entry »

A government was overthrown here Saturday.

You probably read or saw reports about it: Kevin Rudd and the liberal Labor Party snatched control of the country from John Howard and the conservative Liberal Party. It was a transfer of power by ballot and it was a joy to watch.

Having already become avidly partisan even though we cannot vote because we are not citizens here, Kristi and I were thrilled to see Rudd end Howard’s reign of more than 11 years. A leader of dubious veracity and limited vision has been replaced by a younger man who is middle-of-the-road on many issues but seems to grasp the gravity of global warming, the importance of openness in government, and need to preserve the Aussie tradition of “a fair go” for all citizens.

There was a lot at stake, and although Howard had on his stoic, strong face during his concession speech, Read the rest of this entry »

Friends in the United States ask whether or not we celebrate Thanksgiving here and I explain to them that, no, Australians miss out on “turkey day” and a lot of important holidays like July 4th, Evacuation Day, and Sam Houston’s birthday. And hardly anybody here remembers the Alamo.

That’s a tongue-in-cheek reply, of course, and Kristi and I will be joining an American friend and her Australian husband tomorrow for a Thanksgiving feast with others, as we did last year. It will be Friday here as we start the festivities, but still Thursday in the US.

Aussies are aware of this uniquely American holiday, though. In today’s “The Australian,” the paper’s New York correspondent comments on several “things we should thank America for,” including baseball.

Although I doubt our Aussie host tomorrow will agree, David Nason calls it “a game of wonderful nuance and sublime skill that is a worthy rival of cricket,” even if it is “an acquired taste” best enjoyed with a beer in hand.

The post-World War II Marshall Plan, so different from “the Bush-Chaney cock-up in Iraq,” is another worthy gift to the world from the US, Nason says, as is Muhammad Ali, cultural and religious tolerance, freedom of speech, and freedom of inquiry.

Nason notes that freedom of inquiry “remains the most important element of the checks and balances a decent democracy needs Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been discussing trees and flowers with a couple of folks who read messages at a Google-group site for Aussie expatriates in the United States, ozinamerica.com.

One was born in Brisbane and the other has visited here. All three of us admire the flowers on the ground and on bushes, but especially the trees that flower. There is almost always some sort of tree in bloom here.

Just ending now is the Jacaranda season. This large tree covers itself with purple blossoms and then lets them fall off to become a purple carpet underneath its limbs. I first became aware of this spectacular tree when I was visiting in Mexico many years ago.

It was a pleasant surprised to discover that the same tree grows prolifically here. They burst into flower each November, as we near the end of springtime. I’m sure they’re imports, but everyone seems to love them.

The beginning of this tree’s name is pronounced “Jack,” here, as in “Jack and Jill.” In conversation with a Brisbane woman last year, I noted that in Latin America, where these trees seem to be native, people call them “Hock-ah-randas.”

“Well,” she said with great disdain in her voice, “they would!” — Bob

We are blessed with bird sounds every morning here in Brisbane’s inner suburbs, and some of the warblers start early, before we’re aware of any evidence of dawn.

Sleeping in a tree gives you a better perspective on changes in light, I guess. Certainly the fruit bats that occupy the papaya tree behind our house get fussy when I flip on the light in my study to do a little of middle-of-the-night writing.

My window is only about 15 feet from the roosts of two of these big bats known as flying foxes and from the tone of their screeching when my light comes on, I suspect it’s a good thing I don’t speak bat.

We don’t speak much bird, either and we’re only now beginning to know which birds are making some of the highly entertaining sounds we hear before, during, and after our rise-and-shine time.

I am not sure, for example, when I am hearing magpies, although I’m sure they are among our early morning singers. There are a lot of these black and white birds around here and Gisela Kaplan says we should be celebrating them.

Kaplan, a university professor in New South Wales, has published a book on magpies that I have not yet read, but I want to. I heard her interviewed on public radio recently and she made me understand what a remarkable bird this is. “The Australian magpie,” she said in a newspaper column this week, “is one of the foremost songbirds in the world.”

Maybe soon I’ll know one when I hear one. It’s a little embarrassing to live here and be able to identify with confidence only the sounds of doves, crows, flying foxes, and kookaburras. Oh, and rainbow loikeets, my favorite Aussie bird. — Bob

Bribie Island is just up the coast from Brisbane and it was about an hour’s drive this morning, going the opposite way from the in-bound commuter traffic. One of the joys of living in Queensland’s largest city is how quick and easy it is to get to beaches, forests, or mountains.

After being here more than two years, we’ve even begun to have favorite places that we know from previous visits. One of those is Buckley’s Hole Conservation Park, the “hole” being a lake only a hundred yards or so from Pumicestone Passage, the strip of sea water that separates Bribie from the mainland.

Since we’re having a cooler-than-normal spring (summer starts December 1 here and this area will be toasty by Christmas), we were glad of our windbreakers as we walked between the pond and the passage looking Read the rest of this entry »

Pardon me, please, while I name-drop a bit. I’ve met few famous people and one of them just died.

The other one was Lyndon Johnson and I made him angry once after a presidential press conference.

I was working part-time for Long News Service in Austin and I suppose its owner, Stuart Long, had something better to do that Saturday morning in 1964 or 1965 when he put me on a press bus and sent me to find out what LBJ was going to do with a retired fire truck donated to the Johnson Ranch by a nearby Texas town, Brady.

The nationally-televised event was held on the lawn in front of the ranch house and dealt with issues of somewhat greater substance. Afterward, I waited and watched as Johnson walked around shaking hands with every potential voter there. When he got to me I screwed up my courage and asked him two questions about the old red fire truck.

With my right hand in a firm grip, he smiled down at me during the entire minute or so of our conversation, but he told me Read the rest of this entry »

Good news: Tess, the heroic Sheltie bitten by a six-foot Eastern Brown Snake on the Gold Coast south of Brisbane last week, is doing well. She is expected to make full recovery after being bitten in the ear as she defended her owner from the highly poisonous, aggressive snake.

As I reported earlier (Kids, Kelpies, snakes, Nov. 1, below), Tess went into a coma and was given a 50-50 chance of living, according to a story on “The Age” newspaper’s web site.

Strangely, my daily searches of “The Age” for news of Tess yielded nothing and no one there responded to my email queries, either. Today I found a follow-up story on the web site of Agence France-Presse (AFP).

AFP had contacted Fay Palethorpe of Ipswich about her brave dog, and quoted her as saying that Tess will be home Saturday and “getting a few extra hugs and kisses.”

No word on whether Ms. Palethorpe will ever go out into her garden again. — Bob

Having written negatively about a corporation, Comcast, in my last blog, I now have something positive to say about a corporation that seems to be providing surprisingly fine customer service.

The company is Portable on Demand Storage or PODS and I was pleasantly surprised in my dealings with them more than two years ago and again last Saturday.

When Kristi and I were in the process of getting ready to move from Oklahoma to Australia in 2005, we investigated places to store some household goods we didn’t want to part with and couldn’t afford to ship down under.

That’s when we learned about PODS, a company that will bring a large metal box with a door on it (8 feet tall, 4 feet wide, and 10-12 feet deep, perhaps) to your house, park it in your driveway Read the rest of this entry »

A friend of mine called my attention yesterday to the incredible story of Comcast and “the hammer lady,” Mona Shaw, 75, folk hero.

I won’t repeat the story of how she and her husband were misused by this huge corporation, or how she took matters into her own hands by smashing some Comcast equipment at their Manassas, Virginia, office. You probably know it already and if you don’t, you can type her name into a search engine and get, as I did, a page full of reports mostly about her action plus 350,000 other sites to check.

A highly successful consultant to business leaders, my friend Kathy wrote, “As someone who is a creator of ‘Marketing Messages’…. it is my worst nightmare that customers would begin to utter a catch phrase I’ve developed for a client as a profanity.”

But now something like that is happening. Just as “going postal” was born and then added to our language, the term “being comcastic” has been coined and launched. One day soon, dictionaries may list this entry: Comcastic – “adj., behaving with insensitivity to and disregard for the interests of customers.”

Mona Shaw, as my friend Joe in Houston tells me, is much revered by several members of his Unitarian Universalist Church who have had unfortunate dealings Read the rest of this entry »