2 Texans Down Under

Being in Australia after a lifetime of living in the United States reminds me of migrating from PCs to a Mac.

After many years of using a “personal computer” with Microsoft software, I switched a while back to using Apple laptops running different software, now OS X.

The two software platforms do the same things, for the most part.  Learning OS X is not like learning a new language, but it is learning a new dialect and the trickiest part is that if your computer savvy was born in PC land, there are scores of tiny, hidden facts you don’t just intuit about OS X.

The first and most telling (most revealing of your newness to the environment) is that the “X” is a Roman numeral, so the name is “OS ten” and doesn’t rhyme with “Tex,” just as Brisbane rhymes with “tin,” not with “rain.”

Which brings me to something else local folk know without thinking about it, something we’ve just learned.  The rivers here run quickly to the sea.

Somehow, I’d imagined that rain to our north would benefit our dams, that the rivers that were going out of banks and flooding Emerald and other towns to our north would bring their load of runoff to Wivenhoe, Somerset, and North Pine dams, the three reservoirs from which Brisbane draws its drinking water.

Not so.  There’s a sort of minor Continental Divide that runs along the east coast and rivers flow from this line of smallish mountains, mostly, east or west.  So the Pacific Ocean gets the runoff.

Somerset Dam has caught enough runoff to show a major gain.  It’s up to 62 per cent of capacity.  Wivenhoe, though, is still below 20 per cent, as is North Pine.  The total level for the three is 27.8 per cent, a gain from where we were a couple of months ago, but still worryingly low.

Oh, well.  At least I know now how to say OS X and Brisbane.

And we know that, in Australia, what we’ve always called a “lake” is called a “dam.”

What’s the structure that holds back the water and makes it form a giant puddle?  The thing I’ve always called “a dam?”

A dam wall, of course.

When you’re new in a country, as we are here in Australia, lessons can come from any direction. Even from the trees or a power line, as is the case when you look up and finally get to link a bird call you’ve been hearing for months with the type of bird that makes it.

Suddenly you know a tiny bit more about the neighborhood. I have learned to recognize the call of a Fig Bird.

Another thing I learned today came from our friend Peter. He told me the house for sale for $780,000 on the back or park side of our block used to belong to an elderly woman who could put two fingers in her mouth and whistle loud enough to cause a taxi driver to stop on a street 50 meters away.

That, it turns out, is as far as you can legally move an Australian possum.

This new information came from my reading Jane Fraser’s column in the “Weekend Australian,” and it confirmed for me the wisdom of my decision last week to spend $60 for wire mesh that I have now unrolled and attached to a section of trellis over the patio of our small house.

For a couple of months now, my bougainvillea plants have been doing their damnest to grow up to the boards of that trellis in order to proceed across them and fulfill their purpose in life by providing us with shade and beautiful blossoms.

Somehow, though, no green was getting much above the patio wall a couple of feet below the trellis. Why? Because the new, tender shoots at the growing ends of my bougainvilleas were neatly nibbled off.

Neighborhood possums use our fence tops as a highway at night. They don’t touch mature bougainvillea leaves and I’ve never seen one of them actually nibbling the new green, but I did espy possum droppings on the wall, right below the scene of the crimes against our vegetation. Felony convictions have hinged on less.

I toyed with the idea of capital punishment only briefly and it’s just as well Read the rest of this entry »

Blackall. Barcaldine. Townsville. Longreach. Airlie Beach. Giru. Charlesville. Bradleys Gully. Murweh Shire. Charters Towers.

These are all names of towns in Queensland. Where are they, exactly?

With only a couple of exceptions we don’t know, but we’re hearing and reading about them now because we’re also hearing and reading about rivers that we’ve never seen: the Warrego, Don, Proserpine, Haughton, Fitzroy and Burdekin.

They’re out of banks, causing floods in all those towns because genuine, significant rain has come!

A “monsoonal low” left the ocean, moved across the state to our north, headed west and south and, contrary to expectations, intensified over land.

As a result, heavy rains fell in the catchment areas north and west of Brisbane. Queensland’s second-largest reservoir, Fairbairn Dam, is overflowing and its gates were opened Friday for the first time in 17 years. According to the “Brisbane Courier-Mail,” a thousand people showed up to see that.

Bureau of Meteorology severe weather expert Jeff Callaghan told “The Australian” that this week’s weather here was common from the mid-1950s through to the mid-1970s. He hopes this is the start of a pattern not seen since 1977.

It’s an unusual monsoonal low, of course, that brings no one harm. Lots of photos of flooded streets, homes, and stores are in the news here and disaster relief funds, promised by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, will be badly needed.

But, still, it has finally rained. — Bob

Just when I think I’ve begun to understand my Brisbane friends and neighbours (Aussie spelling), I make the mistake of visiting Bunnings, a sort of down under version of Home Depot or Lowes, and ask a sales clerk where I can find a pair of pruning shears.

“You want ___?” she asks. At that moment any attempt on my part to spell out what she’d just said would have been utterly futile. I ask her to repeat that seemingly random collection of sounds, but what I hear the second time still causes no linking of synapses in my brain.

“Maybe so,” I say and follow her down an aisle until we come to a display of pliers-like clippers, most of which have labels containing the word “secateur.” Sec-ah-tour. A brand new word for me, but I thank my helper and leave with a “pruner” identified by its manufacturer as a “bi-pass secateur.” With it I can cut twigs.

This expansion of my vocabulary came only moments after a clerk in the plumbing department had asked me if I own a “shifting spanner.” Damned if I know, I thought, but after a bit of discussion I realized that I do, indeed, have a shifting spanner, a couple of them, actually. I just call them crescent wrenches.

English is supposed to evolve, I know, and I’ve run into region-based differences before. The first time I ordered coffee in New England, for example, the waitress asked if I wanted it “regular,” and I said I did, since coffee comes regularly fresh from the pot and unadulterated. Mistake. In those pre-latte days in Boston “regular coffee” came with milk in it. In other words, ruined.

In Australia, though, the evolution of our common language seems as divergent, at times, as the evolution of trees that shed their bark in winter while keeping their leaves.

Kate Veitch, author of an Aussie novel called “Listen” that is being made available in the US as “Without a Backward Glance,” says she was almost brought to tears Read the rest of this entry »

I sometimes refer to Australia as “the land of Oz,” as do others.

In doing so, I may be sounding pretentious or just silly to some folks, so I think it might be a good thing to explain to everyone who reads this blog (as I explained to a few of you in an email recently) where that description originates.

Although I thought it might the first time I heard it, this way of referring to Australia has nothing to do with Dorothy and Toto wandering around the outback with a lion and a tin man looking for a wizard.

To explain it, you have to talk a bit about Aussie pronunciation, which is something we’ve come to appreciate gradually.

When we first arrived in Brisbane (which, by the way, rhymes with “tin,” not “pain”), we were describing the folks around us as “Aussies.”  We were correct, of course, but we were pronouncing the word “Awe-sees.”

That’s not how people here say it, but before we explain how the term is pronounced, we have to tell you something else we learned early on.  Here, “z” is pronounced “zed.”  I’ve heard that’s not true all over Australia, but it is here in Queensland, at least.  People say “… x, y, zed.”  The name of a bank here, ANZ, is pronounced “Ann zed.”

Maybe you knew that already, so I need to warn you that, in the very next sentence, I’m going to use an American “z” sound, not the local “zed” sound.

Aussies say “Aussie” as if it were spelled “Ahh-z.”  If you say that rapidly, and everybody here says nearly everything rapidly, it comes out “Oz-ee.”

Lots of words get shortened here, too, so the spoken “Oz-ee” became just “Oz.”

You’re right if you’ve already thought that we’re surely not in Kansas anymore.

How “land of” got attached, I’m not sure.

I have a theory, though, about how “antipodean” came to refer to Australia and New Zealand.  An “antipode” is a point opposite another point on the globe.  I expect British folk in the 1700s and 1800s, while colonizing this continent with prisoners, considered Australia and its people to be the exact opposite of the cultured homeland and its upstanding gentry.

So, saying something or someone was “antipodean” surely was not a compliment.  Now the tables are turned and, in the land of Oz, one doesn’t necessarily want to be known as a pomme (someone from England).

As John Douglas Pringle said in Australian Accent, “Australians are strongly pro-British but tend to dislike individual Englishmen, while they like individual Americans but tend to disapprove of the United States.”

I think I’ll get a lapel button that says “Individual American.”– Bob

The connection between my two countries — Australia and the United States — is amazingly strong and shows up often, both in the press and in private conversations.

For example, Barack Obama’s primary win in Iowa and Hillary Clinton’s win in New Hampshire got almost as much attention in “The Australian” newspaper this week as Kevin Rudd’s election as Aussie Prime Minister received a few weeks ago.

Both these two US election events were front page leaders here, accompanied by big photos. Inside the papers, there were long analytical articles, editorials, and letters to the editors. I’m certain we get better newspaper coverage of this Presidential contest from Aussie papers than we’d get from the smaller and thinner “Dallas Morning-News,” which is what we read while we were in Texas.

Being just back from a holiday trip, Kristi and I have been in conversations with fellow Brisbane residents about similarities and differences. Today at our gym I confirmed for someone who hasn’t traveled to the US that, yes, restaurant meals there do tend to be, by Aussie standards, huge.

And in today’s paper there’s a report out of Washington, D.C., about a new book asserting that obesity is now Read the rest of this entry »

Kristi and I put some relatives and friends in potentially uncomfortable positions this past holiday by giving each of them a paperback copy of my just-published book and small glass bottle with a yellow top, a jar of Vegemite.

With the givers present, recipients tend to be under pressure to express some degree of appreciation for what they’ve been given, lest feelings be hurt. In an ideal world, as the wrapping paper falls away, the recipient expresses unrestrained joy, marked by laughter and perhaps even tears. In the real world, “Oh, how nice” usually suffices.

My book, Moving to Australia: Two Texans Down Under, didn’t present much of a problem to those with whom we exchange Christmas gifts since one could admire the cover and put it aside for later reading (or consignment to a shelf or recycle bin) in the absence of the givers.

The little jar of “concentrated yeast extract,” though, seemed to require immediate opening, sniffing, and sampling.

I told people that even though I am now a Vegemite fan, I didn’t like this thick paste to which Australians are often addicted when I first tried it. I agree with a columnist for “The Weekend Australian Magazine,” who wrote for the January 5-6 issue that there is “something outlandish about it, from its faintly pharmaceutical jar to its trademark toxic-wastefulness of texture, color and aroma.”

But I also agree with Susan Maushart, a New Yorker who is now an Australian citizen, that Vegemite “has a way of sneaking up on a migrant.” It snuck up on me. Now I love it as a thin layer on buttered toast.

We suggested that way of sampling Vegemite when the gift-openings were over. One couple’s reaction was to politely give the little bottle back to us with only a small divot disturbing the smooth, brown surface of Kraft’s most famous Aussie product.

Some reactions were along the lines of “People eat this?” and there were no spontaneous outbursts of joy. Out of about 10 samplings, though, Read the rest of this entry »

The birds are singing, the weather is wet and windy, there’s hope for rainfall in Brisbane’s reservoir catchment areas, fuel prices are headed up, and we talked this morning with an Australian wearing a “Don’t Mess With Texas” T-shirt he bought in Dallas without knowing the slogan’s intended meaning.

In other words, my hope that we’d welcome the new year sitting in a Qantas plane about to leave LAX was fulfilled and we’re back from our summer/Christmas vacation.

Our friend Nicola met us at the airport yesterday and we used the last of our energy for unpacking. Jet lag put us in bed by 7:30 p.m. and our internal clocks had us wide awake by 4:30 this morning.

Shortly after five, with rich and various bird sounds reminding us that we are home, we went out for an hour-plus walk that turned out to be a social occasion.

We talked weather with Peter and Shane, neighbors we often see at a bench beside the Brisbane River.

I chatted with Alicia, a woman with whom we used to ride the ferry across the river to the University of Queensland.

And we got a chance to explain to a local man that the Dallas-purchased T-shirt he was wearing Read the rest of this entry »

December 31 — My daughter, Lyn, dropped us off at DFW just after 6 p.m. yesterday, more than 12 hours ago, so we could catch an American Airlines flight to LA and then a Qantas flight to Brisbane, but I just called her and it was a local call.

We’re in a La Quinta motel in Arlington, near Six Flags over Texas, with our trip extended 24 hours courtesy of American. Brake repairs to the plane and a pilot calling in sick combined to produce a delay so long that we knew we’d miss our connection in LA.

Such stories are so common that they don’t merit blogging about, but the experience has produced a couple of conversations worth mentioning.

One was overheard. A crew chief confided in an AA clerk behind the counter while we were getting switched to tonight’s flight that a pilot was on hand to fill in for the sick captain. The brake problem had been fixed. We could have flown then and made our connection.

“Too late,” said the clerk, “we’ve already told people we’re leaving at 10 and they’re all over the airport now.” So, we could be almost home as I’m writing this, but we’re not.

The other conversation is one I had outside the terminal with a very tall man named Robert C. I’ll withhold his last name to protect the angry innocent. As we waited for the La Quinta shuttle to take us here to the motel, he was waiting for another bus and he was quietly raging.

Here’s his story. He and his wife had arrived from Mexico for a flight home to Philadelphia. At customs, he was detained so long that he missed his connection. At his insistence, his wife went on home without him.

At first, he said, the customs authorities wouldn’t even tell him why they’d taken him Read the rest of this entry »