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.