2 Texans Down Under

This is just a quick note to say that if you’d like to find out if the novel by Kate Veitch that I reviewed yesterday is something you might like to read, you may want to visit her web site.

The practice of offering excerpts for free on line is one I approve of highly, and you can read enough here to get a good taste of Listen or the Americanized version, Without a Backward Glance.

You’ll also find at the top of her site the article which introduce me to her work, about the difficulties of converting an Australian-language novel to American English. It’s the “Better a Beaut Bloke Than a Great Guy” piece.

I’m told Kate Veitch is going to be doing a book tour in the US from mid-July to mid-August in mostly cool places like Seattle, Washington; Portland, Oregon; Denver, Colorado; New York City; New Canaan, Connecticut; and one of my favorite places in the world — which is not likely to be cool at that time of the year — Austin, Texas.

I recommend that my friends in Austin turn out to say to her, “Howdy, mate.”

A while back I corresponded with Kate Veitch about differences in Australian and US word usage after she’d written about the difficulties of getting her first novel, already a success here, published in America. A lot of Aussie terms had to be translated and the result was not always to the author’s liking.

I read the Aussie version, called Listen and loved it. Now it’s set to hit the bookstores of the US as Without a Backward Glance and I’ve submitted a review to Amazon.com. Here it is:

Why? This question holds open a gaping hole in the lives of a husband and four children for decades after a woman — his wife, their mother — gets into the back seat of a car on Christmas Eve, 1967, and disappears, evidently forever and without explanation.

As Chapter One of Without a Backward Glance opens, the reader becomes immersed in the twenty-first century lives of the children, now adult, and their aging father, Alex. How have they managed? How have they coped, each one, with this unexplained loss?

Set in her home country by Australian novelist Kate Veitch, this is an engrossing story of depth, color, and complexity that deals with universal feelings.

As my trust in the author’s compassion and insight grew, I became increasingly eager to see what the children had been able to make or would be able to make of their lives.

The oldest, Deborah, her brothers Robert and James, and Meredith, a toddler when Mummy flees, struggle with the questions you and I would have had, surely. Why did she leave? How could she, and on Christmas Eve? Was it my fault, did I drive her away? Didn’t she love me?

We are not dragged through the immediate traumas of the motherless child or the abandoned husband. Instead, we are introduced by Veitch to five distinct, well-drawn personalities in a complex family sharing a central, mysterious loss. (And, eventually, to a sixth.) Masterful in shifting speech patterns and tone as she moves from one character to another, Veitch gives her characters such life that I began to read slowly, not wanting to reach the end.

Sisters and brothers share knowledge and memories not accessible to others, and Veitch understands the profound power and inevitable exasperations of being close to siblings. I was drawn to these four. I was less sympathetic to the aggrieved father/husband and the mostly absent mother/wife.

In fact, by the end of the book, a part of me longed for punishment to be meted out for the crime that begins the story. Perhaps because I am male, I wanted Veitch to provide an ending to the story as dramatic as its start. I wanted, finally, action, catharsis, maybe even justice, some balancing of the scales. But what, in adult life, could equal the profundity of a child being deliberately abandoned by a mother?

I suspect the movie version of this novel (surely there will be one and it could become a classic) will give me what my emotions craved, but my reasoning mind knows the “big finish” I missed in the book will not be an improvement.

Veitch wrote this right and true, providing an ending populated with people who are no longer who they were in 1967, people less interested in sorting out what WAS than in getting on with what IS, with each other and with their own families and careers. How very like life. I think you’ll love this book and recommend it to friends.

Fog was still burning off in low places Sunday morning as Kristi and I headed south from Brisbane to the Main Range National Park, which is part of what is called, with good reason, “the Scenic Rim.”

Less than an hour and a half after leaving home, we were in Cunningham Gap, parked in a roadside lot containing only one other car, and ready to hike up Bare Rock Trail.

In the 1820s, explorer Allan Cunningham saw the possibilities for a pass through the dividing range here and now the Cunningham Highway carries sometimes heavy car and truck traffic past the start of the trail, but within half an hour or so we walked beyond its distracting sounds.

Soon we were standing still and listening to a fascinating concert of bird calls and trills and flourishes from what could only have been a lyre bird, though we never saw her. After 10 minutes or more she quit as suddenly as she’d started and we felt like applauding.

Most of the treats of the day Read the rest of this entry »

Thinking of taking a big leap? Thinking of starting a new chapter in your life and considering Australia as its setting? Then you may be in luck.

The new Rudd Government has announced for the coming fiscal year the biggest annual increase in permanent and temporary migration into Australia since the 1940s, and there doesn’t seem to be much backlash. Some worries, but no real opposition.

The plan is to open the door to nearly 300,000 workers from overseas between July 1 this year and the end of June, 2009, and the work visas will be not only for high-demand jobs, but various kinds of work, skilled and unskilled.

As I noted in my last blog, Treasurer Wayne Swan, speaking for the Labor Government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, announced this widening of the immigration door in his budget presentation last week and it could be good news for anyone considering moving to the Land of Oz.

(Note: My spell checker IS working. Aussies put a “u” in “labor,” writing it “labour,” but not in the name of the party now in power, Labor.)

Inflation is a hot topic here and business leaders hope opening the door to more migrants will help dampen wage demands. Labour union leaders fear that it might, but they don’t seem to be too worried, only protesting that they need a place at the immigration decision-making table.

The reasons behind this substantial change and the absence of acrimony about it, so far, were expressed in a column May 17 in The Australian by the newspaper’s primary political-affairs editor, Paul Kelly.

Kelly wrote: “Australian labour shortages are here to stay. They are Read the rest of this entry »

Australia is one of the few countries that it is still relatively easy to get into, one of the few not closing down its borders, according to the Dallas-area doctor who did our health checks as we were applying for visas to move here in 2005.

Certified to screen visa applicants for Australia and other countries, he seemed to know what he was talking about. The news here these days supports his opinion.

Of course, that Texas doctor said “relatively easy,” not “easy,” so his remark didn’t do much to calm our fears about all the requirements and paperwork looming up between us and the work permits that would allow us to move down under.

Three years later, as we look back, the scary mountains we saw before us in 2005 look like rounded hills. With permanent residency status in hand,we have a “that wasn’t so bad” perspective.

Moving here does involve clearing many hurdles. You have to pass Read the rest of this entry »

After nearly three years here in Australia, I am less often pulled up short by evidently English words and phrases that I don’t understand.

Not so long ago, I wouldn’t have known what to think if I’d heard an Aussie say she was planning to buy some avos in the arvo.  Now I immediately cotton onto her meaning, which is that she’s going to purchase avacados in the afternoon.

“Cotton onto,” by the way, is Texan for grasp or understand the meaning of something.  Aussies often abbreviate words.  I guess we Texans go for colorful, both in word choice and accent.

It’s not just us, though.  Years ago, a friend of mine with a foot-thick Alabama accent caused some New Englanders to laugh loudly when he commented, after meeting someone from Louisiana, “She sure does talk funny, don’t she?” 

So, it’s all in the ears of the hearer, and I know there are Aussies (just as there are Texans) who think they have no accent, although Kiwis would disagree.

Most of us probably think we speak and write as everyone would if they just knew how.

But I reckon I haven’t heard everything yet, in Aussie phrasing.  This morning while reading a short column in the weekend “Review” published by The Australian, I hit a moment of confusion.  

A mother, Jenny Thorsborne, was telling about life with her son, who had just left the nest he’d been sharing with mom.  Woops.  Excuse me.  He’s Australian, so it’s “he’d been sharing with mum”.  (Note: I expect to get approval from my Aussie spelling and grammar checker for putting the period at the end of that sentence outside the closing quotation marks, which is not how I learned to do it.)

Anyway, reflecting on times of sharing she’d had with her son, Jenny Thorsborne wrote about trips they’d taken together “when I could gather enough of the readies to venture to different places.”

I never heard of anyone gathering readies.  From the context, the meaning does seem clear.  They traveled when she had enough money.  Correct?  Or are there other “readies” necessary to travel.  Does enough free time also have to be gathered, accumulated?

I haven’t been able to find a reference to “the readies” in my dictionaries or on line.  Can anyone help me?  Are you an Australian (or a person from somewhere else) who grew up using this term?  Any notion of its roots?

I need a definitive answer before I take another trip.  It could be that I’ve been traveling all my life without gathering enough readies. 

Come to think of it, if this term refers just to money, I know that I have. 

“Less tar, more taste,” proclaimed a United States cigarette company
ad a few years ago. Today, the US and Australia could claim this:
“Less smoking, more pollution.”

Americans send huge amounts of toxic stuff into the air and water and
Australians pollute more per person than any other nation, but while
we foul the atmosphere, we are breathing easier at ground level than
we otherwise would because of steady declines in tobacco smoking.

Phillip Adams, a prominent print and radio commentator here, recently
wrote about parallels between the indefensible tactics of tobacco
companies peddling their products over the decades and the way our
political leaders in both countries avoid taking effective action to
stop “giving the planet lung cancer.”

Propaganda and profit, he argues, are keeping us from cleaning up our
environmental act in the same way lies and deceptions allowed
companies to manufacture and sell billions of highly addictive
products that maim and kill.

These little white sticks that Adams labels weapons of mass
destruction (March 22-23, 2008, The Weekend Australian) are still
being manufactured and sold, of course, often addicting the poorest
and most vulnerable before they reach the legal age of consent. Adams
could have written about corporate child abuse, too.

Tobacco use is still the leading cause of preventable death in the US,
according to the Center for Disease Control, but the proportion of
adults smoking there is as low as it’s been since the 1930s. About
21% of adult Americans smoke.

A government report says 70% of Aussie men and 30% of Aussie women
smoked in the 1950s. About 17% of adult Australians smoke now.

In both countries, prohibitions against smoking in enclosed public
places Read the rest of this entry »

Americans want to do nation-building, says Thomas L. Friedman in the New York Times after five months of traveling the country while writing his next book, but “they want to do nation-building in America.”

Why? In a May 4 op-ed piece entitled “Who Will Tell the People?” Friedman says ordinary citizens in the US are becoming aware that the country desperately needs to be rebuilt.

He believes people are realizing that the US is not as strong as it used to be, that city-states like Dubai and Singapore are providing money to shore up American banks, that the war in Iraq has the military pinned down, and that President Bush has been reduced to begging Saudi Arabia for petroleum cost relief.

The post-WW II belief in America as the place where everyone wanted to be is, now, harder to maintain.

Friedman cites two transportation hubs as examples of the impoverishment of American infrastructure relative to that of other nations. One is Berlin’s “luxurious central train station” in comparison to the “grimy, decrepit Penn Station in New York City.”

Well, of course, Europe beats us on trains, many Americans would say. We know that.

But the second comparison pits a John F. Kennedy Airport terminal against one in Singapore’s Changi Airport. At JFK, Friedman says, he and his wife recently had difficulty finding a place to sit. In Singapore’s airport they found spaciousness, free internet portals, and children’s play zones.

And he doesn’t even mention some of the things that make Singapore’s airport a preferred stop-over point for me and my partner. In one terminal there are luxurious foot-massage machines. These are stress-reducing and they’re free. Not far away there Read the rest of this entry »

Train service in Europe, as many of you know already, is wonderful. By the standards of most American cities, trains run frequently and reliably here in Brisbane and in other Australian cities, but the wait for a train in the Netherlands and Belgium, from which we’ve just returned, must average less than half the normal wait time here.

As Kristi said to friends of ours this morning, “You don’t even have to know train schedules. You just show up at the train station and you can be pretty sure there’ll be a train going where you want to go in a few minutes.”

Such high levels of train service, along with the predominance of bicycle travel in both the countries we visited, make us green with envy or, more exactly, envious of the “green” values manifested by the policy decisions of the Dutch and Belgians.

Given the great bus and subway/tram availability, too, getting around in much of Europe is easier than it is where we’ve spent most of our lives and, it turns out, better for health.

Population density, of course, is necessary for the economic viability of mass transit, but culture-wide expectations matter, too. There are plenty of places in car-dependent America with enough people to make train or trolley service feasible if people understood how much better off they’d be getting to work or school without jumping into their own cars.

Australia is no less car-dependent Read the rest of this entry »