2 Texans Down Under

I got a bird’s eye view of about a thousand miles of Australian desert, mountains, sandy rivers, and “gibber plains” this week and it was about as much fun as a person can have in a commercial airliner seat.

A courteous Qantas check-in agent at the Alice Springs Airport assigned me and Kristi to window and aisle seats toward the front of the plane to Brisbane when I told him I wanted to see the countryside.  I’m grateful that he did.

The sky was clear and for an hour and a half I sat transfixed by the scenery passing below at, I suppose, 600 miles an hour or more.  My camera has an “aerial photo” setting and a zoom lens with an anti-shake mechanism, so I shot picture after picture of territory I’d never seen before and may never fly over again.

We’d just spent a week hiking around in “the red center” of Australia, starting in Uluru (also known as Ayers Rock), driving to King’s Canyon, and then using Alice Springs as a base for tours to its west and east.

From our home-bound plane on Wednesday afternoon, I got to see country similar to and different from what we’d hiked and I was made sharply aware of the luxuries of modern-day life by Alice on the Line, a book about one family’s experience of travel to, and life in, Alice Springs a century ago.

With the help of a professional writer, Douglas Lockwood, Doris Bradshaw Blackwell told of traveling in 1899 from Adelaide with her mother and siblings to join her father, the newly appointed manager of the telegraph station in Alice Springs.  She was eight years old and 300 miles of the trip involved riding for 14 days in either a buggy or a wagon, neither of which offered any protection from sun or storms.  It’s quite a story.

We got to visit Telegraph Station Museum, including the house the Bradshaws lived in until Doris was 16.  Built of stone and located two miles from what was then a tiny village known as “the Alice,” it is today much as it appears in black-and-white photos from the early 1900s.

As the landscape slipped past, below my comfortable airline seat, I noticed long red streaks that puzzled me at first.  They were part of the scenery for about an hour.

I realized what I was seeing when I recalled Doris Blackwell’s tale of Read the rest of this entry »

Finally, we have a clear notion of “the Darling downs.”

Most Brisbane folk watch the ABC television weather news on weekday evening, I expect, for hints on how to dress the next day, but for me it’s a geography lesson as much as anything else.

On an outline of Queensland, town and city names are posted with their high and low temperatures for the day, and I think, “Oh, that’s where that is” or, more rarely, “We’ve been there.”

But the names of various regions such as “the Darling downs” never get put on the screen because, obviously, everybody knows where they are. Unless, of course, you’re newcomers, as we are even after nearly three years.

Until Easter weekend this year, we didn’t know where Australia’s “New England” was. Then we drove through there and expanded our knowledge even further by visiting Texas, QLD, which is, appropriately enough, in the southwestern part of the state. Well, south, anyway, and as far west as we’d been.

On that trip, we also learned, while hiking over large chunks of it, where “the granite belt” is and we got to know a bit about Stanthorpe, where our farmers’ market apples come from, near the New South Wales border.

But “the Darling downs” was an entirely mythical place as far as I was concerned. I assumed it must have something to do with the Darling River, which is dying a slow death from drought, up-stream irrigation, and city-water demands.

Our printed maps don’t use the term as a label and my trusty Australian dictionary carries no definition of it despite listing “Darling shower.” That’s a dust storm.

As I said, though, we are finally in the know. This past weekend, Kristi and I traveled west and then north, passing near Ipswich, driving over the Wivenhoe Dam’s dam, and going through Esk, Toogoolawah, Blackbutt (named after the tree of the same name, I assume), Read the rest of this entry »

Two liquids, water and gasoline or petrol, are big news here this week, as is the case in many parts of the world.

The good news is that we’ve had rain, glorious alternating bands of light to heavy rain for more than a day, ending this morning, about three inches of unexpected wet stuff here in Brisbane. That’s about twice the normal June total.

News reports say farmers south and west of here, who’ve missed out on earlier rains this year, also got welcome totals.

The three lakes (called “dams” here) that are Brisbane’s main water source — Wivenhoe, Somerset, and North Pine — have all caught some runoff and their total content is approaching 40 per cent, the point at which water-use restrictions here would be eased back a notch.

The largest, with about two-thirds of the storage capacity of the three, is Wivenhoe and it is often shorted by weather systems that soak Brisbane. Located well inland from the coastline, where rain is almost always heaviest here in Australia, it’s increase yesterday was less than two-tenths of one per cent of capacity.

Worse, government bar graphs show a decline from nearly 30,000 megalitres of stored water in the three dams in April, 2005, to just over 10,000 in April, 2008, roughly the time we’ve been living here. (Honest, though, we’re not at fault; the two of us use just a bit more water daily than Brisbane’s Council has set as a usage goal for one person.)

Petrol is another matter, of course. While the gasoline pumps seem to be delivering ample supplies, the cost has soared here as it has in the United States and elsewhere. Unleaded regular was selling this morning at our local 7/11 for about $1.43/litre or roughly 5.15 US dollars per gallon.

I put in premium on the recommendation of a Prius mechanic and paid Read the rest of this entry »

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.”

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 »

As I said yesterday, Aussies are paying close attention to Presidential election primaries and to fluctuations in the US economy.

The sharp drop in the share market that began here last month is attributed to fears of a recession growing out of policies shaped in Washington, D.C. The great majority of the well-informed here can hardly wait for a “regime change” in America and they expect the US to be on a saner course by this time next year.

But for hope of safety in rough economic seas, folks here are looking elsewhere, toward China.The supply of iron, alumina, coal, and other raw materials to China as its vast population moves up from poverty is buoying Australian prosperity now and is counted on to continue to do so.

The old economic health analogy, therefore, is applied to that country, not the US. An article in “The Australian” newspaper this week, headlined “China’s bubble quivers,” said, “If China catches a winter cold, Australia sneezes.”

Trade between these two countries topped $50 billion in the last financial year, the article by China correspondent Rowan Callick said, and nearly half of that amount came from the sale of resources from Australian mines.

“This dictates,” Callick wrote, the need to pay as much attention “to pronouncements from Zhongnanhai, the Chinese leaders’ citadel next to the Forbidden City, as from the Federal Reserve in Washington.”The importance of these pronouncements is heightened by the fact that Read the rest of this entry »

Surely nowhere outside the United States are the current election primaries — now evidently down to Obama vs Clinton and McCain vs Romney — being watched more intently than here in Australia.

Having just gone through their own election season and brought to power fresh leadership, the Labor Party and Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister, Australians seem more attuned to politics than might otherwise be the case.

Neighbors and friends here have quizzed us about unique aspects of the American election system, just as we quizzed them about candidate selection, preference voting, and other matters here that seemed odd to us, last year.

At least as much attention in Australia, though, is being paid these days to the US economy. Is recession setting in or not? If it does, will the rest of the world economy slide downward with it? What effect will be felt here, half a world away but as near as each trader’s Internet connection?

The papers and TV news casts are full of speculation and commentary, especially now that some high-flying Australian companies have been brought low in recent days and weeks by bad loans and stock purchases made with borrowed money.

Yesterday’s “Australian” carried a story about a man who put $600,000 of his own money, most of his life savings, into a company called Gold Coast MFS. Shares in MFS were trading at around $5 in December, Read the rest of this entry »

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 »