2 Texans Down Under

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. 

Being salary-dependent and knowing that we might be able to live in Australia only another year or two, Kristi and I take every opportunity to experience its various parts. And varied this country is, in its plant life, its critters, and its geography.

Like most people here, we had four days off for Easter weekend and we took advantage of every waking moment, leaving our driveway at 7:15 a.m. Friday and returning at 8 p.m. Monday.

Our plan was to visit national parks in the Granite Belt about three hours southwest of Brisbane in the vicinity of Stanthorpe, but by the time we got home, we’d also hiked in parts of Washpool National Park and the Main Range National Park.

And get this: we visited New England and drove from one side of Texas to the other. That’s what we’ll be writing about to friends and family, and it’s true.

We were on the New England Highway from Warwick, QLD, to Glen Innes in New South Wales, and, being as close as 60 or 70 miles from a town we’d heard so much about, we couldn’t resist adding in a trip to Texas, Queensland, population 900.

It was one quiet place on Easter Monday, but now we can say we’ve been there!

Not only that, but, thanks to an amateur Japanese astronomer named Aiji, we’ve finally been introduced to Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I talked about three important considerations for predicting compatibility in relationships — sex, money, and degree of neatness — and speculated that these concerns could be important to the question of how compatible Australia and you might be. Could you move here and sustain a relationship with this continent?

I dealt with degrees of neatness first. Now you might want to be sure no one’s looking over your shoulder because I want us to consider s-e-x in the US and in AU.

SEX — I have no idea what single life here is like. (How embarrassing, to have to begin with a confession of ignorance, but then, knowledge isn’t a requirement of blogging, is it?)

I get the impression, though, that sexual mores are pretty relaxed here. Live together for a while and you’ll be seen, legally, as being in a “de facto relationship.” You may even be identified, a bit inelegantly, as “a de facto.”

On the positive side, some states allow same-sex and opposite-sex de facto couples to register with the state in order to get a certificate as verification of their commitment to each other.

More than US women, Australian women seem to have an easy-going attitude about the exposure of skin.

My wife has noticed, for example, that cleavage is much more common here Read the rest of this entry »

I read somewhere that people considering marriage or living together should ask themselves, first, whether they are compatible in three aspects of life: money, sex, and degree of neatness.

The idea was that if your would-be partner (the all-encompassing Australian term for what I would have referred to, once upon a time, as “boy friend” or “girl friend” or “fiancé”) was much different from you in attitudes toward the acquisition of and spending of money, in sexual preferences and ethics, or in her/his place on the slob-to-neat-freak continuum, chances for long-term love were poor.

That’s exactly the sort of wise counsel that people falling in love have no interest in hearing, of course. Most will be making the classic errors I saw illustrated once in a cartoon that showed a man and woman passionately kissing. Above his head there was a thought balloon saying, “She’ll always be this way.” Above her head? A thought balloon saying, “I can change him.”

But what if you’re falling for a country? What if you’re thinking you might love living, for example, in Australia? Could you and the Land of Oz have a good thing going? Should you make the big leap, abandon your present neighborhood, and flee to a new neighbourhood in Sydney, Perth, Brisbane, or some other down under place? Could you and this continent be compatible?

Obviously, I know nothing about your attitudes toward money, sex, or neatness, but I am in a position now to tell you a bit about Australia’s tendencies in those areas. You be the judge of whether or not this sounds like a partner for you.

DEGREE OF NEATNESS — Per capita, Australia pollutes more than any other country, because of coal (mining and burning), industrial plants, and too many cars on the roads too often for too long. It’s a suburban culture along the coasts and the growing traffic jams are not neat.

On the other hand, the population is less than a tenth that of the US, so congestion away from the city centers tends to be not too bad. In the capital cities, mass transit is better than in most US cities other than, perhaps in Boston and New York. We’ve never lived anywhere that is so Read the rest of this entry »

Maybe there should be an organization for people like me, people addicted to the famous short story published in 1901 by the writer some have called “the Mark Twain of Australia,” Henry Lawson.

I could go to meetings of others with my problem, stand up and say, “Hi, I’m Bob, and I’m addicted to ‘The Loaded Dog.’” The group’s initials would be LDAA, for Loaded Dog Anonymous Association.

We could help each other control our impulses to memorize and recite key lines from the story of a friendly dog with a bomb in his mouth. We could petition governments to declare Mark Twain “the Henry Lawson of America.” We could be, well, not alone.

Sure, I could, maybe, just go cold turkey on the dog tale, but I began to doubt my inner strength this morning when I got an email from my friend, Glenn Turner, and followed up on what he told me: anyone can read this hilarious bit of writing at a web site he’s found.

Trouble is, he gave me the URL, and I clicked on it. I had a lot to get done this morning. I had a to-do list. But there they were, on my screen, the opening lines Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll be darn. I’ve been tagged. On line, I’ve been tagged.

The tagger is a good friend of mine who writes as “Granny,” thereby reminding us all that many young and vibrant people, these days, have grandchildren.

The “tag” she gave me is called the “Nearest Book Meme,” and there’s a drill that goes with it. Please read these instructions in case you’re one of the five I chose at the end. And, even if you’re not, feel free to consider yourself tagged by me, anyway, and proceed. (Sorry, Granny, if this violates any rules.)

Instructions:
1. Grab the nearest book that is at least 123 pages long.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Go down to the 5th sentence.
4. Type in the 3 sentences immediately after that 5th sentence.
5. Tag five people by sending them the three sentences and these instructions.

I took “nearest” to mean “the one I’m currently reading” since, technically, the nearest is my “Oxford Pocket Australian Dictionary,” a useful book indeed, but one that’s a little short on plot.

What I’m reading is a thin volume from the Australian Literary Heritage Series entitled Humorous Stories of Henry Lawson. Born in 1867, Lawson wrote about the outback and “bush people” in ways that can, today, jar those of us who prefer to avoid stereotyping others.

Nevertheless, this collection contains the funniest short story I have ever read, “The Loaded Dog,” and it makes me laugh every time I read it.

Somewhat less funny are the three sentences following the fifth one on page 123, but, appropriately enough, the story in which those sentences appear is about an American, “a cute Yankee.”

I’m sure Lawson didn’t mean “cute” in any positive sense, or, Read the rest of this entry »