2 Texans Down Under

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 »

Having two homes — Australia and the United States of America — is wonderful for us, but it creates a problem for someone else, the person who receives and sorts our mail at our US address. Perhaps some of you can relate.

In our case it is Kristi’s patient mother who receives mail addressed to us in Houston and sorts through it to see what envelopes, flyers, magazines, and catalogues we need to see and what pieces of mail we’ll be happy to have her discard.

The third possibility is “maybe they want to see this, maybe not.” Mail with that designation goes into a pile we sort through when we next show up to visit. It can be a substantial pile.

We’ve sent lots of change-of-address and stop-and-desist cards and letters to companies, without much effect. We’ve always wanted a way to shut off the flow of fat, glossy catalogues we got, especially in the months before Christmas.

Today, thanks to the folks at Tidbits, producer of an email newsletter I read to stay current with Mac computer issues, I’ve found a solution, or at least something that may help.

It’s an organization called “Catalogue Choice,” and it provides an easy way 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

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 »

Having written negatively about a corporation, Comcast, in my last blog, I now have something positive to say about a corporation that seems to be providing surprisingly fine customer service.

The company is Portable on Demand Storage or PODS and I was pleasantly surprised in my dealings with them more than two years ago and again last Saturday.

When Kristi and I were in the process of getting ready to move from Oklahoma to Australia in 2005, we investigated places to store some household goods we didn’t want to part with and couldn’t afford to ship down under.

That’s when we learned about PODS, a company that will bring a large metal box with a door on it (8 feet tall, 4 feet wide, and 10-12 feet deep, perhaps) to your house, park it in your driveway Read the rest of this entry »

Nearly all our friends smiled, two and a half years ago in the United States, when we told them that we were planning to move to Australia. Many looked wistful. Some pulled out an Aussie phrase or two that they seemed proud to know. Others began talking about, maybe, visiting us down under.

Our announcement was treated as good news by nearly all our friends and acquaintances.

We did get more ambivalence from some of our family members. “Australia!” one said, as if I’d just told him we were moving to Mars. Another took me aside and proposed an outside limit for our being so far away: “You know, Bob, three years would be just about enough.”

And, for us, two Texans who’d never spent more than a few months abroad, the idea of leaving secure work situations, selling most of our possessions, and then packing up and moving to a new hemisphere and a continent we’d never even visited… well, it was a scary and an exciting time.

We had a thousand questions and there were a thousand more we would have asked if we had known enough ask them.

We prepared as best we could. We read some books and did web searches and called or emailed some people who’d been in one or another part of Australia, but we boarded the plane that brought us here with much less knowledge than we wanted.

The only person on this continent that we knew picked us up at the airport in Brisbane, dropped us off at a motel, and graciously left us alone to begin finding our way in a place where people drive on the wrong side of the road and speak their own sort of English.

Now, many months and some hard-knock lessons later, we know a few of the questions we should have asked but didn’t and we even know an answer or two. We have some experienced-based opinions about what it’s like to live and work in this country we have come to love.

This blog will be about what we’ve learned, about Australia as it is seen by two Americans far from what we’ve always known as home, and about what we hear from other immigrants and visitors.

If thinking of Australia as a place to visit or to live gives your spirits a lift, then please join us by returning here regularly. We like company. We like responses. We want to hear your questions.

Australia has surprised us, tested us, and pleased us. We’d like to tell you about why all those smiles on the faces of our friends were, in fact, justified. — Bob