2 Texans Down Under

Earth Hour is being judged as a great success here for saving a bit of energy and showing worldwide concern for environmental issues, in part because the idea began only a year ago in Sydney when 54 per cent of Sydney folks are said to have switched off their lights.

Last night, Sydney’s Lord Mayor Clover Moore launched her city’s participation by noting that this “inspired idea” has become a world movement whose “immediate success and … swift adoption around the world shows that people are not only alert to the threat of global warming but they’re engaged and they’re ready and willing to act.”

Here in Brisbane, according to the “Courier Mail,” more than 6000 individuals and 800 businesses signed up in advance to turn off lights from 7 to 8 p.m. last night (Brisbane does not observe daylight savings time) and many thousands more folks here took part.

Along with 190 buildings and more than 100 neon signs registered to switch off, reporter Daryl Passmore said, key Brisbane landmarks that went dark for an hour included the Gateway, Story, Victoria and William Jolly bridges, Conrad International Treasury Casino, City Hall, Castlemaine Fourex Brewery in Milton, Waterfront Place and the Suncorp building’s highly visible downtown clock.

We didn’t see any of that, of course, because Read the rest of this entry »

Getting out of Brisbane on the Friday before Easter was easy since we’re not far from the highway to Ipswich, the first major town on the route Kristi had planned for us.

Soon we were in farming country with rolling hills and trees and grass and clean air. After Ipswich: Warwick. Then, Stanthorpe, a central town in the Granite Belt. On the road again.

Maybe road-trips such as the one we were beginning won’t be possible for much longer, or as common, anyway. We’d been warned that we were heading for popular vacation destinations and that we should expect crowds of people on the national park tours and on wine tours.

Only on one of our several hikes did we see many people. Often we were alone and we could walk for an hour or more without seeing other hikers. Some local folk we talked to complained of slow business and too-few visitors.

No complaints from us. Except that the visitor’s center in Stanthorpe was closed for Good Friday (and lots of businesses were closed right through Monday). The public toilets were open and available, though, and we found a nice, shaded and smooth rock beside a beautiful pond for a picnic lunch.

Then we headed out for the mother of all granite domes, Bald Rock, the largest protrusion of volcanic stone in the southern hemisphere. Years ago, we’d hiked up Enchanted Rock near Fredericksburg, Texas, a “batholith” that rises 450 feet (137 meters) above the woods in the Hill Country, and we thought of that as we stood at the bottom looking up at the smooth slope and two wee figures we could just make out at the top.

Twenty minutes later, we met these two coming down as we moved up. All four of us were proceeding slowly and carefully, because Bald Rock is 200 meters (650 feet) high, measured from the forest-level starting point, and if a person slipped and started rolling down the hard granite, there’d be nothing to stop him until he reached the trees.

Fortunately, the granite is pitted like orange peel, and good hiking boots let you feel fairly secure about your footing if you go slowly and pay attention to balance. We decided we wouldn’t want to be climbing Bald Rock in a rain, though, and we were glad to know about a more gentle, longer path down.

From the top there are great views of trees, hills, Mount Norman, Mount McKenzie, and other granite outcroppings such as The Pyramids and Castle Rock.

Bald Rock itself, however, is the main attraction, with its vertical striping caused by mineral deposits, and the presence of egg-shaped boulders of marble, each one or two stories tall, strewn casually around, seemingly ready to start tumbling downward at any moment. Given that they’ve been there many hundreds of years, we took a chance and sat down on the slope below one to rest in its shade.

How much of our appreciation of Bald Rock came from the effort and risk required to reach its top? We’re not sure, but, coming from a law-suit prone country, we found it a bit amazing that the Aussie park service posted no signs stating the obvious (if you slip and fall, you could die) in language written by attorneys for the protection of the government.

And there were no handrails to mar the bald beauty of the Rock. No handrails. No legal jargon. Could be worse.

We climbed Bald Rock without mishap and then had a pleasant meander down. We liked it all. We recommend Bald Rock National Park for your list of places to visit when you come to Queensland.

Money. Since beginning consideration of your compatibility with Australia, I’ve discussed two of the three traditional areas of concern: degree of neatness and sex. I took the easy one’s first.

Money is the tough one. First, flying to an Aussie destination from the US will cost you couple of thousand at least, maybe much more, for a round-trip ticket, and then you’ll need food (expensive) and lodging (very expensive).

It helps a little, of course, that your US dollar will still get you an Australian dollar and nine cents more, and maybe you are one of the fortunate few who don’t have to worry about such things. A “New York Times” story this past week said there are in the world today 2,000 superyachts (120 to more than 500 feet long, valued in millions) and about 200,000 people could afford to buy one of them.

Are you more interested in the minimum wage than the price of yachts? You could be in luck here. Is the minimum wage still about $5.50 per hour in Texas and up to around $10 in one or more states of the US? I know middle- and low-income earners in the US have been losing ground.

It doesn’t seem so here. Aussies prefer to speak in terms of minimum wage per week and a week is counted as 38 hours of work. The current, Australia-wide minimum wage is $522.12 or $13.74/hour (US$12.60).

The Australian Fair Pay Commission (AFPC) wants to give the lowest-paid workers here a $26/week raise to $548.12/week or $14.42/hour (US$13.23). Unions want more. The Rudd government is expected to decide soon.

No worries, though, if you’re between 18 and 45 years of age, and your training or experience qualifies you for a 457, skilled migrant worker, visa. That lets you stay four years, at least, and according to this morning’s newspapers, you won’t be worrying about the minimum wage.

“The Australian” has a front-page story today by Paul Maley and Matthew Franklin saying Australia’s full-employment economy is currently paying skilled migrants $15,000 more per year than the average Australian earns.

Here are a few facts from that story:

1. In 2006-07, the average skilled migrant’s salary was $71,600 (US$65,682) while the average salary 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 »

Enrique Penalosa spoke here in Brisbane last week and opened my eyes to new ways of seeing cities.

Mayor of Bogotá, Columbia, for three years until 2001, Penalosa made major improvements in the city’s transportation system, put in 300 kilometres (more than 180 miles) of bicycle and walking trails, and left behind a network of 1,200 parks and public spaces.

What are cities for, he asked a packed auditorium at Griffith University, cars or children?

A highway through a city is like a fence in a pasture, he said, separating people from each other. Highways also give special privileges to some people (car owners) and not others.

And, “A city is a collective work of art.”

His fundamental beliefs include at least these two: human beings should come first (“humans are sacred”) and democracy depends on providing both equality before the law and the chance for the poor to move as freely outdoors as the wealthy usually can.

Sidewalks, bike paths, parks, other open public spaces, and mass transportation can further democracy and make cities great. When precedence is given to cars and highways, democracy suffers and cities fall short of their potential.

“Every great city has at least one great public space where even rich people Read the rest of this entry »

The birds are singing, the weather is wet and windy, there’s hope for rainfall in Brisbane’s reservoir catchment areas, fuel prices are headed up, and we talked this morning with an Australian wearing a “Don’t Mess With Texas” T-shirt he bought in Dallas without knowing the slogan’s intended meaning.

In other words, my hope that we’d welcome the new year sitting in a Qantas plane about to leave LAX was fulfilled and we’re back from our summer/Christmas vacation.

Our friend Nicola met us at the airport yesterday and we used the last of our energy for unpacking. Jet lag put us in bed by 7:30 p.m. and our internal clocks had us wide awake by 4:30 this morning.

Shortly after five, with rich and various bird sounds reminding us that we are home, we went out for an hour-plus walk that turned out to be a social occasion.

We talked weather with Peter and Shane, neighbors we often see at a bench beside the Brisbane River.

I chatted with Alicia, a woman with whom we used to ride the ferry across the river to the University of Queensland.

And we got a chance to explain to a local man that the Dallas-purchased T-shirt he was wearing Read the rest of this entry »

A challenge for you, if you’re accustomed to American English. Translate this paragraph, please:

“Well what a week this has been. We finally packed the house and got away in nice time. We made it uneventfully that arvo to Glen Inness and again towards Newcastle when all of a sudden the car goes POP and we were looking at a blown turbo…”

Anyone given to shortening words, as Australians tend to be, might write “turbo” for “turbocharger,” defined in my “Australian Pocket Oxford Dictionary” as “a supercharger driven by a turbine powered by the engine’s exhaust gases.”

But “arvo?” It took us a while to figure out, once we’d moved to Brisbane, that arvo is Australian for “afternoon.” Just like “avos” is short for avacados, “Salvos” is the local term for Salvation Army, and “prezzies” (also “pressies”) means gifts.

See how migrating to the Land of Oz keeps a person on his toes?

Anyway, the blown turbo turned out to be something less serious and the story of one family’s year-long car trip around Australia got off to a good start. You can read all about it at a blog posted by Annett Kruse: http://duffkruse.blogspot.com . The sentence Read the rest of this entry »