2 Texans Down Under

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 »

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.

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 »

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. 

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 »

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 »

Australia’s top leaders officially said “sorry” today to the “stolen generation” and their families. All over the continent Indigenous people and the non-Indigenous gathered in crowds to listen, applaud, and shed tears of both happiness and sorrow.

For outsiders living here, it was like being present for a family event almost too personal for the eyes and ears of guests. One felt honoured to be able to listen and watch.

Kevin Rudd, elected Prime Minister in part because he promised to say the word his campaign opponent, John Howard, refused to say, “sorry,” spoke solemnly and without great flourish, but his message was powerful.

It is time, he said, to “deal with this unfinished business of the nation,” to “remove a great stain from the nation’s soul and in the true spirit of reconciliation to open a new chapter in the history of this great land Australia.”

He said: People of European descent took Aboriginal and Torres Strait children forcibly from their parents and put them into institutions or foster homes and they did so for much of a century, finally ending the practice only in the 1970s. (Yes, the nineteen seventies.)

He said: Laws passed by previous Parliaments permitted this to happen and we, the Parliament of today, must say we are sorry. The resolution he offered used that word three times.

With 100 invited Indigenous leaders present and all major 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 »

Just when I think I’ve begun to understand my Brisbane friends and neighbours (Aussie spelling), I make the mistake of visiting Bunnings, a sort of down under version of Home Depot or Lowes, and ask a sales clerk where I can find a pair of pruning shears.

“You want ___?” she asks. At that moment any attempt on my part to spell out what she’d just said would have been utterly futile. I ask her to repeat that seemingly random collection of sounds, but what I hear the second time still causes no linking of synapses in my brain.

“Maybe so,” I say and follow her down an aisle until we come to a display of pliers-like clippers, most of which have labels containing the word “secateur.” Sec-ah-tour. A brand new word for me, but I thank my helper and leave with a “pruner” identified by its manufacturer as a “bi-pass secateur.” With it I can cut twigs.

This expansion of my vocabulary came only moments after a clerk in the plumbing department had asked me if I own a “shifting spanner.” Damned if I know, I thought, but after a bit of discussion I realized that I do, indeed, have a shifting spanner, a couple of them, actually. I just call them crescent wrenches.

English is supposed to evolve, I know, and I’ve run into region-based differences before. The first time I ordered coffee in New England, for example, the waitress asked if I wanted it “regular,” and I said I did, since coffee comes regularly fresh from the pot and unadulterated. Mistake. In those pre-latte days in Boston “regular coffee” came with milk in it. In other words, ruined.

In Australia, though, the evolution of our common language seems as divergent, at times, as the evolution of trees that shed their bark in winter while keeping their leaves.

Kate Veitch, author of an Aussie novel called “Listen” that is being made available in the US as “Without a Backward Glance,” says she was almost brought to tears Read the rest of this entry »