2 Texans Down Under

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 »

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

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 »

An English-speaking American living in English-speaking Australia gets the chance to learn a lot of new words. Today I learned “pashing.” I encountered it for the first time ever in the book review section of the most recent “The Weekend Australian.”

A literary critic named Stella Clark began her review of two novels by saying, “Spontaneous sex-change may be less alarming today than a man pashing his mother but many of us would, presumably, have trouble empathising with either sensation.”

Word usage here, for the non-native, requires some caution.

Despite the fact that there is a street not far from where we live called “Fanny Street” (and no others in all of Greater Brisbane), I have learned since moving here that one should not say, in polite company, f—y because f—y is a slang term for a very private part of human bodies that are female.

In addition, I have learned that “root” is, according to my Australian dictionary, a “course colloquialism” for an act of sexual intercourse. Not surprising, perhaps, but new to my ears, just as “pashing his mother” was new to my eyes when I read it this morning.

I suspected the worst, of course, even before I read further and saw Stella Clark’s reference to Sigmund Freud’s belief that beneath the surface Read the rest of this entry »