Australia is a lot like home, but really different.

Where’s the best place to live? The answers vary, but every year Australian news sources pay attention to survey results and generally report that Sydney and Melbourne get high ratings among the world’s cities.

This year, Sydney was named “world’s best city” by a group called Anhold City Brands Index, just topping London, Paris, Rome, New York, and, in sixth place, Melbourne.

While researching my book on Australia last year, I found a report from a British firm called the Economic Intelligence Unit that put Melbourne at the top of its list of “most livable cities,” behind only Vancouver and Vienna.

That group put Perth, Adelaide, and Sydney in the top 10 and Brisbane at 11th.

This year’s report from a company that advises on pay levels for expatriates puts Australian cities high in its list of 215 cities, but not at the top.

Mercer’s Worldwide Quality of Living Survey for 2008 has Sydney at 9th, Melbourne [click to continue…]

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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), [click to continue…]

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On this Environment Day, Queensland got news about water in our dams, the Prime Minister talked about cars and fuel, and everybody seemed to be paying attention to events in the United States.

On the down side, this week’s rains didn’t top up Brisbane’s reservoirs after all. They’re still a half point short of the 40 per cent of capacity needed to trigger a pull back from the current level of water restrictions here, according to an announcement by Premier Anna Bligh.

Only showers are predicted for the weekend.

But on the up side, our Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, announced to Parliament that fuel efficient and hybrid cars will be the main focus of his government’s plan to assist Australia’s faltering automobile industry.

Noting that there’s already a $500 million green car innovation fund set to begin operation in 2010 and run for five years, Rudd looked to a government/industry partnership to address fuel and environmental challenges by producing not only a “green” car, but also “a green car industry.”

The biggest story in Australian news for most news outlets today, however, is an American story: the victory of Barack Obama in the Democratic primary contest. It was the lead story on the 7:30 Report (ABC, public television) last night and Hillary Clinton’s indication of her decision to soon withdraw will probably be the lead story tonight.

The entire front page of Brisbane’s Courier-Mail (tabloid) was devoted to the Obama victory and the national paper, The Australian, gave it thorough coverage, too. Public radio carried a story of jubilation in Africa and in Indonesia along with positive comments from America-watchers in Europe and other parts of Asia.

Geoff Elliott, The Australian’s Washington correspondent, wrote that there is much for Australia to be glad about in the possibility of an Obama presidency, noting that Obama is [click to continue…]

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Two liquids, water and gasoline or petrol, are big news here this week, as is the case in many parts of the world.

The good news is that we’ve had rain, glorious alternating bands of light to heavy rain for more than a day, ending this morning, about three inches of unexpected wet stuff here in Brisbane. That’s about twice the normal June total.

News reports say farmers south and west of here, who’ve missed out on earlier rains this year, also got welcome totals.

The three lakes (called “dams” here) that are Brisbane’s main water source — Wivenhoe, Somerset, and North Pine — have all caught some runoff and their total content is approaching 40 per cent, the point at which water-use restrictions here would be eased back a notch.

The largest, with about two-thirds of the storage capacity of the three, is Wivenhoe and it is often shorted by weather systems that soak Brisbane. Located well inland from the coastline, where rain is almost always heaviest here in Australia, it’s increase yesterday was less than two-tenths of one per cent of capacity.

Worse, government bar graphs show a decline from nearly 30,000 megalitres of stored water in the three dams in April, 2005, to just over 10,000 in April, 2008, roughly the time we’ve been living here. (Honest, though, we’re not at fault; the two of us use just a bit more water daily than Brisbane’s Council has set as a usage goal for one person.)

Petrol is another matter, of course. While the gasoline pumps seem to be delivering ample supplies, the cost has soared here as it has in the United States and elsewhere. Unleaded regular was selling this morning at our local 7/11 for about $1.43/litre or roughly 5.15 US dollars per gallon.

I put in premium on the recommendation of a Prius mechanic and paid [click to continue…]

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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.”

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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.

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Fog was still burning off in low places Sunday morning as Kristi and I headed south from Brisbane to the Main Range National Park, which is part of what is called, with good reason, “the Scenic Rim.”

Less than an hour and a half after leaving home, we were in Cunningham Gap, parked in a roadside lot containing only one other car, and ready to hike up Bare Rock Trail.

In the 1820s, explorer Allan Cunningham saw the possibilities for a pass through the dividing range here and now the Cunningham Highway carries sometimes heavy car and truck traffic past the start of the trail, but within half an hour or so we walked beyond its distracting sounds.

Soon we were standing still and listening to a fascinating concert of bird calls and trills and flourishes from what could only have been a lyre bird, though we never saw her. After 10 minutes or more she quit as suddenly as she’d started and we felt like applauding.

Most of the treats of the day [click to continue…]

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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 [click to continue…]

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Australia is one of the few countries that it is still relatively easy to get into, one of the few not closing down its borders, according to the Dallas-area doctor who did our health checks as we were applying for visas to move here in 2005.

Certified to screen visa applicants for Australia and other countries, he seemed to know what he was talking about. The news here these days supports his opinion.

Of course, that Texas doctor said “relatively easy,” not “easy,” so his remark didn’t do much to calm our fears about all the requirements and paperwork looming up between us and the work permits that would allow us to move down under.

Three years later, as we look back, the scary mountains we saw before us in 2005 look like rounded hills. With permanent residency status in hand,we have a “that wasn’t so bad” perspective.

Moving here does involve clearing many hurdles. You have to pass [click to continue…]

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