Down Under Inside Out

One of the things I’ve been pondering recently is the nature and the foreignness of the land I now find myself in. While I was packing, back in those days when the pre-travel panic was building like acid in my stomach, I was thinking that another one of the reasons that I was so nervous about going to Oz was that it simply seemed to be part of another world, one with which I was altogether unfamiliar. In going to London, besides the fact that I seemed to remain largely dazed and oblivious during the time when preparations were underway, I just didn’t get as worried, and I think that comes largely from the fact that in some not entirely sensical sense, London is only London, just another city across the sea. I’m not sure if that’s an entirely accurate reflection of my feelings at the time, but London was a place that I was more informed about, England was a place that I felt like I had heard enough about to be prepared to go see. I didn’t have that in coming to Australia. I had expectations, of course, but what were they based on? Nothing but my own imagination. Australia is to us a very foreign land indeed, all the way across the Pacific, an unknown land that no one ever gives much thought to, except maybe when eating at an Outback restaurant or watching Crocodile Hunter. In our country, Australia is only seen in 2-D silhouettes, flat copies where the whole of life “over there” gets summed up in kangaroos, koalas, funny accents, Blooming Onions and “the Outback,” whatever that’s supposed to mean. Really, things have to be a bit more complex than that.
I think it’s that kind of curiosity that has led me to do so much more thinking just in the short time that I’ve been here than I ever did in London about what this place is an means and what makes it tick. I’m seeking the sense of the place, focused on finding out what is Australia. Now granted, that wasn’t emphasized very much in London, probably because we weren’t so much studying all things English as much as we were looking at all things Western, which is so much bigger and grander than any one country. But I am appreciating my own intentionality in reflection this time around, and I’ll let you know if I ever find any answers.
One of the things we’ve been talking about in Australian Lit. is this very idea of being in the antipodes, which literally means “the place underneath our feet.” It encompasses the idea that if we went right through the center of the planet earth, we would come out in “Opposite Land,” a place that was the mirror image of ours in every way, like stepping through the looking-glass. Many Europeans felt that way when they came to Australia, and I think, in a vague sense, I understand why. This place does kind of seem like an opposite land; backwards, mixed up, changed around. The inside-out, upside-down down under. I’m not sure if I can be specific enough to explain why it seems to be this way, especially because it a hundred little things that make you stop and say, “Yep, things are not working like they used to.” Suffice it to say that I’m truly enjoying trying to figure out how things work in this crazy, backwards place. I look forwards, too, to perhaps coming back a bit more inside-out myself than I was when I came down here.