Harold and the Purple Crayon

I worked really hard all weekend so that I could just take Monday and go spend the day in the city doing whatever I wanted to do, to finally start doing some of the "Melburnian" things that I've wanted to do since I got here, but never quite got around to doing. So I got my camera, a bottle of water, and a map, and set out. I started out in Flinders Street station, the hub around which the city spins. It is a bright gold building, and could be considered rather garish if it weren't so lovably full of character. Right across the street I went on a photo spree in St. Paul's Cathedral (obviously not THE St. Paul's, but a fairly good southern hemisphere substitute). They have beautiful stained glass windows, like all respectable cathedrals, and I also got the chance to go around this little passageway and find that the quilty thing that I had stared at the time I was there for an Evensong service was not actually the front of the church! The front is being restored, but I got to have a peek at it and it is actually a beautiful marble mosaic. It strikes me though, that they would care so much about the beauty of their church that they would make this elaborate quilt-like facade to hang just while the restoration is being done. Evangelicals need to get back on the wagon in terms of art and worship spaces. Also, there was this group of school kids visiting the cathedral, and they would go around and take notes, they would kneel on the kneelers provided in front of whatever feature they wanted to take notes on. It was a striking image, a line of school girls with ponytails and bright blue coats all kneeling in a church for purposes that had nothing to do with prayer and reverence, but just academia. I think that might be why I found it so noteworthy, but then I'm still not sure.

Around St. Paul's you can find the statue of explorer Matthew Flinders, and in a separate monument, the statues of explorers Burke and Wills. It is ironic that these are the men who are given statues, since if you know anything about Australian history, their expeditions were all failures to one degree or another. Then again, if you know anything about Australian culture, you will realize that they have this tendency to make heroes out of their losers. And then, there is something oddly appropriate about good old Matty Flinders standing there year in and year out with bird crap all over his head...

After that I passed the Melbourne Town Hall (which I have walked past about a million times without ever realizing what it is) and the Melbourne Unity Building, which is an Art Deco monstrosity and looks like a skyscraper made from a golden lampshade, and went up Collins Street. Collins street is one of the ritziest addresses in Melbourne, and all the Swells were out in full force that day, pushing past me, jabbering into their cell phones, in their neatly pressed Italian suits and slicked back hair, all of it screaming "LOOK AT HOW IMPORTANT I AM!" I felt rather small and in-the-way as I strolled along, taking pictures of all the glorious Victorian facades I had admired for so long.

I continued on my walk up to Spring Street, where I saw the Treasury buildings and on to Parliament. I read that there was a riot which lead to a siege of the parliament building in the not too distant past, and if you look on the front of the building you can still see the gun slits that they made to allow those who were defending the building to shoot people without ever leaving the safety of its confines. And I looked and sure enough, there they were. History right there in front of me. I went on past the gaudy edifice of the Princess Theater, all fake gold leaf and hot pink signs advertising their production of Dirty Dancing, and on to the ornate arches of Chinatown.

Those of you who have recieved a card from me recently probably know that Chinatown is a place fraught with peril, but fortunately in the daylight it manages to behave itself rather well. I stopped at the Korean lunch box and ordered myself some noodles and...other stuff for lunch. I have no idea what the other stuff was, I just pointed to what looked appetizing and they dished it up (camel's hump,anyone?). But I made out like a bandit, the food was so cheap and good and I got to sit under a beautiful red laquered Chinese arch and eat it out in the open air with chopsticks. I then peeked into the Chinese museum and moved on from there to check out some of the shops. To be honest, they are mostly kind of kitchy, with statues of golden Buddhas and those lucky kitties with one paw raised (now they even have ones that wave that paw at you mechanically for hours on end) and junky jewelery, but if you look around, you can still find some beautiful treasures, and it's the hunt that I have always found most satisfying. The strangest place I visited was this place that looked like a candy shop, but instead of candy they had tons of different dried fruits, like prunes and plums and cherries and mandarins and lychees and mangos and ginger. Then, in another set of cases, they have a ton of dried fish products, including cuttlefish (which is like squid). The whole area smelled like the flake fishfood you would buy at a pet shop. The weirdest part was definitely the little bags of snacks that they were selling that definitely had a picture of a cartoon cuttlefish on it, to make it more appealing for the kids. Now eat your squid, honey...

It was also in Chinatown that I found this random little side alley that has all these signs down at the one end. They look like parking signs, but instead of actual parking sign content they have mottos like, "There is no forwards, there is no backwards;" "I have examined myself;" and "The best kind of man would be like water." I'm pretty sure they were Taoist sayings because of the content, but I'm not at all sure how they got to be there, since there weren't really any buildings in the alley besides restaurants.

Well, I did a little more poking around in some of the arcade shops, I found a wonderful art supply store and an amazing store which sold journals and albums and address books from Italy, but for a standard size, leather bound notebook it costs, drumroll please, $120 (gasp of horror!!!). But they were amazing beautiful and well made, and it was fun to look at them. It's actually pretty hard to find nice, not to expensive blank books in Melbourne, so if anyone feels inclined to buy me gifts... *wink, wink*

But it was a wonderful day, I went all over the city, I took a million pictures, I walked myself ragged and I just thought I would like to share the events of day with you, my dear friends. Thank you for your kind attention.

The Rubicon (just kidding, it's only the last post about break)

Okay, I am going to try to squeeze the rest of break into one last entry and still not have it be super long, so bear with me as I attempt the impossible. Well, first of all we found this amazing hostel to stay in in Adelaide which gave us free rice and free hot apple pie with ice cream and custard every night. There was a dear old Scottish man who owned the place named Peter, and he had been all over the world but had finally settled down to run this old hostel in Adelaide and he was the custard master. So every night while we were working on dinner, he would come in and putter around and fix the custard and pop the pies into the oven. And then about forty minutes later, he comes back in and sticks his head in the oven to check on the pies and with all the ire and righteous indignation one can imagine,this dear sweet old man says, "Shit!" by which he of course meant that the oven was broken and the pies, as yet, unbaked. Thryn and I had to focus very hard on our plates of rice in order to keep from laughing. But at any rate, we could not enjoy the company of Peter for as long as we might have wished to, because we were soon off from the pleasant green hills of Adelaide and on our way to Kangaroo Island. We had to book a tour in order to see KI, but I'm glad that we did, because it ended up being one of my favorite parts of the trip.

KI is like wildlife central for Australia, so we got to walk on the beaches with the sea lions, stand face to face with a koala, and cuddle a baby kangaroo (that last part was a big bonus, Flinders Chase Visitor center had taken in a joey who's mother had been hit by a car, and we got to have a little visit. So soft!!!). We also got to see NZ fur seals, echidnas, wallabies, and one fairy penguin. Then the second day we got to go on this hike through this big rocky gorge that had a stream flowing through the bottom that was so clean we could drink out of it, even though the water was red. We also got to see tea trees, which is where tea tree oil comes from. My dad has always been a big believer in the merits of tea tree oil, so I was excited to see the source for myself. The rocks in this gorge were amazing, metamorphic layers all along the bottom with metamorphic rocks of all different kinds along the path, and pieces of loose limestone mixed in which had fallen down from higher up where the walls were sedimentary. They even had caves up along the ridge of this kind of gorge thing. It was a geologists paradise. Then we hiked all the way out to where the gorge meets the sea, but we couldn't go too far out because the gorge suffers from "freak waves." This basically means that you can look out on a wide empty beach about 200 feet away to the waves one minute, and the next minute, the water can be up and soaking your shoes. There's a narrow little opening from this beach out onto the sea, and a bunch of waves will all surge in at once and move up the beach as quick as lightning. It was such a cool place.

I think the thing that made the tour really worthwhile though was the fact that Toni, our guide, was so amazing. She was fairly young, and she had this amazing sense of humor that was really engaging and helped us to feel comfortable joking around with her right away. She was really interesting too, she knew so much about cultural things and she had travelled around quite a bit, as most people in Australia seem to have done. She was a regular naturalist, with all the different things that she knew about the plants and animals and even geology. She wanted to know what I thought about the gorge that we hiked through and how it was formed, so we swapped opinions about subduction zones and tectonic movement. Then the one night that we stayed on the island we got to sleep in this adorable little farmhouse with a little kitchen and a loft and a barbie in the front porch and kangaroos roaming around in the front yard. It was such a fun tour, I really love KI and I would go back in a heartbeat.

The last few days we spent around the bustling metropolis known as "Magnificent Quorn" (okay, so it's only Thryn that calls it that, and it's an incredibly dinky town, but we had a good time. We were exploring the Southern Flinders Ranges, which is an incredibly beautiful area north of Adelaide. We climbed a couple of mountains (Dutchman's Stern and Devil's Peak) and hiked through Warren's Gorge (aka the Valley of Bones and Flies). The hiking was great, because it cost us money for every little hiking point the hostel people drove us too, so we would basically just go to one and stay all day. We ended up spending a lot of time just out in nature, sitting on a big boulder and staring at an amazing view. There's something about that experience that is so purifying to the soul, you know? Devil's Peak was insane, it was so rocky and there was almost no trail, but I really enjoyed the challenge of climbing. At the top there was a kind of visitor's book where everyone who had made it would sign. The entries in there were pretty funny. My favorite was "Erasmus was here." Warren's Gorge was pretty crazy. First of all, the amount of flies there was absolutely insane. I don't know if they just prefer the low places or what because we were much more bothered by them that day than the other days. Also, there were many bones and dead kangaroos in this particular valley. And the day that we went through was particularly cloudy and ominous, and the place was so strange that it was quite portentious, I was definitely expecting a dwarf or a witch to pop out or for something of mystical quality to happen. The other great thing about "Magnificent Quorn" was that our hostel had a whole movie cabinet full of WESTERNS!! Which meant that one night, after a full day of climbing, we ended up chilling with, that's right, Gunga Din. Quality, quality film, although I will say that Cary Grant has THE worst fake British accent I have ever heard. Well, after such thrills, what can be left of an adventure except a tortourous all night bus trip back to the cozy confines of urban living?

And it is there friends, that my epic tale must at last come to an end, and so, once again, for the time being, I bid you adieu.

Still On Break...

Well, I’ll try to move through the rest of the break a little more quickly rather than take two pages just to do one day (although I think we can all agree that that was quite a monumental day…). The rest of the tour was pretty normal, the second day we went around to all the famous sites along the Great Ocean Road, like the 12 Apostles, London Bridge, the Grotto, and the Bay of Martyrs. Although, well, one funny thing did happen that day. We were on this random beach that didn’t really have any famous things on it, but I was trying to take a picture of the foam rolling in, all lacey and white. So I was quite close to the edge of the shore and this kind of rogue wave rolled in and so I started backing up really quickly to avoid getting my feet wet, but the sand was deep and sucked at my feet and I got bagged down so, Wabam!, over I went, falling right on my butt in about 3 inches of surf. I struggled to my feet pretty quickly, but the back of my jeans had already gotten soaked. So we rode to the next beach, the 12 apostles, and I had to sit in our van with my wet pants. But then I saw a chance while some others were going on this expensive helicopter ride and I asked our driver if I could get into the trailer in the back for my pack. And so, as I was rummaging around back there, he saw the forlorn state of my trousers and was like, “Geez, what happened to you?” And so I explained to him that I had fallen, but I had an extra pair of pants to change into and could he please leave the trailer open so I could go run and change? And he was like, “Well, if you wanted, you could just change here.” And I looked around, and he was right, there was no one around. So he just went around the other side of the trailer door and I changed pants in the lovely fresh sea air. Word.

So anyway, the third day started out as a bit of a disappointment because it was cold and rainy and so we drove around like, “Hey, that’s the beach that’s rated number 1 in Australia, anybody want to get out for a picture?” “Nope.” And we also had to miss seeing a petrified forest because of the rain, which sorely disappointed by. But it was also because we missed that that we got to see a composite volcanic cone, sadly extinct, but still really cool. The day finally cleared up, so we got to spend some more time looking at tide pools along the shore and it was nice and clear for our big barbecue dinner that night. The next day was comparatively kind of dull, but still pretty fun. We saw this giant lobster statue that Thryn was quite thrilled by and also a pink lake (beta carotene, don’t ya know?) and we stopped for lunch at the Coorong Wilderness place and had kangaroo balls (don’t worry, just meatballs made from kangaroo meat) and we had a little talk from a man who was descended from Aborigines and he talked to us about the plants in the area and what the Aborigines had used them for. But I think even though the day was enjoyable, I was pretty relieved when we finally pulled into Adelaide.

As for the next day, well, the less said, the better. We pretty much just walked around Adelaide to different travel agencies and spent massive amounts of time in the library on the internet trying to figure out what we would do for the rest of break. We knew that we wanted to go to Kangaroo Island and to either the Grampians or the Flinders Ranges, but transportation issues were just not working out, and we were either going to run out of money or spend the rest of our time in Adelaide doing pretty much nothing. So we were quite dejected most of that day, and then I think by the end of the day, even when we got back to our hostel, we were pretty sure that nothing good was ever going to happen again. But then that night Thryn started making a few more phone calls that night and things finally started falling into place. The day, as a whole however, was not a pleasant one. We like to call that one Black Wednesday.

The next day, however, made up for that by being rather fantastic. We met up with Susannah’s friend from camp, a girl named Eve. She was really a cool person, fun and outgoing and outrageous and warm and helpful and just generally awesome. We spent the day around the Adelaide Hills area, we got my first Aussie pie in Handorf, a little German town, we took lots of free samples at the Melba chocolate factory, we poked around this tiny toy store with the kitschiest ever souvenirs (not surprising, since it’s mascot was a giant steel rocking horse). Not only did they have this amazing piece of monumental art, they also had quite an aviary. So, naturally, we ended up dancing with a rowdy crew of sulphur-crested cockatoos, which are quite rhythmical, apparently. Then Eve took us back to her house to make stir-fry and noodles for dinner and we got to meet her family, and all was quite well with our souls, though they had been replete with abrasions from the turmoil of the previous day. More next time, don’t worry kids, we’ve crossed the halfway point!!!

Super long, but interesting... (1st Day of Break)

Okay, now to what everyone (all four of you; ah, well, actually I have no idea at this point how many people read this blog, for all I know it could number in the millions) actually wants to hear about, the break! I will warn you from the get go that I will not be able to write this whole thing all at one go because SO MUCH happened over the course of thos two weeks. It was really like having 3 separate breaks. So I will try to stick to the highlights, but still this will give me the ability to give a more detailed account of my journey. So, the first phase of our voyage was the bus tour that we took from Melbourne to Adelaide along the Great Ocean Road. But, in order to explain this trip more fully, I will have to back up to before we even departed.

So, we were downtown about two hours before our bus was scheduled to leave because we needed to look for a book we were reading for class. Plenty of time, right? Well, then we decided to go down to St. Kilda for lunch and we had still about another hour before the bus was supposed to leave (for those of you keeping score we never found the book and had to give up). St. Kilda is probably about a 15 minute bus ride away from where we needed to meet the bus. So we ride out and are looking for a place to eat that will be cheap enough and finally just decide to grab some pizza. The thing we had not figured into the equation is the fact that it would take some time for the pizza to cook. So we sit and bite our nails while the pizza is cooking and as soon as we get them we rush out the door to find the bus stop. By this time we only have about 20 minutes left before the tour is scheduled to depart (and keep in mind that we had also never received the e-mail confirmation we were promised by the bus company confirming that there were seats for us at all). So we find a bus stop and look at the time table and discover that the bus will not even arrive until 10 minutes before we are supposed to leave. We don’t know if another bus that goes where we need to go will be stopping at some other stop and we don’t know where to walk to get back for our bus. We just have to wait. So we sit, again biting our nails, while the wind is tearing down the street, freezing us half to death. The bus finally comes and we wait through each agonizing stop, watching the minutes tick by. We get out already about five minutes late and start sprinting from the bus stop to our pick up site. Thank God, the bus was still there, but they told us as we arrived that one of the drivers had just been on his way to call HQ and tell them they were leaving without us. Now, I ask you, do you need any more proof that God’s tangible favor is resting on us?

But, at any rate, it was after we climbed sheepishly onto our little bus, mumbling apologies to the other passengers, that our vacation finally got underway (btw, I think it was this initial lateness that made it so that Thryn and I never got to sit next to each other the entire tour, since people tend to settle down wherever they first decide to park themselves in situations like these). The thing that you have to understand from the get-go is that this was no ordinary bus tour. You should go to their website (Wayward Bus tours), their very indie and organic and probably they all eat a lot of brown rice. But the whole point of the company is to have bus tours for people who don’t like the idea of going on bus tours. The “buses” are really more like large vans and the tour groups are no larger than 21 people. They tend to be younger but are definitely not all students and they come from all over the world. So we set our for our first day of amazing driving. The Great Ocean Road was designed to be like the Pacific Highway One in CA, so the first part skirts right along these cliffs on the ocean coast on a very windy road. The weather was not especially nice, kind of rainy and cold, but that fact made it so that about half an hour of our drive we were in view of the most beautiful rainbow I have ever seen, Technicolor bright, a complete arch spanned out over the ocean. For a good portion of that time it was so bright that it made a double rainbow.

We stopped at a lot of really pretty beaches that day (great OCEAN road, get it?) with water that would roll up to the shore in crashing arches, the color of clear glass after its been worn down by the sand for a couple of years. But, describing all the beaches would slow down the narrative, so moving on to Apollo Bay, where we stopped for the night. We were sitting in the kitchen when one of the people on our tour came to ask us to borrow pepper. He paused when we gave it to him and said, “We’re making a fondue, would you like to come.” We must have looked quizzical because he went on to explain, “Well, we’re Swiss, right, so we wanted to make this fondue because it’s been so long since we had one and we’re really used to having it and we miss it. We don’t have the right stuff, the right cheese, the right wine, but you could come and taste it anyway, some Swiss fondue, eh?” Well, we said that sounded really neat and we might come over. So after we finished our dinner of pasta and weird tomato tuna sauce, we looked at each other and said “Wanna go?” “Yeah!” and off we went.

We walked over to their flat and knocked timidly on their sliding glass door. As soon as they saw us, they started cracking up with laughter, but waved us in. They introduced themselves, and then explained to us the ins and outs of fondue, all the while apologizing because theirs had turned out so hilariously poorly. They were sure that it was substandard, but I think we just thought, “Hey, melted cheese and bread, where’s bad?” Well, after we tried about a slice of bread, they pulled out a pack of cards and asked if they could show us a Swiss card game. It was pretty simple, a lot like playing spoons except instead of grabbing spoons we were supposed to slap the table. They explained that it was usually a drinking game, but that they didn’t have enough alcohol left, so we couldn’t play it that way. After a few hands, someone got the idea that instead of a drinking game, the last person to slap the deck would instead have to play another little game called “Truth or Action.” It’s basically a different name for truth or dare, just with a card game added. I think they could tell that we were a little leery, because at first the things they were asking were so benign, like hopping around on one leg and yelling, or saying where and when we were born. But then things got a little rougher, first they asked Cedric to eat a clove of garlic, and then they asked me what I thought of President Bush and then, well, then more questions were asked, although at that point the tide of the game had turned and Maud, one of the Swiss, was losing more hands and she just answered them in French (they all knew like 4 or 5 languages) so we were largely spared. We also had some interesting conversations about our respective cultures; mostly centering on the fact that we were disturbing their confident belief that life without alcohol is not actually possible. Christophe actually asked us, “How do people, like, hook up, or become couples?” We were like, “I don’t know, I guess they just talk about it.” Heads shaken in utter disbelief, understandable since apparently in Europe people can’t become couples, socialize, communicate honestly or basically exist without the saving grace of alcohol. Oh, the Swiss. But they were seriously very kind people, like even though they weren’t doing anything terribly scandalous, Christophe kept telling us that this was just the way that they were, but he knew we came from a different kind of culture so if anything made us uncomfortable we should just go ahead and say so. They kept saying, “Oh, you will go away from here tonight and have such a terrible opinion of the Swiss!” Actually, Maud came to find us after we went back to our part of the hostel just to apologize for the way they boys had acted and say that she hoped we had not been offended. She was so sweet and earnest, and we assured her that we had enjoyed the evening immensely. Very true, but also true that this encounter did forever alter my opinion of the Swiss. :-)

Sorry guys, they won't all be this long, promise...

Not quite what you want to hear about yet...

Well, even though the news is quite stale at this point, I have to say at least a few words about our visit to Healesville Sanctuary because I’m required to for our Engaging Australian culture class and also because I was just having an interesting conversation with Thryn about some of the things that I could say about it, so I thought I’d stop conversing and start writing.

Well, it’s interesting to reflect on how I feel about the experience after my break travels, because I’ve really changed the way I think about it a lot. I think initially I enjoyed the experience, in spite of the incredibly cold and drizzly weather. I liked the chance to have a close encounter with these animals that so represent the native Australian fauna. But when I think about the experience as a whole, I think it represents more about Australia than perhaps it ought to. I think the image that stands out most starkly in my mind are the languid eyes of the browbeaten kangaroos, lying around in their pens submissively allowing tourists to pat them while their pictures is taken. Or there was the Tasmanian Devil who paced manically around his cage, running laps with restless abandon. I think the kangaroos were the worst, they were so lackadaisical and their eyes said that they were heartsick. Oddly enough, it made me think of the way that Aborigines were portrayed in Greater Nowheres and Tracks, lying browbeaten and drunk in the middle of a dusty road or an old, dry creek bed. I think there is a common link between the two images, something about taking things that lived here for centuries free and on their own terms caging them, taming them, putting them on display so that everyone could ogle these “primitive” and exotic creatures. And now, well now they lie around in the hot sun and maybe just wait to die because they’ve been institutionalized and all their spirit is gone and tourists can come and pat them on the head and take their picture.

The other funny thing is the way that the staff of Healesville viewed their project. They seemed to be really defensive about the fact that it was NOT a zoo and the animals could either come to the keepers or not come of their own volition. Well, how does the bird show, where birds of prey are flown around a stadium after bits of meat. And why aren’t the koalas allowed to go up in the tops of the trees where they would live in the wild. They have to kept at eye level so the tourist can snap their pictures. I sympathize with their plight, because they have to balance the goals of educating the public with the goals of taking care of the animals, but they seem to be quite ready to defend their position as an advocate for the animals, rather than their wardens.

Really Long Post--"An Answer to Fear: Exploring the Practicalities of the "White Australia" Policy

So, most of you probably won't find this interesting, but I'm posting the paper I just wrote anyway. It's about the extremely racist policies that were put in place during the time of Australia's federation because of certain insecurities the nation felt b/c of their lost ties with Britain. Good stuff. Peruse as you fancy...

"An Answer to Fear: Exploring the Practicalities of the "White Australia" Policy"

The time period surrounding Australia’s decision to form a federation was a tumultuous one in many ways. The change over caused something of a crisis for the former colonies because of the loss of their close ties with Britain, which brought with it feelings of military vulnerability, economic instability, and anomie about the issue of national identity. The laws and mindsets of the White Australia Policy were an attempt to address the fears and concerns that were prevalent during the time of Federation by restricting immigration and promoting a native Australian population.

There were many reasons that it was believed that restricting immigration would help to stabilize the Federation. One of these reasons was that many Australians believed this would solve the economic problems that were facing the colonies at the time. Trade unions were a large part of promoting these beliefs, maintaining that high rates of immigration were contributing to a shortage of work for native Australians. One of the reasons pointed to was the fact that foreign labor was so cheap; it was common to pay two shillings a day for a laborer from the Pacific Islands, four for a Chinese laborer, and seven for a white laborer. The fact that foreigners were willing to work so cheaply was seen as undermining the unions’ work for a better wage. This problem was only exacerbated when foreign labor was used to break strikes. The seasonal nature of agricultural work in Australia also led to a high degree of competition between white labor and foreign labor, causing many Australians to believe that to allow the entry of any foreign labor would inevitably cause a loss of jobs for white laborers. These fears were even more deeply engraved into the Australian psyche during the gold rushes of the 1850’s, when a greater number of foreigners were coming into the country than ever before. In 1855, more than thirty ships carrying Cantonese migrants landed in Australia, by 1858 one in every ten Victorians was Chinese. After a time of heavy influx of migrants, it was feared that foreigners would never cease to pour into the country. It is understandable that people feared immigration would threaten the existing population when one considers that “The inflow of gold rush migrants in just two years exceeded the grand total of convicts who had arrived in the eighty years of transportation.”

Another reason that restricted immigration was seen as a solution to the identity crisis at the time of Federation was that it allowed Australia to establish itself as a “white man’s land” from the outset. It was largely to further these ends that the Australian Natives Association formed. By the 1870’s, native-born, white Australians had become the majority. But these increased numbers did not automatically lead to a more cohesive sense of nationhood. Many of those who had been born in Australia scorned their native land and insisted on continuing to refer to England as “home.” It was within the organization of the Australian Natives Association that this new national identity was intended to be formed. This society tried to set itself apart from similar British societies, with their old-world class distinctions. However, membership in the association remained a formal aspect, as shown by the practice of certifying members (see figure 1). These associations reinforced the idea that native Australians were white Australians, helping to give a more settled feel to the matter of identity.

Another major concern in deciding to form a federation was the militarily vulnerable position in which Australia would be left. In the 1870’s, Britain had decided to withdraw their troops and leave Australians locally responsible for their own defense. Even before this time, Australia had reason to feel anxious about their own defense simply because of their geographic isolation from the protective “mother land.” Also, the 1894 Anglo-Japanese treaty was a cause for much consternation. This treaty gave rise to a new awareness among many of Britain’s colonies that Japan had risen as a new world power, which was of especial concern to Australia because of their proximity. This led to an even great fear of the eventual prospect of occupation. It also showed Australians that Britain was still intent on pursuing its own interests in the Pacific and that they would have to take the initiative to protect their country. However, Japan was not the only restless superpower which caused some anxiety among Australians. It was also during this time that Russia was taking over Manchuria, China was being carved up by the European superpowers, America, with its demands for an “open door policy,” was making its presence felt in the Pacific, and France and Germany were not shy about participating in the land grab. All of these factors made a defensive build-up seem prudent. These feelings of military vulnerability left Australia especially sensitive to the fact that large numbers of foreigners were now attempting to enter the country.

When the idea of cutting ties with Britain was entertained, Australians developed a preoccupation with seeking to fill vast, “unsettled” areas of the country in the west and north. The thought of new immigrants coming into the country made many uneasy because of the fear that foreign settlers could eventually question their right to effective proprietorship. Trying to settle an entire continent with only four million people was not a very practicable solution, but many felt that if this was not accomplished, Australia would not be able to make a case for their claim on the land. Many bookshops of the time were stocked with novels on the theme of “invasion.” Anxious thoughts were filled with pictures of descending Chinese and Mongol hoards that would come and tear the country away from the white settlers as they, in turn, had taken it from its original inhabitants. The political cartoon in figure 2, which was run in The Bulletin, is a good example of common sentiment at the time; it shows obviously caricatured Chinese people breaking into to people’s very homes through cracks in “Deficient Immigration Laws.” It was also during this time that a republication of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire led to parallels being drawn between the demise of mighty Rome and the recent decline of power which Britain had experienced. These parallels gave rise to the fear that the time of the white race was ending and unless drastic actions were taken, they would be forced to succumb to the increasing numbers and advanced technology of Asia. These rather jingoistic fears also played a large role in the decision to restrict immigration at the turn of the century.

All of these fears and concerns led to the decision that something had to be done to restrict immigration. One of the first bills that was passed after the formation of the Federation was the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901. This act became the centerpiece of what was to be known as the White Australia policy, legislation that was aimed at excluding all non-European migrants. However, the terminology of this law could not express that explicitly. British approval was needed to allow the bill to be written into law, and Britain would not have allowed any legislation that would have offended their new Japanese allies with racist rhetoric. Therefore it was decided that the dictation test, first developed and implemented in Natal, South Africa, would be used to screen out non-European immigrants. The initial suggestion was to implement the test in English, but this was decided against because it could discourage desirable northern European migration while encouraging undesirable Japanese and African-American migration. So the specification eventually decided on was “any European language” in which the proctor should decide to conduct the test. Initially, the specification caused difficulties because most customs officers conducted the test in the language they were most comfortable with: English. Because of this oversight, four Indians were able to pass the test, which caused an immediate public outcry. Officials responded by training the customs officers to use the test to effectively bar the entry of any non-European person. From 1932 on the dictation test could be given at any time within the first five years of residency, and the test could be repeated any number of times, but it was unlikely that these loopholes ever had to be utilized, since no one managed to pass the test after 1909. It was very unlikely that someone from northern Europe would be asked to take the test at all, unless they fell into one of the other categories of immigrants that were deemed undesirable, such as those who were insane, anyone who was likely to become a public burden, any person suffering from a contagious disease, as well as prostitutes and (ironically) criminals.

Along with this piece of legislation, the Pacific Island Laborers Act was also created in 1901. The purpose of this act was to allow for the deportation of the vast majority of Pacific Islanders after the end of December 1906. Of the 10,000 Pacific Islanders living in Queensland and New South Wales at the time, only 700 were exempt from deportation. The act also imposed limits on the number of migrants from the Pacific Islands who were allowed entry before 1906 and encouraged emigration for the current population. These two laws, as well as some others passed during this time period, were intended to shape the character of the newly federated Australia, establishing a white identity and stabilizing the Commonwealth economically and defensively.

However, in spite of these well-intentioned legislations, Australians still faced a dilemma. They wanted their population to reflect their British roots, and yet they still needed to settle the “empty” regions of the country. One of the ways they sought to accomplish this was by decreasing “desirable” immigration, soliciting candidates from Britain and northern Europe. Not only was propaganda a major part of this scheme, but there was also financial assistance to encourage people to take advantage of the opportunities of Australia. Australia Unlimited, a book published by E.J. Brady, was full of lively descriptions and photos depicting the boundless opportunities the land could offer an enterprising settler. The dual nature of Australians’ attitudes towards immigration is well expressed in the political cartoon (shown in figure 3), which shows the mixed messages that many immigrants received. It is significant, too, that the immigrants portrayed are Italian, as they would have been one of the groups who received different messages based on the degree to which their appearance allowed them to assimilate into mainstream Australian culture.

However, it was not just immigration that was placed under greater government control during this time period. Another major goal of the White Australia policy was to maintain racial purity, which meant that the number of native, white Australians had to be increased. Because of the perceived health of the climate and the lifestyle of Australians, it had historically been perceived as a kind of breeding ground which would, given enough time, produce a superior race of human beings. This lofty goal was behind much of the opposition to immigration, based on the desire to keep bloodlines pure. Because the production of white male babies was seen as vital to both the defense and the development of the country, it was the Australian mother who was placed under scrutiny, especially when studies uncovered a recent drop in the birthrate. A newly formed Commission on the Decline of the Birth Rate and on the Mortality of Infants in New South Wales reported that any desire to restrict fertility was “characteristic of a decadent state of society.” Women’s use of birth control and other methods to control their fertility was seen as “selfish,” a product of their indulgent desire to enter the industrial world. Unfortunately these opinions ran against those which the mothers themselves were forming in the time after Federation. Increased levels of education for both men and women contributed to these changing ideas; the demand for more children was in conflict with the aspirations of many Australian families. It was largely considered to be more immoral to give birth to a child they couldn’t afford than to deprive their country of one more citizen. For them, having fewer children was an opportunity to be better, more dedicated parents.

However, because the need for more native Australians was so strongly felt in the public ethos, the issue of fertility became not so much a personal preference as a matter for state action. For many politicians, quantity trumped quality because of the ultimate need for a large population to perpetuate the race, win wars, and claim the land. In order to encourage their goals, the government banned the importation of contraceptives and birth control information, and introduced a “baby bonus” of five pounds for every white child born in order to discourage abortions. Not only mothers, but cities were also blamed for the decline in birth rate, and were seen as disease centers which polluted the healthy and wholesome Australian way of life. Many doctors recommended that people be sent to small country farms, which had the added bonus of providing incentive for them to have large families.

In spite of these differing opinions, both government and families agreed that it was essential to Australia’s future that the infant mortality rate be cut. Increased medical knowledge made an instant advancement in discovering how to thwart the major killer of young children: diarrhea. But the government was seeking a more all-encompassing system through improving the sanitation system, establishing infant protection acts to prevent infanticide, and improving education on mothering practices (or “mothercraft,” a term which was coined in this era). The picture in figure 4 shows a meeting of a mothering class, with all participants proudly holding a healthy and robust little one. But beyond the propaganda aspect of this image of joyful motherhood, it is also interesting to note the posters on the wall, admonishing the maintenance of a healthy diet and the reminder that babies are a woman’s “rare pearls.” It was also during this time that metropolitan areas began to establish large women’s hospitals and maternity wards as “monuments to motherhood,” as well as infant welfare centers. The photo in figure 5 shows a baby being weighed by a nurse at one such center to check the health of the baby. It was agreed during this time that better education in mothering was key to producing healthier children and families, which was in turn, key to securing the future of the nation.

However, in spite of these efforts, the baby craze never quite caught on to the degree that the government had hoped it would. Although the importation of contraceptives and birth control was banned, it was not illegal to produce them inside of the country and information concerning their use was, by this time, beyond the government’s ability to control. Furthermore, changing ideas and cultural tides rendered much of the propaganda too little, too late. But in spite of not achieving the immediate results desired, this campaign did have a lasting impact on the Australian psyche. A slogan from a New South Wales “Baby Week” broadside sums up the sentiment well: “The nation that has the babies has the future.”

The attitudes and mindsets that were prevalent during the time of Federation were reflective of the fears aroused by the loss of ties with Britain. Foremost in the minds of many Australians at the time were fears of economic instability, military invasion, and a loss of national identity. The White Australia policy sought to address the fear of economic instability by removing competition through restricted immigration. It also sought to secure the country against military invasion by prohibiting an influx of immigrants who could challenge the claim to effective proprietorship and by encouraging a baby boom to supply more Australians to fight for and fill the country. And it shaped the character of the nation by affirming a white identity through attempted removal of any foreign presence and an emphasis on bolstering the native population of Australia. Although these policies served to direct the nation through this pivotal and formational time of their history, they would prove insufficient and misguided as a lasting paradigm for future generations. However, these matters would have to sidelined, as the focus shifted to the all-encompassing problem of a Great War in Europe…

The Silence of Shannon

For the few, proud blog-readers who may remain; my apologies. I am sorry that it has been so long since I last updated this blog, but I have spent the greater part of the last week in the abyss of research and paper-writing. Next on the agenda: break. So it will be probably another two weeks before you hear from me. But, at least when I come back, I should finally have something interesting to say again (at least I hope...). Cheers, mates!

Bwah!!!

Sharon reads my blog!!!! And I, I am an abuser of friends... :-( I will write to her someday!

Right into the Dandedongs

This weekend we were kind of casting about for things to do, since this is one of the only weekends that we don’t have excursions planned for our Engaging Australian Culture class, so we had a lot of spare time (comparatively) and not a whole lot going on. Well, someone from the other flat suggested that we head out to Dandendong National Park, that we can get to with our met passes, but is remote enough (about 2 hours by train) that we still feel like we’re doing something cool and exciting. So we set out bright and early Sunday morning (comparatively, like 10:30) and caught a few trains till we ended up at Upper Fern Tree Gully Station, only a short walk away from our next adventure. I must confess that the better that I know the land of my new, temporary home, the more I love it. The forests that we visited were amazing. As the train made its way out into “the country” we could see the rolling hills on the horizon, carpeted with trees like astroturf run amok. I certainly was not prepared for what remarkable scenery we were about to see. At the head of the trail, there were groves of tall, stately eucalyptus trees, stretching back like ghostly pillars as far as I could see and creating a tall, leafy canopy over head. I remember reading in one of our exploration accounts for Oz Lit that the explorer narrating found the eucalyptus trees to be rather distasteful, thinking that their leaves were a drab, ugly olive green. I find that I must heartily disagree with this assessment. I never saw so many shades of green as I did in the bright bushy heads of the gum trees (don’t get lost, still talking about eucalyptus here). And not just greens, but ambers and reds, which tinged the sides of the leaves and added to the rainbow of the forest.

As we went further, the scenery on either side of the path became even more breathtaking. In addition to the mammoth gum trees, there were also monolithic ferns of a size that boggles my puny North American imagination. At least 6 feet in height and four feet in circumference, these giants looked as though they had been beamed in from a primordial time period, as attested to by layers and layers of dead fronds that drooped to skirt the trunks of the trees as their life span had ended, making something that seemed like a grass hut around the bottom. Then, in stark contrast to the old life of the fern, in the very center of the verdant ring on the top, the new shoots sprang out in architectural glory. They looked like a natural version of the top of a bishop’s crook, curling in on itself over and over in complex spirals of the life-yet-to-be. So each fern is reflecting its whole life span in its layers of foliage.

Then as we hiked up the fairly steep trail (at least I thought it was steep, which my hips verified in whining tones all the next day) we stumbled upon and old, old hollowed out tree, coated in lime green moss and vacant, for the moment, at least. Exploring inside, we find every child’s dream woodland playhouse, the haunt of elves and fairies, with shafts of sunlight streaming in the bounce off the ripples of the little stream that ran through it. The tiny, tender fingers of new roots were emerging from a branch that slanted through to break up the space looked as fragile and the little mushrooms that were carving out a spot in the wall of the old, sagacious tree.

Not only this, but the variety and the novelty of bird life that we saw were also remarkable. We saw these amazing birds that were bright blue and red and others of the same size and shape that were bright green and yellow. They were fairly small and would race through the canopy like Luke Skywalker getting chased around the Death Star by those other guys, making a chirpy, chattering noise. Then, of course, there were the usual suspects. The sulfur crested cockatoos that would streak through the brush screaming angrily and the kookaburras with their cheeky smiles and teasing laughter.

Ummm…I can’t think of how else to end this post, so hey, if you ever happen to go to Oz, this is one of the places you should visit. Word.

FEAST

Tonight we were invited to a TONGAN FEAST, an invitation we were loath to decline and so, in due time, at five o’clock this evening, we showed up at Box Forest Wesleyan Church, all apprehensive as to what we might find. I think actually, I was fairly well prepared mentally for the experience; when I thought about it before we actually showed up I was like, hey, they’ll probably be a lot of people of a different race than I am and a lot of stuff will happen that I don’t understand, and I’ll probably be in the minority as a white person and the whole situation will probably be uncomfortable. All of this was running through my mind as we walked up to the church, but it was not actually making me feel apprehensive, since I’ve been in this situation quite a few times before, and so I figured I would probably be able to survive fairly well. Well, I think perhaps the most uncomfortable thing was the ice breakers that they subjected us to, but again, I think those were more about the dread after seeing them on the program than any actual trauma caused by the ice breakers themselves, since all we had to do was wander around looking for people from the same part of Melbourne as we are, and then do the same with people of the same birth month. Also, another situation arose which was probably rather embarrassing, though fortunately not for me. Apparently (and I don’t know if this is typical of all Tongan services or all Australian services at small churches, or was only for this one event this one time) every group that is represented there is supposed to come with an “item,” either a skit or a song or a dance or some entertaining little thing to present to the rest of the people. Well, apparently none of us knew that before hand, so we were left quite item-less and in a bit of a panic of what to do. Then finally Pete, the guy who was responsible for inviting us said, “Don’t worry guys, I’ve got an idea” but then wouldn’t tell us what the idea was. Well, when it came around to our turn, he brought us all up to the front and had us introduce ourselves. Then he asked the audience to pick out three of us to do a little activity. Well, earlier in the evening, one of the groups had done a song with Tongan-style dance actions that went along with it. These hapless three were abandoned on the stage, left to perform the dance/actions from memory with no assistance from anyone. That was quite an amusing thing to watch, since they didn’t seem to remember very much.

The rest of the performers, on the other hand, did quite an excellent job. There were a couple of different groups that did dance items, which were really interesting to watch. The last one that was presented was the most interesting to me, since that was the most traditional. It seemed like the dance combined something akin to hula dancing with a relative of hip hop. The men’s dancing part was much more energetic than the female counterpart, which seems to be in keeping with other Pacific Island dancing that I have seen, where dancing is predominantly a male phenomenon, as part of the warrior culture. It was really neat to see how, in the dancing as well as in some singing, which incorporated the Tongan language, these people are preserving their culture and incorporating it with their Christian faith. One of the most puzzling cultural encounters I have ever had actually took place tonight. We were watching a group sing a choral piece, when an older woman in a long black overcoat just walked right out into the front and walked up to one of the members of the choir, where I thought I saw her tucking something into her shirt. After she left, I continued scrutinizing, incredulous. “I think that woman just put money down her shirt,” I said to Katie who was sitting next to me. We were both pretty bamboozled, but then during a later dance number, it happened again, this time unmistakably so. What was this all about? Well, finally for the last item, the woman who was serving as a director of ceremonies mentioned that although it may seem embarrassing to us, it is a Tongan custom to show appreciation by bringing some money up and “putting it on them” (a nondescript way of putting it, if ever I heard it). So for this last number, about 10 different adults came up to different dancers and either put money in their shirt or laid it on the floor at their feet. I am glad they clarified this to us, or who know what I would have gone away thinking.

I think, however, the best part of the night was after all the entertainment was over, and we got to sit with some of the girl who were a few years younger than us and talk. They asked us about our classes, what “college” was like in America (here the word refers to high school), if we’d ever met any famous people (who they apparently thought could be found wandering the streets in America) and what driving and drinking laws are like in America. And we asked them what the rules at home were like, what kind of school they went to, what church services were like, the significance of 21st birthdays and what it was like to live as a third culture kid (without actually using the phrase, of course). This was such a neat time of fellowship and mutual learning. I may go back some time for their church service…

Dual Personalities

Well, now in my continuing discourse on Australian life and culture, I have chosen to focus this day's entry on the concept of the Outback. What's really kind of ironic about it, right off the bat is that while it is considered iconic of the essence of Australia, only about 1% of the Australian population actually lives in the Outback. I think in actuality, while it is regarded as a place of adventure, of freedom and untamable, immutable wildness, it is also regarded with fear and suspicion by many of the residents of this fair land. We have been discussing the roots of this fear in Oz Lit, and they go back to first contact with this land. So many of the first explorations ended up with the participants dead or defeated, just from trying to cross the land. They found it dry, inhosopitable, confounding and deceptive. Incidents like floods that come without rain and ground that looks firm but is actually bottomless mud are not exactly the makings of a great first impression. That is the origin of the development of the Outback, "Stay away from the interior!" Faces towards the safety of the coast, many feel like they can't forget the presence of this inhospitable monster which is always at their backs, always lurking somewhere behind them, shrouded in it's mystery. This is so much in the Australian conciousness that you can even find references to "the dead heart of Australia." In many ways, the quiet country setting is regarded as far more dangerous than the violence and fears of terrorism in the cities, somewhat the opposite of many American mentalities. And yet...At the same time, Australians do take immense pride in their land, even in the very danger of it. Many Australians are quick to brag about the dangers of their land, the great variety and creativity that goes into the sheer numbers of things that can kill you here. But more than that, those that do live in the Outback seem to be inextricably connected to it. The aborigines have developed the concept of being "sung to by the land" and once you are sung to by the land, you can never forget it or leave it. It becomes a part of you forever. And there is the iconic nature of the land, that they can love it in spite of, or perhaps because of its wildness, its transcendence, its immutable, frowning indifference to human meddling. Pehaps this vision of the land is somewhat romanticized, but you could never take the Outback out of Australia, not for the country dwellers or city dwellers. So now, the question that I shall leave you with, and shall continue to ponder is, where is the heart of Australia?

Okay, enough on the Antipodes already!

Well, the last few days have been fairly uneventful, so although I have very little to say, I still feel impelled to write to somehow assist me in keeping my writerly skills intact (although I feel as though the nature of this blog has become more of a note-taking/observation space, and no place for the creation of art at all and yet, I press onward!) I have come to think a little more about what I said a few blogs ago about the strangeness of this place. And I think as far as what I have seen so far, the strangeness is more in the idea of Australia, and this distance of Australia from anything familiar, than anything truly bizarre about the place. So really, the antipodes has become just a concept in thinking about the place, not an experience that you go through in the actual place itself. But then...but then. There is this thing that Profe was telling us while we were studying in Mexico, and that is how difficult it is to cross cultures between two modern ones because on the surface they appear to be so similar, and yet, when you dig beneath the surface, there can be all kinds of differences. I think that is the true experience of Australia. It sounds so foreign that when you get here, you are surprised by how similar everything seems, and then when you start to know its quirks a little better, you realize how strange some things really are. And that is the true spirit of antipodes I think, that it sneaks up on you, catches you by surprise.
One other item of note, and then I will close out this rather pitiful entry...I was reflecting with Thryn last night on some of the things I had tried to blog about a few weeks ago when I was still in Omaha, about what a great group of friends I had in high school and how nostalgic I was for things to go back to the way they had been And she said something of what an amazing miracle that was, what a redeeming thing that God had put into my life. It is an amazing fact that even though I had all of this bad stuff going on in my life, I can still look back with nostalgia on that time because I had such an amazing bunch of people to laugh with me and keep me going. That really was my saving grace in those awful times. And it was like she was saying something that I had understood all along, but had never really put all the pieces together like that, so I really appreciated it. It really shows how God was working and sustaining me, even in those dark times.
So, those are my pithy thoughts for the day. Hopefully something remarkable will happen soon so that I can blog about that too...

Chicken Fried Rice

Today, there is not much of consequence to report. Yesterday was a lazy kind of day, yet wonderful too in its own way. I went to church in the morning at the Box Forest Wesleyan Church right next door, which was a fairly interesting experience. The thing I was first surprised by, when I went into the church, was how old the congregation was. Out of a room of about thirty people, only about 5 of them were under the age of sixty. It would seem strange to me to pastor a congregation of such unilateral makeup. The Sunday that we visited, a lot of emphasis was put on the need for enthusiasm in worship, how important it is to get excited about God. The pastor did a very funny drama about a person who thought that all you had to do for church was show up, and not engage. What made it so amusing is the way he played the character as an unashamedly loud, obnoxious, stubborn kind of person, humorously unwilling to listen to reason or connect the dots. The other interesting aspect was that the sermon was not preached by Pastor Ian, but by a woman. I’m not quite sure who she was, if she was a member of the congregation or someone with a more specific office. But I was intrigued by the fact that they would allow someone besides the pastor to give the sermon, and by the fact that it was a woman. Sunday night was great. Me and three other girls in our house conspired to cook ourselves some chicken fried rice for dinner. It was pretty funny because they (with the exception of Thryn) didn’t really know how to cook, and so they ended up asking me about everything and deciding that I was going to teach them this semester, so that by the time they got home, they would know how to cook. I told them they would have to call me Sensai. But we had such a great time cooking together and then eating together, with lots of joking around and poking fun at each other. We ended up all cleaning up the kitchen while singing “The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything” at the top of our lungs. This is the reason that I came to Australia, to have fun ALL THE TIME, but more than that, to build these new relationships and stretch beyond my comfort zone socially. The End.

(P.S.--Kathryn has brought it to my attention that the fact that none of my entries are broken by paragraph indentions is somewhat annoying. Well, in case you likewise are irritated by this, I would like to mention that I can't put indentions into this, if I indent in the posting it doesn't show up on the blog. Sorry. (Although, since as we've established, Kathryn is the only one who reads this blog, I guess it doesn't matter all that much...))

Take me out to the ballgame?

Well, I was very excited, I think, to attend my first footy game down here in Oz (for those of you unschooled in the higher forms of athletics, “footy” is the abbreviated version of Australian Rules Football, a game that is kind of a conglomeration of American football and soccer, with elements of basketball and volleyball thrown in. In Oz, sports, like the land itself, are something of a conglomeration.) The movie that we watched in Australian History really got me thinking about the place of sports here. It seems like in a land devoted to leisure, of course sports would come to have a kind of pseudo-religious context. And so it would seem; one of the sports commentators was noting how popular athletes are seen as something like young godlings down here, emulated by children and adults alike, and followed devotedly by their acolytes. He recounted how, when he was young, his dad would come into the room in the morning and throw some kind of ball at his head. He had to wake up instantly and identify what kind of ball it was that had been thrown, whether it was a cricket ball or a football or a soccer ball or so on. If he got it right, he dad would bring him into the kitchen and fix him up a nice big breakfast, all glowing with pride, and it would be a good morning. If he got it wrong, however, his dad would drag him out of bed and into the backyard and he’d have to do drills and practice his athletic skills, regardless of the weather. “But,” he said, “it was worth it, just to see the look on my dad’s face when I got it right.” (So immediately, of course, I’m thinking of how this paradigm of fatherhood affects how Christianity is perceived down here and how that does/should affect the way that the gospel is presented as well-i.e. a Father who is approving regardless of performance-but again, that’s another entry.) So, knowing the elevated position that athletics have come to have here, I was curious to see this enacted in an actual sporting event. Well, the first thing I noticed was how different being downtown on a “game day” was from being there at any other time. Throngs of people filled the street, the first actual crowds I’ve seen since coming, most of them sporting either the red and white of the Sydney Swans, or the brown and gold of the Hawthorne Hawks. But, as far as the actual game went, I was disappointed at the level of enthusiasm that was displayed most of the time. Sure, there were sections of the stadium that would go quite crazy when their team scored a goal, but overall it seemed to be just as blasé as any American sporting event that I’ve gone to. Towards the end, however, I was able to observe some funny things. First of all, there was a guy seated a few rows behind us, and about midway through the 3rd quarter, he started yelling out “SYDDDDDD-NEEEEEEEEY! SYDDDDD-NEEEEEEY!” to which another fan in the Hawks section over to our right just yelled “SHUT UP!” in reply. Well, the bloke a few rows up didn’t shut up, and the Hawks fan finally just got so frustrated that he too started screaming, “Yeah okay, go Hawks, we’re cool now aren’t we, yeah, go Hawks, woo hoo,” in a very mocking imitation of the other fan’s enthusiasm. Well, at length this got them both to shut up and the game continued. As we got into the fourth quarter however, the fan’s loyalties seemed to intensify, especially the Hawks’ fans. Their team was trailing significantly (about half as many points as the other team) and so, they began to be very keen-eyed for anything even resembling fowl play. Now, at the refs calls, they began to boo vociferously, and to shout negative remarks about the other team. Well, the game finally ended with the Hawks trailing significantly, which led to some very bruised feeling among the fans, which in turn resulted in some additional shouting matches out in the parking lot.
It was very difficult for me to get so enthused, however. First of all, because the match was so uneven, there was very little tension about who was going to win, which kind of took a lot of the fun out of it. Also, there was the small fact that the sun was shining directly into our eyes the entire game, and so even to see the field we had to shield our eyes, which got kind of tiresome as our arms grew numb from holding that position so long. Then also, there was the fact that the field was so very large, so that it was hard to have a good view, since much of the action seemed to take place on the opposite side of the field. So, actually I think if I could have actually seen what was going on, I would have enjoyed the game a lot more. But at any rate, it was an interesting experience (one of our profs pointed out last week just how nondescript of a word that is, so true, but ha, I will leave you with no other words in parting…)

Gellibrand Hill and etc.

Today we had our first outing of the trip, up to the park and Gellibrand Hill for a view of Melbourne, and also to try and imagine what the land was like when the explorers first “discovered” it. It was quite a fine afternoon all in all. The weather turned out to be gorgeous and we actually had our first chance to see some kangaroos. I was really surprised by how large they were, they stood at least as tall as one of us, or perhaps taller. The park itself was interesting. (Dr. King told us that the hill had probably been formed by a volcanic outcropping, and as a geologist, I can confirm his hypothesis. The boulders were usually composed of a pink or white kind of granite, with some longer, flatter deposits of what may have been basalt. Some of the granite also seems to have gotten some air into it during formation, because of the little pockets or holes that exist in it’s surface, though I’m not sure how that would have happened, since it must have formed beneath the crust. At any rate…) I think if this park area was actually what Australia used to be like, much of what has been said about it has been rather unfair. I have heard so much of what a barren and desolate place it is, and while it’s true that it’s no tidy English pastoral landscape, it’s certainly nothing to sneeze at. The plains of tall grass remind me of Nebraska, but the branching jigsaw of the eucalyptus trees are certainly unique to this place. I can understand why the explorers would have found the land an alien place. It’s so open and windswept and some things do seem kind of off. Like the kangaroos, for example, they seem to be a strange combination of deer and manatees and jackrabbits and I don’t even know of anything else that has a tail like that. And they have an image of just being a cute and friendly little animal, but out in the wild they can be savage and strong fighters that could rip you apart, and then people think of them as a nuisance and hunt them like deer. It’s things like that, where you just don’t get what you’re expecting, that make this place seem so foreign and alien.

Polemic

So, today Thryn and I had what was probably our first rather unpleasant interaction with an Australian that we’ve had since coming here. We were at the bus stop, waiting for the 513 bus to get back to Kingsley (we should have been waiting for the 527, but that’s another part of the story) and I see a woman out of the corner of my eye walking behind me. She looks to be about 40 years old and has dark, thick hair that is down to her shoulders, and darker skin that kind of sags off of her cheeks. She walks around behind Thryn as well, and almost in passing, start talking to her. By the time I turn to face them, she has circled around to stand in front of her, and Thryn is asking her to repeat herself. “What?” she says. “What? Like you don’t know what I’m talking about,” the woman replies, “Don’t act stupid with me, I know what you’re up too, don’t play dumb with me.” She has a low, heavy voice that dripped with disgust. There seems to be nothing to do, so Thryn and I both set our faces like cement, staring without expression at the traffic that is zipping by. “Stupid badgers” the woman says, finally turning to leave, tossing back a few more phrases along the same lines as she goes.
The bus finally comes, and I’m desperately hoping that she will not be joining us on it. At first I am hopeful, because she seems to be making no move to board. But after we are already seated, she shuffles on and shows her card to the driver. As she shuffles her way up the aisle past me, she seems to purposely bump into my shoulders, dropping another “Stupid badgers” to keep us company on the bus ride. Thryn and I have only our frozen faces for defense, but inside I feel mortified, both at somehow having earned this woman’s disdain for no reason that I could ascertain and at what the other passengers must think of us and of this interaction.
It took us until the bus reached the end of the line at Gowrie station to realize that we were lost. I mustered up my courage, and marched up to the grate that kept the driver safe from his passengers. “We’re looking for South St,” I said, trying to sort out where we had gone wrong. But just as we started to talk with the driver, the woman was behind us again, on her way off the bus. “Don’t even listen to them, they don’t even know where they’re going,” she called out to the driver. “Get out of here,” she told us, “go do your business somewhere else. Stupid prostitutes,” she muttered, finally walking away towards the station. I worried suddenly that the bus driver might believe these half-coherent allegations she was making, perhaps kick us off the bus and refuse to help us. But it was painfully obvious that what she said was untrue, both Thryn and I were bundled all the way up to our chins; the way we were dressing could hardly be called provocative. Apparently the driver concurred, because everyone else seemed to just ignore her as well.
But then, a wonderful thing that happened. The bus driver was asking us questions, trying to figure out where we wanted to get to. He didn’t know where South Street was, but then the lady in the seat across the aisle called out some advice. An older man who seemed to know the area well also had some directions to offer. A crowd of people that I was acutely aware that we were inconveniencing had gathered; by blocking the aisle with our queries we made is so that no one could get either on or off. But the other passengers didn’t seem at all surprised or annoyed, and instead did their best to assist the driver with giving us directions. We couldn’t understand what was said in all that jumble, but the bus driver told us, “Just sit back down for awhile, ladies, we’ll get you where you need to go.” As we neared our stop, the woman across the aisle told us, “Just get off here and in about two blocks go right and you’ll be on South Street. You can’t miss it.” We got off the bus with copious thanks to those that had helped us and continued to make our way back home, having, in one night, been acquainted with both the best and the worst of Australian people.

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.

First Batch of Travel-Writing Notes, from Greater Nowheres

Well, at this point, I thought it would probably be beneficial for me to collect some thoughts on the reading I’ve been doing for my IS up to this point and to reflect on said reading for a bit. First of all, what is it that makes this book “travel writing” and not some other form of writing. Well, first of all the authors are in a place that is not their own place of residence, or even very familiar to them. That strangeness or unfamiliarity forms one of the fundamental tensions in the book. All along the way, the authors have to comport themselves as learners, those who are not particularly comfortable or successful in the setting they find themselves in. It is vital that the authors let us see their blunders, their weaknesses, because that is one of the reasons that this book is something that we can identify with the experience of traveling, that sense of being off-balance. Secondly, one of the main elements in the book is the authors’ experiences of meeting and talking too people. Basically, they seem to be very well connected in Oz, in terms of meeting people that send them on to meet other people and so forth. I don’t know how they manage, striking up conversations and knowing what to say to all types of people, to battered little bush-wives to burly fishermen and croc hunters. This, I think is a large part of what makes their book interesting, and that is something that worries me, because I always have such a hard time talking to people that I don’t already know. But honestly, so much of the content of the book is focused on the people they meet as they travel, so apparently this is a skill I may have to cultivate in order to become a decent travel writer. Another thing which kind of surprised me in reading this book was the authors’ use of past experience in the narrative where appropriate. When I think about it, it makes perfect sense that this would be an acceptable practice, especially because it helps the reader to understand why a particular incident is especially meaningful to the author, as well as humanize the author so they are actually seen to have a past, and not just be a talking head about random things in the Outback. But even so, I just never would have considered including things like that without having read it. I think the candidness of the authors’, as was previously alluded to, is one of the things that makes this book engaging and fluid in its presentation. But at the same time, it is important to note how much of the actual experience is left out of the narrative. It must be very important in travel writing to be selective, because there is just such a high volume of stuff that happens that you simply can’t put it all into a form that people will want to read it (speaking of forms, I’ve been brainstorming different kinds that I could work with, besides just this kind of straight-forward narrative one that I’ve been reading). So, that would be just about all the advice I’ve gleaned from Finklestein and London for the moment.

The best of times, and the worst of times

Well, in all fairness I think it is time to list the few things that are starting to really get on my nerves. First of all, I had no idea how cold it was going to feel while I was here. Dr. King told us that it would probably run in the 50's and 60's for the first month or so. I had no idea how cold that was going to feel, after 4 months of 100 degree or higher weather in Texas. Accordingly, most of my packing space was spent on fall clothing, so I have very little in the way of really warm clothes, and our house only has one small heater, and basically I feel perpetually frozen. This is starting to grate on my nerves. Secondly, I don't know if this is one of the byproducts of jetlag, or just the frigid temperatures, but I have not been sleeping very well at night. I think the biggest problem is that my bed is very, very squeaky, like every time I move, it creaks. Unfortunately, there is enough noise produced that it also wakes up Thryn, so she's not very pleased about that either. Furthermore, today when I went to take a shower, it ran out of hot water utterly and I ended up finishing in ice cold water. That is not a happy way to start the morning. Ummm...so basically, since all my problems have something to do with the cold, I anticipate that things can only get better from this point in the semester. I know this is a terribly whiny entry, but I thought just for the sake of fairness and in order to give an accurate picture of my impressions, I needed to provide a balanced view.

Now, with that being said, I was just reflecting on what an absolutely luxurious life I have here. So far, we have had no classes. Although that will change, when classes start, they will be held only three days out of the week. From what I understand, the workload in Oz will be significantly less than it was in Houghton. So far, all I have had to do is bum around the city, come home and write e-mails and post in my blog, and sit in front of our heater wrapped in a blanket reading one of my travel books for my independent study. Ahhhh...this is the life! And for some reason, this much leisure does not seem to bother me as much as it did all last summer when I was back at home. I am actually able to enjoy leisure time. Hooray! So this is the reason I must bring myself back to earth with reminders of frigid showers and creaky beds, especially when I am in the throes of delight over something as simple as hearing garbage collectors called garbos. Furthermore, Steve, the maintenance guy, just dropped a loud clangy piece of a dryer in the hallway and called it a "little rascal." This makes me smile. That's all the news from down under for today. I am going to read. :-)

More first impressions

Today was our first opportunity to really get to see any of Melbourne other than the little suburban area around the college where we live. It was quite an interesting experience. I’ve found that, quite unwittingly, I have come to have a great many expectations of what the city would look like and the kind of atmosphere it would have. Perhaps not very surprisingly, very few of those expectations were met. One of the first things that I was not expecting was how poor the neighborhoods out here look. It was so strange to ride the train through the different neighborhoods because the houses were a lot smaller than I expected them to be, the yards were not as well kept, factories were right in the middle of subdivisions, and people had sheds made out of rusty corrugated tin in their backyards. I guess one of the reasons I was so taken aback at the appearance of the neighborhoods is that from everything I have heard, Melbourne is a world capital of leisure, and leisure seems to me to require at least some degree of affluence. I didn’t see a lot of things that were conducive to a leisurely lifestyle either, like basketball or tennis courts, parks or swimming pools. I will have to do some more investigation to follow up with this hypothesis, but I was doing some reading that suggested that houses are not seen as the main indicator of a family’s status in Australia. If this is true, than I wonder what are the indicator’s of a person or family’s status? One of the other things that surprised me was the sudden switch and the complete difference between the outlaying areas and the city. The city really was very metropolitan and seemed to be on the cutting edge of fashion and culture, as evidenced by the fact that almost every store that we passed seemed to be selling expensive name-brand clothing. But the shift from suburbs to downtown seemed to happen almost instantly, right after we crossed the river. Also interesting is that the entire city seemed to be almost completely devoid of crowds, except for perhaps the Victoria markets. One can walk down the sidewalks in the busiest part of town and never use one’s elbows to navigate. The areas around Kingsley were basically deserted when we were coming home at four in the afternoon. I don’t know if it’s because this is supposed to be the winter season or because of the time of day we were out or why exactly that was the way it was.

One of the big new concerns that I’ve developed however, is that I will spend the entire trip comparing everything to similar experiences in London, and that everything will be found lacking. So far, I have enjoyed my time here, short as it’s been, but I’ve also drawn so many parallels between this trip and the London experience. I want this experience to be able to stand on it’s own, since really the experiences are completely different and can’t be held up next to each other for the sake of discerning which is “better.” I hope that this will go away in time, as I get to know Melbourne on it’s own terms and have some other basis of experience besides prior travels. But I have got to keep this issue in check, because I don’t really know of anything that can spoil an experience so well as discontent.

Dude, where's my country?

I just used that as the subject line on an e-mail that I sent someone, and I liked it so much I thought that I'd recycle it. I have been in Australia for 11 hours now. I still can't seem to get it into my head what a vast shift I have made. I'm in Australia. Australia is now where I currently am. You know, I think at least part of the cognitive dissonance is that when I was packing up and getting ready to head out, Australia seemed like such a distant and exotic location, in many ways so much farther away than London was. But now that I'm here, it seems like, on the surface at least, things are not so bewilderingly strange as I had expected them to be. I think my biggest promblem (no offense, Aussies!) is that I keep feeling like I am back in London. A lot of things are similar to what I remember of my time there. Milo, Cadbury chocolate, calling a shopping cart a trolley, using random terms of endearment with strangers. It all seems so familiar. But that could very well be a product of the fact that I am "jet-lagged" (said with derision because I don't feel sleepy at all) and because I have only seen the tiniest chunk of my new residence. I was quite afraid before coming, but I think that was the prospect of wonky logistics more than anything. Now I really find this place rather enchanting (hello, honeymoon stage!). The smell of wet eucalyptus in the rain (reminding me very much of my early years in California). The wonderful strip mall with the wonderful greengrocer who sells the wonderful produce (I am such a sucker for good produce). Our wonderful, wonderful house, which is so cute and comfortable and already seems homey. Okay, maybe it's true, this has got to be the jet-lag talking, because it is rare that I am so positive about anything. Other first impressions: this place is totally multicultural, which excites me, but in a way the very fact that I find it exciting show me what a novice I am and how untrained at dealing with people of other cultures. Stupid, stupid white girl from West Omaha. The houses here, at least in our neighborhood, actually seem kind of like a shabbier version of suburbia. They are also a lot more spread out than the houses were in England. The people, at least the ones I've met so far, seem to be warmer and friendlier than a lot of Americans I have known, they are all so curious when they find out that we're from the US, they want to know which state and what it's like there. And they don't seem to be intimidated by the fact that we're strangers. But honestly, most of my impressions now are very likely to be broad generalizations based on very little evidence, because I am still so new to this place. So I think I will stop generalizing now, and go have some toast and a cuppa.

Things that go bump in the night

Last night I had my first Australia-related nightmare. I was up at Houghton, in class with my friends and we were discussing a book or something. I made some really intelligent comment (hmph) right before class was ending. Then, as everyone was getting up to leave, I looked over and saw Thryn sitting in class with me. I was like, "Hey, we're supposed to be going to Australia." And she said, "Yeah, I'm all ready to go, aren't you?" because apparently we had both just come on a visit before we were heading out. But I was like, "Uhhh..." because I'd apparently forgotten all about going out to Australia at all. And I rushed off to call my mom and they told me that I could use the phone in the upstairs of the Luckey Building. And I ran up there and was trying to call her, but I couldn't get ahold of her and so I was stuck, needing to be heading off for the airport without a stitch of luggage. Okay, not exactly the kind where you wake up in a cold sweat, but it is a little nerve-wracking to be so close to the point of leaving and to not be sure that I packed the right clothes or what I might be forgetting and all of that. I'll be grateful just to get on the plane. You know, I think what I've been so afraid of all this time is not actually the semester itself, but just all the logistics of getting there and getting settled in. I just can't wait for this to be over. You know, I've already started thinking ahead to when the program will end. It's like, you have this experience ahead of you and you look forward to it for so long and then you're in it and before you know it, it's over and you're looking back wondering where the time went, feeling like you don't know where your life is going. I hate that part too. It just seems like every experience is too short. At any rate, I think I should try to quit now, to leave a good buffer zone of time in which I try not to think about Oz before I try to go to bed.

Grumpy jerk

I really need to stop posting in this blog late at night. Usually by the time I get to this point of the day I'm tired and my brain is fried and I'm in a pissy mood. Tonight the headache du jour is buying textbooks for Oz. I think I've looked at every copy of every book that I'm trying to buy that was ever printed. I ended up shopping at Amazon, and I'm still not sure that I made the right choice, since the shipping could take up to six weeks. So, basically the course could be over by the time I get my books. Now is the time for nail-biting and frantic prayers that my books will get here (or there rather) in time for me to actually read them for the classes. So, I've decided that everything will be much, much better once I'm actually in Australia. I hate these transitional periods even more than I hate the changes themselves. There's so much stress and ambiguity, I'd rather just be in one place or the other. So now I'm feeling sad and guilty about leaving my family, and not only that but I've lost just about all sense of why I ever wanted to go on this stupid semester thing anyway. So I'm just stuck, and I've been spinning my wheels for the past few days and getting nowhere. Especially as far as packing is concerned. You know, I had one brief shining moment when I actually saw to the end of the packing ordeal, and I realized that it wasn't such a big deal and it would be over fairly soon. That feeling was lost long ago in a haze of should I bring this, and can I spare that and Oh lord, that will never fit. I need to sleep, though I'm so much not a morning person that I won't actually be any more positive till about 11:00 tomorrow, though I usually get up at nine. My brain is a total fritter. Enough with the drama and anticipation already, just put me on the damn plane and let's get this over with already!!!

Scattered thoughts

Hello again, everyone (all three of you). The countdown is quite underway at this point. The only problem is that I don't seem to quite realize it yet. I don't think I'll even be able to realize it until I'm sitting on the plane. But I've been thinking about it a lot more lately, and I think it has helped me to be more positive, you know, imagining what life might be like there. I think also Thryn's absolute positivity ("WE WILL HAVE FUN ALL THE TIME!!!") has also added a much more optomistic spin on the future. I don't know what I would do if she wasn't coming with me; I'd be absolutely petrified. I've been a lot calmer the last few days, but I think that's because I've been getting a lot more done. That always helps to put one's mind at rest. But, hey, I finally got my haircut today!!! I realized that it hasn't been cut since about this time last year. It's very short now, the hairdresser cut off so much hair, that she took a picture of the pile when we were done. I think I set some kind of record. But, for me at least, a new haircut always helps to change my outlook on life. You know, I feel like every time I get a haircut or buy a new piece of clothing I have the chance to reinvent myself, and I always like to make the most of those opportunities. Yeah, so if you're a guy and you're still reading this, you're probably drooling with boredom at this point. Wait, let me jazz this up a bit--EXPLOSION!!! (yes, I deal in only the finest stereotypes, thank you very much) At any rate, I have no idea where I was going with that train of thought, so now, back to the topic (Australia, not hair). Well, I thought that at this point it would be advantageous for me to give out my address, which is as follows:
Shannon Callan
Kingsley College
21 South Street
Glenroy, VIC 3046
It is here that you may reach me with your many letters and adoring fan mail (all...three of you). I also wanted to give some various points upon which I would greatly appreciate any prayers that you can find time to offer. Again, they are as follows:
1.)That there would be cohesion and harmony in our group in Australia, both with the other people in the program and with the other students at the college. That we would be able to form supportive, loving relationships and form a strong support network for each other.
2.) That there would be opportunities and divine appointments for us to talk with Australians and others in order to deeply process the information that we're learning and to get insight into Australian culture and POSTMODERNITY!!!
3.)For stregnth and endurance and enough rest to last through the semester's work, both scholastic and otherwise and still be able to maintain a reasonable work/life balance.
4.)For safety for myself and the rest of the group.
5.)That all in our group would have a truly life-changing and rewarding experience.
Thanks friends, I truly do covet your prayers. (NEWS FLASH---The dog just chased a critter with a long tail (a possum?) up the fence and out of our yard, big news--) At any rate, I hope to be able to write again soon, goodnight!

Grrrrrowl...

Things are not right. It is late. I haven't posted for awhile. I have a vague sense of being off-balance, largely stemming from the worries about things that I have not taken care of yet, may not ever take care of; yes, naturally, it could not be possible to take care of all of these vital "things" in the time which I have allotted to do so, which is why they hound me with nagging little pinpricks on the outskirts of my brain. Then too, I seem to have run into a spat of depression, a place I usually visit after any sort of large life-event like a trip to my city of origin. An ugly place, filled with pet monsters of my own making, a place where everyone seems to hate me for no reason and I'm not so kindly disposed towards anyone myself. A place where my face grows hot with discomfort just from placing the order for the lunchmeat at the grocery store and my sister no longer wishes to carry on certain tuck-in traditions, a clear indicator that she has outgrown any affection for me. A place where I sit in the dark and write musty ramblings to the unforgiving void of cyberspace, in which I begin to feel sure enough of my relative isolation as to be careless with my confidentialities. It is here I can percieve that it is my own voice that tells me the stupid things I keep hearing inside my head, where I know that control is ultimately mine and yet I still can't seem to force the switch to the off position. This is not a cheerful night, as the astute observer will have already gleaned from my tone. I don't know exactly what it is that makes it so, and so it would seem that I have little other choice but to ride it out. I think my feelings about Australia at this point are verging on panic. I don't think I can do this whole thing again, even making it to the plane ride seems like a mini-Odessey. I feel incompetent, incapable and ill-prepared. Will I actually be able to buy my own textbooks (never mind that I have done this successfully already for four semesters straight)? Will I be able to tear myself away from my family? Will I be able to put up with my family until I have occassion to tear myself away? Will I be able to wake up again tomorrow morning, with lungs continuing to breathe and heart continuing to beat until I take on the next task in the long line of demands on my time that consitutes Day 6? Because that is all I can consider right now, breathe in, breathe out and repeat, indefinitely. Honestly, I don't think I could say what it is exactly that I'm so afraid of, it's just Everything, the circumstances which keep collaborating and then swarming out to attack me. Bah. I think I'm gonna go work on that breathing thing some more. (in, out; in, out; in...)

Thoughts with a side of headache

Okay, this is my second and will probably be my last post from Omaha. For those of you with a vested interest in my well-being,
I am actually having a most excellent time here, even though,
as I remembered, there is not a whole lot of stuff to do, and
even less if you are broke as we all seem to be. But at any rate, this trip has been really good especially because for once in my life I am finding myself able to live in the moment, which in
turn helps me to be content and happy with my surroundings.
I don't know how I have managed to do that, which means I don't know how I'll be able to repeat the attitude. As far as
Australia is concerned I am feeling rather nervous and freaked
out, as well as excited. I think I am feeling certain that by
the time I leave, I will not be "ready" to go, whatever "ready" means. Perhaps it is just better for me to be unready, to just plunge in like it's the deep end of a chilly swimming pool.
But, being the control freak that I am, in my perfect world I
would have somehow known some mystical technique of self-preparation and would have completed all of the necessary tasks
far before this point, launching me into personal inner tranquility. One of the things I learned in my cultural
transition class was that things go a lot more smoothly when expectations are set aside. But I feel like I don't know what
to expect, or what to think, or even if I'm coming or going most
of the time. Well, my little self, get comfortable in your confusion. I think it's going to stick around for awhile.

A Brief Jaunt through the Looking Glass

So, as promised, here I am in the big O, still posting on my blog. I am so faithful. This has been quite the surreal trip up to this point, what with the sudden revelation that such a trip would even be possible, the rapid ticket buying and the exceedingly early flight (up at 4 in the AM, thank you very much). Just being here is strange. In some ways, Omaha changes very little from visit to visit, which is a blessing to someone like me, who is resistant to change. But I always come expecting more differences than what I find. I keep looking around for people I might recognize from back in the day, expecting to see people who have aged a good fifteen or twenty years in the one year that I have stayed away. That is not so much the case, and the constancy makes this place very therapeautic. As I said in my last post, I think there will be much benefit in making this trip backwards before I move forward into this next adventure. Most of all, I love being here with my friends. There is such an amazing difference between being with people with whom you have this much history and being with anyone else. There are so many stories, so many of which I had forgotten until I came back here for the reminder. The glorious thing is, not only do I remember them, but I am surrounded by others who could hear the same one-word trigger and we all have a similar flood. Inside jokes, memories, interruptions as we all add pieces to our communal past. The funny thing is, it's not like I've even known these people all my life. I realized that almost all of the stories that we tell are from those four short years of high school. When I think of it, I am already halfway through my four short years of college, and I feel like there are so few stories to tell. I would blame this primarily on the pandemic workaholism that plauges Houghton's campus, (and partly on my really, really crappy memory) but Hope was telling me that somehow, in high school, the stars just aligned and we got some things right. The right mix of people, the right mix of characters on our little stage of Omaha, and funny things would just happen. Why don't we have that anymore? Are we just not weird enough in college? This, again, makes me rather paranoid about my prospects of enjoying adult life. Then also, there was the massive revelation that somehow I was looked at as the one with the "charisma" that put me as the nucleus of our social group(other's words, not mine). Me, charismatic? Yeah right. This definitely deserves some more reflection, since that is not the role that I have held in any social group before or since. Anyway, you want to know what the best part has been, even just over the past couple of days? We get together and we sit in parks, or in living rooms, or on the hood of someone's car, and we just laugh and laugh and laugh.