Muriel and I exchange ideas—mine burgeoning and hers long-solidified—about healthcare, education, war, and travel, issues that, before now, I’ve barely considered. The world, of course, has changed dramatically since 9/11, and I’m of the right age and disposition to start giving this some thought, especially ensconced in a country with a perspective different from America’s.
The current Howard government has sent Australian troops to support the war effort, a development increasingly unpopular with the people. While they are offering this assistance, Australians find themselves (like other nationalities) under increasing scrutiny when they enter the U.S., and this further irks the nation of avid travelers. Headlines abound: ATTENTION, PASSENGERS: QUEUING FOR THE LOO IS FORBIDDEN FOR 14 HOURS, describing the new prohibitions against congregating near the bathroom during the fourteen-hour flight from the United States to Australia, and SECURITY RANKING FOR ALL U.S. TRAVELERS, outlining how all travelers boarding at U.S. airports will be given a score and color that rank their perceived threat to the aircraft.
“One day we’ll all be citizens of the world! No more passports. No more visas,” Muriel declares one tipsy evening. We clink our wineglasses together, pleased to have solved many of the world’s most pressing problems at the kitchen table.
Sometimes Carly meets me at Aki’s after work. Damien, a skinny bartender, sneaks us the cheapest bottle of wine the restaurant sells, and we find some empty seats down at the edge of the wharf, past the slew of seafood restaurants offering high-priced oysters and king prawns.
Carly sighs. “I’m so sick of Sydney.”
“Sick of Sydney?” It seems impossible. To me, Sydney is an Eden. The sun wraps you in its warmth like an old baby blanket. Sure, it’s a baby blanket likely to give you skin cancer, but after twenty-one years on the overcast East Coast, I’m willing to take my chances. The ocean is such a glittering shade of blue that I can’t bear the thought of the murky, freezing Atlantic back home. We’re so close to a handful of beaches that we swim in the ocean almost daily, an insane luxury. The first few times I got pulled under by gargantuan frothy waves, but I’ve learned how to duck below the water when they crash overhead. I swim farther and farther out, where the water grows calmer.
Swimming lessons are compulsory for all schoolchildren here, and sometimes I catch a glimpse of enthusiastic kids in matching red swimsuits out for their ocean recess. Playing dodgeball in the dead grass or sliding down a greasy fireman’s pole set up in the middle of an uninspired concrete playground, both activities I cherished in elementary school, seem a bit depressing when viewed through Australian sunnies. I’m settling in nicely to Sydney life. My normally pale white skin has reached back to what must be some long-lost Mediterranean roots and darkened admirably. My nose has broken out in freckles, something it hasn’t done since the carefree summer vacations I spent at Club Med with my parents when I was a little kid. How could Carly possibly be sick of Sydney, a place I feel like staying forever.
“I need to go somewhere new,” she says.
If my own restlessness is a dull itch I can’t quite scratch, Carly’s is a gaping, bloody wound that refuses to heal. No matter how she puts pressure on it, in Bangkok or Marrakech or Prague, within a few days of her return to Sydney, it breaks wide open, the monotony of her native land gushing forth.
Carly has been home for a few months when I turn up in Sydney. She hasn’t saved up enough money for another trip, but she’s aching to hit the road. In the meantime, her reentry into Australian life has been bumpy. She’s addicted to the rush of being a foreigner: new cities, new people, new food, new languages. Australia marks a return to the predictable—and a place where she doesn’t quite fit anymore.
Carly has known for a long time that Sydney is not her place in the world, just as I have always suspected Syracuse, New York, isn’t mine. The geographies of our childhoods don’t quite suit either of us, something we have in common. But she’s more displaced than usual after her travels. Everything here is the same, or so it seems to her, while she is definitely different after her journey. Her friends can’t relate to her experiences abroad because they haven’t traveled yet, so she’s greeted by sharp loneliness back in Sydney.
“You’re kind of the only person who gets me,” she says.
I am in that same place, where my ideas and experiences and desires are expanding. I’m in that traveler’s space with her.
Carly longs to be back in the world of backpackers, bohemians whose values differ from those of the typical middle-class Northern Beaches Australian girl. She has never been compelled by the traditional trajectory of a short stint abroad, then back to Australia for the beach lifestyle: relaxed, comfortable, and predictable. She knows that her gap year was only the tip of the travel iceberg for her, and she’s desperate for more adventure. Her mates are living a life of health, sun, and the day-to-day, which is all well and good, but Carly wants more of a challenge. Her friends are content in this environment, but she gained a more global perspective from meeting all sorts of travelers abroad. She misses talking world politics and philosophy. And she has become quite a minimalist, so it’s hard to refocus on material desires. Although Carly would always have a shared history with them, she was out of sync with her childhood friends, and with Australia.
Other than traveling, Carly has no specific image of her future and is okay with that, whereas I’m still struggling.
“I don’t want to be a waitress,” I tell her as she pours me another glass of Shiraz.
“You’re not a waitress. You’re just waiting tables.”
“Aren’t they the same thing?”
“Definitely not. It’s just an easy way to make some cash,” Carly says. “It’s a long road, mate.”
A long road. What’s the long road? Is it traveling around Sydney? Or is it returning home? Is the long road the rest of my life?
When I was in my early teens, my viola teacher, Ms. Sasson, had an older student, a doctor my parents’ age. His lesson preceded mine, so when I arrived early, I made myself at home on the couch and listened in. Inside the closed doors, it sounded just like any other lesson, except that he called my teacher by her first name, something I would never dream of doing. But when he emerged in his plaid collared shirts, I was always a little sad to see him. He was a friendly, distinguished-looking man, but definitely old. Secretly, I thought taking lessons alongside all these young, ambitious kids was depressing. It was obviously far too late for him to have a music career, and it didn’t ever occur to me that this wasn’t his goal. Back then I was smug in the knowledge of my own true purpose. That saving lives might be his purpose—or worse, that one might have no purpose at all, that all we have is the present moment and what we make of it—was unimaginable.
And so you see our twin problems. I could not get a fix on any one thing because I was always stressing about what I was truly meant to do and be, especially after giving up music. Carly could not stay put because she was constantly chasing happiness, searching for it in every foreign nook and cranny. My purpose and her satisfaction were equally illusive things, both of us so desperately trying to figure out our places in the world. And we were both restless, no doubt wanderers at heart—travelers.
We’re bouncy drunk when we leave the restaurant a few hours later. The sun is setting, and by the time we reach the Domain, it’s nearly dark. Stumbling, singing old show tunes, we tramp through the green. I’m behind Carly, following her to the other side of the city to catch our bus. Something drops in the grass. I bend down and scoop up her scuffed leather wallet. One step later, I find her sunglasses. Her purse must have ripped open, because she is shedding belongings like bread crumbs: lip balm, hair tie, ticket stub, cell phone. When I finally catch up, my hands are full of her things.
“Huh!” she says, delighted. “Where did you find all that?”
We stuff all of it inside my bag, her broken purse, too, and keep on walking.
[9]
Our heroine learns much
about the so-called Down Under and the people who reside therein. She considers the nature of families and homes, dingoes and the British. Resolves to avoid encounters with magpies at all costs.
My arrival in Sydney provides the perfect excuse for Carly to perform a favorite role of hers—that of all-knowing guide. If she herself can’t travel again quite yet, at least she can witness Sydney through the wide eyes of someone seeing it for the first time.
We hit all the typical tourist sites. There’s the Aquarium, a low, sprawling structure at the edge of lively Darling Harbour. The Aquarium is currently capitalizing on the success of Finding Nemo, an animated film about a young clownfish’s adventures away from home. A massive tank houses numerous orange-and-white-striped Nemos flapping in the dull water, while all around me little kids and their parents, each more original than the last, shout, “I found Nemo!” Okay, okay, I shout it, too. That movie really brings those darn fish to life, plus I totally get the storyline, you know? Carly rolls her eyes and tells me I’m blinding the fish with my flash. I snap shots of Nemos 1, 2, and 3 as they snake along the edge of the tank, up to the very top and then, after realizing there is nowhere else to go, back along the sides.
We check out the Hyde Park Barracks Museum, up on Macquarie Street, named after Lachlan Macquarie, an early governor of New South Wales. The museum has transformed itself several times during its life. Some of the first convicts, mainly from Ireland, were housed here between 1819 and 1848. The men, transported far from home for both petty and significant crimes, faced the involuntary task of fashioning the new city.
We visit the Opera House, which is most spectacular from a good distance. Up close, you can discern each individual corrugated tile, and the overall effect is lost, whereas from farther away, the layered roof shells undulate like waves. One day Carly’s friend Simon, a Qantas pilot, takes us for a flight over the harbor. From that high up, the Opera House reposes like a queen amid her sailboat subjects. We stare down at determined tourists inching up the sides of the Harbour Bridge.
One of the best spots in Sydney is the Royal Botanical Gardens, a large expanse of blossoming land abutting the Domain, located between Macquarie Street and Woolloomooloo Wharf. It brims with sublime flowers whose names I’ve all forgotten. It is also home to a good number of sulfur-crested cockatoos, my absolute favorite Australian birds, even more than the kookaburra with his psychotic laugh. The cockatoo is a type of parrot. It has a white body, a black beak, and a canary-yellow cowlick that fluffs out into a hell-raiser Mohawk when it’s pissed off. It’s an awesome bird.
There are countless astonishing birds and animals in Australia, though many of them have off-puttingly sharp fangs and talons. And that is why Carly takes me to the Featherdale Wildlife Park, a short drive from Sydney, to observe them up close. It’s a petting zoo for the deranged, harboring only a handful of native animals that are safe enough to come within kicking distance. You can hand-feed green pellets from an ice-cream cone to a scruffy kangaroo or wallaby (similar to a kangaroo but smaller). You can cuddle up to a fuzzy koala as he lazes like a portly, drunk man on his gum tree. Nearby, the laughing kookaburras are perched like professors, and the Tasmanian devils (a carnivorous marsupial with rodentlike features) run in endless, loping circles. It’s a parade of strange new creatures: wombats (marsupials again, with some rodentlike features, though furrier and less angry-looking than the Tasmanian devils), goannas (like lizards but uglier), lorikeets (rainbow-colored parrots), Cape Barren geese (known as pugnacious and intolerant of other birds), and the all-time winner for scary-as-shit birds, cassowaries, large, flightless, with a Cruella de Vil nail on the middle of three toes that can easily sever a limb or eviscerate an abdomen.
Museums, gardens, aquariums, and petting zoos might be considered my formal Australian education, secondary to the informal, far more colorful instruction Carly and her family and friends provide, what I’m absorbing by osmosis living here.
First, the 2003 Rugby World Cup, held in Sydney—where the Australians ultimately lose to the British in the finals—provides an opportunity to see the two countries’ complex relationship. The sweeping generalization is this: the Australians firmly believe that the English are arrogant and aloof, while the English arrogantly and aloofly dismiss the Aussies as immature and uncouth. (This was concretely illustrated by an unfortunate British girl someone brought to the Dawson family Christmas, who was met with stony silence after her ill-timed joke: “What’s the difference between Australia and yogurt? If you leave the yogurt out, after a while it will develop a culture.”) England is the country Australians love to hate, and nowhere more than in sporting matches does this typically good-natured but competitive rivalry have as much room to express itself amid patriotic face painting and beer guzzling. Britons pour into the country to attend the match, bringing with them the rain that ends a six-week uptick in the drought, and inciting Carly’s younger brother, Steve, to amble around the house despondently for several days muttering, “Bloody Poms.” (This is an expression the Australians have twisted back on the British, the assumed originators, that supposedly stands for “prisoners of mother England.”) Even after the match ends, the two proud nations can’t let it go. Egging them on is the fact that the ball used by British star kicker Jonny Wilkinson to score in the ninety-ninth minute of the final disappeared into the Australian crowds afterward, and the British are demanding its return. An article in The Sydney Morning Herald entitled “Why the Poms Have No Balls” argues: “Since the British refuse to return the Parthenon sculptures, the Sphinx’s nose, and various Aboriginal skeletons to their rightful owners, Spike [the writer] doesn’t think they are on very high moral ground when it comes to some sweaty old piece of pigskin. We shall not succumb.” Points of contention between the two countries are never wholly about the present moment but always threaten to hark back in time as far as necessary in order to prove who is right and who, in common parlance, is a complete wanker.
And if there is one thing Australians can’t stand, it’s a wanker. One day we attend a cricket match where an off-key chant I can’t make out starts to ripple through the crowd an hour in. I lean over to solicit an explanation.
“They’re saying the members are wankers,” Carly informs me.
“Why?”
“Because the members are wankers.”
“No, why are they wankers?”
“Well, look at them, all snobby in their box seats.” She gestures disgustedly toward them. “Plus, didn’t you see how they wouldn’t do the Mexican wave a few minutes ago?” (Another random difference: many outside North America apparently call it “the Mexican wave” instead of plain old “the wave,” since the first time any international viewers witnessed the phenomenon was on the televised 1986 World Cup in Mexico.)
These affronts, essentially one bunch of Australians acting “too good” for another group of their fellow Aussies, are unacceptable. It’s an example of the Australian expression “tall-poppy syndrome.” Carly puts it succinctly: “Poppies grow taller than the grass, so they get their heads cut off by the lawn mower.” Others have attributed its etymology to the world wars, where ANZAC (Australian New Zealand Army Corporation) forces fought many deadly battles on poppy fields and where, if you stuck your head out of the trench, you were likely to get shot. Regardless of its origins, this phrase showcases a major cultural difference between the U.S. and Australia. Australia is a proudly egalitarian, community-based society where the group reigns supreme, whereas the U.S. is a staunch meritocracy with the individual as the prime unit. So while Americans love first to build up a homegrown hero only to take schadenfreude delight later on if he/she gets knocked down, Australians prefer to skip the building-up part and go straight for the knocking down. This way, no one gets to thinking he or she is better than the neighbors, when everyone should be equal.
I quickly discover Aussies have a strong sense of humor, the kind in which anyone or anything is fair game. The only exception seems to be their origins as
a penal colony. Though Australians live in a developed, democratic, educated, and multicultural society, media representations of them often stereotype. Carly despises a particular Simpsons episode where the Australians are portrayed as lying, thieving, incoherent simpletons, which, obviously, they are not.
Australians are proud of their continued hardy existence in a country where it’s relatively easy to get yourself killed. The environment can be inhospitable, the animals/birds/reptiles bite, the waves threaten to drag you to a watery grave. Nowhere is their pride in self-reliance better illustrated to me than when the Steve Irwin scandal breaks. Irwin, the now sadly deceased Crocodile Hunter, decides to hand-feed a large crocodile in front of a crowd while holding his infant son. Some Australians and the appalled American media condemn his behavior, likening it to Michael Jackson dangling his baby over a balcony, but Carly’s friends adamantly express an opposing attitude. “If there’s one thing that guy knows, it’s crocs,” they say, or “He’s been wrestling crocs since he was nine years old!” Carly has often claimed Irwin is a caricature of an Australian, but even she joins in the chorus supporting him. He is fearless and capable, just like the twentysomethings who surround me in Sydney.
Australia, unlike the U.S., doesn’t sugarcoat the inherent dangers of being a human being, of inhabiting a vulnerable body. Australia is your tipsy blunt uncle who tells it like it is. There is danger. You are not immune. The world is not a fair place. Life is precarious and fleeting, but what’s the point of letting these obvious facts get you down? Better to be out catching an ocean wave, or diving headfirst from an airplane, or whatever you do to enjoy yourself in the here and now (Australians do different things than most for enjoyment because they are bad-asses, but you get the idea).
The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure Page 11