20 Things from Australia
1) Don’t Tell the Tourist Board Award – I arrived at the train station in Canberra and decided to take a taxi to my hotel. The taxi driver asked me, “What have you come here for? It’s a horrible place.” That’s how to sell it.
2) Security Award – I am not sure why security staff at airports think that being rude and unpleasant is the same as being efficient but it seems like a common misunderstanding. However, well done to the security guard at Perth airport who put her theory to the test. She was convinced that I had steel toe-capped boots and I insisted that they were not. When I suggested that the security sensors were being set off by the metal lace-holders on the boots, she told me that that was impossible. Then she stood on my toes. My reaction should have proven to her that she was wrong, but after I had taken off my boots to go through the scanner, I heard her asking the man looking at the x-ray machine to confirm that the boots had steel toe caps. There was no sign of steel toe caps, he said.
3) Getting Your Visitors Drunk Award – the Collectionist in Sydney was an early leader as it gave every guest two free cans of beer every night between 6.30 p.m. and 7.30 p.m. but even that noble effort was surpassed by the Ovolo Nishi hotel in Canberra where the entirety of the minibar was free and refilled every day. Three beers, two small bottles of wine, two bottles of water, some orange juice and some sparkling water in case you wonder. Were they saying that you needed to be drunk to experience Canberra?
4) Ironic Tribute Award – King O’Malley’s brewery and pub is named after one of the founders of Canberra. He was also responsible for ensuring that the city remained alcohol-free until 1927. That’s a fitting tribute, then.
5) The ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ Award. Many areas of Australia appeared to be holding some kind of ‘Christmas in July’ festival to mark the winter. This was more successful in some places than others. Top marks for persistence to Bondi, where the ice rink had melted in the sun and so children were attempting to skate on boards and a film of water. And there won’t be snow in Australia this Christmas time.
6) Planned Cities Are Great Because ... Award. I asked the bar server in King O’Malley’s why she liked living in Canberra. She said because it was ‘perfect’. I asked her to explain and she said that the three main areas of the city were based around a circle and each circle was linked by a straight road to make an overall triangle. From that point outwards, you can then draw rectangles for all the suburb designs. She pondered if this might be something to do with OCD, but I asked her what happened if she went to cities with bendy roads – she admitted that she wanted to straighten them.
7) Marsupial of the Year Award – Quokkas, every time. Kangaroos can hop it.
8) Highest Concentration of Welsh People In One Spot Award – with the North Canberra Quakers I met in quick succession – a woman who moved to Australia from Cardiff in 1969 aged 23, a woman who had competed in the International Eisteddfod, a man who had spent a month in Wales riding on every narrow gauge railway in the country and a woman who had spent a year living in Swansea.
9) The Fitting In Award – on my first suburban train journey in Sydney, I was asked directions. I must have looked like a knowledgeable stranger at least, as this happened another couple of times.
10) Desperate Tourism Award – I do like desperate attempts to get the attention of tourists but actually the winner has to be one that is truly mainstream. I should have noticed that ‘Captain Cook’s Cottage’ (also known as ‘the oldest building in Australia’ (!)) is actually referred to as ‘Cook’s Cottage’. I had heard the story many times before, how Captain Cook’s cottage in Teesside was put up for sale and was bought by an enterprising Aussie who had it broken up and re-assembled in Melbourne as a visitor attraction in the 1930s. Except ... it’s not. The Cook in question is James Cook’s father and there is no evidence that the ‘discoverer’ of Australia visited it and he certainly never lived there. Fair play to the owners, who still make six dollars from everyone wanting to visit it, but calling it ‘the cottage of someone famous’s father’ would be a little more truthful.
11) Urban Insecurity Award – in Canberra I was able to buy a fridge magnet that said, “Sydney has a nice bridge, but Canberra has a lot more.” There was not even an attempt to explain which feature of Canberra was better than the bridge. Mind you, Sydney is not adverse to it – in the Sydney Harbour Bridge Museum, the information boards ask, “Is Sydney’s bridge the longest? No, but it is the most iconic” along with diagrams to show the lengths of different bridges across the world. I can cope with it not being the longest, it does not need additional justification to be impressive!
12) Urban Insecurity Award (late entry) – at the Pier Pavilion in St Kilda, there is an information board that explains that the pavilion burned down in 2003 and that the people of Melbourne were asked about rebuilding it. There was a suggestion that it should be rebuilt ‘to be something as great as an Opera House’ but that people realised that ‘we have that already’.
13) Heroic animals award - there is a piano in Alice Springs that was assembled in Adelaide and then dragged to Alice by a camel.
14) Ex-Pat Awards – Ex-pats the world over seem to have among their number a particular type, the ex-pat who so loves their new home that they get annoyed if you don’t also want to move there. I met a couple who were originally from Middlesbrough but who had moved to Australia thirty years ago to work in the railway industry. They were annoyed at me when I answered the enquiry as to whether I wanted to live in Australia with ‘no’ and proceeded to tell me why I was wrong.
Amidst all this, they also patronised me about some basics, including that although a desert is hot during the day, it becomes very cold at night. I had to explain that I had learnt this 35 years ago from an Asterix book. Asterix explains this same fact to Obelix. I then encountered the desert itself – hot, dusty, dry and with no wifi coverage. I concur with Obelix’s response – ‘the desert is crazy’.
15) First Day On the Job Award – I ordered a taxi from my hotel in Adelaide with an extra hour to get to the railway station. The taxi driver pulled up, helped me with my bags and then asked if I knew where I was going. It turned out that he had been a taxi driver in Melbourne for the last ten years and this was his first day in Adelaide. He seemed not to have taken the precautionary step of finding out where things were in the city. Then a policeman came along and tapped his badge on the window because the taxi driver was parked in a bus lane. All in all, I was seeing my extra hour as a wise choice ...
16) Hostile Sport Award – the rugby league in Sydney was brutal, the Aussie Rules Football in Melbourne was tough, the Channel 9 coverage of the World Cup Cricket Final was breath-taking but no, nothing exemplified the Australian attitude to sport more than the chess match I witnessed in ‘Lentil As Anything’ in Sydney. The two players – both Australian – made careful, calm and considered moves and then unleashed an invective of abuse against their opponent. After each tirade, they would apologise to me and explain that this was the way that Australians played sport, any sport. Never has a bishop’s withdrawal by one square sounded quite so vicious.
17) Never Forget Where You’re Coming From Award – I recognised something in the barman’s accent at the hotel in Darwin and, sure enough, he said that he came from Lancaster originally. He had met a woman from Perth (she played the fiddle in an Irish band ... oh sorry, wrong story) and they had ended up moving to Perth together and living there for two years before she was offered a teaching job in Darwin. He said that he was just about starting to acclimatise to the heat north of the Tropic of Capricorn. He admitted that he had been back to Perth three weeks previously but ‘it’s winter there’ and he had had to wear a jumper because it was ‘only sixteen degrees’. I think that he had forgotten what winters in Lancashire are like.
18) Inappropriate Clothing Award – I thought that I was being a little too British when I packed a jumper for my trip to the desert ‘just in case’, but I noticed that an (Australian) woman on the same trip turned up wearing leather trousers. Probably eight or nine marks out of ten for style, but on a scale of one to ten for practicality, very much ‘what the f***?’
19) Exploration Award – a loud and large Australian man looked out of the window at the countryside of central Australia rushing by and said that he did not understand why Victorian explorers kept dying trying to cross Australia as it seemed quite easy to him. He said this while drinking his third glass of wine following a three course meal in a luxury dining car of a train that he had to put no effort into driving. If only the early explorers had thought to take the train, eh?
20) Welsh References Award – Australia is somewhere where most people seem to know a little about Wales or, at least, that it exists. On a technical note while we are here, it is New South Wales but old south Wales. NSW is a title so it gets capitals but south Wales is a description of which part of Wales it is. Believe you me, the BBC gets letters about it ... though not from me, I promise.
So, what do people know about Wales? Singing, Cardiff City FC, narrow gauge railways, beautiful countryside ... and then the coach driver in Alice Springs heard where I was from and yelled, “Gavin & Stacey!” Turns out that he was one of Australia’s biggest Gavin & Stacey fans and he was thrilled when I explained that I used to walk to work in Barry past Stacey’s house. None of the other passengers had heard of Gavin & Stacey mind you, so there was considerable confusion ...