How long can you chase the ocean before it catches up with itself? How long can the night run away from the morning?
When you leave Virginia at 8 in the evening and arrive in Australia at 6 in the morning, over 24 hours and—two, three days?—later, after 17 hours alone over the trackless Pacific Ocean, a never-ending ripple of black under a black night sky, the answer to the above questions is: a long time. And yet, now, after all that, after three in-flight meals and five in-flight movies, here I am. Flying over the Australian continent, over a blustery, Southern Hemisphere winter, my usual broiling August reversed on itself into a dry, 50-degree cold, except it’s not even 50 degrees, its 10 according to a temperature system I don’t know.
Here I am, asking the same questions Tony Horwitz asked in the beginning of “One for the Road,” when he moved to this odd little country around the world where the woman he happened to love lived: Where am I? You look down and it’s all a crumpled plain of dry and scarp and shrub, brown-green mountains smoothed out by age and the rough-hewn canyons of tectonic isolation.
I came here once before, in 2004, on a working holiday visa, a joke of a holiday if ever I heard one, as if working as one-step-above an illegal immigrant for minimum wage is somehow a vacation. It seemed a strange country then and still a strange one now, not for its differences but its utter similarity to the States. Sitting next to a couple from Baltimore on the plane over, I remarked, staring over the endless Pacific, that coming to Australia feels like coming all the way around the world to the place you just came from. Of course, its not, in certain, certainly pertinent ways: a different landscape. Funny accents, funny spelling. Strange weather. A dry, Pacific land carved by a dry, Pacific wind, with no forests or fields I’d recognize in North America.
But in so many ways, more than England, more than anywhere except Canada, Australia feels like America. The books in the airport lounge are all by Americans — the same ‘Marley and Me’ and Oprah book club recommendations, maybe a few more Bryce Courtenays and Lonely Planets over Fodor’s and Frommer’s, to this country’s credit. The same fashions, and the same brashness of youth. The same disengagement from world issues, although here I suspect our motivations differ; Americans are turned off to the world because we feel above it. Australians ignore the world because it is so far away. The immensity of the Pacific isolates this land, its people, even its flora and fauna, like a million, modern English Channels. During World War II, wounded American Marines fighting the Japanese were flown back to Hawaii for hospital care. If their comrades in France flew the same distance for treatment, they’d be evacuated from Caen to Kansas City.
The love of sport (of course, the Australians I saw in LAX were part of a cycling team), the love of MTV, the lack of history, all make Australian culture feel like a rip-off of my own, as if I were shopping in Hong Kong for nationalities and couldn’t afford genuine ‘American’ and settled for a cheap knock-off: Yankshmee! Just as loud and shallow and young and vibrant as the real thing!
Except (and it’s a big except) Australia isn’t an independent country. It is still part of the Commonwealth of nations, and what’s more, the head of state is still technically the Governor General of her Majesty Elizabeth II, the Queen of England. A technicality you may say, except that same Governor General used the authority derived from the inbred House of Windor, thousands of miles away, to remove a sitting Australian Prime Minister from office in the 1970s. Australians can claim all they want that the Whitlam affair was simply a bending of the rules, an expedient expulsion no different from any ‘No confidence’ motion, but I still think Americans would balk in disgust at the idea of the appointed representative of the Queen removing their head of government from office. And worst of all: When Australians had the chance to vote, in referendum, on becoming an independent Republic in — what year was that honey? ‘I don’t know!?’
See, they don’t even CARE about the time they COULD have become a real country, which isn’t surprising because they didn’t. You read me right — when Australians had the option of voting themselves into a real Republic (note: didn’t even have to fight a revolution) they opted: to stay. To stay in the Commonwealth. Because it would have cost too much to change all the stationary and the stamps. Because becoming an independent member of the society of nations was too much trouble and bother.
I’ve had Australians rib me for my American spelling. To which I say: You win a revolution and become an honest-to-God, independent country, and then you can spell any way you want.
Australia IS an independent country. And yes it is a member of the Commonwealth, which consists of 53 independent countries. Why doesn't the writer check his facts before placing his "views" in an online forum?
Posted by: Bryn | January 29, 2009 at 03:18 AM
Adam should understand that among the 53 members of the Commonwealth, 16 are monarchies with Queen Elizabeth as Head of State. Another five have their own monarchs. The rest, 32 in all, are republics. All are members of the Commonwealth of Nations.
Adam is displaying his lack of knowledge. He should be aware that to be a member of the United Nations, a country must be independent. Australia is a foundation member of the UN, having joined when the UN began in 1945. All the other 52 Commonwealth members are also UN members.
What do you have to say to this, Adam?
Posted by: Bryn | January 29, 2009 at 03:22 AM