Adam's Ambles

Entering Australia, Ch. 3

We live in a former rope factory (on Rope Walk) just off of Sydney Road, although I am not in Sydney city. I am in Melbourne, Australia’s second city, by circumstance and not by choice as any Melbournian will tell you.

This is (or thinks of itself as) Australia’s cultural capital, seat of the arts and design and converted warehouse lofts. If Baltimore is a city defined by its port and lake trout takeaways, Melbourne’s distinctiveness lays in coffee shops and art galleries, its ideal citizens emerging from an austere, exposed-wall studio with a glass of red in the one hand, reaching for an espresso in the other. “What’s the difference between an Australian and a bowl of yogurt?” runs the old joke. “Leave the yogurt in the sun for a week and it’ll develop some culture.” Leave a Melbournian in the sun for a week and they’ll develop a samba-house fusion lounge.

To Melbourne’s credit this sense of cool isn’t encased in an armor of exclusivity; the city feels very West Coast, and particularly Northern California/Pacific Northwest in this regard. But maybe me, the born and bred East Coaster, can’t stand that much accessibility. When everyone’s cool, no one’s cool. Then again, I’ve never had much time for velvet ropes. At first glance Melbourne feels unlike Manhattan because there’s no line between who is in and who is out, but to expand on my above allusion, when everyone’s in, it kinda feels like everyone is out. Melbournian’s natural tendency to make a frenzied rush for the next trend — a city that moves from tapas to converted warehouses to chocolate bars (as in bars that serve chocolate) — makes non-participants in the race for cool feel a bit put out.

But there’s bits I love about this city. I can think of few towns of this size — about 3 million — so packed with immigrants. Sydney Road is one long stretch of Turkish restaurants, Italian (or as they’re called here, ‘Continental’) grocery stores, including one of the largest in the southern hemisphere (which, by the way, always feels like a cop out indicator. ‘Largest in the southern hemisphere,’ a phrase that gets thrown around a lot in Australia, sort of implicitly acknowledges ‘largest in the world’ tends to be above the equator). I’ve never seen Malayalam script outside of Kerala, but there it is, advertising dhosas and thalis at a clean little restaurant just across the corner of a cozily cool bar that serves $10 “’Roo and a glass of wine’” specials on Mondays.

Vietnamese, Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Greeks and Lebanese (the latter two living here in apparently some of the biggest concentrations outside of their home countries) round out the milieu. Thank goodness for the Arab Melbournians, who at least know how to brew a cup of coffee. The heavy Italian presence here means the capital of Victoria has been reared on espresso, and the nasty, thick bitter stuff is ubiquitous. It’s impossible to find a normal cup of Joe here; my girlfriend looked at me as if I were suggesting we casually eat babies when I asked for normal filter coffee in some chic Italian bakery.

Still, I’ll take the Italians and their espresso over the all-in-black hordes of Melbournian literati any day. And in fairness, this far up the Sydney Road I don’t have to worry much about running into the hip and hipster-ish — although ‘Villain,’ a skater-chic, graffiti-ed up boutique does sit next to Ereem ‘Muslim women’s fashion’ (which is just down the street from the Radical Socialists’ ‘Solidarity Salon’…).

Entering Australia, Ch. 2

First days here and my girl took me to Bell’s Beach and Lorne on the south Victorian coast.

“I always know I’m in Australia just by looking out the window,” she said. “It’s the most distinctive landscape I know.”

Australia’s continental isolation does make its scenery unique. On the way to the Great Ocean Road, a sort of Australian Highway 1 that runs from Victoria West to the state of South Australia and Adelaide, the land smoothes out into flat stretches of dark, mossy green and then re-establishes as lumpy mountains rolling all the way to the coast, their exposed red cliffs facing a teal-and-stormy blue southern ocean. The dagger-sharp rocks that litter the bays, the fleeced-out chilly beach towns and hard-core wet-suited surfers and the dark green forests put me in mind again of Northern California. Except here there are no redwoods, no pine trees or sequoias. The tall copses of weirdly skinny, paper-barked gum and gingko trees are unique to this land, as are the giant leaves of spiky cactus and dinosaur-era ferns clumping up in valleys with shallow estuaries fed by the sea.

We stop to watch surfers race through some of the biggest waves I’ve ever seen at Bells Beach, famous (to me, anyway) as the setting of the final scene of Point Break. I’ve been out to the Wild Coast of the Transkei in South Africa, supposedly one of the great surfing beaches of the world, but those green breakers under their green African hills don’t compare to the perfectly curved tubes and rips that form with almost monotonous predictability off of Bell’s.

I don’t know much about surfing, the entirety of my experience being a two-to-three foot wave I belly-boarded in Narrangesset, Rhode Island, but even I can tell the waves here are as perfectly sculpted as David. We stop in the cute and quiet (in winter, anyways) seaside town of Lorne and have decent fish and calamari and chips (although they charge us extra for ketchup and tartar sauce). The girl finishes with a muddy cappuccino. On the grass that runs up to the beach I stare in frigid amazement (it is windy and cold and wet in August; where am I?) at red-headed cockatoos and zebra-mottled magpies, birds utterly foreign to my eyes that must be as common and pest-y as sparrows and crows back home. I look east at the mountains that front the Great Ocean Road. A few years ago North Korean diplomats were picking up, dropping off and otherwise hiding 50 kg shipments of heroin in these wet hills.

The day after the girl takes me to visit her family in the Goulbourn Valley. Her father (to my father’s delight, like I had found as perfect a specimen of the Australian Outback as possible) is a retired farmer and sheep rancher. From their cozy, single-story brick home he takes me in a ‘ute’ (pickup truck) through a sheep-hearing station (a real sheep-shearing station!), past fields of ‘crop’ (which seems to be a catch-all for what we Americans would differentiate as wheat, barley, oats and hay) and metal fences, much of it neglected because, as he tells me, the area is flooded with ‘lifestyle’ farmers from the city buying out farmland they tend on the occasional weekend away.

We see some kangaroos hopping through the gum forests, although he assures me that there are days when whole herds of ‘roos thunder (do kangaroos thunder? What’s the appropriate adjective for describing the syncopated hop of hundreds of marsupials?) through the valley. We pick around the ruins of what was, during World War II, Australia’s largest prisoner-of-war camp, a facility that housed 8,000 Germans, Italians and Japanese, guarded by 5,000 sentries, all interred in (essentially) my girlfriend’s backyard.

I think of my home in Maryland and its proximity to Point Lookout, once one of the biggest POW camps of the Civil War, where Confederate prisoners were packed into a malarial swamp and guarded by free black soldiers, all a warning to the pro-secessionists who inhabited my corner of the state. The death toll among the Southerners, as you might guess, was enormous, and their ghosts are still supposed to roam the marshes of the Point Lookout peninsula.

In contrast, the prisoners in the Goulbourn Valley were apparently well-looked after (although some Japanese, honor-bound by Bushido, did attempt a mass break-out); many Germans and Italians decided this rich, open farmland was a better option than there bombed out homelands and stayed in Australia when the war ended. Near an old, concrete bunker, once a nest for a machine-gunner, now the same for swallows, is an iron cross-studded monument from German soldiers to their “gerfallen komraden.”

Back at the girl’s place I read the war-time diary of her grandfather, a veteran of Tobruk, which is tantalizing for all the details he leaves out, be it from fear of German capture or typical Australian dryness or both I’m not sure (he describes a retreat across the North African desert as “a hell of a time,” surely one of the great understatements of all time). A book by a popular Australian journalist-cum-historian slams Douglas Macarthur and the American military in general for inactivity in the Southwest Pacific theater, a characterization I imagine a lot of veterans of Bloody Ridge, the Coral Sea, the Ilu sandpit, Savo Island, Tulagi and Henderson Field might resent, but I bite my tongue — convincing the world Americans are heroes hasn’t done a lot lately for our self-image.

We have a ‘snag’ (a sausage, apparently) at the girl’s brother’s house, where I play with the kids and humiliate myself while trying to kick around an Australian League football. But hey — it’s all about making an impression on the family, and I am trying to be the good foreigner here. I am pretty un-athletic at the best of times, but put me up against Aussie Football, one of the roughest, least sensible sports in the world (it appears to basically be a game of non-stop punting, ‘fisting’ [i.e. punching, you sickos] and bouncing of a normal football), and the spectacle must have been mortifying to girl’s family. They were gracious with my incompetence though, inviting me to a real game in Melbourne despite the terrifying manner in which I debased their favored sport. My final stroke of humilation: when the girl’s seven-year old nephew arced a perfect, NFL-style spiral after I attempted a lame duck wobble version of the same pass. Sigh.