Hey! Teacher! Leave Them Kids Alone!

This week I have had cause to interact with a bunch of very smart school kids for a gifted and talented programme run by the University for which I work. These folk were all in the first year of their HSC, so all seventeen this academic year. Why I am telling you this. Well, you should see the uniforms these poor buggers have to wear!

 

We live near a busy rail station and since loads of Sydney school kids commute across the city to go to their schools I’ve seen plenty of uniforms. Now, I thought the uniforms were just imposed on them up to the age of 16, but it turns out they send 17 year old boys to do the equivalent of A-Levels in knee length shorts, virgin socks, and a Straw Boater! FFS!

When I did my A-levels, I went to school in army surplus and think I would have forgone further and higher education had I been made to wear what these guys do. Imagine having to dress like Don Estelle from “It Ain’t Half Hot Mum” but with a boater instead of a pith helmet. Sod that. And my wife (who went to a school in U.K. where pretty disgusting uniforms were compulsory even at A-Level) describes lots of the girls uniforms as “designed by paedophiles”. I’m not posting pictures, but I think she’s right.

We Meet At the Store, I’m a Sensitive Bore

Last night we went to see Joanna Newsome at the Sydney Opera House. She was performing her recent(ish) album ‘Ys’ with the Sydney Symphony orchestra, and some older songs from ‘Milk Eyed Mender’ and two songs from the ‘Joanna Newsome and the Ys Street Band’ EP.

 

The whole thing was amazing. She was brilliant. I’d never really twigged what a great harpist she is, and just how she veers away from conventional harp playing. I also think her voice has really matured recently and you can detect what I think is the Appalachian folk roots of her songs. The Sydney Symphony Orchestra were really good too, and as you can imagine, seeing this in the Opera House was quite an experience. The acoustics are stunning and the concert hall actually feels rather cathedral and epic. What’s more the Korean girls sitting in front of us were wearing some kind of frangipani scent, so I even have some pleasant olfactory memories to take away too!

One thing that I did notice though: the performance was split into two halves - the Ys album first, the stuff without SSO second - and in the second half, there were lots of empty seats. The reason is simple. Sydney is awash with tourists and loads of people who go to performances at the Opera House just get whatever tickets are going so they can say they’ve seen something there. Lots of those who left at the interval had obviously never heard of Joanna Newsome and probably couldn’t stand a second half. And in case you’ve never heard of Joanna Newsome either, her music tends to polarise opinions.

Depending on where your opinion falls, her voice is either unique or f*cking aggravating, her lyrics are either dense and poetic or pretentious nursery rhymes, and her songs are either structurally unconventional and avante-garde, or atonal anti-melodic dog shit. If you’re a baby boomer in your sixties doing a P&O world cruise and for your Opera House outing you get tickets to see some women - who you assume is to the harp what Yoyo Ma is to the Cello - playing with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and what you get is Joanna Newsome, I imagine you’re only two minutes into “Monkey and Bear” before you think you should have stumped up the extra $75 for La Boheme.

Anyway, I absolutely loved it!

Cut the Sides Don’t Touch the Back

Every country has its coifered peculiarities - God knows, the eighties fright cuts and emo fringes kicking around in the U.K before we left were amusing the hell out of me. But the haircuts on some of the workmen and boy racer types in Australia truely are something to behold. There is a version of the Hoxton Fin (you know the one sported by Beckham and Fran Healy about seven years ago where the hair on top of your head is brushed up into a pointy ridge). However, imagine if the fin sliped further and further towards the back of your head until the pointy ridge ran down your nape. But the main reason for my post is that this is mullet country.

Back in the U.K, when I spent more time listening to the Beasty Boys, my friends and I had classifications for mullets. I think this was a popular sport back then. A women with a mullet had a Shmullet. A bald guy attempting the business-up-front-party-down-back look had a Bullet. A permed flock of hill-billy mane was a Pullet. And so on.

Now, I haven’t thought about this haircut for a while, but Australia provides fertile ground for adding to the classification. One version seems to be a sort of localised afro on the back of the head (this is favoured by some of the local rev-heads) which doesn’t really hang so much as coagulate. I’ve christened this the Frollet. Another involves having the hair all over the head reasonably short except for the very last threads of the hairline on the neck which are grown to maybe only a couple of inches. This proto-mullet is most prominently sported by a local “singer” called Shanon Noll. Hence I’ve called it the Nollet.

There also numerous pissed up versions of rats tails which seem to emerge from entirely random parts of the back of the head - behind the left ear, the top right back corner of the head. I’d try to get some pictures but I’d probably get smacked. Each to his own, and I guess you can’t fault them for so stridently embracing the forbidden hair. But seriously, even Billy-Ray Sirus has given up the Achy-Brakey hair, and that guy was committed.

Limp Biskit

Here in Australia they have a biscuit called Timtams

 

Timtams are rather like Penguin biscuits; they’re the same size, chocolaty (although they have other flavours), and cloying. However, they are, I think, inferior to Penguins in all but one respect. The preferred local method of eating Timtams is this

You bite off one corner, then bite off the corner diagonally opposite and use it rather like a fat straw to suck up your cup of tea. When you’ve sucked tea through it pop it into your mouth whole and wait for it to give up its form and melt all over your mouth. I’ve tried this with Penguins and its o.k but rather adds to the cloy. With Timtams, however, when it splooges inside your mouth, the feel is rather different and altogether better. It’s a nice way to eat them. You know, Australia is rather worried that it has an obesity problem.

You Can Hear It In My Accent When I Talk

As you will notice, by user name, Telbort, is a bit odd  (but not very). The reason I use it for this blog is that some Sydneysiders have struggled to understand my accent. An Australian Coffee shop chain called Gloria Jean’s take your order and type in your name in the till which appears on a screen so the person making the drinks can call it out when your coffee is ready. When I gave my name, Albert, the guy on the till looked at me as though I’d just called him a bad thing. I’m used to this. I’m not that old and most people see ”Albert” as an old person’s name. So I repeated it. He asked me to spell it. Still looked like I’d called him a bad name. Anyway, when my order was called it turned out they had made a regular flat white (this is what the Aussies call white coffee) for Telbort.

Of course, my accent isn’t so mangled as to turn “Albert” into “Telbort” for all Aussies, but I get asked to repeat myself a lot. Also, my wife was told by a guy in a phone shop that her accent was very English. She quite liked that. I just wondered what it meant to sound merely English (as opposed to *very* English), or what it meant to sound a little bit English (like Rene Zellweger’s in Bridget Jones say). Still not sure.

I Don’t Drink Coffee, I Take Tea My Dear

Well, let me begin with a brief comment about who we are and what we’re blogging about. Just over a year ago, I was offered a really good job in Sydney. Following a slow and tedious visa process, my wife and I moved out to Australia just three months ago and we thought we’d blog about our experiences and impressions of the place, especially so friends and family back home have a reason to remember that we still exist.

Let me also say something about the title of the blog. “The Lucky Country”, as many of you will know, is a nick-name Australians use for their country. The origins of this nick-name are from the title of a book written by one of Australia’s more well known intellectuals - the historian and journalist Donald Horne. Interesting is that current use of “The Lucky Country” seems to reflect Aussie pride in their beautiful country, the lifestyle, and the wealth and prospects of the nation. Horne’s book, however, was a rather critical account of Australia in the 1960’s, questioning its parochialism and dogmatic fixation with its colonialist Anglo-Saxon traditions (I believe that Horne was a committed Republican). Indeed, the first line of the chapter from the book where “The Lucky Country” first appears reads as follows:

 ’Australia is a lucky country, run by second-rate people who share its luck.’

Strikes me as kind of interesting, and as future posts will no doubt suggest, it seems to me that in some arenas, his criticisms still hold.

Further, the sub-title, “Our Home is Girt by Sea”, comes from the Australian National Anthem, “Advance Australia Fair”. What’s nice about “Advance Australia Fair” is that it’s wheeled out for sporting occasions etc. and from what I can see of the crowds, the Aussies know its words about as well as we Brits know the second verse of “God Save The Queen”. However, they do all seem to know the words “Our Home is Girt by Sea”, for interesting reasons.

This line was discussed in parliament with the Labor MP, Graig Emerson describing it as the worst line in any national anthem, and that it was pretty obvious that Australia was surrounded by sea. Former leader of the Labor party Kim Beazley, however, suggested that he would like to see “girt by sea” celebrated, and would oppose changing the national anthem.

Another nice thing about the national anthem is that, although only recently adopted, (in 1984 in fact), it is pretty old, was written by a Scotsman from Port Glasgow and contained this verse which has since been dropped:

When gallant Cook from Albion sailed.
To trace wide oceans o’er.
True British courage bore him on.
Til he landed on our shore
Then here he raised Old England’s flag.
The standard of the brave.
With all her faults we love her still.
Britannia rules the wave
In joyful strains then let us sing
Advance Australia Fair.

I like it! It’s my favorite verse, but I can see why they dropped it! By the way, when choosing the national anthems, John Howard voted for Waltzing Matilda. More on him later - we live in Benelong, his old constituency.