Friends Reunited

Before I talk about chocolate, I’ll start with the very pleasant news of Toxic Math’s surprise visit from two great friends from Blighty. Alistair is a one time Toxic Math contributor, and we’re both pictured here wearing our best Australian. What’s equally surprising is how remarkably well such a secret was kept from me, namely by my girlfriend, who had been planning such a shock for months before hand, rather accurately as it turns out, and completely without my knowledge. Either this questions my observance or the quality of her subterfuge: anything else I need to know about, darling? Maybe a secret Warhammer addition, perhaps? This, in part, is why this addition of TM is slightly overdue, and probably why the next one will be too. As many people who have enjoyed the east Queensland coast will tell you, the fact of the matter is that we’ve just been having a little too much fun.

Now, chocolate. I have now had two conversations with separate Australians who are both convinced that Cadbury chocolate is a local product, and not a proud British institution, for which I argued the latter. Before we go any further, I am right about this - John Cadbury opened his first cocoa shop in Birmingham in 1824, inherited by his sons but spearheaded mainly by George Cadbury who would turn the business into a mighty industrial force with the opening of a purpose built chocolate factory located in the sleepy village of Bournville, four miles south of Birmingham, complete with housing and amenities for all employees. But the history of Cadbury’s in Australia is such a long and distinguished one that you can fully understand the sentiment involved in wanting to claim the brand as their own.

For starters, the factory here in Hobart, Tasmania, was the first one outside of Bournville, built in 1918 just as the Cadbury name began to seriously diversify. They worked tirelessly as the official provider of chocolate for the Australian armed forces during the Second World War. According to their website, “Cadbury ration chocolate in brown-paper wrappers was supplied to troops in the field, made from a special formula so that the precious parcel did not melt in the heat of the tropics or the desert.”

There are now factories in Melbourne, Victoria and New Zealand, not to mention Cadbury factories located around the world. Patriotic Brits appeared to lose their crème eggs when it was announced that the American food giant Kraft were to buy out the company in 2010 for the substantial sum of £11.5bn, but before we get too emotional about these things, it is worth noting that by this stage, Cadbury were far from an exclusively British product: the company also owned Trebor Bassett, Fry’s, Maynards, Halls and, until the demerger in 2008, they had been known as Cadbury Schweppes since 1969 with much of its factory work based in Poland.

Through their acquisitions Down Under, well known and uniquely Australian brands like Freddo and Cherry Ripe would end up carrying the Cadbury name, and so a long list of exotic and sumptuous chocolates began to emerge. Take a trip into Australia’s two leading supermarkets, Coles or Woolworths (which, rather fortunately, has nothing to do with its failed British namesake), and just look at what glorious, calorific indulgences are available only on this side of the Cadbury hemisphere: dairy milk blocks filled with macadamia and cashew nuts, peppermint flavours, a desserts range with Black Forest, Tiramisu and Crème Brulee, and many, many more. And what do we get in England? Boost bars. And a Twirl, if we’re lucky. That certainly doesn’t seem fair.

Because many of these types of chocolate could be easily obtained in the UK. Things like Rocky Road (a lethal combination of marshmallow, cherries, peanuts and coconut), Top Deck (a block of both milk and white chocolate), or even the Snack block (with individual pieces containing different flavours; some filled with caramel, others strawberry, orange, and Turkish Delight), could be easily replicated. So I contacted Cadbury Australia for an explanation, and Customer Services’ Tracey Delaney offered this: “Cadbury Australia manufactures many products that are not available throughout the world. Cadbury UK have their special products just for the UK as dose [sic] New Zealand.” Which may not fully explain such a grave injustice, but may give the English one more reason to be jealous of Australia.

Rockhampton is the capital of beef, apparently, which may explain why there are so many large cattle statues as you enter the city, all in praise of the bovine delights which have brought such great fortune to the region thanks mainly to two large, still functioning abattoirs. It has the same sprawling feel of suburban Bundaberg built in a similar spirit of turn of the century Americana. By the way, Australia are quite fond of their Big Things, as you will no doubt discover, with giant shrimp, burgers, crocodiles, toads and other seemingly random assortments regularly dotting the landscape. Rocky’s five large cows represent the different species which are bred here, and inevitably slaughtered, of course, in rather brutal numbers.

Anyway, we’ve stopped here as we travel north along the Bruce Highway, connecting the majority of Queensland’s east coast, to take part in a more hands-on, Aboriginal experience, courtesy of the Dreamtime Cultural Centre. Set in 30 acres of ancient tribal lands (although, lets be honest, most of modern Australia has been built on ancient tribal lands), this is an insightful if slightly over-egged tourist shop which hosts tours involving the history of the Torres Strait islanders in Queensland, and a gift shop where you can buy Aboriginal art, literature, didgeridoos and boomerangs. Speaking of which, the more practical side of the tour allows visitors to give this ancient throwing stick a spin for yourself, after a helpful demonstration from tour guide Wayne. It’s more tricky than it looks, which isn’t too surprising, and a complete physical marvel when you actually sit and think about it - the sort which could drive mathematicians nutty.

But Wayne’s real talent lies in his didgeridoo skills. This ancient Aboriginal instrument, which can be played in a multitude of different tones and pitches given the extent of the player’s skills and their sheer lung capacity, is intrinsically linked to different ceremonial dances and stories. It’s also a male fertility symbol, but Wayne’s quite open to women giving it a go, although his rather stark advice is for them to “not do it in public.” Hard luck for a young Canadian tourist, then, who seems quite keen to try beat boxing underneath the ceremonial didge drone. “Most people tend to respect the instrument,” Wayne says by way of a courteous put down, and the conversation moves swiftly on.

Incidentally, ‘didgeridoo’ is not onomatopoeic, which is what I initially thought. In fact, it’s not even an Aboriginal word. It belongs to politician and anthropologist Herbert Basedow, an Australian no less, who lived for some time amongst the more remote Aboriginal tribes of the Northern Territory and published many books on the subject. He seems to have become fascinated with this musical aide, which was simply made from the hollowed out, termite bitten wood of a branch or trunk and suitably named it a ‘didgeridoo’, but to this day, the local tribes will not call it this. Wayne tells me the most common name for the instrument is ‘yidaki’, although even this term varies from town to town.

Home Sweet Home

A few weeks ago, I commented on the sugar cane fires that used to be a regular sight in Bundaberg. I had been reliably informed that farmers don’t tend to set their fields ablaze quite so much anymore - “health and safety gone mad,” probably - but this certainly wasn’t the case earlier in the week, where a number of local farmers turned their crops into smoke-filled scenes from Apocalypse Now. A striking sight, I think you’ll agree. This is done to kill any vermin in the undergrowth, and careful attention is paid to contain the blaze and avoid any wild fires spreading into neighbouring fields. Which is why cane fires only ever happen at winter time when the temperature is cooler, and the crops are appropriately sheared before hand. We chanced upon this one just as the sun was setting, but I counted four other fields which had been set alight, all within relatively close proximity.

This asylum seeker row in Australia looks likely to unsettle Labor’s chances in the forthcoming election, despite the party taking a more hard line approach and adopting a change in leadership. I find it particularly hard to fathom the notion of the opposition: that so-called ‘boatpeople’ might pose a threat to the Australian way of life and - this reason seems most peculiar - that Australia might not be able to support any more people. Former PM Kevin Rudd put forward the idea of the ‘big Australia’ when he came to power in 2007, with plans to increase the country’s population to 35 million by 2050. Let’s put this into perspective: the population of England is 50 million, and, yes, nearly two thirds of Australia is arid desert - completely uninhabitable - but considering that you can roughly fit around 50 Englands in Australia, we’re still talking about an incredibly vast area of land. If there is anywhere in the world where these desperate people could feasibly go, then surely it is Australia.

The ‘big Australia’ was Rudd’s way of curbing the country’s aging population. As the number of Australians aged between 65 and 84 looks set to double in the next 40 years, there will need to be a steady stream of eligible workers ready to plug the financial gaps, not just to provide the necessary pensions and health provisions required, but to also cover the deficit as new retirees step out of the workforce. And who will plug that gap? Well, there have been three boats full of people since last Sunday who would be quite prepared to help, considering that the vast majority have already been unceremoniously displaced from their own countries (many of Australia’s recent arrivals are from Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq) and have survived a long, arduous and uncertain boat ride in some considerable discomfort just to come here.

Peter van Onselen, writing in The Australian, put it well when addressing the fact that since 2007 - when Kevin Rudd’s Labor came to power - only 4,500 refugees have attempted to seek asylum in Australia, many of which have been assessed as eligible to fit into the country’s yearly quota of 13,750 refugees. “Australia's refugee numbers will always be low because of something called the ocean,” he writes.

But there is a clear notion of ‘not in my back yard’ going on here - as new PM Julia Gillard faces strong local opposition to the building of an offshore processing centre in East Timor, a small Southeast Asian country 400 miles northwest of Darwin. The East Timor parliament rejected the idea on Monday, and Gillard has been playing down the embarrassment ever since, now setting her eyes on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island while negotiating new terms with East Timor in what appears to be a large scale refugee version of ‘Deal or No Deal’. A cartoon in The Weekend Australian by Nicholson depicts Gillard telling a reporter that “we won’t rush our decision” as an octopus sprawls its tentacles over boxes labelled with a number of different locations - a parody of the German octopus who was alleged to have correctly predicted a number of significant results at this year’s World Cup. For Gillard, barely three weeks into her new position, the immigration issue is proving to be her toughest challenge yet.

But the history of Australia’s immigration policy has never run smoothly, and there are echoes in Opposition leader Tony Abbott’s ‘turn back the boats’ rhetoric that, distastefully, conjures up memories of the country’s more extremist past. It is worth noting here that Abbott has since refrained from using this soundbite and even corrected it, claiming that the Opposition (a coalition between the Liberals and the Nationals) will only turn back boats as a deterrent to people smugglers. But still, such corrosive language only acts to highlight inherent concerns about the dangers of immigration, a populist thought from the more right wing members of Australian society.

We’re yet to comment on the 'White Australia' immigration policy, which was inherited by successive parliaments over a period of 72 years, and prohibited people from entering the country on the grounds of race. Moreover, it was only abolished in 1973, after taking a period of roughly 25 years to dismantle.

The argument for such legislation was originally and primarily targeted against Chinese and Japanese labourers who, during the turn of the century, started arriving into Australia in large numbers for work on gold mines and sugar plantations. Chief organiser of the policy, Alfred Deakin, put it like this in 1901: “It is not the bad qualities, but the good qualities of these alien races that make them so dangerous to us. It is their inexhaustible energy, their power of applying themselves to new tasks, their endurance and low standard of living that make them such competitors.” Those wishing to enter the country would have to pass a controversial dictation test, obviously in a language which they couldn’t understand, all as a means of placing “certain restrictions on immigration and to provide for the removal from the Commonwealth of prohibited immigrants,” according to the words of the original Act.

For another example of racially-motivated border provisions, we need to turn to the unsavoury character of Pauline Hanson, a former fish and chip shop owner who started her political life as a Liberal MP, before leading her own One Nation party with a strong anti-immigration stance. She made a fiery maiden speech to the House of Representatives in 1996, which explained how she wanted ‘multiculturalism abolished’, among much else. “If I can invite whom I want into my home,” she said, “then I should have the right to have a say in who comes into my country.”

In 1997, Hanson took the strange step of recording a video of herself to be played in the event of her assassination, leading with the words: “Fellow Australians, if you are seeing me now, it means I have been murdered.” Disconcertingly, One Nation picked up quite a sympathetic following, acquiring one quarter of the vote in the Queensland state elections of 1998, causing a rise in right-wing parties to form across the continent with equally strong and verbal anti-immigration policies.

All of which makes Rudd’s ‘big Australia’ prophesy even more courageous in the face of such opposition from certain ugly factions of society. Of course, we should not confuse these outdated opinions from the very real and prominent issue of Australian immigration today, and Gillard is more than sympathetic to the cause. “There are racists in every country,” she said in a speech on Tuesday in Sydney. “But expressing a desire for a clear and firm policy to deal with a very difficult problem does not make you a racist.” As a mere aside, it is worth remembering that Australia is one of the most culturally diverse countries on the planet: according to the 2006 census, a population count of 20 million included citizens from over 200 countries, with 45% either born overseas or having at least one parent born overseas.

We can only hope that Gillard doesn’t completely U-turn on Labor’s initial plans in the face of mounting pressures, especially as a tactic to merely appease the dissidents and stay in power for another term.


Incidentally, a quick note on the Americanised spelling of ‘Labor’ in this context. There doesn’t appear to be any concrete reasoning for this, as the party was formally known as the Australian Labour Party since their formation in 1908, but then changed the spelling in 1912. So it was clearly a conscious decision. Some credit the change as a way of modernising the party following the influence of the United States labor movement at the turn of the century. Alternatively, it could have been altered as a need to differentiate the party name from the more general labour movement in Australia. Regardless, it seems that both spellings of ‘labour’ were used before the formation of the ALP, so the reason for the variant is all a bit subjective. 


AU Tube: Understanding Australian TV
‘AFL: Western Bulldogs v Port Adelaide’ (Ten)

“Port Adelaide’s forward structure is working a lot better,” says the commentator at the start of the second quarter, which is good to know, although I’m not entirely certain what form a forward structure might take, let alone one whose function is improving. Actually, I’m not really too sure of anything here, as Aussie Rules is a completely baffling sport to me. It’s played predominantly in New South Wales and Victoria, and according to one of my Queenslander friends, “I’m not even sure they understand it.”

It’s phenomenally popular, though, taking up almost daily prime evening slots that something like ‘Coronation Street’ might occupy in the UK, and on a Saturday night too. The Australian Football League is the official governing body, mass marketed just like the English Premier League, and it’s commonly referred to as ‘footy’ by its followers. This, in itself, is quite confusing, as ‘footy’ is also used to describe rugby league (and union, actually), and there have also been calls to refer to soccer as football, further confounding things. This runs the risk of serious social suicide if you’re ever asked whether you saw the footy last night. In Australia, ‘footy’ just about covers everything that involves a pitch, large balls and goals posts.

Speaking of which, there are four posts in this game - two of a slightly smaller size - and different points are allocated to a ball passing through either side. Stick one down the middle and you score even more. This much I can just about fathom, but the rest seems like an absolute free for all: there is no offside rule, as far as I can tell, so the ball can be passed up field, or just booted as far as possible and (hopefully) into the waiting arms of a team mate. Catch it properly and the whistle blows. Players back off and the ball is hoofed up field again. This seems similar to the free pass rule in netball, but there are tackles too, hefty ones, just like in rugby, while the whole game is played on a cricket pitch. To use a cooking euphemism, the sport is basically like a Spanish omelette - a real hodgepodge of ingredients with no one having any idea how they got there.

Incidentally, the Western Bulldogs are Melbourne based, and there is a nice half time excerpt of the team paying a visit to a special indigenous training school in the Northern Territories (tonight’s game is held at Darwin’s TIO Stadium). Roughly 11% of all professional AFL players are indigenous Australians, and the sport is keen to be seen as playing a major part in the regional development of poor, indigenous communities. Furthermore, the AFL’s commitment to the cause is seen as a key motivator in discouraging racism within the sport, which is unfortunately still a bit of an issue. At a charity luncheon earlier this year, high profile former footballer Mal Brown referred to Aboriginal players as “cannibals”. He bizarrely excused himself by saying it was meant as “a term of endearment”. Such instances are also apparent in the other ‘footy’ sports, but seem to be dealt with swiftly and apologetically, even if they do suggest that, behind the scenes at least, these sports are not completely exonerated just yet.

From Wonglepong with Love

Here’s a fun if ultimately juvenile way to spend an arvo: trying to find funny Australian place names. There are many, ranging from Humpty Doo in the Northern Territories right down to Wagga Wagga in New South Wales. The more bizarre locations derive from ancient Aboriginal terms, ranging from names of specific tribes to proverbs, landmarks and respected elders - as in the word ‘bunda’, which means ‘important man’, which when conjoined with the German word for mountain, ‘berg’, creates the name of my current location: Bundaberg.

But still, it’s hard to not crack an immature smile at any of the following: Boing Boing, Wee Waa, Tittybong, Wonglepong, Burrumbuttock, Humpybong, Moolooloo, Woolloomooloo and Bong Bong. But then even the colonialists weren’t seemingly without a sense of humour: there is a creek in South Australia called Cock Wash, while a rather steep mountain in Victoria has been christened Mount Buggery.

All of which leads neatly onto the origins of place names, and just how many locations coined by homesick English settlers are still in circulation today. In an attempt to populate their own piece of Blighty down here in Australia, you will encounter many townships in the country that still hold very recognisable British namesakes, like Ipswich, Croydon, Hungerford and Scarborough in Queensland, to locations in New South Wales like Newcastle, Kendall, Tottenham, Epping and Exeter. There’s a Peterborough in South Australia, a Sheffield in Tasmania, a Highbury in Western Australia and an Ascot in Victoria. This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise considering the names of the states themselves, with Victoria obligatorily named after Queen Victoria, similarly to Queensland, while it was Captain Cook’s original idea to name the whole country New South Wales, in recognition, allegedly, of the Welsh countryside which Cook believed bore a striking resemblance to Australia’s east coast.

I’d like to question Cook’s reasoning here, mostly because when his vessel, the Endeavour, first made contact with the eastern shores of Australia in 1770, he was surveying the botanical wilderness of the accurately named Botany Bay, which is where he first made contact with the natives, noting that “they appear'd to be of a very dark or black Colour but whether this was the real colour of their skins or the C[l]othes they might have on I know not.” He would then run aground in Cooktown (named thereafter) for seven weeks after crashing into the Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest living thing and an area of truly outstanding natural beauty. Now, I’ve been to Wales a few times, and my recollections are somewhat different. That’s all I’m saying.

I was told about Pulled Apart by Horses’ debut on the Triple J radio station via text message. They’re a scrawny bunch of shouty ragamuffins if ever there was one, and while I was drumming in Leeds band Wintermute, we played a number of live shows together and grew to be very good friends. If I think of memories of Leeds, then surely Tom screaming “I’ll make you dance with my balls of fire” on their track 'High Five, Swan Dive, Nose Dive' is pretty much up there as a leading thought. Or maybe the time when we stumbled into the recording of their first EP (we were practising in the same pub at the time) and assisted by shouting backing vocals into the microphone.

Their album is out now on the Transgressive label and their appearance on a Triple J playlist is big news, not solely because it’s the only decent radio station here, but mainly because it broadcasts across the whole country. Local station Hitz FM is particularly un-listenable, boasting about playing ‘today’s best new music’ before launching into 'Come As You Are' by Nirvana (from 1992), or some godforsaken nu-metal record from the late 90s. Its interpretation of ‘new music’ appears to be based solely on playing ‘Bad Romance’ by Lady Gaga three times in one day.

Huge things beckon for these chaps, which is an exciting prospect, and should hopefully be enough to keep them within easy reach of antiseptic and band aids for a very long time. 


AU Tube: Understanding Australian TV
‘Border Security: Australia’s Front Line’ (Seven)

The main reason I wanted to talk about this particular programme is, of course, to discuss rabbits. They may be cage-dwelling bundles of cute, floppy eared domesticity in Britain, but Australia’s relations with the unassuming European rabbit has been quite tumultuous to say the least.

This is largely thanks to an early Somerset-born settler named Thomas Austin, whose pioneering expeditions in the mid nineteenth century saw him eventually acquire 11,736 hectares (around 45 square miles) of land in Victoria. Austin was a member of Victoria’s Acclimatisation Society, whose ill informed if not malicious intention was to introduce new plant and animal life into their new and bountiful environment. Yet Austin’s intentions when he asked his brother to send over 24 grey rabbits from England (along with ‘five hares, 72 partridges and some sparrows’) was less of an attempt at preservation. He wanted them so that he and his guests could enjoy a spot of game shooting. “The introduction of a few rabbits could do little harm and might provide a touch of home, in addition to a spot of hunting,” is how Austin put it at the time, which is just about the gold standard in the history of understatement. Nothing could have been more profoundly to the contrary.

For starters, the fresh pastures and mild Australian winters proved incredibly habitable for rabbits who, being completely new to Australia, enjoyed the freedom of having no natural predators. So they started breeding like, well, rabbits: an average litter size can be between four to eight bunnies, and the female rabbit can produce seven of these a year. Couple that with the fact that new born females can start breeding from six months old and we’ve got a quick and considerable number of rabbits on our hands. So much so that the bilby - Australia’s rabbit equivalent - would almost be driven to complete extinction in the shadow of their new rival. Rising rabbit numbers feasted on native plants and dived into young trees, particularly jeopardising the topsoil on valuable farmland which would take hundreds of years to recover.

One suggestion was to build a giant rabbit proof fence to ebb the growing tide, and three were eventually built in Western Australia. The biggest stretched for over 2,000 miles and was completed in 1907 after taking six years to build. It is now known as the State Barrier Fence as it crosses the state from the north to the south - an incredible feat of engineering which, at the time, cost £337,841 (just under £20 million in today’s money) and, quite annoyingly, didn’t work. European rabbits are known for jumping to an incredible height, as well as being highly adept burrowers. Shooting was (and still is) advised to help control population growth, but this would prove just as futile. Authorities have now turned to more biological means, like the horrifically sounding ‘rabbit haemorrhaging disease virus’ which is highly infectious, causing fatal organ failure and causing a rabbit to be ready for stewing in just under 24 hours.

Although it is unfair to label the fault solely with Thomas Austin and his 24 furry friends (indeed, many other settlers would follow Austin’s lead in introducing small numbers of rabbits into Australia), the current population of European rabbits is predicted to be somewhere over the 200 million mark.

I mention all of this merely as a means of understanding why Australia is so precious, almost to the point of paranoia, with regards to the stability of their sumptuous and unique landscape. Much of the plant and animal life in Australia cannot be found anywhere else in the world, and even the slightest outside interference (like Austin’s 24 rabbits) can cause an awful unbalance. A few weeks back I mentioned the introduction of the cane toad from Hawaii which was designed to feed on the growing numbers of sugar cane beetles busily munching through crops in Queensland, but the toads were quick to concentrate on procreation instead. Since the introduction of 102 toads in 1935, they, like the European rabbit, now number in the hundreds of millions.

Now let us consider those really, really small living things, like micro-organisms found in fungus - like, say, the chytrid fungus, which is currently threatening the lives of many Australian frog species since its introduction into the country. How it got here is a matter of some considerable debate for environmentalists, whether a poisoned specimen somehow entered the country or infected water was at some stage released unknowingly. Regardless, it’s here, and the fungus remains the single biggest threat to amphibian life and the main cause in the decline of over 385 different frog species. Then there is the plant life: the Australian government spends $3.5 billion a year on the management of weeds. It is second to land clearing as the biggest threat to the country’s biodiversity. Half of Australia’s most poisonous weeds have crossed the border deliberately - ‘a third of which as garden ornamentals’.

And so we finally get to why a Chinese lady was having such a hard time from Nadia, a quarantine office at Melbourne airport, on this week’s episode of ‘Border Security’ - a long-running behind-the-scenes look at the day-to-day life of customs officers at Australia’s busiest airports - especially after failing to declare a huge amount of nuts, seeds and plant life buried in her luggage, despite the strict instructions which greet passengers upon entering Australia. Quarantined goods include all foodstuffs, animal products, skins, feathers, wool, bark, dried flowers, fruits and herbs, right down to soil on your shoes and ‘biological specimens including tissue culture.’ Our disgruntled visitor causes a big drama and refuses to budge for five hours after being issued with the on-the-spot fine of $220.

Also featured is a British backpacker trying his best to look unassuming when traces of morphine and methadone are found in his suitcase. More alarming is how closely he seems to resemble me. His interrogation doesn’t go well, particularly when he refuses to visit the toilet alongside a customs officer, but they let him through regardless. “Maybe I look like a dirty, seedy criminal type,” he says, “Maybe it’s the beard.” Speak for yourself, mate.

Kangaruined

The kangaroo may be the internationally recognised symbol for Australia, adorning everything from Qantas airlines to the country’s coinage, but people will still tell you that these giant marsupials can be an absolute menace. You may be shocked to learn that you can legally shoot wild kangaroos here, both for commercial and non-commercial purposes (if not being used for their meat and skins, there are strict documents to support killings for “damage mitigation”, “the provision of meat for pest animal control programs” and “recreational hunting”), but the real danger is during their rampant mating seasons (that’s springtime and early summer), when kangaroos can often get a little too close for comfort.

Like in 2003, when New South Wales resident John Crouch, while holidaying in Queensland, was forced to kill a wild kangaroo with an axe when, for no apparent reasons, the creature attacked his wife. They can grow to an incredible size: Crouch’s encounter was with a kangaroo two metres tall. In the wild, away from the close proximity of humans and the security afforded by captivity, kangaroos are known to gather in packs, becoming scarily muscular and really quite fierce. In more built up areas, they are notorious for feeding on marshland near the roadside and can cause untold havoc on the dimly lit highways. Earlier this year, a female driver in the outback of the Northern Territory hit a kangaroo so severely that not only was her car promptly disqualified, but she also found herself in the grossly unfortunate situation of being stranded in some of the most inhospitable terrain with limited means of rescue. It is small wonder that Rolf Harris sang about tying them down.

We travelled to Woodgate, some 20km south of Bundaberg, with the intention of catching a glimpse of these unique creatures in their natural habitat, and sure enough we managed to see this one, and many more besides, merely a few metres from our car. There is something so rewarding about spontaneously catching sight of creatures in the wild, particularly an animal so alien to any other culture. Just remember to keep your seatbelt on.


I wanted to start this week by talking about the Hypervision Optical Measuring System, which is a fantastic machine but, granted, is hardly the sort of conversation starter that will get you noticed at parties. If indeed you have already raised your eyebrows at the mere mention of this, then clearly you are someone well versed in the world of laser optics, but for the rest of us, this expensive machine is single-handedly responsible for why farmhands may be finding it hard to get work in the Bundaberg area. And here’s why.

An OMS can not only distinguish between various types of freshly picked produce, but can also utilise this information to separate vast quantities into different sizes, colour and quality. At the farm where I am currently employed, hundreds of thousands of locally picked grape tomatoes are fed into one of these machines on a continuing daily basis, where each tomato is individually scanned and differentiated in increments of mere microns. It is the centrepiece of a large refrigerated warehouse, permanently set at a chilly temperature between 10 and 12 degrees. Using laser optics, it takes the OMS a thousand to a million points per second to detect the correct grade of a single tomato, a job that could take a team of manual labourers weeks to perform, and at some considerable expense to the farmer. But despite this astonishingly efficient technology, the kangaroo item took the lead, but that’s mainly because it had a better pun.

But still, this doesn’t fully disengage those workers who are willing to manually separate fruit for a living, something which - unless there is some form of devious sexual thrill to be derived from frisking through small red tomatoes that I’m not yet aware of - is ultimately a thankless and monotonous task. I work with six graders whose job it is to pick out inadequate tomatoes prior to being placed into small punnets, which are then weighed, labelled and stacked for shipment to supermarkets across the country and beyond, to locations as far flung as Darwin, Sydney, Tasmania and New Zealand. They work in what is deridingly called the ‘dog box’. On a busy day, we are personally responsible for the shipment of somewhere in the region of 22,000 punnets, and each item of fruit has had to meet the regimentally high standards of each individual grader. That’s just a little something to think about when you next find yourself in the fruit aisle at Tesco’s.

The staff are kept in check by Crystal, the farmhouse matron who appears to have trained at the Heinrich Himmler school for workplace motivation. When she is not berating the workers or threatening them with the sack, she is offering remarkably confounding advice. For example, I was once told to hurry up while grading, but take my time in doing so. Her passive aggression is the schoolroom equivalent of asking to borrow a pencil, and then punching you in the arm for taking too long.

Much more amiable is the 17 year old Joel, who I have talked about before. For someone so cheerful, he is strangely bemused by Owen, one of the older workers who looks a bit like Richard Dreyfus and has the sensible, compassionate demeanour of a TV handyman. “I don’t understand people who are happy all the time,” he says, which is agreeable, especially when your job is to look at fruit all day.

He also possesses a remarkable turn of phrase. I once asked Joel if he feels lucky. “If it wasn’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.” On skydiving, he asks simply, “Why would I jump out of a plane if there was nothing wrong with it?” Baring in mind that he dropped out of school two years ago, it is still sometimes difficult to see how there is nearly a ten year age gap between us.

Our good friend Julie sums up the job like this: “It is the only prison camp where they let you out at night.” There is certainly an almost military edge to proceedings, with all staffers required to wear a uniform of white lab coats, latex gloves and, for an extra swipe at any last remaining dignity, a hairnet. A friend once asked me whether I also had to wear a beard net. These do exist, by the way, and would essentially mean that I would be spending a typical shift of 10 to 12 hours with a bag covering my entire head.

As a final note, I would like to add that it is a sobering thought to know that if you were to die tomorrow, it would be to absolutely no consequence to the synchronised procedure of working life down at the farm, other than it might cause a slight upset to their rota system. And, even more tragically, when it comes to identifying the body, you will almost certainly be wearing a hairnet.


AU Tube: Understanding Australian TV
‘Miracles’ (ABC1)

Occasionally you catch a show that just boggles your brain, and this new ‘extraordinary stories’ series does just that. The format reminds me of the BBC’s ‘999’ which featured the dramatic tones of Michael Buerk and a roster of amateur reconstructions which, by comparison to this, now look like quite trivial if undoubtedly horrific stories of misfortune. ‘999’ was a terrifying show which made a kid stuck down a well look like some kind of hostage takeover situation, and never failed to give me nightmares. ‘Miracles’ focuses instead on such unfathomable acts of human survival that, despite its title of biblical proportions, couldn’t really be called anything else.

Tonight focuses on Polish-born paraglider Ewa Wisnierska, who in 2007 was practicing in New South Wales for an upcoming competition when the weather down south took an unexpected turn for the worst. Recorded footage on the day shows fellow paragliders observing large, ominous looking clouds appearing before them and promptly gliding to the ground. But the incoming storm would prove too quick for some, and before Wisnierska could find time to react, she would find herself caught up in fierce winds and, in a freakish incident appropriately called ‘cloud suck’, lifted between two cumulonimbus clouds. Wisnierska was now, quite literally, in the eye of the storm, climbing upwards at a rate 20 metres per second to an altitude of (get this) 32,600 feet. That’s nearly 10km off the ground.

While up there, she passes out from hypoxia (caused by a lack of oxygen) and drifts, high above the storm, just below the earth’s stratosphere where the temperate reaches a startling -50 degrees. It is here where she hovers for somewhere within the region of 30 to 45 minutes, before her glider collapses and she falls unconsciously to the ground at a speed of 200km an hour.

Now for the miracle. Not only does the wing of her glider spontaneously reopen, but she summarily regains consciousness due to the increase in oxygen. Despite being covered in ice, she then manages to somehow muster enough energy to navigate herself away from the plight of the storm and land safely, some three and a half hours after taking off. Her superhuman survival is made all the more poignant when we learn of Chinese pilot He Zhongpin, who was only 500 metres away from Wisnierska when he was also sucked into the cloud, only to be struck by lightening and killed instantly.

Ruddy Hell

“A great day for redheads,” says new Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard on Thursday’s ‘7.30 Report’, following an exciting 24 hours which saw the doe eyed, silver haired Kevin Rudd on the receiving end of a rather severe political shafting from a fractious Labor Party who said, quite coldly, that enough was enough. He didn’t even bother to call a vote in the end, knowing that his Deputy had enough power to really stick the knife in. And as well as being a proud redhead, she’s a Sheila too, if you haven’t noticed: Australia’s first female leader but, more alarmingly, the country’s third PM in three years. If Opposition Leader Tony Abbott wins this year’s upcoming election, he will become the fourth. How’s that for consistency.

Conjuring up regretful memories of Sarah Palin’s ‘hockey moms’ banter, some critics are concerned with the reaction of Australia’s ‘soccer mums’, who might not support Gillard’s lectures on family values given that she is unmarried and without children. You have to feel a bit sorry for the pressure now bestowed upon Gillard’s partner of five years, Tim Mathieson, who has the unprecedented task of being Australia’s first man - the country’s first first man, if you will. He’s a Melbourne based estate agent and the two met when he was Julia’s hairdresser, which is the sort of boring anecdote that you would probably hear couples recount on a game show. Mathieson will do well to jump into his charity work, already becoming a patron of the Australian Men’s Sheds Association (among many more reputable ones). ‘Sheds’ isn’t an acronym, by the way. This is a group that “encourages men to get together and talk about their problems in a familiar environment.” Sounds great. I’ll get my toolbox.

But debating Australia’s immigration policy may be a conflicting one for Gillard; as Abbott wheels out his ‘turn back the boats’ soundbite at every opportunity, hopefully Julia will maintain Labor’s seemingly more sensible approach, especially considering her background as a Welsh-born immigrant who settled in Australia as part of the country’s ‘£10 Pom’ scheme in the 1960s. I’ve been reading about Julia’s small southern Welsh birthplace of Cwmgwrach, which translates, rather alarmingly, as ‘the Valley of the Witch’. She moved into a terraced house in Barry where, if politics hadn’t beckoned and Julia had stayed put, I like to picture her now as an Aunty Gwen type character from ‘Gavin & Stacey’, enjoying a sip of mint Bailey’s while cooking up an omelette.

Joking aside, this is clearly an issue of image control for Labor and nothing more, with no clear divisions made on Rudd’s policies aside from attempting to form some sense of cohesion within the party in the run up to a big election which sees the opposition vastly ahead in the polls. Kevin Rudd famously ousted long standing right winger John Howard in the general election of 2007, but his unceremonious rejection on Thursday morning proves just how far his favour had fallen - from rejection on sweeping climate change policy to an angry, embittered battle with the mining industry following his failure to budge on a 40% super tax initiative.

Gillard says that she’s willing to reopen discussion on these issues, as well as concentrate on her education reforms which she spearheaded as Deputy, although she is yet to ascertain any major policy shifts. But the coup seems to be paying off in some opinion polls, with ABC Online putting her at 54% to win the next election.

No sooner had I made last week’s quirky Queenslander comments do we meet Lillian, who is as mad as a Russian van. “These are called piss flaps,” she tells us, pointing at the front of a pair of navy uniform trousers. We’ve just moved into her home as house sitters, and Lillian (a fascinating, all-swearing so-called ‘bushie’) is enjoying showing us around. “You won’t need to get a DVD out, we’ve got drawers full of the bastards.” Lillian then randomly picks out a porcelain statuette of a holy man praying with a naked lady between his legs: “look at this shit,” she says, “have you ever seen anything like it?” Heavens no, of course not, but this house is full of such ornamental barminess, like her cuddly kangaroo which sings ‘Down Under‘ by Men at Work. The whole song. Thank goodness the batteries still work.

You’ll be pleased to see that I have attached a picture of the statue just to satisfy your curiosity.

I’ve been reading up on the outback, and some of those early, brave, and downright barking pioneers who first settled and worked on some of the country’s most feral and inhospitable lands. There are still vast swathes of Australia which are relatively untouched by human hand, some areas where the only inhabitants are tribal, and as people continue to get a grip on such an immense continent, the list of people who have endeavoured throughout history to discover more about the place makes for utterly compelling reading. There are many stories to choose from, like the country’s first postmen, who (for the price of a two pence postage stamp), would trapeze through the most life threatening conditions imaginable - floods, fires, bushrangers and dangerous wildlife - just to deliver Her Britannic Majesty’s Mail to the country‘s most far flung regions.

For example, in 1838, John Conway Bourke, the first overland mailman, was lumbered with the job of delivering letters to Yass from Melbourne every fortnight, a 200 mile distance of uncharted terrain, on his lonesome with only his horse, a shotgun, and his mailbag for company, which according to his memoirs, “made a very comfortable pillow.” In one instance, his horse is stranded while crossing the soft clay of the River Hume, and as he swims to safety to seek help from the locals (“almost as naked as when I was born”) he is attacked by a pack of wild dogs and forced to escape up the nearest gum tree. Protesting his credentials to the farmer, who is now aiming a shotgun at Bourke, the man replies, “So you are the mailman then? Well, I don’t think much of your uniform.”

But turn to the story of Frank Birtles for something really barmy and inspiring in equal measure. According to Outback Heroes by Patsy Adam-Smith, by 1911, Birtles (pictured) had “cycled seven times across the continent and twice around it - taking a new route on each trip.” Just ponder that for a moment. Now the next question you’re probably thinking is, understandably, “why?” As well as food and water, he carried with him 300lbs of photography equipment, taking pictures and writing about his discoveries along the way.

In 1909, he peddled over 3,000 miles in 44 days from Freemantle in Western Australia to Sydney. His diary demonstrates just how perilous this particular trip was. Here he is on the quest for fresh water: “Had to choose between ‘stewed rabbit’ water or the evil smelling ‘muss’ that the camels had been wading in. I took the latter.” Birtles suffers niggling issues, like quite severe injuries (“cut my heel badly; sand making it fester”) to a number of rather close shaves, best summarised with great flippancy when describing a 70,000 mile round trip from Sydney and back again in 1911. “Crocodile crawled out onto a sandbank in the middle of the stream,” he writes. “Fired a bullet at him… grilled about eight pounds of it for tea, salted the rest.”

His journey through the Kimberley foothills is equally disturbing: “Run over a small spinifex snake, which bit me on the front of the right leg. Pinched the flesh, cut piece out. Leg black and blue; not hurting much; let blood run freely; feel very thirsty.” Of course, if it wasn’t for people like Birtles and his overwhelming audacity, then we wouldn’t have acquired even a small measure of the knowledge that we now know about such an overwhelming environment. The outback is full of these wondrous stories, ones which I will no doubt divulge freely in the coming months.


AU Tube: Understanding Australian TV
‘Neighbours’ (Channel Ten)

So, during a week of such monumental political change, I’ve been watching ‘Neighbours’, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. The more observant amongst you will know that Britain is six months behind in the TV scheduling, so if you don’t want to know what’s going on, feel free to stop reading now and, with the greatest respect, maybe get a life.

Luckily, the soap remains as sugar coated and eccentric as ever and much better than ‘Home & Away’, which is on during the prime ‘Coronation Street’ slot and treated with equal reverence, while ‘Neighbours’ seems to be cruelly sidelined in the early evening. Channel Ten cram three advert breaks into their daily dosage from Ramsay Street, which is tiring, and the show has suffered in the UK since its move to Channel Five, usually the bedrock of morally reprehensible product like bad American TV and sex comedies.

But I have to admit a liking for ‘Neighbours’, ever since Hannah was trapped down a drain for a whole episode, and especially when Harold Bishop turned into a mentalist for a week, and also given the fact that no brewing storyline couldn’t be resolved without a freak plane crash or a fire at Lassiter’s.

Paul Robinson - who is the only remaining character to have depressingly been on the show since it started - now resembles a psychotic Phillip Schofield as he retains his role as being Erinsborough’s number one bastard with his blackmailing of Jared Rebecki, better known as comic moron ‘Toadie’ who has now thinned out and is expecting a child with Steph Skully. I remember when he was at school, for Christ’s sake. He’s been dodgy dealing as Paul’s lawyer but wants out, so as a disproportional response, Paul hires a private detective to tap his phone line. “You can’t expect miracles in a couple of hours,” says the sleuth. “That’s exactly what I expect,” Paul beams with veins pulsing. “I want results now!” He sips from a mug with the words ‘I Like Me’ in bold letters. What a bastard.

Around the corner, Susan Kennedy is being stalked. It’s got to be someone at the school where she teaches, they think, as her work email is plagued with death threats. It’s good to see her and Karl back together with Libby in tow, considering that Libby appeared to change her identity at one point, and especially since Susan so tragically lost her memory, believing that she was living in the 1960s and failing to recognise even her own husband. Mind you, marriage to Karl Kennedy must be about as exciting as shopping for a door wedge, so who can blame her.

Hoons, Chooks and Pashing

There is a great chapter in every guide book which relates to language. My Australian one says that ‘Strine’ (a word used to describe Australian-English) “can sound like a profound Cockney intonation piped through the nose.” They certainly seem to elongate their vowels and substitute t's for d's much like the Cockney accent, but there are some words which just don’t compute, things that I have had to question and, in extreme cases, look up. Here are some of them. I’m sure there will be more.

arvo: afternoon. “I’ll see you in the arvo.” 
chook: chicken. Fast food places like Red Rooster will serve you a whole chook, and delicious it is too. It’s like a fast food version of Nando’s, if you can imagine such a thing. 
daggy: uncool, out of style. “I know it’s a bit daggy, but I collect antique chamber pots/play chess on my own/listen to James Morrison” etc.
dinkum: meaning honest or true. If you heard “is he fair dinkum?” that would mean “is he for real/is he serious?”
hoon: hooligan, generally reserved for shouting at young people on loud motorbikes.
ocker: an unsophisticated country type who is really, really Australian, to the point where you would probably have to squint a little to understand them. I’m not yet sure whether this term is used affectionately or as a bit of an insult.
pash: kissing, full on, with tongues and everything.
pokie: a slot machine, like a one-armed bandit. Some bigger bars seem to have entire rooms dedicated to these, not to mention large numbers of gamblers and their small change.
schooner: the largest beer glass in Queensland, which is the maximum amount that you can be served in a bar and is smaller than an English pint. The glass size below a schooner is called a ‘pot’.
servo: service station. This habit of abbreviating words is popular, which seems to add to the somewhat casual informality of the place. I wasn’t sure whether ‘servo’ was just one of those slang terms which becomes part of the vernacular but is not generally embraced outside of local communities, but thankfully I stand corrected. I have spotted road signs with ‘BP Servo’ written in big letters, which I find completely endearing.
sluggos: small swimming shorts, like Speedo’s. In February, opposition leader Tony Abbott was photographed in sluggos as he competed in a swimming competition (pictured above), causing many to criticise the politican for using the opportunity as a publicity stunt. That may be true, but I don’t think he looks all that bad in what is certainly a difficult look to carry, especially when you consider the David Cameron equivalent.
smoko: break time at work, which used to relate to a cigarette break but now seems to embrace all worktime restbites.
stickybeak: to take a look, as in to ‘stick your beak’ into something. A bank clerk said this while I was opening an account and trying to get my brain around all the different rates of interest and saver deals open to me, so throwing in a word like stickybeak certainly didn’t help.
stubby: a small bottle of beer, a larger bottle is called a ‘tallie’ and a can of beer is a ‘tinnie’.
stubby holder: a fabric or foam case to keep your stubby or tinnie cold, which is an essential outdoor item. The better novelty ones usually have comic, beer-related quips written on the side, things like “if it’s not at your local, then move house,” and so on.
Tim Tam: a chocolate biscuit, like the McVities Penguin bar. There is a really adventurous way to eat these with any hot beverage - simply bite off the corners of opposite ends and slurp your drink through a specially designed air pocket which runs through the chocolatey centre. And yes, people actually do this. It’s mucky business, and takes dunking to a whole new level.

But if you want to get your head around some of the country’s most famous linguistic luxuries, then simply consult their adopted national anthem, Waltzing Matilda, written by the bush poet Banjo Paterson in 1887. It’s full of such rich verse that, even today, it takes a little bit of decoding, particularly for an Englishman. For example, here are the opening lyrics:

Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong
Under the shade of a coolabah tree,
And he sang as he watched and waited 'til his billy boiled
“You'll come a-Waltzing Matilda, with me”

Now, firstly you will need to know what a swag is in order to understand what a swagman would be doing with one. A swag is a waterproof bed, and a swagman was the name given to a traveller living hand to mouth and working from farm to farm. He’s camped by a billabong (a lake), under a coolabah tree (a eucalyptus tree, the like of which are found across Australia), waiting for his billy (a portable kettle) to boil, singing to himself about carrying his matilda (a bag containing all of his belongings).

Similar to the British national anthem, people will struggle to recite all of the verses to this popular folk song, but if you read it all, you'll notice that things don’t turn out too grand for our jolly swagman. He steals and eats a sheep, only for the farmer to alert the authorities and have him arrested, but before the police catch up to him, he commits suicide by drowning himself in the billabong. Paterson concludes his lyrics with the spirit of the swagman haunting the site: And his ghost may be heard as you pass by that billabong, "You'll come a-Waltzing Matilda, with me". Spooky.

I hadn’t realised until reading up on the history of British colonialism in Australia that, throughout the 80 years that they were sending convicts here (160,000 in total), different allocated states and islands were used to separate the various classes of criminal. The first ships would arrive from Portsmouth into New South Wales on 26 January 1788 (now the celebrated Australia Day) after a journey of eight months, which adds a little perspective on the 24 hour flight that it takes today. They docked in Sydney and, over time, the city would form the designated home for solely those charged with petty theft and embezzlement. For really violent sorts who were fond of escaping, these were sent to an island (of course) off the coast of Victoria, which was then called Van Dieman’s Land, named after Anton van Diemen, governor of the Dutch East Indies who sponsored Abel Tasman’s journey to the island in 1642, later to be rechristened Tasmania in his honour. As for the ‘worst kind of felons’ - those who were deemed so bad that any free settlers wishing to live near them were banned from doing so inside a 50 mile radius - well, where do you think they were sent? Yep. That would be Queensland.

What they would have found, of course, were acres of tropical wilderness, enriched soil for vegetation and fine grazing for livestock, and underfoot, an abundance of natural, profitable resources from coal to gold. Compared to the squalor of an overcast, over-populated Britain, you can’t help but feel that these were some of the luckiest prisoners in the world.

A booming economy was waiting to be exploited here, although life was by no means easy, and you wonder whether Joseph Banks, the president of the Royal Society (pictured) who came up with the whole penal colony idea in the first place, had really thought it through carefully enough. The temperatures during the summer months in Australia would prove far too hot for the prisoners to work, and being city folk, they had little experience on how to cultivate crops or work on the land. As a result, and despite such obvious potential, those first fledgling steps in their new habitat would result in famine and hardship. Then there was the small matter of the natives, but that’s a whole other story, and one that I promise to come back to.

So there seems to have developed a north/south divide along the east coast between Queenslanders and those from New South Wales, who consider some northern folk to be, well - and putting this in the nicest possible way - bonkers. Whether this links to its colonial history, who knows, or maybe its just something about the heat. I couldn’t possibly pass judgement on this, being as I’m yet to spend any time in New South Wales, so I mention all of this merely as an aside to the real story that I wanted to discuss, which concerns the locals at my farm here in Bundaberg. All of them perfectly pleasant, but a select few perhaps meeting this prescribed assumption.

Like Mavis, who on my first day introduces herself as ‘Billy’ - she prefers it, she tells me, which is absolutely fine, although everyone else still calls her Mavis, which certainly puts one at risk of huge social embarrassment. There is a young girl, perhaps a similar age to myself, who has outwardly refused to engage in any form of prolonged conversion, and seems idly happy to spend her lunch breaks staring into a wall. The teenagers, however, are all smiling workhorses and much better at the job than me, like Joel, who didn’t get on too well at school and left in Year 10. There’s a slightly wild eyed look about him, especially when he laughs and tells me “why should I go to school when I’ve got a PS3 at home and a 50 inch plasma screen?” A tough decision for any 16 year old, certainly.

The ever-charming Bill Bryson has looked into other reasons why Queenslanders are allegedly “madder than cut snakes” in his brilliant book, Down Under. “For almost two decades the state was under the control of Joh Bjelke-Peterson, an eccentric, right-wing state premier who at one time seriously entertained the notion of blowing up parts of the Great Barrier Reef with small atomic bombs to create shipping channels.” There are anecdotes denoting the ‘crazy’ behaviour of Queenslanders in most Australian books, like the one Bryson explains, about an American tourist asking for salad to go with his meat and potatoes while staying at a Queensland hotel. The waitress turns to the other guests in disgust and says, “this bastard thinks it’s Christmas.” “In a word,” he concludes, “Queensland has a reputation for being a place apart.”

Now I would like to stress at this point that I am in no way suggesting that these select Queenslanders are indicative of a whole state, and with an area as large as Queensland it would be completely absurdist to suggest so. But they certainly don’t act as an exception to the rule, and that’s all I’m saying.


AU Tube: Understanding Australian TV
‘Santo, Sam & Ed’s Cup Fever’ (SBS)

All of the World Cup games on SBS are preceded by this comedy show, recorded live from Melbourne in front of a studio audience. I’ve caught it a couple of times this week and it is funny, in places, like an extended version of the 2 Good, 2 Bad section at the end of ‘Match of the Day 2’.

Here, a deadpan trio of established comedians (Santo Cilauro, Sam Pang, Ed Kavalee) host a round up of the day’s results with an extended look over the more absurdist moments from the previous day’s games. This includes excerpts of convoluted commentary, officials falling over, plenty of references to the vuvuzelas and a regular gag like Take On My Nuts, featuring the ‘hilarious’ image of a wall of players protecting their groins. The boys are clutching at straws a bit here, so lets hope there is a contingency plan for when the tournament reaches the later stages and the gags, as well as the games, start to dry up.

Better are the pre-recorded skits, like the Socceroo player Mark Bresciano’s Cup Diary, which has the midfielder commenting more on what he had for lunch rather than his training (trust me, it's funnier than it sounds), and then when it stops being silly to talk to special guests, like Dutch legend John van 't Schip who featured on last night’s show. The hosts suddenly prove themselves as not only gag blowers but also, reassuringly, big fans of the game, which certainly helps.

The SBS coverage might not be the slick, revolving, multicoloured stat fest that something like Sky would be rolling out, or the come hither homeliness of the cuddly Beeb, but at least they’re showing all of the games live, even repeating full matches at more sociable hours, as well as putting together a more serious round up of highlights. So this show acts as a nice alternative look at a sport which, we were led to believe, the Australians don’t even particularly like.

But let’s not forget that I am writing all of this as a frustrated England fan, and given our goalless draw with Algeria was so painfully dull that, at one point, the director chose to instead focus on a bird which had rested on one of the goal nets, then perhaps laughter is the best and only medicine.

Ball or Nothing

England’s first game against the United States was broadcast live here at 4.30am, which certainly didn’t deter associated company from opening a few cans of beer. I’m not sure whether I’m happy to not be so bombarded with all the hysteria of this year’s World Cup, which could probably pass in Bundaberg with all the significance of a school fun run. If previous experience is anything to go by, England seem to overestimate the collective talents of their footballers to such a degree that nothing short of complete disappointment will do. So credit must go to Robert Green for maintaining our track record of goalkeepers with hands like Swiss cheese. He must have seen the Sun headlines flash in front of him before the ball had even trickled over the line. Poor bastard. Let’s put it down to nerves and move on.

Tim Cahill is the big name around here for the superbly titled Socceroos, who received a visit from John Travolta this week to offer some imperative strategic advice ahead of their game tonight with big hitters Germany, their toughest challenge of the group. Cahill is the commercial face of Australian soccer, but Mark Schwarzer and Harry Kewell are prominent too, although the effect of their endorsements have, in my eyes, been very slight. These players were all part of the team’s second round success in 2006, but before then Australia hadn’t qualified for the competition since 1974, and their star players will be past their prime before the next competition in four years time. Despite this, a new book called Soccernomics is claiming that Australia is set to become a huge footballing nation, and that “[a] century from now, Aussie rules might exist only at subsidised folk festivals”. An unlikely thought, although their claim that more youngsters are taking up the sport over rugby could suggest otherwise.

So that’s a thought to chew on, particularly if the Socceroos prove successful at this year’s event, and especially if FIFA accept their ongoing bid to host the 2022 event, which sounds to me like a splendid idea.

So, a bit more detail on where I’m currently living. Bundaberg (or ‘Bundy’ to the locals) is a good 240 miles north of the Queensland state capital, Brisbane, and the first thing you notice is how remarkably flat the landscape is. The best way to view the city is from the Hummock, an inactive volcano turned lookout spot which may only be 96 metres above sea level but still offers a wide enough view of the whole area, from the sea as it brushes the shores of Bargara in the east (a lovely holiday resort with dramatic beachside views and regarded as the starting point of the Great Barrier Reef), to views of the region’s crucial Burnett River, where it is said that pioneering aviator Bert Hinkler flew his aircraft underneath the river’s railway bridge. There is even a bust of Hinkler near the site to celebrate the fact.

Hinkler is one of Bundaberg’s most famous residents, and forgive me for a moment while I bore you with why: Bert may have travelled to England to learn his trade, but his hometown would remain a crucial location for many of his most notably records, eventually settling his light aircraft here after being the first pilot to fly solo from England to Australia in 1928, taking only 15 and a half days to do it (beating the former record by nearly two weeks).

He had a superb mathematical intellect, too, and created technologies during the first world war which would go on to be used in the second. He would also be the first to fly solo across the South Atlantic in 1931 - a remarkable feat, given that for part of the journey he was flying with limited to no visibility. Poor Hinkler’s technical abilities would eventually fail him, however, while attempting to beat a new solo flight record of only 8 days from England to Australia, losing contact while flying over the Tuscan Mountains in 1933. The original landing site of his 1928 journey has now been renamed Hinkler Park in his honour, and you can even visit his Southampton home, which was transported from England to Bundaberg brick by brick and is now a museum on the site of the city’s botanical gardens.

Tall, dense sugar cane fields dominate the surrounding landscape which have thrived in the subtropical temperatures since the first sugar mill opened here in 1882, thus providing the city with global trading potential and a burgeoning economy. Sugar is transported from Bundaberg as well as processed here to create the molasses which is used in the city’s most famous export, Bundaberg Rum, which is available across the world as well as other associated products, but more on this later. In certain areas, when the sugar cane is harvested, huge fields are dramatically set alight to burn any dry leaves and to rid the fields of any damaging infestations, most notably from poisonous snakes, with taipans and brown snakes being the most likely to lurk in the undergrowth.

Farming work in Bundaberg attracts a huge number of backpackers to the area, and more than enough converted hostels to accommodate them. This makes a journey to the supermarkets quite interesting, with communities of Japanese, American and European tourists milling along the aisles. The population here is only 70,000, but that’s still enough to make Bundy within the top 30 most populated cities in the whole of Australia. 26th, to be precise. But the area is large, and residents are free to live in plenty of space, in homes that have become synonymous with the state (called ‘Queenslanders’) which are built on stilts to help cool the inside of the house, especially during the humid summer months. The average yearly temperature in Bundaberg is 26 degrees. July is when it gets really cold here, well, in Queensland terms, with an average low of just under 10 degrees in the winter time.

Given such clear days, I would certainly suggest a trip up to the Hummock at nightfall. Given the flat of the land, the skyline seems to stretch for an unimaginable distance, with the most breathtaking sunsets you’re ever likely to see. A glorious mixture of deep orange splits the burning clouds on one side and is replaced by the first signs of stars from behind you, often simultaneously, and you can almost feel the night creep up on you, like a blanket slowly being lifted. And the stars! Following an evening drive, we step outside and arch our heads for a hypnotising spell under the clear night sky. It takes a few moments for your eyes to adjust to such splendour: not only does the moon seem to glow with even more luminance, but you can clearly see the Milky Way with an almost divine potency (no, seriously), and the most famous constellation of the southern hemisphere, the Southern Cross, which is so symbolically important to the country that it features prominently on the country’s flag.

When describing the sky to you now, the word ‘vast’ doesn’t seem to be a big enough word, but vast it is, and completely spellbinding: with daily magnificence like this, it quickly becomes apparent what people mean when they describe Australia as a truly magical place. I can’t wait to discover more.


AU Tube: Understanding Australian TV
‘Deal or No Deal’ (Channel 7)

I’m convinced that you can tell a lot from a country just by how they approach the concept of ‘Deal or No Deal’. A Dutch creation, lest we forget, but just look at how the Brits interpret it: eccentric plebs add camaraderie and real-life drama to opening random boxes, while Noel ‘Crinkly Bottom’ Edmunds hosts with his hairy faced faux charm. It’s mostly a self-conscious effort to appear high spirited in the face of inevitable, crushing disappointment, and no one does that better than the Brits.

The Australian version takes it’s cues, seemingly, from both 1980s American game shows and the sort of crazy-ass Japanese delirium that would probably have the word ninja in the title. The ker-razy host is Andrew O’Keefe, who makes Noel Edmunds look like some boring parking attendant, as he poses and pouts like a coke-filled, malfunctioning Brian Conley. In attempts to keep the quick-talking, epileptic nature of the show pumping, his banter is short and reactionary. Today it’s Carol’s game, and she’s a full time carer looking after her 86 year old father who wants to save enough money for a trip to Holland. “You’re not taking your Dad with you, then?” O’Keefe asks from his gurning face. “I don’t think he’d make it,” she replies, still trying to maintain the forced frivolity of the setup, but luckily he’s not really listening. “OK then!” he yells.

And then there are the rules, which seem to have been made up as they go along, with crazy bonus games thrown in just to confound the viewer further. There are 26 suitcases, with numerical values from 50c to a maximum of $200,000 (and a car, for some reason); contestants are chosen at random from the audience and play along with their best friend, with the audience members opening the cases. They can play along too by guessing the contents of their own box, and if correct, they win $500. And there’s none of this ‘lets talk to the banker’ chicanery - the offers flash up on screen like the values on a slot machine. So far, so relatively comprehensible.

Then, about halfway through, the screen goes mad and Carol has to take a ‘Megaguess’, where random monetary amounts appear on screen. She says one of them, then everyone in the audience groans, there’s a brief moment of unexplained despair and then play continues, leaving no clues as to what just happened. Then, at the end, they wheel out the ‘Supercase’, which is like the gamble option at the end of ‘Bruce Forsyth’s Play Your Cards Right’, where you can opt to sabotage your overall winnings in favour of eight possible choices. It doesn’t really matter what the player wants to do, though, because O’Keefe bullies them into gambling anyway. Luckily for Carol, it pays off, and she goes home with $30,000.

But I’m yet to mention the ‘Dealettes’, who work in the ‘Dealadrome’ and deliver the 26 suitcases in a get up of identikit blond bobs and blue, sequined dresses. The girls seem to be a prominent feature in just about every other format of the show across the world except Britain, where perhaps the idea of cookie cutter trolley dollys is, I don’t know, a little bit dated, perhaps. And kind of sexist too, actually. All of this happens in less than 30 minutes, by the way, and the whole thing feels like being trapped in an arcade with the fire alarm going off.

Pommy Bashing

I was accused in last week’s blog of not being very funny, so here’s a joke to kick things off: how do you get a Pom out of a bar? Turn on the tap.

No, I don’t understand it either, but I think it has something to do with the representation over here of the English taking a somewhat relaxed approach to personal hygiene. There’s a similar joke about hiding a stash of money under the one place that a Pommy would never look - the soap dish.

Contrary to the notion of the Brits supposedly possessing the ability to laugh at themselves, there is a committee of 14 ex-pats based in Perth and Melbourne who seem determined to disprove the rule: the British People Against Racial Discrimination (BPARD) complained to the Advertising Standards Board when beer brand Tooheys went with the slogan “cold enough to scare a Pom” on their campaign posters in 2006. (That’s another stereotype, the one about the Brits drinking beer at room temperature). The ASB confirmed that the term Pom was not derogatory and cleared the ads, despite the organisation’s spokesperson David Thomason claiming that the word was comparable to terms like “wog, wop, dink, dago, coon and abo.” He continues: “The worst you hear from the Barmy Army is that Aussies are sheep shaggers and you all live in a penal colony.”

This is all news to me, but clearly these terms are bandied about jovially and without malice, usually during large sporting occasions like, for example, the Ashes, where both sets of fans give as good as they get. Incidentally, when this story broke in Australia, News.com.au went with the glorious headline “Don’t call us Poms, say Poms” which, you have to admit, is really quite funny.

You really can’t be expected to live in Australia if you don’t possess a substantial tolerance for creepy crawlies. Leave remnants of food out for more than five minutes on a kitchen work surface and you’ll return to a trail of ants performing the can-can on your breadcrumbs. Flies appear to taunt and heckle you in huge, buzzing numbers. The other day I saw a cockroach, a big one too, rapidly fleeing from under a hump of dry clothes, but these are mere grazes compared to the plague of destruction wrecked by the likes of the Redback, a spider distinguished by a lightening bolt of bright red across its small underbelly, which can render a human quite helpless with a single nip.

It’s the females who you need to keep an eye on: despite their small size, they can lure lizards into their webs, some up to four times their size, and their inhospitable side makes them quite violent lovers, famed for eating the male after copulation. Conveniently, Redbacks are common around Queensland, and I’m told they like small, dark, damp places like, say, the inside of your shoe. “Just give them a shake before you put them on.” That’s some damn good advice right there.

This stuff is unheard of in England, but Australia is sparsely populated, and creatures are free to roam amongst the relative obscurity. Queensland is still a mostly untouched, tropical landscape with acres of baron desert a mere 30 minute drive into the west. A population of some 4.5 million people (that’s roughly the same number as Liverpool) live in an area the size of Western Europe. And (get this), throughout such a vast expanse of unrelenting land, only three roads will take you west and even then you’d probably be quite mad to consider driving out there, not at least without some heavy duty sunscreen and a shotgun. Anything could be out there in such a large and open wilderness, and what an absorbing thought that is. Entire species have fought and survived without much human interference, building up ingenious natural defences that you can’t help but admire, if only from a rather sizeable distance.

For example, you can’t move for cane toads here, and they can get quite feisty at night time, but even these seemingly innocuous creatures have toxic skin, and many animals have perished after ingesting their tadpoles. (Interestingly, the toad is native to South America and was only introduced to Queensland as a means of pest control to help reduce the numbers of cane beetles, so called for their destruction of the local sugar fields. Only 102 were introduced in the 1930s, but it seems that the toads have had other things on their minds besides killing beetles, as the number is now somewhere in the region of 200 million, with their migration patterns heading ever increasingly south at a rate of 25 miles a year. Such an infestation helps to clarify just why the border police here seem so inherently paranoid).

But if the danger’s not in your back garden, then consider the seaside, where you might feel innocently obliged to pick up a cone shell, largely in part due to its intricate and beautiful design, only to disrupt the sleep of the small sea snail lurking inside, who fire poisonous harpoons in self defence. Some species are called ‘cigarette snails’ because (and how Australian is this) you only have roughly the same amount of time to smoke a cigarette before the venom takes hold and summons you to the big clam in the sky.

Disturbing, yes, but then consider what’s in the sea itself: upon a trip to Coonarr Beach, a stretch of pristine east coast shoreline upon which you could feasible walk for several miles without encountering another human being (and that’s on a busy day), eagles circle the ocean looking for shoals of fish, but no matter how tempting it looks, my girlfriend warns me not to go in. “If there are a lot of fish, that probably means that there are quite a few sharks out there.” Oh, righto.

I’ve had quite a few of you asking about how the quiff is holding up in these sub tropical temperatures. Well, it’s going pretty well, and thank you for asking. Although at a recent encounter with a hairdresser (and I believe that this incident may just about warrant the name ‘quiffgate’), where upon asking for an Elvis Presley look (circa 1956), I instead receive a Ronan Keating look (circa 1994) - razor short sides and spiky, not curled. But thank you for your concern people - I’m sure Quiffwatch will return in due course.

And while we’re readdressing cultural stereotypes, I enjoyed fresh shrimp on the barbie the other day, and delicious they were too, even if the little creatures were still keen to put up a bit a fight right up to the very end. Which goes some way to proving the point that the best way to cook these crustaceans is in boiling water and not on a barbie; pop them straight into brine and the shells are much easier to peel. And the Australians don’t even call them shrimp - they’re prawns. The phrase itself was concocted for a series of commercials presented by Paul Hogan for the Australian Tourist Board in the 1980s aimed at the overseas American market where the notion of barbeque is already quite familiar, not to mention ‘shrimp’.


AU Tube: Understanding Australian TV
‘Good News Week’ (Ten)

Current affairs panel show which, like the BBC’s ‘Mock the Week’, gives a sizeable platform for stand ups to blow gags and banter, as well as accommodating for larger personalities to show their lighter side. Like current Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who famously appeared on the sit-down Q&A section of the show earlier in the year. It’s presented by Paul McDermott, a prick-haired former novelty singer with a tendency to laugh at his own jokes.

Regular panel members include Akmal, an Egyptian Uncle Fester, and Tom Gleeson, dressed as an IT technician. Gleeson plays the cheery-faced geek card and is understandably popular here: he’s as much a safe pair of hands as finding Alan Davis on a ‘Q.I.’ line up. Other panellists include Mikey Robins, a version of Tony Blackburn as a platypus, and Fiona O’Loughlin, a Catholic comedian whose steady recovery from alcoholism is, for some rather cruel reason, constantly lampooned. On this week’s episode, she’s also giving up smoking. “If I have to give up one more thing it’ll be my will to live.” She takes the jibes in a self-deprecating manner akin to nearly all Australians that I’ve met, and still manages to be one of the funniest people on the show.

The game is set inside a Rubik’s Cube with intermittent musical asides, most notably from American-born soul singer Marcia Hines, who can be found on the judging panel for ‘Australian Idol’ and delivers two faultlessly rehearsed renditions of ‘You Make Me Feel (Like A Natural Woman)’ during the one show, proclaiming her ageless talents as “black don’t crack.” She’s not particularly funny, rather just happy to be there, as the teams dissect top international news items with a light sprinkling of bad punning (which works) and an undercurrent of Islamophobia (which doesn’t). Of course, you’d have better luck learning about the week’s news if you read the back of a Vegemite lid. And, what with all of Channel Ten’s commercial breaks, it feels like the show goes on for days.