Anzac Day

I’m in a pub full of people screaming.  I have a five dollar note in my hand and I’m using it to tap repeatedly at my head.  All around me are people doing the same, yelling at the top of their voice, gesticulating with notes, fives, tens, even fifties, desperate to find someone to do a deal. 

 At last I spot a big guy at the back of the crowd.  He’s pointing at me and waving, nodding his head yes he’ll do a deal on my five bucks.  He passes his own five over, handing it to a drunk blonde who grabs a small guy in jeans who passes it to his mate to give to me.  With the money in my hand I make eye contact with my opponent to reassure him I remember who he is.  I hold both our notes tight and we wait separated by the heaving crowd.

There are several more minutes of ramshackle dealing until  the sunset stripes the sky outside and the referees begin to calm us down, herding us off the square of carpet we’re on, gently pushing so even the drunkest comply.  

Until now the referees too have been looking for bets, demanding opponents for my hippy friend Karen who’s come to stand beside them.  Having matched her money - the pile of notes lies in the middle of the square between them - they can get us going.

There is a tiny silence whilst we all wait.  A mass hesitation like when the little man turns green and everyone breathes before crossing the road.  Then my mate Kurt shouts “Tails!!!” and there we are all yelling again “Heads heads heads!!” “Tails, tails, tails!”.  Karen loves this and revs up the crowd, her left hand to her ear, her right teasing us with the wood holding the coins.  At last she tosses them, a perfect toss which follows the rules, all three coins raising above our heads and all three of them landing in the square.  

Again, a tiny silence whilst we look.  They’re old Australian pennies, huge and dark, a large white cross on the tails side so they’re easier to read in the shadows near our feet.  I see one cross, then find the other coins and both are showing dark.  So it’s heads!  So I’ve won!  Half the crowd yells with joy, its cheers drowning out the small sighs from the other half.  I search out my opponent who sees me and smiles in defeat.  No worries mate, keep my money.

And immediately the next round of dealing starts.

A week earlier I’m in a similar pub playing cards with Kurt and Karen and Zen.  One of the old guys who works behind the bar ambles over and says g’day.  “Just checking you lot aren’t doing that for money?”.  We smile and reassure him.  Everyone knows it’s illegal to gamble in a pub away from the pokie machines.  “Not even matchsticks which you’ll change later on?”.  No mate, it’s 500, it’s just for points.  Well, alright then and he ambles back to his taps.

So what’s the difference?  Same state, same laws, could have been the same pub.  The difference is Anzac Day.  On 25^th April every year the populations of Australia and New Zealand (and Somoa, Tonga and the Cook Islands) remember the troops of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps who fought at Gallipoli.  That’s World War 1 folks, Winston Churchill still young and thinking a quick hard strike would knock Turkey out of the war.  An early mistake which got bogged down in an eight month stalemate and left 8,000 Australians and 2,700 New Zealanders dead in foreign soil.  And 86,000 Turks dead at home. 

Australia was still a young nation then, only thirteen, and it was their first foray onto the world stage of conflict.  Now, years later and prouder than ever, the country never forgets.  

In Australia Anzac Day is a public holiday, one which starts earlier than most as thousands attend dawn services across the country.  If the original heroes have passed away, their descendents march wearing their medals.  In fact this has become such a popular pastime that this year New South Wales has asked descendants to march separately so the shrunken veterans of Gallipoli can be seen by the crowds attending.  And Anzac Day is the only day of the year when it is legal to play two-up.  The gambling game with three coins that gives you better odds than any other (always fifty-fifty) and which was the only fun to be had in the hellish trenches of 1915. 

I needed Anzac Day this year.  I’ve been going through one of life’s regular lows (no one wants to publish my book, nor do I, volleyball is an uphill struggle, Oliver’s away in Ireland) and it’s been raining for thirteen days.  Under a slate grey sky Sydney’s just another big city and the smiles which come more naturally here have been overwatered and drooping.  To walk into a pub full of strangers who trust each other with their money (whoever bets Heads always holds the cash), to laugh with twenty, thirty people I’ve never met before, to watch the madness of alcohol-infused gambling go on without the tiniest hint of aggression, this is what I needed.  It reminded me why I live in Australia. 

Private Schools

Please excuse the delay since my last letter.  I’ve got a new boss and he seems to expect me to work for a living.  So its been full (or at least half) steam ahead as I prove to the new incumbent that part-time doesn’t mean half-arsed.  One advantage of having a committed boss is that I’m getting involved in more influential stuff around the bank.  This generally means I’m doing the same sort of thing but with bigger cheeses than before.  As a result the meetings are mildly less boring as they’re held higher up in the building and the views over the harbour, the bridge, the opera house and the other skyscrapers are simply fantastic.  

The sun still comes out at this time of the year but it never climbs too high and if the meeting is timed correctly the top floor is infused with the most beautiful pale light.  Until someone pulls the blinds down so we can focus on his spreadsheet that is.  Sigh.   Anyway, I was waiting for one of these meetings to start the other day when I overheard the following conversation:

Suit 1: So where are you from originally then?

Suit 2: Coogee (an Eastern Suburb with a nice family beach)

Suit 1: Oh, so where did you go to school?

Suit 2: Magellan College in Randwick.  It’s a medium middle-class school.

A what?  I had to ask.  Suit 2, who’s actually a bit of a dude for a finance guy, explained.  “Most of the guys in this room will have gone to one of the better schools, Scotts or Kings or Knox.  Or one of the North Shore high schools.  By calling it a “middle class school” I meant it’s a private school but not a well known one.  So he didn’t have to pretend he’d heard of it”. 

Private schooling has a different connotation in Australia.   In the UK it generally denotes toffs and boaters.  There are exceptions I know, but average school fees in the UK are still 35% of the average salary so don’t tell me everyone can afford it these days.  Also, only 7% of children in the UK are in private education.  In Australia the figure is 33%.

What, you gasp.  You mean there’s a whole population of well-spoken Australians out there?  Surely that’s the best kept secret in the world?  Well no.  As I said, the connotations are different.

For a start, many private schools cater to the thousands of kids who grow up scattered away from cities in this huge, underpopulated continent.  I have friends who are as rough and tumble as they come but went to boarding school because the nearest town was 58 miles from their farm.  (My friend Big Andrea, for example, was so terrified of the experience of population density that for four years she only ever did a poo when she was at home for the weekends…ouch!).

But even in town the kids who go to private schools are sometimes indistinguishable from those who don’t.  Now clearly, the Sydney school that this week fell victim to a machete-and-baseball-bat attack by ten members of the local gang probably wasn’t fee paying.  But you’re just as likely to see groups of badly-coiffed yoovs with socks at odd angles kicking cans in an expensive uniform as in a state one.

That said, I suspect this “we’re all in it together” feeling might be a little bit of marketing by Australia.com.  This year’s hit TV show “Summer Heights High” was set in a state-school and one of the most popular and cringeworthy characters was J’aimee, on exchange from a private school (“where there are less criminals because our parents are richer”).  And up in the towers of power of the Sydney CBD a little research by your intrepid reporter did indeed prove Suit 2 correct.  Everyone else in the room had been to private school.  

Start saving folks.

Sorry

I want my money back.  I moved to Australia for sunshine and clear skies, beaches and barbies and bare skin.  To live in city which even in winter stretches and yawns under clear blue skies.  But this week I look out of my window what I do see?  Come back el Nino, all is forgiven.  It’s raining again.

I know we should be glad the drought is over and “it takes a flood to kill a dry spell” but really, enough is enough.  This has been the wettest summer in New South Wales for sixteen years and the coldest February in fourteen.  Sydney’s not had it too bad but large areas north of here are under a metre of water for the third time this year.  That’s a lot of bad carpet that needs replacing.

There are few things I like less than being wet or cold and it’s rare that a grey sky will find me far from a fireplace but last Thursday I dutifully headed out through the pouring rain to stand in Martin Place.  This is the closest thing Sydney has to a main square.  It’s more of a paved street really, albeit lined with the city’s few historic buildings, but it’s where you tend to go if you have a forty-foot Christmas tree to light or a large demonstration to suppress.  On Thursday it held an enormous cinema screen surrounded by speakers the size of telephone boxes (remember them?).and about five thousand people.

I couldn’t actually see the screen but I didn’t need to.  The hushed silence that fell over the crowd as the speakers crackled to life was enough.  It’s not often you get a sense of being at an historic occasion and the only other time I can quote was being in Berlin when the wall came down.  Clearly, our new Prime Minister’s apology to the stolen generations was not as earth-shattering as that great event, but I can tell you a similar sense of magic was in the air.

Here are the facts: between 1920 and 1972 up to thirty per cent of aboriginal children were taken away from their parents and imprisoned in institutions where they were taught to be domestic servants to white people.  They were chosen based on the colour of their skin, the idea being that any child not completely black would benefit from being separated from the aboriginal way of life.  1972 is a not a long time ago and there are a lot of people alive today who were taken away from their homes as children and entered into an environment of violence and abuse.  They still no have idea what happened to their families.

Twelve years ago an enquiry was commissioned by a Labour government into this atrocity and the resulting “Bringing Them Home” report made it clear an official apology to the native people of Australia was a vital starting point in any reconciliation.  But by the time the report was delivered a Liberal government was in place and the Prime Minister of the time (John Howard) steadfastly refused to apologise.  He had done nothing wrong and nor had the people he represented.  100,000 people took to the streets to persuade him to think otherwise but he wouldn’t budge.  Ten years later, in November just gone, we got another Labour government and this month, within one week of parliament reconvening, PM Rudd laid out a strongly worded Sorry.

Not everyone approves of the apology but in a quite remarkable feat Mr Rudd delivered a speech which everyone agreed was a masterpiece of dignity.  There were tears in the eyes of the people around me in Martin Place.  We cheered loudly every time the live broadcast from Canberra used the word “sorry” and we stood with our heads bowed when we heard the details of what had been done in the name of building Australia.  By the end of the speech there was an incredible buzz in the air, an aura of excitement that a new era was beginning.  I can honestly say I have never felt prouder to live in this amazing country.  And that has to be worth a bit of rain.

Anti-Intellectualism in Australia

This week I forgot I was in Australia.  The problem started at a barbie when I confessed to a Scottish friend that I never read non-fiction.  He insisted on lending me a treatise entitled “Al Qaeda and What It Means To Be Modern” which politeness dictated I at least attempt to read.

I’d forgotten what intellectual texts are like.  How slowly you have to read to understand the complex sentence structures (clever parentheses) and pronouns where you’re not quite sure to what they refer.  So after an hour or a half there I was google-eyed with a headache when I switched on the radio for some light relief.  Except I’d forgotten it was tuned to Radio National, the closest thing here to Radio 4.  

There was a broadcast on from the BBC, a conversation between Will Self and the editor of The Paris Review on the subject of George Orwell and what a faker he was.  Interesting enough to cook to so I listened all the way through.  Then, the next day, The Guardian Weekly arrived with the bad weather and I spent the morning on the sofa looking out at the rain reading about the difference between Islam and islamism.  

So all in all you can’t really blame me for forgetting what country I was in.  It wasn’t the weather that was so un-Australian, it was all the long words.

Germaine Greer is so reviled in this country (she left + she criticises it = she is evil) that only her barmiest comments are ever reported.  Until I got here I quite liked her though and I do remember her complaining loudly about the “anti-intellectualism” of the place.  Never was she more accurate.  Not “lack of intellectualism” you note, but positive “anti-intellectualism”.

There is a commonly held belief in the rest of the world that Australians are outspoken.  This is bunkum.  Australians will only tell you what they think if what they think is positive, so you have to learn to read their expressions very carefully.  One of the expressions I’m learning to read is the one which follows the use of any foreign, multisyllabic or erudite vocabulary.  It’s a bit like the expression a cat  would wear if it had been bitten by a mouse.  Surprised, a bit unsure of itself, just waiting to prove how sharp its own teeth can be.  So a conversation might go like this:

Naïve foreigner:  I’m not sure, if we observe the status quo we might learn something.

Most listening aussies: Mm, yes, mm.

Aussie brave:  I prefer AC/DC myself.

You see, it’s not that they don’t know what status quo means.  It’s just that you deserve to have the mickey taken out of you for using a latin term.  And, importantly, Acker Dacker are a true-blue Aussie group and you’re a dag for thinking some trumped-up use of the language will ever be better than honest-to-God Aussie rock AND you’re a foreign ponce for telling me that I might need to learn something.  Got it?  Mate?

This rejection of intelligent discourse is all-pervasive.  Time and again I hear European colleagues at the bank being told to “make it simpler”.  Bearing in mind half of them work in financial services strategy this is a challenge.  They might have the most fantastic insight into the purchasing, sorry buying, habits of Gen Y but if they can’t present it in short headlines it won’t get heard.

And talking of headlines, you want to know how I suddenly remembered what country I’m in?  Well, tonight I flipped past The Biggest Loser Australia, Australian Who Do You Think You Are, So You Think You Can Dance Australia and Australian Idol to watch the television news.  And this is what’s happening in the world.  There was an explosion in a chicken shop in Sydney; it’s raining; deodorant doesn’t give you cancer.  And now, sport.  

Pass me that Guardian Weekly!

This could never happen in the UK.  Or do I mean Britain?  England at least.  I’m on the beach watching a low helicopter drag the biggest flag I’ve ever seen.  Seriously, it’s about as high as a twelve story building so you can imagine how wide it must be.  It’s the Aussie flag of course, the same one I’ve seen festooning half the cars on the way here.  I’m used by now to seeing boys with it tattooed around their body, but to see it covering (in colour) all the kids faces, every picnic blanket, half the sky is weird.  But it’s that time of year.  Happy Australia Day.

I ask Rafaella at volleyball if there’s any equivalent to this rampant nationalism in Italy.  “Are you crazy? she says “We’re too busy hating each other to be unified around anything”.  

“I can’t imagine it in England either” I say “without at least some desenting voices questioning whether patriotism is appropriate.  But here..”

“I know! I know!  Not one person here questions it….they’re all too…proud of being Australian”.

Not that that’s a bad thing.  But there is a facial expression you learn to recognise here very early on.  It’s the one that appears when you, with your pommy accent, are perceived as being in any way critical of this country.  Even long-bearded, anti-war demonstrating, government-hating, camouflage-kitted agro-hippies wear it if you make any generalisation about Australia which isn’t a hundred percent positive.

Once, about six months after we got here, it was all too much for Oliver.  He exploded in a drunken rampage “It’s not all ***ing sunshine and lollipops you morons, it’s not perfect and stop telling me she’ll be right mate!”  Fortunately he was very drunk and he was talking to a bush but I got his point.

We have now, by the way, been here exactly four years.  Australia Day (26^th January) happens to be the day Oliver and I left the UK for our new homeland, and it’s nice that they celebrate it with a public holiday.  

We used the long weekend to go out at last on a Sunday night (the one night, in this strange city, where things are most guaranteed to go off).   We met friends in Woollahra, a very smart part of town just east of the city.  Woollahra is old money, or as close as you get to it in Australia.  Galleries, delicatessens, shops full of cushions you can’t afford.  And, I know now, a bar which is a vision of the future.

Imagine this.  A large corner pub, nice recent fit-out, good bar staff, real buzzy atmosphere.  Funky south african band with two drummers and as the evening progresses the whole bar dancing.  There are more women here than men and these women are, shall we say, somewhat approachable.  No we shalln’t say that.  We’ll say they’re downright predatory.  Groups of three or four of them eyeing every man in the room with a knowing eye, smiling in conversation but really looking past each other at that new guy who’s just walked in the room.  They’re a good looking bunch, well put together and very expensively dressed.  My friends and I do not interest them in the slightest.  We are far too young as not one of them is under fifty-five.  

I’m telling you, this is the future.  The massive baby boomer generation starts retiring this year and it’s never going to grow old gracefully.  These people want to go out to cool bars, dance and have fun.  They are the generation that was young in the sixties, got political in the seventies and made all that money in the eighties.  They’re loaded, semi-retired and ready to party.  They might not be down at the beach showing off their Southern Cross tattoos or running through the streets wearing nothing but flags but they are out and they are very proud.  You think it’s a coincidence Viagra’s hit the market in the last ten years?  The future is here and the future is old, even in this young and cocky country.

David Beckham

David Beckham’s in town.  Now, I don’t want to say Sydney is provincial about this kind of thing, but I think you can tell a lot about a place by the way it reacts to famous visitors.  Hip New Yorkers and stiff-upper Londoners wouldn’t bat an eyelid if the son of God flew in for the weekend.  Sydneysiders are reacting as if he has.  80,000 people have spent $3.5m to go and watch him play a sport they normally scorn.  This for me is a) too difficult to work out the price of the average ticket and b) a bit like buying a plane ticket just so you can watch the movie.  

That said, I have two reasons to be glad The David is here.  Firstly, because at last, years after everyone else, I have for the first time heard him speak (I know, I know, but I’ve been on Mars a lot this last decade).  Now at last I can see why he doesn’t speak more often (strange that the same logic doesn’t stop his wife from singing).  But more than this, I’m glad Becks is here because at last the media has stopped going on and on (and on) about the election.  Eugh it’s been boring.  A very dull Prime Minister has been ousted by an extremely dull leader of the Opposition.  Centre-left has replaced by centre-right in a long z test of zzz….  

I’m sure it’s interesting if you’re Australian but as a Johnny Foreigner who isn’t yet allowed to vote I do struggle to care.  And whilst every one of my friends voted one way and every one of my colleagues voted the other and I’ve been unusually privy to both sides of bigotry, I really can’t engage with either of the two grey men who kept pointing at the charts.  Imagine a run off between John Major and your father-in-law and you get the picture.  You can see why it’s illegal not to vote over here.  

Of course if they made voting optional they’d have to put polling booths inside cricket grounds or rugby stadia to get anyone into them.  As it is you get a fine if they know who you are and you don’t vote.  Strangely, they had a massive campaign a few weeks back encouraging people to register for the first time and then an equally large one threatening fines to those suckered in by it.  Wouldn’t it have been easier just to let people be?  But that’s not democracy I suppose.  The people, unlike David Beckham, must be encouraged to speak.  And spoken they have with a 6% swing to Labour mostly z from Queenzzland zzz….  When does the tennis start?