“Did you know,” Carly asks me one day, “that Australians invented the lawn mower, the revolving outdoor clothesline, and wine in a box?”
“Umm … no, wow, I didn’t realize that,” I say. This trinity of innovation, unlike her jests about the drop bears and hoop snakes, is true. It’s a strange assortment, to say the least, but one that swells Carly’s national feathers like a peacock’s.
I come to learn certain other fascinating things about my new country. When it comes to fashion, Aussies are firmly and proudly stuck in the eighties. Mullets still reign supreme. So do fluorescent (fluoro) shirts with the collars up and Jane Fonda–esque off-the-shoulder T-shirts. Another piece of trivia: prostitution is legal and regulated. And another: Australian citizens are required by law to vote. Politics here are far more entertaining because people say whatever the hell they want. During my stay, the head of the Labor Party was quoted calling John Howard (the prime minister) an “arselicker.” Another high government official told a reporter a new bill was “a load of frigging crap paperwork.” These examples illustrate what I think are some of the fundamental qualities of Australians: they are practical (prostitution is the world’s oldest profession, after all), blunt (just imagine Nancy Pelosi calling George W. Bush an “arselicker,” if you will), and above all, they don’t take themselves too seriously (mullets—business in the front, party in the back). And then there is their unflagging friendliness. Any time I try to sneak a look at my Sydney map, lost for the dozenth time that hour, the nearest Australian pops his head over my shoulder to ask: “Are you right?”
My favorite piece of Australiana is an indie movie called The Castle. Its hero, Darryl Kerrigan, lives with his family in a run-down but proud abode so close to the airport that the planes sound like they’re in the living room. Though his “castle” is clearly no castle, the family resides there contentedly until one day the government threatens to take it all away by forcing the family to relocate so the airport can expand. Darryl takes his case all the way to Australia’s high court. When asked what law he is basing his appeal on, he shouts: “The law of bloody common sense!,” which, for me, pretty much sums up Australia.
After Carly pops out the DVD, I open my journal to add it to the list of my various Sydney experiences. Carly leans over me. “You make a lot of lists,” she says.
“How else will I keep track of everything?”
“Why do you need to keep track of everything? The doing part of it is the fun part, not the preparing to do it and then crossing it off the list once you’ve done it.”
“Well, yeah, sure,” I respond, not totally convinced.
“I used to keep journals, too, Rach,” Pete chimes in. “Should I pull them out?”
Carly says, “Dad, no, please, so boring” while I say, “Yes! I’d love to see them.”
He disappears into the hall closet and reemerges with a dusty stack of brown leather journals. “Here we go. Take a look at this. This is good stuff.”
Page after page recounts his mundane routine when he was an assistant in an accounting firm, before he traveled the world with Muriel, long before Carly.
January 10, 1975
Picked up a paper and went for coffee. Rain.
January 11, 1975
Picked up the paper and ran errands for Mr. Jones.
Sunshine.
January 12, 1975
Woke up late. Went to work. Sunshine.
Carly raises her eyebrows at me, like, Now do you see what you’re up to? But I don’t care. I want to keep a record of all this, being in a foreign land with a foreign family, down to the evening’s DVD. Writing has always been a way for me to make sense of the world, even if the most important changes happening to me abroad—many of which are imperceptible until years later—are nowhere to be found on those pages.
My Irish friend Dee has been living in Australia for close to a year. She’s one of the masses of English, Irish, and Canadians here for their gap year. She planned to return to Ireland two months ago but fell for an Australian man a few months after arriving in Sydney. Now she’s applying for de facto residency, a type of visa program based on the fact that you are dating (but not engaged or married to) an Australian citizen or permanent resident. Nothing comparable exists in the U.S. In order to get the visa, you have to live with your partner for a certain number of months, so Dee has moved into John’s tiny Bondi Beach apartment. I take the bus from the city center to visit her, and we lounge around sipping tea and nattering on her couch—John yelling questions at Dee from the bedroom, or slinking off to work after an awkward hello. He doesn’t seem particularly fond of the idea of Dee having friends, and the one time they come out to Forestville for a Dawson barbecue, he sulks and shifts and avoids all attempts at conversation until Dee excuses herself and leaves with him after half an hour. But she seems happy, she wants to stay here, and after a few visits, he warms up enough to accompany us to the beach, clad in his signature blue board shorts and wraparound shades that completely obscure his eyes.
Bondi is the closest ocean beach to Sydney’s city center. Carly’s dad spent his early childhood here before it became a popular hub for surfies and backpackers, back when it was a cheap settling place for a large group of Jewish and Italian immigrants, though Pete’s ancestors hail from England and Wales. His father was a moody, thoughtful veteran who had no interest in talking about the war, or much of anything else. He had received medals for his service as a gunner, and the family lore is that one day while they were at the market, he deftly pinned them on a pumpkin and kept on walking. Pete’s mum was a redheaded cafeteria cook and every bit as theatrical and outgoing as his father was reserved. She pretty much let her offspring run wild. The streets were ablaze with kids back then.
Bondi is still home to a large population of Jews and Italians, but now it’s also a gathering site for the hordes of backpackers and tourists who arrive in Australia all year round but pack in tightest in the summer months. Flip-flops, backpacks, discarded clothes, and beer-filled eskys (the Australian term for coolers) cover the sand around crisping sunbathers while volunteer lifesavers in red and yellow uniforms and paid lifeguards in blue patrol the area. The beach is only one kilometer long, and it’s body to body in the summer months, a blanket of exposed pale European skin ignoring the omnipresent warnings about skin cancer. The locals soak up the sun more judiciously but are still several shades darker. A shark net dives eight meters below the water and extends a hundred and fifty meters out, though there have been no shark fatalities since 1937. Red and yellow flags designate swimming areas, which change according to surf conditions. The northern end and the center of the beach are typically the safest, though sweltering tourists at the southern tip are renowned for heading into rougher waters instead of taking the short walk, their impatience sometimes rewarded with a lifeguard rescue. The ocean is lukewarm, barely cool enough to keep the heat at bay. On Christmas Day, the beach swarms with girls in bikinis and Santa hats, boys in red swim trunks. As with almost everywhere in Australia, it is perfectly acceptable to walk into local shops and restaurants barefoot. Carly thinks our American NO SHIRT, NO SHOES, NO SERVICE signs are a punch line to some unfunny joke.
When it’s too hot for the beach or Dee’s baking apartment, we head into downtown Sydney and spend $3.50 to ride the air-conditioned monorail around in circles, Chinatown to Darling Harbour to the long-standing Paddy’s Markets, selling everything from exotic fruits and veggies to the koala souvenir key chains I buy in bulk and never end up giving to anyone back home. It’s funny to meet up so far away from our homes.
Dee misses Ireland. She wishes she could fly back to visit—her sister’s birthday is coming up—but the visa process makes it impossible. Does she picture herself here forever? She scrunches up her nose at the thought. No. Does she picture herself with John forever? Yes. Where that leaves them is not a question I ask, nor one that she offers to answer. Whenever you’re traveling, you have these thoughts of home. At what point will you
have been away so long that it will no longer be recognizable—or you won’t be?
One afternoon I open an email from Erica saying she’s gotten a job at Deutsche Bank that starts in June, soon after she graduates. It’s a definitive move in the opposite direction from the low-wage art world. Like Tara and Jen, she’s headed to New York City. Her brother already works at Deutsche Bank. He tells her every day, “You’re going to hate this job,” but she takes it anyway.
I can’t picture her there, among the cubicles and traders, happily plugging away at a job that equals all money and no time or creativity. This is the same girl who convinced me to let her take naked photos of me at two A.M. on Locust Walk, a cobblestone drag in the center of campus, for her big junior-year photography assignment. In them, I have two accessories: my glasses and an empty corduroy book bag, as though I’m on my way to a fantasy class in a nightmare. She’s blurred one of the pictures so that my body looks like it’s in motion, my head turned to face the camera, smiling at the danger of getting caught.
Then again, maybe Erica has the right idea, or at least the practical one. I have infinite time and no money, a reverse equation. I can picture myself doing the same thing she is back home, convincing myself that it’s only a few shitty years of time-sucking monotony. In the meantime, I’d save a bunch of money, then do what I really want, whatever that is. Her email reminds me I, too, have to figure something out, and why should I be any different than my friends, paying dues at jobs that soon will seem like their past and their future—stretching in all directions but the present. What’s the right way to go about this time in our lives? Should you do what you love, what’s outrageous and unpredictable, and worry about the future later, or plug away at a steady job first and go off and have your fun when you retire?
In five years, when we analyze our post-college lives over numerous glasses of sauvignon blanc, Erica will confess that she’s unclear how she ended up here: “here” being an apartment on Central Park West and another, higher-paying finance job, still slaving seven to nine most days.
“It was, like, momentum,” she’ll say, as though her life had a force of its own and she was along for the ride.
Here in Sydney, it’s impossible to imagine myself in a high-powered job, much less in a suit. Just thinking about polyester makes me shift uncomfortably in my seat, as though I am not in fact wearing a sarong and tank top, no shoes, a few minutes from an afternoon dip in the pool.
I know Carly would never dream of working in finance or in an office. “What kind of career do you want?” I asked her a few weeks ago, and she looked at me like I had requested a definition of the space/time continuum. The Brazilian rain forest, Prague on a rainy day, ancient Chinese temples, this is her language. For now she works as a bartender at the Manly Wharf Hotel, a sleek, modern version of the traditional seaside pub. Her only goal is short-term: make enough money for the next trip.
Like healthcare or student loans, rent isn’t an issue for Carly—whereas moving in with parents after graduation is seen among my friends at home as failing to make it in the real world. Carly also has the advantage of coming home after each of her journeys. Although it’s typical for Australians to reside with their parents during university, the way the Dawsons have opened their home indefinitely to Carly is pretty unique. They’ve never funded any of her trips (that’s up to her and the handful of jobs she has at any given time), but she is always welcome to return to the family residence. Her room remains untouched, all the snapshots of her and her high school friends still tacked to the same spot above the dresser.
One night at dinner, Muriel tells me about the magpie problem they had when Carly, Mike, and Steve were in grammar school. Australian magpies are black and white birds that resemble crows, with beady red eyes and long, pointy black beaks. They’re extremely territorial, especially during breeding season. They’ve been known to swoop threateningly close to intruders (like any human coming too close to their nests), sometimes pecking the person in the ears, neck, or eyes or, worst-case scenario, dive-bombing and pounding the person’s head with its chest, WWF-style. In response, Pete and Muriel and the other neighborhood parents made the kids wear empty ice-cream containers with eyes and a mouth drawn on the backs as a decoy. The bus stop was apparently ground zero for the attacks because it was right under a magpie nest, so every day was a mad dash to get the kids safely to and from the bus, their plastic helmets bobbing, magpies buzzing menacingly all around like a dark cloud.
The Dawsons are nonchalant about such incidents, though it’s difficult for me to imagine a world in which walking to the bus stop was fraught with anything greater than whether or not the rowdy boy down the street had a crush on me, too. Maybe this is because there have been other incidents, par for the course in Australia but which make Carly’s youth sound like an episode of Survivor. For example, on one family trip, hours and hours into a dry, deserted landscape, they happened upon a mob of emus. Emus are Australia’s largest birds; they’re flightless and resemble ostriches. Pete screeched to a halt. “Go on, kids,” he encouraged. “Get out and chase them! See how fast they can run!”
Carly and her brothers excitedly jumped out. Carly turned back pretty quickly after getting spooked by a decapitated kangaroo carcass, but Mike and Steve kept up the chase. Soon they came upon a wire fence cordoning off some property. All the emus started awkwardly scrambling over it, but a young one couldn’t make it. Steve and Mike were getting closer, and the little guy started to get agitated. That was when Papa Emu got pissed. He eyed the boys, and they stared back, as in an old-western duel. And then the chase reversed, the enormous bird in hot pursuit of the boys, who sprinted back to the car, terrified.
There are other, similar family tales, though poor Steve seems to have weathered a disproportionate number of these encounters, like when hungry dingoes surrounded him on Fraser Island one summer. I discovered only recently that a dingo is a dog and not, as I thought for reasons unclear to me now, a specific type of kangaroo.
“Maybe a dingo ate your baby!” I shout at dinner one night, performing my butchered Australian accent after Pete has displayed an American accent that sounds like a Texan swallowing a Bostonian, every sentence ending with “you guys.” My Australian accent still inexplicably resembles Eliza Doolittle’s, like the Irish one before it, though this time it’s mixed with Crocodile Dundee. Since I don’t know the next line, I improvise: “Maybe it put it in its pouch and ran away with it.”
Everyone laughs, but then what I’ve said registers with Muriel. “Wait—what’s that, Rach? What’s the last thing you just said?”
“Maybe it put it in its pouch and—”
“Put it in its pouch?” Muriel repeats. All three of them lean toward me with curious expressions. “Rach. What exactly do you think a dingo is?”
When I tell them it’s a really mean-tempered kangaroo, they erupt with laughter. Carly is practically in tears. “It’s—it’s a wild dog, you idiot,” she says once she catches her breath.
“Crikey dick,” Muriel exclaims, one of my favorite expressions, beat only perhaps by “throwing a wobbly” (having a tantrum) and “up and down and in her lady’s chamber” (having looked all over for something) and Pete’s “strewth” (as in an exasperated “honestly” or an agreeing “ain’t that the truth, sister?”). Crikey dick, technically a New Zealand expression left over from Muriel’s upbringing there, is an expression of surprise that translates to something like “for heaven’s sake.”
“Ohhhh,” I respond thoughtfully. I try to picture a thin, raggedy mean-streets dog (this gets easier when I see one a few months later), but as hard as I try, all I see is a hopping-mad kangaroo, teeth bared, claws gleaming, with a little baby bundle in its pouch.
The Dawsons’ colorful wildlife encounters do not comprise even a sliver of the myriad differences between Carly’s childhood and my own. Family vacations for the Dawsons typically involved road trips and camping in the bush. The five of them would pile into the car and
head up or down the coast a few hundred miles, then pull over with their big yellow tent and gear and settle in for a few days of what Darryl Hannigan from The Castle calls “the serenity.” My parents did not camp. My dad likes to joke that “roughing it in my book is a hotel with three stars.” My mother appreciated nature as an activity, but not as somewhere one might hunker down and remain among the elements once the sun set, a cozy bed disappointingly replaced by the hard earth below your sleeping bag.
Carly’s parents took the kids on a few extended trips when they were growing up, once pulling them out of school for six weeks to visit Europe, Egypt, Thailand, Canada, and the United States. It was unfathomable that my parents would take me out of school for anything less than emergency surgery (and even then we’d surely try our best to coordinate with a long holiday weekend) much less to head off on an extended cross-continental adventure. When I was little, travel was something we did as a family. Later, when my parents’ marriage was disintegrating, we took separate vacations. I remember being pleased about being let off on my own, like a grown-up, at eleven or twelve, off to music camp or a week with a friend’s family or a visit to my brother out in California. I felt tremendously independent and pushed aside any darker thoughts about the fragmenting of my family. I’m jealous of all the memories the Dawsons have together that extend up to the present.
Carly had stability waiting for her after living a travel life in flux for however many months. My life lacked this. My childhood home was sold. My dad had moved to Chicago with his new wife, into a condo where they converted the second bedroom into an office. And no matter how hard my mother attempted to make one of her spare rooms comfortable for me, I was still a guest. Maybe this was partly why I found the Dawsons’ intact family so appealing, and appreciated the space I occupied in their lives so much, a space without any past to complicate it.
The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure Page 12
