When does a plan cease to be a plan and become simply “the way things will be?” Many of life’s Rubicons have clear delineations between this side and that, before and after—death, marriage, and childbirth come to mind—but many others do not. Take this scheme to live and work abroad, for instance. Is it going to happen at all? If so, where will this experiment be conducted? Is it even a certainty yet?
Well, as of late July 2008, Kathryn and I have airline tickets, she has accepted a job offer, and someone with a baby-grand piano has signed on to rent our home in the coming months. Taking these facts together, I here venture the opinion that we have indeed entered new territory.
Early October looks to find us, then, in Australia—Melbourne, to be precise. I thought it would be entertaining to relate a few little-known facts about Australia, but as I sat down to do it I realized that I didn’t know any: everything I knew is known by everyone, and there wasn’t even much of that. Kangaroos, Great Barrier Reef, good beer in blue oil cans—not a lot else came immediately to mind. Moreover, in talking with others I found this to be a very common condition: Oz (as it is known to its friends) apparently remains the terra australis incognita, as it was called by early European cartographers when they referred to the hypothetical place that they thought should down there somewhere.
So I have been doing some reading to mitigate my vast ignorance of the Commonwealth of Australia. Bill Bryson’s In A Sunburned Country was a good place to start, since it is extremely amusing and quite informative. Frank Welsh’s Australia : a New History of the Great Southern Land is even more informative, but it is also markedly less amusing. I may also go as far as renting Mad Max as well, but probably that will be all I have time for prior to the Big Move. Here, then, is a bit of what I have learned so far—a shamefully brief introduction to our soon-to-be new home.
Though aboriginal peoples have inhabited this island continent for more than 40,000 years, it remained unknown to Europeans until the early 1600s, when Dutch explorers encountered a large land mass where they didn’t expect one. Initial reports of the find did not kindle much enthusiasm, however: the climate was withering, the land appeared infertile, and the aboriginals’ habit of showering would-be landing parties with spears all but ruled it out as a potential eco-tourism destination.
Consequently, the west took virtually no notice of the place for another century and a half until, in 1770, Captain James Cook apparently decided “Oh, why not?” and claimed it for Great Britain. Within 20 years, the British were shipping convicts to New South Wales (as the whole territory was then known) as a cost-effective solution to the problems of overcrowding in jails at home and recidivism among released convicts. “Let ‘em recidivate several thousand shark-infested miles away,” seemed to be the era’s guiding philosophy regarding penal administration. The first permanent European settlements, then, were established by prisoners and those sent to watch them.
Today, of course, Australia is a modern, prosperous, democratic nation—the world’s sixth-largest country, after Brazil. In area, it is 95% as large as the continental U.S., but with only 20.6 million inhabitants, it has less than 1/12th the population of that region. The vast majority of Australia’s people are concentrated along the eastern and southern seaboards (the boomerang coast). They cluster here because most of the rest of the country is covered by deserts, sweltering tropics, and other territory where nature seems intent on making things uncomfortable for anything but reptiles, kangaroos, and spinifex (genus Triodia, a grass with sharp, pointed leaves and almost no nutritive value for animals. It is a plant whose chief uses are to provide a resin for spear-making, and as a superior fuel choice when one wishes to send up a good, visible smoke signal to distant correspondents).
Melbourne, Australia’s second city after Sydney, is a modern and cultured metropolis of 3.8 million inhabitants, making it only slightly less populous than Los Angeles. It is also Australia’s southernmost major city, at the “cold” edge of the continent. That will probably take some getting used to—this reversal of directions and seasons: Christmas is a good beach day; Easter is in the fall, and ads for apartments boast of “good northern exposure to catch the winter sun.” A Melbourne winter, of course, means the short, bleak days of July and August, when the nighttime lows plunge to an average of 43º F (7º C), not counting any wind chill. The city’s precipitation is remarkably consistent at about 2 inches (5 cm) per month, the whole year round.
If Australia were transferred to the northern hemisphere, Melbourne would be at the same latitude as San Francisco, and the rest of the country would extend southward as far as the northern edge of Costa Rica. The distance from Shark Bay on Australia’s west coast to Brisbane on the east is about the same as from Los Angeles to New York City.
In other words, It’s a big place, and it looks terribly interesting from where we are now. I can’t wait to see it for myself, and I expect future installments here will have proportionally more first-hand information and less hearsay.
--originally posted 7/2008
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