Let me preface this essay by saying that I love The Land Down Under and certainly hope that I can teach there for a Semester each year and come back to teach a Semester at CSUN. In this way, Giti and I can avoid the brutal Aussie and Woodland Hills Summers while mak ing the mortgage in semi-retirement.
With this said – I have to suggest that our Aussie brethren are a rather naïve lot. Those who have come to visit US – report having a great time – so I guess they have missed our dark underbelly. Which is understandable: because if ever there was ever a country that is a Junior U.S. – it’s Australia!
My God! They copy things like having hot, female “talking heads” on-the-nightly-news, to commercials in between ALL OF THEIR TV PROGRAMMING. In fact, their commercials tend to be as vacuous as ours (the Murdoch hand reaches far-and-wide – but may have had a few inches cut off recently).
And where I once thought that Australia was Lily White – I saw many Asians in Brisbane, Sydney and Perth. Indeed, the Aussies are complaining about the-rate-at-which the Chinese are buying up there Aussie dollars. So, those White rapscallions are finally being forcibly integrated by those Asian mining concerns, er, dollars (the Aussie government did report a 3 billion dollar surplus for this past fiscal year).
But rather than think yellow, I’d like to get back to that dark underbelly I mentioned earlier – because the Aussies copied US in the genocide of their indigenous people, and, like us – are trying to make good on those earlier atrocities by giving land back to the aboriginals.
Whenever White folk write history, or report statistics – they tend to slant the data in favor of the ruling class, er, color. So when the U.S. military reported 175 civilian deaths in-the-taking-of Manuel Noriega (instead of the 5000 mowed down by the Marines) we know that creative bookkeeping is at work that might be revised circa 2030 (when Latino/Hispanic genes could become the dominant US gene.
Similarly, when dated sources report a total of some 700,000 aboriginals cut down to some 500,000 – one wonders about the accuracy of the figures. These days, a more “open” Australia suggests that there may have been about 3 million aboriginals who were butchered down to 480,000. Indeed, aboriginal children were kidnapped and interned, er, schooled, by Whites up until the late 1960s. I never appreciated Evonne Goolagong’s heroics until this moment.
On the first night of my return from Australia, I had a strange dream – much like Coleridge’s Kubla Khan – in which I believe I put-my-finger-on what I had internalized of the Australian Sentiment: a land where crime is limited to drunken brawls; folks can leave their doors unlocked; and, the national religions are rugby and “footie” – all-the-while sporting clean, organized living spaces with rapidly improving wines; good beer; and, a massive unconscious called The Outback.
But like Coleridge, I lost the gist upon awakening.
At-any-rate, however, the Aussies have ample water to bring in 13 million more into a country that has relaxed its immigration policies in the wake of the burgeoning mining industry and a 4.5% unemployment rate.
I need to get a “foot” into the door of this place. Hell! I might even hang out my psychotherapist shingle again – since the only problems seem to be infidelity and snotty-nosed teenagers…but…like…the ever-present sharks – I saw signs of those hungry lawyers moving in…