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| David Unaipon, Aboriginal author, inventor and political leader. |
When my taxi left the Melbourne airport and whisked me downtown, we rode on highways large enough to feel at home in Southern California to a city which recently rediscovered its waterfront, building tall new business headquarters while managing to preserve some heritage buildings and some green space. A city with pretty good public transportation, a growing bicycle presence, and a happy opinion of itself, which is shared by much of the rest of the nation. A place a lot like, say, Portland – and you think, this is a very American place.
But then you notice the British spelling of colour and centre, the teens in their anachronistic school uniforms more at home in mid-century Oxford, the Union Jack on the Southern-Cross festooned flag, and Queenie on the five dollar bill and you think, oh, this is a very British sort of city.
The desire to file a new experience under something I already understand can be an impediment to learning very much about the new place I’m in. Australia is neither the US nor the UK, as a slightly more thoughtful look around the place reveals. My “look around the place” usually starts with its visual and literary arts, but when I really start paying attention, I notice clues in less obvious places. Take the Australian currency, for example. Old Queen Bess is indeed on the fiver, but the other denominations feature a socialist poet, the author of Waltzing Matilda, the founder of the flying doctors, a woman who arrived in Australia as a convict and went on to business success, an educator and an Aboriginal icon. A balance of women and men, and even a nod to the people who received none of this currency (or any preceding one) to pay for the land that used to be theirs. Writers and activists, populist songwriters, and not a politician among them. Does that give us a clue about the culture?
After a few days of wandering and mentally storing up cultural confusions, I am grateful to have a class full of smart women to bring my questions to. When I asked them for a list of Australian books and movies I shouldn’t miss, they provided not only their lists, but their reasons why the films and writings were important. Some of the women were weary of the stereotyped outback Ozzie in movies like Crocodile Dundee, one wanted the world to know that most Australians lived in urban environments and thought “the outback is as boring as batshit.” The books and films dealt with modern issues of immigration, the history of their native people, the skew-whiff Australian sense of humor, and the penchant for gritty true-crime dramas.
But here’s the interesting part of the conversation: after the women recovered from their surprise of having been asked, my questions made them think about their country in a way they hadn’t in a while, and their thoughtful answers expanded my understanding of their society. Books, films, art work, even currency are good paths into understanding, but conversations with intelligent women are high speed freeways.
Our discussions made me think about how my travel is changing as I age: no more backpackers digs for me, and no more shared loos at the end of the hall. And it isn’t just how I travel that has changed; why I travel has changed as well. I used to travel to see a work of art, a view from the sea, a building that had witnessed huge historical shifts. It’s the people who fascinate me the most now -- the conversations they include me in and the cultures they create. It does help, I admit, if the cultures they’ve created yielded interesting art work and chose to locate near an ocean view. Throw in the ability to make a good decaf trim flat white and I’ll be happy to book a ticket.