HUMOUR dammit. it's humoUr.
..."as we followed david through the two coach carriages, 124 pairs of sunken eyes sullenly followed our every move. these were people who had no dining carriage, no lounge bar, no cosy berths to crawl into at night. they had been riding upright for two days since leaving sydney, and still had twenty-four hours to go to perth. i am almost certain that if we had not had the train manager as an escort they would have eaten us." (american author bill bryson, from his hilarious book “down under”)
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you will find the occasional australian that dislikes bill bryson for his perceived “taking the piss” out of australia, but underneath his jabs, a deep love affair with australia and it’s people is evident. the following is an excerpt from his incredible book “down under”
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... flying into australia, i realized with a sigh that i had forgotten again who their prime minister is. i am forever doing this with the australian prime minister—committing the name to memory, forgetting it (generally more or less instantly), then feeling terribly guilty. my thinking is that there ought to be one person outside australia who knows.
but then australia is such a difficult country to keep track of.on my first visit, some years ago, i passed the time on the long flight reading a history of australian politics in the twentieth century, wherein i encountered the startling fact that in 1967 the prime minister, harold holt, was strolling along a beach in victoria when he plunged into the surf and vanished ...
... no trace of the poor man was ever seen again. this seemed doubly astounding to me—first that australia could just lose a prime minister (i mean, come on) and second that news of this had never reached me.
the fact is, of course, we pay shamefully scant attention to our dear cousins down under—not entirely without reason, of course. australia is after all mostly empty and a long way away. its population, about 20 million, is small by world standards—china grows by a larger amount each year—and its place in the world economy is consequently peripheral; as an economic entity, it ranks about level with illinois.
australias’ sports are of little interest to us and the last television series it made that we watched with avidity was “skippy”. from time to time it sends us useful things—opals, merino wool, errol flynn, the boomerang—but nothing we can't actually do without. above all, australia doesn't misbehave. it is stable and peaceful and good. it doesn't have coups, recklessly overfish, arm disagreeable despots, grow coca in provocative quantities, or throw its weight around in a brash and unseemly manner.
but even allowing for all this, our neglect of australian affairs is curious. just before i set off on this trip i went to my local library in new hampshire and looked australia up in the new york times index to see how much it had engaged our attention in recent years. i began with the 1997 volume for no other reason than that it was open on the table. in that year across the full range of possible interests—politics, sports, travel, the coming olympics in sydney, food and wine, the arts, obituaries, and so on—the times ran 20 articles that were predominantly on or about australian affairs.
in the same period, for purposes of comparison, the times ran 120 articles on peru, 150 or so on albania and a similar number on cambodia, more than 300 on each of the koreas, and well over 500 on israel. as a place that caught our interest australia ranked about level with belarus and burundi. among the general subjects that outstripped it were balloons and balloonists, the church of scientology, dogs (though not dog sledding), barneys, inc., and pamela harriman, the former ambassador and socialite who died in february 1997, a misfortune that evidently required recording 22 times in the times. put in the crudest terms, australia was slightly more important to us in 1997 than bananas, but not nearly as important as ice cream.
as it turns out, 1997 was actually quite a good year for australian news. in 1996 the country was the subject of just nine news reports and in 1998 a mere six. australians can't bear it that we pay so little attention to them, and i don't blame them. this is a country where interesting things happen, and all the time.