The Perks of the People

Is it just anthropologists that are interested in people? Can any coffee drinker with a keen ear, nosey disposition and romantic notions about ‘people watching’ that they picked up in some gormless guide book to Paris be interested in people? Are we all anthropologists? Or are all people just interested generally in all people?

People-interest oscillates between those noble, benign feelings towards humanity one has when you invariably don’t have to interact with them, like on a country walk in the early morning, or when you’re feeling very generous with just your friends down the pub; and then the deeply felt misanthropy that surfaces when other people’s children throw shit fits in supermarkets. I am guilty of all these oscillations and naïve good intentions. But so far, the Australian people interest me deeply. Having just finished writing a satire of D.H. Lawrence’s collected works, I hesitate to make sweeping generalisations on an entire population throughout thousands of miles with the sagacity of a fortnight’s experience. But the people I’ve spoken to are delightful.

First, the lexicon of the Australian people (people-of-Canberra-Barton-well,theonesItalkedto) is quirky and highly endearing. That’s patronizing. What I mean is, I can’t help just smiling whenever I hear an Australian talk. My first experiences were superficial interactions in shops and bars. But my GOD they’re polite. Having endured service by untrained muppet teenagers who have never seen a pumice stone and wouldn’t know a courgette if 10kilos killed their mother from a great height, or who are clearly too busy flirting with their colleague or whoever just walked in from school, I have to admit we’re not great at service in England. It’s very different here. The standard salutation in these circumstances is ‘Hi, how’re you?’ which is really, unnecessarily nice! One can’t help launching in to a familiar discussion of your day’s movements (since you asked me for a tale…). One woman in a jeans shop pulled this one on me; after I stammered my reply and reciprocation, she told me her name and instructed me to let her know if I needed anything. I nearly gave her my number and asked if she’d like to meet for coffee because I’m new here and don’t have any friends yet and… Confusing friendliness for an Englishwoman. And I must stress, this is not the hollow, robotic blandness I have seen in America with its infamous ‘have a nice day!’ (keep smiling or they’ll take you out back in a bag!), but genuine.

Consider the only time the English interact with strangers. The country walk – you pass another couple out at their leisure, they stop their conversation as you approach and each of you gears yourself up for the altercation. Then there is the awkward spasm where you only have to say ‘morning!’ but manage to confuse the starts of words and and for god’s sake, don’t look at them. Our standard greeting is ‘alright?’ which succeeds in uniting two syllables into one vowel-y grunt, and the super effortful reply of ‘yeahyou?’ also manages to be a several toned single syllable. Here, if I encounter someone in the street or on a walk, they look me square in the face and offer their communication so clearly, so comfortably, so genuinely that I have to stop myself from hopping off my bike, grasping them warmly by the hand like a Dickenzian Pickwickian and telling them what a lovely day I’m having.

There are two incidences I’ve noticed where friendly human exchange is not forthcoming here. One is during your morning walk or jog. I find in England there is such profound respect and admiration for anyone that can be determined enough get up at six and march their arse at pace round the field/lane/block through the frost in the damn dark that my panted ‘mornings’ (I can now pant two syllables while running) are always met with slightly pitying but very encouraging responses. And solidarity amongst other mad bastards doing the same. Like a little pact. I find this hugely gratifying. Here, everyone is healthy so just get on with it and don’t expect wild praise just because you got your heart rate above sedentary.

The other incidence of the absence of warmth is flat hunting. It’s a very surreal and highly competitive scenario. You have fifteen minutes to view a flat, at the leisure of the estate agent. You gather outside in your guerrilla groups; couples sizing each other up – who looks like the better earner? – students with their wealthy parents, pairs of friends. You start counting how many there are. They’re all your competition. You go inside and all thirty-six-odd of you rampage around the place, getting in each other’s way, opening doors into each other, having muted conversations about the things you like, as Yates phrased so beautifully when he described it. You say loudly something negative about a cupboard, then run home as fast as you can to put your online application in, always clocking those that left first, wondering ‘what the hell is their game?’ It’s pretty freakin’ brutal.

So after two bloody weeks of this, we finally have a place. It’s an apartment in the city centre, cute little split-level affair with the two bedrooms, main bathroom and en-suite down a short flight of stairs. Then one large room with a smart little open kitchen on the right with an island unit. It’s very professional middle class and I can’t wait to start pretentiously arranging ikea blankets and display fruit. Balcony’s a bit shabby but hopefully plants and umbrellas and stuff will soften the brickwork. We move in this week. I am surprisingly tired of meals out, although the prospect of cooking the eternally popular ‘snausage gnocchi’ in forty degree heat doesn’t thrill me.

Other charming phrases we’ve heard in the last week are the abbreviations. If you can take a longer word, chop it in half (or preferably just down to its first syllable) and stick an ‘o’ or a ‘y’ on the end, job’s a good’un. Now this is not wholly unfamiliar to boaters, after Cow Roast is ‘Berko,’ I like to walk round the ‘ressy,’ are you going to the festival in ‘Ricki?’ So I’ve slipped into this quite readily (my favourite is ‘eggs benny’ – I’ve always found the phrase ‘eggs benedict’ needlessly pretentious) and I enjoy the squirm of pleasure I furtively observe Australians doing when they feel they have assimilated another pom. I also love the phrase ‘heaps of,’ and ‘get-go.’ Also ‘ks’ instead of kilometres. But the favourite has got to be wheeler-dealer Dean’s judicious and heavily frequent use of ‘Look’ every third sentence when he was selling us a car. It’s an alright car – ford focus, automatic, bit squeaky (then turn the goddam radio up), white… but we have a car now, and a running joke, so we’ll take that.

It’s been a bit of a funny week, seeing as I have been alone applying for jobs and piffling away at my silly writing while Yates goes out and earns. Not sure how I as a feminist feel about that one. Ironically, unliberated. I have been acclimatising to the heat because after three days of barricading myself into the hotel room, I realised life can’t just stop because it’s hot, so get out there, get sweaty, stay in the shade, drink water and commit to your twice daily shower. It’s a shame not to look at this blue, green, white and gold world. I went to the art gallery. Educated myself on a bit of aboriginal art. So a lot of what you see is called dot painting, and apparently, it’s what the desert looks like from above. There’s method in there. There are symbols mixed into all those shapes, for rivers, campsites, kangaroo tracks. Not just random colours and triangles yo. Lots of the pictures had names involving dreaming: woman dreaming, fire dreaming, egret dreaming, naughty boy dreaming (perplexing). On investigating this, I was told dreamtime is sort of all history, as well as the mythical creation of the world. This is, I gather, because of the oral tradition of the aborigines, everything from before your grandparents (Chris interpretation – I suppose then, the last people that can tell you stuff about a certain time) is ‘dreaming.’ Sort of beautiful.

Then it was the weekend, and we could do more exploring! We had a lovely time at the botanic gardens. We saw lizards! And we found a tinder party on the eucalyptus lawn…. And kangaroo tea towels. Then on Sunday we went to Tidbinbilla!

This is one of those unfamiliar words carelessly pronounced at me in the first week. I had to get the chap to write it down to make sure he wasn’t joking. Apparently it was great for all your standard Aussy wildlife. We’d been up into Namadgi park (just approaching the Australian Alps) the week before and I caught myself thinking, well it’s bloody hot, and we already walked around in glorious eucalypt covered hills last week. Tidbinbilla is amazing though, and I am vetting and spotting most places for Teck appropriateness and where I will take my family.

Tidbinbilla is an enormous nature reserve that you drive round. But there are loads of places of interest, where you park up, get out, use the loo (there are lots, but check under the toilet seat!) and then go for a walk. You can do 11k walks around the place, and lots of little ones…which easily add up to that. So it’s the sort of place you wanna pack a picnic for, take a ball or frisbee, a book and spend all day. Do some walks, chill out, have some lunch, do another walk. It was beautiful. And as we strolled around this enormous open site with nine thousand metre, green cloaked mountain peaks all around us, and yellow ragwort-like flowers adorning the grass, it occurred to me at once that I could see no one. There is not a damn spot in the whole of the vastness of the Lake District where you can’t see the little bright red figure of the gortex-wearing hiker somewhere on a ridge or against a sodden hill, but here, no one. Just Yates and I, and thousands of these funny little cricket things that had beautiful patterned yellow wings that could properly fly with them. Thousands of them in the air, how I imagine our butterfly population used to be a hundred years ago.
We finally saw kangaroos too. Scratching kangaroos, lying down kangaroos, hopping kangaroos, baby kangaroos. It was awesome. And swamp wallabies. We hunted for platypus very patiently, but didn’t see any. We visited the koala enclosure and saw some sort of displayed, like in a zoo and they are bloody cute, and we spotted one up in a tree. We heard kookaburras. We saw turtles and swallows, cormorants and a musk duck. It wasn’t forty degrees, it was shady and breezy and it was incredibly beautiful. I can see why a culture of respecting the land has persisted here for millennia; why my ancestors who travelled to western Australia battled isolation and hardship to stay here.
And when we thought there could be nothing more lovely on earth, we went to Gibraltar falls, which is the most end of the world freaking beautiful place on the planet. It’s a waterfall with gentle little streams and rock pools weaving their way down to the larger drop, in the palm of the mountains that rise up above it on all sides. And despite all the tiny yellow signs saying ‘danger, drop,’ it’s a local goddamn swimming pool. Loads of people in swim stuff luxuriating in the cool streams and pools and always with the beautiful blue, green and white of the bush to look at. Heavenly. I thought a place like that only existed in films or on the internet. So grab a picnic, a couple of beers and a book, and stay there till it gets dark.

In other news, I gave a killer karaoke performance last weekend too. Pub quiz again tonight, and I’ve been swotting.