I keep learning more about Australian pests. The biggest pests – white people – brought with them a while host of other creatures that soon became a massive problem, for the land, but for humans as well. The story of the rabbits is well known. Perhaps more annoying is the story of foxes, brought to Australia by bored English gentlemen who missed home and fox hunting. Needless to say, many animals escaped and started to breed like rabbits, and since local fauna didn’t know to run from them, they could hunt down echidnas etc. without any trouble. Camels, which people brought for transportation, were abandoned once we got cars, and colonised the desert areas. Pigs got wild and are destroying other animals’ habitats. It’s really depressing.
It’s funnier when it turns back on people. Australia is covered with fruit farms, and the farmer’s worst enemy is… The fruit fly! There are signs everywhere not to bring fruit from cities to the country, so you don’t carry fruit flies with you. And you are all encouraged to become Fruit Fly Fighters (what an excellent band name!), which includes setting up traps on the treacherous beasts. Outback life continues to be hardcore.
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In Melbourne most people are white, but there is a large number of East Asian people, and there is an abundance of Chinese, Japanese and Korean restaurants. Yet there are very few people from other ethnic groups – virtually no Indians or other South Asians, very few black people, very few indigenous people… I wonder why the difference.
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Everything seems so very confused on the issue of indigenous people’s rights and colonial history. On one hand there is a great deal of awareness raising, drawing attention to the past wrongs, to the value and diversity of indigenous cultures. On the other, the interests and feelings of those people are routinely trampled on, from displaying images of dead people (which is taboo in many indigenous cultures), to glorifying genocidal colonial heroes.
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There is an enormous number of bars and restaurants in Melbourne. It really looks like an average local eats out eight times a week. There are more food places here than there are pubs in the UK. And food culture seems to be reaching previously unknown heights of hipstery. The choice is overwhelming, as are the prices.
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Pretty much all beer here is sold in 0.33 cans or bottles. The only 0.5 ones are imports. Alcohol is also quite expensive – a 0.33 beer can cost the same as a decent lunch (by decent I mean filling, not hipster-fancy – those cost in the range of a small car). However, tap beers are all .5l. Go figure.
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All showers in Australia have shower heads attached to the wall. Non-detachable. What the hell? I mean, do those people ever wash their butts and genitals? Or masturbate with the shower head? Or just, say, use the shower to fill up a bucket or wash something that’s too big to wash in the sink?
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Australian internal flights have sensible safety regulations – none of this not allowing liquids in hand luggage nonsense. You just can’t take aerosols, which is a sensible safety precaution given possible pressure changes.
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Dee keeps having issues with the lack of imagination with which Australians name things. Hey, we have those cookies that are in various shapes and are barbecue flavoured, how should we call them? Barbecue Shapes! Check out this creek with fresh water, how should we name it? Freshwater Creek! What about those islands that are really flat and low? Why not Low Islands? Dee’s poetic Celtic soul was dying a little each time we found things like that, and we found a lot of them. Hard to disagree! I suggested that we should take lessons from this and as a new era of colonisation might dawn on humanity, we should make sure that every spaceship has at least one resident poet on board to come up with decent names for things.
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