Frostbitten in a Sunburnt Country

The sole purpose of this essay is to tell anyone that is interested something about the country I love and why I love it.

Thanks to Chloe for prompting this opportunity as part of her 'In a Sunburnt Country' story event.

My thanks to CTC once again for the ideas and edit.

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First an admission; I wasn't born in the greatest country on earth, the lucky country. Yes, folks, I'm an import. But that's fine, I share that with 6.7 million other Aussies, almost one in three. However, we're all Aussies.

How about I start with some history?

It's thought that humans first inhabited the continent of Australia around 50,000 years ago and survived quite happily until white fellas arrived. The first visitors were Dutch and Portuguese navigators. They think the Dutch landed as early as 1590 something. Luckily, most of them landed on the North or West coasts, where conditions are harsh, and they had no wish to stop. The Dutch, of course, called it New Holland. Several of them probed the West coast over the next hundred years. An example, was the Dutchman, Abel Tasman, who called the part he discovered, Van Dieman's Land, after his sponsor, the governor of Batavia. Later, they kindly renamed it Tasmania after him.

It wasn't until the Brit, Captain Cook, hit and mapped a big chunk of the East coast, where the land is more hospitable and fertile, that Europeans started to show interest. Incidentally, the story goes that a botanist on Cook's crew asked a local aboriginal what those strange grey hopping animals were. The aboriginal replied, "What the fuck are you on about, honky," or in the local dialect, "Kangaroo."

Cook's report when he returned to Britain came out at an interesting time. The Brits were in the process of being kicked out of America and needed somewhere to dump their riff raff, otherwise known as convicts.

To claim a country, you need to map it and colonise it, consequently, the 'First Fleet' of convicts, some free settlers and their guards arrived on the 26^th of January 1788. Staggering coincidence that, landing on Australia day, but these things happen. They settled in Botany Bay but soon found a hidden gem of a harbour just a few kilometres further north. They named it Sydney harbour and moved there. Obviously, the name New Holland had to go, so, using a great English tradition, they stole from the Latin phrase for 'great south land', or 'terra australis' and hence Australia was born.

One slight problem in claiming a land is you have to show no one owns it already. The Brits were well practiced at doing that. Despite the evidence that the local aboriginals looked human, walked, talked, and had a culture, the British courts declared them 'non-human', which made the land 'terra nullius', or vacant. So, in essence, we stole the place.

The early settlers traded with the locals and were helped by them but eventually herded them into enclaves and introduced them to the delights of western culture; like smallpox, cholera, typhoid, and alcohol. Does any of this sound familiar? Even worse, when the locals decided it was easier to spear a nice, slow, juicy sheep, rather than chase a stringy kangaroo, they became a feral pest, like the dingo. In today's enlightened times, of course, we recognise this for the horror it was and are nationally embarrassed about it.

From Sydney, the explorers cut out across land to the west, and groups of ships headed north and south. If they found somewhere nice to settle, were far enough away from the government and were ambitious, they declared their own colonies. Finally, at the end of the nineteenth century, they decided to all band together into one country and on the first of January 1901, the 'Commonwealth of Australia' was born. We even had a constitution written. Thank fuck it left out references to God and guns.

The old colonies became the states of Western Australia, South Australia, Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, and Tasmania. There was a bit left over so that came under the administration of the Federal government as the Northern Territory.

Immediately, Melbourne and Sydney, capitals of the two most populous states, began arguing who was going to be the national capital. Unresolved, they decided to purchase a sheep farm between the two and build a whole new capital. When the first settlers, well, settled the area, it was dominated by two round hills. They asked the local aboriginals what the hills were called. They replied 'Canberra'. It was only well after the capital was built that they found out Canberra was the local dialect for 'breasts'. You'd have thought we learned after the 'kangaroo' incident, wouldn't you? They bought the sheep station, excised that bit from New South Wales, gave it the imaginative name of the Australian Capital Territory, and built a rather dull city there.

Which leads me to the rather dry topic of politics. Don't give up, folks, there's more and better to come.

Our states work in a similar way to those in the US and counties in Britain. They have their own police force and look after education and some environmental issues. The federal government looks after defence etc. Once every three years, each state elects a 'state government' and they run around for three years thinking they're important. Also, every three years, we democratically elect two federal houses of parliament, not dissimilar to the US Congress and Senate, or the British Houses of Commons. The party with the most representatives in the lower house, called 'the House of Representatives', nominate their biggest wanker, give him a flash house and call him the Prime Minister. We then keep an eye on the till to keep their fingers away from it. Like most liberal democracies, our system of democracy has been corrupted from the original concept in that it's very difficult to get elected unless you're a member of one of the three major parties. The Liberal Party generally represent small business and the middle class; the Labour Party generally the labour unions and the working class; the National Party generally farmers. In reality, the Liberals and Nationals always band together as a coalition. The leader of the losing party becomes known as 'the Leader of the Opposition', or colloquially, 'the Wanker in Waiting'.

Officially, I think Queen Liz II is still our Head of State, governing through her representative, the Governor General. The one time the holder of that office interfered in running the place, in 1975, by dismissing the then Prime Minister, they quietly changed the rules to cut Her Maj out of the picture. If you're the slightest bit interested, Google 'The Dismissal'. Now the GG wears a funny uniform, shakes hand, and hands out the gongs.

Secularity is written into our constitution. Our head of state is entitled to NOT be a church going Christian.

Now onto our armed forces.

Militarily, we've contributed lives to just about every war since the Boer war. In both world shindigs, Australian troops were sought after by commanding generals. They held the port of Tobruk against Hitler's Africa Corps while besieged for nine months. When the German propaganda machine tried to belittle them by calling them rats, they adopted the term, 'Rats of Tobruk' as an honorific. They gave the Japanese their first bloody nose of World War II on the Kokoda track. We were attacked at home by the Japanese at Darwin, Broome, and Sydney. We're not embarrassed that our national day of remembrance celebrates a defeat at Gallipoli, and the most famous character from that conflict was a pacifist who was killed after three and a half weeks of hauling wounded back to the beach on a series of donkeys that were progressively shot out from under him. I look forward to going on pilgrimage there one day.

That's enough history and politics; how about some geography?

Chloe called us the sunburnt country which is only partly accurate, although sunburnt is not the word I would use; sun-blasted is more accurate.

The truth of the matter is, Australia stretches from not far from ten degrees below the equator, to more than forty-two degrees below it. That's like North America between Panama and New York, or between Ethiopia and Portugal. It ranges from snow-capped mountains in Tasmania, through baking deserts, to tropical swamps. From -10 ^o C (14 ^o F) in the southern mountains to 51 ^o C (124 ^o F) at a mine site in Western Australia I worked at. I have been frost-bitten in Tasmania and heat-stricken in Queensland.

The land is arable in the south west corner and near the coast all along the eastern side, but away from the coast it gets hotter and drier until you get to where only specially bred cattle can survive, the stock count is per square kilometre and they round them up with helicopters. Where we have single farms bigger than some English counties. Where the people are so tough, they rust. Not being able to resist the urge to brag, here's some statistics. The largest cattle station (ranch) in the world is in South Australia. Its about the same size as Yorkshire in England and only a tad smaller than Connecticut in the US.

We're 76% the size of the US, but with less than 8% of the population. A huge proportion of the population live in the big cities that ring our coastline and those people tend to be as soft as city dwellers worldwide. The further inland you go, the less people there are and the tougher they get. Until you get right to the middle, where the men are real men, and, unfortunately, so are most of the women.

Also, the further inland you go, the greater the male to female ratio is, the fairer sex do like their creature comforts, don't they? Again, you get to a borderline where the men are real men and the sheep are nervous. Na, just kidding. I love the outback people, they will unhesitatingly give you the shirts off their backs.

The Australian deserts don't tend to be the sandy ones. More, blasted rocks, stunted trees, and hardy animals. In mid-summer, your life expectancy can be measured in hours if you get stuck unprepared out there. What rivers there are only have water in them during the wet season, then have nine months of dry bed. After they stop running, and before they are totally dry, you get a series of isolated ponds called billabongs. There you go, you learned something today.

Disaster struck our most famous boat race (the Henley-on-Todd) one year, when unseasonal rain caused there to be water in the Todd river. You might want to Google that if you like a laugh. They cut the bottoms out of boats, then a bunch of pissed hooligans get in them and run. Kinda like a nautical Flintstones.

Culturally, we don't really rate on the world stage, never having an opera written here. Ask us if we give a shit. One of our greatest artists did stick drawings of a famous local outlaw, about the standard my son could do when he was six or so. We all laugh like fuck when we hear one sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. We did give the world ACDC, INXS, Midnight Oil, Powderfinger, Silverchair, Icehouse, Men at Work, Australian Crawl, Mental as Anything and Kylie Minogue's arse. We also gave Hollywood, Mel Gibson. We don't respond well to threats, so stop saying you'll send him back.

The first Tuesday in November ever year, the whole country just about stops for three minutes while a horse race is run. The other 364 days, 23 hours, and 57 minutes of the year we feel that anyone who owns a horse, unless they ride it to round up cattle, is a bit of a prat.

We invented a game, called Australian Rules Football or aerial pingpong, which is played in one half of the country. The other half plays a commercialised style of rugby, called Rugby League. The two codes despise each other, only coming together to laugh at the pretty-boy soccer players.

Language wise, we speak only the queen's proper English, it's ripper enough for us. Don't say we make a dog's breakfast of it. A pommy sheila accused us of being coarse once, but we reckon she had a few roos loose in the top paddock, so no one listened. No, dead set, they didn't, you'd be a drongo to think otherwise. Like civilised people in other countries, we banned durries in watering holes, but it's still ridgy-didge to drop yer guts during an arvo of blowing the froth off a couple. Don't overdo it or it's off flat chat to the dunny for a chunder. If you don't quite make it, no wucken furries, spew in a plant pot. Makes you look a little like a galah, but strewth, it's still better than being a seppo.

Fair dinkum, every red-haired person in Australia is called Bluey. Don't ask us why. It's usual to shorten your friends name and put an 'o' on the end. Davo, Johnno, etc. Somehow, 'cark it' means to die, 'no worries' means yes, 'yakka' means work and a good guy is a 'top bloke'.

A bit of trivia for you.

Look in the Guinness Book of Records for the world record for the quickest consumption of a yard glass of beer. It's an Aussie. We later rewarded the guy by electing him as our Prime Minister. He was the last one we took seriously. He led by example.

We support the underdog. Our most famous song is about a guy that stole a sheep. Our favourite son, Ned Kelly, was an Irish immigrant that turned to crime and was eventually hung.

The New Zealanders, or Kiwis, and us have a love-hate relationship—Sydney is the second biggest New Zealand city in the world.

Nature wise, if the leaves fall off a tree, its imported or sick.

Twenty-one of the twenty-five deadliest snakes in the world, including the top seven all call us home. Add to that, the deadliest scorpion and the three deadliest spiders. And guess what? It worries us not a jot.

We welcome people being eaten by crocodiles in the Northern Territory. We call it Natural Selection: it weeds out the those that can't read the signs and those that are too stupid to heed them. We like the fact that the only beaches safe from crocodiles are those where the sharks have eaten them all. The only thing the sharks fear is the jellyfish. Did you know, the biggest alligator in the world was as big as an average sized croc.

To showcase our humour and values. One of the largest crocs ever found was almost seventeen feet long but was called Sweetheart. He was protected by law but the boats he attacked weren't. The biggest recorded croc was 6.4m or twenty-one feet long.

All that said, why am I so proud of my adopted country?

I love that we haven't paid for the Sydney Harbour Bridge yet. Talk about Try Before You Buy—it was completed in 1932!

I love that our favourite jokes are about ourselves and that our most famous poem is about a horse.

I love that we gave the world the rotary clothes line, wifi, flight data recorders, Google Maps, the bionic ear, and the world's first refrigerating device, the Coolgardie safe.

I love that I can call my closest friends 'a bastard', knowing they will take it as a term of endearment.

I love knowing my children won't be shot at school, because bullying is not an entrenched part of our culture and guns are illegal.

I love the fact that if I see someone collapse in the street, I can help them without any fear of them suing me later. Here, if I collapse and am incapable of speaking, the law assumes I have asked for help. If someone breaks my pencil, I can sue him. For the value of a replacement pencil.

But most of all, I love knowing that if I am in danger at work, my fellow workmates will do everything necessary to get me out because we're mates, and that term means something here.

The love of field and coppice
Of green and shaded lanes,
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins.
Strong love of grey-blue distance,
Brown streams and soft, dim skies
I know, but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror
The wide brown land for me!

The stark white ring-barked forests,
All tragic to the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold hush of noon,
Green tangle of the brushes
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree-tops,
And ferns the warm dark soil.

Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When, sick at heart, around us
We see the cattle die
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady soaking rain.

Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the rainbow gold,
For flood and fire and famine
She pays us back threefold.
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze ...

An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand
though Earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.

By Dorothea Mackeller