Australia – Thoughts and Impressions
after a two-week visit in January of 2003

It is 4:30 in the morning but my jet-lagged body thinks it is 5:30 PM and is bugging me to start thinking about dinner. I cannot sleep so I may as well take this time to write down some impressions and memories of my recent trip to Australia while they are still fresh.

Australia is the size of the continental US, with the population of New Jersey . Most of the people live on or near the coast in six large cities, Sydney , Melbourne , Brisbane , Canberra , Adelaide , and Perth . I was fortunate to visit four of these in my two week trip. I was there representing the Glass Art Society, accompanied by our executive director Penny Berk and President Michael Rogers, to explore the possibility of holding our 2005 conference in one of three cities that had submitted proposals. Apparently each city was very “keen” to get the bid because their tourist bureaus rolled out the red carpet for us and we were treated to five star hotels and restaurants and guided tours (albeit hasty ones) in each location, completely free of charge! We ended out trip in Perth in Southwestern Australia where the Australian equivalent of GAS, Ausglass, was holding their bi-annual conference, partly because we are considering partnering with them for 2005 and partly because we wanted to see Western Australia . In all of this, we got one hell of an education, and I am going to try to share just a bit with you now.

They don't call Australia the “land down under” for nothing. It seemed to me that everything there is either upside down or backwards and those things that are not are not found anywhere else on earth. Australians are in the daytime when we are in the night and in the summer when we are in the winter. They drive on the wrong side of the road and from the wrong side of the car. They measure everything using the metric system so gas is sold in liters, temperature measured in degrees Celsius, size measured in centimeters and distance in kilometers. Voting is compulsory and everyone respects the posted speed limits. The night sky is completely different with a number of unfamiliar constellations (such as the southern cross) and those that are familiar are upside down. The interior is so harsh a place that a chunk of it the size of Alaska has never been charted or explored. Nothing can live for long where summertime temperatures commonly exceed 45 degrees (Celsius, remember? - about 122 Fahrenheit). It is by far the oldest land mass on earth with rocks dating back nearly a billion years. It hosts the oldest indigenous people on earth with a history that dates back nearly 50,000 years! That is long before the last ice age and predates the famous prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux , France by double their age! There is more than 50,000 miles of pristine coastline in Australia , the vast majority of it completely undeveloped and rarely visited by people.

Plants and animals alike evolved for most of Australia 's history without any contact or influence from the outside world so most indigenous species are not found elsewhere. Australia boasts the top ten most poisonous snakes in the world, a jellyfish that can kill a man, and man-eating freshwater crocodiles. It is the home to the vast majority of the world's species of marsupials, animals who bear their young in pouches. Many of these animals evolved into hopping about like a pogo stick because of the extremely harsh conditions. Hopping is a much more efficient method of locomotion than running on two legs or four. One type of marsupial species has only two members, the echidna, sort of a cross between a porcupine and a hedgehog, and the platypus, which was so strange when first discovered that biologists thought it was a hoax. We saw Koalas, Wombats, Wallabys, and several species of Kangaroo, all in the wild, that exist no where else in the world.

Australian flora is unique as well. I was most impressed with the gum trees (called Eucalyptus in this country) of which there are an astounding 800+ types. Virtually all of Australia is covered to some extent with some variety or another of gum tree. In the southwest we stopped in a stand of Karri and Jarra trees, the only indigenous hardwoods in Australia . They were magnificent, 200+ feet tall and straight as a pole. We visited several botanical gardens where we saw more species for the first time. We saw a bottle tree, shaped like a bottle and emitting a hollow sound when thumped because its interior is mostly porous and often filled with water like a big barrel. While in the Sydney Botanical Garden , we saw a bunch of large, brownish pods hanging from several tall gum trees and wondered what they were. Then, suddenly one of the “pods” began to move! Then it sprouted wings and dropped from the branch and flew off, sporting a wingspan of more than 30 inches! It was a fruit bat, the largest bat in the world, and there were hundreds of them in the trees in the Sydney botanical garden. They looked like Yorkshire terriers with wings.

People in Australia look just like us, but they talk funny. They speak English, and with an accent that is somewhat derivative of a British accent, but with many slang terms and phrases that are distinctly their own. For instance, they are not “Australians”… they are “Ozzies”. They live in “Aw-stry-lya”. They drink “bee-ah”. They cannot hear any difference between the words “paws”, “pause”, and “pores” (“po-ahs”, “po-ahs”, and “po-ahs”). They have a habit similar to people in our country of making single syllable words into multi-syllable words such as “know” (“kno-er”), and “too” (“too-eh”). They have a tough time with “r”s that follow vowels choosing to push it out of the front of their mouth like a peach pit (“bee-ah”, “po-ah”) and then adding it on some words where there isn't supposed to be one (“kno-er”, “aw-dear”). They have no problem with “r”s that follow consonants like “apricot” or “trespass”, but if there are two “r”s in a word, they sometimes lose it completely (“contrary” = “con-tree”, “Canberra” = Can-bra”). Australians can also be a bit lazy about words with consecutive vowels. Penny kept hearing our hosts refer to New Zealanders as “Marys” and she thought that might be Australian slang for “gay”. “Are there a lot of gay people in New Zealand ”, she asked? But what it turned out they were saying was “Maories”, the indigenous people of New Zealand , a fierce warrior people that can hardly be thought of as effeminate.

They also have strange words and phrases for things. A pharmacist is a “chemist”. A mini-van is a “Torago” and ice-chests are “Eskys”, (both brand names like “Kleenex” or “Coke”). A sleeping bag is a “swag”. A droll person is a “dag”. A swamp is a “billabong”. When they want to congratulate you they say “g'don ya myte” (good on you, mate). A funny person is a “gallah” (a type common of pink-headed parrot). But I never once heard an Australian say “crikey”.

And they are very friendly. Aside from the tourist bureau reps that were trying to wine and dine us to death, the Ozzies we encountered on the street were without exception open, friendly, extremely hospitable and not the least bit rude. Not one of us heard a condescending remark or a dismissive tone of voice from a local the entire time we were there. Our impression was that as a nation they are happy, confident and patriotic. They are convinced they live in the greatest and most blessed country on earth and are eager to share with you any proof of that they can muster. It rubbed off on all of us. We all talked about what it would take to move there.

Depending on what you want and, with a little money and gumption, it would not take much. I met a woman who moved from San Diego in 1973, married an Ozzie surfer, and purchased 7000 acres of land for $50,000 Australian (about $28,000 US). The only catch was that the nearest major town was Adelaide , a ten hour drive over dirt roads away. They had no electricity, no water, and no sewer. But there was a world class surf spot nearby so they were motivated to stay. They installed windmills, sisterns, and a septic system. They built their house and studio by hand with trucked in materials. In the summer the temperatures from the winds blowing off the Nullarbor (means “no trees) plain pushes temperatures into the middle 40's (Celsius, remember?). It rains maybe seven days a year. Their nearest neighbor is an hour's drive away. These are tough people. But she told me it is beautiful there… absolutely pristine. I asked her if she would not rather live where there are other people and conditions are not so harsh, and she replied with a smile, “not really”.

In each of the cities we visited, we were treated to some of the finest wine I have ever had. Australians take enormous pride in their wine production, and it is becoming recognized as some of the finest in the world rivaling what is produced in France and Italy . I was especially impressed with the wineries around Adelaide , in a place called the Barossa Valley where we visited one and another right outside of Adelaide , where we were taken on a tour of the private cellars. There we saw one of the world's most expensive and treasured wines, the Penfold Grange valued at $500 per bottle for recent vintages and over $25,000 for the 1955 vintage, rated one of the best wines ever produced. A complete “set”, a single bottle from each year from 1951 to 1999, would cost more than $160,000!

But their table wines were delicious too, especially the Shiraz and Chardonnay. South Australia is famous for its Shiraz and we were treated to a number of superb varieties during our visit there, and West Australia , particularly in the Margaret River region, is famous for its Chardonnays. Unfortunately, I do not think the same of Australian beers. The ones I tried were unimaginative and fairly homogenous. If you've tried Foster's Lager, you have pretty much had the lot.

And then there is the art. Australians have their own special aesthetic and it is influenced by the both the ancient land and the people that have lived on it for tens of millennia. The aboriginal concept of “dreamtime” connects them to the land and that concept has found new life in contemporary art. The Aborigines are now recognized for their brilliant painting and are being shown in the finest museums and galleries. I found the work mesmerizing and bought several books so that I can further try to understand what they are about. Contemporary Australian artists of European origin also are gaining recognition worldwide, including those who work in glass, thus our interest in having a conference there.

So much of the trip seems like a blur already, and I have only been back two days. There were so many other things that we did. We rode a water taxi across Syndey harbor into the face of a 30 knot wind after a heavy lunch, bouncing over the waves and laughing like maniacs so we would not get seasick. We took pictures of ourselves holding a Koala while praying that the sleepy looking thing would not pee on us. We toured the famous opera house with the manager, getting an inside look at the place few tourists have ever seen. We visited the Australian War Memorial and saw the 40 meter high circular mosaic, the largest in the world. We body surfed in the Indian Ocean at Margaret River . We stood on the tip of Cape Leeuwin where the southern and Indian Oceans meet. And we only scraped the surface. My list of things to see in Australia is now ten times longer than before I went there so going back is a no-brainer. I will go back, and soon.

Robert Mickelsen 1/20/03