When I was a young fella back in the 1970’s, it was a thrill to receive a letter in the post. In those innocent times, you always assumed it meant good news, unlike in later years when envelopes carried bills and “Dear John” letters from childhood sweethearts.
It was a general rule in the “good old days” that bad news was delivered by telephone while the post delivered letters from overseas relatives with exotic dollar notes enclosed and scented letters in German from a pen friend you would never meet. This was particularly true in our house, because we didn’t have a telephone and like the rest of the street, we depended on the good grace of Mrs Gray across the road to be our telephonic link to the outside world. Needless to say, we didn’t abuse that gift and used it only for news of family bereavements and hospital appointments. Mrs Gray was a lovely women but she wouldn’t appreciate you spending half an hour in her living room telling your mate about the weather or the celebrity you had spotted the night before.
I learned at an early age however, that letters didn’t come out of the blue. You had to work for them, usually by firing off an initial mail yourself. One fruitful avenue was to write to embassies enquiring as to their country and seeking any information they might have, as though you had just heard of Canada and felt the need to understand it. Embassies seemed to have entire departments focussed on servicing the queries of small boys, because two weeks after my initial query, a large brown envelope would be plopped into our hallway enclosing maps and wall charts.
It was all positive stuff of course, designed to promote their country. The information from the German embassy contained beautiful pictures of the Black Forest or the Munich Beer Festival with no mention of the war or the ugly steel works of the Ruhr Valley. The Americans sent me a wall chart of their National parks but glossed over the Indians who used to live in them, while the Australians showed lots of smiling black Aboriginal faces but kept quiet about the “White Only” only policy that was still in force at the time.
These posters were my childhood window to the wider world and planted a seed of adventure within me that is still growing. Thankfully, I’ve managed to see most of the places depicted in those pictures, even if the reality has been different to my childhood thoughts.
For example, Australia was always depicted as a country of red dirt, kangaroos and suntanned blokes in wide brimmed hats under a clear blue sky. Cities were rarely presented, unless it was a romantic shot of the Sydney Opera House and bridge. You got no sense of what it meant to live in an Australian City or of seasons that differed from high summer.
There is of course another Australia. The country in which most Australians live and where the weather is pretty crap for six months of the year. While many countries have a North/South or City/Country divide, Australia takes this to the extreme. The South East is a different country to elsewhere, particularly Queensland and the Northern Territory, which are as foreign as Cambodia is to Iceland.
When you leave the sophisticated streets of Melbourne to venture north, you do so with the spirit of Phileas Fogg. The first thing you notice is that people wear different clothing. The natives of Queensland wear wide brimmed hats and knee high socks with shorts and look like they are about to audition for a Western movie. The locals in Melbourne wear European clothes because that’s where they think they live. It’s the same with cuisine. Italian, Greek and Lebanese food is the most popular in the South East whereas our cousins in the North like barbecuing their food, particularly if it involves animals found on Australia’s national emblem. They drink fizzy beer with all meals including breakfast, whereas we sip lattes and micro brewery ales.
The biggest difference you’ll notice is in the area of arts and entertainment. The only art you’ll find in any part of Australia beyond the metropolitan cities was painted 400 years ago by indigenous people and probably has a bowling alley built on it now. Sydney and Melbourne on the other hand have galleries displaying the work of 17th Century Masters as well as opera, ballet and theatre. When we want to watch sport, we head down to the MCG or the Sydney Cricket ground for a night of AFL or Rugby. In Queensland they prefer their sports to include animals, such as bulls that don’t want to be ridden by wannabe cowboys, or dwarves that don’t mind being chucked.
I guess the easiest way to describe the difference between these ‘two countries within a country’ is that one half takes its inspiration from Europe whereas the other looks to the worst excesses of the United States. This can be seen in all its ghastly glory along the Gold Coast, south of Brisbane. It boasts a Miami Beach clone in Surfers Paradise and a gaudy collection of theme parks designed to separate fools from their money. They also have all year round sun and beaches and so attract tourists from the more sophisticated parts of Australia, who dine off fried fast food for a week before returning to their normal routine of salads and almond croissants.
These two Australia’s exist in relative harmony with each other because each of them tries to pretend that the other doesn’t exist. Occasionally however, that harmony is shattered by the realisation that the other side is gaining the upper hand. The recent election is a good example. City Australia likes to think that they run the country and the political class is heavily Sydney and Melbourne based. This election, however, threw up a hung parliament which left the balance of power in the hands of three rural independents with views that made posh Melbournians choke on their lattes.
Their mission is to create “One Australia”. I suspect they will have the opposite affect and in a few years Queensland will split from the rest of the country and rename itself “New Las Vegas”. And afterwards, small Irish boys will have to write to two embassies to get pictures of kangaroos and the Sydney Opera House.
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