AUSSIE, AUSSIE, AUSSIE ... I, I, I.
For years, all I wanted to do was leave Australia. But then I grew up.
I don’t know if you know this, but I’m Australian. In case the above picture (more on that later) and my general daily existence didn’t give it away. Australia is famously referred to as “the lucky country,” and that’s largely right. In fact, the term comes from a book written by author Donald Horne in 1964, but it was originally a pejorative, a diss:
“Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people's ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise.”
Wow, Don was kind of a savage. But when you look back at the era, he was right. Especially when you consider the country’s white population, whose erasure of identity and opportunity for Australia’s indigenous people only began to be acknowledged in a 1992 speech by then Prime Minister Paul Keating:
“We practiced discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine that these things could be done to us."
Anyway, Don had himself a point, and would get grumpy over the following years when his tetchy term became one of endearment (“I’ve had to sit through the most appalling rubbish as successive generations misapplied this phrase.”) I’d quite like to have a drink with Don, but sadly he’s in the lucky country in the sky.
When I was growing up “down under,” striving so hard to be part of the “up over,” I agreed with Don, in a way. I was a teenager in the ‘90s and Australia was at the bottom of the world, not cool, not remotely curious. (I mean, you guys, there wasn’t even the internet to livestream a Gucci show). How was I going to get the hell out of there, to the places – New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles - where Everything Happened? How could a country possibly just be…content? I couldn’t understand it, and spent all my teenage years, then through college, dreaming of New York City, my three month old “new” American Vogues piling up in my bedroom faster than my savings were.
Now, I understand there’s something to be said for growing into your life. For learning that an enriching existence doesn’t necessarily come from flinging yourself around the world in search of perceived excitement; for looking back to where you came from and understanding the vibrancy, the texture, the gift of it all.
And to be honest, Australia now is just more interesting: its belated but full-throated embrace of indigenous culture, art and land (each precinct in Sydney, for example, now acknowledges its Aboriginal name) has only added to its richness, its deep red earthy substance. Wow, who knew that a culture, finally acknowledged, could benefit everyone?
I really started growing back into Australia in 2017, when I was profiled on its Sixty Minutes (local girl done good, nothing more thrilling). For one of the segments, the producers asked me if I would like to visit Featherdale Wildlife Park in western Sydney and name a wombat. Well, obviously. Anyway, I named the wombat Lola (after my mother, I swear this was a compliment to both) and became close friends with Featherdale’s Director of Life Sciences Chad Staples. (Chad is @zookeeperchad on Instagram - follow him because he’s currently raising a baby gorilla rejected by his mother, but that’s another story).
Being around all these funny little creatures turned me back into a kid. I started following @TheKangarooSanctuary on Instagram too – where a legendary couple, Brolga Barnes and his wife Tahnee Passmore rescue orphaned kangaroo joeys when say, their mothers have been, say, hit by a car. They are saints, both of them, living in the desert center of the country, Alice Springs.
When we go to visit, the place just vibrates. If you’ve never experienced the Australian desert, you must. The rusty color, the starkness, the strange, almost alien elegance of it all. And these low key, lovely people who live within it seamlessly, who know it’s part of their bones.
All of this gave me the epiphany – sadly, quite recently – that I was living two vibrant lives. I head back to Australia two to three times a year. I see my friends, eat incredible food, walk around the spectacular Sydney Harbour, take my Mum to Target. I might stay in a hotel, but I really live in the place. My friends laugh at me when I fetishize going to the local pub for a meat pie – but what is better than being an excitable tourist in your home town? I even do some work with Tourism Australia now - I’m officially a “Friend of Australia.”
Of course, then I come back to New York City and start flinging myself around the world again. And I never tire of NYC. A couple of months ago I went to Bono’s transcendent one-man performance at the Beacon Theater. After the show, I walked the three blocks home, via the deli, where I bought some chocolate ice cream, then plonked on the couch and watched Stephen Colbert. Now, you can’t do that in Sydney. The thrill of NYC is that you never know how your week will end – who you will meet, what you will experience, what you will simply see. New York is textured too, but its texture is humanity.
So yes, Australia is lucky, but so are its people. And I consider myself one of the luckiest. I know that after exporting myself into the Big Wide World, I could always go back to Australia. To the bright light and the ocean, the weird, noisy birds and my family who has a sense of humor as dry as a drought.
Maybe Bono isn’t playing three blocks away, but that’s OK.
Oh and if you want to hear the weird story of the kangaroo picture, it’s below the fold. I think it’s worth it?
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