Of Real Men, Genteel Women, and Jealous Kangaroos
In my March column, I told you I had just arrived in Australia for a five-week
nostalgia trip, celebrating Loni's and my arrival there 40 years ago. Well,
I'm back from my incredible adventures in the outback (like eating toasted
grubs) and ready to tell you all about them. But that will be in a future,
longer article, complete with pictures. Right now, I'd like you to bear with
me when I reminisce about my first visit. Everything was still possible then,
and anything could happen.
What actually did happen was that Loni and I hated Australia right away. The
people spoke a kind of raucous English that was not only unintelligible, but
acutely painful. When we finaly managed to understand them, it turned out
they told us exactly what was on their mind. In the Europe we came from, that
was called "rudeness." After five years down under, we realized it was honesty.
When we sailed for the US, we hugged our Australian friends with tears in our
eyes. Australia had been good to us, you bet, "fair dinkum."
Strange things happened to us in that country of cute bears and fiery lizards.
We have been raced by kangaroos on county roads, subjected to a rain of small
frogs, attacked by magpies and outwitted by kookaburras that stole lunch from
the picnic table. I also have a picture of a very pregnant Loni, holding a
koala that carried a little baby on her back. I wanted to call it "Motherhood,"
and send it to Life magazine, but Loni put her foot down. And speaking of
motherhood, our son was once slapped by a mother kangaroo when he tried to
pat the joey in her pouch. Not an insignificant adventure for a two-year old!
Of all the strange animals we saw in Australia, humans were perhaps the
strangest. The men, steeped in Foster's lager and patriotism -- I speak of
forty years ago -- were kind and generous to a fault. The women were genteel,
chatty, and generally the brains of the family. Everybody was casual to a
fault, from the electrician who replaced the light bulb over Loni's head
when she was in labor, to the police officer who stopped me at night for
driving home from the hospital without lights. As it turned out, his wife was
due the following week, so we spent some time conversing, in the middle of a
busy intersection, about the anxieties of fatherhood. Such are the moments
that make mellow memeories, while fortunately we forget how we worried about
the next mortgage payment.
Well thank you for listening. Keep watching the paper for an update about
that great and wonderful Terra Australis.
At Random - Adrian Korpel
