2008 Arriving in Adelaide

I’ve just read a book called ‘wild swans’ - the story of three generations of a Chinese family spanning the communist revolution in China. Now reading that I am humbled by the gritty heroism of the characters involved –the daily struggles-the grinding poverty and excrutiating hardships the like of which I have never, and likely never will have to experience. It makes me feel so inadequate-that I have nothing to complain about in comparison-and yet my feelings of frustration with Australia are so real to me.

I feel homicidal towards them sometimes! I reflect: you really cannot compare suffering can you? Suffering is indivisible. Your suffering is as traumatic for you as mine is for me. You can’t compare apples and oranges. Your suffering is an apple and mine is an orange-there is no point of comparison. I have no time for people who tell me to be thankful for what I have-“Things could be worse: you might be like X or Y over there etc !”

To say that is to discount and invalidate my suffering –to compare suffering is to devalue it – and to devalue me.

Australians make me feel so incompetent and inadequate....

Take getting on a bus for instance:

The Aussie homelander will say ‘vr’bady knaows heow to git ‘n’ a bas mite?’

Yes mate, except if you’ve been living in Borneo and forgotten how to ride a bus.

Firstly, in the eyes of the the homelander bus driver, passengers always should know their destination, which means the driver should be confronted by a person who is at the correct bus stop. Second, the said passenger must know the exact fare and preferably have the exact fare ready to satisfy the driver. Third, the passenger must be in excellent physical condition-because when the bus starts as he wobbles off towards his seat he is likely to be thrown off balance and crack a rib as the driver changes gear.

So any pilgrim from Borneo who rocks up at a bus stop without knowing where they are going for instance is immediately subject to the bus driver snarl routine which goes something like this…

Borneo pilgrim (affecting Aussie accent)

‘Ehhh helao .. I need to go to the ‘cah yads’ on ‘Mine North road’

To which the driver snarls, curls his lip and looks at the pilgrim as if to say

‘No Dunny here mite, want the shirt off my back aswell do ya?’

Not having the correct change or knowing the correct fare, or which machine to put the bloody ticket in, or which way up the ticket goes in the bloody machine, or, on the train, if you have to put the f***ing. ticket in a machine or not to validate it?

To the reader these may all seem, as they did to me, to be minor misdemeanours in their own right , but not so to the homelander bus-driver. Cumulatively, they seem to constitute a felony in his eyes and a sentence of life imprisonment without the prospect of parole. However, since he is not able to dispense such justice he is content with cracking your rib by accelerating erratically through the gears as you waddle down the aisle.

Everything is so difficult for a rookie to do: take going to buy a car for example: I ask the local convenience shop for the location of the nearest second hand car yard and he tells me. We take the bus there and get off. I spend ten minutes crossing the road! I’m hot and sweaty and can’t find the car yard.

No people around. After a couple of minutes we find a loquaceous and cooperative car salesman who seems to be appalled that I want to buy a car for less then 2000. I resist the temptation to explain that I had to give away my last Falcon in Brisbane to my neighbour because no-one wanted to buy it. It was a real good car with years of driving left in it.

He tells us he has nothing available in that range and that we should go to ‘Port Road’ and ask. He says ‘theyah’. After spending ten minutes trying to cross the road to get a bus and then another ten minutes trying to catch taxis which never came, I finally decided to give up and cross the road in the direction I had come in order to go home! Yet another change of mind sees me back in the garage again trying to call a taxi. No response, so, boiling in the sun, eventually I decide to get the bus back to where we started from. Only had to wait fifteen minutes in the boiling sun.

An hour and a half wasted. But crossing that road, even in the wrong direction, did give me a sense of achievement.

The search for Real Estate

Next morning I tried to look for some Real estate agents to see if there were any cheaper apartments for M and J. No estate agents within the vicinity. The man in the convenience store sends me to Melbourne street. I find an estate agent and almost before I can speak she says with an unmistakable look of ‘Don’t bother me’ on her face:

“Go to realestate.com.au”

And I feel like saying:

“ I could have done that at home –what’s the bloody point in having an office here if you’re just going to tell people to go to a website?

And while we’re at it, what’s the point in having a mouth if you don’t want to use it?”

But I say nothing. I don’t want to get into trouble with M for complaining.

Where’s the personal touch? There isn’t any –and that’s still a problem I have with Australia (and perhaps with the rest of the world to be fair to Australia.)

When you are interested in renting a property they hand you an application form with requests for references?

It’s like applying for a bloody job. If I don’t know anyone –I don’t get a place to live, I just go to the Salvos or just pitch my tent?

Ever done that homelander?

Do you get it, yet?

Regulations and contradictions

Australia is over-regulated . Is this really the land of the free –the individual-the independent? Here’s the real deal as I see it:

You can’ t smoke here – you can’t eat there; you can drink inside, but not outside-or at least until nine o’clock, then you have to go inside. If you’re not eighteen you can’t drink at all–but you can go to war and get yourself maimed or killed for a bunch of neighbours who won’t speak to you or who don’t even know you’re there!

The bus doesn’t stop here, only there. You can buy only tea here, not juice. Do I pay now or later –do I sit here and wait or do I carry my own food?

So many decisions…


Intimidation

It’s all so intimidating if you don’t know the system and you are an outsider. I have no car or home or job and feel disadvantaged and a member of the underclass –intimidated by car owners, homeowners and job owners and ‘know owners’

Those who are ‘In the know’ are know-owners. But I can’t complain or I’ll be called a ‘Whinger’ by the homelanders.

You even check-in at the airport with a touch screen Somehow you end up queuing just the same to drop off your bags.

So many contradictions?

Is Australia a warm and friendly culture or are the people stand-offish? Is it just dementia? I don’t know.

Bluey’s revenge

We had a great time finding a successor to ‘Bluey’. Bluey was our ford Falcon when we were in Victoria and Queensland and he served us very well for nine years. So much so that we all developed so much affection for him that we were more sorry leaving him behind than Queensland itself.

Finding a successor to Bluey in Adelaide would turn out to be a difficult task:

We got on the train at Adelaide station at a most unsalubrious place close to Salisbury. We were going to look at a little ford Fiesta. Noel Byrne greeted us. He looked like an Irishman –and he originally was of course-like many Aussies. So he showed us the fiesta and to be frank we weren’t that impressed. It looked tatty and it was quite hard to handle for a small car. We also noticed a ford Falcon of roughly the same ilk as bluey –but a little more modern. He was selling it for 2000 dollars and it looked quite good. Of course it looked just like Bluey and, like Bluey, it ran on gas. The clincher for Maria was the power-steering. Less wrenching of the steering wheel.

So, we went home leaving a deposit of 150 with him and proceeded to get the rest of the money for Noel from the bank next day. We registered the car and travelled back to Salisbury the next day and completed the deal. Noel turned out to be a retired teacher and he was very pleased with himself that he had retired intact and was doing this little sideline selling cars in his retirement.

We drove away and filled up with gas. As we left the station I noticed that the mile-ometer wasn’t working. This was a problem because the gas gauge wasn’t working either–and Maria needed to know the mileage in order to work out how much gas she was using in the tank. So we turned round and went back to Noel-who was embarrassed . We agreed to bring it back the next day so he could replace the mileometer. Off we went again. Ten minutes later –the engine cut out. We restarted and two minutes later the same thing –and then again, and again, and again. Five times on the way home! We get home and park and as we leave the car a neighbour says

“Hey mite th’z wata unda your car!” Water was pouring out everywhere.

More than a little dejected now I phoned Noel and gave him the bad news. He came up to town and took Bluey’s successor away and left us with the little runabout we were originally interested in for a couple of days while he fixed Bluey.

It was fun driving around in the Fiesta and I think Maria felt more relaxed having a car.

Having a car to the urban dweller is almost now an essential part of being human. Without a car you feel disadvantaged and rapidly develop the ‘victim’ mentality. You can even develop mild paranoia as everything seems to be so difficult to do without a car. You can come to believe everyone , including the traffic, is out to get you.

It’s the same identity thing that teenagers have. Teenagers need their ‘kit’ today too in order to feel they belong: mobile phone, ipod, laptop etc. Some teenagers claim even that a car is part of the kit too.

My son said he needed the car to get a job at Macdonalds! As public transport services decline in quality a car has indeed become essential to get to work in many locations. When I was a teenager you worked to get the money to get the car.

Now, in Australia, you need the car to get to the job to get the money. It sounds Irish to me. But it works very well for the world economy. But it drives parents mad as they are constantly having to work hard to earn the money to keep up with the demands made upon them to provide ‘Kits’ for their offspring.

The disappearing agents.

We decided to try and look for a bigger place for M and J. The first problem was finding the estate agents. When I was in Brisbane ten years previously all the main roads were full of estate agents. So we were perplexed to find not a single one as we drove around!

We couldn’t believe it. We ended up going to the post office and looking them up in yellow pages. We found one or two and set off to find them. The general attitude in the agents was to give us a print-out of their properties from a website.

The web had made these offices redundant. Where has the personal touch gone? As an Irishman I find it reprehensible. We did find one very helpful lady in LJ Hookers who sat us down and gazed at us with curiosity like we were ‘retro’ beach bums from the seventies. It was clear by the way she handled us that she was not used to seeing human beings in this context (her office). But she came up with some very useful advice indeed.

She suggested we rent an unfurnished apartment and then rent the furniture. That way we could maintain our flexibility to move at short notice without paying the high price of a furnished apartment. A very helpful lady.

It was with much sadness, and just a little apprehension, that I abandoned M and J  to survive on their own in this brave new world.

I had to return to Brunei.

On the way home my flight from Brisbane was delayed by twelve hours. At first the Royal Brunei Airline representative , in that overassertive and commanding post 9/11 tone of voice which the customer has come to expect in airports suggested I hang around the airport for twelve hours.

I thought I was going to have the first ugly incident of my trip but when I expressed dismay she had a change of mind and I was eventuallly sent with the other passengers starting their journey in Brisbane to a hotel with food vouchers.

When I got into the lift in my swanky hotel I found that the lift didn’t work! I was left there standing with my mouth falling open. How could this be? This is Australia, not Brunei? Two burly men entered the lift and casually looked at me as if to say “Don’t you know how a lift works, dork?” They then waved something at the door and the lift started. It turned out to be a plastic lift activator. I was unaware I had been given one with my room key - a security device which had to be swiped near an infra-red switch to start the lift. Much to the delight of the burly individuals I looked humiliated and dumb.

Another new piece of technological software I have to learn to master to survive in the new millennium.

The war against technology goes on.