Showing posts with label australia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label australia. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Captain James Cook, considered

I am fascinated by Captain James Cook, and the footprints he's left on New Zealand history.

Cook was the first European to widely explore New Zealand, to reach eastern Australia, to enter the Antarctic and visit many of the South Pacific nations. His travels took him from the bottom of the world to nearly the top in Alaska. By any measurement, he was one of the greatest explorers of all time, adding detail to a globe that was largely blank.

Cook's traces are everywhere in New Zealand - he spent a lot of time here on his three global voyages, mapping more of the country than anyone before and engaging with the Maori people. Last weekend, we were up in the Bay of Islands on holiday, and I stood in Oneroa Bay looking at the spot where Cook weighed anchor in 1769. I don't imagine the view has changed much since. I've visited several other spots Cook once landed in New Zealand and it's always fascinating to put your mind into this vanished world. A few years ago I got to see a life-size working replica of his famous ship the Endeavour in Sydney, and it blew my mind to realise just how small and cramped the vessel really was.

Captain Cook's legacy is seen as mixed these days - while he was unquestionably one of the greatest explorers of all time, the European invasion also changed life for the worse in many of the Pacific Islands and countries he visited. Disease, guns, poverty, even genocide followed in a lot of the countries Cook visited, like a dismal trail of modernization. But can you really lay all the ills of western civilisation at the feet of Captain Cook?

I've read several books about Cook, who kind of like Lincoln or Churchill, has new facets seen in each retelling of his familiar story. One of my favorite "Cook books" is New Zealand historian Anne Salmond's "Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas," which attempts to equally give both the European and Pacific view of his travels. Salmond goes far deeper than the usual cliched "happy native" portrayal of islanders. She gives a deep and knowing look at their cultures and shows how places like Tahiti, with an entire society built upon the notion of free love, honour and lack of possessions clashed with the European culture. Salmond shows Cook's flaws, but also explains why things ended so badly for him in a compelling, original fashion.

Another book I highly recommend is Tony Horwitz's "Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before," which is steeped in fascination with Cook's legacy and deeds. Horwitz has a very fun approach with the subject, hopping about and interviewing modern-day New Zealanders and others about their feelings on Cook, travelling queasily in a replica of the Endeavour, and trying to repair the "Conqueror Cook" reputation that has become fashionable these days.

My own opinion is that Cook was a great figure of history - not a perfect one by any means. But he filled in the map for nearly half the globe in a way few can even fathom now. The sheer courage involved in sailing off the edge of the map again and again is unimaginable. I was pretty fascinated a few years ago to stand on the replica of the Endeavour in Sydney and imagine this small boat heaving through the oceans, not just to the South Pacific but as far as the frozen Antarctic and all the way up to the Bering Strait in Alaska.

He could've been another Pizarro, wiping out natives with impunity. But Cook often genuinely tried to understand the cultures he encountered and forbade his men from raping and pillaging. Sure, by our standards today he would still come off as rather biased and racist, but you cannot judge a man of 1770 by the perspective of 2012. Cook's own moderately enlightened views frayed with time - by his third voyage, a worn-out Cook began acting far more ruthlessly, took umbrage at repeated thefts by Hawaiian natives, and the conflicts ended in his brutal death.

It's perhaps faint praise to say Captain Cook was a bit more liberal when compared to many other explorers of his time. But the rest of the world would have discovered the South Pacific eventually even if Cook had sunk just outside British ports on his first voyage. For his sheer intrepid ambition, his tremendous sailing skills and his attempts, blinkered as they might have been, to learn about the places he visited, Cook is still very much worth remembering.

"Ambition leads me not only farther than any other man has been before me, but as far as I think it possible for man to go." - Captain James Cook

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Dali, Jedi and hanged men in Melbourne

Photobucket...So I'm back from my second trip across the ditch to Australia, a lovely 5 days or so in shiny Melbourne. We had a rather quick urban getaway, sticking right to the city itself so no Outback adventures for us, but it was a fine chance to get a look around Australia's second-largest city after our trip to Sydney a while back (with about 4 million people each town is the same size as the entire country over here). Melbourne is a fine place, filled with grand and intricate Victorian architecture and a thriving cultural scene. Going to Oz from NZ is an interesting experience -- both times now I've felt like I was visiting the bigger brother. Sydney and Melbourne are true thriving metropolises like New York or San Francisco, and make Auckland seem rather humble in comparision.

PhotobucketOne of the big attractions of going to Melbourne right now for us was several great museum exhibitions. A big highlight for me was the National Gallery of Victoria's "Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire" show, which features 200 works from Dalí collections. Dalí is one of my favorite artists, and this show was a real treat -- besides the paintings, it also included a variety of sketches, videos and multimedia works. I've got a big Taschen monster book of Dali paintings but there's nothing compared to seeing his works in person – the colours really explode forth, particularly the vivid blues and the yellows of Dali's beloved Cadaqués beaches in Spain. I also had new appreciation for Dalí's underrated sheer skill as a draftsman -- the sketches and rough drafts on show display his tight grasp of anatomy and perspective. The exhibit even included Dalí's bizarre and beautiful animated film collaboration with Walt Disney, "Destino," which was only finished in 2003.

PhotobucketWe also took the train out to West Melbourne and the ScienceWorks museum, where a display of great importance to all of us was on -- Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination, a super-cool show which has been traveling the globe that features dozens of costumes, props and models from all six "Star Wars" flicks, as well as a bunch of exhibits on how the science behind the movies really could work. On a 1 to 10 geek scale this show was an 11; balding 30-somethings like myself oohed and awed at the life-size props of FX-7 the medical droid and a Wampa as if we were at the Sistine Chapel. I mean, the actual model of the land speeder they used in "A New Hope"? Well, I dug it.

Another great place to visit was the evocative Old Melbourne Gaol, which housed thousands of criminals back in the bad old days up til the 1920s. It also saw more than 130 prisoners hanged, including the famed bushranger Ned Kelly.

Photobucket Kind of an Australian Alcatraz,  they've turned what's left of the old structure into a very spooky place, with several dozen cells stretching down a long dark corridor. The cells are tight and crammed (I could just get my 6' 2" self through the tiny doorways) and it's not hard to visualize what it would've been like to be kept there; prisoners were tightly controlled and forbidden even to talk. Spookiest of all are the "death masks" taken of executed criminals, which are displayed almost like decaptiated heads throughout the prison, with short tales about the prisoner's grim lives. Ned Kelly's death mask holds a place of "honor" at the end of the hall, with a good display about his life. (We'd just watched the rather mediocre Heath Ledger movie version of Kelly's life the other day so it was particularly interesting to see Kelly's final domain.)

We had a hyperactive 5 1/2-year-old boy in tow, of course, so couldn't check out everything, but a very good public transport system meant we could see a lot in a few days. We also did a great deal of just wandering around Melbourne's busy streets and many parks and gardens, browsing record and comics stores (the fantastic Minotaur made my heart skip a beat), eating at the Victoria Market, visiting the excellent Melbourne Museum and its superb Aboriginal art display, drinking too much coffee and admiring the view from our hotel of the city sprawled out before the magnificent Yarra River.

Sunday, September 13, 2009

Saturday, September 5, 2009

Gone walkabout, mate

Photobucket ...Hurrah, it's holiday time and we're off to the outback. Well, OK, actually to a city of 4 million people, not "Crocodile Dundee" territory by any means. But anyway, we'll be in Australia for a spell, report upon return!

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

It's not the heat, it's the humanity

Yes, it's winter in half the world, but hot and sticky summer in the other half. So it's only about the equivalent of the mid-80sF here but apparently we've hit 100% humidity at points in the last few days. Frankly, I didn't know such things could be done. I thought 100% humidity means we're underwater. Which is kind of what it feels like. My sweats are sweating. You go swimming to feel less damp. I realize now I could never survive a really humid place like Southeast Asia (and I lived through Mississippi summers for seven years, by gum!).

PhotobucketAnd the heat can be far worse -- it's very sad to see of the tragic wildfires across the pond in Australia; the at least 200 death toll and photos we've been seeing are truly horrific. I've long feared California having something similar happen; fires are a dime a dozen in the Golden State but (knock on wood) they've not quite gotten to this holocaust point.

But I do have to wonder if it's just a matter of time; as places dry up and people fill in all the space, firestorms like this surely will happen more. When we lived up in California's Lake Tahoe 7-8 years ago, we had several wildfire scares there; the Tahoe basin basically is a giant funnel with only a handful of roads in and out. I thought about what would happen if a giant blaze took hold there, and how quickly roads would jam, and what might happen next. The storms in Oz might not happen like that in the US (one of the terrible aggravating factors there is how incredibly flammable eucalyptus trees are). But it's a sober warning for pretty much everyone who lives in a fire-prone zone.

Donate to help Australia's wildfire victims here.

Saturday, August 30, 2008

Burning the Midnight Oil, 20 years on


PhotobucketIt's hard to remember what a breath of fresh air the music of Midnight Oil seemed like on the American Top 40 back in 1987, when the song "Beds are Burning" suddenly was everywhere. A fiery call to arms, with that catchy chorus "How can we dance when our earth is turning / How do we sleep when our beds are burning?" It had the drive of punk, the universality of pop, and a slithery exotic feel that stood out from the pack. It sure didn't sound like George Michael, you know?

With a blast of Australian heat and passion so intensely political that they made U2 look like amateurs, Midnight Oil tackled the environment, indigenous rights, and other causes with their ferocious anthems. To a world that associated Australia with Men at Work and koalas, it was a revelation. Their 1987 disc Diesel and Dust remains a classic, punk power pop mixed with Australian flavours, didgeridoo mashed with electric guitar. It's an antipodean answer to U2's The Joshua Tree.

PhotobucketI can't quite believe it's been 21 years since Diesel and Dust broke Midnight Oil to the world. A massive global hit, it's also an album that sounds nearly as fresh as it did the day it came out. A new Sony Legacy Edition CD/DVD set remasters the album with a bonus song, and a fascinating documentary about the band's tour of the Aboriginal Outback.

Front man Peter Garrett, over 6 feet tall and bald as Australia's monolith rock Uluru, was a stunning stage presence. I saw the Oils live back in the late 1980s, and they were a dynamo – I remember thinking at the time that frontman Garrett's herky-jerky dancing style was like watching a man who'd just been smacked in the spine by a sledgehammer. Garrett's frantic energy leapt off the stage.

The major bonus of this reissue is the DVD Blackfella/Whitefella, which follows Midnight Oil's 1986 tour of remote aboriginal settlements with the great Warumpi Band. This is an astounding historical document, packed with great Oils performances in juke joints, shanty towns and the outdoors. The film is light on narration, heavy on music and a look at aboriginal lives. The hinterlands tour showed the Australia that tourists rarely see, the harsh conditions many Aborigines live in.

"It was the most collectively exciting, eye-opening and ultimately saddening experience for us as a band," drummer Rob Hirst said. But out of the tour came the inspirations for the songs of Diesel and Dust, both an Australian love letter and angry rally against the country's injustices. It's not too much of a stretch to say that Midnight Oil helped contribute to the climate of reconciliation that led to the Australian government's extraordinary apology to Aborigines this year.

PhotobucketBlackfella/Whitefella is a great music road movie, a meeting of the cultures, a fine travel documentary and a real treasure. It's great to see it rescued from obscurity in this new album. Still, this package is a slightly disappointing as a "special edition." There's only one bonus track, the rare "Gunbarrel Highway." I was hungry for a little more – rare B-sides, live tracks maybe, a retrospective essay even.

Midnight Oil went on to release several more solid albums, but Diesel and its followup Blue Sky Mining were the peak of their global success. They put a spotlight on the kinds of issues rock rarely dealt with, even in the "Live Aid" and "We Are The World" era. The band broke up in 2002, but Garrett hasn't given up fighting for what he believes in – he turned to politics, and today is part of the ruling Labor government in Australia as the Minister for Environment, Heritage and the Arts. Midnight Oil may have hit the charts 20 years ago, but their impact still goes on today.

Tuesday, June 5, 2007

Notes from Sydney, Part 3


Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at PhotobucketAh well, a bit disappointed not to have more comments on my Sydney travelogue to date (I know, I'm an attention whore, but hey, aren't all bloggers? Validate me!), but here's the third and final installment for those who're interested…

We arrived back from our Blue Mountains train trip well and truly knackered, but there was still a fair amount of sightseeing to fit in during our final two days in Sydney. Saturday morning we were off early to the Sydney Aquarium, which Peter zipped merrily around for nearly two hours. Excellent displays of platypus, Australia's colorful fish (think Finding Nemo in live-action) and a harrowing shark tank you could walk through. Following that, the wife and I alternated some shopping trips and traded off minding the boy. Lots of folks from New Zealand actually go to Sydney specifically to shop, and things are definitely a good bit cheaper here – not quite U.S. Wal-Mart cheap, but there's an enormous selection, too. (If downtown Sydney really reminded me of anywhere in the U.S. I've been, it had to be New York City.) Loaded up on the books and CDs and clothes.

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at PhotobucketSaturday night, I ended up actually going to a show at the world-famous Sydney Opera House. While there on my tour Thursday, I'd found out that one of my favorite cartoonists, Seattle's Jim Woodring, was that weekend putting on a musical/animation and performance art showcase at one of the Opera House's smaller theaters, the Studio. I figured I couldn't pass up a chance to see something at the Opera House that wouldn't set me back a couple hundred bucks for a ticket. If you're not familiar with Woodring's art, it's like a surreal combination of Disney and Dali, dream-influenced, often pantomime imagery that is subtly creepy and often staggeringly beautiful. It's not for everyone, but his "The Frank Book" is a hefty gem of a book that shows off his truly unique style. At the Opera House, Woodring was launching an Australian tour with a show that combined Japanese-created animations of his art, slide shows and live music soundtracks, and his own performance art narration to his artwork – plus a Q&A. Quite a unique event, and dazzling to see some of his art come to life. Some of it veered a little too hard into experimental for me (particularly one guitar player whose "soundtrack" gave avant-garde a bad name; it sounded like he spent the entire time tuning up), but it was generally a terrific evening. And how queer it was for an American living in New Zealand to travel to Australia and see a cartoonist from Seattle?

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at PhotobucketOn Sunday, our last day in Sydney, we had to get out on the gorgeous harbour and enjoy the scenery. (I think we saw perhaps two clouds during our entire time there, and the weather was a good 15-20 degrees warmer than Auckland has been.) We had the choice between Sydney's famous Bondi Beach or Manly Beach, but we picked Manly as you had to take the ferry to get there. The harbour is honestly one of the finest I've seen in the world – unlike, say, San Francisco, the ugly cranes and container ship traffic are nowhere to be seen (they're in Botany Bay further south), so it's all houses, skyscrapers and blue, blue water. Once we arrived in Manly, I felt like I'd ended up back in California – it looked just like Santa Monica, with a boardwalk, lots of shops and a huge, white-sand beach that gradually filled up with beach bunnies and surfers throughout the morning. Considering this was the seasonal equivalent of late November in the U.S., it still seemed like summertime – witness the bikini-clad volleyball players. We wished we'd brought our swimming togs as it was actually warm enough to take a dip. A fine place for a picnic Sunday lunch and people-watching. (Don't imagine moving there though – an article in the Sydney Herald pointed out the average house price there is AU$1.8 million!)

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at PhotobucketThe ferry trip back to downtown Sydney was one of the more amazing sights we'd seen – that famous harbour view, Opera House, Harbour Bridge and all, was populated by literally hundreds of sailboats out enjoying the day. Remarkable, because at 9 a.m. or so when we went over to Manly the harbour was essentially empty. The ferry was practically threading its way through all the boats out on the harbour. Sigh. I wish I was a sailing man.

We finished off Sunday with some more shopping and bopping around, and I polished it all off with a visit to the excellent Australia Museum, which had some superb stuff – a massive, colorful mineral collection, and tremendous Aboriginal history displays (including one that had a fascinating look at the last tribe of Aborigines to be "discovered" by the white man – in 1984!). Lots of that strange, beautiful Aboriginal art, too, with its hallucinogenic images of the "Dreamtime."

I have to toss in a plug here for some of the excellent books I've read about Australia recently, including Jan Morris' opinionated and trivia-filled "Sydney," which I read while in town; Bill Bryson's hilarious "In A Sunburned Country," and another book by Tony Horwitz, the outback hitchhiking epic "One For The Road" – plus Robert Hughes' legendary look back at the nation's earliest convict history, "The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding."

Considering it's only a 3-4 hour flight away, I'm quite hoping we'll get to Australia again in another year or two for a visit – perhaps up to explore Brisbane and Queensland, perhaps, or over to Melbourne? After all, it's a big country, and there's a lot to see.

Saturday, June 2, 2007

Notes from Sydney, Part 2


One of the things I wanted to do during our trip to Sydney was, ironically enough, get out of Sydney a little bit, capture a glimpse of wild Australia. We couldn't exactly do a Jeep journey into the outback with our limited time, but fortunately, a day's trek to the mighty Blue Mountains were an excellent sample of Aussie woodlands.

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at PhotobucketSydney has a superb mass-transit system, and all we had to do Friday morning was step onto the trains, head to Central Station and catch the line bound for faraway Lithgow, a few hours west of Sydney. It was a fine train trip as we slowly moved out of Sydney's massive suburban sprawl, and rose in elevation up through a gently rolling eucalyptus forest that reminded me a lot of where I grew up in California's Sierra Nevada. We arrived in the touristy town of Katoomba after about a 2-hour ride, where we caught a double-decker tour bus that we'd bought tickets for as a package with the train ride – it went on a 30km loop around the area and you could get on and get off whenever you wanted. It all turned out to be a nice way to see some scenery while dragging a 3-year-old along and not having a car.

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at PhotobucketAnd the mountains were worth seeing. Katoomba perches on the edge of a huge canyon that showcases immense forests, giant limestone cliffs and in the distance, the blue eucalyptus-generated haze that gives the mountains their name. The Blue Mountains start about 70km west of Sydney, and for the first explorers, they formed an impenetrable wall keeping them from exploring the rest of the country (which they foolishly imagined to be lush and green. Hah hah! Foolish explorers!). It took more than 30 years for the first settlers to "break the barrier," which I always thought a little wimpy of them – until I actually saw the mountains. Imagine these gigantic cliffs and canyons stretching on into the infinite – and crossing them without cars or airplanes. (Peter's favorite sight: the cable car spanning over two sides of the canyon.)

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at PhotobucketWe took a nice kilometer or so walk along the very edge of the canyon (which had fences for most of the walk, but we still had to keep a very tight grip on Peter during it all) over to Echo Point, which features a Grand Canyon-esque panorama and the distinctive rock formations of the Three Sisters. An Aboriginal busker blowing on a didgeridoo completes the Aussie vibe (note the ultra-modern water bottle though).

We also took a nice hike down into the canyon a little bit, as far as we could safely with Peter, viewing the Leura Cascades (a very gently sloping waterfall) and the Australian bush, including some gorgeous red parrots. Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at PhotobucketSure, it wasn't exactly heading to Darwin – tourists from all over the world head to the Blues every day – but standing on that canyon rim staring out over the gum trees without a house in sight, you can still kind of imagine what Australia must've been like, 250 years ago now. I'm already counting the days till I get a chance to explore further into the abyss.

More Blue Mountains photos up on our Flickr page!

Next: Wrapping up our Sydney adventures, a surprise appearance by Jim Woodring, and a day at the beach! Plus, bikinis!

Thursday, May 31, 2007

Notes from Sydney, Part 1


Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket...All right mates, we're back from our Australian holiday and I'm ready to write something about our trek down under (well, down-er under-er and a little to the left of New Zealand, I guess). Sydney is magnificent, and a fantastic place to spend nearly a week. I'm totally infatuated with Australia now and ready to hop on a dingo and blow a didgeridoo. But lest I gush too much, here's a look at the first couple days of our trek – and there's more photos up on our Flickr page with more to come, too!

Some dimwit dude (ahem) booked our flight out of Auckland for 7 a.m. Wednesday; which of course meant we had to get up around 4 a.m. to get to the airport two hours before we took off; which meant that by the time we got to Sydney, with a 2-hour earlier time zone, we had been up since 2 a.m. that day. Urk. In any event, we were rather fried after the 3-hour flight, and somehow stumbled out of the airport and onto the subway (whee! I love subways!) into downtown Sydney, where we'd booked what turned out to be a fantastic, quiet Travelodge hotel tucked in the middle of the downtown business district.

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at PhotobucketAfter recuperating from the flight for a little bit, the three of us toddled out to explore the town, walking down to the world-famous Sydney harbour and the Circular Quay, home of the Sydney Opera House, Sydney Harbour Bridge and more. The Opera House is one of the most famous sights in the world, and didn't disappoint on first viewing – it's an astoundingly alive creation by Dane Jørn Utzen. While smaller than I'd imagined (like most such things), the sharp angles, vivid shades of white and ivory and kind of geometric feng shui created by the building are fascinating. It's a building that looks different from every angle, that's assertive but not aggressive. It's like a broken set of china cups, yet it's somehow harmonious. After a stroll around the outside of the Opera House and the adjacent Rocks district (some of Sydney's oldest streets, where the first convict settlers lived), we were worn out and ready to crash after a very long day.

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at PhotobucketDay two was more Opera House goodness – First thing in the morning, I took an hourlong tour of the building, while Avril and Peter went to wander the Botanic Gardens. Getting inside the Opera House, it may not be quite as immediately gripping as the outside, but it's still worth seeing. Architect Utzen actually left the project in a huff before the interior was completed, so it's kind of a mish-mash of heavy-duty industrial design, some purely functional performance space, and occasionally gorgeous rooms like the wood-lined, gigantic Concert Hall (which unfortunately they don't let you take photos of, but you can see it here). It's all impressive, but save that Concert Hall it doesn't have the imposing shock of the exterior. Later that week it turned out I'd go back for a performance at the Sydney Opera House, more about which in another post.

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at PhotobucketThen we had lunch in the Rocks district and walked up onto the Sydney Harbour Bridge, another of those iconic Aussie sights. I only walked about halfway out onto the bridge (which is much shorter than you might think), but it's a dazzling view. I also watched the bridge climbers moving like ants along the top arch - people climb up there on tour groups all day long, apparently. We'd see big groups up there of 20-30 people, all tethered to safety lines. I don't know - I had a pretty good view of the harbor anyway from the bridge just at street level, and imagine you'd have to be pretty confident in heights (and strong winds) to want to walk up to the top of it! (You can see them clustered next to the flags in the photo.)

That afternoon, we journeyed over to the Australia National Maritime Museum, showcasing all things naval. An excellent commemoration of Australia's considerable sea legacy, it included fine exhibits on the early settlers, plus lots of history on Australia's Navy, a submarine replica and more.

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at PhotobucketAnd finally it was on to one of the true highlights of our trip – stepping aboard legendary Captain James Cook's boat, the Endeavour. All right, not the real Endeavour, but an excellent, seaworthy replica boat built about ten years ago that is a stunning evocation of life nearly 300 years ago. The Maritime Museum includes several boats and a submarine moored outside to tour, but Endeavour was the only one we had time for, and one I've long wanted to see. Cook's voyages – the first European to see New Zealand, most of the Pacific, Bering Sea and more – are like the dictionary definition of "intrepid exploration," as the man mapped much of the unknown world in the late 1700s. Getting a chance to see the space he and his crew spent three years in was remarkable – talk about tight living! The replica was tricked out just as it would have been in 1788, even with botanist Joseph Banks' samples and notebooks laid out on his desk.

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at PhotobucketBelow decks, the crew slept in hammocks tightly together, and the ceiling room is rarely over 5 feet tall (at one point dipping under 4 feet). Even the captain's quarters were barely the size of most people's closets today. But at least he had a door, a luxury most of the crew didn't. Above decks, you stand with countless masts and ropes and imagine what it would've been like, sailing into the unknown so long ago. A most excellent historical stop in this living time machine of a vessel. (I highly recommend Tony Horwitz's book "Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before," which combines a history of Cook's travels with Horwitz's funny and informative tale of actually sailing on this modern Endeavour replica.)

Next: Up into the Blue Mountains!

Monday, April 16, 2007

Shrimp in the barbie, mate?


...So because we haven't done any major globetrotting traveling in like, a whole six months, we've decided to take a little vacation next month. Yep, we're off to sunny Sydney, Australia for five days and nights May 23-28! We racked up a ton of mileage award points with our two flights here to New Zealand last year, so we decided to make the hop over.

(It's actually more than a "hop" - NZ and Australia are over 1,000 miles apart, which tends to surprise a lot of folks not familiar with the South Seas. After one of my early visits to NZ, I had someone ask me if I took the "ferry" over to Australia, as if it were the English Channel or something. Anyway.) I've long wanted to visit the land of Crocodile Dundee, Nicole Kidman and kangaroos. We're not heading deep into the outback, just sticking to the Sydney urban area more or less on this trip (because Australia is big, y'know), but still eager to check out the sights.

But this gives me an excuse for another of my Spatula Forum Reruns marking three years of blogging -- here's Spatula Forum Rerun #2: A Few Words In Praise of Men At Work, the Aussie band that was one of my formative childhood influences. G'day!

Tuesday, August 31, 2004


A few words in praise of Men At Work. There's certain songs I can listen to a zillion times and they never get old -- Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust." Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes." Sebadoh's "Ocean." Tom Waits' "Downtown Train." And right up there is Men At Work's "Down Under." Sure, it's a silly song about life in wacky ol' Australia, where the women glow and men plunder, but for some reason its goofy flute-laden choruses and pub singalong vocals never get old to me. I guess it's the thing about hearing something when you're young -- Men At Work's "Business As Usual" is as far as I recall the very first album I ever bought, back in 1983 or so.

There's a lot of great songs on that one-hit wonder album, from "Who Can It Be Now?" to lesser gems like "I Can See It In Your Eyes" and "Down By The Sea." But "Down Under" is the one I return to again and again. It sums up mysterious worlds -- I wanted to go "Down Under." (And I sort of did, when I met and married my kiwi wife, if you count New Zealand as part of "Down Under.")

But best of all is those lyrics, which I spent hours listening to to try and decipher. What the heck was "vegemite"? What's a "combie"? Did the guy really sing "flying in a tent of clay?" (No, "lying in a den in Bombay) (Digression: There's a whole art form to misheard lyrics, also called 'mondegreens,' and an awesome web site about them is www.kissthisguy.com)

The real words for this groovy little song may not be poetry, but somehow, they always get me humming along...

Traveling in a fried-out combie
On a hippie trail, head full of zombie
I met a strange lady, she made me nervous
She took me in and gave me breakfast
And she said,
Do you come from a land down under?
Where women glow and men plunder?
Can't you hear, can't you hear the thunder?
You better run, you better take cover.
Buying bread from a man in Brussels
He was six foot four and full of muscles
I said, Do you speak-a my language?
He just smiled and gave me a vegemite sandwich
And he said,
I come from a land down under
Where beer does flow and men chunder
Can't you hear, can't you hear the thunder?
You better run, you better take cover.
Lying in a den in Bombay
With a slack jaw, and not much to say
I said to the man, Are you trying to tempt me
Because I come from the land of plenty?
And he said,
Oh! Do you come from a land down under? (oh yeah yeah)
Where women glow and men plunder?
Can't you hear, can't you hear the thunder?
You better run, you better take cover.