Shock and Ocker

Sold!

2011-03-17T00:17:00.000-07:00

One more step on the Aussie Gold (not yellow) Brick Road ... we've exchanged contracts on our house. If anything had a chance of tripping up our return plans, it would have been the house sale falling through. Now, however, we're signed and sealed, with delivery due to take place at the end of March. I kept waiting for one of the many surveys the buyer commissioned to come back saying: sorry, but there's a major fault line running directly under the house.

Or: sorry, but it turns out your electrical system is essentially a large paperclip chain run on magic and radioactive energy which is seeping out from the fault line under your house.

Or: sorry, apparently this is Crown land, and the Queen wants you out by Friday.

The only news which came back from the surveys were small, trifling, niggling this, which we duly ignored. And now we've sold it.

We're now going to train ourselves for the Sydney rental market by undertaking a trial reaming in the London market. Sales might be low over here right now, but rentals are taking up the equal-and-opposite position. How much worse can Sydney be than London? Close your eyes and imagine passing a moderately-sized kidney stone; now, replace the kidney stone with a lump of red-hot coal. Why do you think Aussies are always depicted squinting? It's not the glare of the sun doing it.

Chavs, CUBs and the Chant of Despair

2011-02-23T23:56:00.000-08:00

Germans have the good sense and global sensitivity to avoid the use of the swastika, of the Nazi salute and the sieg heil. You won’t see many Germans goose-stepping with one arm held up and out in front and the other rubbing at their top lip. They know how people can feel about those things. If they can do that, surely Australia can get it together long enough to abandon the Chant of Despair.

You know the one. It starts, ‘Aussie Aussie Aussie’, and goes downhill fast from there.

You think I’m exaggerating? It’s in my list of Top 5 Repatriation Deterrents. Here’s the list:

Top 5 Australian Repatriation Deterrents

The Australian dollar
House prices
CUBs
The Chant of Despair
Ugly cars

I’ll explain CUBs in a minute.

There’s only one thing worse than hearing the Chant, which is hearing the Chant in another country. Picture it: Twickenham, Australia versus England in the rugby, a packed house, the crowd buzzing with the anticipation of a thrilling display of scrummaging (yay England!), and how-not-to-scrummage (yay Australia!). The embarrassment begins with the anthems.

Australians all let us rejoice,

For we are young and free;

We’ve golden soil and wealth for toil;

Our home is girt by sea.

The English crowd don’t hear the rest of it, they’re too busy trying to translate girt by sea. If you’re watching the game on TV, you’re praying the boom operator stays away from the Aussie players, because no-one wants to hear sportsmen punishing an already unfortunate tune. The score looks like this:

Imagine a front-rower with the build and features of a short gorilla belting that out. It’s not a good thing.

The crowd is then given a reprieve with God Save the Queen. It’s a simple tune, easy enough for the most tin-eared of rugby players to belt out, and even if we could hear them the crowd effectively drowns them out.

The game kicks off, there is excitement and physical challenge, and as England toil in scrum reset #15, the strains of Swing Low Sweet Chariot begin to ripple around the ground, and soon the song is vibrating in your back teeth. It’s hard not to be impressed. Then, a natural lull in the noise, a brief period of quiet, and the Australian contingent in the cheap seats behind the goal posts (not their fault, blame the Australian Rugby Union) launch their counterattack:

‘Aussie Aussie Aussie …’

No, no, NO! Our best hope was a stirring Waltzing Matilda, and you go and pull that shit out? It’s the kind of chant you picture Lleyton Hewitt belching out after a few too many Bacardi Breezers at the pub.

If I ever launch a political campaign in Australia – or a coup – my platform will be based on a complete eradication of the Chant. Fuck freedom of expression, I want it gone. The Chant, it’s like the whole country is admitting to a lack of creativity. We know, we know: but it’s the best we could do. I’d even go so far as to say it’s worse than U-S-A, U-S-A, because at least that stands for something. We might as well be done with it and just say: Australia, we’re bogans!

A bogan, for those of you unfamiliar with the term, is the Australian equivalent of the English chav, or the American redneck. And with bogans, I’m back to #3 on my Top 5 Repatriation Deterrents list: CUBs.

CUB stands for Cashed-Up Bogan. I’d never heard this phrase until recently, when my cousin’s wife was complaining about all the CUBs pushing up the prices of everything in Perth, from coffee to clothes to property. I thought, really? I was in cubs as a kid, and I don’t ever remember wielding that much power, regardless of how many achievement badges I had sewn to my sleeves. They’ve come a long way.

No, she explained, the CUBs are all the bogans who have suckled to bursting from the massive, swinging tits of the mining industry, and for much of the mining industry, Perth is the nearest city centre. Long-haul truck drivers, she told me, can earn AUD200K for a six-month stint, hauling coal or iron ore or whatever other commodity the mining companies stumbled across. A quick and rough conversion at current rates: USD200K (yes, the Aussie dollar is at parity with the greenback … next come the locusts); GBP150K. Two hundred thousand dollars for driving a fucking truck around the desert for six months? Where do I sign? And the truckers are just the tip of the iceberg – I can’t even begin to imagine the rivers of cash being pushed out from the remote dusty guts of the country.

A quick contrast of how displays of wealth might be seen in the UK and Australia:

UK: a banker walks into a Mayfair cocktail bar. ‘I’ve just been paid my six million pound bonus for a year’s worth of obscure financial jiggery-pokery … fetch me a bottle of Chateau Mouton Rothschild 1945 and half a kilo of cocaine!’

Australia: a dusty miner in short-shorts and a wife-beater drives into Perth, howling out the window of his Holden ute. ‘Wooo, I’m gunna buy a whole fucken suburb and get pissed outta me fucken head and fuck every prossie in the city!’

Of course these are exaggerations … Australian miners are more likely to be driving Porsche Cayennes, or Lear jets.

How must the English equivalent of the bogan feel about this? Where’s all the cash for the chavs? Put a chav in a lorry, he’ll either earn twenty-grand a year hauling groceries for ASDA, or slightly more ferrying stolen cars to Dover. Cashed-up chavs have a different name over here: we call them criminals. Organised crime is the only path to wealth for the true chav, the only exception being female chavs, who make their money by being Katie Price.

This is something truly scaring me about returning to Australia. The financial direction of the nation, the local rate of inflation and the evolution of the marketplace is being driven by men who still refer to women as sheilas, and by women who are actually called Sheila. Who told them to start taking the anthem literally? Yes, there’s that line about wealth for toil, but guys …

It’s just a song.

It begins

2011-02-16T23:35:00.000-08:00

It's happening, it's really happening. I'm scared -- someone hold me.

We'd always planned on moving back to Australia some day, for the kids, for the weather, or simply because we were supposed to. And now we're doing it, we're repatriating.

My wife and I being Australian, you'd think that would make it easier. It doesn't. If anything, it's the opposite.

We've been in London for over a decade, living and working and raising a family and supporting various retail credit institutions, and now the time has come to go back. We're selling our house and shipping our lives back to Sydney.

Why should this concern me? Most Brits I meet can't understand why I'm here at all, let alone hesitant to return to the country of my birth. Let's see if I can lay out a few pros and cons to the move.

Pros:

We'll no longer have to rely on occasional trips to Spain and Egypt to tone down the reflective glare of our skin
The kids will be able to play outside without four layers of clothing, raincoats, boots, and warnings ringing in their ears to stay the hell away from those muddy puddles
The economy is strong, having skipped the worst of the recession by virtue of being able to sell to China the shit it digs up from the vacant plot of land out in the middle
Our families live there

Cons:

With all our natural melanin supplies depleted, walking around outside shirtless will be like taking a nap in a pizza oven
The kids will be able to play outside bare-arse naked, and will no doubt take every opportunity to do so (see con #1 re naps in pizza ovens), with warnings ringing in their ears to stay the hell away from everything, because anything you're thinking about touching will probably do its best to kill you
The economy is only strong for as long as they keep digging up desirable shit. What happens when the shit runs dry (not an intentional poo-pun)? What happens when China figures out it has its own shit?
Our families live there

I could go on and on, and I will, because that's kind of the point of this blog. This will be the dumping ground of my neuroses, my paranoia and my fears. What do you call a xenophobe who fears his own country? Me, I guess. Is it even my country any more? Will I recognise it? Will it recognise me? Will I be able to buy milk and bread without some kind of credit facility?

I'll miss a lot of things about London, and a lot of things I won't. We've got just under a year before our planned departure date, which might sound like a long time, but there's a lot of ground to cover.

Phase one is now underway: the house sale. The way house sales often go in the UK, I'm not just touching wood, I'm punching trees and rubbing the bark into the cuts in my knuckles. That's good luck, right?