so victorian

With Jess’s mom and step-dad visiting us in Australia, it’s been a great opportunity to see Australian culture again with fresh American eyes. During our trip with them to Tasmania and now Sydney, they’ve noticed a lot of things that I had completely forgotten to mention on this blog. I thought I’d make a quick list of these observations just to set the record straight:

1. Melbourne. Pronunciation: “Mel-buhn,” or to preserve your American “r,” say “Mel-burn.” In no circumstance should you ever say “Mel-born.”
2. If you are male, when you need to pee, you announce that you are “going to go to the little boy’s room” and then you ask the waitress “Where can I find the gents’?” Once you find the toilets, you will then stand directly on a metal grate and pee into it. That’s right: you pee on the same thing you’re standing on.
3. Australians love both “sport” and public service announcements. Channel surfing involves choosing between cricket, Australian-rules football, rugby union, rugby league, soccer, or depressing commercials of actors who warn you about the dangers of driving while on drugs, tell you how to look beautiful when you have cancer, and inform you where to put your bag of ragwort once you’ve eradicated it from your yard.
4. When you’re out to dinner, don’t believe for a second that the food on your plate is yours just because you paid for it. If you can’t eat it all there, you can ask for a doggy bag but you’re not gonna get one.
5. Gambling is legal everywhere, 18+. Gambling agents are in almost every neighborhood. Woohoo, I love Keno! 

This morning my alarm radio woke me up with a great talk by Bess Price [the woman in the photo] from a few months ago. To give you an American parallel, the Aboriginal civil rights issues in Australia are like a mixture of those of Native Americans and African Americans mixed together, the main difference being that Aboriginal issues still make front page news.

Bess Price’s speech that I heard was about Aboriginal violence—both the probable causes and the effects. Aboriginals are about 10 times more likely to go to prison than other Australians, and Bess Price believes that this could be resolved by rectifying our very twisted standards for Aboriginal culture.

A very common point of view is that Aboriginal culture needs to be preserved, or somehow isolated from the globalization process. The Australian Law Reform Commission, for example, released a report in 1986 arguing that Aboriginal customary law be considered in trials involving Aboriginals.

Unfortunately, however, such attitudes tend to ignore the persistence of Aboriginal violence and sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities. In the talk I heard this morning, Bess Price’s husband told the story of a 13-year-old girl who had been raped and beaten by a 50-year-old man who threatened her with a shotgun if she did not comply. The girl’s grandmother had apparently encouraged the girl to consent, as the girl had already been promised to the man as his wife. In the resulting court case, the (white) judge sentenced the man to only 18 months in prison, and apparently told the girl something along the lines of “You knew what was expected of you.” 

The indigenous Australians are held responsible to follow both Aboriginal customary law (an oral law) and Australian law, but if a set of laws are neither consistently applied nor taught, is anyone really surprised at the outcome?

Bess Price suggests that young Aboriginals’ general ignorance of the Australian legal system is the root of the problem. But what struck me the most about her speech was her critique of the rest of Australia’s efforts to somehow “pay back” Aboriginals by supporting all aspects of their culture. When preserving a culture requires ignoring the universal human rights of a group of people—young Aboriginal girls, for example—is it really worth it?

There’s obviously much more to this issue than I’m even aware of. If you want to read more from Bess Price, here’s an article from The Australian. For some less-serious and more-ridiculous Aboriginal-involved issues that have been going on recently—wow, that was a lot of hyphens—read about Andrew Bolt’s slur and why someone accused Bess Price’s speech (the one I heard this morning) as being more offensive than sex with a horse.

Funny enough, a friend from Austin told me that she read an NPR article about the new “Giant Theremin” in Melbourne. I mean…I live here now, shouldn’t I know these things before people in Austin hear about them?! 

For those of you who don’t know what a theremin is, a theremin is an electronic instrument that sounds a lot like a musical saw. But unlike any other musical instrument, the musician creates music without making any physical contact with the instrument. (See this video.)

After getting over the idea that people on the other side of the Earth might know cooler things to do in Melbourne than we do, Jay and I made an afternoon trip down to visit the (not so) famous Giant Theremin. The Giant Theremin is not quite like a traditional theremin, but it does respond completely to body movement and the number of people in its “Activation Zone.”

I clearly had a lot of fun prancing around like a little fairy in front of this giant rust colored pyramid. 

Surprisingly enough, it turns out that when you want to visit Sydney for the first timethe best place to stay the night is actually in a suburb outside of Sydney (Wentworthsville, for example). Also, you’ll have to fly to Sydney, but you’ll want to make sure to arrive at night, and have someone to pick you up from there and drive you to their home outside the city in the dark so you can’t see Sydney at all.

The reason for all this is simple: the next morning, when you take a ferry from your suburb into Sydney, your first view of Sydney will be all at once, in all its glory—the Harbour Bridge, the Sydney Opera House, the city skyline—from a ferry, on a beautiful day, in the sunshine.

(The ferries are, amazingly enough, part of the Sydney metro public transport system. This means they’re a cheap fun way to get around. Beat that, trams!)

Jay and I went to visit the free gallery at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) that features a broad sweep of the history of moving images. Starting with spinning photographs and huge mechanical viewing-boxes that make giant flip books to silent movies and finally the moving image we know today (including video games)!

With interactive toys throughout the exhibit, the place was incredibly over stimulating. But we essentially discovered the best I’m-stuck-in-the-city-on-a-rainy-day place. Their interactive kids zone is full of fun things to do like in the video above.

In this video, you can see my image projected onto a screen that turns my body a giant living shadow puppet by giving me funny limbs, bumps, hairs, and noises. 

+ Jess and Jay in The Matrix

We were planning on going to the NGV today, but instead we got side-tracked and went to this great exhibit on the history of film and television at the ACMI. Check out our great video that ACMI refuses to let us download!

On Thursday, on the way to Jay’s Biarri Christmas party, I bought a road bike. Finally. 

Getting a bike has completely changed my perception of time and space in Melbourne. A 45 minute tram journey now takes me 20 minutes. Places that used to feel miles away are really just minutes away by bike. 

Melbourne is a large place, but compared to Houston or Dallas, it’s nothing. It’s more the density and cultural variation that gives you the sense that Melbourne is large. All in all, best purchase—only $100—since I’ve been here. 

I was at first questioning if $100 was worth it, but then I remembered that I spent $120 on a pair of shoes. Bikes are a vehicle! Certainly worth $100.