The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost (15 page)

Other than traveling, Carly has no specific image of her future and is okay with that, whereas I'm still struggling.

“I don't want to be a waitress,” I tell her as she pours me another glass of Shiraz.

“You're not a waitress. You're just waiting tables.”

“Aren't they the same thing?”

“Definitely not. It's just an easy way to make some cash,” Carly says. “It's a long road, mate.”

A long road. What's the long road? Is it traveling around Sydney? Or is it returning home? Is the long road the rest of my life?

When I was in my early teens, my viola teacher, Ms. Sasson, had an older student, a doctor my parents' age. His lesson preceded mine, so when I arrived early, I made myself at home on the couch and listened in. Inside the closed doors, it sounded just like any other lesson, except that he called my teacher by her first name, something I would never dream of doing. But when he emerged in his plaid collared shirts, I was always a little sad to see him. He was a friendly, distinguished-looking man, but definitely
old. Secretly, I thought taking lessons alongside all these young, ambitious kids was depressing. It was obviously far too late for him to have a music career, and it didn't ever occur to me that this wasn't his goal. Back then I was smug in the knowledge of my own true purpose. That saving lives might be his purpose—or worse, that one might have no purpose at all, that all we have is the present moment and what we make of it—was unimaginable.

And so you see our twin problems. I could not get a fix on any one thing because I was always stressing about what I was truly
meant
to do and be, especially after giving up music. Carly could not stay put because she was constantly chasing happiness, searching for it in every foreign nook and cranny. My purpose and her satisfaction were equally illusive things, both of us so desperately trying to figure out our places in the world. And we were both restless, no doubt wanderers at heart—travelers.

We're bouncy drunk when we leave the restaurant a few hours later. The sun is setting, and by the time we reach the Domain, it's nearly dark. Stumbling, singing old show tunes, we tramp through the green. I'm behind Carly, following her to the other side of the city to catch our bus. Something drops in the grass. I bend down and scoop up her scuffed leather wallet. One step later, I find her sunglasses. Her purse must have ripped open, because she is shedding belongings like bread crumbs: lip balm, hair tie, ticket stub, cell phone. When I finally catch up, my hands are full of her things.

“Huh!” she says, delighted. “Where did you find all that?”

We stuff all of it inside my bag, her broken purse, too, and keep on walking.

My arrival in Sydney provides the perfect excuse for Carly to perform a favorite role of hers—that of all-knowing guide. If she herself can't travel again quite yet, at least she can witness Sydney through the wide eyes of someone seeing it for the first time.

We hit all the typical tourist sites. There's the Aquarium, a low, sprawling structure at the edge of lively Darling Harbour. The Aquarium is currently capitalizing on the success of
Finding Nemo,
an animated film about a young clownfish's adventures away from home. A massive tank houses numerous orange-and-white-striped Nemos flapping in the dull water, while all around me little kids and their parents, each more original than the last, shout, “I found Nemo!” Okay, okay, I shout it, too. That movie really brings those darn fish to life, plus I totally
get
the storyline, you know? Carly rolls her eyes and tells me I'm blinding the fish with my flash. I snap shots of Nemos 1, 2, and 3 as they snake
along the edge of the tank, up to the very top and then, after realizing there is nowhere else to go, back along the sides.

We check out the Hyde Park Barracks Museum, up on Macquarie Street, named after Lachlan Macquarie, an early governor of New South Wales. The museum has transformed itself several times during its life. Some of the first convicts, mainly from Ireland, were housed here between 1819 and 1848. The men, transported far from home for both petty and significant crimes, faced the involuntary task of fashioning the new city.

We visit the Opera House, which is most spectacular from a good distance. Up close, you can discern each individual corrugated tile, and the overall effect is lost, whereas from farther away, the layered roof shells undulate like waves. One day Carly's friend Simon, a Qantas pilot, takes us for a flight over the harbor. From that high up, the Opera House reposes like a queen amid her sailboat subjects. We stare down at determined tourists inching up the sides of the Harbour Bridge.

One of the best spots in Sydney is the Royal Botanical Gardens, a large expanse of blossoming land abutting the Domain, located between Macquarie Street and Woolloomooloo Wharf. It brims with sublime flowers whose names I've all forgotten. It is also home to a good number of sulfur-crested cockatoos, my absolute favorite Australian birds, even more than the kookaburra with his psychotic laugh. The cockatoo is a type of parrot. It has a white body, a black beak, and a canary-yellow cowlick that fluffs out into a hell-raiser Mohawk when it's pissed off. It's an awesome bird.

There are countless astonishing birds and animals in Australia, though many of them have off-puttingly sharp fangs and talons. And that is why Carly takes me to the Featherdale Wildlife Park, a short drive from Sydney, to observe them up close. It's a petting zoo for the deranged, harboring only a handful of native animals that are safe enough to come within kicking distance. You can hand-feed green pellets from an ice-cream cone to
a scruffy kangaroo or wallaby (similar to a kangaroo but smaller). You can cuddle up to a fuzzy koala as he lazes like a portly, drunk man on his gum tree. Nearby, the laughing kookaburras are perched like professors, and the Tasmanian devils (a carnivorous marsupial with rodentlike features) run in endless, loping circles. It's a parade of strange new creatures: wombats (marsupials again, with some rodentlike features, though furrier and less angry-looking than the Tasmanian devils), goannas (like lizards but uglier), lorikeets (rainbow-colored parrots), Cape Barren geese (known as pugnacious and intolerant of other birds), and the all-time winner for scary-as-shit birds, cassowaries, large, flightless, with a Cruella de Vil nail on the middle of three toes that can easily sever a limb or eviscerate an abdomen.

Museums, gardens, aquariums, and petting zoos might be considered my formal Australian education, secondary to the informal, far more colorful instruction Carly and her family and friends provide, what I'm absorbing by osmosis living here.

First, the 2003 Rugby World Cup, held in Sydney—where the Australians ultimately lose to the British in the finals—provides an opportunity to see the two countries' complex relationship. The sweeping generalization is this: the Australians firmly believe that the English are arrogant and aloof, while the English arrogantly and aloofly dismiss the Aussies as immature and uncouth. (This was concretely illustrated by an unfortunate British girl someone brought to the Dawson family Christmas, who was met with stony silence after her ill-timed joke: “What's the difference between Australia and yogurt? If you leave the yogurt out, after a while it will develop a culture.”) England is the country Australians love to hate, and nowhere more than in sporting matches does this typically good-natured but competitive rivalry have as much room to express itself amid patriotic face painting and beer guzzling. Britons pour into the country to attend the match, bringing with them the rain that ends a six-week uptick
in the drought, and inciting Carly's younger brother, Steve, to amble around the house despondently for several days muttering, “Bloody Poms.” (This is an expression the Australians have twisted back on the British, the assumed originators, that supposedly stands for “prisoners of mother England.”) Even after the match ends, the two proud nations can't let it go. Egging them on is the fact that the ball used by British star kicker Jonny Wilkinson to score in the ninety-ninth minute of the final disappeared into the Australian crowds afterward, and the British are demanding its return. An article in
The Sydney Morning Herald
entitled “Why the Poms Have No Balls” argues: “Since the British refuse to return the Parthenon sculptures, the Sphinx's nose, and various Aboriginal skeletons to their rightful owners, Spike [the writer] doesn't think they are on very high moral ground when it comes to some sweaty old piece of pigskin. We shall not succumb.” Points of contention between the two countries are never wholly about the present moment but always threaten to hark back in time as far as necessary in order to prove who is right and who, in common parlance, is a complete wanker.

And if there is one thing Australians can't stand, it's a wanker. One day we attend a cricket match where an off-key chant I can't make out starts to ripple through the crowd an hour in. I lean over to solicit an explanation.

“They're saying the members are wankers,” Carly informs me.

“Why?”

“Because the members are wankers.”

“No, why are they wankers?”

“Well, look at them, all snobby in their box seats.” She gestures disgustedly toward them. “Plus, didn't you see how they wouldn't do the Mexican wave a few minutes ago?” (Another random difference: many outside North America apparently call it “the Mexican wave” instead of plain old “the wave,” since the first time any international viewers witnessed the phenomenon was on the televised 1986 World Cup in Mexico.)

These affronts, essentially one bunch of Australians acting “too good” for another group of their fellow Aussies, are unacceptable. It's an example of the Australian expression “tall-poppy syndrome.” Carly puts it succinctly: “Poppies grow taller than the grass, so they get their heads cut off by the lawn mower.” Others have attributed its etymology to the world wars, where ANZAC (Australian New Zealand Army Corporation) forces fought many deadly battles on poppy fields and where, if you stuck your head out of the trench, you were likely to get shot. Regardless of its origins, this phrase showcases a major cultural difference between the U.S. and Australia. Australia is a proudly egalitarian, community-based society where the group reigns supreme, whereas the U.S. is a staunch meritocracy with the individual as the prime unit. So while Americans love first to build up a homegrown hero only to take schadenfreude delight later on if he/she gets knocked down, Australians prefer to skip the building-up part and go straight for the knocking down. This way, no one gets to thinking he or she is better than the neighbors, when everyone should be equal.

I quickly discover Aussies have a strong sense of humor, the kind in which anyone or anything is fair game. The only exception seems to be their origins as a penal colony. Though Australians live in a developed, democratic, educated, and multicultural society, media representations of them often stereotype. Carly despises a particular
Simpsons
episode where the Australians are portrayed as lying, thieving, incoherent simpletons, which, obviously, they are not.

Australians are proud of their continued hardy existence in a country where it's relatively easy to get yourself killed. The environment can be inhospitable, the animals/birds/reptiles bite, the waves threaten to drag you to a watery grave. Nowhere is their pride in self-reliance better illustrated to me than when the Steve Irwin scandal breaks. Irwin, the now sadly deceased Crocodile Hunter, decides to hand-feed a large crocodile in front of a crowd
while holding his infant son. Some Australians and the appalled American media condemn his behavior, likening it to Michael Jackson dangling his baby over a balcony, but Carly's friends adamantly express an opposing attitude. “If there's one thing that guy knows, it's crocs,” they say, or “He's been wrestling crocs since he was nine years old!” Carly has often claimed Irwin is a caricature of an Australian, but even she joins in the chorus supporting him. He is fearless and capable, just like the twentysomethings who surround me in Sydney.

Australia, unlike the U.S., doesn't sugarcoat the inherent dangers of being a human being, of inhabiting a vulnerable body. Australia is your tipsy blunt uncle who tells it like it is. There is danger. You are not immune. The world is not a fair place. Life is precarious and fleeting, but what's the point of letting these obvious facts get you down? Better to be out catching an ocean wave, or diving headfirst from an airplane, or whatever you do to enjoy yourself in the here and now (Australians do different things than most for enjoyment because they are bad-asses, but you get the idea).

“Did you know,” Carly asks me one day, “that Australians invented the lawn mower, the revolving outdoor clothesline,
and
wine in a box?”

“Umm … no, wow, I didn't realize that,” I say. This trinity of innovation, unlike her jests about the drop bears and hoop snakes, is true. It's a strange assortment, to say the least, but one that swells Carly's national feathers like a peacock's.

I come to learn certain other fascinating things about my new country. When it comes to fashion, Aussies are firmly and proudly stuck in the eighties. Mullets still reign supreme. So do fluorescent (fluoro) shirts with the collars up and Jane Fonda–esque off-the-shoulder T-shirts. Another piece of trivia: prostitution is legal and regulated. And another: Australian citizens are required by law to vote. Politics here are far more entertaining because people say whatever the hell they want. During my stay,
the head of the Labor Party was quoted calling John Howard (the prime minister) an “arselicker.” Another high government official told a reporter a new bill was “a load of frigging crap paperwork.” These examples illustrate what I think are some of the fundamental qualities of Australians: they are practical (prostitution is the world's oldest profession, after all), blunt (just imagine Nancy Pelosi calling George W. Bush an “arselicker,” if you will), and above all, they don't take themselves too seriously (mullets—business in the front, party in the back). And then there is their unflagging friendliness. Any time I try to sneak a look at my Sydney map, lost for the dozenth time that hour, the nearest Australian pops his head over my shoulder to ask: “Are you right?”