Gordon Barlow

As a former Australian, I check in on this section from time to time, but there's never much action, is there? Not many visits, even. Why is that? The Canadian equivalent (The Maple Leaf) is much more active, and I wonder why. British expats in Canada aren't inherently more interesting than their counterparts in Oz, so what is it? The same monitors service both sectors (presumably), so that can't be a factor.

I'm not really going anywhere with my questions. I don't intend to get involved. But in a long life I have been involved with a variety of forums, persuading people to at least follow topics and threads, so I know how it's done. Ah well... I'll come back in a couple of weeks just to see if there's been any change. I hope there is, for the better, because that's supposed to be what BE is all about - right?

Shard

The Canadian forum is still active, but nothing like it was some years ago. Probably long time users are getting bored and drifting away, and new users might find the forum format a bit old fashioned. Could also be Covid, that's reduced immigration everywhere so there's less activity on BE too.

old.sparkles

I'm not sure there has been much migration to Australia in the last two years - Australia's international borders were closed to all except citizens and permanent residents (with some exceptions).

Borders opened to all only on 21 Feb.

But it is quiet here (BE), with very few visiting regularly

Retirednow

It’s this forum. Others are much busier…

Pulaski

If I suggested why, I believe it would be deleted PDQ.

Retirednow

Exactly.

DeadVim

I’ve given up trying to fight against the Mass Formation Psychosis.

Better uses of my time/attention.

Gordon Barlow

Dear oh dear. Still no action to speak of, around the barbie - and a couple of hints that there might be actual discouragement from somewhere up above. Ah well, it happens in all forums...

"The barbie" is a good title, because that's where a lot of Australians used to gather and swap stories - and I'm sure still do. I haven't been down under since 1995, when "around the barbie" is exactly how I spent a couple of happy days, courtesy of an old school-chum of mine. I have family there - two brothers and their children and grandchildren - but not reason enough to go back. I have a son and his children in Norway, so that's my overseas destination these days. No barbies there!

Also, I let my Oz passport lapse a while back - in 1997, I guess, when China took over the management of Hong Kong. That freed the UK up to give UK citizenship to all the residents of its remaining colonies. So I have travelled on a British (EU) passport since then. The Australian government didn't disown me or anything, but now I'm British and don't need to be anything else. My son was born in England, so he's a Brit too, although his children aren't.

My home state was Queensland, and my wife's was Victoria, and we spent a year (1971) in Perth, where we spent two weeks on a safari up to Port Hedland and back - driving in a convoy of six or seven cars up the inland road and back via the coast. To get to Perth in the first place we spent three days and nights on the train from Melbourne, via Adelaide. That was worth doing, and I can recommend it. I'm not an expert on Australia or all things Australian. Also, the country has changed a lot since we left for the first time in 1963. As an old man, I like to remember the way it used to be - what I knew of it - and I would like to pass on some of those memories. I'm doing the same sort of thing on another BE thread - over in "The Rest of the World" sector. (I hope the BE rule-book - quite a volume! - allows me to mention that.) The stories there cover our 3 1/2 years living and working in what was then The New Hebrides (now Vanuatu). If permitted, I will be glad to breathe life into The Barbie. Let me start by giving a piece of doggerel that has always amused me. I don't know where it came from, but it is true enough about the Australia of a couple of generations ago.

The people of Melbourne are frightfully well-born.
Of much the same kidney is the beau monde of Sydney.
Adelaide's forte is culture,
But in Brisbane the people insult ya,
And don't hardly know they've been rude, they're that ignorant, common and crude.

It's hardly worth mentioning Perth.

Gordon Barlow

I grew up in the 1940s and '50s in an Australia that - as a general statement - despised the mass of new immigrants that were escaping their war-torn homes in Europe. There was no sensible reason for this contempt, but it did exist. These "New Australian" nationalities were (mostly) given dismissive nicknames. I can't give examples without running afoul of the BE censors, but while many of them were relatively harmless, some were plain nasty. Even the British were not always exempt. When I was 17, eleven years after the war had ended, I hitched a ride home with a pleasant English salesman who asked me "Why do Australians hate us English?" I couldn't deny the premise, and nor could I explain why the dislike existed. The only comfort I could have given him is to say that every other nationality was treated worse. Well, not "treated", but certainly regarded with resentment.

And, I write of generalities. My Dad's best friend out in the bush (the Darling Downs, sheep-rearing country) was half Chinese. My Mum met his mother once, who sat in the corner of the big room dressed exotically and who didn't speak English. Well, she probably could, but she didn't. Nobody spat in her beer, so that was good.

At my boarding school in Brisbane in 1951-56 we had a scattering of nationalities - maybe eight or ten in each year of 180 kids. I was friendly with a boy from Cyprus and another from Greece, and there was one aboriginal in my dorm - one of "the stolen generation" whom the government had abducted from his tribe and given to a white family to adopt. We did call him by a nickname that would not pass our BE censors, but it was never used nastily. Also there was a chap with brown skin whose origin we never bothered to discover - but who also had a nickname that wouldn't pass muster here. And we had two Jews - at a Church of England school, yet! I myself was mistakenly identified as a Mexican from my earliest days at the school, and was called Pablo for the whole of my six years there. But again, not derogatively. Very few of my fellows ever knew my real name; even most of the teachers called me Pablo. But I was never jeered at for being foreign, that's the point of mentioning it. So it's probably fair to say that my generation did much to ease the newcomers' path to acceptance.

Or maybe it was the Queensland laid-back attitude to life in general. She'll be right. No worries, mate!

Gordon Barlow

A couple of weeks ago in the BE "Rest of the World" section, I posted a piece about Australia's brush with slavery. Actually it was a pretty broad brush - how broad, depends on your definition of slavery. The "blackbirding" trade abducted native Pacific Islanders from their home villages and transported them to Queensland, where the colonial government assigned them to selected white settlers on small cotton and sugar plantations. The trade lasted for fifty or sixty years from the mid-1800s, until it was ended by the first Federal Parliament of the newly united Australia. Those who had lived in Queensland for fifteen years were allowed to stay if they wanted; the rest were shipped "home" to the most convenient island and dumped there.

The system was that ships' captains called at random islands and "persuaded" illiterate individuals to sign up for five years' service, for a few pounds' wages payable at the end of the contract. Some of the victims got paid, though not all. The persuasion itself took various forms, as you can imagine. Getting them drunk onboard and taking off to the nearest Queensland port was one of them. The American author Mark Twain wrote about the trade, having observed it during his voyage to the region in the late 1800s. He also noted that "kanakas" (that was the Hawaiian word for humans) were also traded from eastern islands to the Pacific coast of the USA and Canada. He was horrified by the practice.

I wasn't taught any of this at school. I only found out about the practice from my mother in the 1970s, when she lived near a small community of kanakas down near the NSW border. Her grandparents had employed nine kanakas on their small sugar plantation up outside Mackay. Ironically, the grandmother had herself been an unpaid child-labourer in the tin mines of Cornwall, before she came to Australia. What a turnaround it was for her, eh?

the troubadour

Little changes in the case of Perth then. Probably a positive in a time of insane change in so many places.

brits1

When we arrived in Perth we were told all kinds of tales from “back in the day” one of my favourite ones …living in this busy world was that at weekends you had a list of which petrol stations would be open I think it was one either side of the river, another was that at their primary school a lot of students did not ware shoes (by choice), there was not anything like air con so at night a lot of people would sleep outdoors during the hotter months (maybe a lot of people still do) that had all “gone” by the time we arrived but Sunday the shops were all closed except some in the city centre and a few even closed Saturday afternoon now that was a pleasant surprise for us as it left our weekends free to “chillax” not sure if anything stays the same but the memories are always nice to have.

Gordon Barlow

Most immigrants to Australia live in towns, naturally enough, and don't have much knowledge of what happens in the countryside. I'm going to do a few snippets of reminiscing on this thread, of my early life in "the bush". I hope it's interesting. I'll start with a report of some time ago from England's Daily Mail, of two men in a lamb-castrating speed-contest in the US somewhere who had become physically ill from removing lambs' testicles with their teeth. I may have been one of a rather small number of readers whose immediate reaction was, "Gosh, Dad used to do that all the time, and it never made him sick." Why should it? I wondered.

Of course that practice wasn't limited to the colonies. After all, how did the old-time farmers in England castrate their lambs and kids, if not the way my father’s generation did it? (And by "kids" I mean baby goats. Come on! Be reasonable.) Those things are way too slippery to get a grip of with hands, so teeth were the obvious tool to do the job. Around 1950, where we lived, that traditional method gave way to expandable rubber rings placed where necessary with a sort of tweezers. The surplus organs dropped off in the course of time - way too slow for speed contests of any kind, and probably not quite as certain.

There are many other cultural differences between town life and country life. Horses, for instance. Town horses - town residents' horses, that is - are trained to leap gracefully over formal obstacle courses. Country horses are mere vehicles for pulling ploughs or herding sheep and cattle. Immigrants to Oz would be well advised to read some of the poems of Banjo Paterson, Australia's equivalent of Lord Tennyson. Start with "The Man from Snowy River", to get the flavour.

old.sparkles

A colleague I worked with in the UK attempted to migrate to Perth.

I'm not sure of the exact timing of the move, but from the story he told they arrived in Perth on a Saturday and found most shops closed. His wife was not happy. They went to where they were staying and tried again on the Sunday to go shopping, and found it all closed.

They didn't last long as the wife hated it and returned to the UK after only a week or so. Fortunately, he had taken a career break and was able to return to his old job.

I was in Perth a few weeks back - travelling for work with a couple of engineers / managers. After many attempts we found a bar open on a Sunday night (it was still early at around 9pm) but most were already closed. Not sure if that is normal, or due to Covid.

BEVS

Is Perth in New Zealand ?