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It's just not cricket
According to Chris Gayle the captain of the West Indies cricket team, there is something the Australians are not good at and that is being on the receiving end of sledging, the verbal intimidation that they dish out so well to others. Four days after the end of the third cricket test here in Perth controversy is still raging, Gayle has dismissed the Aussies as whingers and hypocrites after the Australians complained that he had taunted them on field, and bowler Shane Watson was fined a portion of his match fee for his dramatic responses. Gayle has publicly described Watson as soft and as predictable as a wind-up doll; “He only looks big and strong . . . [but] he gets miserable easy,” he said. Of the team collectively, Gayle is reported as saying; “Australians are well known for sledging players. They are a good team and should get on with it instead of having to whinge.” Such tension bodes well for a confrontational one-day series due to start in the New Year.
There is something though that Australians are good at, and that is talking about themselves. Take for example the young man behind the counter at the local post office who volunteered, without prompting, that he couldn’t wait for 2010 to arrive as 2009 had been such a rotten year; two really bad things had happened to him. Obviously feeling the need to explain further, he continued that he had survived prostate cancer only for his fiancé to then leave him. The explanation didn’t stop there; the fiancé apparently told him afterwards that she had wanted to leave for six weeks before she did, but only three weeks before she left went shopping for rings, at her insistence. Despite his betrothed’s heartlessness he felt a bit sorry for her as, aside from her immediate family, everyone saw right through her and supported him. “One thing is for sure,” he concluded, “I’m certainly not going to get a fiancé in 2010.”
Our sympathy ran short on the next visit to the post office however when the same young man asked if we had any friends who could put him up for the 2011 Rugby World Cup as he was looking forward to being in Auckland when the All Blacks get beaten in a home final. The former fiancé now has two more supporters.
Similarly, while opening new Australian bank accounts the customer services officer, when she learned of our occupations as union officials, volunteered a full rundown on the failings of this particular bank as an employer. Even to the extent of describing the difficulties in getting away from the desk to get to answer urgent calls of nature. Notwithstanding the bank’s failings, the customer services officer was efficient and excellent, not only at getting an account opened but also arranging a credit card in the complete absence of an Australian credit rating or even a fixed abode. We liked that.
That we struck such chatterboxes twice may have been chance, but our inclination that this is a national characteristic was cemented by a third instance. Marty slipped off to a nearby hostelry to meet for the first time some of his soon-to-be work colleagues. While not one single question was asked of him, he learned the full warts and all history and every dysfunction of his new employer in a single session. This should not have come as a surprise; years ago he travelled to Melbourne to an industrial conference of the same organisation to describe the perils of New Zealand’s Employment Contracts Act only to find once there that he was superfluous, they already knew it all. There is, apparently, nothing you can teach an Australian.
In something of a confessional, it can be revealed that our flight from reality has been somewhat grounded, hopefully only temporarily. We have been shopping for work clothes, applied for tax numbers, and got the bank accounts already referred to, and that can only point to one of the dirtiest of four letter words; work. Marty has been offered and accepted some fixed-term work in WA (also known as Wait Awhile) and we can only hope such an impediment to our life on the road doesn’t last too long.
Back on the subject of language and dialect, when at the post office recently we were asked what was in the large envelopes we were sending to New Zealand. Books, we replied. The attendant looked puzzled, how was it there could be a box inside flat envelopes he enquired? Not boxes, but books we repeated. He still looked at us suspiciously; you cannot fit boxes in these envelopes he insisted. He looked relieved when, eventually, in front of a queue of bemused Australians and in best Marcel Marceau tradition, we mimed reading a book. Ahhh, you mean booooks, he said.
Of other interesting Australians, Richard Pennicuik, the tree man of the Perth suburb of Thornlie, is in his eighteenth or nineteenth day perched up a gum tree in front of his house in an attempt to stop the local council from chopping it down and replacing it with a Jacaranda. As a result of the protest the council has promised not to touch the tree for three months to allow Pennicuik to come down and meet with them in an attempt to try and resolve the standoff. Pennicuik, bless him, is having none of it. He is stopping up that tree.