Emu jerky

I’ve been reading Down Under by Bill Bryson, in which he talks about how ridiculous Australia is. Did you know they had a prime minister who was walking along the beach one day and got swallowed up by the waves, and was never heard from again? That happened to their head of state, and yet nobody – outwith Australia, at least – seems to really know about it.

Nobody seems to really know anything about Australia. Or at least not as much as I feel like we should, considering it’s really not that different from the UK in many ways. It’s like a weird parallel dimension. A lot of the TV broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation is just BBC stuff (Midsomer Murders seems to be on most hours of the day), but it’s good to know that the TV we always knew Australians really watched – Neighbours and Home and Away – is also on all the time.

Other classic Australian telly includes the heavily trailed “Puberty Blues”, in which a teenager appears to be troubled by things, and one breakfast show which breaks up all that tiring sad news stuff with clips of cute animals from a vault apparently unknown to the newscasters. It adds an unsettling air of mystery to proceedings, like they’re being forced to improvise by some deus ex machina character for absolutely no reason other than to test their ability to cope under pressure. They never do very well. “I’m not sure whose golden retriever puppies these are,” muses the anchor, “but they sure do love playing with ice blocks.”

There’s a lot that I don’t understand about Australia, but is familiar enough to be comforting. “Bam! And the dirt is gone.” Almost. “How you going?” the Australians say. (I’m used to this, as I worked with a massive Australian contingent at my last job, but it’s still novel. I’m going… well?) I’m even confused by the book I’m reading, the one I said was called Down Under. After discussing it with Rachael we realised that we’re reading the same thing, but her book is called In a Sunburned Country. Why?!

There are some things about Australia that were pleasant surprises for me when I got here, like how Sydney has the largest IMAX cinema in the world. It doesn’t seem the obvious place, because it’s not even a particularly densely populated city, but I enjoyed watching Catching Fire in a half empty cinema. Most surprising, though, is probably the fact that there is a Spiegeltent in Hyde Park in central Sydney – I worked in one almost identical to it in Edinburgh a number of weeks ago, and one of the shows I staffed is performing here too. “Give me work!” I’ll say. “I’m pretty sure we know the same people! Do you want to see how good I am at holding a fire blanket?”

And then I won’t be jobless and homeless any longer.