Sydney

Another vacation come and gone! Boy, Australia is getting expensive. Mom and dad, please send more money. Oh yeah, I love you.

Spent the last extended weekend with the two French fries, Agnes and Maud, in Sydney, Australia’s largest city. It boasts a population of over four million—half a million more than Marvelous Melbourne. Sydney is a city for strong people: strong businessmen who drive cars with strong engines, strong surfers who show off their skills at the famous Bondi Beach, strong sailors who compete in the annual Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race, and strong naked men in statues who fight minotaurs with one hand while turtles softly spew water in the foreground.

Despite the city’s outward strength and wealth, it lacked some X factor or vibrancy that the French fries and I spent some time trying to identify. We decided that the lack of college students and children, the huge Central Business District and the monoculture of all the businessmen, and the large amount of tourists lend the city a different feel than Melbourne. As many Melburnians will tell you, Sydney is a nice vacation destination, but it’s not as nice a place to live.

Not having enough time to do some proper research, I booked a hostel for the three of us in a place called “Kings Cross”, which sounded innocent enough. Actually, it’s Sydney’s red-light district, filled with shops of the most creative names and merchandise, and dotted with the best women that money can buy. Whenever we returned to our hostel late at night, we made sure to sober up before entering Kings Cross. And when the French fries locked themselves out of our hostel room, I only opened the door if they introduced themselves as another word for “night workers,” which according to Maud only strengthened the Australian perception that French girls are easy. Other than that, the location of our hostel didn’t really impact our trip.

Sydney does have some redeeming qualities, notably its numerous harbors, a certain Opera House, and the Harbour Bridge. Every architect seems to know this, as all the buildings competed for the best views of the harbor. Between the skyscrapers, the carefully maintained walkways, and the heavily landscaped gardens, I felt that central Sydney was overproduced. But enough whining. It made for some nice pictures.

The Opera House is by far the most stunning part of the city. It seemed like the three of us were always pulling our cameras out, putting them away, walking ten paces in any direction, and pulling them out again. The Opera House stands stoically in bad weather, shines in the sunlight, and glows at night. The “shells” that resemble sails or orange peels—depends on who you talk to—were thought to be impossible to build, but with enough money anything can happen. Construction went fourteen times over budget, but Sydneysiders now think it was worth it, and the rest of the world agrees.

Agnes and I felt quite overwhelmed with the beauty of the Opera House and let loose on the Monumental Steps.

I went on a tour inside, and found it to be disappointing overall compared to the exterior (except for the designer toilets, which were a religious experience). Most of the theaters and lounges look pretty typical, except for the largest Concert Hall, which seats less than three thousand people but has a huge organ (“Grand Organ” in these parts), leaving about four pipes per person.

Thought you might be interested to know that before the Opera House began construction in the 1960s, the site was being used as a tram shed. Back in those days Melbourne was the grandest city in Australia (it had temporarily become the wealthiest city in the world in the late 1800s, after the Gold Rush), and it had the honor of hosting the 1956 Olympics. This spurred Sydney to action, though the Opera House wasn’t completed until the mid 1970s. (In 2000 Sydney hosted the Olympics.)

Went to Bondi Beach, were I was the only swimmer without a surf board. Australia being more European than America, there are the occasional topless sunbathers. But I came during the wrong decade, because all the hot girls were skinny enough to look like prepubescent boys in speedos while lying down.

Because I don’t like Sydney as much as Melbourne, I’ll leave you with the fruit bats in the Botanic Gardens. I’ve seen these hideous messengers of the Devil in Melbourne and Cairns, but in Sydney Agnes and I were able to send them straight back to Hell by throwing seed pods at them for amusement—while the groundskeepers weren’t looking, of course. You know you’re in the wrong city when the premier art gallery features a sculpture in their likeness. Ughhh.

Sydney pictures, post to follow

Or you can go to the gallery, here.

News Flash: Adam Steals Christina from Andre*

You heard correctly! Adam steals a fraulein for his very own. Here's how it works:



1. Find a couple in a pre-existing relationship. The more stable, the more impressive to destroy. This one was four years in the making.








2. Befriend the couple and join them in an innocuous activity like hiking in Wilson's Promontory, the southernmost point on mainland Australia.







3. Sabotage the relationship from the inside by talking smack about Christina to Andre, and vice versa. Push things to the breaking point and check for telltale signs of stress, such as strangulation.






4. Come to the rescue before Andre damages the goods you're after. Try not to fall off a mountaintop while the couple fights over who gets to keep you as their "friend."







5. Play nice as you hike down the mountain, ensuring your survival. Suggest that you all work things out at a relaxing place, like a beach filled with boulders and a strong current.






6. Push Andre off a boulder, into the strong current, when Christina isn't looking.













7. Move in for the kill. Hope desperately that the romantic scenery stalls any questions.













*This is all a joke.

Australia and Virginia Tech

In a country of only 20 million people, if you want to hear real news, inevitably you look outwards to what the rest of the world is doing. A couple weeks ago we heard about Virginia Tech. Only, we didn't hear about it in dribs and drabs, like some echo from across the ocean. Thanks to technology, we got to experience the events in real time.

I remember coming to the RMIT library before lab and starting my morning ritual of checking email and googling Harry Potter articles. All of the news websites were focused on Virginia--it was the evening after the shootings and the death toll kept changing--I think it increased by five in the half hour I was online. The sites were anticipating a public press conference with the VT president, and the big question at the time why the university had failed to notify its students after the first two shootings.

After a couple hours of lab I went to my philosophy tutorial, where some of the other students expressed their dismay for the victims and asked me whether I thought the gun control laws might be changed to prevent this from happening in the future. The conversation turned political and I told them since nothing had been dramatically changed after Columbine in 1999 it was unlikely that gun control would become a big issue now. I also mentioned that the NRA might be pretty strong in Virginia, and that it would suggest that if other students had guns, the shooter would have been stopped (and it did, predictably). And with a national election coming up, the big politicians wouldn't be going out on a limb and alienating themselves.

The six other students and the professor (he's Scottish, so he doesn't really count) seemed pretty disappointed that the US could go from shooting to shooting without "learning from their mistake." I found this to be the general sentiment in Melbourne, whomever I spoke to. Even Australian TV correspondents in Virginia made of point of telling their anchors that although it went against their personal convictions, they thought gun control was unlikely to change in the US.

You see, Australia has some experience with these matters, because in 1996 a loner named Martin Bryant drove his car to Port Arthur, Tasmania, stopped at a cafe, calmly bought and ate his lunch, opened his bag, took out an AR15 semi-automatic rifle, and began to methodically shoot anyone in sight. Port Arthur is home to the ruins of one of Australia's worst convict settlements, so there were many tourists around the cafe who heard gunshots and assumed there was some sort of historic reenactment going on. Some actually approached the cafe. Bryant came out after killing over twenty people and fired into the crowd outside. He got back into his car and drove down the street, shooting at other cars and pedestrians he crossed. He hijacked a BMW after killing its three occupants, then approached a couple in a Toyota. He killed the woman and forced her boyfriend into the trunk of the BMW. Shooting while driving, Bryant made his way to the Seascape Cottage, where he would ultimately kill the owners, the guy in his trunk, set the cottage on fire, and turn himself in. In total, he killed 35 people and wounded many others--making him the worst spree killer in history. Although the Virginia Tech Massacre may be the worst school shooting in US history, the Port Arthur Massacre just beat it, and remains the worst mass shooting in the world. (To be fair, though, Bryant had an easier environment--filled with tourists but otherwise rural, and without a large police force nearby.)

The newly elected Prime Minister John Howard worked closely with state governments to increase gun control across the country. At the time, he said that Australia couldn't risk having a gun culture like the US (and this was in 1996). A National Agreement on Firearms was composed two weeks after the massacre, which prohibited the sale of automatic and semi-automatic firearms, and offered a "gun buyback" program. Australian citizens returned 643,726 guns (many were soon to be prohibited) and received $320AUD from the federal government.

Martin Bryant was sent to jail for 35 life sentences without parole. If you go to Port Arthur, as I did in February (pictures of the convict settlement ruins start here), you'll find some memorials set up in various locations, some maintained by the town, others by family members. You'll also find a bunch of reading material on the massacre, as no one in town wants to explain it to yet another tourist.

So when Australians think about America's most recent massacre, I'm sure their sympathies and regrets are as sincere as anyone's. But for the life of them, they can't understand why the nation they emulate, with its celebrities they worship, fashion they borrow, and sitcoms they enjoy, should be so obtuse to consider what happened in Virginia just a "tragedy," and not also "a learning experience."

ANZAC Day (April 25)

So ANZAC Day is probably the most important day in Australia, as it commemorates the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps who fought side by side in their first major battle--on the the Gallipoli Peninsula of Turkey, during WWI. I had been meaning to write about the history of ANZAC Day and the ANZACs, as we had talked about it to death in my Intro to Australia class. However, now that it's crunch time in the semester, I've been spending lots of time in the chemistry lab, writing school papers, and travelling on the weekends, so in lieu of a description of the holiday from me, check it out here--Wikipedia has some great external links at the end of the article too.

Basically I was at Federation Square to watch a parade of other countries, bands, and many veterans (not real ANZACs, they're almost all gone by now) walk across the Yarra River to the Shrine of Remembrance, in the Botanic Gardens. I was surprised to see some Turks in the procession (German Andre: "That's like Nazis marching in a WWII parade!"), but they made sure to hold up a sign indicating the reconciliation between the two nations after WWI.


It's a sign of how connected Australia felt to the British Empire that only 16 years after federation it sent thousands of its sons to fight for the Allied Forces. Though the battle was ultimately a huge failure in just about all military aspects, the ANZAC myth of selfless sacrifice and duty to one's country (and empire) has lasted to the present. It's the most important holiday in Australia, as I said, and many others will tell you that the Australian identity was formed on the fields of Gallipoli.

More pictures, and two videos--bagpipes and an explanation of ANZAC Day by some professor. Sorry that it's so shaky--I was zooming in all the way.