Belated

Sydney, Australia 10 September 1994

It was a Saturday night like any other in Sydney. The dorm I was living in had organized a pub crawl for that night and I, along with a large crowd of American and Australian students, boarded the city bus bound for downtown Sydney.

I don’t remember the details of where we went, but the idea was that we’d spend an hour at this pub, then an hour at the next, then the next and continue for a half dozen or so pubs. It was just long enough to get a drink, or two if you were ambitious, and then the crowd would move on to the next pub on the list. We pulled our hand-drawn photocopied maps out of our pockets, they were harder to decipher after each stop on the crawl.

I successfully completed the crawl and boarded the bus with my illegally gotten student rate bus pass. American students weren’t allowed to have them, only the Australians. I risked detection from a random bus inspector every time I rode on the bus, but I couldn’t resist the allure of a half rate bus fare. At the wee hours of September 11, I stumbled up the stairs to my 4th floor room. It was conveniently located right across the hall from the stairs, and one door away from the communal hallway payphone. I squinted as I tried to read the small note taped to my door. It was written in blue ink, in impeccably neat handwriting.

“Congrats BJ!! You’re an auntie!! Call home.”

I didn’t bother to unlock my door, and instead scrambled to the phone. I frantically dialed the international calling code, the calling card number, and drunkenly navigated the ridiculously complicated process of calling home to Connecticut.

“Mom! It’s me! I just got the news!”

“It’s a girl!” she cheered into the phone. She gave me the number of my sister in law’s room at a hospital in Hartford.

Your dad answered the phone, and you were crying in the background. I started crying too.

“Her name is Magdolene Jeane, and she’s perfect!” your Dad raved. “She’s so beautiful!”

Months later my brother sent me a video that was shot on the morning of your baptism. It was December, and I was in the throes of the Australian summer. I was living in a flat down the road, because the dorm was closed for the summer. The flat came equipped with a TV and VCR, but the VCR’s format was different than it was in America. I could hear the audio, but couldn’t get the picture. My flatmate Vanessa and I tried to get it to work, and I began to cry because I could hear your dad talking, but all I could see were the static-y squiggly lines.

I ejected the tape and ran to the media center in the library on campus. They had a machine that would show American tapes. I located it, and slid the tape into the VCR. With the headphones firmly in place on my ears, I pressed the play button.

Your dad’s voice guided me through the house until the camera panned to an infant giggling and bouncing in one of those jumpy swing things suspended in the doorway.

“And there’s my baby!” he cooed. His hairy hand extended from behind the camera and caressed your face as you smiled at your dad and the camera. Tears streamed down my face, and I laughed at the same time.

I didn’t meet you until you were 10 months old. You tottered up to me, after having just learned to walk. Without a hint of shyness, you smiled at me as I picked you up and held you for the first time.

And now you’re 15. You’re cool. You’re poised. You’re whipsmart. And I am so very proud of you.

Australian Nutella

Last week I brought home a jar of Nutella. In case you haven’t had it, it’s quite possibly the most decedent thing ever to arrive in a jar. It’s a chocolate hazelnut spread, and is amazing with peanut butter, or on a banana, or scooped with a giant serving spoon directly from the jar and rapidly globbed into one’s mouth.

Last night Todd baked some blondies (chocolate chip cookies that are in brownie form) and swirled some of the wonder drug, Nutella, on top. We each ate one, and today I brought in the rest to share with my co-workers and to keep them from lodging themselves onto my hips as these blondies can only be described as a party in the mouth.

Having a jar of Nutella in the house brings back an Australian memory. I was one of two full year American students in my dorm, Dunmore Lang College. There was a dining hall in the dorm that served food that can only be described as shockingly bad. An Aussie friend once shoved her plate away in disgust and said “This ought to be banned by the Geneva Convention.” The kitchen at DLC only served one choice for meals, and a vegetarian option as well. To give you an idea of how bad the food was, the vegetarian option was often something called “Not Meat.” It looked like dog food. It smelled like dog food. It tasted like dog food. It consisted of unidentifiable lumps of something not made of meat, and was served with gravy. So, it actually wasn’t vegetarian at all with the meat gravy on it. As a result of the horrible cuisine at Dunmore Lang, I was forced to get creative at meal times and basically spread peanut butter on anything set in front of me for ever meal.

On every table in the dining hall there were unmarked jars. One contained peanut butter, another contained jam. The third contained a brown substance that I had thought was Nutella. On my first day at Dunmore Lang I sat down to lunch and opened the jar of brown stuff and smelled it. Repulsed, I closed it. It smelled like vitamin pills and burning rubber, not at all like Nutella. I learned later on that it contained Vegemite, and is served in a thin layer on buttered toast. I tasted it twice over the year I was there and didn’t care for it. At all. It tasted like salty vitamin pills.

Half way through my year there the first batch of six month stay Americans had gone home and the next batch had come in. I had already been there for half a year and was quite popular among the new Americans, as I knew where the cool places to go were and I knew were everything was in town.

I sat with the new batch of Americans for their first meal, when one of them piped up and said, “No way! They have Nutella on the table!” He grabbed a banana, cut it into pieces and spread a generous amount of the brown goo on each piece. I watched, smirking silently. With an expectant look in his eye, he bit into the piece of banana, howled in disgust and spat it out onto his tray.

“Ugh! What the hell was that stuff? That’s gross!” He dabbed at his tongue with a napkin to eliminate his taste buds from any further exposure to any remaining Vegemite and banana molecules.

“Oh, that’s Vegemite. An Australian delicacy,” I replied sagely. “You put it on buttered toast, not bananas.”

Rabbit Proof Fence

I’ve seen the dingo fence when I travelled in Australia. It’s a chain link fence that extends almost to the center of Australia from the east coast. It was originally built as a rabbit proof fence, but was later converted to keep wild dogs away from the sheep farms in the south eastern part of the country.

In the western half of the country, the state of Western Australia, there is a network of rabbit proof fences that extend for thousands of miles. These fences were designed to keep the rabbits on one side, and the farms on the other, and were erected in the late 1800s. While not as impressive as the Great Wall of China, it’s still quite a feat to nearly bisect the entire continent of Australia with a chain link fence.

More than a decade ago I visited the Tandanya Aboriginal Culture Center in Adelaide, Australia, twice. The first time I visited they were running an exhibit on the Stolen Generation of Aboriginal children. The Stolen Generation consisted of children whose mothers were Aboriginal (native Australian) and fathers were Australian (white men). These children were dubbed “half-caste” by the Australian government. These children were forcibly removed from their Aboriginal homes by the government and forced into camps and dormitories as early as the late 1800s and into the early 1970s. The idea was that these children would be educated and introduced into Australian society, and eventually the Aboriginal would be bred out of the generations that followed these children, thus solving the “problem” of half-caste children.

The removal of these children was done as part of the Aboriginal Protection Act of 1869. This act gave the government guardianship over the Aboriginal people. The brutality of removing the children from their Aboriginal home only served to displace the children from their own world, and from the world that the Australian government forced them into. Despite their “education” they were never accepted into Australian society, and were too far removed from their Aboriginal home to ever go back to it.

I walked the exhibit and spent hours gazing at the photos of scads of children dressed in uniforms, not a smile on a single face. I read about the conditions they lived in at the dorms, and the so called education these children received there. The Stolen Generation had lost touch with their families, many of them to never see or hear from them again. The sadness of the exhibit has haunted me ever since.

Tonight I just watched the movie Rabbit Proof Fence in my Todd’s-away-and-Beej-stacked-the-Netflix-queue binge. It was a beautifully done based on a true story movie about three half-caste girls from their village called Jigalong in Western Australia. (Oh, and Peter Gabriel did the soundtrack! I LOVE Peter Gabriel. It just doesn’t get any better than that.) In the beginning of the movie the three girls were ripped from their mothers arms in the early 1930s, despite the village’s efforts to hide and protect the girls. They were placed in the Moore River Native Settlement. After some time there the three of them escaped the settlement.

They determinedly dodged almost every attempt to be captured by an Aboriginal tracker that worked for the Australian government, and ended up spending nine weeks walking along the rabbit proof fence that was erected in Western Australia, their only landmark from their home. Over the course of the 9 weeks they walked 1,500 miles just to get home.

Just to give you some perspective, this is a map of the rabbit proof fences and the track that the girls walked to get home:


It's hard to see, but there's a dark blue line that starts in Moore River, on the east side of the map, just north of Perth. Then you can follow it northeast to Jigalong. Keep in mind the terrain there is very rough, portions of it are desert. And these three girls, age 5-14 walked the whole way.

If you’re looking for a historical drama that will draw you in, I highly recommend this movie. The bleakness of the Western Australian scenery is stunningly gorgeous, the music is great, and the story is both chilling and inspiring.