Date: Fri, 10 Dec 2004
From: Lee Lady
To: Friends
Subject:

I know that you're all anxious to hear about Australia, especially Sylviane's meeting with the government tax auditor, who explained the Goods-and-Services Tax (i.e. sales tax) to her. But that will have to wait.

The main guidebook I was using in Sydney was Access Sydney. I have found Access Paris, Access New York, and Access Seattle all very helpful. But neither Access Sydney nor the Lonely Planet managed to succeed in making Sydney sound like an interesting place. Some minor intersection where there were three very small coffee shops would be considered a noteworthy tourist attraction.

I was told that Sydney was supposed to be considered the Gay Capital of the world. Well, maybe. I remain to be convinced. Sylviane and I went out to the main gay area one evening, Oxford Street in Darlinghurst. We went to a bar called Stonewall, and it was certainly just as packed with aggressive gay guys (and a few women) as any bar in San Francisco's Castro Street district. Sylviane loved it. One guy in his forties came up to me at the bar and told me that I was definitely the most interesting man in the bar that evening. "I love your hairdo," he said. Hm..... Okay.   I guess it's all a matter of which side I sleep on the night before.

I drove up to Canberra one afternoon to with a woman friend of Sylviane's to Australian National University. The point was to attend a talk given by a young woman refuge from Rwanda, a friend of Sylviane's, but for me, the idea was that I would get to see a little of Canberra. In fact, I saw a fair stretch of the highway, which looked pretty much like a highway anywhere else, and that's about all.

The friends of Sylviane who had organized the conference were worried that the room was much too big for the number of people who were expected to attend, so they planned to hire a half dozen models from an agency to help fill up the room. It was interesting for me to look at the audience and try to identify the models. Two seemed pretty obvious: a fairly handsome middle-aged guy who I suspected normally modeled for magazine ads, and the woman sitting directly ahead of me, who sat very attentively and quite motionless for the whole talk.

I later learned, though, that the plan to have models had fallen through. The handsome guy who I pegged as a magazine model turned out to be from the Foreign Office. In any case, the room was about as full (i.e. not very) as for most university conferences I've attended. You only get a packed house when somebody really famous comes. The cases I've experienced have been for talks by Robert Frost, Truman Capote, and Buckminster Fuller. Maybe a couple of others. This twenty-one year old woman from Rwanda just did not qualify, even though she was the survivor of a massacre in which the rest of her family had been killed.

For me, though, the most interesting thing was the Belgian ambassador, who was largely instrumental in organizing the whole thing, and tried to get several other ambassadors to come. (Only the Hungarian ambassador actually showed up.) He was sixty years old, and had spent a large part of his life in Africa. He didn't wear a tie and looked nothing like what I'd expect an ambassador to look like. He'd fairly clearly decided that at his age, he had no more interest in being the sort of person other people wanted him to be. He just looked like a charming old guy who it would be very interesting to have a conversation with.

Waiting for the talk, I interested to notice a little booklet stating that the Australian National University had recently been evaluated by a team of eminent academics who turned in a report saying that the ANU was definitely a world-class university, and was in fact among the world's hundred top universities.

I don't know a damned thing about the ANU and certainly don't want to pass judgement on it, but for me this sort of thing was very reminiscent of the University of Hawaii, where they are always trying by one means or another to get people to testify that UH is one of the world's best universities and not just a mediocre university (albeit with a few excellent programs) that happens to be in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Partly the hope seems to be that maybe if they could just convince the State of Hawaii that the university is something really great, then the state might be willing to provide it with a decent amount of money. But the response from the people who control the money in the Hawaiian state government has consistently been that they are all in favor of having a world class university, as long as it can be done on the cheap.

When I got here to Seattle, I was amused to notice an extremely small espresso bar which had decided to call itself the World-Class Café. I guess at least here in Seattle, the phrase "world class" has been overused to the point of turning into a joke.

Well, there must have been something else that happened in Sydney that I could tell you about. I didn't make the effort to see any kangaroos or wallabies or koala bears, although I talked to someone who could tell me all about them. (Kangaroos can be very tame and be petted, but they can also easily kill you with a single blow of their tail.)

I met this kangaroo guy at the club for the local rugby team. Sylviane belongs to the club because you can get cheap meals there. There's also a bar-casino that's pretty much like what you would find at a Ramada Inn in Oklahoma or Texas or nearly anywhere in the U.S. not close to a major city. With a band doing routine renditions of music that was about ten years older than the people in the crowd. (John Denver, Glenn Campbell, Elvis Presley.)

The rugby team calls itself the Roosters. I guess even in Australia, they wouldn't want to call themselves the Cocks. Anyway, according to Sylviane they don't win many games.

--Lee