Saturday, March 17, 2012

Australia - part 1/2

Australia
I had very few expectations when arriving in Australia, except the one of finding a country somewhat similar to home, and somewhat exotic. The familiar side is there, definitely: Sydney and Melbourne streets are bustling almost night and day with white, caucasion people, all the major food, fasion, and retail chains from the Western world are here to make our stay incredibly easier than in South-East Asia. Everyone speaks English, like they should, but the local accent is very hard to understand for us since many syllables are pronounced in a different way.
As for the exotic part... I have not found it yet: White people, again, though most would be very tanned; English names for streets and places, quite reminiscent of London and its burroughs; staple food looks a lot like meat, rather than rice; downtown architecture is a blend of classic Victorian style and modern glas-and-steel office towers; etc.
We learned that Melbourne is the largest Greek city outside of Greece, with 800.000 Greek citizens established there. Turkish, Indians, Japanese and to some extent Chinese are the other significant foreign groups there.
Sydney is obviously a more cosmopolitan, diverse city. It concentrates tourists, air traffic, and, in season, rainy weather like no other place in the country, or so it seems. Walking its streets, we encounter a multicolored crowd talking and laughing out loud, very prompt to start a conversation with you at a traffic light if you wear a funny hat or an unusual amount of luggage, or walk with crutches... well, very chatty, for any reason, really. And very nice and helpful towards the lost tourist peering at his tourist map.
History tells us that Australia was build by convicts, fugitives, and self-made tycoons. Today, road signs tell us that the Australian was also partly built on a large consumption of alcohol: the CBD is a formal "alcohol free zone", and regulations over consumption of alcohol are numerous. The latest book I swapped in a Bali hostel, "compulsive viewing", telling the tale of the TV industry in Australia, is filled with jokes and anecdotes of drunk executives abusing their staff and making alcohol-imbued decisions. Brisbane has a "drinking consultants" pub to make it clear that it's a business and you need to learn how to drink!
The sheer size of the country makes its 20-million-odd population very spread out, and transportation options always expensive. The location of the main cities on the East coast is based on the first commercial counters setup by the British, and on the West coast, on the late gold rush.
We take the train from Melbourne to Sydney, suffering high delays due to the flooding of large parts of the way. In Melbourne Southern Cross station , before the return train arrives, an Australian woman with dark skin tells us that she is going to Sydney to see her four children and eleven grand-children, and that it is the very first time she takes the train. She might be the first Aborigenal person we meet in the country.
As for the economy, industry is a major sector, with mining leading the pack. Environmental damage has become a concern in recent years, after international NGOs denounced un-sustainable corporate practices. Some of the large mining corporations try to wave off critics through facade CSR programs, while others genuinely engage stakeholders communities to make their operations more sustainable.
In the end, the white dominance of Australian society, and the underlying taboo about the Aborigenal population, is what strikes us the most. A duo of young entrepreneurs have identified a neighborhood where many Aborigenes live in Sydney, and is setting up "alternative" tours to raise interest about that community and fund local projects. But there does not seem to be that many other Australians with such commitment to making the society progress...

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