I’ve been neglecting my mission of offering my very important rants to the world of the interwebs for the past couple of months in favor of focusing on actual un-blogged, non-virtual life which somehow took me across the world to a continent I never thought I would visit. Not that I never wanted to, I just never gave it much thought, because, well, it’s on the other side of the world! I think maybe that’s why people were more impressed when I told them I was going to Australia than any other country I’ve gone on tour to. It’s like, “Australia! Madness!” And it seems to go both ways. When I would talk to folks there about NYC they acted like it’s a crazy dream that some day they would get to see it.
In an attempt to be at least a little informed I read Bill Bryson’s “In a Sunburned Country” before I left, but all I really knew about Australia before I got there was that giant worms are a real thing, not just something from a low budget ’90s horror film, and that you can “cuddle a koala” there, except in the places where it’s illegal.
We performed “Gatz” the first week in Brisbane, which as far as I could tell is the Ft. Lauderdale of Australia. Palm trees, crazy birds, and a 75 degree Autumn, which they think is downright chilly. I went into a store one day sweating from my sunny walk into town and the lady in the store said, “You’re hot? Where did you come from? Tasmania?” And it took a big effort not to say, “Um, is that a real place?”
Here is me and my new koala friend Eeyore – who is less a friend and more a koala forced to spend half an hour every other week “cuddling” tourists in order to earn her eucalyptus keep at the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary:
We then spent three weeks in Sydney performing at the Opera House:
It was nearly as glamorous as it sounds, but was nicely balanced out by where we were living, which I’ve since discovered is the most notoriously sleazy neighborhood in the entire southern hemisphere. Our hotel was lovely, but it was in Kings Cross, which is like Bleeker Street on a balmy saturday night crossed with a less-family-friendly Bourbon Street. Just to give you a little taste, evidently this happened one block away from our hotel on our opening night:
This girl is now an Australian internet sensation. Or at least she was for a few minutes there. And I like the guy who says “There was no need for it.”
Kings Cross doesn’t feel dangerous in an NYC “bad neighborhood” way, it’s a little more complicated than just a feeling that you are not going to make it down the street alive. This is a place with nice coffeeshops next to the strip clubs where ladies too old to be wearing what they’re wearing are hanging in the doorways. It almost feels kind of welcoming and charming in its seediness at first. It took about two weeks for it to all start feeling very sinister.
The thing about Australians (who I now understand completely since I have now spent a month around them) is that they are such nice people. And not in an intrusive or overwhelming way. Just in a very generous “chat in a shop” “have a beer” kind of banter way. But in the end these people are renegades. Maybe it’s not so PC to bring up the criminal origins of this particular continent, but it really makes a lot of sense to me. I mean, even if their recent ancestors hadn’t all been imported criminals, these are people who are very conscious of the fact that they are far away from anything and anyone. And they’re making up the rules as they go along. And maybe tomorrow there will be different rules. Or none at all.
Of course, if we had stayed in a different neighborhood I might feel completely differently about the lovely Australian people (who, god bless ‘em, laughed their hearts out at our little show and leapt to their feet at the end). But maybe not. On one of my trips to Bondi Beach, very popular with surfers, there was a “shark sighting” siren and not a single person got out of the water. There were at least 30 surfers there, and it wasn’t even a nice day, and no one moved. I’m telling you – renegades. Lovely people, not to be messed with.
