Put Another Shrimp on the Barbie...

Australia is a pretty fucking cool country. Here are a few of my favorite things about it:

1. Australia mislaid a Prime Minister…I’ve been rereading Bill Bryson’s Australian travel book, In a Sunburned Country, and in it Bryson writes that an Australian Prime Minister in the 1960’s went out for a swim and was never seen or heard from again. In any other country on earth, this would be noteworthy, but it’s easy to go missing in Australia, which brings me to my second favorite thing about Australia.

2. So many ways to die…
You could meet your maker after meeting a riptide; this is a pretty likely explanation of the PM’s disappearance. Your vehicle could break down in the outback, leaving you to die of thirst. A kangaroo could box the shit out of you. One of Australia’s 750 gazillion deadly snakes could bite you; one of the 800 gazillion deadly insects could do the same. You could be eaten by a crocodile in an inland body of water. You could be eaten by a shark in the ocean. Your tourist boat could head back to shore, leaving you to fend for yourself at the Great Barrier Reef. In fact, it’s kind of amazing that only the one PM vanished; I would have thought at least 2 or 3 others would have become dingo munch.

3. Still British after all these years…
For reasons unknown, Australians retain certain British attributes we Americans did away with years ago. They enjoy cricket, and don’t consider tea-drinking to be gay. They haven’t tossed the Queen off of their money, but then again neither have our shifty neighbors to the north, Canada. Also they drive on the wrong side of the road, but in the southern hemisphere that could actually be correct; I don’t fully understand the intricacies of our planet’s equatorial division.

4. It’s like America only different…Vestigial British-ism aside, Australians are Americans’ evil twins; we’re Captain Kirk and they’re Captain Kirk with a mustache. They spend dollars, live in states, and their male inhabitants wear shorts without compunction. They are by all accounts outgoing and friendly, and they love a good barbeque. There’s a preponderance of pre-fab subdivisions from the middle part of the 20th century, antipodean Levittown’s if you will. Like Americans, Australians made off with a country by murdering and dehumanizing its original inhabitants, a people far better equipped than Europeans to cope the vicissitudes of life in the new world, which conveniently segues into my fifth point.

5. Aboriginal Australians are more awesome than Native Americans…Here’s how Native Americans became Native Americans: a long time ago, they wandered over a land-bridge from Asia to what is now Alaska, and spread out over North and South America. How dull. Here’s how Australian Aborigines became Australian Aborigines: we’re not really sure. We do know that, since it has never been connected to a landmass north of New Guinea, the Aborigines must crossed the ocean to reach Australia via New Guinea. Strangely, despite having been a seafaring people at some point in their history, the Aborigines were land-bound at the time of the first European colonization of Australia. Although genetic evidence suggests that aboriginal Australians are descended from the first human migrants out of Africa, their isolated existence has meant that their languages and cultures are essentially unrelated to any others on earth. As for their beliefs, good luck understanding “dreamtime,” an aspect of Aboriginal religion and mythology that refers to both the time of creation as well as a separate spiritual timeline running concurrently with our own.

6. I declare this land…Australia is home to a bizarrely high percentage of the world’s micro-nations. In essence, Australians, more so than other people, are prone to declaring their own homes to be sovereign states. I don’t think I can articulate just how or why this is cool, but I also don’t think I need to. Clearly, Australia (and Aeterna Lucina, Atlantium, Rainbow Creek, and any other independent nation therein) is a kickass place.