ASHLEY KALAGIAN BLUNT How to be Australian: extract
This week we bring you an extract from Ashley Kalagian Blunt’s memoir How to be Australian: An outsider’s view of life and love Down Under.
In 2011 Ashley convinced her husband Steve to leave their native Canada – specifically, the city of Winnipeg, with its minus-25-degree winters – and spend a year in sunny Australia. Because Australia would just be Canada minus the snow, plus sunshine and exotic animals – right?
How to be Australian is both a lively travelogue – encompassing, among other things, the real meaning of the original Indigenous name for Canberra, the Coorong’s legend of an emu-back bushranger, and what it means to go to the waffle in Perth – and a moving personal journey. It’s about discovering that while Canada and Australia are ‘Commonwealth cousins’, they do have quite distinct cultures and attitudes, including to things like same sex marriage and refugees. And it’s about the knotty question of how to belong, and how to overcome an at-times crippling anxiety.
It seems only fitting – to us at NRB at least – that Ashley’s Australian adventure begins in Sydney’s Newtown. In this extract, Ashley has just slept for 24 hours after surviving the 40-hour trip from Canada, and she and Steve have set out to explore their new neighbourhood, starting with Newtown’s King Street.
Extract courtesy of Affirm Press
From Chapter 1
Outside, I took a glorious joy in the sun’s warmth, until I felt my skin burning within the first block. We crossed the street to walk in the narrow patches of shade. The temperature edged past 30 degrees.
‘I’m so glad I finally coaxed you out of Winnipeg,’ I said. Steve smiled, wide and unreserved. ‘It’s nice to see you so happy.’ Checking a map he’d grabbed at the hostel, he led us to King Street. The trees vanished, replaced by stoplights and parking signs. Every second place seemed to be a cafe. In between were African restaurants, cosplay shops and an actual operating DVD rental store that suggested Newtown was situated within a tear in the space-time continuum.
We strolled among the hubbub, enjoying wafts of coffee and bacon. Bus engines idled and crosswalk signals rapped mechanically. We passed shoebox-sized shops selling fresh produce like it was 1950, and hand-holding lesbian couples with neon purple mohawks and metal chains connecting their nose and ear piercings like it was definitely not 1950. My curiosity surged.
We passed women in hijabs, a group of young Koreans speaking animatedly outside a cafe, and other people whose nationalities I could only guess at, but who could have easily represented half the United Nations, from the variety of languages being spoken. Winnipeg had its share of cultural diversity, but the suburbs I’d lived in were far-flung and largely white.
It wasn’t just the diversity of people that struck me; it was the sheer number. In Winnipeg, because of how the climate shaped the city’s design and its inhabitants’ lifestyles, it was rare to see so many people bustling about the streets.
The first person I noticed walking down the sidewalk without shoes only briefly caught my attention. He was otherwise ordinary, wearing shorts and a T-shirt. What piqued my interest was his confident barefoot stride, as if the roughness of the pavement, the chance of stepping on a used needle or dog faeces, had never occurred to him.
The second barefoot person held my attention longer, not only because we encountered her less than a block after the first guy, but also because she was carrying her shoes. I’d have understood this if the shoes were stilettos and this was the end of a long night of dancing. But it was noon, and she was holding a pair of runners.
When, a few blocks further on, I saw a barefoot man boarding a bus, I squeezed Steve’s hand and gestured towards the man, whispering, ‘Is that legal?’
‘I thought you said we weren’t near the beach.’
‘I’m pretty sure this suburb is landlocked.’ We both frowned. Maybe the barefootedness was a political protest.
We ran out of shade. On the hottest day in Canada, the sun had never felt so intense. ‘I feel like a chicken on a spit.’
‘Let’s get some water,’ Steve said. When I’d imagined life in Sydney, the heat had been dry, like a blanket fresh out of the dryer. Today’s heat felt like a boiled sponge wrung over my head. Still, I was pleased it was sweat dripping from my nose instead of cold-induced snot.
We stepped into a convenience store, its air-conditioning set to Antarctic. Steve and I looked at every brand of water, in the fridges, in the aisles, stacked by the counter, our faces growing increasingly grave. The cheapest bottle we could find cost $3.80.
In my derision of Winnipeg as a frozen wasteland, I have to emphasise this one fact: Winnipeg is cheap. The house Steve had bought – recently renovated, three bedrooms plus a detached garage – cost $175,000 Canadian, a smidge more in Australian dollars. We’d known Sydney was going to be more expensive than Winnipeg. Practically everywhere with indoor plumbing was more expensive than Winnipeg. But $3.80 for a litre of water? This wasn’t artesian mineral water sourced from the French Alps and filtered through crushed diamonds. This $3.80 bottle was the house brand, probably local tap water filtered through a used cheesecloth.
‘I’d rather die of thirst.’ Steve put the water back and clicked his teeth, his jaw visibly tense. My own jaw clenched in response. Of course he was stressed, being unemployed for the first time in ten years, so soon after the global recession. Everything would be fine once Steve found a job, I thought, trying to brush my concern away.
We ambled on. The smell of roast garlic and lemon came from a restaurant, and we realised we were starving. We sat down at a patio table, menus in hand.
‘They’ve got an actual espresso machine.’ I pointed through the open doors. Outside proper cafes, espresso machines were only found in the fanciest Canadian restaurants. They were the Ferraris of coffee: expensive, rare and show-offy.
A server appeared, a dozen silver hoops lining her left ear.
‘How’re you going?’ she asked, smiling. Steve and I exchanged a look.
‘Uh, we’ve just moved here?’ I wasn’t sure if this answered her question. I was also starting to suspect the whole g’day thing was an urban legend.
‘You’re from America?’
‘Canada,’ we said in unison.
We ordered one entree to share, and I asked for a decaf cappuccino, since it was after my 9 am caffeine cut-off.
Ashley Kalagian Blunt
‘And a coffee with cream, thanks,’ Steve said. What he wanted, though neither of us knew to specify it, was a cup of black filter coffee with a thimble-sized serving of cream, specifically the liquid variety with 18 per cent fat, portioned in an individual plastic capsule. This was what the phrase ‘coffee with cream’ meant to us.
The server looked at Steve like he must be new to English. ‘So, um, a flat white?’
‘A what?’
‘Like … with espresso?’
‘Okay, with cream.’
She cocked her head. ‘I guess I can bring some cream with it.’ When she left, Steve took an abandoned newspaper from another table, portioning a few sections to me.
‘Hey, there’s an article about hockey!’ For the first time since we’d arrived, real excitement filled his voice. But hockey turned out to be a jowly politician and not what Aussies would call ice hockey.
The sports section was alien to Steve. ‘I think they have … two types of rugby,’ he said, like he expected the Twilight Zone theme to start playing.
‘How old is this paper?’ I flipped to the front, expecting to see a date from at least a decade ago. ‘It says same-sex marriage isn’t legal here.’
‘That can’t be right. It’s 2011.’
The server returned, setting our drinks on the table. ‘Is this how Canadians drink coffee?’ she asked.
‘Everybody has it like that,’ Steve replied, his nose in the paper, and she left before he noticed his latte-looking beverage, and beside it, a tiny bowl of whipped cream. He looked from the cream to me, as if this was a practical joke I’d orchestrated.
I threw up my hands, protesting my innocence.
*
We left the restaurant, still hungry but keen to explore more of King Street. I practically dragged Steve along. Who knew what we might see? A polo-shirted man barbecuing suspiciously oversized shrimp, a gigantic venomous spider, or a dingo eyeing a baby carriage. Nearly everyone had joked about these ancient memes before we left Winnipeg, as if all of Australia’s vastness contained only this handful of things.
It was the inverse, I suspected – with Australia so far away, people’s brains could only hold a few random, repetitive tropes about it. I wanted to stuff my brain full of Australiana – flat whites and billabongs and so much more.
Consulting his map, Steve led us to the University of Sydney, where I was about to start a one-year Master of Cultural Studies. Because Steve was older than me, and because it had taken so long to convince him to move outside the 25-kilometre radius in which he’d lived his entire thirty-three years, he’d no longer been eligible for a working holiday visa by the time we got married. But there was a solution. If I agreed to pay a mere $27,000 in international student tuition, Steve was legally permitted to tag along on my student visa and work full-time in order to fund the endeavour.
I’d planned to do a master’s degree regardless, as a way to kickstart an actual career – in what exactly, I still wasn’t sure. But everything had worked out so far, and I trusted that by the time I finished the degree, a clear career path would open up.
We turned into the campus, strolling towards the sandstone quadrangle that beckoned from a hilltop. This was the austere, Oxfordesque building splashed across the university’s marketing material. Green lawns surrounded the quad, each blade of grass cut to uniform height. For a moment it felt like we’d been transported to a very sweaty day in England.
‘It feels really … English here,’ Steve said, like he’d been reading my mind.
‘Do you remember people talking about how English Canada used to be?’ It was something I’d heard often, but was always framed in past tense.
He nodded. ‘Toronto has some buildings like this.’
Canada and Australia must have been more similar in the past, when they were still English colonies. Now Canada had the United States to define itself in opposition to.
For the first time, I wondered about Australia’s identity. Tucked down in the bottom corner of the Pacific, it couldn’t still think of itself as English. Could it?
Then I looked up.
Among the quad’s run-of-the-mill demonic gargoyles, a kangaroo stared down at us. It wasn’t an exaggerated gargoyle kangaroo, just an ordinary roo mixed in with the gothic beasts. Its mouth curved down like it was experiencing digestive discomfort, but it otherwise looked cuddly.
Perched over the front entrance of such a venerable building, the roogoyle promised Australia would be full of surprises.
From Ashley Kalagian Blunt How to be Australian: An outsider’s view of life and love Down Under Affirm Press 2020 PB 336pp $32.99
Like to keep reading? You can buy How to be Australian from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.
To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.
