What's American for "it's the vibe"?

The President of the USA and... some chick

I spent last night baking kangaroo-shaped cookies to celebrate Australia Day, the national Aussie holiday which, if I were home, I would normally spend enjoying the day off, swimming, barbequing, listening to the radio and getting drunk, but because I’m across the other side of the world I will spend working, drinking coffee, napping on my desk and getting drunk. Oh, and eating kangaroo-shaped cookies.

Actually, the thing I miss most about Australia Day is the listening to the radio part. While I guess it may seem like some sort of quaint tradition to those not fortunate enough to call that big, dry, marsupial-infested island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean ‘home’, in fact listening to the Hottest 100 is an important cultural right and indicator of social belonging. Listening to the Hottest 100 is to Australians what watching the Superbowl is to Americans: everyone organizes house parties or crowds into bars and screams obscenities at electrical objects that can’t hear them. Basically, in the lead up to Australia Day, Triple J (the government-funded nationwide youth radio station… see guys, big government ain’t so bad after all!) organizes a huge online ballot where you can vote for your favourite ten songs of the preceding year. Voter turnout is pretty damn huge, numbering somewhere around 2 million people I think – so, a larger percentage of people than those who drag their asses of the couch to go and vote for the President (who, let’s not forget, is also the leader of the free world, for now at least) in America. On the big day itself, the countdown stretches until the early evening, when, upon the announcement of the number one song – which always happens to be at once completely out-of-the-blue and completely underwhelming – screams of excitement or disappointment rise up from just about every backyard in every street in every town across the land.

Anyway I was explaining this to my lovely new housemates while I haphazardly rolled out my cookie dough last night (“Wait, you’re making it from scratch? Why?” which was the natural progression from last week’s comment, in relation to my exclamation that you can buy cake frosting already made in a can, of “Of course you can. How else do you get frosting?”) and they were peppering me with questions about the holiday, our traditions, and Vegemite (“it tastes like vitamins”). In the course of the conversation, we decided that the analogous holiday in America might be Thanksgiving, at which point one of them said, sweetly, “Thanksgiving is a national holiday here in America. We eat turkey and pumpkin pie and all the family comes together to give thanks for allthe good things in our life.”

I looked at her blankly. Seriously? Did I need that explained that to me?

And then I realized: Americans think that we know as little about them as they do about us. Because they have no idea what 72 degrees is in Celsius or whether we have freshman and sophomores or what a “Sheila” is or whether we have parliamentary democracy or what any of the cities that aren’t Sydney or Melbourne are called, they assume that we are similarly lost when it comes to the equivalent in their country. They’re completely unaware that we have all of this information shoved down our throats every day from birth, through the television and books and music and even our own slowly-Americanising culture. Since I’ve arrived here Americans have stopped to tell me the meaning of any number of things I have not only heard of, but been colloquially familiar with – the meaning of ‘frat’ and ‘jock’, what a hogie is, that ‘Philly’ is short for ‘Philadelphia,’ what Crisco is, who the speaker of the House of Representatives is – despite the fact that those things don’t exist in Australia at all. Watching the State of the Union while eating dinner last night, one of my roomies turns and, in all kindness, points at Joe Biden and says “that’s the Vice President, Joe Biden.” Are you kidding me? Does he think that just because Julia Gillard and Wayne Swan aren’t on the front page of the New York Times once a week, it doesn’t mean that Obama and Biden aren’t gracing the pages of The Australian? I almost expect them to say “Just Google it. Do you know Google? It’s like a search engine that we have here in America. It’s awesome, you should totally see if you can download it illegally or something.”

There was just one exception to this insanity in the last week that put a smile on my face: while reading an article in the New Yorker on mass incarceration in America, I was pretty tickled pink to find a reference to The Castle, an AMAZING Australian film that is just about required viewing in every law school in the country. The article was referring to this scene, which has become a cultural reference akin to “a dingo ate my baby” around which whole friendships and relationships can be made by Australians in bars in remote, foreign locations:

  

If the Americans are referencing this (and in an almost intellectual way), I thought, then perhaps things aren’t so bad after all. Perhaps we Aussies are finally about to make an impression on this country and The Castle will receive the accolades it so deserves. Only 15 bloody years after it was released!

Happy Australia Day!