hey, from australia!

“People here are nice here” is one of those useless platitudes that doesn’t tell you anything real about the place. People are nice everywhere. Moreso here, maybe. The best way to demonstrate how nice people are here in Manly is to tell you about the one and only guy I met who was a complete asshole. 

Here’s the scene: I’d dropped my kids off at school moments earlier, and now I’m standing on the sidewalk next to our cargo bike that can fit both kids on the back and serves as our local minivan. It’s big, maybe the size of a normal tandem bike. I’m standing next to it with my hat on, my bike helmet over my hat, sunglasses, and headphones. I’m looking down at my phone turning up the volume on my music and trying to decide whether I want to pick up a coffee or smoothie for the bike ride home (I opted for smoothie because I got a bit drunk last night and read something about how eating blueberries every day can prolong your life). 

I now have my music on pretty loud and over it I hear someone yell at me, “Move asshole! You’re blocking the whole sidewalk!” I laugh and look up to say “hello” to the person, assuming it’s one of the dad’s from my kids class joking around with me. 

I look up at the guy and turn off my music so we can catch up and I realize, “I don’t know this dad.” Then I think, “I must have met him at one of the dad’s nights out and forgotten his name.” I take notice of the guy’s dog, sleeveless shirt, and the fact that he’s only about four feet tall, and I finally realize that I just don’t know this guy. 

People here are so nice that my next thought isn’t, “This guy is an asshole.” My next thought was, “Oh my god, this man is having some sort of mental health episode and I need to help him.” The notion that anyone I meet walking around on the street here would be such a shitbag still hasn’t occurred to me. 

Now he’s past me and the stunning truth hits me: I’ve just encountered a guy who’s a jerk. Here, in Manly. Wow. Didn’t think that was possible. 

I try to go out for a pub lunch by myself about once a month. I drink a couple beers, read the newspaper, and eat something a cardiologist wouldn’t touch. Four Pines in Manly is one of my spots. It’s open for lunch, has good beer, good food, and lots of fresh air. 

I was sitting at a hightop making my way through my second pint and a bacon burger when the woman a few tables over screamed like she’d be stabbed and jumped to her feet slapping at her leg like she was trying to put out a fire. Everyone in the pub stopped eating for a moment and looked up, then everyone gave a little chuckle and went back to their meal. I wasn’t close enough to see exactly what happened, but it’s a safe bet that a roach or spider ran over her leg while she was sitting. 

When we lived in Chicago, I’d sometimes stop at the Rainforest Cafe on the way home from daycare with my then 3-year-old to get him some nuggets. It was an easy way to inject a little fun into dinner when my wife was away, and I’d get to have a happy hour beer while he ate. On our last trip, just before they went out of business, a roach ran across our table while he was eating. He stopped eating, I showed our waitress the video, and they gave us another meal (and beer) for free to go. 

The attitude here is quite different. Big spiders, roaches, snakes, whatever…they’re all just nature and come with the territory. If you get freaked out by a possum sniffing around your table on the wharf at Skiff club, we’ll that’s on you, he was here first.

It’s about as easy of an order as a bartender can get: one draft beer and one glass of wine. The deer-in-the-headlight eyes of the young man who took my order gave him away as a guy on the first day of a new job. Even if it hadn’t been for the look that radiated nerves or his asking a colleague for help to punch in my order, his question would have done it when he started pouring the beer.

“How much head do Americans like on their beer?” he said.

It put me in an interesting position. One that I hadn’t had too often in life. The chance to speak on behalf of my entire nation and shape how at least one member of a foreign nation would see and treat us moving forward. What power, I thought.

“Aaaahh, not too much, I guess,” I said while he poured my beer. I worried that if I said anything else he’d give me a cup of foam like I’d ordered a pupachino from the Starbucks drive-thru.

Anyway, if you’re American and stop by the Boathouse and the bartender gives you a beer with no head, now you know who to blame.

My friend Maura from Chicago is moving to Australia (hi Maura!) in a few days, and it got me thinking if there’s one thing I can share about the country that might help Americans understand what they’re getting into when they move here. After a lot of ruminating I’ve settled on one aspect that in my extreme naivety I overlooked while moving here: scale.

1. Australia is massive.
2. There aren’t that many people.

The land size of Australia is about the same as the United States. The population is about the same as Texas.

The consequences of these few people in a country this massive affect everything you see and do.

You get your big cities like Sydney (Austin), Melbourn (Houston), and Perth (Dallas). The Texas analogy works a bit further because, like Australia, many parts are uninhabitable and mostly used for mining, and the best parts of the coastline are the most population dense. But it’s not a state the size of Texas, it’s just that many people spread all across the country the size of America.

Size and population affect everything. For example, you’re watching the national news at night and they have nothing to report. The lead story is still a house fire that happened four days ago and no one was injured. They share the latest updates on the fundraiser to help the fire victims and they’ve only raised something like four or five thousand dollars. Then an animated graphic pops up to transition to the next news story and it’s a horrible animation that looks like it was cut from Microsoft paint five years ago. A minute later a woman comes on and makes a lucid, well-educated point about something like climate change, and then the male broadcaster interrupts her and says something like, “Did anyone ever tell you you look like Michelle Pfifer?”

The point is, the talent pool is much smaller. There aren’t a ton of motion graphics people, or broadcaster people, or people in general. And when a person gets really, really good at something like cooking or acting, they almost always move to Europe or the U.S. where they can make more money, find more avenues of work, and just be more famous.

Scale—a massive country without many people—is important to understanding a lot about how Australia feels sometimes. But it’s not all there is to how Australia feels. Usually, it feels a bit like a paradise. It’s a hot sun on your skin with a cool breeze at your back. Crystalline blue waters along towering cliffs and white sand beaches. It’s warm weather, warm water, swaying palms, and towering pines. It’s filled with people who seem like they’re always happy to see you.

And the giant spiders and poisonous snakes that everyone warned you about? I’m convinced it’s a guerrilla marketing campaign run by people who don’t want a lot of Americans to come to their country.