Courage, dear heart

In my travels abroad I’ve often been asked what I think about the frequent shootings in the U.S.A. Days after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Valentine’s Day, I was asked, “Don’t Americans love their children more than their guns?” I was also told that, given their contrasting experience here, Australians are becoming afraid to travel to the U.S.

I was tempted to say that most Americans have probably never met an Australian and this will make no dent in America’s image of itself. But that’s the cynical response. I was tempted to cynicism because, like most of what the tax authorities call “U.S. persons,” I expected the response to this massacre to be like the many others:

Public figures offer thoughts and prayers

Outraged people mock “thoughts and prayers” as empty words

Fatalists say that these tragedies are unavoidable because even if we got rid of every gun, there would still be people with evil in their hearts, who would find a way to kill

Cynics say it’s not that nothing can be done, but that nothing will be done

And we wait for the next body to drop.

As the week unfolded, however, even from the other side of the world it was possible to observe that the response was different. Some young survivors of the attack were refusing to perform the choreographed roles that we adults have been guilty of. And, like generations of young people before them, they are threatening to change history.

Since we traveled to Vietnam I’ve been reading a lot about the American war there (in which Australia also participated). As we know, young people in that time pushed for change in public opinion on the war, because they, being of draft age but not yet old enough to vote, were most affected by it. Leaders of the Vietnam era should have known better, but were too locked in to their ideologies, and beholden to what became known as the military-industrial complex. 

People back then also drove drunk and smoked at their work desks. We can’t do those things anymore because of social change.

The young people of the present moment have correctly identified the problem, and it’s not convincing Americans with one interpretation of the Second Amendment to adopt a different interpretation. That won’t work, and in any case would only involve about 3% of the U.S. population. The problem is politicians, of whatever party, who are bought by the gun lobby. These young people weren't born in George Bush, Sr.’s time, when he was a member of a National Rifle Association that represented responsible gun owners and could conceivably have been associated with gun safety. The students today have identified the N.R.A. as being less a concern for gun safety and more a front for the gun manufacturing industry.

It is in the interest of gun manufacturers to sell as many guns as possible. Obscenely, even mass shootings are in their interest—as long as the response is status quo. Part of the status quo response is for those who already own a lot of guns to go out and buy more. But these young consumers, soon to be voters, have a goal: Make it politically toxic to take money from the gun lobby.

You can tell that the young students have changed the status quo response, because we are talking about children’s lives, and we are talking to each other. To be sure, some suggestions being made do not appeal to my ideological bent, while other ideas being proposed do not appeal to other people’s biases. But at least we are talking about them.

Personally, I am not willing to rule out any idea my fellow U.S. persons have for preventing more gun deaths, whether it comes from a 17-year-old or a 71-year-old like the president. No one will mistake me for a fan of his, but one thing we know about him is that he likes winning. One of my senators from Tennessee, Lamar Alexander, has flattered him that he could be “Nixon to China” on another issue. This aspect of his personality can be used, but we have to be a little Machiavellian. If he thinks he can trump Obama by doing something, and the result is kids are safer, I’d support that. 

Here are some other ways we can help keep these inspiring young people’s momentum going:

Let them lead. With a wisdom that has eluded their elders, they are taking a bold nonpartisan stand. They are correct that no political party has served them well and they are interested in results, not who achieves them. Follow their lead.

Let them focus. Do not co-opt these young people for their ethnicity, gender, sexual identity or anything else. “March for our lives” is a hard message to oppose. Keep it clear.

Support them by being what they are: consistent and rational. Don’t f*ck up this moment on social media by posting things that will invite “libtard” or “Europe blows” comments. If you’re not sure whether a quote or article is accurate, follow it to its source. If you can’t remember the facts of what happened at Fort Hood, don’t share that meme. There is no room for trolls in this movement, Russian or otherwise.

In fact, let’s follow these suggestions 100% of the time. Think (before posting) and pray—then act. Do you remember when companies stopped discriminating against gay people because it wasn't good business? These students are too young to remember, but they are using their economic power in the same way as boycotters past. If the next generation of consumers want to make a brand toxic, you can bet they will.

In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, there is a scene in which Lucy, in her fear, is comforted by words from Aslan: “Courage, dear heart.” C.S. Lewis writes:

“The darkness did not grow any less, but she began to feel a little—a very, very little—better.”

I feel that way now. We are being led by young people who are marching for their lives. They believe it’s still possible to change their country.

Courage, dear heart.

Americans abroad: Sydney

A journey to Australia inevitably begins or ends or circles back to Sydney. At least, ours do. Sydney is the largest city in the country. When I was a kid and barely knew where Australia was, I remember that list of largest cities from publication pages in books: New York, London, Toronto…and Sydney. So I knew it was a place I would someday go.

And my cousins' apartment in Sydney was the first place I ever stopped in Australia, when we visited four years ago. But before catching up with them, I need to catch up on The Discreet Traveler. Faithful readers may recall my visit to the National Mosque in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Built in 1965, it was the “new” mosque when my aunt Janet visited two years later. It is thanks to her that I made a point of going there and being photographed in front of the very 1960s wall where she was pictured in this very ’60s miniskirt.

Photo courtesy of Janet Knowles Haisman

No robes being handed out when she visited! It’s a great picture, and it just goes to show that there are fashions in religion, as in anything else. Covering women in this part of the Islamic world was not a thing in 1967, and it may not be a thing in the future. 

It is probably thanks to my aunt that I’ve done all this traveling in my life, not just to the National Mosque.

So we continued the family theme by visiting our American cousins. They've been in Sydney for a while now and are pretty well ensconced here. It helps that they get to travel a lot, and visit the U.S. frequently. It also helps that this is the view from their balcony.

Sydney Harbour Bridge

They're an easy train ride from the airport, and we settled in for a stress-free weekend enjoying Sydney. Only slight issue was that over the weekend, the train system was doing what it does on so many weekends back in the U.K.: Track repairs. Instead of the easy train ride across the river into town, we had a bus replacement to content with. Still pretty much of a cinch after some of the public transit we used in Africa and Asia. Or Budapest!

Queen Victoria Building

If you stay on the train long enough, you can get out of town to Cronulla. There's a beach there which we were fortunate enough to visit with our friends. We last saw these friends when they hosted us in Bakio in the Basque Country. But half the year they spend here. Back in June in Spain, their little daughter was quite shy with us and didn't warm to having company. What a difference eight months make in the life of a two-year-old.

We started Sunday afternoon at Luna Park, another slice of history that became decrepit in the 1970s and was luckily saved from the wreckers. Luna Park is a loony replica of a classic 1930s American theme park. Its funhouse, named after Coney Island, remains basically unchanged, and it's fun to watch 21st-century kids playing on giant slides, pinball machines, and other wonderfully analog things that I remember from my own childhood.

From Luna Park, we took another integrated part of Sydney's public transit--the ferry--across to Circular Quay.

I never knew this until I was a young adult, but there's a famous building in Sydney. It's the Opera House and, like the Eiffel Tower, it's an icon of the city that was hated at first. The Sydney Opera House's construction went on throughout the 1960s and it finally opened in 1973.

The area around Circular Quay is called The Rocks. There's a lot of shopping and dining there now, but The Rocks were almost destroyed in Sydney's building boom during the 1960s. Are we sensing a pattern here? Fortunately, a group of neighborhood activists at the time were successful in preserving this part of history, and today it's a really interesting place to hang around. 

In one afternoon I saw a Muslim mom watching her kids in a 1935 funhouse, a Sikh family waiting for the ferry, and a butch-femme female couple having their portrait painted in the Rocks. Even if it weren't for the skyline, Sydney would be a pretty cool city.

Our last night in Sydney we had an unexpected opportunity. Social media being what it is, one of our friends had shared a post from a musician she's a fan of, and tagged us because she knew where we were traveling. The musician, Erin McKeown, was the opening act at the Sydney Opera House, and needed a couple of volunteers to help her at the merchandise table before and after the show. Were we interested?

T. said sure! We'd been backpacking through Asia for months and freely admitted we weren't up to speed on the music, but by the time the audience started to arrive, T. was hawking CDs (and, by gum, a vinyl record) with authority. Yes, you should buy this one, this is the new one. Of course Erin is a fantastic guitar player! You'd better buy now, you'll be kicking yourself after the show when we run out of albums.

Well, we did run out of albums and there was a customer to whom T. said "What did I tell you?" In between, we thoroughly enjoyed Erin's music, and were amused by the podcast that was the main act. All the rest of the audience seemed to be millennial cult followers of Night Vale. The loudest cheer for these U.S. artists was for the recollection that in 2014, the president of the United States had not been a national embarrassment. That, and Erin's use of the term "queer." She had said there would be a mad rush after the show, and there was.

Erin McKeown. Check it out. We loved the songs, and we got to sing along in the concert hall of the Sydney Opera House. What will these travels bring next?

The devil inside: Tasmania

“It’s like sailing into Venice!” T. enthused. Well, maybe not. As the Spirit of Tasmania sailed into Devonport, I saw a movie theatre and a McDonald’s. But crossing the Bass Strait from mainland Australia had not been as uncomfortable as I’d expected.

Tasmania is the island off the southeast coast of the continent of Australia. It’s often left off of maps and ignored by mainland Australians, but it is a state. The fast way to get there is to fly, as we did last time. This time we were relocating a camper van and took it on the ferry. For five Australian dollars a day, it was not a bad deal.

T. was the main driver so I had to pay for my own seat on the ferry. By “seat,” I mean a reclining seat, which I was told would be something like a plane seat. Not in the class we fly! It was so comfortable I was actually awakened by the announcement that we would dock in 45 minutes. It was a promising start to several nights’ sleeping in the back of the camper van, as we camped along the coast at Bicheno.

“Did you see that enchilada?” T. asked excitedly as we drove along. She meant echidna. This is a prickly native beast that looks a bit like a large hedgehog, and it was waddling along the side of the road in the sunlight. Most refreshingly, this enchilada was alive.

Echidna

There are a lot of things to like about Tasmania but there’s one big drawback, and it’s to do with Tasmanian roads, like roads in many other parts of Australia, having no street lights. Most of the native Tasmanian wildlife is nocturnal, and this makes for a distressing number of dead animals squashed every morning. I grew up in the country so I know about roadkill, but this you wouldn’t believe. Even driving slowly and carefully at night is no guarantee you won’t hit something, and based on how people drive during the day, I don’t think they’re trying very hard.

The unique Tasmanian devil, a cleanup species like the catfish, used to play its part in clearing the roadkill. But its leading cause of death is now a facial tumor, spread too easily because of the Tasmanian devil’s limited gene pool. This inbreeding, in turn, is the result of the species being decimated repeatedly and having to bounce back from limited numbers. The devil is so called because it chews through everything—bones and all—and because of its screeching noise, but it doesn't deserve the bad press that nearly led to its extinction. 

You’re supposed to get used to all this death and destruction if you live in Tasmania, but it's not something I want to get used to. That’s the way the human brain works—if you’re repeatedly exposed to something, say a repressive government or news of yet another shooting at a school, the brain dials down the volume simply to protect you. But when something is distressing, I don’t want it to start to seem normal. 

At East Coast Natureworld

This is a baby wombat. The keeper first showed us a “teenaged” wombat, walking around the enclosure and even letting it bite his legs, to demonstrate how inappropriate a pet a wombat makes. I thought he was going to great lengths to show that we should give wild animals their space. Yet no sooner had he turned his back than one of the men in the group leaned into the enclosure and was petting the wombat, and encouraging his kids to do so. Next to a big sign saying “don’t lean into enclosures or touch any animals in them.” The guy wasn’t bitten, but he deserved to be. 

Sometimes I wonder why evolution has not yet weeded out the gene for stupidity.

Kangaroos roam free in the Natureworld sanctuary. It's OK to feed them.

Another thing that’s distressed me is the number of white people who, even today, repeat what they’ve heard about indigenous people. That they’ve been given too much, when in actual fact, nothing could ever make up for what was taken from the indigenous people: their own country. It boggles my mind that there are still so many people who believe that they, or their ancestors, had the right to immigrate to a country, better than the right of its original inhabitants to live there in the first place.

I’m not just picking on white Australians. Henry Knox, George Washington’s secretary of war, said that to dispossess the American Indians would be “a stain on the character of the nation.” He was right—it is a great stain—but Knox is also evidence that even back in the eighteenth century, there were people who knew better. The principle of not just taking what doesn’t belong to you was as well known hundreds of years ago as it is today.

The only way not to get used to something you shouldn’t get used to, is to get away from it. So we got out of the city of Hobart and explored the state as much as possible. We started at nearby Mount Wellington, where, driving up to the summit, we were surprised by a cloud of snow flurries! In wintertime it’s common for Mount Wellington to be capped by snow, but the end of January is midsummer in this hemisphere. Fifteen minutes later, you’d never have known there was snow there. But I saw it.

Our stay outside Hobart coincided with a once-in-150-years lunar event. There was a blue moon (the second full moon in a single month) combined with a supermoon, and a total lunar eclipse. I confess to not seeing the “super” aspect of a particularly large moon, but luckily the clouds did clear around 11:00 at night, and we saw the totality. As the blue moon reddened, it occurred to me that the eclipse darkening the moon was the shadow of the entire earth. This whole planet, with its billions of people and conflicting concerns, was only big enough to cast this shadow on the moon.

Photo courtesy of T.

My camera isn’t up to capturing constellations, but T’s sister-in-law pointed out the Southern Cross, which is represented on the Australian flag. It felt like I was seeing the entire galaxy. The darker the moon got, in a country sky without light pollution, the more stars appeared.

Another day we hiked on the Tasman peninsula to Cape Hauy. The views along the cape were stunning, reminding me a bit of Ireland’s Cliffs of Moher, but warmer and not nearly as windy. Unfortunately, in order to make the hike doable steps have been built up and down almost the entire way. It’s an impressive undertaking by the parks system, but not my favorite way to hike. 

Maybe my legs were worn out from the previous night’s dancing. Friday nights see Hobart’s finest, including a Bear Bryant lookalike and someone who reminds us of cousin Tony, dancing to a blues band behind a rock wall. Our hosts for all these adventures were T’s brother and sister-in-law, plus assorted nieces. On this occasion we were also joined by a young friend who’d stayed with T. and me during her own sojourn in Britain a few years back. We’re cashing in on all this hospitality now as we make our way back round the world.

Another night the fire pit was lit, and I had a go on my brother-in-law’s guitar. It felt good to be picking at a guitar again, but mostly it reminded me how out of practice I am. My fingertips no longer have the worn pads that a guitarist should, and I couldn’t play very long before having to set the thing down!

We had some other good walks, on Seven Mile Beach and in Mount Field National Park. Something that has started happening is that my day pack, with its flags of all the nations we’ve visited, has become a conversation piece. A Malaysian standing in line behind me, or a European couple on the trail, will ask about all the patches and the places we have visited. One of them even asked if he could take a picture—not of me, but of the pack! It made a change from the selfies with Asian people. “Wild lady,” he called me.

T. also called the carabiners on my backpack "carbonara." Clearly she has food on the brain.

Mount Field is the site of the Three Falls hike. One of the falls is called Horseshoe, which is pretty funny to me as that’s also the name of the most impressive Niagara Falls (on the Canadian side). Horseshoe Falls in Tasmania are the least of the three. But the Tall Trees walk offered us the chance to see eucalyptus (“gum”) trees that are more than 400 years old. In other words, they were already standing there before any European set foot on the island. Around Lake Dobson, we saw some pine trees that are more than a thousand years old.

All these experiences of nature were quite humbling. So it seemed only fitting to balance that out by watching the Super Bowl. It wasn’t easy: home televisions now are too complicated for us to turn on, let alone tune in, without special training. Instead, we found a cafe in Richmond that was showing the big American football game on TV. I got a curried scallop pie (a Tasmanian specialty) and the cashier offered a plate of free cupcakes. Given that it was Monday morning here, I felt I participated in the excess adequately. 

Before leaving Tassie, we visited yet another UNESCO World Heritage site: Port Arthur.

The remains of the British prison at Port Arthur are the world’s best surviving example of a modern prison. Sounds surprising, as the history of Britain transporting convicts to what was then called Van Diemen’s Land is not often thought of as modern. But in the nineteenth century, as our excellent guide told us, the maximum security prison built at Port Arthur was an attempt to rehabilitate the most serious offenders—not flog them or keep them in horrible conditions. The most serious punishment they endured, in an era when the sole responsibility for old people’s care rested with their families, was that these criminals could never see their families again.

The fact is that solitary confinement at Port Arthur was probably no more inhumane than solitary confinement today, and the prisoners may have had a higher standard of living than where they'd come from. Crime, after all, doesn’t emerge from a vacuum, and the slums of 1840s England were some of the worst places to live in the history of humankind. The average life expectancy in Manchester’s slums was 17, reflecting extremely high infant and child mortality as well as the early age at which adults grew old.

Britain in the nineteenth century was the first country ever to industrialize. The longterm result of industrialization, for good or ill, is our modern life, unimagined in any previous century. But the first decades of the Industrial Revolution were, in the word of our Port Arthur guide, “horrific.” No wonder the Communist Manifesto originated in London.

Port Arthur is [in]famous for another reason. In 1996 a lone white man opened fire on the historic site, killing 35 people and injuring 23 others. It was the worst mass shooting in Australia’s history, and it shocked the country, as any massacre should. Australia’s government, which at the time comprised center-right parties, decided to make it harder for Australians to reach for a gun. Despite being hanged in effigy by the Australian gun lobby, these politicians did it. Not only was Port Arthur’s the last such shooting in Australia, but there have since been far fewer of the deaths that make up most of gunfire’s toll: suicide and domestic murder.

There have been other acts of terror in contemporary Australia. No one claims that it is possible to eliminate evil. But that didn’t stop Australians from doing something that saved lives.

Melbourne

Victoria, Australia. Where you can drink the tap water; where there is T.P. in abundance, and you can even flush it. After months in Asia, I felt like I’d arrived in a wonderland.

We’ve enjoyed watching episodes of Border Security: Australia’s Front Line. So we know what happens when people declare they have no food with them, and then get caught with a suitcase full of meat, for instance. I was, therefore, hardly prepared for how laid-back an entry we had at Melbourne airport. The only question the immigration official asked was why we hadn't used the automatic kiosks! “Never mind, you’re always welcome to visit us up here.” 

“Welcome”? To a First World country? We’d declared our intention to stay for three months, and were prepared to give our itinerary and our onward flight, but we might as well not have booked one. All she said was, “Enjoy your stay”!

I wish I could speak as highly of Scoot, the discount Singapore airline we’d flown to Australia. Do not be tempted by the lower fares. Not that there was anything cheap about the plane itself, except that if you touched the armrest with your elbow, the overhead light went on. We paid to check our bags and for a meal, but we were lucky to get the former. Nothing, not even water, was included on this flight, and heaven help you if you didn’t bring your own entertainment. Anyway, by the time we got to T’s sister’s place, nothing could have been more welcome than family, and little luxuries like fresh salad.

Continent #4 is a change of pace for us. While we’re exploring some places that we’ve never been before, it’s mainly about visiting family and friends. Australia means not only developed-world prices, but fish and chips (you can get this in Asian countries, but we never did). The British influence here also means familiar bread, Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes, and Coronation Street. We lapped up everything.

Of course, you don’t have to be in Australia long to remember that Britain is very far away. One morning, we got up early to take a walk down by the Yarra River. We shared the first part with a number of Eastern Grey kangaroos.

There’s also the fact that it is summer here. Which means swimming, and desperately needing shorter hair. I’m not sure the Australian hairdresser did any better on mine than the barber in Hanoi, but at least it cost many times more!

Did I mention T’s sister and brother-in-law spoiled us? A pool, watching American football and even basketball on TV, a guest room that made me feel I was floating away on a feathery cloud. We may have been far away from family at the holidays, but they certainly made up for it in the New Year.

We were close enough to Melbourne to get in via public transit, but far enough out to feel like we were in a small town. The first day we stopped by a local information center, and the woman there offered us information on more walks than we could possibly do during our stay. She also advised us on how to buy the elusive transit card (like some other public transit systems nowadays, Melbourne’s no longer takes cash). As we walked down the road to where we thought we could buy one, here came this woman’s car, and she jumped out to tell us actually we could buy it on the bus, and then gave us a ride to the bus stop! As it happened, the buses we tried did not have any cards for sale. But that was okay because the bus drivers were happy to give us a ride anyway!

By the time a workman by the side of the road actually doffed his hat to us and said, “G’day to you fine ladies,” I thought I was on a TV show myself.

Since we were visiting during the Australian Open, it made sense to go into Melbourne itself and spend a day at the tennis.

Not the one you're thinking of

The day before, the weather was so hot I don’t know how players could be expected to stay on court. We, however, spent it in a neighborhood of west Melbourne where T. had found a better value-for-money hotel than could be found in the Central Business District. The Plough Hotel has been there for many years, and its surrounding neighborhood, Footscray, turned out to be a fascinating place to stay.

Wish I'd gone to Tina's.

Walking by the Footscray Market, we felt like we were back in Vietnam. Waves of immigrants from Italy, Southeast Asia, and Ethiopia have made this neighborhood home, and it’s reflected in the variety of restaurants. You can just tell that these are family places that have been there for decades—it’s not a place that dresses up for tourists.

 From Footscray it’s easy to get into the C.B.D., where we met up with a friend I knew in London. Being a Melbourne resident herself now, she showed us a succession of cool places, including one of those elusive rooftop bars. In Melbourne, you only have to go a couple stories up to have a view.

Because of the sad phenomenon of terrorists driving vehicles into people, many cities have implemented new security measures. Melbourne is no different--there are now big blocks along Federation Square to prevent this from happening. Artists have put their own interpretation on the blocks, only to find that the city has rented them--might not get its deposit back!

A common sentiment

The next day, when we went to the Australian Open, was fortunately much more moderate in temperature. We didn’t see any famous stars, except a “Legends” match between John and Patrick McEnroe and two Swedes, Tomas Johansson and Mats Wilander. 

John McEnroe serves

But we saw some women’s and mixed doubles matches, including an upset by some young Australians and a winning team that included a Canadian, Gabriela Dabrowski. It was fun to see the Aussies, Sanders and Polmans, win. Not only because the crowd was into it but because afterwards, they just came out carrying their rackets, and were happy to pose for pictures with some local kids. They were little older than kids themselves, clearly just happy to be playing tennis.

On Sunday morning we checked out of our hotel, diagonally opposite the Footscray Community Uniting Church. The service had just started as we came in. It wasn't a big congregation, but it was very diverse.

The minister is a woman with the wonderful name of the Reverend Lavingi Fine Tupou. She said in her sermon that she was originally from Tonga and that back home, she used to think the Methodists were the only church, so she wouldn’t open her door when Mormon missionaries or others came calling. But, she said, she had learned to open the door, because if she listened to what they had to say, she could then share what she believed. It seemed like a lesson we could apply in many situations.

Rev. Lavingi concluded her sermon with a tribute to a member of the congregation called John, who had just died. Her voice broke as she spoke of how John was always taking care of the church building, how the church would never be the same without him. By the time she finished, both of us were choked up too. “I didn’t even know John!” T. protested.

The Footscray church, with its telltale flame of the Methodists, has services in four different languages during the week. At the coffee hour (to which we were warmly invited by a woman who said “No one visits Footscray!”) we spoke to several people who had immigrated to Australia at different times. One was a woman who moved here from Sicily 56 years ago. Another was originally from Singapore and, though in her seventies now, had recently discovered through Facebook that she had family in Canada. So she’d just gotten back from a three-week trip to see them in Toronto, as well as Ottawa, Montréal, and a frozen Niagara Falls!

The woman who had invited us to stay also mentioned that down the street, the neighborhood was celebrating the lunar new year. So we had to stop by and check out the foods of various Asian countries, just for old time’s sake. There was also a sober reminder that some immigrants had been on the losing side of the war in Vietnam.

Given the summer weather, we were happy to have a day at the beach with family. Anglesea is some way along the Great Ocean Road, and as lovely as it sounds. We even got to borrow body boards. Though we didn’t get spectacular rides on them, at least we weren’t hammered into the sand, like the last time we tried body boarding.

Our last day in Melbourne was 26 January—Australia Day. Having listened to talk radio during the week, we couldn’t fail to notice that this holiday isn’t popular with everyone. The main sticking point seems to be the date, which was originally the day in 1788 that the first fleet of British ships arrived in New South Wales. Since the indigenous people of Australia were, at best, totally ignored from that time, many Australians today (Aboriginal and not) regard 26 January as “Invasion Day.”

Others, including some Aboriginal leaders, feel that although the date has that history, today Australia Day is about all Australians celebrating what is great about the country. This is not a controversy that can be neatly settled. So when our family invited us to their Australian citizenship ceremony on that day, I appreciated the fact that the local council didn’t try to gloss over the different points of view. There was more than one Aboriginal speaker, and they didn’t see eye to eye. There was a didgeridoo performance by Uncle Gnarrayarrahe while the official flags of Australia were raised—both of them.

The Australian and Aboriginal flags

 There was a veteran of Afghanistan who wheeled up and talked about “the spirit of Anzac,” originally named for the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps.

War memorial. Australians fought in both World Wars as well as Malaya, Korea, and Vietnam.

And, most moving from our point of view, there was the part where immigrants to Australia became full citizens of their new country.

I’ve been to these ceremonies in a few countries now, and they make a deep impression. In these days when “immigration” seems to be spoken of only as a problem, it’s moving to remember how big a deal it is for someone, even a privileged First Worlder like me, to jump through all the hoops of moving to another country legally. To get that far, and to identify with the new land strongly enough to become a citizen, is a huge commitment. I could see that it meant a lot to our newly Australian relatives.

The only weird moment was when a couple of girls got up and sang John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Not that they didn’t do a good job, but “Imagine there’s no country…” struck us as a strange choice for a citizenship ceremony! At least we moved on to the national anthem, followed by a song called “I Am Australian.” We all had little Australian flags to wave while singing. The Wurundjeri Elder was waving one, too. 

Back at the house, we enjoyed a barbecue (naturally), along with a very fine Australian wine out of Waterford crystal glasses. Given the value of the glasses and my penchant for spilling red wine, I drank with much trepidation. We talked about identifying with the country we were born in, or were naturalized in, or where our parents or grandparents were born. Maybe all three.