Feeling Sheepish

I miss sheep. Not in the Kiwi kind of way*, of course, but where I am there is a serious dearth of the ovine.

Australia is known for riding on the sheep's back (again, not in the Kiwi kind of way*), and that's reflected in so many ways. I lived in Melbourne's Western Suburbs for so much of my life, and even there in such an industrial environment you could find paddocks with small flocks of sheep in them. When I moved to Hoppers Crossing it used to amuse the heck out of me that the big police station was surrounded by sheep.

The Husband grew to love sheep (note: not a Kiwi**) as well, and was just as joyful as me to see those woolly specs in the pastures, especially when we spotted a black faced sheepie in the herd. I've had a special affection for the black faced sheepies since I was a kid reading the Enid Blyton farm books. They're so cute!

Historically wool was regarded as the saviour of the Australian economy, and the man who introduced the merino sheep to the fledgeling colony eventually became one of Australia's richest men. John MacArthur realised that rearing sheep for wool was more economically sound than simply raising them for their meat. Wool didn't spoil on the long journey back to Europe, so he had a product that could be sold back to the homelands for a profit.

We loved him for his sheep so much that we put him (and a sheep!) on one of our bills.

We'll just forget about the part where the two dollar bill has been replaced with a coin sans sheep and move on, shall we?

Sheep are awesome, and I simply haven't seen any since I've been here. I know that somewhere in Canada there has to be herds of them, for their wool if nothing else, but I find that I'm missing them. Driving around here I see cows and horses - there's even a farm near here that has herds of bison and deer on it - but I miss seeing the silly, jumpy, woolly forms of sheep.

Vegetarians may want to leave this post there.

I've written before of pigs and the proliferation of pig product here in North America, and walking into a supermarket's meat section reflects that. Row after row of pork and bacon product extend across the walls; more if you also count the sausage shelves. Beef takes up another good third of the space, with chicken and poultry taking up another cooler. If you look really hard, you'll find one set of shelves set aside for lamb and veal, with veal the majority of what is actually there for sale.***

In Australia it's a bit different. You'll find a couple of supermarket cooler banks set aside for lamb, and you can get more than just the typical cuts of leg of lamb and lamb chops that I've found here so far. Lamb stir fry, lamb sausages, lamb rissoles, lamb steak, lamb shanks, lamb schnitzel, lamb burgers, stuffed lamb roasts - pretty much anything you can think of by way of cuts of meat and you'll find it in lamb.

Lamb and mutton have the reputation of being fatty and chewy, but when it's prepared right, they're not. It's flavourful and juicy, and can be so very tender. Mutton isn't easy to come by back home, but I remember mum buying two-tooth on occasion and the flavour was so rich that I came to prefer it to lamb. Well, that and I liked the idea of the animal living longer than just the few months lambs were permitted to live.

I miss sheep. To look at and to eat, but especially to look at. Though I could really go for a curry... I guess I'll just keep on dreaming.

Image from icanhascheezburger

* I'm dead to the New Zealanders, aren't I? But I'm an Aussie, I need to have a go!
** Ok, I'm really flogging this joke to death now, eh?
*** And what's for sale is New Zealand lamb. I guess it has to go somewhere after they've "tenderised" it.

I should note that Australians tell naughty jokes about New Zealanders - Kiwis - being sheep molesters.  This does not mean I actually believe they are into bestiality. I am just amused by the jokes.

Little Boxes

I'm not an architect, so I apologise now if I get the terms wrong or mess things up.

When I first came over for my visit in May, I was amazed at how different houses were than back home. Apart from the notion that overall they were bigger to my foreign, working class eyes, there were visual differences in overall architecture that made me boggle.

Aussies, those quaint houses you see in films and on television actually do exist. You know the ones, the high gabled, precipitously pointy rooved chalet styled houses you see in The Goonies and other New England/Canadian productions. You can see the same style up in the Dandenongs, around Olinda, but apart from the mountainous regions, you won't see this kind of building much at all.

They're everywhere here, and they almost did my head in when I first visited. Canada and Australia are very similar in a lot of ways, but seeing those buildings showed me more than anything else - even driving on the wrong side of the road - that I was Somewhere Else. That I wasn't in Melbourne anymore.

Tangent Time!

When I was in my teens, one of my most beloved teachers introduced me to fantasy novels. Amongst those was the Dragonriders of Pern series by Anne McCaffrey. In those novels there is a marked difference in the climates of the two continents; the North being colder and mountainous, while Southern was more tropical and flat, being covered with jungle.

Through the course of these novels, the Masterharper, Robinton, nearly dies, and so it's decided that he will retire to Southern. The Smithcrafters design a house for him that will make the most of the breezes that come in the afternoon. They include wide verandahs around the outside of the place and make sure the ceilings aren't too high to trap the heat in.

I always read the passage describing Cove Hold and saw the architecture reflected all around me. Australian houses often include verandahs, particularly in our cultural consciousness as featured in our "true blue dinki di" ads. They wouldn't show up in commercials if they didn't stir some recognition in us. If we don't have a verandah, we often have a widened eave - the roof doesn't directly meet the top of the wall.

Have a look at my old house as an example.

You can't see it here, but the house was also quite open plan, allowing breezes to flow through the place. Evaporative coolers (known as swamp coolers, at least in certain parts of the US) worked well here except on the most humid and hot of days owing to this airflow potential.

The house pictured above was a relatively new place - I only had it built ten years ago. Before that I lived in a 1950s house that didn't look too much different to the place above. It was weatherboard, not brick, wasn't open plan and originally had a porch and a trellised area, but in broad strokes it was similar to the above.

When I was first thinking about living here I didn't know if I could ever wrap my head around the alienness of what I was seeing around me. Could I live in a suburb that had such different overall looks around me? Or a town with such? This sense faded when I went out to stay in a riverside cottage, but I still remember that sense of being out of place.

It wasn't until I came back and things were getting colder that it all made sense. It all comes down to something we didn't get and Canada (not to mention mountains) gets in abundance - snow. Snow on a flat roof would sit and get heavier and heavier and heavier until the underlying surface gave way, making a hell of a mess beneath. I've already seen this in the prefabricated shopping malls (which do look like the ones back home) here. So I realised that the sharp angles were for the sliding of snow! I'm so clever.

Well, this footage may have helped.

footage from the Associated Press

It's a major urban clue indicating that you're not in Australia anymore, and is quite picturesque or jarring, dependant on one's state of mind when looking at them. It gives the place a European kind of feel, and makes this place almost magical after the flattness of Australia. I now live in a town dotted with little chalets, and how is that not amazing?

Right is Wrong, U-Turn

Further to my prior post, Right is Wrong, I have now driven on these icy roads. No one died. There was only mild panic; mostly from me. No blood stains, no odd dents in the sides of the car. I even backed up the driveway and didn't hit the garage door.

It's still all arse-backwards, but I did it. Yay!

Car Bin?

Every locale's population has their own ways of refering to itself, be they Sydneysiders, Novocastrians or Melbournians. Yet it should be fairly self evident how the city or place name itself should be pronounced, one would think. After all, in English at least, there is an agreed upon way to pronounce the given syllables in a word, accents and inflections aside. One would think that when given a particular word with a given, agreed upon way to pronounce the syllables within that word, there would be no deviations from that given way of pronouncing it, right?

It takes a whole heck of a lot to keep myself from snickering when I hear a local pronouncing the name of the capital of this province, Toronto. You see, I pronounce it "toe-RON-toe", but whenever I hear a Canadian pronounce it, I seem to hear it as this:

My dear Ontarians, this is the image I get in my head when you refer to "toe-RAH-nah". That's a Holden Torana, a car synonymous with the late 70s and what we like to call hoons. These cars are done up to the nines, lowered, given mag wheels and "hotted up", and are often clocked going waaaay too fast in residential areas.

I know it's my comprehension of Canadian tones that affect how I hear the word, but I still can't help but giggle when people refer to living in what I hear as "toe-RAH-nah". Even the newsreaders seem to pronounce it this way!

How many Canadians can fit in a Holden car? 5,555,912 according to the last census. Ba-DOOM tish!

Australians aren't like this, obviously. We don't have any kind of weirdness like that, right? We call a spade a spade and there's no confusion in how we pronounce our city names!

Drat, foiled again by my own hubris.

One of the things I always cringe at when I hear non-Australians talking about my home city is the way so many of them tend to elongate the second syllable, making it "mel-BOOOOORN". Some of them even manage to pronounce the "e" on the end of it. One of the things I liked about The Husband before we got together was that he assimilated to saying "mel-BIN" very quickly, despite how it's actually spelled.

Sorry Canadians, but I don't think I can pronounce "Toronto" the way you guys do. So I'll make you a deal - I'll not wince when you refer to Melbourne if you don't make fun of me and my foreign interpretation of Toronto, ok? I am not sure I can promise not to titter at "toe-RAH-nah" every time, though. I'm only human, after all.

Right is Wrong!

I don't know if I will ever get used to driving on the wrong side of the road. Heck, it's taken me a while now to get used to sitting on the wrong side of the car as a passenger, and in moments of tiredness or vulnerability I still go to step around to what you northerners consider the driver's side door.

"Oh, you want to drive?" comes the chirrup, and I go pale.

"No. No no no no no." is usually what I stammer, and beat a hasty retreat to the side of the car there really should be a steering wheel on.

I haven't dared actually try to drive yet. Everything about driving is backwards to me, save the pedal positions, I'm told. Even the wipers and indicators (we call 'em "blinkers" coz they, you know, blink) controls are on the opposite sides of the steering column, and I know I've experienced at least two periods where The Husband would be driving and the wipers would come on instead of the indicator signal - once when he was accustoming himself to driving in Australia and again when he was reacquainting himself with driving here.

I have a whole plethora of excuses I can rattle off in case anyone actually does ask me why I haven't driven yet. It's too icy, I've never driven a 4WD before, OMG snow, moose! However what it all boils down to is this:

We're going the wrong damned way!

I know this looks perfectly normal to someone from up here, but trust me, this is strange to those from my part of the world and is a scene that belongs on television or a film screen. We're familiar with the scene, but it's not quite right. Northerners, go watch Neighbours or Coronation Street (or any Australian, New Zealander or British television show) for the same sense of weird.

I know we don't wave swords at each other anymore, but it sounds more heroic to say that we left drivers do that because we predominantly right handed warriors needed to be able to get access to and use our weapons rather than the rather boring reason of "we used to ride on the back left horse of the dray team when hauling freight as it was easier to pass on that side".[1] Left side drivers are warriors, you righties are teamsters. Which seems more impressive?

I think what it all boils down to is that I'm terrified I'll be driving along and suddenly realise I've just gone past ones of these:

Pic from freefoto.com

I've heard of so many foreigners going up the off ramps in Australia. In fact, I believe I'm related by marriage to at least one of these. I don't want to reciprocate here. Yet worse, I know that sooner or later I'm going to have to deal with one of these:

Pic from freefoto.com

And I thought roundabouts were bad. *shudder*


[1] http://users.telenet.be/worldstandards/driving%20on%20the%20left.htm