Meet (the Real) Australia

Crimes that could send you to Australia

Australia is a land of impressions. These impressions usually involve crocodiles, kangaroos, cool accents, and Finding Nemo.

It is generally decided that Australia is an agreeable country and fairly innocuous—minus all of the dangerous animals it claims. There are few who despise it (it is really much too far away from everything to cause much trouble) and even fewer who really take the time to get to know it (except for the occasional fascination with its cult classics like Crocodile Dundee and The Man from Snowy River). If we’re like most people we tend to think of Australia as a quiet little nook on the other side of the world that we’d all like to visit someday, but probably won’t.

This is how the hilarious travel writer Bill Bryson describes the country:

“Australia doesn’t misbehave. It is stable and peaceful and good. It doesn’t have coups, recklessly overfish, arm disagreeable despots, grow coca in provocative quantities, or throw its weight around in a brash and unseemly manner.”

In short, Australia doesn’t do much.

In reality, however, Australia is quite a brilliant country. Here are some fascinating factoids about this famously sunburnt nation.

Christmas in Oz

Sydney Harbor (the view from my deck)

You know you’re in Australia when it’s December 17^th and you’re wearing your bathing suit and eating squishy mangoes. I must admit, it doesn’t feel much like Christmas here on the other side of the world.

I arrived into Sydney on Monday (after a delightful week of chasing cows in Wellington), and immediately ripped off my sweater, wishing I was wearing shorts instead of jeans. Crossing the Pacific Ocean from New Zealand to Australia is like crossing into another season. Although it’s summer in New Zealand as well, it’s the jacket and trousers kind of summer. Not so in the Land of Oz (aka Australia). (Side note: I’m not really sure why they call it Oz. There aren’t yellow brick roads or anything).

So while everyone in the States is probably baking Christmas cookies and dusting off those first layers of snow from the windshields, I’m here lathering up the sunscreen and wishing I brought more tank tops.

Chasing Cows and Hatching Chooks

Zoe and a "chook"

This morning I woke up thinking I would be going to a prison to do interviews. I found myself instead chasing cows through a New Zealand paddock.

Since Tuesday I’ve been staying with the Taylors, a lovely family who live on a farm outside of Wellington. The couple (Graeme and Mary) used to work for Prison Fellowship in New Zealand, so we have many mutual friends, and they graciously offered me a bed for a few days. After a week of tramping, whale-watching, and glacier walking, I was ready to take off my tourist hat and taste a bit of local flavor. I don’t think it gets more local than what happened to me today.

I was driving back from town with Graeme today (I was sitting on the passenger side, the left side, of course). As we approached the turn-off for the Taylors’ rural road, I saw five large blobs of black and white blocking the entrance.

“Oh, hello?” Graeme said quietly (but I could tell something was wrong). It was “the boys” (the Taylors’ five Hereford cows), who had apparently escaped from their paddock and were making good progress toward a dangerous intersection. “Gramps,” Mary’s father, had arrived on the scene just minutes before us, and was doing the best a 91-year-old man could do at rallying a small herd. Graeme whisked his white pickup alongside the escaping fivesome, threw on his gum boots, and began chasing the cows back down the road.

"The Boys"

He soon realized that he couldn’t do it alone, so he instructed Gramps to drive ahead and close off the neighbors’ gates, while he drove the truck behind the cows with the intent of encouraging them to move in the right direction. Feeling a bit out of my league, I offered to chase behind them on foot. Graeme thought that would be lovely. So, out I jumped, into the wet field with my nice blue jeans and new shoes. I wasn’t quite sure what was involved in moving five breathing objects, all four times my size, but I figured yelling and clapping would do the trick. So off I went, running through wet grass up to my waist, clapping away.

Surprisingly, the big boys took the hint and began galloping (as much as two-ton mammals can gallop) down the road. After several detours (at one point, two took off up a side road), quite a few laughs, and one soggy pair of jeans later, Graeme, Gramps, and I had herded “the boys” safely into a new paddock (one broken fence showed us how they had escaped from the first one).

But the rural excitement was only beginning. This time in the hen house.

Tramping through New Zealand

There are few things more quintessentially “Kiwi” than “tramping.”  And it has nothing to do with selling oneself on a street corner or sleeping in a cardboard box. Rather, it has everything to do with strapping a bulky pack to one’s back and spending the next few days becoming incrementally dirtier.

Last Tuesday, Shannon (my traveling buddy) and I ventured into the world of New Zealand tramping—essentially backpacking, but sleeping in communal huts instead of tents—in what could be considered the most mouthwatering vista in the known universe (aka Fiordland National Park in New Zealand’s South Island).

Not a half hour into our “tramp,” I discovered that it is one thing to climb up a mountain; quite another to climb up a mountain with a 20-pound pack on your back. It wasn’t so much the weight, as the inertia. Lean forward, and you’re bound to lean forward all the way off a cliff. Lean backward, and you’ll land your rear side on that perfectly placed rock with a thousand sharp angles.

I also found out my pack liked to play this little trick of hiding the very thing I was looking for—whether it was a granola bar, my sunglasses, or some toilet paper. I eventually found them nestled among the bulging curvers, but not until I had emptied all of my belongings across the track, winning myself the title of the most inexperienced backpacker (or should I say “tramper” on the trail).

But this was nothing compared to the enemy I encountered that evening. After downing a bowl of soup with fellow sojourners at the Routeburn Falls Hut (a shelter with bunks, and a kitchen with stoves and running water), I was excited to nestle into my dry bunk for what I hoped would be a good night’s sleep. Not a second after I had crawled into my sleeping bag, I heard him.

Away I Go!

Photo courtesy of Tourism Australia

In a small manilla envelope, I have two dark blue booklets. Under the front cover of one reads: citizen of the United States. In the second, similar words: an Australian citizen. The slight discrepancy in those titles makes all the difference.

Despite the glamorous connection I feel with Jason Bourne, the owning of two passports means that I belong to two nations. But sometimes I feel neither of them belong to me.

I have never felt comfortable answering the question, Where are you from? In Washington, DC, everyone asks everyone where they are from, because no one is actually from DC. Everyone is from somewhere else. It’s a simple question. It should elicit a simple response. But I stumble. Well, my family lives in Indiana, but I grew up all over the Midwest, and before that I lived in Australia. I was born there, actually.

But where am I from, really?

I don’t know.

Thirty Minutes with Tony Dungy

With Tony after the Catalyst Conference in October

A smile that spreads across his freckled face at the mention of his kids speaks more of Tony Dungy’s greatness than the trophy he gripped in his hand after becoming the first African American coach to lead a team to Super Bowl victory.

The quiet football giant slides into the back of the pickup, his lanky frame filling up the backseat where clothes and sports paraphernalia are strewn. “This reminds me of my truck,” he comments sonorously, fastening his seatbelt for the 25-minute drive to the Atlanta airport.

(Read full story here at Inside Out)

I’m a Swine Flu Survivor

Last Monday morning I rolled over and I just knew! It felt like my body had been sent through a toaster oven and a washing machine, and come out a churned-up mess on the other side.

Whether it was the swine flu, or just the regular strain, the doctor couldn’t tell me, but as far as I was concerned I had just joined the ranks of victims of the most popular pandemic of the day. And I was almost pleased about it.

There’s something so unabashedly glamorous about contracting a fearsome disease, especially when you get to be by yourself and call it something dramatic like quarantine. You gain a heightened sense of importance as people cower away in the distance at the very sound of your cough. And when every feeble attempt at anything productive is met with a concerned look and a Don’t worry about that—you’re sick, convalescence grows all the more appealing.

Between popping pills and crawling to the bathroom, I must admit that my sense of the cosmic grew. I wanted to be part of something larger than myself—something that would make me feel special—something that would make me feel like a survivor. I wanted to shout from the rooftops, Look at me! I have the swine flu! Don’t you want to be sick and cool like me?

In all unromantic reality, I was boringly sick, and I hated it. Despite all the media hype, this year’s scare craze seems little more than a gross fascination with something as dull as getting the flu.

(First published on The Point)

Grace Under Pressure

(Courtesy of Carol Kent)

At 12:35 a.m. on October 24, 1999, the phone rang.

That phone call thrust Carol Kent into a waking nightmare. Her son, 25-year-old Jason, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and a strong Christian, had been charged with the murder of his wife’s ex-husband.

But even as Carol and her husband, Gene, reeled with the devastating news, a story of hope and redemption began emerging alongside the despair.

(Read full story here)

Patchwork Sisterhood

Photo courtesy of Katherine Brandt

Five blocks from the National Zoo, a banner outside a brick storefront on Mt. Pleasant Street announces the grand opening of Amani Ya Juu’s first U.S. boutique. Amani, an organization started in 1996 to offer hope and trade skills to struggling women in East Africa, since its summer opening has added an artsy, fair-trade feel to the tony establishments in northwest Washington.

(Read full story here at World Magazine)

Serenading the Beast

Photo by Lizzie Coombes, courtesy of Music in Prisons

Since the 1920s, when wardens whipped out band tunes to quell skirmishes in chow halls, music has played its way through barbed wire fences and into many a lonely prison cell. It found its way to the fingers of Jewish women in an orchestra at Auschwitz who were forced to serenade Nazi commandants, as well as other prisoners in work gangs. It crooned its way to Folsom State Prison through Johnny Cash’s gravelly blues. And today classical strains waft across jail yards in India, while Venezuelan convicts learn how to play Beethoven, and Maine prisoners pick away at guitars to Bob Dylan’s “Knocking on Heaven’s Door.”

(Read full story here at Prison Fellowship)