My First Impressions of Australia

First, it is a long way from Canada. The flight from Vancouver to Sydney takes 15 hours or about. At the same time, the hours work fairly well – definitely better than when flying to Europe. The flight to Sydney takes off late at night Vancouver time (which is even later Toronto time), so it is not difficult to fall asleep after the meal. The flight is long enough that you have plenty of time to sleep; that is quite different from flights to Europe, where you only get a few hours of sleep and then it is already time to get up as the crew starts getting ready for landing. When we landed in Sydney, it was late morning. By the time I got to my hotel and had a bit of food, it was already late afternoon. I was able to fall asleep until the next morning. After that, I was feeling the sting of jet lag during the afternoon for a few days (since afternoon there is middle of the night Toronto time) and then I was back to normal.

 It was fascinating to see people’s reactions when I say that I am in Australia – just about everyone I told about my trip immediately asked about the fires. When it comes to that, things are more or less the way I expected them to be, at least in the cities I have visited (Sydney, Perth and Brisbane). In essence, this is like the major fires we had in British Columbia during the 2018 summer. This means three things:

• Fires rage in the remote areas, not in the big cities. The only impact I felt in Sydney was the odour of smoke that is in the air. The smoke was not as bad as it was in Calgary or Edmonton in August 2018. The difference is that Australian buildings are not nearly as well insulated as Canadian buildings, so the odour was both outside and inside, whereas I did not smell it inside when I was in Calgary or Edmonton.
• It is a really big country. Not as big as Canada, but still very big. It takes four hours to fly from Sydney to Perth. When I was in Perth, the fires had absolutely no impact whatsoever. It is like being in Toronto when there are fires in BC. While the fires have devastated an area that is larger than Portugal, I think it is only a few percent of the total country area. In Brisbane, there was quite a bit of rain in the past few days, so the fires in that state are completely extinguished and there was even flooding in some areas!
• Media focus on the worst-hit areas. This is completely normal – this is what viewers want to see. As a result, people get the impression that the whole country is burning. I learned the difference between the impression that media create and what actually happens on the ground during the 1989 earthquake in San Francisco. This is when the Marina district was on fire and part of the bridge over the Bay collapsed (and one guy drove into the gap). My late wife Diane was in the Bay Area at the time. TV reports kept showing the two images (fires and of collapsed bridge) over and over again; from afar, people thought that the entire Bay area had been wiped out. In practise, only a few areas were impacted. But the emotional impact was so strong that Diane drove down to LA and stayed with me for a few days until the whole thing was out of the media's eyes and people's stress level came back down to normal (everyone was expecting the Big One to hit, since there were so many strong aftershocks). I always thought it was quite ironic that Diane drove to LA to get away from earthquakes!

 Australia is really far from everything – far from Europe and from North America and much closer to East Asia than anything else. That weighs heavily into their psyche and their economy. From a psyche perspective, the British / White Australia policy is no longer in place, but it is still there in people’s minds. Australians are not shy about expressing their opinion; when I ask people what the average Australian thinks of immigration, they don’t hesitate to talk about how Chinese people buy all the luxury goods and many high-end properties, drive up the price of real estate in general, buy resource areas (mines, oil fields or farms) and send everything they produce in these facilities to China, bring down the quality of university education, etc.

 According to national statistics, the percentage of immigrants is higher in Australia than in Canada (29% versus 24% in round numbers). It does not feel like it when you walk in the streets and there is a good reason for it. The majority of their immigrants are white and speak English as a first language. They come from the UK, New Zealand and South Africa. China and India also contribute significantly to their immigration, but more recently and not in as large numbers as in Canada. Whereas the majority of immigrants to Canada in the 1980’s were from Asia, the UK was still the number one source of immigrants for Australia until 2003 or so.

 You can see the difference in the hair colour. There is a higher percentage of white folks who have light hair colours (blond or red) than in Canada. Clearly, most of their white immigrants came from Northern Europe and did not mix with others (since dark hair is a dominant feature). There are far fewer of these French or Latin folks here!

 Clearly, they fear being invaded by Chinese people. The fascinating part is that their economy is quite dependent on East Asia. First, they have massive numbers of foreign students – teaching English and other subjects to foreign students is a major industry in Australia. Somebody told me it is their second industry, behind mining but ahead of tourism. They have 700,000 foreign students on a population of 28 millions! Far more proportionately than Canada, I believe – I will have to check out the numbers. At the same time, foreign students need to prove that they will leave at the end of their studies in order to be allowed to study in Australia. Adding to the confusion (at least in my mind), is the fact that the Australian government encourages skilled immigration… I think people are really torn when it comes to immigration here. They want it without wanting it – I guess they want immigrants who are just like them!

Besides education, most of their economy is geared towards exports to East Asia. Australia has been doing well economically for the past 30+ years – ever since China starting developing to the point where it became a major player in the raw material industry. Australia has been doing really well because they could export coal, iron and a whole pile of other raw materials to China… So I think their relationship with China is ambiguous to say the least. I wonder what would happen if they had something like the Meng Wan Zhou incident – would they release her quietly in order to avoid antagonizing Beijing? Yet they are quite close to Taiwan…

While I expected Sydney to be a large metropolitan city, I was surprised by Perth and Brisbane – I did not expect them to be nearly as large as they are. Perth is even more isolated than the rest of Australia, which says quite a bit. It is four hours away by plane from the rest of the population of Australia. Bali is closer than Sydney or Melbourne. Economically, Perth is like a really warm Calgary – oil & gas and mining are their big industries, so they have booms and busts just like Calgary. Perth made me think of what Los Angeles must have looked like in the 1950’s and 1960’s (before the smog and before major migration to the city). Blue sky, palm trees, lots of parks, people exercising everywhere…

Sydney has a beautiful location – it made me think of a warm Vancouver without the mountains and with palm trees. I stayed near Chinatown in Sydney, so it felt like downtown Vancouver – lots of East Asian folks! Lots of Chinese restaurants as well, whereas I have seen very few in Perth and Brisbane so far. Brisbane is quite humid; while the climate is warm year-round, I am not sure I would enjoy it.

Being in the southern hemisphere in a country where people drive on the other side is somewhat confusing. I did not dare driving and I think I made the right decision. I had close calls with bicycles on several occasions, since I tend to walk on the wrong side of the path by their standards. I cross only when it is green for pedestrians since I find it hard to anticipate where cars come from. In eastern Australia, like on any east coast, the sun is in the "wrong" place in the sky for me. It rises over the ocean and sets over land. In western France, it rises over land and sets over the ocean. So Perth felt right from this perspective.

The other thing about being in the southern hemisphere (besides the fact that Christmas is the hottest time of the year), is that the sun moves in the “wrong” direction. I know, it still rises in the east and sets in the west. But east and west are not where you would expect them. In the northern hemisphere, the sun is south; when you face the sun, east is on your left and west is on your right, so the sun moves from left to right and shadows from right to left. Here, it is the reverse. The sun is north; when you face the sun, east is on your right and west is on your left, so the sun moves from right to left and shadows from left to right. I find it quite confusing – I can’t figure out in which direction shadows will move over time.

Another thing that strikes me is how ornate the old buildings are in the Central Business District (CBD – downtown area). They have passed a law that requires anyone who wants to build there to keep the old fa?ade; they can build whatever they want behind that fa?ade. So you see old facades with tall, modern buildings behind. The thing is, these old facades are full of sculptures and what I would describe as “architectural frills” – things that are clearly not needed from a structural perspective. It looks to me that Australia was significantly richer than Canada in the first half of the 20th century, or that Australians were willing to spend more on their buildings than Canadians were. I don’t recall old buildings in Canada being anything other than the equivalent of a box or about. Maybe I have selective memory, since the Royal York hotel or the Old City Hall are far from architectural boxes… but the old Bay building downtown Toronto does look like a box to me… I will have to look at this one in more detail when I come back.