downunder update

Australians have a great tradition of spinning yarns, of telling tall tales, and many of us work hard to keep that tradition alive.

The stories are, of course, all true. Most of them.

Perhaps it’s a tradition from the colonial days, this telling of tales, to talk around the campfire and exchange news of outback and the Old Country.

In my urban family we gathered round the laminex-topped table on Sundays and listened to the old people speak of the giant mosquitos in Marble Bar, the Stockade in the goldfields, traveling boxing shows, the Kaidacha Man and the Man from Snowy River and the frightening gibber plains that went on forever and ever to the Indian Ocean. And, of course, the Old Country.

It was the stories of the Old Country that my great grandparents had never even seen that ignited a passion for mythology and a love of this adopted land despite its bloody history.

We have our own culture now, and cultural references and our own, often bizarre, manifestations of it. The mythology concerning convicts, Ned Kelly, the outback, the shearer, the drover, the strike, and mateship belong to no other land but Australia.

Here in Down Under you’ll find plenty to chew over. And it’s not all kangaroo