Covering Canberra
Technically, I've been gone a week. After leaving the U.S. last Friday we arrived in Sydney on Sunday, thereby missing an entire day due to the International Date Line. It is winter in Australia, which means my long summer days have been dramatically reduced. By the time I'm in Canberra (ironically further south), the mornings began with frost and I could see my breath in the air. Only last week I was sweating in Palm Spring's desert air in excess of 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
Australia for me is all about the details. If I was kidnapped from home and my departure was concealed, I would hardly believe I had moved upon arrival because so much looks the same. My clues? The infectious Aussie accents that I am trying not to emulate in my speech. Cars driven on the left with the driver's seat on the right. An ordinary train ride with kangaroos bounding through the countrywide vista.
A croque monsieur is a "ham and cheese toastie." Breakfast is "bray-kee." I inquired after pigeons and finally saw one. Then I became fascinated by the magpies and cockatoos. And despite the season, most of the trees and landscapes were remarkably green.
This week, I attended the annual conference of the Australian Historical Association at the Australian National University in the capital city of Canberra. The ANU students were on holiday for a week so that we (and three other conferences) could descend upon the campus and share books, papers and knowledge. I also took time out to see the federal capital building, the national museum, and experience the modernity of this relatively young city (much of it built in the last sixty years).
During most vacations, I learn a location's history from tour guides while viewing significant points of interest. At the conference I heard about Australia's past from historians--people responsible for teaching the country's past to current and future generations. Most had pored over archival records, collected oral histories, and read volumes of books to re-create stories and events from long ago.
Perhaps more intensely than ordinary people, these storytellers were personally invested in the past. One presenter had gathered numerical data on the convict and slave trade of the British Empire and mapped out the routes traveled around the world by ships transporting men and women who lost their freedom. A series of papers presented the year 1968 from an American perspective followed by a global view and finally through a story of events in Adelaide that eventually expanded electoral representation throughout Australia.
Hundreds of papers were presented during the week and I heard only a small portion of them. Through papers on race, I learned about the conscious efforts of some Australians to apologize for the past treatment of indigenous people, and the nation's identity as one born of convicts, as well as Australia's overt racism at its founding.
My paper titled, "Hostility, Heroism and Hope: How to Have History in an Epidemic," and co-written by Oberlin history professor Clayton Koppes, was presented at the end of the week thus giving me an opportunity to gauge what to expect from my audience. Our segment included a presentation by University of Adelaide professor Paul Sendziuk author of "Learning to Trust: Australian Responses to AIDS." I learned that Australia, unlike the U.S., was probably more humanistic and pragmatic regarding HIV/AIDS because they studied what Americans were not doing and decided to do it (e.g., condom distribution and needle exchanges). The Aussies are still learning though, as evidenced by this week's announcement that their universal health system will include Truvada as PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) in its formulary thereby dramatically reducing the cost of the drug for most citizens.
All of my knowledge about Australia in the upcoming week will be a result of sightseeing, not lectures. I am awed by the impression America has made in Australia. I had to reckon with my horror and dismay that Australia's founding fathers looked at America's constitution as too liberal regarding birth citizenship and declined to define citizenship in order to exclude people of color. I was disturbed to overhear an Aussie say, "All the way with LBJ," not because it was a catch phrase to say he was all-in with a companion's plan, but because the phrase is a lingering memento of America's responsibility for the death of hundreds of Aussie soldiers in Vietnam.
The people I have met in Australia have been marvelous, especially my hosts in Canberra. With so much turmoil in the news, I appreciated the hospitality and warm-hearted welcome I received here. My next destinations include a few more days in Sydney, then on to Queensland and the Great Barrier Reef followed by a visit to Tasmania.
Jax Kelly, Mr. Palm Springs Leather 2018