By this point, it is literally impossible to give you fine details about everything that has transpired since my last email, which was, what, September? What I think I should like to do instead is give a brief overview of some of the highlights of the last 4 months, and then maybe simply go into depth about the new pictures that are up on my website, which you should have memorized by now as http://canzona.iwarp.com.

That’s http://canzona.iwarp.com.

In brief, I have gone bushwalking, finished school with two major concerts, got published in the local paper, had a massive birthday bash, fallen into a groove of some good weather days, visited some various sights near Melbourne, spent the holidays baffled at the way they do things here, and even managed to get a mild case of athlete’s foot. Don’t worry; I’ll go into fine detail about the athlete’s foot part. Plenty of up-close photos!

Further, I have actually gallivanted around Australia and New Zealand with my mom, but that can wait until a later installment of my travels, since the one I’ll be writing in late February is going to be pretty slim, as I have no intention of doing anything exciting. More accurately, I have no intention of doing anything. I do promise another letter in February, though. I can hear you groaning already. Can it.

In terms of Australiana, I have little new to report. I would like to claim that I could fake the Australian dialect pretty well by now, though it is exactly that: faking it. I haven’t tried it in front of my friends, mainly because I don’t know if I could handle the ridicule. But I’m willing to bet that my Australian is better than their American. Apparently we all sound like John Wayne to everyone else in the world. Speaking of that, I have caught myself actually saying “y’all” occasionally, and now it’s baffling me; did I always say it without realizing, or is it something I ‘picked up’ here, subconsciously flaunting my Americanness? And which of these two possibilities is less embarrassing, really? There are a few Australian speech quirks that I could point out, though, that are good for a laugh if nothing else. (I say this only because I get made fun of for my speech regularly.) In the States we have ‘aluminum’. In Australia (and all the British Commonwealth countries, apparently), it’s ‘aluminium’, pronounced ‘al-you-mini-um’. “So as to match the other elements pronunciation,” I am told. Uh huh. Also, they pronounce the words “talk” and “torque” exactly identical. Don’t ask about the conversation that had to transpire to discover this. Similarly, “shorts” and “shots”. You’d think that they just wander around all day misunderstanding each other. You’d be right.

Sport is a major part of life here. It’s simply a fact. If you want to have any chance of holding a conversation with an Aussie, male or female, it is important to know the current figures for your favorite team (one for each sport) as well as their names, the coach’s names, and, if possible, their pet’s names. This is potentially the reason they all hate me. (I’m joking of course… they’ve been quite patient with my inability to care for a particular team or sport.) I have been to a few events, however, that are worth pointing out, if only for the kitsch factor. (Is that how you spell ‘kitsch’?) I had already mentioned Aussie Rules Football (colloquially, “Footy”… see how bizarrely ambiguous they inadvertently make their speech?). Also a big part of Melbourne tradition is horseracing; everyone dresses up and heads down to the racetrack for an afternoon of endless gossip, getting drunk, and losing a few dollars betting on the horses. It’s an interesting event, that aside. There is only a race every 45 minutes or so, so it’s usually about 30 seconds of 120,000 people screaming for their pick, and then a very long time to do nothing else (except talk, drink, and gamble).

Another popular sport, which I have truthfully become somewhat interested in, is cricket. You know, English guys with the flat bat running back and forth randomly. I’ve been to a few games at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, and after much, much explaining by friends it actually is beginning to make a tic of sense. The real trick is ‘unlearning’ baseball, because if you understand that then there is no chance you’ll understand this sport. I’ll try to explain a little, for Corey & Corey’s sake, but if you don’t care feel free to cut to the next paragraph (or, better still, to the next email in your inbox.) Basically, there is a ‘bowler’, which is the pitcher, whose goal it is to knock the little wooden pegs (’wickets’, like the Ewok) off three vertical sticks behind the batter, using a ball roughly the size of a tennis ball. Unlike baseball, however, for some reason the ‘bowler’ gets a 30-foot running start. There are two sets of sticks on the field, about 50 feet from one another, and two batters, each ‘guarding’ a wicket. The batter is not necessarily trying to knock the ball out of the park, like baseball, but instead simply trying to get it far enough away from the wickets so the batters can run back and forth between the wickets for a point. If the bowler gets it past the batter and knocks the wickets off the sticks, then the batter has one ‘out’, like baseball. What makes for a bit of change, however, is that the batter has NO PENALTY for swinging at the ball… there are no strikes. Also, each batter gets TEN outs before the teams trade sides, which makes the games go on, and on, and on. So long, in fact, that they actually take a lunch, drink, and tea break during the length of any given game. It can take some batters so long to strike out that it is not uncommon for a team to ‘declare’ a turnover, i.e. they think they are so far ahead that they aren’t even worried about the other side catching up, and so they let the other team to bat, even though they themselves don’t yet have ten outs! Most regulation length matches (known as ‘test’ matches) last five days. And you have to by a new ticket every day. Australians are suckers! That all said, though, it actually is kinda fun, in the same way that baseball is fun, and hitting your head into a wall gets to be fun after a while.

You may have noticed that I have been doing nothing but bagging Australians up to this point in the email. This is Australian sense of humor (or ‘sense of humour’, maybe) rubbing off on me. It is certainly in the style of comedy here to make fun of as many people as you can as often as you can. You should hear some of the insults, coupled with profanity, my professors have subjected me to. Americans are their favorite subjects of ridicule, and they get such a kick out of hearing me sling it back at them. This is probably the reason I feel like I can get away with all the jerky things I’ve been writing about them here. I have also learned that it is uncouth to say “just kidding” afterward; they already know you’re joking. This is something I can truly appreciate; when it comes down to it they are almost impossible to offend. It’s when my friends and I are going back and forth with a stream of insults that they forget I have an accent. The few times I have emulated their dialect for the sake of a joke they have liked that too. Like a dancing bear, when I meet someone in a particular circle of friends for the first time they prompt me to say something about swimming at the “Grait Barriah Rife”. I usually add a “Crickey!” for good measure. No one actually says “Crickey!” No one. As Crocodile Hunter is easily the country’s biggest export (after that, sheep), they love to poke fun at him whenever they get a chance.

This brings up an interesting factoid that I have had several conversations about, with several people. They have a condition here, in Australia, which they have entitled “Tall Poppy Syndrome”, which basically means that the average Australian holds a grudge to anyone who is more successful than he/she. I personally have not seen this occur, but, to my friends, it explains the moderate anti-American sentiment that was here even before George W. It also explains why they hate Steve Erwin (Croc Hunter.) I find it interesting, considering how laid-back and unoffendable a people they are. I could go into some other examples and stories, but they aren’t really worth the trouble.

So anyway, back at the end of September I had the chance to head about 4 hours southeast of Melbourne to the very bottom of the Australian continent and do some serious hiking in the national park located there. There were 6 of us, and we spent 4 days hiking a little over 120 km with everything we needed on our backs. I made the mistake of buying a pair of used army boots from an op shop as my hiking boots, and from the first day my feet were in so much pain I considered hiking barefoot (which would probably have been even less a good idea.) It is a truly beautiful place, and every turn lead to another spectacular view. The last day was one long uphill climb (come to think of it every day seemed like an uphill climb), but getting back to the carpark gave such a fantastic feeling of accomplishment. Or maybe it was the thought that I would get to eat hot food again, and drink something other than powdered milk. [see some photos]
I haven’t really talked about school much in this letter, and that’s mostly because I haven’t been in school since the beginning of November. School went off pretty well. In mid September there was a gamelan concert that I had the pleasure of performing in [see the photo], the only problem was afterward the class was over, and we didn’t play gamelan again! However, for I tried to wrangle up some friends who I thought would be interested, and for the composer’s concert at the end of the school year I had a piece of mine performed with gamelan as well. [another photo]. It also required computer live-processing, so the final effect was pretty unique. I don’t know if I can put sound clips up on my website, but if I can figure out how to do it I’ll through one of the seven short movements up there for a listen if you really have too much time on your hands. I still have some ideas for about 30,000 other gamelan pieces, so I’m looking forward for school to start so I can get back to working with them. Lastly, about school, for my ethnomusicology course I was required to write a 13,000-word essay on “Tradition and Innovation in the Compositional Process of Sudanese Gamelan Music” (a topic of my choosing, if you can believe that!), which I ended up writing almost 15,500 words. 15,000 words, I find out later, is the maximum amount of words a Master’s Thesis from Monash can be. Oops. I ended up getting a 74, a ‘D’, which, while it sounds awful, apparently is pretty good. 80 is top marks, where the ‘D’ means a ‘Distinction’. It’s all terribly British.

But thankfully school did get out. A few weeks later I threw a birthday party, the first and only time many of my friends have come south of the city to see me. Check out the flyer on the website, as it gives a run down of the day. The days leading up to it were cool and very wet, however, the day itself was absolutely beautiful, without a cloud in the sky, and it hit 42 degrees (102 degrees F). And that was the start of a much better climate than I had been bitching about in the previous emails. It has yet to get as bloody hot as everyone was complaining to me about, but it’s pretty nice all the time. I take that back; what I mean is that it’s pretty nice at some point every day. My new rant about the weather, though, is that it changes so drastically, constantly, and without warning. Multiple times I have left my pad with a short-sleeve shirt because it’s sunny and nice out, and by the time I get to the train platform (350 m up the street) I am drenched with rain. Then the sun’ll come back out. The local Melbournians get a real kick out of this, and whenever I whine about it they all have the same response in two parts: First they tell me to always wear layers because it’s impossible to tell what the weather will be, and then they say Melbourne is unique in that it has “Four seasons in a day here.” While this very well may be true on both accounts, it doesn’t make me feel any better about going down to the beach when it’s sunny and then sitting under a pavilion when I get there because of the monsoon coming through. (We don’t actually get monsoons.) And while I’m whining, the public transportation still sucks.

One weekend was spent with some friends on a nearby tourist trap called Phillip Island, where we did everything we could to not be touristy. Another week, my friend Steve took me down to his hometown, a small fishing village called Portland. We drove along The Great Ocean Road, a fantastic section of road that winds its way along the south coast, not unlike those incredibly dangerous roads-on-the-sides-of-cliffs-overlooking-the-ocean you see in the movies. Every turn offers an incredible view out over the water (the Indian Ocean). At one point along the road there are colossal rocks standing out in the water, known as the 12 Apostles (there are 12 of them.) These are amazing to just sit and stare at, as they are truly huge. I could go into detail about how they were formed and all that, but you’d get the hint if you check out the photo on the webpage. Portland itself was a lovely little town. Except for one small casino every business works in one way or another with the fishing industry. Finding vegetarian options was tough; fortunately Steve’s parents fed us (all too well), so I didn’t have to resort to eating chocolate bars all week. Like Christmas.

The holiday season here is… incredible, but only because there isn’t a better word to describe it. First of all, they don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, obviously, and to my surprise Halloween is only an American thing as well, thus the major department stores had all their Christmas decorations up in mid October! And I thought it was bad in the States with the décor going up the day after Thanksgiving. Christmas itself is a bit of paradox; they don’t quite know how to handle it. Being a European country (they wouldn’t be happy if they heard me say that, haha), they have all the same pictures of Santa Claus and evergreen trees as well do. Except that it’s warm here, so Santa would swelter to death in those woolen red pants. He’d also consider trimming the beard, I’m sure. Also, there was one moment I will never forget: at a BBQ (a barbie, or “bah-bey”) a few weeks before Christmas some friends and I were having a beer or three around the grill, in shorts (or “shots”) and sandals, singing Christmas carols. I was thinking it the entire time but not saying anything, just waiting for it to come up, and it did: Jingle Bells. Some of these people had never seen snow in their life. I had to explain what a sleigh is. “Why,” I asked, “do you even sing that song?” They answered in traditional Australian, shoving another beer into my hand and telling me to shut up, stupid Yank. (Yank, being short for Yankee, the derogatory (& pet) name for Americans. There are some worse names I’ve been called, but this is a family show, folks.) Lastly, everyone had Christmas trees up, and they were evergreens. But why use evergreens when all the trees are green right now, especially since evergreens aren’t indigenous? For Christmas itself, I visited the hometown of me mates Ed, Andrew & Louise, which is about an hour east of Melbourne. It didn’t feel at all like Christmas, but it was a beautiful day. We sat in the yard and opened gifts (they even got me a few small boxes of cereal! How sweet!), even though they had a Christmas tree inside. The entire day was spent outside, riding horses (they had a few acres of land), playing cricket, and lots and lots and lots of eating. At least there’s a Christmas tradition that translated correctly. The only difference was our Christmas dinner was made on the grill. Less classy, perhaps, but more Australian.

The day after Christmas (Boxing Day) I saw Ben-Hur on the big screen (for which was nice to see the chariot race, but the plot is actually surprisingly lame for a ‘classic’), and then the day after my Mom arrived and we started our incredible journey cavorting around the country. But that can wait until the next mass email from me (I prefer to think of them as “emails of mass”, however, considering the sheer bulk of space they take up in your inbox.)

While I actually do have a mild case of athlete’s foot, I’m not actually going to go into any sort of detail about it. If you’ve been reading through this letter just to get to the part about my toe ailments, then (1) sorry to disappoint, and (2) you’re a sicko.