Ignorance

 

I am ashamed to admit it, especially in public, but I’m utterly, painfully ignorant about Australia.  If you put a gun to my head and gave me one minute to rattle off some basic facts about it, I’d probably be able to perform as well as a competent 5^th grader would. 

I think of kangaroos, the outback, the Sydney Opera House, cowboys and buckskin hats, funny accents and quaint expressions, koala bears, boomerangs, beer, sheep, Aboriginal people who play the didgeridoo, great Olympic competitive swimmers, miles of sandy beaches, longhorn cattle and enormous expanses of terra cotta-colored desert land with snakes and often-dangerous critters.  I have some general idea that it was settled first by the British as a penal colony sometime maybe in the early 1800s (?) maybe.  From what I can tell at a distance, the people are rugged and cheerful.  But, folks, that’s it!  My minute is up.  End of my 5^th grade report, and I was sweating bullets trying to come up with even that much.  I’m frankly very embarrassed to admit that my depth of knowledge about Australia is pitifully shallow!

How odd that I could reach this ripe, old age and find myself so completely uninformed about such a large and important part of the global map!  After all, I have a Bachelor’s degree (and then some), thirty years of teaching experience under my belt, enough grey matter to tie my shoes, and an unquenchable curiosity about the world.  I have lived my entire life passionately seeking out and learning about different cultures, history, art, languages, architecture, traditions, religions and archeology, and, as you all now know, I have feverishly tried to see as many iconic landmarks around the world as I can possibly see in one human being’s lifetime.  So why am I so clueless about Australia?

 
I suppose the best answer lies quietly in the fact that is the very last of the seven continents that I have chosen to visit.  It is the one, quite frankly, that I’ve been least interested in as I’ve circumnavigated the planet over the course of my world tour.  Never, until just as these last few years in which my quest has intensified, was I particularly drawn to The Land Down Under.  (Sorry to all Aussie readers- if any!) Perhaps it was just tooooo damn far away.  But then I went to Antarctica and truly learned what far away was.  Perhaps I considered Australia “too modern” or “too Western” for my now-sharpened and more-exotic-leaning travel skill set.  Too much like America or Britain, I thought. I’d rather see Machu Picchu or the Taj Mahal.

Nothing to me is more thrilling than to hop in a beat-up taxi cab upon in a foreign land and be instantly thrust into a brand new world that you only see in the movies where the sounds, the costumes, the smells, the shades of skin, the shops and foods, the sounds of traffic and undecipherable languages, odd-colored currency and coins with square holes in the center, and even many of the animals only seen heretofore in a magazine – all variables of living around me are truly “foreign” and completely alien to my existence.  Often, it feels as if I’ve traveled to another world, another planet; everything is so strikingly different!  For me, it is among the greatest thrills of life. It is almost like being born all over again and having to learn how to walk and talk just so you can survive in it.  And it only makes coming home and appreciating my own back yard all the sweeter; it happens every time. Traveling abroad helps provide profound perspective on the life I live here.

 So dear, faraway Australia, please- forgive me. Forgive my ignorance about you!  I know you are full of extraordinary sights and magnificent people.  I know I will come home as a walking, babbling, annoying encyclopedia of Australian history, folklore, humor, culture and bore people for months about all the interesting and trivial facts I learned there about you. I will certainly show them scores of photographs of your undoubtedly- breathtaking landscapes and your warm-hearted, fascinating, hospitable people.  I will bring back pictures of your unique plant life, historical places, unusual creatures and occasionally one or two of them with my goofy face in it so my beloved Americans will know that I saw you with my own eyes. 

 

As with every trip I take, I always come back a hundred times more excited about my destination than I did before I left.  I know this adventure will be no different.  It’s just that this one finds me going into it feeling a little stupid!  This ignorance is quite humbling actually.