Aussie Ausbourne

I passed through Singapore. Two nights I spent there and I feel thats long enough to safely condemn the place as a soulless monument to money and malls and politeness, the streets are clean though, well done. I skimmed along the surface entirely unengaged, moving through like a ghost. I walked the streets at midnight with a full rucksack and almost wished someone would mug me. Fortunately I wasn't, and flew on none too soon to Sydney.

I've never had much interest in coming to Australia, unlike many of my fellow countrymen it seems, who proudly roam the streets in their county colours. Sydney, Co. Offaly. H'up the bhoys.

Sydney is a beautiful city but initially I had the same problem as with Singapore, wandering the streets alone watching couples and friends and other lonely people, and only later did I realise that I was wandering the upmarket districts, the Dawson streets and Powerscourt townhouses. I did however manage to find a giant chess game in a park. I watched a bum beat a Lebanese guy, the Lebanese guy was gold strewn and hair slicked, a mover and a shaker, and he did not like to be beaten by a man with dirty jeans. But the bum seemed uncaring of dented egos, instantly absorbed as he was by the next players to take to the board. One was an Asian man dressed like a tourist, an outsider perhaps in a shirt and shorts and socks with sandals, but calm like a clock. His opponent was a cycle courier on lunchbreak who never took off his helmet, as if every move he made was an All-In push. The courier took a slight lead and then just played attrition chess, taking one for one whenever he could. A good general, he won, but obviously not a bring-the-troops-home general. Around these players a bunch of us misfits watched, all males, nodding and hah-ing occasionally to let everyone else know what we knew. And wandering among us a man in his socks, homeless, or the victim of a rugby team prank, young and clean-shaven but edgy enough to make elderly spectators avoid eye contact and hasten away.

Australians are some of the friendliest folk I've met, particularly once you get out of Sydney. This is fortunate as most Aussie lads seem to be built like forges and if they chose to be unfriendly there is very little I could do about it short of pissing myself and threatening to get it all over them. And with most folks here a casual "How's it goin..." isn't a greeting, it's a conversation opener. I've said it a couple of times and when they reply I sometimes look a little put out, in a Ijustwantedabottleofwaternotyourlifestory kinda way. This in turn leads to the brick walls in front of me frowning and my bladder going into empty or exit mode. I have so far escaped unsoiled. So far.

The Aboriginal names for many places are still used (or are now back in use). I reckon when the first explorers arrived they encountered some very stoned young Aborigines. These lads, no doubt struggling valiantly with fits of the giggles, managed to pass off names like Wagga Wagga and Dingalingadong as genuine. They've only stuck with them as an eternal one finger salute to the white man, who has pissed all over them ever since. Where I was in the Blue Mountains the original pioneers found a lot of recent evidence of Aboriginal settlements but no Aborigines, apparently the diseases the pioneers carried had got there before them.

Still, at the tourist spots there is inevitably an Aborigine, body painted, playing a didgeridoo and looking as bushworn as they can. I saw a tiny Japanese woman stood beside one Aborigine for a photo up in the hills. He was a giant of a man, she barely came up to the top of his barrel of a belly. She ooohed nervously in that uniquely Japanese way and he just stood there with this fearsome thousand yard staring out from under his shaggy mass of hair, his mouth hidden in an equally shaggy beard. Two more starkly different human beings I have never seen, and I find it difficult to believe that they could ever treat each other as equal in the eyes of any god.

It is christmas here but it is not. The shop windows have christmas displays and there are christmas trees and decorations in every building. But listening to "A White Christmas" while struggling to apply suncream to that divil-to-reach place between my shoulder blades gives the whole thing a faintly ridiculous air. (I know Ireland is rarely white for christmas but we still seem to have that eternal luxury of hope. Bring on global warming.) I spent a couple of days on the beach and true to form I got sunburnt within an hour. When I took to the water I had to wear a t-shirt to cover my skin, my arms and face were painted white on lobster pink, my beard was grey, and I floundered desperately on my surf board, busy drowning myself. I couldn't have looked more Irish if I'd been eating potato-on-a-stick in a Celtic jersey.