Why is it considered so fashionable to tour Australia in preference to touring the United States or Canada? That question has perpetually confounded me as one friend after another proclaims in high tones that, while they have never seen the southwest of Colorado or the Canadian Rockies, they desire with all their hearts to go to Australia.
Is it clever advertising, I wonder. Or just the lure of places far away? Or the bragging rights that are exercised with dreary regularity on every conceivable occasion?
I feel almost freakish finding myself totally absent any desire to rush off to Australia and suffer the heat of long drives through nothing.
“Go to the east coast,” my friends tell me,”for it is nice.”
“Nicer than the east coast of Canada and the United States?” I ask.
“We have not seen them,” is their inevitable reply. “But you must see the east coast of Australia,” they persist.
Yet today my resolve is wavering. I am almost tempted to go and see Australia’s newest uranium mine. Imagine: it is owned by the world’s biggest arms dealer; it is approved by an ex-singer, now politician who believes in team play; and even the opposition approves the mine. Actually the owner is from the United States and the uranium is to be imported to the US, so I might as well stay home and seek them out. The nuclear power plant just down the road from Huntington Beach in California is a nice place and the sea views are spectacular. I might even go and see Al Gore, the only person on record as opposing the new mine.
Instead of longing to visit Australia and the place of the new uranium mine, I clicked on Google Earth and toured around. This is such an easy way to cover a vast expanse of nothing to see a tiny town of squat houses and asphalt road littered with large trucks. No wonder Mr. Blue was able to buy up large chunks of land. Nobody else wanted it.
Or maybe I should go to Australia to visit those Rio Tinto folk who managed to bribe the entire Chinese steel industry. Surely they live in the nicest suburbs of Sydney? What skill they have in manipulating the folk to the north—or seemed to have had until their spies and bribers got caught. Can we put this down to loss of British skill as the lead came from the colonies? Or is this bravado induced by the infinite landscape? Maybe it is simply crass ham-handedness at getting caught. Either way, it puts the west on notice that business with the dragon kingdom is complex and dangerous. And reinforces my resolve not to visit China as some of my more romantic friends have done. They are so “fascinating,” was their profound insight.
The lure of far-away places! But maybe that is the very instinct that drives miners every-one. For who else, other than the miner, would go tramping distant, uncomfortable places for pleasure and profit?
Funny you mention all the North Americans who must visit Australia but have no intention on seeing their own countries (I was unashamedly one of them).
I went, saw, and returned. More importantly I met quite a few Aussies who’d seen less of Australia than I had (and had no intention to see it), but were desperate to visit Canada first.
One of the distinct memories I had was seeing tour packaged for aussies advertising Vancouver Island Surf Packages (in Surfer’s paradise of all places!)