Things I still don't get after 6 months in Australia

[robinpud]

apart from the obvious one- WHY DON'T THEY BUILD PROPER HOUSES WITH INSULATION AND HEATING????

What on earth is Manchester and why is it on sale in lots of supermarkets- is it something about mancunians the Australains don't like?

Yeah Eidsvold- it was an eye opener to say the least. I only put small things aside as we will be in Fiji for xmas and then flying home so weight is a bit of an issue.
I still wonder how people manage to pay for xmas, 6 week holiday ( even if you don't go away you spend money amusing children) and the all the expenses of a new school year at the same time!

mogwai - your list gave me shivers of excitement on this god awful Edinburgh morning! Only 20 weeks till I go home for Christmas!

Ooops - meant the weather this morning is awful, not Edinburgh. Edinburgh is fab except what happened to summer?

Rain ceck as in "lets take a rain check on that"?
I don't think it's an Australianism, but it's actually a reign check - equestreian term. Coming up to a jump if your horse is approaching on the wrong rythm or too fast you check (pull back on) the reigns to give yourself more time.
Taking a reign check means delaying something that was otherwise going to happen immediately.

I might be walking the city to surf with my work colleagues (we are employed by a charity) but certainly not running it!!

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suzy in today's metro there's a picture of a teensy weensy white faced gibbon, abandoned by its mother, which is being bottle fed - in perth! have you been to see it?

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The Maori population of New Zealand is no way 50% of the total ...
Hang on a sec, I'll find out ...

but yes, the Treaty of Waitangi is really the difference isn't it?

According to this in the 2001 census the Maori population was 15% of the total NZ population in NZ.

Ghosty yes the Hook turn is the same thing I remember

Go on tell us about the trams

Bloss I meant the way the Aboriginial people are treated in Alice Springs ie stopping them coming together on a piece of wasteland to sit around and talk esp the elder generations of them - that is what we were shocked by. And iirc the population of them in Alice Springs area is quite high.

bundle, I am re-lactating for it and taking a trip to the zoo on Sunday. Hope the wire is open enough for me to poke my teet through.

pmsl suzy ... you're mad

RTKanga ... I have to go to bed now, no time to tell about trams ... I will pluck up the courage tomorrow ... maybe

i hear the nearest city to Perth is Singapore

i think too the fact that the aboriginal people are made up of a number of groups - depending on their location and language also made it difficult.

As to them being passive - bit of a mistruth there - large guerrilla wars were fought between settlers and aboriginal people. Unfortunately - muskets won out and lots of people were killed. It was a systematic approach to decimating the aboriginal people - offering them flour and sugar etc that had been laced with poison. Up North - rounding them up and driving them over cliffs!!!! In fact I am not sure if it has been returned but the head of one of the famous guerrilla fighters from WA was chopped off and sent to the British Museum along with lots of other body parts and bones.

Stolen generation again another terrible thing done with intention of 'integrating' aboriginal people rather than respecting their culture and differences.

Disease and alcohol as well played their part.

Terrible terrible things were done.

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I wonder if a big reason for the colonists trying to exterminate indigenous people in Aus but not in NZ was just force of numbers.

ie it was possibly do-able in Aus, so they had a go, but unlikely to succeed in NZ, so they didn't.

Because surely the colonists in both places would have been fairly similar in background and outlook? I can't think why the NZ colonists would have been nicer people, yet they do seem to have behaved better (relatively speaking - I don't think they were angels).

I wonder why?

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Thank you Bloss, that is fascinating.

There were some parallels in NZ I think, for instance with the Treaty of Waitangi, where both sides signed the treaty but because some concepts of British law didn't translate exactly into Maori, in effect, the British and Maori representatives signed 2 different treaties.

This is just my very imperfect understanding so am happy for any actual Kiwis to correct this, but I believe that one of the problems was the different understanding of land ownership between the 2 cultures.

So although Maori ideas of land ownership were closer to British ideas, they were different enough for the Treaty to generate a huge amount of bad feeling which persists to this day.

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Yes, it's easy to believe that in those days a culture so unlike that of Europeans would have been dismissed as primitive no matter how rich and complex it was, because it was would have been judged using European terms of reference.

What is "terra nullius" by the way?

Empty Land - or something of that nature

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