Gud onya mate!
I lived and worked for a while in England. London specifically. I was an IT Manager for an international publishing concern. I was one of two “Yanks” in the office. The other was from Baltimore, which may as well be a different country from my upbringing. So I felt very alone in a sea of Brits. The Brits don’t really like Americans, mildly accept Canadians. Are a tad annoyed by South Africans and Kiwis. But Australians? Oh boy…
I was on the phone with a personnel sourcing agent who was trying to place temp workers in my company. He kept offering me vastly overqualified people for the needs that I had. I gently reminded him of my modest needs and general skills I was looking for, and he replied “Oh! You need an Australian!”
The British think about Australian guest workers about the same way Americans consider the guys who loiter around the Home Depot early in the morning, making themselves available for day labor, payable in cash. If you know the combat history of the British Army in WW1 & 2 it all begins to make sense. Cannonfodder. Disposable. Australians.
I was a bit taken aback, but he did send over an Aussie and I ended up hiring the guy as a full time employee. Certainly not disposable, I considered him indispensable! Fantastic work ethic. Always cheerful. Super smart and creative. The Brits of course all thought he was a moron.
It took me a while, but then I finally figured it out. It’s the accent. To a Brit, all Aussies sound stupid. Sort of their version of a Hick. Like when an American movie portrays someone of being stupid, inevitably they have a drawling sort of accent from some part of the USA that we collectively consider “backwards”. Like Mississippi, Kentucky, or South Boston.
My Australian guy worked for me for well over a year. I learned from him that this accent/perception thing effectively prevented him from getting any sort of traction, romantically, with any British woman. I told him that American women would practically throw themselves at him as soon as he opened his mouth and said “gidday”.
It has been decades, but I’m still friends with that Australian guy. In fact about a year after I came back to the US he stopped by to visit on his way home to Australia. I picked him up from the airport, and he spent a few days with me and my family. I showed him the sights, saw an NHL hockey game, and went skiing. I then put him on a train to Los Angeles where he was going to resume his flight path to Sydney. I learned later that he did indeed have a woman throw herself at him within moments of meeting. She was a daughter of some wealthy record producer in LA and he ended up delaying his return to Australia as he and she spent a week of debauchery in daddy’s Malibu beach mansion.
GOOD ONYA MATE!
I’ve enjoyed almost every Australian wine I’ve ever tried. Like my Australian friend, they always try hard and often score when enjoyed in the right context. This wine is right in the wheelhouse of this blog, circa 2009. Cheap, CHEAP bottom shelf grocery store wine. Did I mention cheap? My wine tracking app pegs this one at $6.99/bottle. Given that it comes from the literal opposite side of the planet, that price is shockingly cheap.
I didn’t buy this wine. It was left at my house by someone at some pre-pandemic party. For all I know it could have been five years ago! It has been buried in a wine rack with a bunch of other wines for quite a long time. Frankly, I was sort of afraid of trying it, expecting (like those British expectations of Australians) to be terrible.
Testa Rossa returned last night from ten days away with family. She wanted some wine to sip while we soaked in the hot tub and I didn’t want to sacrifice a “good” bottle for that and frankly I wasn’t even planning to have any myself, so I grabbed this bottle of cheap Aussie wine.
I poured her a glass and took a sip. “Not bad!” I thought. So I poured myself a glass and we both enjoyed it during our moonlit soak in the tub. So I’m now slapping myself for making the snobby assumption that I did. Sorry Australians!
You must be logged in to post a comment.